The stairway was dark. On my floor the light was not turned on. Everything was shadows and reflections of shadows, as if total darkness did not exist and our eyes, don’t they eventually become accustomed to the blackness, in the end denying its dominion?
“He didn’t want to leave them adrift in crime, like Miguel Aparecido,” Sanginés said urgently.
I didn’t reply. I began to walk up. He came behind me, like an unexpected ghost in need of the attention I denied him, perhaps because I feared what he was telling me now and could reveal to me later. But there was no later, the lawyer wanted to talk now, he pursued me from step to step, he didn’t leave me alone, he wanted to snatch away my peace …
“They let Max Monroy into the asylum.”
“The asylum?” I managed to say without stopping, compelled to reach the sanctuary of my garret, astonished by the lack of logical continuity in a man who taught the theory of the state with the precision of a Kelsen.
“He maintained the asylum, he gave them money.”
“I understand.” In spite of everything, I wanted to be courteous.
“They let him in. They left him alone with the woman.”
“Who? With whom?”
“Sibila Sarmiento. Max Monroy.”
I was going to stop. The name halted my movements but hurried my thoughts. Sibila Sarmiento, Max Monroy’s young bride, locked away in the madhouse by the wickedness of Antigua Concepción.
“Miguel Aparecido’s mother …” I murmured.
Sanginés took my arm. I wanted to pull away. He didn’t let me.
“The mother of Jericó Monroy Sarmiento one year and of Josué Monroy Sarmiento the next.”
“HE’S IN A safe place.” The phrase repeated by Sanginés and Asunta regarding Jericó’s destiny tormented me now. It referred to my brother. It brought up huge questions associated with memories of our first meeting at the Jalisco School, El Presbiterio … Was that encounter prepared beforehand too, wasn’t it simple chance that brought my brother and me together? To what extent had Max Monroy’s desire directed our lives? Beyond the monthly allowances each of us received without ever finding out where they came from. Who argues with good luck? Beyond the coincidences we didn’t want to question because we took them as a natural part of friendship. Through my memory passed all the acts of a fraternity that, I knew now, were spontaneous in us but watched over and sponsored by third parties. And this was a violation of our freedom. We had been used by Max Monroy’s feelings of guilt.
“Believe me, Josué, Max felt responsible for the destiny of Miguel Aparecido, Miguel threatened him with death, Max knew the fault lay with Doña Concepción, he didn’t want to blame her, he wanted to make himself responsible, and the way to take on the obligation was to take charge of you and Jericó, making certain you wouldn’t lack necessities but that extravagance wouldn’t make you slack, this was his moral intuition: You should be free, make your own lives, not feel grateful to him …”
Sanginés said this to me in the stairwell.
“Did he intend to reveal the truth to us one day?” I became confused and was angry with Sanginés. “Or was he going to die without telling us anything?”
I regretted my words. When I said them I understood I had associated fraternally with Jericó, and I knew if Sanginés revealed Max’s secrets it was because Max had already exiled Jericó, as if he had tested us all our lives and only now Jericó’s gigantic, crucial mistake gave me primogeniture. Jericó—it was the sentence without reason or absolution—had been put in a safe place … What did it mean? My uneasiness, at that moment, was physical.
There was an anxious pulse similar to a heartbeat in Sanginés’s words. “Max allowed desire and luck to play freely in order to form destiny—”
“And necessity, Maestro? And damned necessity? Can there be desire or destiny without necessity?” I looked at him again without really making him out in the gloom, believing my words were now my only light.
“You didn’t lack for anything …”
“Don’t tell me that, please. I’m speaking of the necessity to know you are loved, needed, carnal, warm. Do you understand? Or don’t you understand anything anymore? God damn!”
“You didn’t lack for anything,” Sanginés insisted as if he would continue, to the last moment, fulfilling his administrative function, denying the emotions revealed by his avid, nervous, anxious figure, I don’t know, distant from what he was but also revealing what he was.
