Did our life end before our youth?
At what moment?
I loved and admired this man, my brother. Now I summarized my life with him in a question: Everything that happened to us, did it happen to us freely? Or, in the end, were we only a sum of fatalities? Did we rebel against particular destinies—masculine sex, orphans, aspirants to intelligence, I’ll say! translators of intellectual talent to practical life—We won’t be doctors or mechanics, Josué, we’ll be political men, we’ll influence the life of the city … the city he described to me from the terrace of the Hotel Majestic, lengthening it with a gesture of his arm, denying we were puppets of fatality, only to arrive, exhausted, at our destiny chosen as a compromise, as our personal will, to discover at the end of the road that all destiny is fatal, gets away from us, closes life like an iron door and says to us: This was your life, you have no other, and it wasn’t what you wanted or imagined. How long will it take us to learn that no matter how much will we have, destiny cannot be foreseen, and insecurity is the real climate of life?
And in spite of everything, Jericó, wasn’t there a certain equilibrium, an ultimate harmony, an involuntary measure in all you and I did and said? Necessity on one side, chance on the other, they go beyond us and place us, eventually, on the crest of a wave, at the brink of death, conscious that if we don’t know our destinies, at least we’re conscious of having one …
How was our shared destiny revealed to the extent it was not shared but chosen by each of us on his own, knowing we were inseparable: Castor and Pollux, even before we knew we were brothers: Cain and Abel? And I don’t know whether as boys we fought not against each other but against the necessity that seemed to impose itself on us. How did we lose our way? Judge me if you wish. I don’t judge you. I merely confirm that gradually, in the apartment on Praga, seeing the Zócalo from the Hotel Majestic, gradually your face gave way to your mask only to reveal that your mask was your true face … We spoke of the tiger in the zoo devoured by the other four caged tigers. Why that tiger and not one of those that attacked it?
“Use force as if it were an animal you release so it can do harm and then return to its domestic enclosure.”
You released it, Jericó. You couldn’t control it. The tiger didn’t return to the zoo. You turned yourself into the animal, my brother. You believed that from power you would defeat power and turn yourself into power. You told me: Be violent, be arrogant, they’ll respect you in the end and even come to adore you. You believed it was enough to assign a destiny to the mass of people to have them follow you with no motive of their own, only because you were you and no one could resist you. And when you failed, you accused them of treason: the masses who ignored you, Max Monroy because he didn’t consult with you, Valentín Pedro Carrera because he got ahead of you, Antonio Sanginés because he read you in time, Asunta because she preferred me.
I stopped on Calle de Génova, at the entrance to the tunnel that leads to the Glorieta de Insurgentes. The darkness of the urban cave gave me a sense of agony, that word in which accountability and death are associated as they laugh at us and mock our challenges, inspirations, powers …
What was the sin, Jericó? I go onto the plaza filled with young Mexicans disguised as what they are not in order to stop being what they are, and it comes to me like a revelation: your lack of interest in others, your inability to penetrate another’s mind, your pride, Jericó, your rejection of those who are unwanted in the world, which is the immense majority of people. The mobocracy, you said once, the massocracy, the demodumbocracy, la raza, that raza incarnated now, when I penetrate the darkness of the tunnel, in a scuffle, a shove that joins my lips to other lips, a fortuitous kiss, unexpected, dry, unknown, accompanied by a smell I try to recognize, a stink, a sweat, something sticky, an incense of marijuana and bait, the urban smell of tortilla and gasoline …
Rapid, fleeting, the kiss that joins us separates us, the tunnel brightens with its own light and we see each other’s faces, Errol Esparza and I, Josué once Nadal from Nada, now Monroy of a kingdom …
I EMBRACED ERROL, Baldy Esparza, as if he were my past, my adolescence, my precocious thought, everything I was with Jericó and that Errol returned to me now, in a diminished though nostalgic version, thanks to a fortuitous encounter on the Glorieta de Insurgentes.
