Destiny and Desire

by Carlos Fuentes

  “The Mariachi Batalla is a killer,” Miguel Aparecido told me in prison. “I don’t know who put him in here and why I wasn’t able to stop him.”

  He too carried his hands to his lips and from there to his nose.

  “I can almost always smell out guys like that because of my network of informants, and then I can have them thrown out of here. I don’t know how this one got away from me. Something didn’t work right.” Miguel Aparecido frowned. “What? Who? How?”

  “Thrown out?” I remarked as if I suspected an impulse natural in the person I was studying for my thesis on Machiavelli.

  “You understand me,” Miguel Aparecido said with a sinister subtext. “The fact is that when he’s free, Maximiliano Batalla can commit any excess. I already told you about his antecedents.”

  “What makes you think he acted in concert with Sara P.?”

  “Who’s the porter she was fucking?”

  Who was the porter?

  This was the least of the mysteries. It took Sanginés no time to learn that the false porter in the airport was Maximiliano Batalla: an opportune disguise that my discovery linked to Don Nazario Esparza’s dishonest wife, implicated for that reason in Maxi’s crimes.

  Like a Pandora’s box, the sum of events opened to reveal one mystery after another. Who had gotten Maximiliano Batalla out of prison? What, besides sex, joined Nazario’s wife to the Mariachi Batalla? Were they accomplices? If so, in what, and why, and to what end?

  These were the hypotheses spread before me by the legalistic mind of Antonio Sanginés, pursuing in an unexpected way my juridical education, overly practical until then, which implied, first of all, recovering our friend Errol Esparza and arriving together, as I announced at the beginning of this chapter, at his family’s house in Pedregal de San Angel.

  IN THE MEANTIME, based on the presumption of importance that is also a part of being young and of a certain natural impatience to know more, I suggested to my apparent boss and secret love, Asunta Jordán, that she talk to me about the great man himself, Max Monroy, without ever revealing—this was tacit proof of my discretion and the growing conviction that some things should not be known—that I had spoken to the tycoon’s mother in the cemetery where the sainted señora lay buried.

  “I understood about his businesses,” I said to her one morning. “You don’t need to expand on that. You can stop now.”

  She laughed. “You have no idea how Max Monroy expands.”

  “Tell me.”

  “From the beginning?”

  “Why not?”

  I knew Asunta was going to tell me what I already knew, boring me to death. But what is love for a woman but an obsession independent of the foolishness she may repeat like a broken record? I was resigned.

  Asunta told me in English that Max Monroy was not a “self-made man” (I reflected on the fact that one does not talk about modern business without introducing Anglo-Saxonisms) but the heir to one volatile fortune and another durable one. His father, the general, had “carranzaed,” as it was called in the time of official corruption in the era of revolutionary combat under the command of the chief executive Venustiano Carranza: He had stolen. But that was like stealing chickens in a henhouse without touching the rooster or disputing his control. A little ranch here, a little house there, a tame flock here, a rough herd there, since things were easy to obtain and just as easy to lose. On the other hand, Max’s mother had a crystal ball and was always ahead of events. Always a step or two ahead of the law and the government, she was on good terms with the second and consolidated the first: communications, real estate, industries, banks, credit, construction companies, until she exhausted the possibilities of the small Mexican industrial revolution and the concomitant role of intermediary to invent companies out of nothing, receiving funds by using different names, and avoiding final solutions. Max Monroy’s career has been an example of fluidity, Asunta added. He doesn’t marry anything forever. He observes what’s coming down the pike. He’s ahead of everybody. He excludes no one. He’s not a monopolist. On the contrary, he believes monopoly is the disease that kills capitalist development. This, says Max, is what beginning capitalists don’t understand: They think they’ve invented hot water though they’re often second generation and their parents are the ones who boiled it.

  “Take a look at the list of Max Monroy’s businesses, Josué. You’ll see he hasn’t monopolized anything. But he has moved everything forward.”

  He believes final solutions are almost always bad. They only postpone and deceive. On the other hand, partial solutions are much better. Among other reasons, because they don’t pretend to be final.

  “Didn’t he ever take sides?”

  “No. He told me: ‘Asunta, life isn’t a matter of sides or chronology. It’s a question of knowing what forces are at play at any given moment. Good or bad. Knowing how to resist them, accept them, channel them.’

  “ ‘Channel them, Max?’

