Destiny and Desire

by Carlos Fuentes

  “Can you say something to her that will make her tremble?” Jericó whispered in my ear, he and I facing each other with the woman between us, the two friends head to head, panting, trying in vain to smile, naked in our carnal blindness, our hands resting on the woman’s waist, fingers touching, I looking out of the corner of my eye at the bee tattooed on one of the whore’s buttocks, our mouths joined by respiration that was shared, yearning, suspicious, shy, ardent.

  “Can you imagine all the men who’ve had her? Doesn’t it excite you to know the road of her body has been traveled by thousands of cocks? Does it bother you, interest you, repel you? Only you and I become emotional? Are we going to find our pleasure separately or at the same time?”

  I would like to believe, at a distance, that those nights at La Hetara on Calle Durango sealed forever the fraternal complicity (that had already existed since school, since our readings, since our conversations with Filopáter) between Jericó and me.

  Still, there was something else. Not only the postcoital sadness I didn’t feel with Elvira and did now, but an ugliness, a vulgarity that Jericó himself took care to point out to me.

  “Do you want to believe?” He coughed with a caricatured, pompous cough while the woman lay facedown in the bed. “Do you want to believe that sex is like a great baroque poem whose exterior is the insidious ornamentation on limpid profundity?”

  He made a disagreeable face so I would laugh.

  “Then take a look at Hetara at dawn, without the night’s makeup. What will you see? What will it taste of? A roll dipped in perfume. And what will you find if you tear off the veil? A revolting face.”

  He indicated the woman’s backside. She had a queen bee tattooed on her left buttock. He didn’t know I had seen it, which is why he pointed it out to me.

  “Everything’s varnish, my dear Josué. Lose your illusions and say an affectionate goodbye to the veiled woman.”

  Only later did I remember that when I made love to her I closed my eyes, knowing that he, Jericó my friend, made love with his eyes open and came without making noise. Even though he came. She did not.

  “Like clockwork.”

  WHEN WE GRADUATED from prep school, we would matriculate in the Faculty of Law. We took that for granted.

  Our earlier philosophical meanderings—the reading of Saint Augustine and Nietzsche, the discussions with Father Filopáter, the magnet of Spinoza—convinced us that the framework of ideas was like the skeleton in a body that now required the flesh of experience. And without having read Spinoza, experience could be had by a bus driver or a cook. We—Jericó and I—ran the risk of believing that ideas were enough in themselves: splendid, eloquent, astral, and sterile. To give reality to our thoughts, we decided to study law as the option closest to our shared intellectual vocation.

  Because we could share a woman or an apartment. This was almost child’s play compared to the brotherhood of thoughts—Castor and Pollux, children of the swan, the Dioscuri born of the same ovary, causing flowers and grasses to burst forth in the world, attending the birth of love and conflict, power and intelligence. Because they were so united, they decided our next step: to be lawyers in order to give reality to our ideas.

  I was certain about our shared purpose. Still, I noticed in my friend, during the months of vacation between our leaving prep and matriculating at the university, a growing disquiet manifested in isolated phrases when we ate, showered, walked through the neighborhood, went into one of the increasingly rare bookstores in the city, and invaded (or allowed ourselves to invade) spaces devoted to popular music, videos, and gadgetry. There was no lack of street life on the way to our old prep school. Vast, swarming, moving like an undisciplined army of ants, the street gave an accounting of increasingly greater differences of class. There was an abyss between the motorized world and the world on foot or even between those in cars and those on a bus. The Mexican contrast, far from ebbing, increased, as if the country’s “progress” were an optical illusion, calculated on the number of inhabitants but not the sum total of their welfare.

  The working-class city increased its numbers. The privileged city isolated itself like a pearl in the urban oyster (cloister). Jericó and I went to a cineclub and saw Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, with its two rigidly separated universes. Above, a great penthouse of games and gardens. Below, an enormous underground cave of mechanized workers. Superficially gray, at bottom black. Or rather, without light.