What did he say to me? What did he show me? Where did he take me? He couldn’t take me to the emo clubs because only young guys went there and not uptight ones like me, dressed to go to an office (a funeral, a wedding, a quinceañera dance, a baptism, everything forbidden by Jericó?), and on the plaza, congregating in silent groups, adolescent girls and boys with no gaze because they covered their eyes with bangs, wore extensions at the back of the neck, dressed in black, with self-inflicted wounds on their arms, drawings tattooed on their hands, very skinny, more dark than dark-skinned, sitting on the flower boxes, silent, abruptly moved to kiss, decorated with stars, perforated from head to foot, I felt impelled to look and avoid their gaze, suspicious of the danger and drawn by an unhealthy curiosity until Errol, my guide through this small parainferno or infereden, placed like a navel in the center of the city, said to me,
“They like it if you look at them.”
A tribe of skinny dark bodies, stars, skulls, perforations, how could I not compare them to the tribes on the Zócalo that Jericó trusted to attack power and where Filopáter earned his living typing at Santo Domingo? Never, with Jericó, had I approached this universe where I was walking now guided by Errol, who had become the Virgil of the new Mexican tribe that he, in spite of his age—which was mine—seemed to know, perhaps because, skinny and long-haired, dressed in black, he didn’t seem to be his age and had penetrated this group to the degree that he approached a girl and kissed her deeply and then her companion, who asked me:
“Do you smooch?”
I looked at Errol. He didn’t return my look. The dark boy kissed me on the mouth and then asked if I had a vocation for suffering.
I tried to answer. “I don’t know. I’m not like you.”
“Don’t stigmatize me,” answered the boy.
“What did he mean?” I asked Errol.
That I shouldn’t distinguish between reason and sentiment. They viewed me as a thinking type who controlled his feelings, Errol said, that’s how they view every outsider. They wanted you to free your emotions. My emotions—wasn’t I going over them again and again on my walk through the Zona Rosa? What other extreme, what externalization of my emotions could I add to the internalization I’ve narrated here? A generational abyss opened before me. At that instant, on Insurgentes, with Errol, surrounded by the tribe of emos, perhaps I stopped being young, the eternally young Josué, the apprentice to life, graduated and moved a step away from retirement by this Bedouin tribe of adolescents determined to separate from me, from us, from the nation I have described, analyzed, and constantly evoked here, with Jericó and Sanginés, with Filopáter and Miguel Aparecido. A secession.
Now, on the Glorieta de Insurgentes, at dusk on this Wednesday of my life, I felt the country no longer belonged to me, it had been appropriated by children between fifteen and twenty years old, millions of young Mexicans who didn’t share my history and even denied my geography, creating a separate republic in this minimal utopia on a plaza in Mexico City, another in Guadalajara, another in Querétaro: the other nation, the threatening and threatened nation, the rejected and rejecting country. It was no longer mine.
Did Errol read my gaze that afternoon as we strolled around the sunken plaza of Insurgentes?
“They’re only trying to substitute one pain for another. That’s why they cut their arms. That’s why they pierce their ears.”
Substitute one pain for another? I would have liked to tell my friend I too had a tribal esthetic, had nonconformity, had depressions, couldn’t stop falling in love (Lucha Zapata, Asunta Jordán) and suffering. Was it only my esthetic that was distant, not my sentiments? This sudden need to identify with the young peopl
e on the square was doomed, I knew, to failure. It had value on its own, I thought, it had value as an effort at identification, even though physically I could never be part of the new, ultimately romantic nation of darkness longing to die in time, to save itself from maturity … from corruption …
They were romantics, I said to myself, and to Errol I said: “They’re romantics.”
I sensed the personal excitement, the desire to leave the great shadow of poverty and mediocrity and become visible, free the emotions forbidden by the family, religion, politics …
“Don’t stigmatize me.”
“What are they called?”
Darketos. Metaleros. Skatos. Raztecos. Dixies. They form groups, crews. They help each other. They defend themselves. They’re grateful. They’re emos.
