Destiny and Desire

by Carlos Fuentes

  I don’t know if Filopáter was proposing to us a kind of menu of the origin of the universe, and if he expected us to subscribe to one or the other of his three theories he was mistaken and knew it. He wanted only to force us to think on our own, and in the course of our talks we realized our initial error. Filopáter did not want to convert us to any orthodoxy, not even his own. And I confess I ended up wondering what, then, if not religious faith, the philosophical reasoning of our teacher could be.

  What was he saying to us?

  “If you don’t believe in God, believe in the universe. Except that the universe is identical to God. It has no beginning and no end. That is why God alone can see a thousand-year-old tree grow.”

  In the admonitory reference to Spinoza, however, we encountered a personal resonance that Filopáter could not, or would not, let us hear. Spinoza was not expelled from Judaism because of persecution. He expelled himself because of love of solitude, and he loved solitude—Filopáter explained—in order to think. He wanted to be expelled from the Hebrew community to demonstrate that religious believers care more about authority than about truth.

  “What do you think?”

  After consulting with each other, Jericó and I told the priest he would have to answer the question himself. We were disrespectful.

  “If what you want, Father, is to set a trap for us so we commit today to what we won’t commit to tomorrow, we believe the one who has been trapped is you.”

  “Why?” the cleric said with great, with real humility.

  How to tell him that whatever happened, whatever he thought, Filopáter would never renounce his religious fidelity? He would be faithful to it no matter how heretically he might think—no matter how much he might choose.

  Perhaps he guessed the answer we didn’t give to his “why” loaded with responsibilities for two young students who were alert but immature.

  “Why?”

  He looked at us with the gratitude, confidence, and affection we would always have for him.

  “Listen, don’t be satisfied with telling me what I might want to hear. And don’t challenge me out of mere negativity. Be serious. Don’t exaggerate.”

  It was another way of telling us he had chosen a path but it was up to us to choose our own. He said it in the indirect way I’m saying it now. He left us with a permanent feeling for the unavoidable difficulties in living life seriously. Spinoza engaged in rebellion and scandal intentionally, in order to be expelled and be independent. Filopáter had not done the same. In the light of his experience, was the venerated Baruch (Benoît, Benito, Benedetto) a coward who, instead of breaking with his Church, looked for the way in which his Church would break with him? And was Filopáter another coward who knew a good many intellectual options outside the Church and settled for the protective cupola of the ecclesiastical dome?

  “I avoid rebellion and scandal,” he told us the last time we saw him, Jericó and I both knowing that when we left school we would not visit Filopáter again, or the students, Professor Soler and his restless hands, Director Vercingetorix and his trampled gladioluses. Why? Because it was simply a rule of life that the attachments of adolescence are lost in order to become adults, without weighing the loss of value this can signify. Filopáter would become the object of our self-satisfied contempt because his instruction consisted of teaching the thought of others, with no contribution of his own.

  But wasn’t the inquiry itself, the ability to ask and to ask ourselves, an indispensable part of the education that would allow us to be “Jericó” and “Josué”? Only later, much later, did we learn that Filopáter resembled Baruch more than we had imagined at school.

  “He did not accept his family’s inheritance. He died in poverty because that is what he wanted. He left with nothing.”

  “Nature is happy with very little. So am I.”

  The candles drip wax on a barrel filled with blood.

  MARÍA EGIPCIACA’S EMPTY bed became the symbol of my being abandoned inside the mansion on Calle de Berlín. Nurse Elvira had disappeared, I suppose forever. The imperious doctor had no need to return. Now the lawyer named Don Antonio Sanginés put in an appearance. I wanted to solve the mysteries that surrounded me. Where was my warden, María Egipciaca? What did the empty bed and rolled-up mattress mean? Where were her clothes, her cosmetics (if she had any), her basic possessions: dentifrice and toothbrush, hairpins, brush, comb? The bathroom was as empty as her bedroom. There were no towels. And no toilet paper. It was as if a ghost had lived in the room of a woman whose physical reality was obvious to me.