  In our city, the young who were neither poor nor rich rubbed elbows with the wealthy in discotheques and wandered solitary and joyless through the commercial centers, the large groupings of stores, movie houses, and cafés under the common roof of provisional protection. Outside, an option was waiting for the young in stylish clothes: Move up, move down, or stay where you are forever.

  For all these reasons, Jericó and the one who is narrating this story to you, gentle survivors, felt privileged. I had lived in protected comfort in the house on Berlín. Now, I shared the apartment on Praga with my friend. I hadn’t known the source of Jericó’s income. Now I had a suspicion that I didn’t have the courage to share with him. On the fifteenth of every month an envelope appeared in the mailbox with a check made out to me. I confess I cashed it in secret and didn’t tell Jericó. But I imagined that periodically he received similar assistance and even went so far as to think, with no proof at all, that the source of our controlled income might be the same. The truth is that the amount I had at my disposal was enough for my immediate needs and nothing more.

  Since my friend and I led twin lives, I supposed his income was not very different from mine. What we did share was the mystery.

  I was saying that during the months of vacation, Jericó began to let slip phrases without precedent or consequence. They seemed directed at me, though at times I considered them mere expressions in viva voce of my friend’s thoughts and concerns.

  In the shower: “What do we fear, Josué?”

  At breakfast: “Never leave yourself open to an ambush.”

  Having lunch at three o’clock: “Don’t let anyone impose opinions on you. Be independent.”

  Walking together through the neighborhood: “Don’t feel superior or inferior to anybody. Feel equal.”

  Back in the apartment: “We have to make ourselves equal to everything around us.”

  “No,” I replied. “We have to make ourselves better. What makes us better also challenges us.”

  Then we fell into a frequent debate, our elbows leaning on the table, my hands supporting my head, his open in front of me, at times he and I in the same posture, both joined by a fraternity that, for me, was our strength … as we drank beer.

  “What undermines a man? Fame, money, sex, power?”

  “Or, on the contrary, failure, anonymity, poverty, impotence?” I hurried to say between sips of brew.

  He said we ought to avoid extremes, though in case of necessity—and he smiled cynically—the first was preferable to the second.

  “Even at the cost of corruption, dishonesty, lies? I give up!”

  “That’s the challenge, dude.”

  I took his hand affectionately.

  “Why did we become friends? What did you see in me? What did I see in you?” I asked, returning with a certain dreamy melancholy to our first meeting, when we were both almost children, in the school officially named Jalisco and in reality Presbytery.

  Jericó didn’t answer. He remained silent for several days, almost as if speaking to me were a form of treason.

  “How to avoid it?” he murmured at times. “I give up!”

  I smiled as I said, so the conversation would not be sidetracked in the usual way: Either you learn a trade or you end up a highway robber.

  He didn’t smile. He said with punctual indifference (that’s how he was) that at least the criminal had an exceptional destiny. The terrible thing, perhaps, was to give in to the fatality of the evasive, the conformity of the common and ordinary.

  He said the vast m
asa pauperatis of Mexico City had no choices but poverty or crime. Which did he prefer? Criminality, no doubt about it. He stared at me, as he had when we made love to the tattooed woman. Poverty could be a consolation. The worst commonplace of sentimentality, he added, removing his hands from mine, was to think the poor are good. It wasn’t true: Poverty is a horror, the poor are damned, damned by their submission to fatality and redeemable only if they rebel against their misery and become criminals. Crime is the virtue of poverty, Jericó said on that occasion I have not forgotten, looking down and taking my hands again before shaking his head, looking at me now with a restrained happiness:

  “I believe that youth consists of daring, don’t you agree? Maturity, on the other hand, consists of dissimulating.”

  “Would you dare, for example, to kill? To kill, Jericó?”

  I pretended terror and smiled. He went on with a somber air. He said he feared necessity, because hunting for the necessary meant gradually sacrificing the extraordinary. I said that all of life, for the mere fact of being, was already extraordinary and deserving of respect. He looked at me, for the first time, with a wounding contempt, lowering me to the condition of the commonplace and lack of imagination.

