Destiny and Desire

by Carlos Fuentes

  She heaved a sigh like an earthquake.

  Once there were years, boy, of a vast, really vast displacement of fortunes, from the old patriarchal world of haciendas and peonage, from the usurpation of Benito Juárez’s liberal victory by the personal dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and the exploitation of the free market so the land would pass from the hands of the clergy into the hands of the huge landowners and for the original owners, the campesinos, a thumb to the nose and a go fuck your mother, my lad: here’s your agrarian reform.

  I was terrified. I mean, an obscene finger rose from the earth.

  I’m telling you this so you’ll know what’s buried here with me: the history of the country, our past as incarnated in my husband General Maximiliano Monroy, an actor at every stage of this national melodrama, the civil war that lasted twenty years and cost us a million lives, not on the battlefield but in cantina shootouts, according to a really lovely gov, González Pedrero, ha!

  A great guffaw came rumbling out of the depths of the earth and the finger returned to its place.

  A million dead in a country of fourteen million inhabitants. How many of us are there now?

  One hundred twenty million, I whispered into the grave as if it were the ear of the woman I loved. (Do I imagine myself telling the nurse Elvira Ríos listen, love me a lot, look, I’m one of a hundred twenty million Mexicans? Or the whore with the bee on her buttock, let yourself be fucked by a hundred twenty million Nahuatlacas? Or the defenseless Lucha Zapata just think, you’re not alone, you’re surrounded by a hundred twenty million citizens, my love?)

  A hundred twenty million! exclaimed the voice from the grave. But what happened?

  Health. Food. Sports. Education. I was going to say all that. It seemed like a sacrilege to introduce statistics into a conversation with death, though she soon refuted me: Death is the Queen of Statistics, though wars tend to overburden her accounting …

  It is the country of betrayal, that’s Mexico’s worst account, Doña Antigua insisted. In 1910, Madero betrayed Don Porfirio, who thought he was president for life. In 1913, Huerta had Madero killed. In 1919, Carranza had Zapata killed. In 1920, Obregón had Carranza killed. In 1928, Calles pretended to be distracted while they murdered Obregón. Only General Lázaro Cárdenas put an end to the assassinations.

  But he killed your husband, Señora.

  He was executed for being an asshole, she said very pleasantly. Whoever gives the order … He deserved it …

  But—

  But nothing, fool, don’t kid yourself. It has all been betrayal, lies, cruelty, and vengeance. You simply try to anticipate it. Follow my example. You have to create economic powers prior to the decisions of the government. And you have to fear yes-men. These are the two rules of Antigua Concepción. I have finished speaking. Become powerful on your own and to hell with flatterers. I have finished speaking.

  But Concepción, Conchita, Antigua Concepción, had not finished speaking. Now she continued talking to tell me that her husband the general was a real revolutionary huckster who served Villa as easily as Obregón, Obregón as Carranza, Calles as Cárdenas, and when Don Lázaro ended insurrections through the power of institutions, General Maximiliano did not give up, he “rose up” on the border proclaiming the Plan of Matamoros, but he was the only dead Moor, strangled by a drunk and without a single bullet hole in a Texas cantina in Brownsville, where the stupid prick took refuge …

  I didn’t know if I should feel sorry for her because of these uxorial misfortunes. She didn’t give me time. She was already on another track.

