Jericó and I were not (I must inform you) beings separate from the school community. On the contrary, knowing ourselves (as we knew ourselves) superior to the gregarious collectivity of the institution, fortuitous companions in earlier readings perhaps well thought out and digested, our meeting owed a great deal to chance, which is accidental, but also to destiny, which is disguised will. In cafés and classes, on long walks through the Bosque de Chapultepec or the Viveros de Coyoacán, we two had compared ideas, evoked readings, each one filling in the lapses of the other, recalling a book, condemning an author, but in the end assuming an inheritance that eventually we shared with the unrepeatable joy of intellectual awakening that is a fact in every society, but especially in ours, in which true creativity is rewarded less and less while economic success, celebrity, television appearances, sex scandals, and political clownishness are valued more and more.
The difference between us, I admit right now, was one of exigency and rigor. I also admit, for the eternal record, that in our relationship I was more indolent or passive, while Jericó was more alert and demanding.
“Demand more of yourself, Josué. Until now we’ve moved forward together. Don’t lag behind me.”
“Don’t you lag either,” I replied, smiling.
“It’s hard,” he responded.
After gym, which was required, we all showered in the long, cold, solitary bathrooms in the school. Unlike the nuns’ schools, where girls have to wash dressed in gowns that turn them into cardboard statues, in schools for boys, showering naked was normal and attracted no one’s attention. An unwritten law dictated that in the shower we men would keep our eyes at face level and no one, under penalty of suspicion of unhealthy curiosity or simple vulgarity, would look at a classmate’s sex. Naturally, this rule was overseen by the one who observed it least: timid, impertinent Father Soler, who would walk up and down the bathroom with the mixed gaze of an eagle and a serpent—very appropriate to our nation—and in his hand a threatening, symbolic rod that he never, as far as we knew, used on the boys’ wet backs and lustrous buttocks.
Those who are still alive and reading me will agree that I am telling them something as unusual for them as it was for us. Jericó decided that the temptation of our looking at each other naked existed, but the way to overcome it was not by physical effort but by expressing ourselves intellectually. For that, he said, let’s choose two thoughts that are opposite and therefore complementary and invoke them in the shower—which was icy, those who still enjoy their senses should know, for that was demanded by our mentors’ code of physical rigor and aspirations to sanctity.
It still causes astonishment, as well as sensual delight, to remember that by common agreement, when it was time to shower, standing side by side, not looking at each other, soaking wet and naked, with the incessant drip of delicious water falling on our heads, one would repeat aloud the constituent, formal ideas of Catholic philosophy as if they were at once dogmas and anathemas, while the other recited the theory of their absolute negation. Jericó maintained that the Christian philosophy of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas was the basis of the authoritarian, oppressive system of the Iberian nations. The ancient dispute between Saint Augustine and the British heretic Pelagius in the fourth or fifth century set the pattern. The heretic proclaimed the freedom to approach God by means of our own sensibility and intelligence. Saint Augustine stated that there is no personal freedom without the filter of the ecclesiastical institution. The Church is the indispensable intermediary between individual faith and divine grace. By contrast, the heretic claimed that grace is within reach of everyone. Grace, the saint responded, requires the power of the institution to be granted. From this ancient dispute in ruined oracles between a child of Roman Africa and an obscure northern monk grew, said Jericó in the rain of the shower, first the division between Catholics and Protestants and then the difference between Latin Americans and North Americans: We had the Middle Ages, Augustinian and Thomistic, and they didn’t; they had Pelagianism brought up to date by Luther and the imperatives of capitalism, and we didn’t. For North Americans, history begins with them and the past was invented by Cecil B. DeMille with the help of Charlton Heston. For us, the past is so old that it has to be lived again.
