The self-assurance of my defender was transformed into authority over a herd that counted its own strength in numbers and not in courage. The professorial whistle for order finally sounded that afternoon, which otherwise was stormy because the morning sun was leaving to bathe in cataracts of punctual twilight rain.
“It’s the rainy season,” said my smiling defender, resting his hand on my shoulder.
I thanked him. He said he could not stand cowards who fight only in a gang. He became distracted and offered his hand to the bald kid to help him up.
“Don’t be late for class, asshole,” he said.
The bald kid wiped the blood from his nose, turned his back on us, and ran away.
Together my new friend and I walked the length of the large yard, a space surrounded by two floors of classrooms and auditoriums, with a frontón court at the end.
“If they were a little more educated, they’d have called you Cyrano.”
“They’re sons of bitches. Don’t give them any ideas. They’d call me Sir Anus.”
“And if you were lame, Nureyev.”
My savior stopped and looked at me astutely.
“You don’t have a big nose. It’s only a long nose. Don’t let that bunch of bums get to you. What’s your name?”
“Josué.”
I was going to add the standard “at your service” that dates from colonial Mexican courtesy, when my protector threw back his head and began to laugh.
That’s how I always want to remember him, the way he was at that moment. My height, but the reverse side of my coin. A face tending to plumpness, with the cheeks of an infant not yet weaned. Yes, the mouth of a nursing baby, and eyes so tender and bright they almost demanded a pacifier. His body, on the other hand, was vigorous, his walk decisive, perhaps too sure of his strong step and firm forward motion, while my movements tended to slip away from me, subtle and even a little hesitant, as if they weren’t sure if at my feet they would find earth or the void, solid ground or swamp, light or mud …
It was the first thing I noticed. My uncertain, short steps. The martial, even imperious walk of my friend.
I realized he hadn’t told me his name. I introduced myself again.
“Josué,” I said, still walking.
He stopped like a mock statue. I looked at him with some surprise.
“Josué. Josué,” I repeated, somewhat uncomfortable. “Josué Nadal.”
My friend convulsed. Laughter seized him, doubled him over, eventually it obliged him to raise his head, look at the increasingly cloudy sky, then look at my astonished face, laugh even more when he saw me, and provoke in me a certain feeling of annoyance at not being in on the joke, a pleasantry that was somewhat unpleasant for me.
“And you?” I managed to say to him, hiding my irritation.
“Je … Je …” he in turn managed to say between outbursts of laughter.
I was becoming angry: “Listen, I don’t find the joke …”
He took me by the shoulder: “It’s not laughter, compadre … It’s surprise …”
“Then stop laughing.”
“Jericó. My name is Jericó,” he said, suddenly serious.
“Jericó what?” I insisted.
“Just Jericó. No last name,” said my new friend with an abrupt, definitive air, as if in the act of opening a book the entire text had disappeared, leaving only the first name of the author but not his last.
“Jericó … We’ll get along like clockwork.”
THE RIVER OVERFLOWS its banks at harvest time. Now it is dry and the tribes can cross over. But first spies must be sent out to reconnoiter the area. Joshua crosses the Jordan disguised as a merchant and hides in a brothel in the city. The harlot lives there with her family. She is a simple woman and a generous one. With her body, her affection, her protection. She is accustomed to hiding fugitives, antagonistic husbands, drunkards who need time to recuperate. Impotent men who linger and wish to demonstrate the virility recovered with the affection and patience only a whore can offer because it is her vocation and not merely her profession. Does the harlot know that Joshua and his men are members of a wandering tribe halted on the banks of the Jordan, searching for the promised land? The whore, whose name is Hetara, does not believe there are promised lands or lost paradises. She knows about the madness of Israel and its prophets. They all want to leave the land that offers them hospitality and move on to the next nation of promise. But when they reach it, they immediately begin to dream of the next promised land and so on and so forth until they become exhausted in the desert and die of thirst and hunger. The great whore of Jericho does not want her city to be the final port of the tribes of Israel. Not because she despises them. On the contrary, she loves them because she loves the wandering vocation of Israel and does not want them to stay here only so they can go forward in fulfilling their interminable destiny.