  The mystery of her absence was no greater than my sense of it, except that the enigma of the woman never became anything else, while in my own case, absence signified solitude. It was strange. The customary presence of Señora María Egipciaca somehow filled the empty spaces of this mansion untouched by reversals or novelty. It wasn’t a beautiful house, or historic, or evocative. It was huge, and I had to admit that the occasionally amiable though almost always hateful presence of my jailer filled all the spaces that now were not only empty but solitary, for hollowness as sidereal as the universe evoked by Father Filopáter is not the same as a disappearance of the concrete and customary, no matter how odious it may have seemed to us. I imagine the worst injustices, the concentration-camp universe created by the Nazi regime, and try to imagine something that might have been a consolation. Suffering with others. The prisoner in Auschwitz, Terezin, or Buchenwald could see his death in the eyes of other prisoners. Perhaps that is the mercy no one could tear away from that group of victims.

  How could I, wretch that I was, compare my insignificant abandonment in the mansion on Berlín to the fate of a victim of Nazi racism? Was my vanity so great it placed my minuscule abandonment above the gigantic abandonment of the millions of men and women whom no one could or wished to help?

  Well, yes. You can attribute it, now that I, a victim myself, am nothing more than a severed head lapped by the waves of the Southern Sea, to the failings of self-pity, the rupture of the customary, even a certain nostalgia for the presence, odious or amiable but at least habitual and constant, of my old guardian, to calibrate the solitude that invaded me at the time with a sense of being abandoned that brought me dangerously close to the sin of believing that the world was my perception of the world, that my particular image of things was as momentous as the injustice committed against an entire people, religion, or race.

  I’m being sincere with you and make no apology for my absurd anguish but do criticize my narrow perception and arrogant presumption in believing that because I was solitary I was persecuted. But who, in a situation comparable to mine, does not project his personal misery onto a greater screen, a collective experience that saves us from the sadness of the trivial and insignificant? Perhaps, looking back, I realize that what I perceived was inside me, and what lay outside was so small that to endure it I had to sketch it on our time’s large collective screen of grief, abandonment, and despair.

  Forgive me for saying what I have just said, you who still live and give definitive value to your existence. I do it to punish myself and situate the small crises of my youth within their real limits, which are limits only because we first extended them to the entire universe, turned our small problems into matters of universal transcendence, and compared ourselves, grotesquely, to Anne Frank or, more modestly, David Copperfield. All this is to say that the disappearance of María Egipciaca, preceded by my illness, the incident with Nurse Elvira, and the suspicion I was not who I believed myself to be, confused my existence and left me, like a shipwrecked sailor, wanderering in the solitude of the mansion on Berlín. Waiting for a solution to this new stage of my life, fearful it wasn’t a stage but an insurmountable condition. What would become of me? Following my guardian, would I disappear too? Would I be expelled? How long would a wait continue that was a torment and brought me to the ludicrous extreme of comparing myself to a victimized Jewish girl or an abandoned English boy?

  The atto
rney, Licenciado Don Antonio Sanginés, appeared one Saturday morning to explain the situation to me. Which was what it had always been. Except that Señora María Egipciaca would no longer look after me.

  “Why?” I dared to ask in the unyielding presence of the lawyer, a tall, imperturbable man who looked at me without seeing me, so heavy were his eyelids and so meager the light that came in or went out through those curtains.

  “That’s the way it is,” was his only response.

  “Did she die? Move away? Was she dismissed? Did she grow tired of the work?”

  “That’s the way it is,” Licenciado Sanginés repeated and proceeded to lecture me about my new situation, as if nothing had happened.

  I would continue to live in the house on Calle de Berlín until I finished my preparatory studies. Then I could select my course of study and stay in the house until I completed it. At that time, new instructions would be given to me. I would receive a stipend sufficient to my needs. Matters would be arranged in accordance with those needs.

  The lawyer read the document containing these instructions, folded it, placed it in the jacket pocket of his blue pinstripe suit, and rose to his feet.

