Destiny and Desire

by Carlos Fuentes

  “It’s important to make a list of obligations …”

  “Sacred ones?”

  Jericó agreed energetically. “For us, yes.”

  Where would we begin?

  First, with a shared decision to reject frivolity. My friend took a gossip magazine out of his backpack and leafed through it with displeasure and disgust.

  “Look at this succession of idiocies in full color on glossy paper. Are you interested in knowing that the rock-and-roller Tarcisia married the Russian millionaire Ulyanov, both of them barefoot, with Hawaiian leis around their necks, on the Playa del Carmen, and that the guests began the day dancing to hip-hop on the sand at seven in the morning, when they gorged on a savory tripe stew in honor of the bride’s father, who is a native of Sonora? Would you have liked to be a guest? Would you have accepted an invitation? Answer me.”

  I said no, Jericó, not at all, I’m not interested in being—

  He interrupted me. “Not even if it was your own wedding?”

  No, now I smiled, I thought that taking the matter as a joke was the best thing and I admired Jericó’s intense ability to take life very, very seriously.

  “Do you swear never to go to a quinceañera, a thé dansant, a baptism, or grand openings of restaurants, flower shops, supermarkets, bank branches, the celebration of university alumni, beauty contests, or meetings at the Zócalo? Do you promise to despise a couple who have their picture taken in color and published in the paper when she is eight months pregnant and wearing a bikini with the proud husband caressing her belly and announcing the imminent arrival, baptism, and sanctification of Raulito in the midst of a storm of flashbulbs (which is why they were announcing the emotional event now)?”

  I made the mistake of laughing. Jericó slammed his fist down on the table. The coffee cups rattled. The waitress came over to see what was going on. The hostility in my friend’s eyes frightened her away. The café began to fill up with patrons thrown up after a day of work that perhaps differed for each one but still imposed an identical fatigue on all of them. Public or private offices, businesses large or small, the merciless traffic of Mexico City, the nonexistent hope of finding happiness when they reached home, the weight of what was not. All that began to come into the café. It was seven in the evening. We had begun talking at five-thirty, when the place was empty.

  And together we had agreed on a plan for a shared life. Did we speak only of avoiding the stupidities of social and political festivities and celebrations? Not at all. Before what Jericó contemptuously called “the herd of oxen” came in.

  “Oxen,” Jericó repeated. “Never say ‘oxes.’ ”

  “Oxen?”

  “No. Oxes. Never say oxen are oxes.”

  “Why?”

  “So as not to give in to the vulgarity, stupidity, and camouflaging of mental poverty by means of deadly buffoonery.”

  We settled on a plan of readings, of selective and rigorous intellectual self-improvement, which, survivors, you will not find out about today because at that moment Errol Esparza walked into the café and reminded us, boys, today’s the day you visit my house. Let’s go.

  “Like clockwork,” Jericó said, as usual.

  THE ESPARZA FAMILY lived in the Pedregal de San Angel, an ancient volcanic bed, a remnant of the eruptions of Xitle, on whose dark, bulky foundations the architect Luis Barragán attempted to create a modern residential district based on strict rules. First, that volcanic rock be used to build the houses. Second, that they would assume the monastic forms of the Barragán style. Unadorned straight lines, clean walls, with no variant other than the colors, evocative of folklore, associated with Mexico: indigo blue, sour-cherry red, and sun yellow. Flat roofs. No visible water tanks as in the rest of a chaotic city where so many styles cohabitate that in the end there is no style unless it is the triumphal repetition of squat houses, one-story businesses, paint shops, auto repair shops, tire shops, garages, parking lots, and miscellaneous candy stores, taverns, and retailers of all the daily necessities of this strange society of ours, always controlled from the top by very few and always capable of organizing itself from the bottom, with the majority living independently.

  I have said all of this because the pure order desired by the architect did not last as long as a snowball in hell. Barragán had closed the Pedregal with symbolic sentry boxes and gates, as if to dictate a public anathema: Vade retro, Partagás, you will not pass.