If enunciating medieval Catholic contentions in the shower was a singular but unifying act between two naked eighteen-year-old boys, it was no less demanding to make the nihilistic argument in its Nietzschean dress (or in this case, nakedness), for it was up to me to allege that there is no freedom if we don’t emancipate ourselves from faith and from every foundation or acquired rationale, lifting the veil of appearances and adopting the impulse toward the truth, whose first step …
“Is the recognition that nothing is true.”
I said these words “in the rain,” and I confess I felt desolate and in those moments wanted to possess the certainties enunciated by Jericó, for not only did the stream of water on my head blind me, but so did the grief of the loss of all certainty. Still, my role in this fraternal dialogue, which distanced us from false modesty or unhealthy curiosity, was that of a transformer of values by means of false values, saving my dear, my beloved friend Jericó from Christian culture, which is the culture of renunciation.
“And when have you ever seen a Catholic renounce pleasure if in the end it’s enough to confess to a priest to free yourself of all guilt?”
“Or money, something that once was the occupation of Jews or Protestants?”
“Or fame, as if modern sanctity was granted by the magazine Hola?”
We left the bathroom laughing, happy to have surmounted sexual temptation, proud of our intellectual discipline, prepared to exchange roles the next time, when I’d be Catholic, he’d be nihilist, and in this way we’d sharpen our weapons for the inevitable encounter—it would be the greatest dispute of our early youth—with a man—the only man—capable of challenging us: the recently arrived Father Filopáter.
—
WE RETURNED TO Errol’s house. Because of Jericó’s permanent curiosity and, in my case, not only for that reason but because of something I haven’t mentioned yet and that profoundly affected my life.
The fact is that the Esparzas were entertaining that night. Don Nazario had acquired a chain of hotels in Yucatán and was celebrating with a party. Our classmate the bald kid (though I should say the ex-bald kid, since Errol had let a mane of hair grow that, he told us, was the sign of rebellious youth in the sixties) invited us, as he remarked, to inspect the flora and fauna. Conforming to manners they deemed “distinguished,” Errol’s parents welcomed their guests at the entrance to the Versailles salon. Don Nazario, whom we had never seen, was a florid man, tall, red-faced, with eyes that were someplace else. He seemed full of bonhomie, distributing embraces and smiles, but looking off into the distance, almost fearful that something forgotten, menacing, or ridiculous would appear. He wore green gabardine and a large Hawaiian tie lavish with palm trees, waves, and girls dancing the hula. He looked like a man in costume. He dressed in accordance with his origins (carpentry, furniture, hotels, movie houses) and not with his destiny (a mansion in Pedregal and a bank account safe from bruising). Was it an act of sincerity and pride in his humble past to display himself as he had been, or the cleverest disguise of all, almost a challenge: Look at me, all of you, I reached the top but I’m still the humble, easygoing man I always was?
He greeted us as if we were his oldest friends, with great embraces and mistaken references, since, with his heart in his hand, he thanked us for the “service,” that is, the favor or favors we had done him, which, of course, were nonexistent, leading us to one of two conclusions: Either Don Nazario was out-and-out wrong, or he was treating us in a manner that would not offend but did save him from the possible mistake of owing us something and having forgotten it.
In any event, the confusion passed as rapidly as the speed with which Señor Esparza, radiating cordiality, pushed us forward and repeated the ceremony of the joy
ous, grateful embrace with the guests behind us, freeing us from the welcome of his wife, Doña Estrellita, who was there, no doubt about that, we saw her, we greeted her, though at the same time she was absent, hidden by the powerful presence of her husband as well as by a desire for invisibility that duplicated, in a certain sense, the desire to disappear altogether.
Was the attire of the mistress of the house the result of her own taste or an imposition by her husband? If the second, we were approaching uxoricide. The lady seemed dressed, if not to go to heaven or hell, then to inhabit a gray limbo, as gray as her mouse-colored tailored suit, her eternal cotton stockings replaced by old-style nylons, her low-heeled shoes by ones of patent leather with ankle straps. Her discomfort at standing on line and receiving in public was so evident that it immediately classified her husband as a sadist who, when he saw her from time to time, would say with a ferocious look, utterly foreign to his affability as host:
“Laugh, you idiot! Don’t make me look bad!”
