“Don’t worry, Don Nazario. We demanded a tidy sum for accepting the present and didn’t let them see her again. Sarita is all alone. She’ll have only you, Señor.”
According to what he himself said and his son Errol told us.
You and a motley band of mariachis, thieves, bums, crazies, drug addicts, pimps, bongo players, and all those she hadn’t met but imagined, for more men passed through her head than there were in an army, those who had fucked her and those who would have fucked her if they had known the tricks lodged in the well-disposed body of Sara P. Like a beautiful butterfly that could turn into a caterpillar of pleasure, imitate to perfection the manners of the upper class, and engage in all the wicked lower-class vices. I saw her as a funereal hostess on the day of Doña Estrellita’s obsequies, she was refined but sham refined, something was out of place in her gestures, her dress, above all in the way she gave orders and treated the servants, the arrogant contempt, the lack of courtesy, the essential bad upbringing of Sara P. exposed with a disdain that assimilated her into what the stupid woman believed she despised.
Of course Sara came to the mansion on Pedregal with her virginity intact, and Don Nazario enjoyed the privilege of deflowering her. She was a Scotch tape virgin, astutely fabricated by the false nuns of the dissolute convent, who restored maidenheads as easily as they cooked mole. How could Don Nazario know? He hadn’t fornicated with a virgin in his whole damn life except for the chaste but narrow Señora Estrellita, who had a psychic padlock between her legs, and since Sarita gave him that unheard-of pleasure, from then on he became a slave to his wife the false nun. Nazario, who was a Roman emperor accustomed to tossing coins into the crowd. Nazario, who demanded to be the center of attention. Nazario of the choleric temperament and blind rage. Transformed into a poodle, a lapdog, a plaything of the whorish, sensual, voracious, impassive Sarita: the pontiff vanquished by the unaccustomed lechery of the false priestess who gradually bared her soul, provoked lust, vomited filthy words, demanded animal positions, Make me the lioness, Nazario, make me what all men like, tiger, not just you, enjoy my cunt, I want to enjoy it, I want everybody to enjoy it, the mariachi, the porter, the cabdriver, the potter: Shape me, Nazario, like I was your flowerpot.
Did this repel Don Nazario? Did he care when she said she was giving him what everybody liked, not just her husband? She laughed at him, telling him about sexual experiences that she said were only imaginary and now she was demanding them of the increasingly dazed, distracted old man, bewildered by so much excitation, so much novelty, not realizing that she, even in their closest intimacy, saw him from a distance, scornfully, as if she were reading him, as if he were the day before yesterday’s newspaper or an advertisement on the Periférico. But she didn’t realize she wasn’t humiliating him. She merely excited him more and more, fired his imagination. Esparza saw Sara in every conceivable position, imagined her fornicating with other men, enjoyed this vicarious sex more and more.
She hated him—she says—but he held her as if she were a dog. Eventually he desired his penis to be always inside her. She felt like castrating him. She told him that the more lovers who enjoyed her, the more semen he’d have stored up inside. Imagine, Nazario, imagine me fucking men you’ve never met.
“I’m just telling you. Whores: You take them by the ass, they’re the cheapest. If they sit on top of the man, they’re more expensive.”
Except, at the same time, her marriage to the ridiculous old man made her more and more afraid. She started seeing herself as she wasn’t, greedy, uncultured, spectral. She fervently desired the death of the man who loved, her, desired her, and at the same time kept her cornered by luxury and ambition.