  “Who will look after me?” I said, alarmed at not having anyone to fix my food, make my bed, prepare my bath, and ashamed at having to admit to this catalogue of requirements.

  “That’s the way it is,” Sanginés repeated and left without saying goodbye.

  I asked myself if I could live with so many unanswered questions. I saw myself lost in the big old house, left to my own devices and the question Sanginés had posed: What were my needs?

  As soon as the lawyer had left, the usual maid came in and, without saying a word, began her work. I believe it was this resumption of custom in the midst of an unaccustomed situation that disconcerted me more than anything else. The attempt to mollify me by assuring me everything would be the same did not resolve the mysteries I found troubling. Who was María Egipciaca? Where was she? Had she died? Had she been dismissed? Would I see Nurse Elvira again? Who was I? Who was supporting me? Who was the owner of the house I lived in? How did those proverbs end?

  “… does dawn come earlier.”

  “… wakes up crazed.”

  “… the old woman’s in the cave.”

  “… lets in no flies.”

  “… shuffling the deck.”

  Jericó completed the proverbs María Egipciaca had left dangling and gave me an order:

  “Come live in my apartment.”

  “But the lawyer—”

  “Pay no attention to him. I’ll arrange it.”

  “And if you can’t?”

  “That can’t happen. You have to learn to rebel.”

  “And be left without—”

  “You won’t lack for anything. You’ll see.”

  “You’re pretty rash, Jericó.”

  “Sometimes you have to take a risk and ask yourself: Who needs whom? Do they need me or do I need them?”

  “Us?”

  He looked with contemptuous eyes at the empty rooms in the house on Berlín.

  “You’ll go crazy here. It’ll be like clockwork.”

  JERICÓ LIVED ON the top floor of a crumbling building on Calle de Praga. The green tide of the Paseo de la Reforma could be heard in perpetual conflict with the gray traffic of Avenida Chapultepec. In any event, living on the seventh floor of an apartment building with no elevator had something about it that isolated us from the city, and since on the other floors there were only offices, after seven in the evening the building was ours, as if to compensate for the cramped arrangement of a living room integrated with the kitchen—stove, refrigerator, pantry—separated only by the high counter we used as a table, integrated in turn by two high stools that resembled the racks where they placed heretics, to the derision of the people, and the punished, to the mockery of their masters.

  What else? Two bedrooms—one smaller than the other—and a bathroom. Jericó offered me the larger room. I refused to displace him. He suggested changing beds every seven days. I accepted, not understanding the reasoning behind the offer.

  We also shared the closet, though I brought from Berlín to Praga (from Döblin to Kafka, one might say) more clothing than the very few items my friend had.

  And we shared women. I should say, a single woman in a single house on Calle de Durango, the brothel of La Hetara, a name of ancient lineage, according to my friend, for at the dawn of Mexican time two women fought for control of whoredom in the city: La Bandida, a famous madam celebrated in boleros and corridos and, much more discreet, La Hetara, to whose house Jericó took me one night.

  “You’re like a lamb going to slaughter, and I know why. You fell in love with the nurse Elvira Ríos. You didn’t realize that the nurse, the doctor, the entire house on Berlín, and of course your jailer Doña María Egipciaca were all passing illusions, phantoms of your childhood and early youth, destined to disappear as soon as you reached the ‘age of reason.’ ”

  “How do you know that?” I asked without too much surprise, since to me the speed of my friend’s associations and conundrums was already proverbial.

  “Aaaah. The fact is your case is mine … I believe …”

  With growing perplexity I asked him to explain. I had grown up in a mansion in the care of a strict tyrant and he, apparently, had been freer than the wind, giving the impression—underscored by his apartment, his vital ease in speaking, living, going to see whores, walking between the Zona Rosa and Colonia Roma as if there were no (were there any?) urban frontiers—that he had appeared in the world totally prepared, with no need for family, antecedents … or a last name.