  “Do you know what I admire, Josué? Above all things I admire the man who murders what he loves, the thief who steals what he likes. This is not necessity. This is art. It is will that is free, supposedly free. It is the opposite of the herd of complaining, stupid, bovine, directionless people, the ones you pass every day in the street. The filthy herd of oxen, the blind herd of moles, the thick cloud of green flies, capeesh?”

  “Are you telling me it’s better to have the extraordinary destiny of a criminal than the common destiny of an ordinary citizen?” I said without too much emphasis.

  “No,” he replied, “what I’m praising is the capacity for deceit, disguise, dissimulation of the citizen who murders in secret and turns his victims into strawberry marmalade!”

  He laughed and said we wouldn’t matriculate together at the Faculty of Law in the Ciudad Universitaria. Next week Jericó was going to France on a scholarship.

  That’s how he told me, without preambles, amiable but cutting, with no warning and no justification. That’s how Jericó was, and at that very moment I should have put myself on guard against his surprising nature. But since our friendship was, by this time, old and deep, I thought the reappearance of my friend’s Nietzschean “brutalities,” contrasting the world with the perception of the world, was merely a momentary return of the options that mark youth, similar to a circular plaza from which six different avenues emerge: We have to take only one, knowing we sacrifice the other five. Will we know one day what the second, third, fourth, or fifth roads held in store? Do we accept this, thinking it didn’t matter which one we chose because we carry the true path inside us and the different avenues are mere accidents, landscapes, circumstances, but not the essence of ourselves?

  Did my friend Jericó understand this when he abandoned me so suddenly in search of a destiny he could separate from me, but even more, from himself?

  Or was he taking an indispensable step so Jericó could find Jericó, and to do that it didn’t matter to him—or in the end, to me—if his trip to Europe distanced him forever or brought him closer than ever to me? I didn’t know the answer then. Only now, cut down, on a remote Pacific beach, do I return to that moment of our shared youth, trying to resume life itself, beyond our personalities, as a premonition of postponed horror: a youth of external violence and internal desolation. An age that disappeared, fragile but perhaps beautiful.

  My absurd preoccupation was different then, different.

  What name would Jericó travel with?

  What last name would be displayed, of necessity, on his passport?

  PROFESSOR ANTONIO SANGINÉS stood out, in every sense, in the Faculty of Law. Tall, distinguished, endowed with an aquiline profile, melancholy brows, and eyes at once serious, cynical, mocking, and tolerant under heavy lids, he appeared in class immaculately dressed, always in three-piece suits (I never saw him combine an unmatched sports jacket and trousers), double-breasted, buttoned to emphasize the high, stiff collar, the monochrome tie, and his only concessions to fantasy, light brown shoes and cuff links won at raffles or bought with love, for it was not impossible to imagine Licenciado Sanginés buying cuff links decorated with the figure of Mickey Mouse.

  I do not need to add that a figure like his made a devilish contrast with the increasingly popular style of our time. The young dress the way beggars or railroad workers once did: torn jeans, old shoes, threadbare jackets, shirts with announcements and slogans (KISS ME, INSANE, I NEED A GIRLFRIEND, TEXAS LOST, I LIKE TO FUCK, I’M ABANDONED, MY PORK RINDS CRACKLE, MÉRIDA METROPOLIS), sleeveless T-shirts, and baseball caps worn backward and all the time, even in class. Even sadder was the sight of mature, not to say old, men and women who assumed a borrowed youth with the same sports caps, Bermuda shorts, and Nike sneakers.

  With it all, Professor Sanginés’s elegance was seen as an anachronistic eccentricity, and he repaid the compliment by viewing the style of the young as decadence unaware of itself. He liked to quote the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi and his famous dialogue between Death and Fashion:

  FASHION: Madame Death, Madame Death.

  DEATH: Wait until the right time, and you will see me without having to call.

  FASHION: Madame Death!

