I learned in that secret, sacred instant that desire moves us farther from and closer to obtaining the object of desire. I learned that we desire what we do not have and when we obtain it, just for ourselves, we desire to dominate what we have, deprive it of its freedom, and subject it to the laws of our ambition.
I closed my eyes. I breathed deeply. I closed the drawers, fearing to possess Asunta beyond this secret violation of intimacy. Fearful, above all, of myself, of my own desire and the limits or lack of limits that only desire could show me by inviting me, as it did at this moment, to be content with the objects I touched and smelled or take the step beyond the place where they intertwine and complicate the subjects of desire.
Asunta’s maid suddenly turned on the lights in the room.
“And what do you think you’re doing up here?”
—
WHAT HAVE I left in the inkwell? I mean, regarding my relationship with Jericó. Who defended me against the bullies at school, beginning with Errol Esparza in his earlier incarnation. Who took me in when I lost my orphan’s home with María Egipciaca (and much more). Jericó taught me to drive a car. He opened my ears to the classical music he collected in the attic on Praga. He opened my eyes to reproductions of the great paintings of the past he assembled on postcards. He pushed me to examine the philosophical seeds planted by Filopáter in our flowerpots. He extended our joint readings to Dickens and Dostoyevsky, Balzac and Beckett. He even taught me to dance, though with a warning at once ironic and forbidding.
One night he invited me to a cabaret, and instead of leading me into the dance hall he took me to a kind of office from which you could observe the couples dancing but not hear the music. I was disconcerted for a minute. Then I suffered an attack of laughter watching the poses, the contortions, the senseless, graceless comedy of couples captured in an aquarium by dancing they obviously deemed charming, gallant, sophisticated, sensual, liberated, and libertine: heads gyrating, eyes closed dreamily or open in false amazement, hands shaking as if to throw or catch invisible balls, shoulders in grotesque calisthenics, legs freed of all control, halfway between prayer and defecation. And the feet, cockroaches in shoes to avoid death by Flit, two-toned men’s shoes, cowboy boots, pointy-toed stiletto heels for the women, an occasional tennis shoe, all given over to the silent dance, the grotesque ritual of bodies deceiving themselves, feigning elegance, sensuality, good humor, which, stripped of accompanying sounds, reduced the dancers to a macabre imitation of an anticipated dance of death.
I thought that friendship was something fundamentally indecipherable. Pride, generosity, tenderness, accepted inadequacies, quiet reserves, the courage memory keeps acquiring—or the bitter absolution of its loss: everything united as in a chorus at once present and very distant, more eloquent in memory than in actuality, though with each gleam it brings the announcement of a future as unpredictable as a pistol going off at a piano concert.
“Let’s be independent,” Jericó fired at me. “Let’s not have opinions imposed on us.”
If the words surprised me, it was because they contained a tacit truth in our relationship. We had always been independent, I replied to my friend. He said I hadn’t: I had lived in a mansion like the prisoner of a tyrannical nanny and saved myself by coming to live with him.
“And you?” I asked. “Have you always been independent?”
Jericó looked at me with a kind of compassionate tenderness.
“Don’t ask me a question you could answer or be quiet about yourself, old pal. We’re independent? First ask yourself: Who has supported us for as long as we can remember?”
I interrupted him. “Lawyers. Licenciado Sanginés, the—”
He interrupted me: “Were they sent? All of them, servants, sent by someone else?”
“Physically or morally?” I attempted to lighten the unusual conversation; we hadn’t seen each other for more than a year, and this meeting in our old den on Calle de Praga was taking place on his initiative.
He ignored me. “We’ve assumed we have no past, that we live in the present, that the lawyers will provide and if we ask indiscreet questions, we’ll break the spell and wake up no longer princes in the bedroom but frogs in the ditch … and with no way out.”
I told him he was right. We had never inquired beyond the immediate situation. We received a monthly check. At times Sanginés led us to the doors of a mystery, but he never opened them. It was as if the two of us—Jericó, Josué—feared knowing more than we already knew: nothing. I suggested, before the ironic gaze of my friend, that perhaps our negligence had been our salvation. What or who would have answered our questions: Who are we, where do we come from, who are our parents, who supports us?
“Who supports us, Jericó?” I looked at him as if he were a mirror. “Are we innocent pimps? Are we better than La Hetara on Durango or the whore with the bee on her buttock?”
He remained silent, refusing to be surprised by my brusque remarks.
“Do you remember Father Filopáter when we were at school?”
I nodded. Of course.
Jericó said, after looking at the floor, that we had never understood—he spoke for the two of us—whether Filopáter pretended to be a false heretic to make faith palatable, like the false unbeliever who takes us down the path that leads to belief.
“Because Filopáter did two things, Josué. On one hand, he made us see the mindlessness of religion in the light of reason. But he also revealed the foolishness of reason in the light of faith.”
“Reason compromises faith and faith compromises reason,” I added without thinking too much about it, almost as a fatal, exact conclusion, that is, as dogma.
