Destiny and Desire

  I have to give Max Monroy credit—to give you the most complete version possible of what I saw and did in his company—for keeping young scientists and mathematicians educated abroad in Mexico. Monroy realized something: If we don’t generate technology and science, we will always be at the tail end of civilization. He put Salvador Venegas, a graduate of Oxford, and José Bernardo Rosas, an alumnus of Cambridge, at the head of the technoscientific team, while Rodrigo Aguilar, who studied at the London School of Economics, coordinated the project dedicated not only to gathering and applying technologies but to inventing them.

  The business team was guided by one norm: giving greater importance to research than to innovation. Venegas, Rosas, and Aguilar proposed taking the formative leap from computing and communications based on Max Planck’s quantum theory. The unity of all things is called energy. The proof of energy is light. Light is emitted in discrete quantities. On the basis of this theory (science is a hypothesis not verified or denied by facts; literature is a fact that is verified without having to prove anything, I told myself), the young scientists apply thought to practice, perfecting a pocket simputer capable of immediately converting text to word and thereby giving information access to the rural, illiterate population of Mexico in accordance with Ortega y Gasset’s exclamation when he interviewed an Andalusian campesino: “How erudite this illiterate man is!” Reducing the distances between economic vanguards and rearguards. Attacking an elite’s monopoly of knowledge. Less bureaucratic statism. Less antisocial capitalism. More community organization. Less distance among the economic area, the popular will, and political control. Bringing technology to the agrarian world. Giving weapons to the poor. Julieta Campos’s book What Shall We Do with the Poor? was something like the gospel of the intellectuals who worked in the Utopia building.

  “What marching orders were we given?” Aguilar asked himself. “Activating citizen initiatives.”

  “Municipalities. Local solutions to local problems,” Rosas added.

  “Cooperation of urban universities with the rural interior,” Aguilar continued.

  “Putting an end to the nepotism, patrimonialism, and favoritism that have been the plagues of our national life,” added Venegas.

  The dark young scientist, focused, serious, and brilliant, concluded: “Either we create a model of orderly growth with local autonomy or fatally deepen the divide between the two Mexicos. Those who grow become rich and diversify. And those who remain behind remain as they have been for centuries, sometimes resigned, other times rebellious, and always disillusioned …”

  I looked at the extensive series of buildings that continued the power of Max Monroy along the Plaza Vasco de Quiroga, the horizontal honeycomb of laboratories, factories, workshops, hospitals, garages, offices, and underground parking lots.

  I thought again that Vasco de Quiroga established Thomas More’s Utopia in New Spain in 1532 in order to provide a refuge for Indians, orphans, the sick, and the old, only to give way later to a powder factory, a municipal garbage dump, and now, the modern utopia of business: the kingdom of Max Monroy, long, high, glass-enclosed … resistant to earthquakes? The nearby volcanoes seemed to both threaten and protect.

  The reader will forgive my narrative sluggishness. If I pause at these persons and these considerations, it is because we need—you and I—a contrast—a positive one?—to the willful dramas, false affections, and frozen positions that occurred in the months following this, my year and some months of virtue and good fortune in the bosom of the small working community on Plaza Vasco de Quiroga.

  Which I shall tell you about now.

  I WANTED TO interrupt the account of the meeting between Max Monroy and President Valentín Pedro Carrera in the office at Los Pinos not for reasons of narrative suspense but in order to situate myself inside what José Gorostiza calls the site of the epidermis: “filled with myself, besieged in my epidermis by an ungraspable God who strangles me …”

  The God strangling me was, in the long run, myself. Now, however, I was present at a duel between divinities, the supreme being of national politics and the civic deity of private enterprise. I’ve already recounted how Max Monroy came into the office of the president and how he ordered the head of the nation to remain standing while Monroy occupied a straight chair and sat in it even straighter than the chair itself. We have already seen how the president continued to stand and asked his aide to leave.

  “Have a seat,” Carrera said to Monroy.

  “I will. Not you,” replied Monroy.

  “Pardon me?”

  “This isn’t a question of pardoning.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “This is a question of listening to me carefully. While you’re on your feet.”

  “On what?”

  “On your feet, Mr. President.”