  All the entrance bells at the building on Praga had the names of individuals, companies, legal offices. The top floor said only PH—Penthouse. Ever since school, and above all after the incident with the young administrator whom I asked about Jericó’s last name, I did not have the courage to investigate any further. It cost the administrator his job. After my question we didn’t see him again, not even hidden behind his officious little window. I deduced that just as the school secretary had vanished, I could disappear too if I inquired about the last name and therefore the origins of my straightforward though mysterious friend Jericó.

  And yet, here we were together in the garret (penthouse) on Calle de Praga between Reforma and Chapultepec, sharing roof, bathroom, meals, readings, and, finally, women. Or rather, woman. Just one.

  Jericó pushed aside the beaded curtain and moved easily among the twenty or so girls gathered in the parlor of La Hetara. He told me—noticing my glances—to close my eyes. Why? Because we were going directly to the room where our friend was waiting for us. Friend? Our? Our whore, Josué. Our? Mine is yours. I forbid you to choose. I already chose for you, he went on, opening the door of a bedroom that had a thick, mixed aroma (perfume, sweat, starch) slathered on the walls, which no one and nothing, except the collapse of the house, could eliminate.

  It was a room overloaded with heavy curtains on the walls, an effort at the kind of Oriental luxury I would later appreciate in the paintings of Delacroix crowded with silks, draperies, carpets, incense burners, fans, odalisques, and eunuchs … except in this room everything was sensually olfactory and barely visible, so great was the pileup of pillows, carpets, poufs, mirrors with no reflection, and the smell of cat piss and fast food, as if, when the act was over, the prostitute’s solitude was compensated for only by an appetite contrary to the insatiable hunger that is the rule for the modern woman, molded by models who look like broomsticks and lead the daughters of Eve to bounce back and forth between bulimia and anorexia.

  What awaited us? Was she fat or thin? Because in the darkness of the room, which was not even half-lit, it was difficult to find the dependable object of Jericó’s desire transformed, with fraternal tyranny, into my own.

  I allowed myself to be led. I recognized my position as student with barely one flower in my buttonhole, the deflowered and lamented Elvira, while
Jericó strolled through this brothel like a sheikh in his harem with an unpleasant self-assurance that owed a good deal to his nineteen years. He was the sultan, the qaid, the chief, the top dog. Would his age humble him or exalt him even more on this, my first night as an eighteen-year-old adolescent in a whorehouse?

  With a dramatic gesture, Jericó took a heavy silk bedspread and pulled it aside, revealing the woman protecting herself beneath and behind this large scenic device.

  How much was revealed to me? Very little. The woman was still covered from the waist down, only her bare back gleamed, in the dusky light, like a forgotten moon, and her face was covered by a veil that concealed her from nose to shoulder. The only things visible were the eyes of a winged beast, black, large, cruel, mindless, and indifferent, as mysterious as the hidden half of her face, almost as if from the nose down this woman had an appearance that denied the great unknown of her gaze with a vulgarity, simplicity, or stupidity unworthy of her enigmatic eyes.

  I didn’t see much more, as I say, because as soon as we were undressed, the woman disappeared amid Jericó’s kisses and my timid caresses, the two of us naked without any previous order or decision, naturally stripped of everything except our skin, avid to kiss the woman, touch her, in the end possess her.

  And never speak to her. The veil that covered her mouth also sealed it. She did not allow a sigh, a moan, a reply to escape. She was the object-woman, something volunteered, made for the pleasure—that first night—only of Jericó and Josué, Castor and Pollux, here and now again the children of Leda, whore to the swan, born in this instant of the same egg, the Dioscuri in the act of being born, crushing the flowers and grass, shattering the eggs of the swan so that from her would be born love and conflict, power and intelligence, the tremor in the thighs, the fire on the roofs, the blood in the air.

  We followed each other in love.

  Only later did I try to reconstruct in memory what existed outside my body, as if in the act itself any impression other than pleasure would extinguish it. The woman behind the veil was inanimate though endowed with a labored indolence. She adopted mechanical poses that left the initiative to the two of us. Even so, my love was abrupt, spasmodic, obliging me to imagine Elvira’s lack of haste.