That was when Nazario did her the favor of becoming paralyzed following an energetic sixty-nine. The old man became overly excited and was left half-rigid with a hemiplegia that kept him from speaking beyond a milky-rice mewling. Then she felt again the temptation to castrate him and even put his flaccid penis in his mouth. But she had a better idea. Gradually she scaled a policy of humiliations that began by parading bare-breasted in front of the paralyzed man. Then confused him by walking past his idiot’s gaze, dressed in mourning one day, for a cocktail party the next, finally as a nurse, taking him out in the wheelchair to the Pedregal courtyard without shade so he’d roast a little, hours and hours in the sun to see if he dies of sunstroke, and Nazario Esparza encased in wool pajamas and a plaid bathrobe, without shoes, trying to avoid the direct gaze of the sun and observe how his yellowish toenails were growing …
Alone? Sara laughed a long while, at times with the manners of a modest señorita, at other times with whorish guffaws, what the hell, I brought into the house all the men I only mentioned before, mariachis, bums, my buddies the towel boys from the brothel who brought me warm cloths after lovemaking, bongo players who played tropical music while I danced for the rigid old man, pimps who did everything for him, cooked and served the food. They took the useless old thing out in the midday sun of the damn central plain, like a roast pig, though she pampered him too, put him in the bed and toyed with him, said into his ear Go on, do the nasty to me, whispered Mummies are so tender, and if he stretched out his trembling fingers she slapped him and said Quiet, poison and then stripped and made love with the Mariachi before the astonished, desperate, illogical gaze of Nazario Esparza, who signaled wildly for her to get into bed with him.
“In your bed, Nazario? In your bed all you do is piss.”
It culminated, she recounts, with what she calls “everybody gets to fuck her.” The entire cast of servants and parasites who gathered in the house in Pedregal staged the collective violation of Sara P. in front of Esparza. She exaggerated her poses, her screams of pleasure, her orders to action, she even exaggerated the fakery with orgasms that echoed on the mummified face of Nazario Esparza like a mirage of life, a lost oasis of power, a desert resembling death.
Which came to him, she declared, in the middle of the last staged orgy. It was verified by the bongo player, who could gauge from a distance the beats of the tropical world. It was testified to by the pachuco who searched men who died suddenly in houses of prostitution. Nobody saw him die. Though the Mariachi, who was embracing Sara at the time, says he heard, as in a song of farewell, the words of “The Ship of Gold”:
I’m leaving now … I’ve come just to say goodbye.
Goodbye woman … Goodbye, forever goodbye.
Is it true, or is it poetry?
Where was he buried? asked Sanginés, on whose face a displeasure appeared that contrasted, I must admit, with my own fascination: the rocambolesque, surreal, indescribable tale of this woman stripped of any moral notion, enamored of her mere presence on earth, possessed of incalculable vanity, enveloped in an idiotic glory, with no more reality than that of her actions with no connection to one another, which only form a chain of servitudes that escape the individual’s consciousness, all of it, in that instant, closed a stage of my youth that began in the brothel on Calle de Durango when together with Jericó we enjoyed the female with the bee tattooed on her buttock, and ended now, with the female seated on a prop throne, sex painted on her face so she would have a mouth and speak.
I THOUGHT, OVER the next few days, that my relationships with women never really concluded, they ended abruptly and lacked something that at my age was beginning to intrude as a necessity. Duration. A lasting relationship.
In preparatory school Jericó and I had read Bergson and because of that reading, the subject of duration reappeared at times in our conversations. Bergson makes a very clear distinction between duration we can measure and another kind that can’t be captured with dates because it corresponds to the intimate flow of existence. What we have lived is indivisible. It contains the past as memory and announces the future as desire. But it is not past or future separate from the moment. Consequently each moment is new though each moment is the past of memory and longing for the future.
(One understands why Bergson’s philosophy was the weapon of intellectu
als at the Ateneo de la Juventud—José Vasconcelos, Alfonso Reyes, Antonio Caso—against the Comtean Positivism that had been transformed into the ideological mask of the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship: Everything is justified if in the end there is progress. At the Palace of Mining in Mexico City, a modern goddess, with the brilliance and opacity of leaded windows, is proclaimed a divinity of industry and commerce. She was the courtesan of the dictatorship.)