  Impure disorder in the name of the false freedom of residents and their accommodating architects—all of them subject to another tyranny, the tyranny of bad taste and assimilation of the worst in the name of a robot’s autonomy—finished off the fleeting effort to give at least one metropolitan residential district the unity and beauty of a district in Paris, London, or Rome. So that in the midst of the naked beauty of the original framework there erupted like malignant chancres fake Colonial, Breton, Provençal, Scotch, and Tudor residences, not to mention the inconceivable California ranch and the nonexistent tropical “adobe hacienda.”

  Still, the Esparza family had not brought to Pedregal the architecture of their previous districts. They had accepted the severity of the original monastic design. At least on the outside, Barragán triumphed. Because once Jericó and I walked into the home of our new friend, Errol Esparza, what we found was a baroque disorder inside a neobaroque chaos inside a post-baroque clutter. In other words, one horror did not suffice in Esparza’s house. The bareness of the walls was a summons that could not be denied to cover them with calendar art, mostly still lifes, picture after picture, not merely contiguous but incestuous, as if leaving a centimeter of empty wall were proof of barefaced miserliness or the crude rejection of an invitation. Articles of furniture also fought for the prize of space. Massive sofas from cheap furniture stores designed to fill large empty spaces: six griffin claws, three cushions of embossed velvet for the back, tables with dragon feet and surfaces covered with ashtrays taken from various hotels and restaurants, rugs with Persian intentions and the appearance of straw sleeping mats contrasted with salons of a Versaillesque nature, Louis XV chairs with brocade backs and deer feet, glass cabinets with untouchable souvenirs of Esparzan visits to Versailles and Gobelin tapestries of recent manufacture. Everything indicated that the first room, with its gigantic television screen, was where the Esparzas lived and the “French” room where, in the evenings, they received.

  “Make yourselves comfortable,” the good Errol said without a hint of irony. “I’ll let my mother know we’re here.”

  We were looking at the shaggy purple rug whose obvious intention was to grow like an interior, crepuscular lawn, when Errol reappeared leading a “simple” woman who announced her simplicity with her old-fashioned hairdo—I think it was called a “permanent”—down to her low-heeled shoes with black buckles and moving—now upward—to her cotton stockings, one-piece flowered dress, short apron on which the lady listlessly rubbed her red hands, as if drying them after a domestic flood, to pale, barely made up features. Her face was the blank canvas of an artist undecided whether to conclude it or leave it, with impatient relief, unfinished.

  The lady looked at us with a mixture of candor and suspicion, still drying her hands like a domestic Pontius Pilate, and said in a dull voice, Estrella Rosales de Esparza, at your service …

  “Tell them, mother,” Errol said brusquely.

  “Tell them what?” Doña Estrellita asked with no pretense of surprise.

  “How we got rich.”

  “Rich?” the lady said with authentic confusion.

  “Yes, mother,” the bald kid continued. “My friends must be amazed at so much luxury. Where did it all come from, this … junk?”

  “Oh, son.” The lady lowered her head. “Your father has always been very hardworking.”

  “What do you think about papa’s fortune?”

  “I think it’s fine.”

  “No, its origins.”

  “Oh, son, how can you be—”

  “Be wh
at?”

  “Ungrateful. We owe everything to your father’s efforts.”

  “Efforts? Is that what we call crime now?”

  His mother looked at him defiantly.

  “What crime? What are you talking about?”

  “Being a thief.”

  Instead of becoming angry, Doña Estrellita maintained an admirable composure. She looked at Jericó and me with patience.

  “I haven’t welcomed you. My son is a very impetuous boy.”

  We thanked her. She smiled and looked at her son.

  “He insults me because I’m not Marlene Dietrich. As if that were my fault! He isn’t Errol Flynn either.”

  She turned her back, bending her head, and went back to the mysterious place she had come from.

  Errol burst into laughter.