  “ ‘As a conclusion it’s desirable. But no matter how much will and foresight you bring to an issue, dear lady, chance always plays a hand. Being prepared for the unexpected, welcoming fortune—good or bad—and inviting her to dinner, like Don Juan with the Comendador, that—’

  “ ‘Don Juan went to hell, Max.’

  “ ‘Who’s to say he didn’t arrive in hell and transform it to his image and likeness?’

  “ ‘Perhaps he already was living his own hell in the world.’

  “ ‘It’s possible. People live, or invent, their heavens and hells on earth.’ ”

  “ ‘Thy Heaven Doors are my Hell Gates,’ wrote William Blake,” I recited, and added, pretentiously: “It’s poetry.”

  I winked at Asunta and immediately regretted it. She looked at me gravely. How did you fight this bull? Because she was a bull, not a cow. Or was she a clever ram that is a ewe?

  “I don’t believe Max Monroy reads poetry. But he knows very well the gates of heaven and the walls of hell in the world of business.”

  I let Asunta know I was prepared to learn.

  “ ‘The position of the stars is relative,’ Max always tells me, and I think that’s why he’s never said ‘Do this,’ but only ‘It would be better if …’ ”

  “Then you don’t feel inferior or subject to him, like a simple employee of Max Monroy?”

  If Asunta was offended by my words, she didn’t show it. If she intended to be offended, she smiled back at me.

  “I owe everything to Max Monroy.”

  She looked at me in a forbidding manner. I mean: Her eyes told me Go no further. Stop there. Still, I detected something in them that asked me to postpone, only postpone, the matter. She moved her body in a way that let me know her spirit’s willingness to answer my questions, she was asking only for time, time for us to know each other better, to become more intimate … That’s what I wanted to believe.

  I mean: That’s what I read in her posture, in her way of moving, turning away from me, looking at me out of the corner of her eye, sketching a sad smile that would give promise and grace to a bygone, serious tale.

  “The interesting thing about Max Monroy is that even though he could have established himself at the top from the very beginning, he preferred to go step by step, almost like an apprentice to the guild of finance. He knew the danger facing him was to sit at a table prepared ahead of time, when the butler named Destiny orders: Eat.”

  Did Asunta smile?

  “Instead, he went out to hunt the stag, butchered it himself, took out the innards, cooked the meat, served it, ate it, and placed the horns over the fireplace in the dining room. As if none of it really mattered.”

  Asunta said this with a kind of administrative sincerity that irritated me a good deal. As if her admiration for another man, even though he was her boss and she “owed him everything,” took away from me the position, perhaps a small one, that I wanted to obtain.

  “Doesn’t Max Monroy ever make mistakes?” I asked, very stupidly.

 
“I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you the truth. It isn’t that he makes or doesn’t make mistakes. Max Monroy knows how to escape the demands of the moment and see farther than other people.”

  “He’s perfect,” I remarked, marinating my own attraction to Asunta in more and more stupidities.

  She didn’t take offense. She didn’t even doubt my intentions, irritating me even further. Did this woman consider me incapable of an insult?

  “He escapes the exigencies of the moment. He moves forward. You understand that, don’t you?” she asked, and I realized that with her question she was telling me she knew what I was attempting and, incidentally, didn’t care. Max Monroy anticipates.

  Asunta looked at me seriously.

  “He moves ahead of the times.”

  “And what happens if you change over time?”

  “You’re defeated, Josué. Time defeats you.”

  “ ‘Think, Asunta, of the speed of things. Just in my lifetime Mexico has moved from being an agricultural country to an industrialized one. Once the cycles were very slow. A cycle of centuries (Max likes alliterations, Josué) for the agricultural country. A dozen decades for the industrialized one. And now, Asunta, now …’ ”

  An exceptional gesture: Max Monroy slams his fist into the open palm of his other hand.

  “ ‘And now, Asunta, a time of speed, a global race without borders, without flags, without nations, to the world of technology and information. China, Japan, even India, even Russia …’—he didn’t mention the United States, it would have been redundant—‘The global world is a techno-informational world, and whoever doesn’t get on the train in time will have to walk barefoot and arrive at his destination late.’ ”

  “Or not travel,” I commented.

  “Or at least buy a pair of huaraches,” she said with a smile.

  “ ‘Asunta, there are things I don’t say but that you know. Understand them and we’ll get along very well. Let’s work together. In Mexico, in all of Latin America, we mistake rhetoric for reality. Progress, democracy, justice. It’s enough for us to say them to believe they’re true. That’s why we go from failure to failure. We indicate a goal for Mexico, Brazil, Argentina … We convince ourselves that with words, favorable laws, the ribbon cut, and immediate forgetfulness we’ve achieved what we said we wanted … We say words that mock reality. In the end, reality mocks our words.’ ”

  “Max Monroy wins out over reality?”