  My husband the general was thirty years older than me. But he was a baby compared to me. All I had to do (you a young boy and I a young girl) was take a look at what was happening to make a decision: I would anticipate the future. I’d do first what would come later: Do you understand me, youngster? I had inherited haciendas in Michoacán and Jalisco. I divided them up among the peasants before the agrarian law demanded it or, more important, put it into practice. I told myself the country was going to emigrate from the provinces without will, impoverished by two decades of revolution, to the capital, the center. At the right time I bought empty lots in the Federal District, Morelos, and the State of Mexico, whose value has increased a thousandfold. And kid, I asked myself where they’d place the highways they’d need? I bought lots, level ground covered in huizache plants, mountains of pine, walls of basalt, whatever, because now it was important to get to the sea fast, to the borders, to the heart of the sierra in trucks filled with comestibles and combustibles that I organized into national fleets carburized for oil whose nationalization in 1938 I anticipated, when I was thirty years old, by acquiring strips of probable potential wealth in the Gulf, which had been mine, Mexican, since 1932 and that I later ceded, my lad, just think about it and get ready, to the government and Petróleos Mexicanos, along with my damn wedding ring to contribute to the cost of expropriation, a piece of jewelry I should have buried, if truth be told, in the grave of my by then deceased and decrepit husband General Don Maximiliano Monroy—R.I.P.

  I believe she winked at me from the bottom of her grave.

  Don’t think I’m a cynic or an opportunist, she said. Everything I’ve told you was possible because thousands and thousands of people moved, the isolation ended that had been imposed by a geography of volcanoes and deserts, mountains and swamps, coasts strangled in mangroves, impassable cordilleras: It ended, children, women, and cows, trains, horses, and guerrillas moved, boy, in all directions, from Sonora to Yucatán, from Río Santiago to Río Usumacinta, from Nogales to Tapachula, from Gringolandia to Guatepeor, through dry fields and lost harvests, leaving orphans and widows strewn everywhere, creating new wealth beside eternal poverty, because you know, my little chick, only when fortunes change, only then do we recognize ourselves and know who we are …

  I don’t know if her buried gaze asked me: And what about today?

  Today we’re exploding as citizens of the Narconation, I declared. She had stopped at a point in the past. She didn’t understand me.

  Did you hear, dear readers, a sigh from the grave? Listen to it now. It seems it’s not serious but, perhaps, humorous. It seems it isn’t deep but, when it reaches the crust of the earth, superficial.

  Antigua Concepción continued:

  I anticipated the industrialization that could occur thanks to nationalized oil and the campesino labor freed by agrarian reform. But I no longer anticipate anybody because in 1958 Don Adolfo Ruiz Cortines left the presidency and I said to myself, this is the best president we’ve had, a mature man, severe but with a sense of humor, slyer than a spider, hidden behind an uncompromising, austere, penetrating mask with dark circles under the eyes to disguise the irony that is the artery of true intelligence, and above all, the head of a Greco-Roman wise man strangled by a bow tie with white polka dots, the president who could swallow a baked potato without making faces, the apparent cripple who walked the six years of the presidential high wire over the void and set the example of good sense, serenity, irony, and tolerance his country needs: We have more than enough inspired ideologues, ignorant ranchers, machos castrated by their harem of magpies, acrobats from the political circus, Machiavellis in huaraches, curly-haired Don Juans in Maseratis, ugly people who can’t look at themselves in the mirror without declaring war on the world and going out to kill, and above all the thugs, the ones who rob our revolution of its legitimacy and hand us over, my little fool, to the madmen of democracy, ay!

  I supposed her ay! expressed the unworthiness of democracy and her nostalgia for enlightened authoritarianism, but I said nothing. It was her business. She really was “Antigua.”

  She went on: You must remember, boy, that once there was a president who dispensed justice, heard complaints, received petitions. The Old King!

  And now the exclamation was prolonged, plaintive, in the air for a period of time that Antigua Concepción interrupted with these words:

  Look, that was when I retired to my front ro
w seat and passed things on to my only child, Max Monroy.

  She paused, satisfied.

  I’m happy with him. As you’ll see, he’s like me though less folkloric. He anticipates events. He knows what has to be done before anybody else. He knows when to buy and how to sell. He’s discreet. His life is not the object of writeups or gossip. He has never appeared in the magazine ¡Hola! He has never been sponsor at the wedding of rock-and-rollers. He has never been fond of the sun. (He isn’t albino!) He resembles the night. He lives in a tower in Santa Fe, to the west of the city. Find him. That’s a good thing for you to do.