What does this movement of the moment contain that embraces what we were and what we will be? On the one hand, instinct. On the other, intelligence. People confronted by the creative act, confronted by Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Beethoven or Bach, Shakespeare or Cervantes, speak of inspiration. Wilde said that creation is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. In other words, creating supposes work, and both Jericó and I believe the production of frustrated talents in Latin America is as great as the production of bananas because our geniuses are waiting for inspiration and wear out chairs waiting for it in cantinas and cafés. Ten percent, however, wait patiently beside the ninety that can appear, why not, in a bar or café, though it is better received in a room as empty as possible, with a pen, a typewriter, or a computer close at hand and a concentrated effort that otherwise can be made in an airplane, at a hotel, or on a beach. The text admits no pre-text.
Intention and intelligence. I believe my friend and I, in a long relationship begun in the schoolyard of a religious academy, did not need to pronounce those words to comprehend and live them. They weren’t the only basis of our understanding, affirmed the day I went to live with him on Calle de Praga. Today, however, two or three days after hearing the damned (or was she blessed in her compassion?) Sara Pérez de Esparza, Jericó came into our shared apartment and said point-blank that the time had come for us to live apart.
I didn’t change my expression. “I’ll leave today.”
Jericó had the grace to lower his head. “No. I’m the one who’s leaving. You stay here. It’s just”—he looked up—“I’ll be traveling a lot around the country.”
“And?”
“And I’ll be receiving all kinds of visitors.”
“You have an office.”
“You understand what I’m saying.”
I didn’t want to linger over the obvious and think that Jericó needed to move to have greater erotic freedom. Perhaps he’d already had it while I was devoted to Lucha Zapata and now, without her, the promise of my constant presence had cost him a couple of “romances.”
I realized there was something more when Jericó said abruptly, “Nothing obliges me to live against myself.”
“Of course not,” I agreed with gravity.
“Against my own nature.”
It didn’t even occur to me that my friend was going to reveal homosexual inclinations. Images return to my memory of the shared shower at school and, more provocatively, our eroticism with the woman who had the posterior bee. I also recalled what he said when he returned from his years of study in Europe, a trip planned with as much mystery as his return, a mystery deepened by a certain falsity I intuited—I didn’t know, I only intuited—in the Parisian references of a young man who didn’t know French argot but did use American slang, as he did now:
“Look, as Justin Timberlake sings: ‘Daddy’s on a mission to please.’ Don’t be offended.”
“Of course not, Jericó. You and I have had the intelligence never to contradict each other, knowing that each of us has his own ideas.”
“And his own life,” my friend said exultantly.
I said that was true and looked at him without any expression, asking him rhetorically: “His own nature?”
I didn’t say it trying to trap him, or with ill will, or deceitfully, but really wanting him to explain to me what “his own nature” was.
“We’re not the same,” he said in response to my tacit question. “The world changes and we change along with it. Do you remember what I said, right here, when I came back to Mexico? I asked you then, What do we have? A name, an occupation, status? Or are we a wasteland? A garbage dump of what might have been? A canceled register of debits and credits? Not even the bottom of the stewpot?”
I stopped him with a movement of my hand. “Take a breath, please.”
“We need a position, Josué. We can’t give as our occupation ‘I think’ or ‘I am.’ ”
“We can turn into young old men, like some musicians, Compay Segundo or the Rolling Stones, why not? didn’t I warn you?”
“Don’t joke around. I’m serious. The time has come for us to apply ourselves to action. We have to act.”
“Even though we betray our ideas?” I said with no mean-spirited intention.
He didn’t take it badly. “Adapting ourselves to reality. Reality is going to demand things in line with our talents though opposed to our ideals.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to do, I’m going to act in accordance with necessity and try, as far as possible, to maintain my ideals. What do you think?”
“And if your ideals are bad ones?”
“I’ll be a politician, Josué. I’ll try to make them less bad.”
I smiled and told my friend we really were faithful to our Catholic education and the morality of the lesser evil when it’s necessary to choose between two demons. Were we Jesuits?
“And besides, the Jesuit goes where the Pope orders him to, without protest, without delay.”
“But that order was to save souls,” I said with the irony his words provoked in me.