  DEATH: Go to the Devil. I will be ready when you are not.

  FASHION: Don’t you know me? I am Fashion, your sister.

  This was what, with a certain macabre, decadent air, attracted me to this teacher who taught the class in International Public Law with a degree of meticulousness far above the abilities of the students, for he, far from filling us with facts, expounded on two or three ideas and supported them with reference to a couple of fundamental texts, inviting us to read them seriously though convinced—a glance at the flock was enough—no one would follow his advice. That is: He did not order, he suggested. It did not take him long to realize I not only listened to him but for the next month responded to his questions in class—until then simply a cry in the desert—with respectful alacrity. Sanginés suggested The Prince. I read Machiavelli. Sanginés indicated The Social Contract. I immersed myself in Rousseau.

  First he invited me to walk with him through the Ciudad Universitaria, then later to go to his house in Coyoacán, an old residence from the colonial period, only one floor but very extensive, where in room after room, books supported, in a manner of speaking, the wisdom, if not of the ages, then of the end of the world. He noticed my delight and also my nostalgia. The encounter with Professor Sanginés reminded me of our conversations with Father Filopáter. It also brought to mind the absence of my friend Jericó and the lonely need we sometimes feel to share what we see and do with a brotherly friend. I don’t know if Jericó felt in Europe what I felt in Mexico. The pleasure would have doubled with his presence. We would have been able to comment on Antonio Sanginés’s lessons, compare them with those of Father Filopáter, and proceed, as we had done then, with our intellectual formation on the solid foundation of our friendship.

  Professor Sanginés’s residence breathed the air shared by the man and his books. Both were joined in an internationalist ethic very much opposed to the new global laissez-faire. Globalization was a fact and its momentum swept away old frontiers, laws, and discourses, antiquated habits and defenses of sovereignty. The teaching of Antonio Sanginés did not deny this reality. It merely pointed out, with elegant emphasis, the dangers (for everyone) of a world in which international decisions were made without competent authority, just cause, juridical intention, or proportionality, and with war as the first, not the final, recourse. The catastrophic intervention of the United States in Iraq was the probative example of Sanginés’s theories. The authority had been nonexistent, fragile, and usurped. The cause, a true potpourri of lies: There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, overthrowing the dict
ator was not the reason behind the resolution, the dictator fell and terror made its entrance, the region passed from maximum order (tyranny) to maximum chaos (anarchy), and the catastrophe did not ensure the flow of oil or confirm the lowering of prices. The little match on the Potomac became the conflagration in Mesopotamia.

  “The only ones who win,” Sanginés concluded, “are the mercenaries who profit from the beginning and ending of wars.”

  If this was Antonio Sanginés’s practical lesson in class, in private I discovered that his condemnation of international crime merely reflected his interest in crime tout court. I was discovering that half his library dealt not with the noble thoughts of Vitoria and Suárez, Grotius and Pufendorf, but with the obscure though profound examinations by Beccaria and Dostoyevsky of crime and criminals and, even more somber, the books of Butterworth on the police and of Livingstone and Owen on prisons.

  When he explained the prison system, Sanginés offered details about subjects like security, living conditions, recognized privileges, health, access to the outside world, correspondence, legal contacts, family and conjugal visits, repatriation, internal discipline, punishments, segregation, cells, life sentences, and discretionary sentencing.

  “Prison is like a mummy bandaged from head to toe in laws and institutions. The prison authorities, for the most part, behave, for good and for evil, in accordance with ‘regulations.’ Except there are so many ‘regulations’ that they allow great discretion in applying them and even in ignoring or violating them, creating a set of unwritten laws that, especially in the case of Mexico, eventually replace written law.”

  I don’t know if he sighed: “Throughout Latin America homage is paid to the law only to violate it more thoroughly. Prisons in Mexico are no worse than the ones in Brazil. In Colombia the guerrillas impose their own prison law, mocking national statutes. In Central America, the disasters of war have created so many de facto situations that the legal code is a dead letter.”