“And Jericó?” I stopped, photographed in front of myself like a being of lights and fugitive shadows.
“He’s in a safe place,” Sanginés repeated.
The phrase did not calm the vivid but painful memory of my fraternity with Jericó, the intense moments we had together, reading and discussing, assuming philosophical positions at the request of Father Filopáter. Jericó as Saint Augustine, I as Nietzsche, both led by the priest to the intelligence of Spinoza, transforming the will of God into the necessity of man. Were we, in the end, loyal to necessity in the name of will? Was this what my brother and I desired as a goal when we loved each other fraternally? Did our great rapport consist of this, associating necessity with will?
One scene after another passed through my mind. The two of us united at school. The two of us convinced not having a family was better than having a family like the Esparzas. We had signed a pact of comradeship. We felt the warm teenage satisfaction of discovering in friendship the best part of solitude. Together we made a plan for life that would bring us together forever.
“Maybe there will be, you know, separations, travel, broads. The important thing is to sign right now an alliance for the rest of our lives. Don’t say no …”
For the rest of our lives. I remember those afternoons in the café after school and the other side of the coin gleams opaquely. An alliance for the rest of our lives, a plan for life to keep us together forever. But on that occasion, hadn’t he proposed obligations all imposed by him? Do this, don’t do the other, turn down frivolous social invitations. And you’ll also despise “the herd of oxen.” But let’s also make a “selective, rigorous” plan for reading, for intellectual self-improvement.
That’s how it was, and now I’m grateful for the discipline he and I imposed on ourselves and deplore the docility with which I followed him in other matters. Though I congratulate myself because, when we lived out our destinies, he and I respected our secrets, as if part of the complicity of friendship included discretion about one’s private life. He didn’t find out about Lucha Zapata and Miguel Aparecido, or I knew nothing about Jericó’s life during his—how many were they?—years somewhere else. Europe, North America, the Border? Today I couldn’t say. Today I’ll never know if Jericó told me the truth. Today I know nothing about Jericó’s identity except the blinding truth of my fraternal relationship with him. I couldn’t blame him for anything. I had hidden as much about myself as he did. The terrible thing was to think that, “put in a safe place,” Jericó would never be able to tell me what he didn’t know about himself, what, perhaps, he would dare tell me if he knew, as I did, that we were brothers.
Understanding this filled me with rancor but also with sorrow. Once, when he had returned to Mexico, I wondered if we could take up again the intimacy, the shared respiration joining us when we were young. Was all we had lived merely an unrepeatable prologue? I insisted on thinking our friendship was the only shelter for our future.
It was hard and painful for me to think our entire life had resolved into terms of betrayal.
And too, as if to soften the pain, the moments returned of a strange attraction that did not lead to the encounter of bodies because a tacit, equally strange prohibition stopped us at the brink of desire in the shower at school, in the whore’s bed, in our cohabitation in the garret on Praga …
Had friendship stopped at the border of a physical relationship subject to all the accidents of passion, jealousy, misunderstanding, and attribution of unproven intentions that torment ye
t attract lovers? In mysterious ways, the desire felt under the shower or in the brothel was subject to this mysterious prohibition, as strong as the desire itself. A desire that, seen from a distance, is the first passion, the passion for cohabitation and contiguity, while the incestuous desire is confused with these virtues and therefore prohibited with a strength that can deny fraternity itself …
What could we do then, he and I, except feel like forbidden gods? We had the permanent possibility of violating the commandment regarding a prohibition only the gods can transgress against without sin. Who prevented us? How easy it would be for me today, after everything that has happened, to imagine it was the “call of the blood” holding us back. The feeling in the deepest part of ourselves that we were brothers without ever knowing it … Or perhaps he and I had no reason to turn to incest, since incest between siblings is a rebellion against the parents (says Sigmund from the couch) and we did not have father or mother.