Patently clear because Señora Estrella gave forced smiles and looked for approval in the eyes of a husband who did not need to look at her: He dominated her, we realized, through pure anticipatory habit. Doña Estrellita knew that if she didn’t do one thing or another, she would have to pay dearly when the guests had left.
I confess that my understandable fascination with the couple separated me from the rest of the crowd, which was dissolving behind a veil of noises, inaudible conversations, the clink of glasses, and the passing of canapés offered by a short, dark-skinned waiter costumed in a striped shirtfront. I could not help admiring the discipline of Errol’s mother in playing the part of the present absent woman. In her fixed, dead eyes there appeared from time to time a lightning flash that commanded her:
“Obey.”
I don’t believe it was difficult for her to do so. She knew she was easy to ignore, and I suppose that from the time she was young her comments, timid in and of themselves, were extinguished to the beat of her husband’s brutal orders, shut up, don’t play the fool, you’re always out of place. Why worry about it?
“Leave the zoo, guys. Let’s go to the den,” said Errol. “My refuge.”
The “den” was the disordered room we had already seen. Errol took off his jacket and invited us to do the same.
“After what you’ve seen, do you feel capable of betting everything on art and philosophy?”
I think we laughed. Errol didn’t give us the chance to respond. Sprawled on the most comfortable armchair in his shirtsleeves, legs spread, he freed himself of tasseled loafers and seized a guitar as if it were the willing waist of an obedient woman.
“You’d be better off getting into politics. Let’s hope you can find a path between what you want to be and what society permits you.”
I was going to answer. Errol did not allow himself to be interrupted.
“Or are you suddenly going to wager on destiny?”
He held up a hand to silence us.
“Just imagine, I’ve already bet on a destiny.”
He observed us; we were polite and interested.
He told us, without our asking, that even though we didn’t believe him, once—a long time ago—Nazario and Estrellita might have loved each other. At what moment did they stop? What would you call the night he no longer desired her, or didn’t see her as young anymore, and she knew he was watching her grow old? In the beginning everything was very different, Errol elaborated, because my mother Estrella was a convent girl and my father wanted a wife without blemish—that’s what it’s called—because in his life he had known only sluts, and whores know how to deceive. With Estrella there was no doubt. She traveled from the convent to the bed of her lord and master, who used her up in one night, demonstrating to her that he didn’t care a fig about convents—that was his outmoded expression—and it would be better if his wife, being chaste, behaved like a whore to please a macho like Nazario Esparza.
Her family handed over Estrellita, received a check and some properties, and never concerned themselves about her again. Who were they? Who knows. They charged a good price to give her, chaste and pure, to a voracious, ambitious husband. The passion ended, though sometimes he looked at her with an intense absence. It wasn’t enough to avoid the repetition of the same battle every night, when Estrella still retained a shred of courage and dignity that served only to infuriate Nazario. The same battle every night until they found the reason for the next dispute, which was to postpone the obligation of sex that she needed not only as something new but because of the chaste obligation of the matrimonial sacrament and that he, perhaps, wanted to put off because of a strange feeling that in this way he was honoring the virginity of his wife, though it was clear to him that Estrella had come to the marriage bed intact and if she was impure, he had been the reason. None of this endured or had too much importance. He was plunging into a gross vulgarity, which Jericó and I had observed that night and Errol now expanded on for us.
“I loved her ten thousand enchiladas ago” was the husband’s response.
She took refuge in the renunciation of sex in the name of religion and set up a pious little shrine in the matrimonial bedroom that Nazario wasted no time in getting rid of with a swipe of his hand, leaving Estrellita resigned to finally seeing herself one night as her husband saw her. She no longer looked young to herself and was certain she looked like an old woman to him.