Suddenly, the peace—passivity—of the emo world was shattered with a violence Errol himself didn’t expect, and he took me by the shoulders to lead me off the Glorieta. The Génova, Puebla, and Oaxaca entrances were closed by the invasion of young men shouting assholes, fuckers, get them, throwing stones while the emos covered their faces and said—they didn’t shout—equality, tolerance, respect, and offered their arms to be wounded by the aggression until the skateboarders took the initiative and chased the aggressors with their boards and a kind of peace returned followed by a slow nocturnal migration to other corners of a restless city that both was and was not mine.
“I want to kill Maxi Batalla and Sara P.,” Errol said when we sat down to drink beers at a café on the Glorieta. “They killed my mother.”
“Somebody got there first,” I told him.
“Who? Who did?” There was slaver on my friend’s lips.
“My brother Miguel Aparecido.”
“Where? Who?”
“In the San Juan de Aragón Prison.”
“What? He killed them?”
I didn’t know how to answer him. I knew only that the Mariachi Maxi and the whore with the bee on her buttock were “in a safe place,” and with that, perhaps, the history of my time closed and a new history opened, the history of the kids on the plaza who one day, I reminded Errol, would grow up and be clerks, businessmen, bureaucrats, fathers as rebellious as their own fathers had been, pachucos and tarzans, hippies and rebels without a cause, gangs and the unemployed, generation after generation of insurgents eventually tamed by society …
“Do you understand, Errol, why, if there are five tigers in a cage, four get together to kill just one?”
“No, old buddy, plain and simple, no.”
We agreed to see each other again.
“YOU NEED A vacation,” Asunta Jordán told me when I returned to the office on Santa Fe. “You look a wreck. It’s time for a rest.”
For the sake of my mental health, I rejected the idea of a conspiracy. Why did everyone want to send me on vacation? I looked in the mirror. “A wreck”: vitiated, damaged. Ruined by evil companions? Their distribution in my life flashed through my mind: María Egipciaca, Elvira Ríos, Lucha Zapata, Filopáter, Max Monroy, Asunta herself, Jericó … Evil or good companions? Responsible for my being a “wreck”? I had enough honor left to say that I alone—and no one else—was responsible for the “damage.”
I looked in the mirror. I seemed healthy. More or less. Why this insistence on sending me away for a rest?
“To Acapulco.”
“Ah.”
“Max Monroy has a nice house there. On the way to La Quebrada. Here are the keys.”
She tossed them, with a contemptuous gesture though with a friendly smile, on the table.
It was a house on the way to La Quebrada, Asunta explained. It dated from the late 1930s, when Acapulco was a fishing village and there were only two hotels: La Marina, in the middle of town, and Hotel de La Quebrada, which came down from the hills and settled on a terrace where one could admire intrepid divers who waited for the right waves and then threw themselves into the narrow inlet of water between steep, craggy cliffs.
Now Acapulco had grown until it had millions of inhabitants, hundreds of hotels, restaurants, and condominiums, beaches polluted by the uncontrolled discharge from the aforementioned hotels, restaurants, and condominiums, and increasing sprawl to the south of the city, from Puerto Marqués to Revolcadero and even as far as Barra Vieja, in search of what Acapulco used to offer like a baptismal certificate: limpid water, tended beaches, paradise lost …
I arrived at Max Monroy’s house at La Quebrada on a solitary Monday with one suitcase and the books I wanted to reread to see if one day I would present my lawyer’s thesis, Machiavelli and the Modern State. Erskine Muir, who explains the Florentine by means of his time, the Italian city-states, Savonarola, the Borgias; or Jacques Heers, who sees a not very rigorous but passionate historian, poet, and author of courtly plays and carnival songs whose literary imagination was applied to reasons of state, making generations believe that carnival is serious and curiosity the law. Maurizio Piral, who questions the famous smile of Niccolò as the female author of the book Niccolò did not write: the book about life, its paradox, its uncertainty. A misinterpreted man, insists Michael White: his mental lucidity forgotten, his duplicity and ambition codified. Sebastián da Grazia sends Niccolò to the hell made up, of course, of his contemporaries. Franco Fido studies the paradox of an author who writes “The bible of his own enemies,” from the transformation of Niccolò by Elizabethan dramatists into “Old Nick,” the Devil in person, to his vulgar rhetorical invocation by Il Duce Mussolini. The Jesuits, the ignorant, Fichte: Who has not been concerned with the “most famous Italian in Europe,” especially the Italians themselves, who reduced him to municipal, confessional, and academic boundaries?
