Destiny and Desire

  I understood all this because Sanginés communicated it to me indirectly, by means of expressions, qualities, and solicitations that undoubtedly summarized the long journey we had taken together, converging at a point in his long life and my short one.

  I grew up, he said, in a society in which society was protected by official corruption. Today, he continued categorically but with a trace of both criticism and resignation, society is protected by criminals. The history of Mexico is a long process of leaving behind anarchy and dictatorship and reaching a democratic authoritarianism … He asked me, after a pause, to forgive the apparent contradiction: not so great if we appreciated the freedom of artists and writers to savagely criticize its revolutionary governments. Diego Rivera, right in the National Palace, describes a history presided over by political hierarchs and corrupt, lying clerics. Orozco uses the walls of the Supreme Court to paint a justice that laughs at the law from the gaudily painted mouth of a whore. Azuela, in the middle of the revolutionary struggle, writes a novel about the revolution as a stone rolling down an abyss, bare of ideology or purpose. Guzmán tells of a revolution in power interested only in power, not in revolution: They all order one another murdered in order to continue in the presidency, the great cow that gives milk, dulce de leche, cheese, a variety of butters, and security without democracy: a comforting lowing.

  “Today, Josué, the great drama of Mexico is that crime has replaced the state. Today the state dismantled by democracy cedes its power to crime supported by democracy.”

  Perhaps I knew this, to a point. I had never admitted it with Sanginés’s painful clarity.

  “Just yesterday,” Sanginés continued, “a highway in the state of Guerrero was blocked by uniformed criminals. Were they fake police? Or simply real police dedicated to crime? What happened on that highway happens everywhere. The drivers of the blocked buses and cars were brutally interrogated and pistol-whipped. The travelers were obliged to get out. Their cellphones were thrown onto a garbage pile. Among the travelers were individuals working for the criminals. Confusion reigned. It turns out some police believed in good faith they were intercepting narcotics and counterfeit money. They were soon disabused of that idea by their superiors and urged to join the criminal gang or be stripped and stranded there as imbeciles and assholes.

  “Inexperienced police. Corrupt police. To whom do you turn?”

  The prisons are full. There’s no more room, he said, for the criminals.

  “You saw San Juan de Aragón Prison. An agreement was reached there between jailhouse sadism and the minimal order guaranteed by Miguel Aparecido. That isn’t the rule, Josué. The prisons in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Peru can’t hold more criminals. They’re released right away so new malefactors can come in. It’s a never-ending story. Recidivist offenders. Detentions without a trial. Defense made impossible. Badly paid attorneys incapable of defending the innocent. Judges paralyzed by fear. Improvised judges. Courts incapable of functioning. False testimonies. No consistency. No consistency …” the lawyer lamented and almost exclaimed: “How long do you think Latin American democracy will last under these circumstances? How long will it take for the dictatorships to return, applauded by the people?”

  I didn’t recall hearing a sigh from Sanginés. Now I saw an air of fatality more than resignation in his sour expression.

  “Pages and more pages.” He made a large gesture, graceful at the end, with his hand. “We are drowning in paper—”

  “And in blood.” I dared to intervene for the first time.

  “Papers soaked in blood,” Sanginés intoned, almost like a priest singing the requiem aeternam.

  “And do you prefer the law to be defiled by government and not crime?”

  “I would like a little more pity,” the licenciado said as if he hadn’t heard me.

  “For whom?” I prompted.

  “For the poor and the ambitious who have lost their way and their faith in others. Especially for them.”

  I thought of Filopáter and his own forsaken priesthood. At that moment, the group of three little boys laughed behind the door of the tiled kitchen and Sanginés put on an astonished face. The children ran to him, climbed on his lap, his shoulders, mussed his hair, and they all laughed.

  I realized, thanks to my prolonged absence, that these three children were still between four and seven years old. Just like the last time. Just like every time.

