Can’t we rebel against the gray sadness of this fatality? I evoke this feeling because I believe it is what joined Jericó and me as brothers. And I’m also of this opinion because it was the nurse Elvira Ríos who came before anyone else to break the habitual formations enclosing me in the house on Calle de Berlín under the tutelage of María Egipciaca. It isn’t that the nurse had proposed to “free me” or anything like that. It was simply a question of a presence different from everything I had known until then. María Egipciaca constantly praised the Caucasian race, the “whiteys,” almost assigning to them the destiny of the world or, at least, the monopoly on intelligence, beauty, and strength. She suffered from an unfortunate mental confusion that led her to say things like “If whites governed us, we’d be a great country”; “Indians are our burden”; “See, the Americans killed the Indians and that’s why they could be a great nation”; “Those blacks are only good for dancing.” When she leafed through my history books, she would sigh over the blond Emperor Maximiliano de Habsburgo and deplore the triumph of “that Indian” Juárez. She didn’t know much about the war of 1846–48 with the United States, though her prejudices were enough for her to wish that North Americans had taken over the entire Mexican territory once and for all. When I dared to remark that then we would be a Protestant country, she was confounded for the moment and not until the next day did she come up with an answer: “The Virgin of Guadalupe would have converted them to religion,” because for her, Protestantism was, at most, “a heresy.”
The arrival of the nurse Elvira Ríos, very dark-skinned and dressed in white with a black valise in her hand and an active professional disposition that would not tolerate insolence or interruptions or jokes, became a challenge to Doña María Egipciaca. I felt it from the moment the nurse prohibited my jailer from entering my room.
“And the tray with his food?” María Egipciaca said haughtily.
“Leave it outside.”
“Better yet, you carry it up.”
“With pleasure.”
“And if you like, cook it too.”
“That’s no trouble, Señora.”
Each of Elvira’s responses seemed to corner María Egipciaca a little more, and in the end she prepared the meals and brought them to the door of my bedroom, attempting to cross the threshold, not counting on the nurse’s will.
“The patient needs rest.”
“Listen, Señorita, I’m not going to—”
“That’s an order.”
“We’ve lived together his whole life!”
“That’s why he has a nervous ailment.”
“You’re arrogant!”
“Just professional. My job is to protect the young man from any nervous disturbance and restore his tranquillity.”
“It’s my house!”
“No, Señora. You’re only an employee here, like me. Please close the door.”
“Arrogant! Presumptuous Indian!”
From this delicious exchange (which avenged all the years of tension in the house on Berlín) was born my admiration for the small, agile, slender nurse. I attempted to converse with her in a less professional manner. She wouldn’t allow it. She was here to take care of me and restore me to health, not to chat. I looked at her with a look I did not recognize but the mirror confirmed as “the eyes of a lovesick calf.”
My gaze obtained only one response: Elvira placed a thermometer in my mouth with a gallant gesture.
The truth is that this agile, self-assured presence in a young, small body excited me more than if Elvira had shown herself naked. I learned right then, during the first few days of my nerve cure, first to guess at and then immediately to desire the flesh hidden behind the nurse’s snow-white uniform. What would she be like naked? What kind of underclothes would a señorita like her wear? Was she still a señorita? Did she have a boyfriend? Was she married? And as young as she was, did she have children? All these questions resolved, eventually, into a single image. Elvira naked. My eyes stripped her of clothing, and she did not resemble the paper dolls in the magazines that had first excited me. I understood one thing: Seeing her dressed, all in white, moved me more than seeing her without clothes, because the uniform stimulated my imagination more than nudity.
The earlier routine disappeared. It was replaced by a new routine joined to the presence of the nurse, my imagination whirling between her slender hips and the succession of thermometers, pills, checks of blood pressure, and conversations that revealed my juvenile lack of experience and vague desire to prolong childhood without showing my dread of adulthood.
She seemed to observe it all with an intelligent gaze that María Egipciaca, intruding from time to time, called (from behind the door, like a ghost that no longer frightened me) “black squirrel eyes,” or “her with the little mouse eyes,” words that did not disturb the young professional, no doubt accustomed to things worse than a muttering, rabid old woman displaced by the facts of life from her customary dominant position. I was grateful to Elvira that her presence had translated into my liberation. The house would not be the same again. The tyranny of my childhood lost its powers with every passing hour.
“Wakes earlier.”
“Gets up crazy.”
“No flies come in.”
“Shuffling.”
Elvira completed the interrupted proverbs of María Egipciaca, who listened to them hiding behind the door, betrayed by a moth-eaten sigh. She was defeated.
A week went by. Ten days went by. The period of my convalescence was growing short, and one night, when the famous peace of the graveyard reigned, Elvira said to me:
“Young man, you need only one thing to settle your nerves.”
And immediately she undressed in front of me and I could bear witness to my own imagination. What one thinks can be superior or inferior to reality. I feared, when Elvira unfastened her shirt, that her breasts would not be as I had imagined them. That her belly, her pubis, her buttocks, would contradict my fantasy. This was not the case. Reality surpassed fiction. Elvira’s silence during our fifteen minutes of love was barely broken by an earthly little sigh from her and a prolonged ay! from me, which she stifled, with delight, by covering my mouth with her hand.