The truth, I tell myself now, is that time and circumstances moved us away from all temptation: When Jericó returned from his absence (Europe? the United States? the Border?), facts themselves gradually divided us, doubts began to appear, perhaps Jericó’s Naples wasn’t Naples, Italy, but Naples, Florida, and his Paris was in Texas … Elective affinities emerged first with cordiality, then with growing antagonism in our workplaces, in my slow apprenticeship in the Utopia tower while he ascended rapidly in the Palace of La Topía. I was an open book. Jericó was a message in code. Perhaps this was what I wanted. Wasn’t my life a secret to everyone except me, and if it no longer was it’s because now I’m telling and writing it. Perhaps Jericó, like me, is the author of a secret book like mine, the book I knew nothing about as he knew nothing of mine. The sum of secrets, however, did not abolish the remainder of evidence. Jericó had wielded a real influence on presidential power. He had felt authorized to go beyond the power granted him to the power he wanted to grant himself. He made a mistake. He thought he would deceive power but power deceived him. And when he found out about it, my poor friend, cornered by the reality his illusions disdained, the only recourse he found to save his personality was to fall in love with Asunta … He wanted to defeat me in the final territory of triumph, which is love. And even there, Asunta handed me the victory. She defeated Jericó by telling him she was my lover.
Why did she lie? What caused her to give the coup de grâce to the large animal, the living, palpitating thing beyond all logic, the carnal and cruel, aflame and affectionate thing that is friendship between two men? Two men who are brothers though they don’t know it and move into fierce enmity perversely incited by Asunta Jordán: For the first time, my brother Jericó desired a woman and that woman, in order to humiliate and paralyze Jericó, declared she was my lover, awarding me a sexual laurel I did not deserve. Asunta presented to her Jehovah, Max Monroy, Abel-Josué’s harvest and Cain-Jericó’s, and since the terrestrial God preferred mine to his, Jericó the fratricide was prepared to kill me. I believe now the failure of his political insurrection, the way in which he deceived himself about the desire and the number of his followers, was identical to his blindness: Jericó could not distinguish between the reality of reality and the fiction of reality. Now I understand, finally, that this, the fiction, was imposed on reality because it came closest to my brother’s fratricidal desire: His war perhaps was not against the world but against me. A latent war that had gone on forever, put off perhaps because Jericó’s personality was stronger than mine, his triumphs more apparent, his capacity for intrigue greater, his alliance with the secret more covert: personality, success, imagination, mystery.
These were my brother’s weapons, except he couldn’t use them against me because … Why? Now as I enter San Juan de Aragón Prison thanks, once more, to the good offices of Licenciado Antonio Sanginés, now as I pass the cells from which they look at me like caged animals: the Cuban mulatto Siboney Peralta, the thieves Gomas and Brillantinas, the Mariachi, and Sara P., all of them behind bars, I look down, toward the swimming pool of imprisoned children, deficient Merlín with the shaved head, and Albertina who was a boy who was a girl, and the eloquent Ceferino guilty of being abandoned, and Chuchita looking at her tears in the mirror, and the girl Isaura dreaming about a volcano, and Félix the very sad happy boy, and right there Jericó and Josué passed like phantoms, and now I ask myself why, if we were so fraternal, so protected after all, so far from the ruined destinies of these children of Aragón, why weren’t we Félix and Ceferino and Merlín, abandoned children, helpless like our brother Miguel Aparecido? In this strange prison counterpoint, the figure of Asunta Jordán abruptly appears in my head like a sudden revelation. Asunta, Asunta, she prevented the repetition of the biblical verdict and at the same time guaranteed it. Jericó, once Castor, did not kill me, his brother Pollux, because this time Cain did not kill Abel, I found out now, just today, thanks to her, thanks to the woman, thanks to Asunta Jordán who deflected the destiny of the deadly, ancient story: Jericó did not destroy Josué, Cain did not kill Abel thanks to the woman, the seer, the priestess, the enchantress emerged from a desert on the border between life and death, rescued from mediocre obscurity by a man who recognized in her, by simply taking her by the waist during a provincial dance, an earthly strength, the power that he, subject to the voracious whims of his mother, did not have: Would she, the woman desired, admired, feared, censured by me, be the author of my salvation? She condemned my enemy brother. She, on the pretext of saving him from Carrera’s revenge, took him to the mansion of Utopia and exhibited him there to me, degraded him in my presence, in my presence put him naked on all fours and took away from him the fratricidal destiny of killing me on the pretext of jealousy …
Pre-text. Ah, then what will be the text?