  I was ignorant of the reasons—long-standing debts, equally old loyalties, the age difference, dissimilar powers, unspeakable complexes, I don’t know—that explain why the president of the republic obeyed the order to remain on his feet before a seated Max Monroy. The rest of us—Asunta, Jericó, and I—also remained standing while Monroy spoke to the head of state.

  “It’s better if we clarify where we stand right away, Mr. President.”

  “Of course, Monroy. I’m already standing,” Carrera said with his peculiar humor.

  “Well, let’s hope you don’t fall down.”

  “I would be at your feet …”

  “I’m not a lady, Mr. President. I’m not even a gentleman.”

  “Then, you are …?”

  “A rival.”

  “In love?” said Carrera in a sarcastic, even vengeful tone, though without looking at Asunta, while Jericó and I observed each other, I uncertain as to my function in this soap opera, Jericó pensive and even cynical—it’s not a contradiction—in his.

  Both witnesses. Of the scene and, perhaps, of our own lives.

  “Do you know, Mr. President? It took centuries to move from the ox to the horse and another long time to free the horse from the yoke and chest strap that choked him.”

  Did Monroy lick his lips, did he close his eyes?

  “Only at the beginning of the last millennium before Christ, about nine hundred B.C., was the horse collar invented, freeing the animal from pain and increasing his strength.”

  “And?” interjected the president, perplexed or pretending to be perplexed behind a mask of seriousness.

  “And we’re at the point of staying with the ox or moving on to the horse and immediately deciding if we’re going to mistreat the horse by choking him with a strap across the chest or free him thanks to a collar.”

  “And?”

  “You must think, as Mexican political elites have always thought, that in the end ability is measured with a peso sign, concluding that the rich are rich because they’re better and the poor are poor because they’re worse.”

  “You must be rich, Monroy.” The president almost laughed out loud.

  “I’m an old-style rich man,” Monroy interrupted. “You’re new rich, Mr. President.”

  “As your family was at the beginning.” Carrera began to be defensive.

  “Read my biography more carefully. Being at the top, I refused to begin at the top. Being at the top, I began at the bottom. Do you understand me?”

  “I’m trying to, Don Max.”

  “I mean that ability isn’t measured by a bank account.”

  “And?”

  “From the ox to the horse, I tell you, and from the horse in a yoke to a liberated charger.”

  “Explain what you mean, I beg you.”

  “You, with your celebrations, want us to continue in the age of the ox because you treat us like oxen, Valentín Pedro. You think that with village fairs you’ll put off discontent and even worse, bring us happiness. Do you really believe that? God’s truth?”

  Max Monroy’s freezing gaze passed like a bolt of lightning from Carrera to Jericó, who tried to look back at the magnate. Jeri
có lowered his eyes immediately. How do you look at a tiger that in turn is looking at us?

  “We are all responsible for the social unrest,” Carrera ventured. “But our solutions conflict with one another. What’s yours, Monroy?”

  “Communicating with the people.”

  “Very lyrical,” the president said with a smile, leaning against the edge of a table almost as an act of defiance.

  “If you don’t understand you’re not only a fool, but perverse. Because your solution—governing by entertaining—only postpones well-being and perpetuates poverty. The curse of Mexico has been that with ten, or twenty, or seventy, or a hundred million inhabitants, half always live in poverty.”

  “What do you want, we’re rabbits.” Carrera repeated his irony, as if with sarcastic blows he could stop Max Monroy. “So then, distribute condoms.”

  “No, Mr. President. We stopped being agrarian barely half a century ago. We became industrialized and wasted time as if we could compete with the United States or Europe or Japan. We’ve remained behind in the technological revolution, and if I’m here speaking harshly to you, it’s because at the end of my life I don’t want us to come late to this banquet too, when it’s time for dessert, or never.”

  The president sighed cynically. “To be bored, as they say … People want distractions, my dear Max!”