Because she knows these things, the brothel’s clients consult her and she recounts fables. Some she has dreamed. Others she has remembered. But most of them she improvises in the heat of the visitors she receives. She is a sorceress, say her intimates who, like abandoned dogs, seek shelter in her sensual charity; she amazes whoever speaks to her and tells the fortune of her clients only on the basis of who those clients are. She is a realist. She would never give a man a destiny not already found in that man’s future. Because all she needs is a hint of each client’s past to imagine his future with certainty. She is not a cruel woman. She is prudent. When the future appears happy, she decreases the joy because she knows that any change in a life can unexpectedly darken it. When, on the contrary, the future is unhappy, she interjects a small dose of optimism, slips in a joke, shrugs her shoulders, and passes from prognostication to prostitution: her flesh, her mouth, her legs, these are the future …
Joshua came to Jericho with a pure intention: to explore the city and then take it in order to continue the reconquest of the land of Israel begun by Moses, whom Joshua served as a son and to whom he promised, at the hour of his death, to continue the tenacious path from the plains of Moab to the mountains of Nero to the summit of Pisgah. To conquer all the visible land from Gilead to Dan, the lands of Efrain and Manassas and the land of Judea to the sea. But first the city in view had to be vanquished, the first city, the city of palm trees: Jericho. Which is why Joshua was there, his purpose to reconnoiter the land and conquer it the next day. He felt protected in the generous brothel, with its pungent odors of sweat and excrescence, spilled wine, fried food, burned animal hair, smoke from slow fires, red roofs. He recalled, however, the admonition of Moses, his protector and guide, against the pleasures of sex and the orgiastic cult of Balaam. But the caresses of the great whore of the desert told him that thanks to her, her disloyalty, her protection, the city of Jericho would fall and the Jewish people could continue to follow their path of strength with justice and justice with strength. Joshua asked the prostitute what was at play that night, love or war. And she said that in each coupling in the world life and death were at play, pure, gratuitous pleasure alongside the obligation to give birth to the product of the coupling, the temporary suspension of obligation in the name of pleasure and its fatal resumption when the erotic couple separates and the world’s law is imposed. And beyond that? asked an eager Joshua, already captured between the legs of Hetara, which is what he decided to call her, in the fire of his pleasure and with the understanding that here, in the bed of this woman, he was preparing as much for victory as for defeat.
Would he attribute one or the other to this hour of pleasure? Would the victim forgive him his fleeting lust? Would it cost him dearly at the hour of defeat? Joshua hurried the act and Hetara felt authorized, sitting with her legs crossed on the straw pallet, to tell him, Joshua, you will win the battle but will not exhaust your fate. Your people will debate forever either remaining in one place or the promise of the next place to conquer, a place better than the previous one. And on and on forever. The exodus will be endless. And new. In their success
ive exiles, your descendants will enrich the land they walk on. They will be doctors and heal. They will be artists and create. They will be lawyers and defend. They will be successful and envied. They will be envied and persecuted. They will be persecuted and suffer the worst tortures. The great weeping of your people in which, for one tragic, happy moment, all the men, women, and children in the world will recognize themselves. All this I see, Joshua. I also see your people immobile, certain they have found a country and have no obligation to move on. That will be a deception. Israel is condemned to migrate, move, occupy lands in the same way you, tomorrow, will occupy mine. Our bodies have joined just as tomorrow my land and yours will be joined.
Think, Joshua: How will you return my land to me? How will you avoid making my destiny tomorrow the one that is yours forever? Will you occupy my land only in order to forget that no one gave you one of your own?
Joshua listened attentively to Hetara and told himself that this night of forbidden pleasure was the price of permitted victory. Hetara knew everything and forgave nothing. Joshua saw it in her dark eyes, he pulled the red ribbon from her dark hair and said:
“Do me one last favor. Hang the red ribbon from the roof of your house.”
“Will my family be saved, and my clients?”
“Yes, you will be saved. I swear it.”
In this way Joshua justified his night with the whore of Jericho, returned to the mountain, and told the Jews: Truly, Jehovah has delivered the land into our hands. And they all followed him to the banks of the Jordan and shouted with a great shout, convinced that God had promised them victory in battle, and the priests sounded the trumpets. Then the walls of Jericho fell with a great noise, as if the voices and the trumpets were the arms of God, and the Jews entered Jericho and destroyed the city, put men, women, and children to the sword, old people, oxen, sheep, and asses, respecting only Joshua’s order:
“Do not touch Hetara the prostitute.”
And Hetara went to live among the Jews and learned that her city would never be seen again, because Joshua decreed that whoever rebuilt it would be cursed in the eyes of the Lord.
THIS WAS HOW Jericó and I became friends. We discovered everything we had in common. Our age. Sixteen and seventeen years old. Books we had read, not only as children but those we shared now, though he had a year’s advantage on me, which in adolescence is a great deal. He lent me—annotated—books he had already read. We commented on them together. And a similar attitude in and out of school. Being independent. We discovered that we would not permit anyone to inculcate in us opinions that weren’t ours or had not at least been screened by our own critical sense. Further, we thought our opinions were not opinions alone but doubts as well. This was the firmest ground of our friendship. Almost instinctively, Jericó and I understood that each line we read, each idea we received, each truth we affirmed, had its opposite, as day had night. In that final year of secondary school, we did not allow a single line, idea, or truth to pass without submitting it to judgment. We had not yet calculated how much this attitude would help us—or hurt us—when we were out in the world, away from the sheltered nest of school. For now, being dissidents inside it distinguished us with a still adolescent, pedantic, excessive air from the student mob that surrounded us and then, after Jericó’s defense of me and the bloodied nose of the bald aggressor, stopped interfering with me or my nose and looked for new odious marks to fight, as long as they could isolate the victim and present themselves as an unidentifiable and consequently unpunishable mass.
Eventually even the famous bald kid approached us with an amusing false piece of news.
“They’re saying you two are always together because you’re fags. I want to be your friend and see if they dare to say that about me too.”
He accompanied his words with terrible grimaces of ill will and the torpid agility of a budding champion.
