Destiny and Desire

by Carlos Fuentes

  “When something happens here that slips out of my hands, it makes me furious.”

  He repeated it syllable by syllable.

  “Fu-ri-ous.”

  He took a breath and told me that an individual turned up here, and at first Miguel did not attribute the slightest importance to him. Instead he laughed at him a little. He was a mariachi who then became a cop or vice versa, it doesn’t matter, but he was a born crook. It seems this mariachi or cop or whatever he was took part in a neighborhood disturbance a few years ago when the police themselves, charged with maintaining order, created disorder where there had been none, because the people in the district governed themselves and dealt with their own crimes without harming anyone. They gave a phenomenal beating to the cop or mariachi when neighbors and the “guardians of law and order” faced one another one tragic night when the police were sacrificed by the crowd, burned, stripped, hung by the feet as a warning: Don’t come back to the neighborhood, we govern ourselves here. Well, it seems the mariachi or cop or complete ass, his name was Maximiliano Batalla, pretended to be mute and paralyzed just so his mama, a very clever but sentimental old woman named Medea Batalla, would take care of him, feed him, and take him in his wheelchair to pray to the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception.

  “Go on, Maxi, sing, don’t you see that Our Lady is asking you to?”

  “And Maxi sang,” Miguel Aparecido continued. “He sang rancheras so well he deceived his poor mama, passing himself off as mute and crippled while his comrades-in-arts—mariachis and police and potheads and thugs—visited him, and Maxi organized them for a series of urban crimes ranging from the innocence of stealing mail from the United States because workers are sometimes so ignorant they send dollars in a letter, to attacking pregnant women to rob them at intersections when there’s a confusion of streetlights, traffic police, and racing engines.”

  The Mariachi’s Gang—as it came to be known—invaded commercial centers for the sheer pleasure of sowing panic, without stealing anything. It permeated the city with an army of beggars simply to put two things to the test: that nothing happens to a criminal disguised as a beggar but everyone believes beggars are criminals.

  “It’s a gamble,” Miguel Aparecido said very seriously. “A risk,” he added almost as if he were saying a prayer. “The plain truth is that the Mariachi’s Gang alternated its serious crimes with sheer fooling around, spreading confusion in the city, which was its intention.”

  Maxi’s gang was organized to swindle migrants beyond the simple stealing of dollar bills in letters. They were very perverse. They organized residents of the neighborhoods where the workers came from to stone those who returned, because without them the districts no longer received dollars and in Mexico—I looked at Miguel when Miguel wasn’t looking at me—the poor die without dollars from the migrants, the poor produce nothing …

  “Except workers,” I said.

  “And grief,” Miguel added.

  “So then”—I wanted to speed up the story—“what did Maximiliano Batalla do that you couldn’t forgive?”

  “He killed,” Miguel Aparecido said very serenely.

  “Whom?”

  “Señora Estrella Rosales de Esparza. Errol Esparza’s mother. Nazario Esparza’s wife.”

  Then Miguel Aparecido, as if it had no importance, moved on to other subjects or returned to earlier ones. I was stunned. I remembered Doña Estrellita’s body laid out in the Pedregal house on the day of the wake. I remembered the sinister Don Nazario and knew him capable of anything. I evoked the new lady of the house and did not know what she was capable of. My truest, most tender memory was of Errol, our old buddy from secondary school, with his head like an egg. I repressed my feelings. I wanted to listen to the prisoner of San Juan de Aragón.

  “Do you know what hope means?” he asked.

  I said I didn’t.

  “You’re right. Hope brings nothing but sorrow, trouble, and disappointment.”

  I thought I was going to see him being sentimental for the first time. I shouldn’t have had false hopes.

  “What would happen if you were to escape?” I dared to ask him.

  “Here, chaos. Outside, who knows. Here, people wither. But if I weren’t here, the streets would be filled with corpses.”

  “More? I don’t follow.”

  “Don’t look at the moon’s ass, prick.”