Better than my pleasure was the feeling that I had given it to her. No matter how Elvira picked up again not only her clothes but her nurse’s attitudes, I knew from then on that I could give pleasure to a woman and believed at that moment it was the greatest wisdom in life and everything I learned from then on would not be better or wiser than this, although this, I also found out, would never be repeated exactly the same way. There would be in my life loves that were longer, shorter, more or less important, but none would replace my sexual dawning in the arms of Nurse Elvira, healer of my youth and quadrant of my maturity.
And so it happened that on the same day I got up from bed and Elvira very seriously said goodbye, I went into the bedroom of my almost forgotten jailer Doña María Egipciaca and found an unmade bed and an abandoned mattress.
FATHER FILOPÁTER HONORED us with his friendship. Of all the assholes running loose in the schoolyard, he selected Jericó and me to talk, discuss, and think with him. We knew it was a privilege. We didn’t, however, want to be seen as something exceptional, enviable, or, by the same token, laughable or open to ridicule by the mass of students more interested in dozing or kicking a ball than in demonstrating that man is a being who thinks when he walks. Because our conversations with Filopáter were all peripatetic. With absolutely no desire to evoke Aristotle, Filopáter made it clear that in the act of walking, one establishes an active friendship without the hierarchies implied when we sit at a table or receive the lesson from the altar—civil or religious—of the teacher-priest (or as Filopáter would say, not without a touch of pedantry, the magister-sacerdos).
I suppose that speaking while walking was the intuitive way in which the teacher put himself on our level and invited us to speak without his looking down at us from on high. Sometimes we stayed after
class in the yard. Other times we walked the streets of Colonia Roma. Rarely did we reach the Bosque de Chapultepec. The truth is that in the act of holding a dialogue, the city tended to disappear, changing into a kind of agora or academy shared through the word. And the word, what was it? Reason or intuition? Conviction or faith? Provable faith? Rational intuition?
The first thing Father Filopáter set forth for us was what he considered a danger. He knew about our readings and intellectual enthusiasms. From the very first, he warned us:
“Be careful of extremes.”
The invitation to debate was formulated from the moment the priest proposed that we talk to him. We respected him enough—and I suppose we respected ourselves enough—not to question his right to think, ours to refute him, and his to respond. Moreover, I confess that Jericó and I wanted and needed this, I at the age of eighteen and he at nineteen, and both of us fertile ground for receiving another’s seed in the mental fields we had been cultivating at least since sixteen and seventeen with impassioned readings, debates between ourselves, and a feeling of enormous emptiness: Why did we think, for whom did we think, who would dispute our proud youthful knowledge, who would put it to the test?
Because nothing inspires pride comparable to that of a young person’s intellectual awakening. The darkness dissipates. Day dawns. Night is left behind. Not because the earth moves around the sun, but because we are the sun, the earth is ours. We knew it.
“Drinking from the same fountain, you and I can be left dry, Josué, we can turn into intolerant individuals without someone to put us up against the wall and make us doubt ourselves …”
I am transcribing and fixing these words of Jericó’s because I will have occasion to invoke them very often in the future.
Now, as if he had read our thoughts and deciphered our disquiet, Filopáter approached us in the schoolyard, tacitly asked us to join him in his slow walk among the arches of the building, without attracting attention, with pensive references to the weather, the changing light in the city, the quality of the day, the ability to hear and take pleasure in urban music, and thought.
“I’m not mistaken if I say you’re very involved in two authors.”
He saw our books, hidden sometimes in our book bags, sometimes displayed defiantly on our desks or read with youthful ostentation at recess, when the presence of my friend Jericó defended me against the old assaults on my innocent nose and we were both consigned to a kind of student limbo. We were “strange” and didn’t know how to get a ball into a hoop.
The two authors were Saint Augustine and Friedrich Nietzsche. In an intuitive and reasoned way, Jericó and I, like iron unattached to a magnet, had headed for opposing thinkers. We wanted, more accurately, to learn to think on the basis of extremes. Our purpose was transparent to someone like Father Filopáter and his rapid attraction to an unoccupied center: for us and, in contrast to what we could imagine, for himself.
“It matters a great deal to you to think as you choose, doesn’t it?”
“And also to express freely what we think, Father.”
“Authority has no right to intervene?”
“Of course not.”
“Of course not when it’s a question of a religious institution? Or never?”
“We want it never to interfere if it’s a question of a secular state.”
“Why?”
“Because the state is secular in order to dispense justice, and justice is not a question of faith.”
“And charity?”
“It begins at home,” I allowed myself to joke, and Filopáter laughed along with me.
He began by situating our extremes. He clarified that Jericó and I chose two authors who would teach us to think, not two filiations who would oblige us to believe and defend what we believed. In this we agreed with him. It was the basis of our dialogues. We weren’t wedded to our philosophers except insofar as we read and discussed them. Was Filopáter tied to the dogmas of his Church? Thinking this was our initial advantage. We were mistaken. In any event, our thinking was opposed to faith and wagered on the clash of ideas. Our decision was that these ideas were diametrically opposed, and Filopáter situated them in a pellucid manner.