  Sanginés caught the surprise in my gaze.

  He laughed.

  “Look, Josué: Every couple of years I renew my offspring. Three children I manage to rescue from the Aragón prison. You saw the subterranean pool where these poor kids play and sometimes are thrown into the water and sometimes swim and save themselves and sometimes drown, reducing the prison population …”

  He saw the horror in my eyes. His begged me to understand the pity that allowed him, every two or three years, to save two or three children from the horror.

  “And then?” I asked.

  “Another destiny,” he said summarily.

  “And Jericó’s destiny?” I dared to say angrily.

  “In a safe place.”

  He took my hand. “I’ve never married. I appreciate your discretion. Have a good trip …”

  “What?” I was surprised. “To where?”

  “Aren’t you going to Acapulco?” Sanginés feigned a not very credible surprise.

  I DREAMED. AND in dreams, as everyone knows, figures enter and leave with no explicable order, voices are superimposed, and the words of one follow on the tail of another before beginning again, in a different tone, in another voice, other voices …

  The space I inhabit (or that I only think or dream) is as transparent as water, as solid as a diamond. It is a frozen space, in every sense of the word: You have to move your arms vigorously to advance, you have to let yourself be carried by the current, to get anywhere you have to touch bottom knowing it doesn’t exist … The near and the far succeed each other like a single reality and I don’t know to whom to attribute the voices I haven’t quite defined because they join in and vanish in the blink of an eye.

  The voices speak in the peremptory tones of a lawyer or judge but dissipate with the advance of the whitish figure with the large, bald head sunk into his shoulders, similar to a self-portrait of Max Beckmann in which the light of the face barely reflects the external shadow that illuminates it: bald, with heavy eyelids and an inexplicable smile, Beckmann wants to reflect in his face the constant theme of his work: cruelty, the trenches and corpses of war, the erratic sadism of men against men. What does Max Monroy reflect?

  At this moment in my dream, the self-portrait of Max Beckmann assumes the form of Max Monroy, fleeting, gray, slave to uncertain displacements, seized by a physical pain that has set him between movement and repose, possessed of a dignity in brutal contrast to the parrot chatter of the other fleeting figures in the dream, were they Asunta Jordán, Miguel Aparecido, Antigua Concepción affirming, interrogating me, discordant, accusatory, vulgar voices, so different from the quasi-ecclesiastical dignity of the gray figure of Max Monroy? asking me questions, blaming this man who had been revealed as my father, accusing him as if to tell me not to believe in him, not to approach him, no matter how the present dignity of the man and my oneiric proximity to his figure appeared to be the scenario of the encounter we both, father and son, required, interrupted by the voices.