  I was a law clerk. I was a young employee in the companies of Max Monroy. I was bold.

  “I’d like to free you.”

  “Freedom is only the desire to be free.”

  “Free of what, Miguel?” I asked, I confess, with a feeling of growing tenderness toward this man who, without either one of us wanting it, was becoming my friend.

  “Of the furies.”

  The fury of success. The fury of failure. The fury of sex. The fury of resentment. The fury of anger. The fury of love. All this passed through my head.

  “Free, free.”

  With an impulse I would call fraternal, the prisoner and I embraced.

  “The Mariachi has left here, free. Nazario Esparza’s influence freed him. Maximiliano Batalla is a dangerous criminal. He shouldn’t be walking around.”

  He sneezed.

  “You know, Josué? Among the criminals in San Juan de Aragón, there aren’t only thieves, there aren’t only innocents, or kids who must be saved, or old men who die here or are killed by a violence I sometimes can’t control. They fill the pool without letting me know. Some kids drown. My power has limits, boy.”

  The tiger looked at me.

  “There are also killers.”

  He tried to look down. He couldn’t.

  “They’re killers because they have no other recourse. I mean, if you examine the circumstances, you understand they were obliged to kill. They had no other way out. Crime was their destiny. I accept that. Others kill because they lose the ability to endure. I’m being frank. They put up with a boss, a wife, a crying baby, damn it, listen to me, what I’m telling you is terrifying, I know, laugh, Josué, you tolerate a bitch of a mother-in-law but one day you explode, no more, death urges them on: Kill and death itself appears just behind them. I understand the attraction and horror of crime. I live with crime every day. I don’t dare condemn the man who kills because he has no other recourse. There are those who kill because they’re hungry, don’t forget that …”

  His pause frightened me. His entire body quivered without weakness. That’s what made me afraid.

  “But not the gratuitous crime. The crime that doesn’t involve you. The crime they pay you for. The crime of Judas. Not that. Absolutely not that.”

  He looked at me again.

  “Maximiliano Batalla came here and I couldn’t read his face. His face of a criminal on the payroll of a millionaire coward. I reproach myself for that, kid. I entrust you with it.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “A prisoner came in who knew him. He told me. In the end I control everything. The Mariachi doesn’t even control his own dick. He’s an asshole. But a dangerous asshole. He has to be done away with.”

  Then Miguel Aparecido stripped away any shred of tenderness or serenity and presented himself to me as a true exterminating angel, filled with sacred rage, as if he were looking into an abyss where he did not recognize himself, as if obedience were lacking in the cosmos, as if a demon had been born in him who demanded form, only that, the form that would permit him to act.

  “The criminal left without my permission.”

  He looked at me and changed suddenly, became imploring.

  “Help me. You and your friends.”

  I felt exasperated.

  “If you left here, you could take revenge yourself, Miguel. I don’t know for what. You could take action.”

  And his final words that day were at once a defeat and a victory.

  “I’m a loyal man only if I remain here. Forever.”

  THE SECRET OF Max Monroy—Asunta gave me a class as she sat backlit in
her office aquarium, seated so her super-legs would distract me, her most reliable test—is knowing how to anticipate.

  “Just like his mother,” I said only to be meddlesome.

  “What do you know about that?”

  “What everybody knows, don’t be so mysterious.” I returned her smile. “History exists, you know?”

  “Max was ahead of everybody.”

  Asunta proceeded to give me a class on what I already knew from the mouth of Antigua Concepción. Except that what was spontaneous and lively in Max Monroy’s mother was, in the mouth of Asunta, Max Monroy’s executive secretary, contrived and dull, as if Asunta were repeating a class for beginners: me.

  I decided, however, to be a good pupil for her (I admit it), the most attractive woman I had ever met. Elvira Ríos, the whore with the bee, my current ball-and-chain, Lucha Zapata, paled in comparison with this woman-object, this beautiful thing, attractive, sophisticated, elegant, and supremely desirable, giving me little classes on the businessman’s genius. I realized she was repeating a lesson she had memorized. I forgave her because she was good-looking.