“Dogma.” Jericó read my mind. We were Castor and Pollux again, the mystic twins, the Dioscuri. The inseparable pair.
“Listen, who decides that a dogma is a dogma?” I asked, stepping back from the abyss of fraternity.
“Authority.”
“Force?”
“If you think so.”
I didn’t know where or by what route he wanted to take me. I said force isn’t enough. Force requires authority to be forceful.
“And authority without force?” Jericó asked.
“Is morality,” I took a risk with my words.
“And morality?”
“I won’t tell you it’s certainty, because then morality and faith would be the same.”
“Then, morality can be uncertain.”
“Yes. I believe the only certainty is uncertainty.”
“Why?”
“If you agree, Jericó, I’ll only ask you not to feel superior or inferior. Feel equal.”
“Do you remember when we were young we’d ask ourselves: What invalidates a man, what strips him of value?”
I nodded.
“Answer me now,” he said with a certain pugnacity.
“You and I are each embarked on his attempt at success. I sincerely think we haven’t defined ourselves yet. We’re always someone else because we’re always in the process of becoming.”
“I have.” Jericó intensified the conflict another degree.
“I haven’t.” I shrugged. “I don’t believe you, bro.”
“Do you want me to prove it to you?”
I looked at him with as much spirit (adverse, perverse, diverse?) as he showed looking at me.
“Sure, of course. I’ll envy you because I’m not as sure as you are. It’ll do me good.”
I waited for him to speak. We understood each other too well. He hesitated for an instant. Then he observed, smiling this time, that to be coherent, he would respond with actions, not words. I returned the smile and folded my arms. It was a spontaneous gesture but it indicated a certain permanence on my part at this time and in this place we had shared since we were nineteen years old.
“Don’t stop when you’re halfway there,” he said suddenly.
“You make the path as you walk, says the song.”
“You understand me.”
“Because I’m sitting here and you’re over there. All we have to do is change places and all the truth we’ve just said collapses, goes all to hell, becomes doubt.
“And also memory,” I insisted. “Let’s remember where we were before.”
“Though we don’t know where we’ll be afterward.”
“We can predict.”
“And if we’re struck by lightning?”
“We live or we die,” I said with a smile.
“We survive.” He looked at me with eyes half closed and then opened wide as if by orders of an internal sergeant.
“Alive or dead?” I hesitated.
“Alive or dead, we’re only survivors. Always.”
I shook my head.
“We have no father,” said Jericó.
“And?”
“If we did, we’d grow up to honor him so he’d be proud of us.”
“And since we don’t …”
“We can exist for ourselves.”
“On condition we honor ourselves?” I smiled.
“Don’t get lost when you’re halfway there.”
I detected a certain internal disturbance in my friend when he repeated: “Halfway there. There’s more. Something more than you and me. Our country. Our nation.”
I laughed out loud. I told him he didn’t have to justify his job, his position at Los Pinos. I wanted to liven and lighten the situation.
“It all depends,” I said. “What’s the objective?”
“To be superior to all those who challenge us.” He took another breath.
“Wouldn’t it be enough just to be equal?”
“You’re joking. I don’t want them to say about us: They’re like everybody else, they’re the usual ones, the customary ones, the ones in the crowd. Agreed?”
I said probably, if my friend’s words indicated that self-improvement was necessary, of course … Agreed …
“Are we different, you and I?” I said after Jericó’s obstinate silence.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you and I didn’t have to survive. We always had food on the table.”
“Like everybody else? Do you think I did?”
I took a step I hadn’t wanted to take: “I suspect you did.”
In that suspicion were summarized the doubts you already know about regarding the character called just “Jericó,” with no last name, not even the past afforded me by the house on Berlín, the care of María Egipciaca, and the nurse Elvira Ríos, before my destiny and Jericó’s converged like two rivers of fire, Castor and Pollux. I was Josué Nadal.
Jericó, without family names, who traveled without a name on his passport, who perhaps traveled without a passport, who perhaps—everything my affection for him had hidden was now suddenly revealed—had not been in France or the United States or anywhere except the hiding place of his soul … And wasn’t it enough, I exclaimed to myself, to have a soul where you could take refuge? Wasn’t that sufficient?
“Alive or dead … Survivors.”
At this moment, when I heard these words, I felt that a stage in our lives (and consequently in our friendship) had closed forever. I understood that from now on he and I would have to be responsible for our own lives, breaking the fraternal pact that until then not only had united us but allowed us to live without asking ourselves questions about the past, as if, being friends, it was enough for us say and do things together to complement the absences of our earlier life.
It was as if life had begun when he and I became friends in the schoolyard. It was as if, when we stopped being friends, a barefoot death had begun to approach us.
“MAX MONROY,” Asunta Jordán tells me tonight, “has two rules of conduct. The first is never to respond to an attack. Because there are so many, you know? You can’t be as prominent as he is without being attacked, above all in a country where it’s difficult to forgive success. Lift your head, Josué, and they immediately assault you and, if they can, decapitate you.”