  Do you believe Max Monroy is a generous individual? Do you believe he visits his wife Sibila Sarmiento out of pure charity? Or because the measure of his sadism fills to overflowing when he fucks a prisoner, a woman with no will who is also the mother of his three sons? What do you think? Do you think that out of pure beneficence Max kept his other two sons, Jericó and you, at a distance, supposedly so you’d grow on your own, with only the help that was absolutely necessary, free of the burden of being the sons of Max Monroy, rich kids with a Jaguar and a plane, broads and travel, contempt and bribes, you and he making yourselves with your ow
n efforts, your own talents? Do you believe that? No way! He did it because he’s a miserable man, like an entomologist who puts his spiders down in the courtyard to run around just to see what they can think of to survive, to see if they save themselves by scurrying along the walls, to see if a shoe doesn’t squash them, to see, to see … He plays, Max plays with destinies. And do you know why? I’ll tell you: Because that’s how he takes his revenge on his dear old mother Antigua Concha, takes his revenge for how the old bitch manipulated him, imposed her will on him, handled him like a puppet at a fair, one of those from the old days with pink stockings and a bullfighter’s costume that are still seen at village fiestas. I try to view Max Monroy’s life like a long, very long revenge against his mother, the revenge he couldn’t take while Doña Concepción was alive and filled the world with an imperious will, tall and strong and unpredictable like a gigantic wave made of skirts and scapularies and broken nails and the sandals of a feverish nun, Antigua Concepción: Who can endure being conceived not once and for all but all the time, conception after conception, born morning noon and night, the imposed obligation not only to love or even venerate his sainted mother but to obey her, you hear me? even in what she didn’t command. Obliged to imagine what his sainted mother asked of him even when she wasn’t asking anything. Do you believe when Antigua Concepción died Max Monroy freed himself of her influence? Well, don’t go around thinking that. At times I surprise him muttering to himself, as if he were speaking to an invisible being. And when I spell out his words I know he’s talking to her, he asks forgiveness for disobeying her, he admits she would have done things better or in another way or wouldn’t have done anything at all, she would have known when to act and when to do nothing, letting the entourage pass without hearing the band, as hypocritical as a scorpion before it strikes and then Max Monroy behaves as if the insect had bitten him, except he differs from his mother in that she was a showy creature, as ostentatious as a band of clownish mariachis, and he, by way of contrast, is serene, calm to the point of perversity, astute, still, as if only in this way, as you have seen, he could differentiate himself from his mother without offending his parent’s sainted memory, be himself without turning against her … “One makes haste slowly.”

  “Do you know where the señora is buried?” I asked with an air of innocence.

  “Nobody knows,” the voice of voices continued. “Not even Max. He handed the body of Señora Concepción to a group of criminals he got out of prison with the promise to free them and told them to bury Concepción’s corpse wherever they liked, but never to tell him about it … or anyone else. It goes without saying.”

  “What trust in—”

  “None at all. Instead of freeing them, he abducted them. Nobody knows where they ended up. They were never heard from again. Just imagine.”

  “But Miguel’s there, he’s in prison …”

  “Miguel Aparecido is the only person Max Monroy couldn’t handle. Miguel Aparecido chose to remain locked in a cell in San Juan de Aragón as a precaution against his own desire to get out and murder his father, and his father accepted his release, or his imprisonment, as a compromise between two certainties: his and Miguel’s. Max didn’t liquidate Miguel and Miguel didn’t annihilate Max. But Max served an infinite sentence, worse than death itself, and Miguel lived his life creating an empire inside prison.”

  “He didn’t control the sadists who killed the children …”

  “It was part of the compromise.”

  “What compromise?”

  “Between Miguel and the authorities. I’ll give you this in exchange for that. A swap.”

  “Are you telling me the jailers have the right to kill a few kids and Miguel has the right to save them?”

  “He’s the big boss.”

  “How do they choose?” I said with no horror in my oneiric voice, losing the order of the acts, the words attributable to Asunta, to Miguel, to Antigua Concepción, I don’t know …

  “They choose at random. Eagle or sun. Heads or tails. This one stays in prison. That one drowns in the pool. The ones who don’t cross themselves are really lucky!”

  “And the ones who know how to swim?” I said without much relevance.

  “They’re saved too.”

  The voice in my dream went on: “The worst criminals get away, led by the Mariachi Maxi and the whore with the bee, the damned Sara P.… Not everything turns out the way we want, isn’t that right?”

  “They’ve been put in a safe place,” the chorus repeated the sacramental phrase.

  “In a safe place?”

  “They belong to Miguel. I don’t guarantee their well-being.”

  “Just like my brother? Just like Jericó?”

  “We don’t talk about that.”

  “In a safe place? What? How? Isn’t anybody going to—?”

  “I can show you.”

  “What? Not in …?”

  The voices dissipated. They dissipated. Dissipated. They were insignificant voices that bring dreams to distract us from what wants to summon us and we can scarcely guess at.