  I believe she concluded:

  Don’t do any wishful thinking. Just try to anticipate catastrophes a little …

  Later I would remember these words of Antigua Concepcion:

  The state is a jealous work of art, enemy of the free individual and economic power. Remember what I’ve taught you: You have to create economic powers prior to the decisions of the government.

  I HAVE MENTIONED, forgetful reader, that once a month an envelope with the previously mentioned check for my maintenance came to the mailbox of the building on Praga. I had become so accustomed to this punctuality that the favor no longer moved me. Whoever my obliging and invisible patron might be, time resolved two matters. Gratitude, if reiterated, would be unpleasant. And the donor, because unknown, proved to be agreeable, comfortable, and forgettable.

  Except on this day, when I stopped at Praga to change my clothes, take a look around, and pick up the check on the usual date, the check wasn’t in the box. Since it was a certified document, I wasn’t alarmed. I simply didn’t know where to go or whom to see to claim it. It occurred to me that if things became awkward, I could speak to Professor Sanginés.

  I was thinking all this as I climbed the first thirty-nine (or was it forty) steps to our parrot cage and found the door open and the envelope with the check staring me in the face, held up by two hands I recognized immediately.

  He had come back!

  Enlightened or darkened by experience, the prodigal brother was here. The other Dioscuro, my twin, the other son of the swan, my companion on the great expedition of the Argos to Ponto Euxino to recover the Golden Fleece, sign and destiny of our lives, symbol of the soul in search of itself: of truth.

  He dropped the check and embraced me, I don’t know if with emotion but certainly with force. We were embracing our shared past. As well as the future that always united us, though time and distance might separate us. Paris, London, Florence, Rome, Naples, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, the postcards allowed me to follow the route of his travels, though his permanent residence was the Rue Poissonnière in the Deuxième Arrondissement in Paris.

  Could he be carrying all those cities, all those addresses, in his young twenty-five-year-old gaze?

  He was slimmer. The permanently plump cheeks of the childhood that is not completely resigned to abandoning our features had, in defeat, ceded his facial structure to a slender fiction of adolescence, as if time had a chisel that keeps sculpting the face we will eventually have and for which, at a certain point, we become responsible. He did not have a beard or mustache. And his head was shaved like an army recruit’s. Perhaps because of that facial nudity his light eyes shone more than ever, playing the principal role in an appearance not distinguished by his snub nose or thin lips. A shaved skull. Brilliant eyes, the same but different, guardians of both a youthful past and a mature future.

  He embraced me and I smelled the remembered sweat.

  Jericó had come back.

  “You look like a poor fool in an asylum,” I told him.

  “Punched in,” he said in English, and immediately afterward, as if recalling and correcting: “It’ll go like clockwork.”

  I CONFESS THAT the return of Jericó produced contrary feelings in me. After his absence, we were both entering our mid-twenties with a separation that put our youthful friendship to the test. In principle this impinged on any other consideration, though he and I—I imagined—were not strangers to the usury of time. The second consideration, however, had to do with my closeness to Lucha Zapata and the daily, vital question of knowing where I would brush my teeth, in the apartment on Praga, with him, or the little house in Chimalpopoca, with her.

  At first I didn’t permit the choice between them to be a problem that would interfere with my joy. Seeing Jericó again not only renewed my own youth but, in particular, rescued and prolonged it, though with a bittersweet anticipation that I would also begin to lose it. Until the moment of his departure, my friend was what you already know because you read it here: the independent, audacious boy who gave me my place in secondary school, saving me from being the scapegoat of the gang of bastards who were going to feed on me and my prominent nose as they would have taken advantage of somebody who was cross-eyed or crippled. Jericó stood firm “in the middle of the arena,” obliged the “good-for-nothings,” as Doña María Egipciaca would have called them, to respect me. We initiated the comradeship that now, after our separation, his return would put to the test.