All this was in my knapsack. The indispensable commentaries. Above all, those of the statesman speaking to Machiavelli power to power: Napoleon Bonaparte feels he is the Machiavellian incarnation of the New Prince as opposed to the Hereditary one, but is anxious to endure in power: to be succeeded, as the New Prince, by his descendants, who will be the Heirs …
I say all the preceding so the reader can know my good—magnificent—intentions when I withdrew to Acapulco loaded down with Machiavellian literature and with a touch of melancholy, an inevitable residue of my recent personal history, not imagining that the true Machiavellianism wasn’t in my knapsack but waiting for me in the house at La Quebrada, which you reached by ascending the mountainous curves over the bay until you reached a rocky height and entered a mansion that rushed, with no distinction of style beyond a vague “Californian” from the 1930s, past the kitchens, bedrooms, and sitting rooms to the reward of a huge terrace overlooking the Pacific Ocean and, farther down, the narrow private beach. In its entirety, it was like one of those white porcelain dinner pails my guardian María Egipciaca prepared for me with five little stacked plates, from wet soup to dry soup to chicken to vegetables to dessert … the works.
“Max Monroy built it for Sibila Sarmiento,” Asunta Jordán told me surprisingly when I reached the terrace and she came toward me, highball in hand, barefoot, dressed in palazzo pajamas I knew from rooting through her closet. Loose blouse. Wide pants. Black with gold trim and edges.
She offered me the drink. I feigned casualness. She didn’t tell me too much. It wasn’t the first surprise this woman had given me. She looked at the ocean.
“But Sibila Sarmiento never got to live in it. Well, in fact, she didn’t even get to see it …”
She saw me. She didn’t look at me. She saw me there: like a thing. A necessary but awkward thing.
Asunta laughed in her fashion: “Max had illusions that one day he’d be able to bring the mother of his three sons here, to Acapulco, and offer her a quiet life by the ocean. Well. What a hope!”
Her gaze became cynical.
One more of Max’s illusions. He imagined that one day Doña Concha would free him from the maternal dictatorship to which she kept him subjected.
“A man at once complicated and simple,” she went on, “it’s difficult for Max Monro
y to digest. Everything takes him time. He never belches, you know? There are things he doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want … And another thing. Between utility and revenge, he always chooses the useful.”
She raised her glass. She almost winked at me.
“I’m just the opposite …”
She laughed. “Then he strikes like a bolt of lightning.”
She indicated that I should sit in a wicker chair. I remained standing. At least in this I could rebel against what I felt was the implicit dictatorship of Asunta Jordán. She didn’t care.
“Max Monroy!” she exclaimed as if she were invoking the sunset. “A civilized man, right? A reasonable man, don’t you think? He always asks for suggestions. He’s open to suggestions. Ah, but not to criticism. Suggesting is one thing. Criticizing is another. Criticizing him means thinking he can’t think for himself, that he requires orientation, another’s opinion … False. The suggestions should stop halfway between two hateful extremes, Josué, my good Josué: flattery and criticism.”
She told me she would criticize, for example, this useless, uninhabited house … a mansion for a ghost, for a madwoman. Or for a ghostly madwoman.
She smiled. “Imagine Sibila Sarmiento wandering here, not knowing where she is, not even looking at the ocean, distant from the moon and the sun, prisoner of nothingness or of a hope as crazy as she is. The hope Max will return and rescue her from the asylum. Or at least make her another son. Another heir!
“Thank me, Josué … I flew here to prepare the house for you so you’ll be comfortable. It was sealed tight, as if with a cork. And in this heat? Air it all out, dust off the furniture, smooth out the sheets, put out towels and soap, just look, everything to receive you as you deserve …”