“And souls aren’t saved passively,” he replied with conviction. “You must have absolute faith in what you’re doing. Your ends must be clear. Your actions, overpowering. A country isn’t built without implacable acts. In Mexico we’ve lived too long on compromise. Compromise only delays action. Compromise is wishy-washy.”
He was agitated, and I looked at him with distress, almost out of the corner of my eye.
He said that in every society there are the dominant and the dominated. The unbearable thing is not this but when the dominant don’t know how to dominate, abandoning the dominated to a fatal or vegetative existence.
“One must dominate to improve everyone, Josué. Everyone. Do you agree?”
Smiling, I accused him of elitism. He answered that elites were indispensable. But it was necessary to unite them with the masses.
“A more mass-oriented elite,” Jericó declared, moving like a caged animal around a place, ours until then, that he apparently was transforming now into a prison ready to be abandoned. “Do you think you’re immortal?” he asked.
I laughed. “Not at all.”
He waved his finger in my face. “Don’t lie. When we’re young we all think we’re immortal. That’s why we do what we do. We don’t judge. We invent. We don’t give or take advice. We do two things: We don’t accept what’s already been done. We renovate.”
I laughed in spite of myself.
Me too—I said to myself—I think I’m going to live forever, I feel it in my soul though my head tells me otherwise.
“Do you think it’s legitimate for the old to control everything, power, money, obedience? Do you?”
“Ask me that on the day I become old.” I tried to be amiable with a friend whose belligerent face, so impassioned it changed color, distanced him from me by the minute.
Jericó realized I was looking at him and judging him. He tried to calm down. He made a sacrilegious joke.
“If you believe in the Immaculate Conception, why not believe in the Maculate Conception?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, a little shocked in spite of myself.
“Nothing, pal. Only that life offers us a million possibilities on every corner. Or rather, on every plaza.”
His eyes were shining. He said to imagine a circular plaza—
“A rond-point?” I asked deliberately.
“Yes, a circle out of which, say, four or six avenues emerge—”
“Like t
he Place de l’Etoile in Paris.”
“Ecole,” he said enthusiastically. “The point is, which of the six avenues are you going to take? Because when you choose one, it’s as if you’ve sacrificed the other five. And how do you know you’ve made the right choice?”
“You don’t know,” I murmured. “Except at the end of the avenue.”
“And the bad thing is you can’t go back to the starting point.”
“To the original plaza. La Concorde,” I said with a smile and, unintentionally, with irony.
He kept looking at me. With affection. With defiance. With an unspoken plea: Understand me. Love me. And if you love and understand me, don’t try to find out any more.
There was a silence. Then Jericó began to pack his things and the conversation resumed its usual colloquial tone. I helped him pack. He told me to keep his records. And his books? Those too. But then he looked at me in a strange way I didn’t understand. The books were mine. And him, what was he going to read from now on?
“Let’s be baroque,” he said with a laugh, shrugging his shoulders, as if that definition would transform the history of Mexico and the Mexicans into chicken soup.
“Or let’s be daring,” I said. “Why not?”
“Why not?” he repeated with a light laugh. “Life is getting away from us.”
“And to hell with the consequences.” I considered the unpleasant scene to be over. I touched my friend’s shoulder.
I offered to help him carry down the two suitcases.
He refused.
I PROPOSED SHOWING indifference to beauty, health, and fortune. I wanted to transform my indifference into something distant from vice and virtue. I was afraid to fall into solitude, suicide, or the law. I wanted, in short, to avoid the passions, considering them a sickness of the soul.
The deafening failure of these, my new intentions (my doubt), had to do with the mere presence of Asunta Jordán. From nine to two, from six to nine, from the afternoon to midnight, I was never far from her during my period of initiation in the offices of the Vasco de Quiroga building in the Santa Fe district. The building itself consisted of twelve floors for work and another two for the residence of the president of the enterprise, Max Monroy, in addition to a flat roof for the helicopter.