  I admit as well that a series of ambivalent impressions followed one another in my mind on the day I found my friend back in the apartment on Praga. His physical appearance was different. I don’t know if it was better. Yes, he had lost some of the persistent baby fat on his face. He looked more angular, more tense, more reserved. I don’t know if his shaved head suited him or not. I could lean toward the side of fashion and accept it as one of the many ways of making a statement with one’s hair at the time: long manes, shaved heads, multicolored locks, afros, Mohawks, Roman consuls, rebel dreadlocks, except that the combination of his shaved head and slender face emphasized the strangeness of his naked gaze. His eyes, blue, round, fixed, immeasurably enlarged by the nakedness of his entire head, created a contradictory impression in me. I saw in those unprotected eyes an unusual innocence transformed with a mere blink into a cynical, threatening, and wise gaze. I confess I marveled at that instantaneous transition of a psychological profile, not only the next one but its opposite.

  The strange thing (or is it reasonable?) is that his words when he returned to Mexico also blinked, passing from an ingenuousness that seemed out of place in the cynical, daring man I had known, to a gravity it took me a while to identify with the actual name of ambition. Could we reestablish our intimacy?

  He recounted naïve things to me, for example that when he arrived at the Place de la Concorde he kneeled and kissed the ground. I laughed: As an act of freedom? Not only that, he replied: As an act of fidelity to the best in the Old World (I hid a nervous twitch of disapproval: Who would ever call Europe “the Old World”?) and above all, he continued, to France and the French ability to appropriate everything by redeeming the crime in culture.

  “There’s a Napoleon brandy. Can you imagine a Hitler brandy?”

  I wasn’t going to discuss the enormous difference between the “good” Bonapartist tyrant and the “bad” Nazi tyrant because in his tirade Jericó was already immersed in an amusing comparison of national European profiles and the clichés that went with them (the French have a sex life, the English have hot water bottles), leading to feverish amazement at having heard “all the languages we see at the movies” and the enumeration of Rue Lepique, Abbey Road, Via Frattina, Puerta del Sol, and above all the streets, the squares of Naples where, he said, he identified with the possibility of being corrupt, immoral, a killer, a thief, and a poet without consequences, as part of custom and perhaps the landscape of a liberty so habitual it leaves no trace of mortality, surviving, he said, in tradition.

  “Why can’t we be Neapolitans?” he exclaimed with a certain grandiloquence, appropriate to the friend who faced me with the arrogance of a Byron that I viewed as an antipoetic pose and, what is worse, as simple-minded, naïve, unworthy. Why are we, in Europe, nothing but Comanches, mariachis, or bullfighters?

  He laughed, redeeming himself. “We ought to guard against being part of the national folklore.”

 
This was Jericó, my old companion, passed through the sieve of an experience that he wanted, as I understood it, to share with me at a level of exaltation and camaraderie that would lead him to tear off his shirt, gesticulate, and assume the caricature of a bedazzlement that ought to end—I knew Jericó—with an excessive, ironic action, one that in a certain sense flagellated his own ego.

  “On my knees in the Concorde,” he repeated, kneeling in the middle of the living room with his arms stretched wide in an act at once grotesque and tender, and which I understood without understanding it, like a farewell to youth, a stripping away of the vestments of a tourist, the rustic skin that covers the traveler in transit, the soul of the “Argentine we all carry inside us”: the superego.

  Knowing Jericó, this display as part of his weaknesses did not fail to surprise me. Perhaps he wanted to indicate that beneath the appearance of return was a companion who had never left. Or, on the contrary, knowing it was impossible, he was asking for help in getting rid of distance and his experiences and returning to the point at which we had separated. We were the same but different. I had experienced studying at UNAM, the tutelage of Sanginés, the visit to San Juan de Aragón, the mysterious encounter with Miguel Aparecido, the strange, committed relationship with Lucha Zapata. What did Jericó have to offer, aside from the postcard he had just given me?

  “Freedom,” he said, as if he had read my thoughts.

  “Freedom is kneeling down to give thanks in the Place de la Concorde?” I said, not very pleasantly.

  He nodded, his eyes lowered.