“Ten thousand enchiladas ago, while she prayed on her knees: ‘Neither for vice nor fornication. It is to make a child in Thy holy service.’ ”
She replaced the saints with pictures of Errol Flynn, whose erotic proclivities were unknown to both Estrellita and Nazario.
“Do you know what?” Errol continued. “I bet I can have a destiny that lets me overthrow my father. Do you like that word? Don’t we hear it every day in history class? Tom took up arms and overthrew Dick hoping that Harry would overthrow somebody else and so forth and so on. Is that history, dudes? A series of overthrows? Maybe so.”
He seemed to take a breath and say: “Maybe so. Maybe not …”
Without letting go of the guitar, he raised his glass: “I bet I can have a destiny that overthrows my father’s. Overthrowing a destiny, as if it were a throne. Maybe so! Suddenly! Or maybe not …”
He stretched out his arm and played the guitar, beginning to sing, very appropriately, the ballad of the disobedient son:
“Out of the way, father, I’m wilder than a big cat, don’t make me fire a bullet that’ll go straight through your heart …”
Voices rose, angry and gruff, in the hall between the Versailles salon and the refuge where we were sitting.
“Are you crazy? Give me that camera.”
“Nazario, I only wanted—”
“It doesn’t matter what you wanted, you’ve made me look ridiculous taking pictures of my guests! That’s all I needed!”
“Our guests, it’s also my party—”
“It’s also your nothing, you old idiot.”
“You’re to blame. I don’t like receiving. I don’t like standing on that line. You do it just to—”
“If you did it well, you wouldn’t humiliate me. You’re the one who makes me look ridiculous. Taking pictures of my guests!”
“What does—?”
“You can blackmail somebody with a photograph. Don’t you realize?”
“But they all appear on the society pages.”
“Yes, you moron, but not in my house, not associated with me.”
“I don’t understand …”
“Well, you should, you fool!”
Errol stood up and hurried to the hallway. He put himself between Nazario and Estrella.
“Mama, your husband is a savage.”
“Shut up, you bum, don’t butt into what doesn’t—”
“Drop it, son, you know how—”
“I know, and I can smell the vomit in the mouth of this old bastard. He stinks like a cave—”
“Shut up, go back to your
asshole friends and keep drinking my champagne free of charge. Damn freeloaders! Dummies!”
“Leave us alone. This is between your father and me.”
Nazario Esparza’s eyes were as glassy as the bottom of a bottle. He put his hand in his pocket and took out (why?) a ring with dozens of keys.
“Get out, you’re a curse,” he said to Errol.
“I’d like to imagine you dead, Papa. But not yet a skeleton. Slowly being devoured by worms.”
These words not only silenced Don Nazario. They seemed to frighten him, as if his son’s curse resonated with an ancient, prophetic, and in the end a placating voice. Doña Estrella put her arms around her husband as if to protect him against their son’s threat.
Errol returned to the room and his parents dimmed like an empty theater. Jericó and I followed with wooden faces.
“You see,” said Errol. “I grew up like a plant. I’ve lived outdoors, like a nopal.”
It was obvious: Tonight was his and he wasn’t going to let us slip in a word.
He was as insistent as a rainstorm.
“Do you know the secret? My father wants to get rid of himself. That’s why I behaved the way I did. I have him all figured out and he can’t stand it. He’d like to be the product of his own past, denying what happened earlier but taking advantage of the results. Understand?”
I said no. Jericó shrugged.
“Who were those people?”
“Ah!” Errol exclaimed. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Do you know why my father forbids photographs at the parties he gives at home?”
“I have no idea,” said Jericó.
“You can’t imagine. Why do you think he gets all these people together, offers them champagne, but bans photographs? I can tell you because I secretly go through his papers and tie up loose ends. It just so happens that Don Nazario deducts—that’s what I said—he deducts these so-called ‘parties’ from his taxes. He classifies them as entertainment expenses and ‘office expenses,’ business meetings disguised as ‘cocktail parties.’ ”