We read Saint Augustine: God creates all things and He alone sustains them. Evil is only the absence of a good we could have. When it fell, humanity lost its original values. Recovering them requires divine grace. Grace is inaccessible to human beings, fallen and in disgrace, on their own. The Church is the intermediary of grace. Without the Church, we remain joined to the dis-grace of the human mass, which is massa peccati.
Saint Augustine defended these ideas and fought without respite the heretic Pelagius, for whom salvation was possible without the Church: You can be saved by yourself.
At the other extreme of these youthful ideas, Nietzsche proposed freeing us from all metaphysical belief, abandoning any acquired truth, and accepting with bitterness a nihilism that rejects a Christian culture impoverished by the need for renunciation and yet masked by false values that consecrate appearances and hinder the impulse toward truth.
“What truth?”
“The recognition of the absence of any truth.”
Father Filopáter was not lacking in astuteness and I don’t believe he suspected, beyond a couple of peripeteias, that his religious investiture would lead him to instruct us in the virtues of faith and the error of our deviations. Today merely thinking that makes me ashamed, and I let that kind of suspicion fall useless to the sand where my decapitated head lies. Filopáter did not condemn Nietzsche or praise Saint Augustine. And he did not pull another Catholic theologian from his sleeve. We should not have been surprised, in short, that the lesson he set aside for us would bear the name and imprint of a thinker condemned as a heretic by both his original Hebrew community and eventual Christian one.
Therefore, before expounding the philosophy of Baruch (Benedetto, Benito, Benoît) Spinoza, Filopáter, as he placed on his head not a biretta or a cap but a black zucchetto, reminded us of the origin of the word “heretic,” which was the Greek eso theiros, which means “I choose.” The heretic is the one who chooses. Heresy is the act of choosing.
“Then heresy is freedom,” Jericó hastened to say.
“Which obliges us to think, what is freedom?” the priest shot back.
“Fine. What is it?” I came to my friend’s assistance.
To obtain an approximate answer, Filopáter asked us to retrace the path of the heretic Spinoza.
“You have just told me you believe in freedom of thought.”
“That’s true, Father.”
“Is the thought of believing in God free?”
We said it was.
“Then, can faith be free?”
“If it isn’t consumed in obedience,” said Jericó.
“If it affirms justice,” I added.
Filopáter adjusted the black calotte.
“If it doesn’t, if it doesn’t … Don’t be so negative. Do you believe in the will? Do you believe in intelligence?”
Again, we said we did.
“Do you believe in God?”
“Demonstrate it to us, Father,” Jericó said, arrogantly, brazenly.
“No, seriously, boys. If God exists, He is a God who does not demand obedience and offer justice, but a God positively intelligent and possessing will.”
“Our differences aside, I would say I agree,” I affirmed.
The priest playfully pulled my ear and placed the zucchetto on my head.
“Well, you’re mistaken. God is not intelligent. God has no will.”
I laughed. “You’re more of a heretic than we are!”
He removed the zucchetto.
“I am the most serious of orthodox believers.”
“Explain yourself,” said the very haughty Jericó.
“Believing that God has intelligence and will is to believe that God is human. And God is not human. I do not say with vulgarity ‘He is divine.’ Only that He is other. An
d we gain nothing by turning Him into a mirror of our virtues or a negation of our vices. God is God because He is not us.”
“Why?”
“Because God is infinitely creative.”
“Isn’t that what we humans are, individually, collectively, or traditionally?”
“No, because our creativity is free. God’s is necessary.”
“What do you mean?”
“That God is the cause of Himself and of the finite beings—you, me, everything that exists—derived from Him. God is active not because He is free but because all things necessarily originate in Him.”
“Then he isn’t the bearded man in the sky?”
“No, just as light isn’t the light of a candle or a lightbulb.”
“And Jesus, His son?”
“He is a human form among the infinite forms of God. A form. Just one. He could have chosen others.”
“Why?”
“To let us see Him.”
“And then return to nothing?”
“Or to everything, Jericó.”
“What do you mean?”
“That God is vast, not intelligent. God is infinite, not divisible.”
“But He can be human, material …” I apostrophized.
“Yes, because the body is one thing and matter another. We are only body, the stone is only matter. But God, who can be body—Jesus—can also be matter—creation, seas, mountains, animals, plants, etcetera, and also everything we don’t even know or perceive. What we do manage to see and know, touch and smell, imagine or desire, are for God only modalities of His own infinite extension.”
I believe he saw us looking somewhat perplexed because he smiled and asked:
“Do you subscribe to a theory of the creation of the universe? In reality, there are only three. The one of the divine fiat. The one of the original explosion, which derives from the theory of evolution. Or the one of the infinite universe, without beginning or end, without an act of creation or apocalypse. Pascal’s vast sidereal night. The infinite silence of the spheres. Earth as a passing accident whose origin and extinction are equally lacking in importance.”