“Rancors in this country are very old and very deep,” I remarked, and added Socratically, because I didn’t want to disagree with her: “Mexico is a country where everything turns out badly. There’s a reason we celebrate the defeated and despise the victorious.”
“Even though we stay with our idols. If you become an idol, an idol of the ranchera, the bolero, the soap opera, sports, your life is pardoned,” Asunta said with her style of popular humor.
“Idolatry here is very old.” I smiled, continuing my adulatory tactic. “We believe in God but we worship idols.”
Asunta shook off this ideological confetti with an elegant movement of her head. “But the fact of not responding to an attack is a terrible weapon. You don’t give the attacker a moment of untroubled sleep. Why doesn’t Max respond? When does Max respond? How does Max respond—if he does respond? What weapons will Max use to respond?
“In this way,” Asunta continued, “Max doesn’t need to do anything to answer those who assault him. The fact of not doing anything provokes terror and in the end defeats the attacker, who doesn’t understand why he isn’t answered, then doubts the efficacy or ferocity of the attack, immediately feels completely worthless because he doesn’t deserve a response, and in the end aggression and aggressor are forgotten and Max Monroy goes on, as cheerful …”
“As Johnnie Walker.” I laughed then.
She wasn’t too happy with this joke. Asunta was already embarking on the second example she wanted to give to complete the picture of Max Monroy’s conduct. A rancorous cloud passed over her gaze, evoking, without looking at me, those who tried to become famous by attacking the fame of Max Monroy. Lesson learned: They succeeded only in increasing it. They were forgotten.
“And the second case?”
Asunta came back as if from a dream.
“Max Monroy is a cautious man.” She smiled with a certain bitter nostalgia that did not escape my attention. The second example was that Max, who naturally is a cautious man, becomes even more cautious when he receives an improper or unexpected favor.
“Improper?”
If Asunta hesitated it was only for a second. Then she said: As improper as having imprisoned a dangerous man only as a favor to the great Max Monroy.
I searched in vain for a rictus of laughter, an ironic intention, an angry emphasis in Asunta’s voice, her gaze, her posture. She had spoken as a statue would speak—if a statue could speak.
“Favors are paid for, I think,” I continued so our talk would not die, as it could have died, right there, since I was trying to tie up loose ends and bring together what I knew with what I didn’t know …
“Favors have a price, and then we realize the mistake it is to grant them and go mad trying to find an action to wipe out the obligation we have acquired to the person who did us the favor,” she went on. “Do you see?”
“Death?” I asked with the innocent face I have practiced most in front of the mirror.
“Death?” she replied with an incredulous affirmation on the point of becoming a question.
“Death,” she continued calmly, though with a certain pleading tone.
“Whose?” I didn’t let her go.
Perhaps she hesitated for a moment. Then she said: “The death of the one who did us the favor.”
“Improper?”
Or unexpected. Unexpected?
“The one who did the favor died.”
“The advantages of being old,” I said with an erotic calculation doomed, I knew beforehand, to fail. She did not appear to understand. On the contrary, she stressed that Max Monroy was a self-made man, but only in part. He inherited a great deal (I remained silent about my relationship, valid only if secret, with Max’s mother, Antigua Concepción.)
If she spoke like his mother Doña Conchita (with reason she changed her name, refusing the diminutive in exchange for voluntary antiquity) she would say: Agrarian reform benefited him as much as it did his mother. It was the end of the old haciendas as big as all of Benelux. It took
two days by train to travel the lands of William Randolph Hearst in Chihuahua and Sonora. “Citizen Kane,” I interjected, and she continued, not understanding the allusion. She repeated the lesson: “Thirty-five percent of Mexico’s territory in the hands of Gringos. The hacienda was broken, the system of communal lands was created—all for all, sure—agrarian law was violated, now small properties were accumulated and campesino lands stolen to construct hotels on the beaches, the campesinos didn’t receive a thank you, or a whiskey, or a swim in the kidney-shaped pools, but most fled to the cities, above all ‘dissipated and painted’ Mexico City and the new industrial sectors created by the expropriation of the petroleum industry. Max’s good fortune: first, agrarian repartition; second, the system of communal lands; third, small farmsteads; fourth, communal landowners without credit or machinery, subject to the law of the market, without protection or even a five-centavo piece, and fifth—lucky five—the campesino flight to industry, creation of a domestic market, saturation in demand, inequality, unemployment, the flight of labor to the United States, money returned by workers to their old communities, the explosion of cheap consumerism.”
“And Monroy taking advantage of it all?”
“He isn’t a thief.” Asunta looked at me without affection. “He has today’s money just as he had yesterday’s. He has built a fortune on the earlier one, his mother’s. He has multiplied Doña Conchita’s goods” (please: Antigua Concepción, more respect for the dead!), “imposed very severe rules of discipline, justice, independence, knows the gulf that separates reputation from personality, protects the second, scorns the first, is implacable in getting rid of incompetents at the highest levels, occupies the center of the center, governs himself in order to govern others better, does not overstimulate the public …”