  What did Max Monroy do? asks an Asunta whose mind, I observe, bursts into flame when she mentions super-boss.

  “What has Max Monroy’s secret been?”

  According to Asunta, there is not just one secret but rather a kind of constellation of truths. He was not the first, she tells me, to put the modern telephone within reach of everyone. He was the first to foresee a possible clogging of lines because of short supply and excess demand, opening the possibility of buy now pay later but on condition you sign up with us, the companies of Max Monroy.

  “Why? Not only because Max Monroy offered in one package telephone, computer, Vodafone, O2, the entire package, Josué, but without deceptive contracts or onerous clauses. Max didn’t care about hiding costs, he didn’t want to exploit or add clauses in illegible print. Everything in big letters, understand? Instead of high prices and high utilities, he proposed low prices and constant utilities with a gesture of freedom, understand? Max Monroy is who he is because he respects the consumer’s freedom, that’s the difference. When Max asked the consumer to abandon networks established earlier, his offer was freedom. Max told each consumer: Choose your own basic monthly package. I’ll give it to you at a fixed price. I’ll permit you to use whatever you want from our network, films, telephone, information, whatever you like and the way you like it. Max addressed specific groups offering them a fixed price in exchange for a constellation of services, assuming the operating costs and subsidizing operations when necessary.”

  Asunta adjusted the navy blue pinstripe jacket that was her uniform, which must have moved her to say that Max Monroy was a great tailor.

  I laughed.

  She didn’t: “A great tailor. Listen carefully. Max Monroy never offered the same communication service to everybody. He promised each client: ‘This is for you alone. This is yours. It’s your suit.’ And he kept his promise. We offer each client individual tailoring.”

  I think she looked with critical coolness at my classic attire of gray suit and tie. She looked at me as one looks at a mouse. Her eyes requested, without saying anything, “More contrast, Josué, a red or yellow tie, a thinner belt or some striking suspenders, look handsome, Josué, when you take off your jacket to work or make love, don’t dress like a bureaucrat at the Ministry of Finance when you come to the office, how do you usually dress at home? Look for a modern mix of elegance and comfort. Go on.”

  “Sans façon,” she said very quietly. “Charm-casual.”

  “Excuse me?” I said, guessing at the mimetic talent of Asunta Jordán.

  “Nothing. Max Monroy invented individual tailoring for each consumer and each consumer felt special and privileged when he used our services.”

  “Our?” I permitted myself a raised eyebrow.

  “We’re a big family,” she had to say, disappointing me with the cliché and returning me, for an instant, to my old nostalgia for our philosophical talks with Father Filopáter.

  “Other companies put on pressure. Competition is intense. Until now we’ve beaten the others because all our activity is always directed to as many sectors as we can manage, as many consumers as we can imagine. Our strategy is multisegmentary. Growth with utility. Just imagine. What do you think?”

  Asunta’s discourse kept fading until it turned into a distant echo. She continued speaking about Monroy, his enterprises, our companies. I became more and more lost in contemplation of her. Words were lost. Life as well. I don’t know why at that moment, before this woman, for the first time, I had the sensation that until then childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood were like a long, slow river flowing with absolute certainty to the sea.

  Now, looking at her as I embarked on this new occupation dictated by the lawyer Sanginés—and I didn’t know then whether to thank or reproach him for his attentions and painstaking care toward me and Jericó—I felt that, far from rowing peacefully to the sea, I was moving upstream, against nature, in a cascade of short, abrupt movements, violating the laws that had so far ruled my existence in order to escape into a vital—or was it fatal?—velocity that moved backward but in reality flowed toward an unfortunate tomorrow, toward a growing brevity that, as it approached its origin physically and violently, was, in reality, announcing to me the brevity of my days as of today. We all come to know this. I learned it now.