IF I SEND you someone, Miguel Aparecido, tell, talk, don’t leave him unfed. Remember.
He was the same. But different. The blue-black eyes flecked with yellow. A violent gaze tempered by melancholy. A sadness that rejected compassion. Very heavy eyebrows. A dark scowl and eyes flashing light. A virile face, square-jawed, carefully shaved. Light olive skin. An inquisitive nose, straight and thin. Graying hair, combed forward, curly in the back.
He was the same. But he was my brother.
Did he know? For how long? Did he not know? Why?
He shook hands in the Roman style, clasping my forearm and showing me once again a naked power that ran from his hand to his shoulder.
“Twenty years.”
“Why?”
“Ask him.”
How could I demand a reply to something that went beyond us and defined us? Children of the same father and mother. I saw Miguel Aparecido’s face, immobile and defiant. I was troubled by the image of our father Max Monroy and his abominable droit de seigneur in the asylum. I imagined him at night, or by day, what difference did it make, going to the asylum to visit our mother Sibila Sarmiento. She was locked away. I don’t know if she looked forward to Monroy’s arrival as a possible salvation or as a confirmation of her sentence. Perhaps she knew only that this man, father of her three children, desired her with fury, stripped her without asking permission, gave in to the passion she inspired in him and that both of them, Max and Sibila, shared, she because even though in the fleeting moments of Max’s visits, she felt loved and needed, free to see herself naked with pleasure, overcome by the passion of the man who tore at her hair and kissed her mouth and excited her nipples and caressed her pubis, clitoris, and buttocks with an irresistible force that freed her from this prison to which her own lover had condemned her, because Sibila Sarmiento was pleasure when captive and danger when free. And Max Monroy loving Sibila physically, freely, and not by order of his tyrannical mother, had no other way to take his revenge—with no filial unease—on damned Concepción.
Miguel Aparecido’s tiger-eyes told me he understood. He asked me to accept that Sibila our mother won the love of Max our father. This was enough compensation for her imprisonment in the hospital. She could receive
Max’s love and be satisfied, almost grateful because she had the love of the world without its pitfalls. Eventually, receiving Max and making love to him was the same as being free without the dangers of life, the city, the world, which surrounded her like a gigantic threat dissipated only by the man’s visits and then by successive months of waiting: the birth of a son, and much later another, and soon after that a third, and all at the same time.
Miguel Aparecido. Jericó. Josué.
The Immaculate Conception descended on Sibila Sarmiento’s womb intermittently, unpredictably. For her—I imagine now—the instant was eternal, everything happened at the same time, there was no real time between the visits of the man who deflowered her at the age of twelve and the man who impregnated her after that, then again, and then a third time: I believe for her everything happened at the same moment, the act of love was always the same, the pregnancy a single one, the child the only one, not Miguel, not Jericó, not Josué, a single child being born forever, prepared to leave the enclosure, the prison, the asylum, the womb, in the name of Sibila Sarmiento. Born in a cell, and therefore worthy of freedom. Born in misery and therefore destined for good fortune. Engendered in impotence and therefore heirs to power.
My brother Miguel gave me his arm in the Roman fashion and did not have to say anything. The fraternal pact was sealed. Pain was another name for memory. We looked at each other with depth in our eyes. What we had to say about the past had been said. It was time for us to speak about the future. The syntony, in this regard, was total.
There were a few minutes of silence.
We looked in each other’s eyes.
Discord did not take long to break out.