  “No,” Monroy responded energetically. “To inform, as they say. You’ve chosen national festivals, rodeos, cockfights, mariachis, cut paper banners, balloons, fried food stands to entertain and benumb. I’ve chosen information to liberate. That’s what I’ve come to tell you. My goal is for every citizen of Mexico to have a device, only a handheld device to educate, orient, and allow communication with other citizens, to help them understand problems and resolve them, alone or with help, but eventually resolve them. How to plant crops better. How to harvest. What equipment is needed. What friends you can count on. How much credit you need. Where to get it. What employment is available. Campesinos. Indians. Manual laborers and white-collar workers, clerks, bureaucrats, technicians, professionals, administrators, professors, students, journalists, I want everyone to communicate with everyone else, Mr. President, I want each person to know his or her interests and how they coincide with the interests of the rest, how to act on the basis of those personal interests and the interests of society and not remain forever stranded in the ridiculous fiesta you are offering them, the eternal Mexican hat dance.”

  I believe Monroy took a breath. I did, of course.

  “I’ve come here to notify you. That’s why I came in person. I don’t want you to find out what I’m doing through third parties, through newspapers, through malicious gossip. I’m here to face you, Mr. President. So you’re not deceived. We’re going to defend not only opposite interests but antagonistic methods. We’ll see whom you can count on: I already have my people. I’m going to see that an increasing number of Mexicans have in hand the little device that will defend them and communicate with them so they act freely and to their own benefit, not a political elite’s.”

  “Or an economic one,” Valentín Pedro Carrera said with irritated sarcasm.

  “No elite survives if it doesn’t adapt to change, Mr. President. Don’t be the head of a kingdom of mummies.”

  If Carrera looked sardonically at the defiant octogenarian who stood, refusing Asunta’s hand, bowed to Carrera, and went to the door, Monroy was not aware of it, because he had already turned his back on the president.

  I WON’T DENY that Asunta’s diffidence—her disinterest, her lack of amorous confidence—was worse than her indifference—neither affection toward nor rejection of my person. Our relationship, after everything I’ve narrated, returned to a cold, professional channel, like a river that freezes but doesn’t overflow its banks. Does the water run beneath the crust of ice? Having listened to the filthy words of love with which Asunta gave pleasure to Max Monroy, I knew not only that I could never aspire to that “melody” but that having heard it deprived me forever of my stupid romantic illusion. Asunta would never be mine “for sentimental reasons,” in the words of an old fox-trot that Jericó sometimes hummed, for no apparent reason, while he was shaving.

  Deprived of love with Asunta, witness to her sexual vulgarity in bed with Max, my spirit filled with a kind of wounded discontent. I knew what I wanted and now I recognized only what I would have wanted. And both resolved into a categorical negation of my illusions. Not Elvira, or Lucha, or finally Asunta would redeem me from lost loves and open up for me a reasonably permanent horizon, for no matter how much we think of ourselves as Don Juans, don’t we aspire to a permanent, fruitful relationship with one woman? What is Don Juan essentially looking for but a constant woman, a long-term shelter of tenderness and peace?

  My having thought Asunta Jordán was that woman is the greatest proof of my ingenuousness. I know there is a good deal of naïveté in me, and if Voltaire’s subtitle is Optimism, I ought to assess my own great hopes by the experience of lost illusions.

  What takes us from the loss of amorous illusion to the carnal consolation of the brothel? I don’t know how to answer if I don’t bear witness first to my plunge into the sexual pleasure of the famous house of La Hetara, where Jericó and I together fucked the whore with the bee on her buttock who ended up being the damned widow of Nazario Esparza, stepmother to Errol, and head of the criminal gang of the Mariachi Maxi. You, gentle readers, can imagine how my brush with those too-solid ghosts of evildoing brought me back to the brothel on Calle de Durango to explore the earth as in the biblical commandment, but also to explore the body, overcoming cowardice and the heart’s dismay beneath the roof of sexual mercy that gives everything and asks for nothing.