  Was Asunta the person who would, when she touched me, at least give sense and tranquillity to the “great event,” Henry James’s “important” thing: death? I don’t know why I thought these things as I sat across from Asunta this morning in an office in Santa Fe. Did the feeling of fatality authorize another, apparently opposite one, the desire I began to feel in front of her?

  Had my conversation with Miguel Aparecido the night before been prolonged into this morning of leaden sun? Against my will my mood darkened because of the mission the prisoner had charged me with: avenging the mother of our buddy Bald Errol Esparza.

  I was silent. One does not speak of these things here, under pain of being irrelevant to Max Monroy’s great entrepreneurial machine, because if I intuited anything with certainty it was that the entrepreneurial world into which Licenciado Sanginés had thrust me, taking me out of a childish, studentish, irksome, brothel-going, crepuscular semiseclusion in a middle class that had abandoned its values to let itself be carried along by the current—I was thinking of Lucha—this “new world” excluded everything that was not self-referential: the enterprise as origin and purpose of all things.

  And Antigua Concepción? I asked myself then. Was she a madwoman or a super-magnate? Or both?

  Asunta, as I have said, was sitting so I could not avoid an occasional, discreet glance at her legs. I began to believe it was on the basis of those extremely beautiful, long, depilated extremities, encased in flesh-colored stockings, silky to mortal eyes, that my feeling of passion was born.

  I say passion. Not affection, or love, or gratitude, or responsibility, but passion, the freest, least bound of obligations, the most gratuitous. A feeling that flowed from Asunta’s legs to my falsely distracted, deceptively discreet gaze …

  The world is transformed by desire. While she continued to enumerate the companies of Max Monroy for which I would begin to work starting now, all the times of my life—past, present, future, along with the prestigious names of the emotion: memory and desire, recollection and premonition—engaged with one another now and in the person of this woman.

  I thought that life goes by rapidly. I never had thought that before. Now I did, and associated fugacity with fear and fear with attraction. Never, I admitted, had a female attracted me as much as Asunta Jordán did at that moment. And the dangerous thing was that passion and the woman who provoked it were, without my permission, beginning to transform my own desire, which in some way was no longer mine but was not yet—would it ever be?—hers.

  From now on—I already knew it—my entire future would r
eside in that question. Asunta was turning me, without wanting to, into an inflamed man. Careful, careful! I told myself, to no avail. I felt conquered by the attraction of this woman and at the same time, without wanting to, without realizing it, I knew my life with the helpless Lucha Zapata was coming to an end.

  The attraction of Asunta Jordán was inexplicable. It was instantaneous. Mea culpa? Because while she seemed desirable to me, she also seemed tiresome.

  —

  WAS LUCHA ZAPATA a fortune-teller? I didn’t say anything to her when I returned that night to Cerrada de Chimalpopoca. I found her dressed as an aviator again. I noticed her resemblance to the celebrated Amelia Earhart, the valiant Gringa lost forever in a flight without a compass over the South Pacific. I hadn’t realized it. They were alike in something. Amelia Earhart was freckled and smiling, like those North American fields of wheat that laugh at the sun. She wore her hair very short, I suppose in order to fly better and set the aviator’s helmet firmly on her head. She wore pants and a leather jacket.

  Just like Lucha Zapata now.

  “Take me to the airport.”

  I hailed a taxi and we both got in.

  I let her talk.

  “Don’t ask me anything.”

  “No.”

  “Remember what I told you one day. In this society you’re in perpetual debt. Whatever you do, you always end up losing. Society makes certain you feel guilty.”

  I didn’t say what I was thinking. I didn’t correct her or indicate that in my opinion people were what they did, not what they were obliged to do. She was who she was, I thought at that moment, through her own will, not because a cruel, perverse, villainous society had determined it.

  “What will you choose, Savior?” she asked suddenly, as if to exorcise the implacable ugliness of the city crumbling along the length of its cement escarpments.

  “It depends. Between what and what?”

  “Between the immediate and what you leave for another day.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Don’t look outside. Look at me.”

  I looked at her.