  On the other hand, the figure of Max Monroy advances toward me, shoulders high, head sunk into his body, defiant, as if wanting to tell me that insults, physical abuse, praise and blame did not even graze a man of action who was also a solitary man: Action and solitude, solitude and action, joined, are never used up, said Monroy’s voice in the dream, the record of a man’s motives is huge, there is avarice, desire, rancor, rarely complete satisfaction, Josué, if you fulfill a desire the desire engenders another desire and so on until sorrows flourish because the sun did not come out and we cannot understand that our desires are one thing and our loyalties something very different and in order to obtain what is desired you must separate it from all loyalty immediately, my son, without harming anyone. That is what those who detest, envy, or accuse me do not understand: I did not have to harm anyone to be who I am …

  He advances toward me preceded by that strange odor of an animal recently emerged from a cave that Asunta evoked one day.

  “Being old does not mean having impunity,” said the shade of Monroy. “Or immunity.”

  In the logic of the dream, he launched into a list of his ailments and the medicines he took to alleviate them. I’m old, he said, the old feel threatened by the young. I’m ossifying. Go on, touch my bones. Go on. Ándale.

  I didn’t dare. Or I experienced the illogical transitions in the dream. Max Monroy was saying things separated by the oneiric instincts that dissolve the concretion of things, new enterprises disturb the old order, the old resist them, I create them, I am my own opposition …

  “I admit that advanced age develops greater doses of cynicism, a measure of skepticism, a degree of pessimism. Why?”

  I said I didn’t know.

  “You have to know how to say no.”

  “Ah.”

  “Being old does not mean having impunity. Or immunity,” he repeated. “You have to know how to look deep into my eyes to know who I am. Who I was.”

  The voice resonated as if it were traveling the length of a gallery of mirrors.

  He said his joints ached.

  He said: “There are things I don’t want to know.”

  I asked Asunta Jordán: “Why do you appear almost naked at parties and with me only in the dark?”

  “Why is your penis so long?” I believe she asked him.

  “To cool off my semen,” responded Monroy.

  “What does it mean to be put in a safe place? Wait just a minute …”

  “And what does it mean to go to bed with Max, like you do, Asunta?”

  “What do you know—”

  “I’ve heard you.”

  “Have you seen us?”

  “It was very dark. Don’t fuck around.”

  “Black. It was black, you spying bastard!”

  “Go on, don’t play dumb, answer me.”

  “Don’t be a busybody, I’m telling you. What a meddler you are!”


  This reproof, which seemed to come from Asunta, in fact was directed at me by Antigua Concepción: I felt the outrage of her wrinkled hand weighed down with heavy rings, almost in the posture, rather than attacking me, of defending her son Max, who advanced like a ghost, white as chalk, surrounded by the tolling of deep bells, disconcerted, with eyes that said,

  “I feel like sleeping …”

  Max Monroy came toward me, expecting to be interrupted, wanting it, anticipating it.

  The bell rang with a muffled sonority.

  Max said to me: “What, who is it tolling for?”

  I had the courage to respond: “Who stopped destiny?”

  “Your stopping mine or my stopping yours?” he said in a voice desperate with unwanted concern before the entire dream vanished …

  THOSE WHO HAVE accompanied me throughout this … What to call it? Agony? Mental anguish, aching passion? Those who accompany me (you, semblance, brother, hypocrite, etcetera) know my internal chats all strive to be dialogues with Your Graces, efforts of desperate appearance and agonizing reality to escape the site of my epidermis and tell you what I tell myself, without the certainty of truth, with the insecurity of doubt.

  How was the person of Jericó, put “in a safe place,” not going to return constantly to my soul as I walk slowly from the apartment on Praga to an uncertain destination? A pedestrian of the air, because while my feet trod the sidewalks of Varsovia, Estocolmo, and Amberes, my head had no compass. Or rather: North was Jericó, in more than one sense. The cardinal point of my life, the wind that cools it, pole star, guide, direction, and above all frontier, the limit of something more than territories, a frontier of exiles, distances, separations that the life of Jericó made irremediable …