We asked him with false astonishment if he was safe from all aggression and he said yes. Why? we insisted. Because I’m very rich and don’t brag about it. He pointed, his hand perpetually bloodied or covered with scabs, to the street:
“Do you see a black Cadillac parked there at the exit?”
Sure. By now it was part of the landscape.
“Have you seen me get into it?”
No, we had seen him waiting for the bus at the corner.
“Well, it’s my father’s car. It comes for me every afternoon. The chauffeur sees me come out and he gets out and opens the door for me. I go to the bus stop and the Cadillac goes home empty.”
I thought about the useless waste of gasoline but said nothing, thinking that for now the boy deserved all our curiosity. He placed his hands on his hips and looked at us with an appealing—or perhaps pathetic—need for approval. Lacking our applause, he gave in and introduced himself.
“I’m Errol.”
Now Jericó and I did smile, and our friendly smile was a request: Explain that to us.
“My mother has been a fan of Errol Flynn her whole life. Now nobody even remembers Errol Flynn. He was a very famous actor when my mother’s mother was young. She told her she never missed an Errol Flynn movie. She said he was very handsome and “nonchalant,” that’s what they called him in movie magazines. He was Robin Hood, and he swung from tree to tree dressed in green, as camouflage, ready to steal from the rich and give to the poor, an enemy of tyranny. And my mother inherited her mother’s taste.”
A dreamy look passed over the eyes of the aggressive bald kid who was introducing himself now as Errol Esparza and offering us both his friendship and a summary of his life, the three of us sitting on the steps of the schoolyard during the final year of our secondary education, ready to assume the duties (and the airs) of the preparatory school in this same building, with the same professors and classmates, no longer identical to themselves but to the changing mirror of early youth, when a thousand insistent signs of childhood persist in obstructing the face that struggles to break through and tell us: We’ve grown up. Now we’re men.
That is why the final year of secondary seemed so long and the first of preparatory so uncertain and distant. Not because of essential realities in one or the other level of education, but because of the accidental facts that we were ourselves: chubby-cheeked Jericó, bald Errol, and me, skinny Josué, the three of us surprised at the changes our bodies and souls were experiencing, though all three, each in his own way, pretended to accept the transformations without amazement, with natural dispassion, even with a certain indifference, as if we knew beforehand what we would be in the coming year and remained overwhelmingly ignorant of what we still were.
Errol suggested the real pitfall. He invited us to his house. It was an invitation made with a strange air of irony mixed with indulgence concealing a poorly disguised embarrassment. Implicitly, he was expecting to be invited to our houses, believing that our friendship would last only if we knew a sixteen-year-old boy’s worst secret: his family. With this trauma overcome, we could move on to the next stage. Being adults and being friends.
The good Errol’s good faith—not to call it innocence—was beyond any doubt. I knew that everything unsaid by the boy with the shaved head did not live in the basement of bad faith. Errol behaved honorably. In any case, Jericó and I were the ones walking twisted paths.
“Errol Esparza.”
“Josué Nadal.”
“Jericó.”
You who survive me can imagine that when I became Jericó’s friend, I asked him what his last name was and he replied Just Jericó, no last name. I wasn’t satisfied, I felt curious, I went to the admissions secretary at the school and asked outright,
“What’s Jericó’s last name?”
The secretary was a young, attractive man who seemed out of place in the small records office, behind a corrugated glass panel near the school entrance, where half his face and an entire hand would appear, upon request, to attend to the public. He hastily withdrew hand and face and his voice acquired a neutral but forced tone.
“That’s Jericó’s name: Jericó.”
Although it was during office hours, the secretary closed the small window. Soon afterward I sensed both an offensive and defensive attitude in my friend Jericó. I attributed it to the secretary’s indiscretion, though I had no proof. The fact is that Jericó, letting a few days pass through the sieve of an unaccustomed seriousness in our dealings with each other, which I attributed to my own indiscretion as well as the secretary’s (a position normally filled by embittered women in their forties with no hope of finding a husband), asked me to go with him to the café on the corner, and once we were seated in front of two tepid, tasteless, decaffeinated concoctions, he gave me an intense look and said that during the past semester he and I had naturally cemented a friendship that he wanted to know was solid and lasting.
“Do you agree, Josué?”
With a good amount of enthusiasm, I told him I did. Nothing in my past—my very brief past, I said with a laugh—promised a friendship as close as the one Jericó and I had created in the past few months. His concern seemed to me unnecessary, though welcome. We were sealing a pact between comrades. I wished that instead of Nescafé we each had a glass of champagne. I felt the warmth of satisfaction that as adolescents we discover in the friendship of a kindred spirit who rescues us from the solitude reserved, without pity, for the incomprehensible boy who stops being a child overnight and no longer fits into the careful world his parents prepared for him under the illusion that a child so indulged would never grow up.
That wasn’t my case. Then Jericó said that between the ages of seventeen, which we already had reached, and twenty-one, which was yet to come, he and I ought to establish a project for life and study that would make us close forever. Perhaps there would be separations, trips, women, for example. The important thing was to seal, right here, an alliance for the rest of our lives. Knowing that he would always come to my aid, and I would come to his. Knowing which values we shared. What things we rejected.