  I’m La Bebota, face of an angel, breasts of honey, hot kisses, ardent anal sex, I’m La Fimia, I give massages on the couch, I’m little and wild, I’ll eat you up with kisses, I have a magnificent ass, I’m La Emperatriz, I like everything, you won’t be sorry, the best ass, ask me for whatever you want, oral with no rubber, VIP level, I’m La Choli, a sexy little doll, an infernal butt, missionary with a deep throat, I’m La Reina, I raise your energies, I’m ardent and dominating, everything’s fine with me, I’m stunning, dare to know me, down with timidity. I’ll give you tail, get soft without fear, I’m La Lesbia, wet and clawing, look no further, sweet thing, I have no limits in bed, I’m Emérita, I came back with all my medals, you get everything with my rump sex, fantasies, sink into my breasts and enjoy without limits, I’m La Faria, only for the demanding, I don’t give kisses on the mouth because I lose my head, I’m La Malavida, total goddess, I trade roles, double penetration and my name is Olalla, I’m a blond doll, hot and multiorgasmic, everything’s fine by ass, I’m La Pancho Villa, because of my pistols, love among the cactus, I challenge you to extreme pleasure, shoot me, love, I’m La Lucyana, a real schoolgirl, I fuck in uniform, I already miss you, big boy, I’m La Ninón, new to the capital, perky little tail, horny, addicted to you, I’m La Covadonga, give me back my virginity, let’s see if you can, I only accept demanding men, are you one?

  Was I?

  Could I close my eyes and see Asunta?

  Could I open my eyes and feel her absence?

  La Pancho Villa warned me:

  “All the others come from Río de la Plata, Argentina exports all kinds of skin. Only I have an authentic Mexican ass. Come and find it. Ah! Sex goes with us and doesn’t step aside.”

  Lunch, la comida, is a great ceremony in Mexico City. You could say it is the ceremony of the workday. In Spain and Spanish America it is called almuerzo. The verb is almorzar. In Mexico, it is comer. One eats la comida with an ancestral verbality that would be cannibalistic if it were not domesticated by a variety of foods that summarize the wealth of poverty. The food of destitution, Mexican cuisine transforms the poorest elements into exotic luxury recipes.

  None is greater than the use of worms and fish eggs to create succulent dishes. That is why this afternoon (a respectable Mexican lunch
does not begin until 2:30 in the afternoon or end before 6:00 P.M., at times with supper and cabaret extensions) I am sharing a table in the immortal Bellinghausen Restaurant on Calle de Londres, between Génova and Niza, with my old teacher Don Antonio Sanginés, enjoying maguey worms wrapped in hot tortillas plastered with guacamole and waiting for a dish of fried lamb’s quarters in guajillo chile sauce.

  I am going to contrast (because they complement each other) this lunch at three o’clock in the afternoon with the nocturnal meeting on the open terrace of the top floor of the Hotel Majestic facing the Zócalo, the Plaza de la Constitución, where traditional appetizers do not mitigate the acidic perfumes of tequila and rum, nor does the immensity of the Plaza diminish Jericó’s presence.

  Don Antonio Sanginés arrived punctually at the Bellinghausen. I got up from the table to greet him. I tried to be even more punctual than he was, in a country where P.M. means puntualidad mexicana, that is, a guaranteed, expected, and respected lack of punctuality. Some people, Sanginés first of all, followed by the presidents—the attorney because of good manners, the leaders because the general staff imposes manu militari—are always on time, and I had allowed myself to reserve a table for three in the hope Jericó would join us as stated in the invitation I left for him at Los Pinos. The end-of-year holidays were approaching, and something in the extremely formal and conventionally friendly spirit of the season led me to hope our teacher and his two students would get together to celebrate.

  I hadn’t seen Jericó since the tense meeting at Los Pinos between President Carrera and my bosses Max Monroy and Asunta Jordán, whom I had seen then for the first time since the nocturnal digressions I have already recounted, which left me in such poor standing with myself as a peeping tom, that is, an immoral and sexual unfortunate to the sound of a bolero. “Just One Time,” like the widows whose groom dies on their wedding night. And so I appeared with my best wooden face, like a little monkey that does not see, hear, or say anything. I knew on that same night Jericó had made a date with me at the Hotel Majestic downtown. My spirit insisted on waiting for him at lunchtime, for the sake of resurrecting the most cordial memories and hopes that year after year throw us into the arms of Santa Claus and the Three Wise Men. “The Infant Jesus deeded you a stable,” wrote López Velarde in La suave patria. And added, to qualify his irony: “and oil wells come from the Devil.” I ought to tell you in advance I came to lunch with the first stanza, suspecting the second would be imposed at night.