  He told us his father had been a carpenter, first in one of the poorest districts in the city. Then he began to make furniture. Soon he was selling beds, chairs, and tables to several hotels. Then he established a furniture store downtown, near the Avenida 20 de Noviembre. With so much furniture on his hands, the only thing he could do was put up a hotel, and then another, and yet another, and since the guests wanted entertainment close by—television was still in diapers, that is, black-and-white—he took an old movie house in San Juan de Letrán and turned it into a live-performance theater, decorated in the style of a Chinese pagoda just like the one in Los Angeles, and since man does not live by art alone, he opened a furniture store and then another and another and yet another until he had a chain of hotels and that’s what we live on.

  Errol sighed while Jericó and I—and certainly all of you who can hear me—put on a polite face and listened without blinking to this lightning account of a career that culminated in this shambles of a house in the Pedregal de San Angel with a boy who refused to get into the Cadillac driven by a uniformed chauffeur and delighted in humiliating a defenseless mother and attacking an absent father.

  “He hired gangs of bums to put mice inside rival movie houses, break his enemies, and take over their theaters.”

  “How nice,” I dared to say, but Errol, enveloped in the cloud of his own rhetoric, didn’t hear me.

  “He sent salesmen to distract employees in the businesses of his rivals.”

  “Very smart,” Jericó said with a smile.

  “He sent evangelists to convert them to Protestantism.”

  “The religion of capitalism, Errol,” I said for the sake of saying something.

  “Have you read Protestantism and the Modern World by Ernst Troeltsch?” Jericó commented, increasing the aberrations of the conversation. “Without Protestantism there is no capitalism. In the opinion of Saint Thomas, capitalists went to hell. Consequently, all capitalists are Protestants.”

  I swear it hurt me to see Errol’s bewilderment when right after that Jericó and I looked at each other, thanked him, and left the walled house through a garden with no trees where workers were raising something like a statue onto a pedestal.

  “Let the chauffeur drive you home.”

  We agreed and left. Relieved, but without saying a word and exchanging a complicit glance that said: He’s our friend. We won’t stop talking to him.

  Were we talking to ourselves, Jericó? Didn’t we leave the Esparza house secretly thinking that all this horror, this inanity, this dissatisfaction, this grief, takes place en famille, it occurs because a family exists—like a tray of rotten fruit, a cup of poison, a sewer capable of receiving it all, digesting it, purifying it, bringing it back to life from a near-death final injury?

  You and I avoided looking at each other, Jericó, when we left the residence in Pedregal. Neither of us had a family. We were what we are because we were, are, will be orphans. What is orphanhood? No doubt not the mere absence of father or mother or family but inclemency, the ruination of the sheltering roof for reasons that sometimes are clearly attributable to abandonment, to death, to simple indifference. Except that you and I did not know any of these reasons. Perhaps you do, but you’ve kept them to yourself. And my situation was equivocal, as I’ll recount later.

  He’s our friend. We won’t stop talking to him.

  Although perhaps, privately, we envied Errol his family situation no matter how violent or pathetic it was.

  “He didn’t need to say what he said,” was the secret message Jericó sent me when I got out at Calle de Berlín.

  “That’s true. He didn’t,” I remarked, more to confirm our friendship than for any other reason.

  ON THE OTHER hand, months later, when we graduated from secondary to preparatory, we found not a pretext but an opportunity to speak for hours on end with a new instructor who had just joined the faculty. Until then we had not felt admiration or scorn for the group of teachers who, with far too much discretion for our demanding spirits, taught not very imaginative classes based on acts of serial (like a crime) memorization of history, geography, and natural sciences. The biology instructor was amusing because of the subterfuges he summoned and the rough terrain he walked in order to sublimate the facts of nature by means of an explicit final reference, the crown of his reiterated discourse, to the act of divine creation, the origin and destiny of our physical realities and transcendent mortality.

  There were, no doubt, other excesses that broke the gray neutrality of our classes. The headmaster, an irascible Frenchman with unpronounceable Breton family names, whom we called “Don Vercingetorix,” regularly opened the school year by standing on a dais with a gladiolus in his hand. After perusing the assembled student body with a severe look worthy of Torquemada, he would proclaim, “This is a young Christian before he goes to a dance and kisses a girl.” Immediately afterward he would throw the flower on the floor and stamp on it in a kind of holy can-can until he had pulverized the innocent flower, which he would then pick up from the floor and show us the vegetable tatters in his hands, concluding: “And this is a Catholic boy after he goes to a dance and kisses a girl.” Of the moribund gladiolus, all that survived, with a symbolism surely not desired by the enraged Vercingetorix, was the erect stem. A pregnant silence and a final warning: “Think. Confess your sins. Break ranks.” All that was missing was for him to warn, “And don’t break into laughter,” though the formal severity of the school lent itself not to jokes but to a kind of Christian resignation when we got ready in the locker room to play basketball, knowing that at the opportune moment Professor Soler would come in, saying “Let’s see, let’s see, everybody ready?” as a pretext to look at us before we pulled on our shorts and approach, “let’s see, let’s see,” to adjust the jockstraps needed to protect our sex from blows on the court, to heft with touching reverence, on his knees or bending over, the testicles of each student to check that we were well protected as we went out to athletic encounters and, if we were lucky, sexual combat.

  We students forgave this innocent pleasure of Father Soler, whose red face was the product not of any shame but of an inheritance that can give to the product of the mixing of Indians and blonds a sanguine appearance very apt for disguising the blushes of embarrassing emotion. In other words: Collectively the students forgave the life both of the ostentatious Vercingetorix and the silent Soler, considering that they did not have many opportunities to express themselves in public, subject as they were to long hours of prayers and rosaries, early suppers, fleeting breakfasts … They would have put out the sun with the smoke of incense.

  Everything changed when the new philosophy instructor came on the scene.

  Father Filopáter (that’s how he was announced and how he introduced himself) was a small, agile man. He moved with a combination of juvenile athleticism and spiritual animation, as if in order to demonstrate one you had to celebrate the other. He walked with varying rhythms. Very quickly when he went from one task to another. Very slowly when he strolled around the yard accompanied by one or two students to whom he listened with intense concentration, offering the paradoxical idea of a short man who grew as he thought, as if his
ideas—for he seemed to think more than to talk—were flying over him, creating an unusual halo, not round but long, though always shining.

  It goes without saying, you who are still alive and can contradict me with no risk or confirm everything I say out of curiosity, that Jericó and I immediately fixed on the new arrival and imagined how we could approach him and determine who he was—in addition to being a philosophy instructor—by what he thought and said. He was ahead of us.

  Always together, he said, approaching with his quickest step, like Castor and Pollux.

  The mythological allusion did not escape us, and both Jericó and I instantly looked at each other, knowing he spoke of the twins born of the same egg, for their father was a god disguised as a swan. Always together, the twins took part in great expeditions, like the exploits of the Argonauts under the command of Jason, searching for the as yet undiscovered soul they called the Golden Fleece.

  Filopáter read in our glances that we already knew the legend, though neither he nor we had the courage, on that sunlit October afternoon, to conclude the story of the young twins. A legend can end badly, but the conclusion should not be anticipated at the beginning of life (Jericó and Josué) or what soon would become a friendship (with Father Filopáter). And yet how could it not illuminate for me, no matter how tacitly, the suspicion of an ending that was, if not desired, ultimately fatal? Perhaps the affinity born immediately between the instructor and ourselves was due to a kind of shared respect thanks to which we knew the outcomes but held them off with friendship, ideas, in short, life, since for friendship the outcome always was ideas, life, and the death of the real dialogists. If Socrates survives thanks to Plato, Saint Augustine, and Rousseau because they confessed, and Dr. Johnson because he had Boswell as his secretary and clerk, what opportunity for survival did we three—Father Filopáter, Jericó, and I—have beyond a luminous October afternoon in the Valley of Mexico? Would we be capable, like poets and novelists, of surviving thanks to works that, though they are ours, escape us and become the property of everyone, especially the reader not yet born? This was the challenge that began to filter, like a pure breeze separating us from the overwhelming pollution of the traffic, the smog, the movement in the street of desolate bodies, the mere proximity, here in the schoolyard, of noisy students at recess. No, the breeze was not pure. It was an illusion of our affinity.