  “No, he anticipates reality. He admits no pretexts.”

  “Only texts,” I stated clearly.

  “What he doesn’t admit is the madness of the simulations our governments and some entrepreneurs are so fond of.”

  Asunta was telling me that Max Monroy was everything Max Monroy distanced himself from, and what he distanced himself from was the illusion and daily practice of Latin American politics.

  “He moves ahead of his times,” the woman I desired said with irritating admiration.

  “His times never defeat him?”

  “How?” she said with feigned surprise. “Just watch my lips. Let’s see, with what? Please, just tell me that.”

  With old age, I said, with death, I said, with rage, more magnetized by the desire to love Asunta than by the respect I owed Antigua Concepción, my radical interlocutor, that is, the root of my possible wisdom, my fortune, my destiny.

  And in your mind, boy, do you think you can visit my grave with impunity?

  “No, Señora, I don’t think that, forgive me.”

  Then respect my son and don’t rush things, asshole.

  Was I the secret emissary of Antigua Concepción in the world her son Max inherited and strengthened? I asked myself about my part in this soap opera, and what disturbed me most was my carnal desire for a woman who bored me: Asunta Jordán.

  —

  I’M GOING TO let Sara Pérez speak, Sara P., Nazario Esparza’s second wife. I confess her vocabulary offends me, though less than the facts the words ostentatiously display. Ostentatious: Sara P. takes pride in her virtues: The ones that stand out are vulgarity, cynicism, ignorance, perhaps black humor, possibly a hidden desire for seduction, I don’t know …

  First of all, I’ll correct my previous affirmation. Jericó begged off accompanying us to the Esparzas’ house. “I don’t have time” was the message he sent to Sanginés and me. “The president’s office is very demanding. Besides, I don’t know what I can contribute … Sorry.”

  We couldn’t find Errol. Sanginés sent a real expeditionary force to all the old nightclubs in the city and to the new ones in outlying neighborhoods, the tony ones and the dives: Our friend couldn’t be found anywhere, he had vanished, the city was very large, the country larger still, the borders porous. Errol could have been in any city in the United States or Guatemala. You’d have to be a new Cabeza de Vaca to go out and find him. And in our century there was no El Dorado as there had been in the sixteenth, except for the name of some casino in Las Vegas.

  In short: Only Sanginés and I showed up, escorted by the police and the court secretaries to hear Sara Pérez de Esparza’s statement. She was seated on a kind of throne placed in the center of the reception room that I remembered in another time, presided over by the timid chastity of Esparza’s first wife, Errol’s mother, and now by the female I could not help associating, in retrospect, with an act of coarse sexuality in the closet of a men’s room in the Benito Juárez International Airport; with a hurried walk, preceded by a porter and dressed like Judith on her way to Bethulia, “for a chat,” along the immense, crowded corridors of that airport; with a sorrowful day in memory of her predecessor Doña Estrellita; with another walk through the airport on the day I ran into Lucha Zapata for the first time; and finally, with the night on which Jericó and I fucked this same woman in La Hetara’s brothel.

  But back then she wore a veil and I could identify her only by the bee tattooed on her buttock, which I saw again during the absurd scene in the airport bathroom.

  Now, Sara Pérez de Esparza was seated on her semi-Gothic and pseudo-Versaillesque throne, appropriate to her strange mixture of omnivorous tastes, for I was beginning to think everything could be found in this woman, the worst and the best, the most vulgar and the most refined, the most desirable and the most repugnant, without passing through any nuance of common sense. Seated on her throne, scratching at her forearms with silvered nails as long as scimitars, dressed like a star in La Dolce Vita in 1960s palazzo pajamas, black and gold with dolphins swimming between her bosom and her back, between her knee and her coccyx: the strangely out-of-fashion outfit with a loose shirt to generously display her breasts, and wide sailor’s pants. Barefoot, though she had rings on four toes of each foot, a brilliant little jewel encrusted in each small toe, and several slave bands around her ankles, matching the entire metallic orchestra sounding at her wrists and competing with the sepulchral silence of her heavy rings and everything contrasting with the bareness of her neck, as if Sara wanted nothing to distract from the attention due her décolletage, the pride she took in her tits, boobs, melons, jugs, knockers, who knows what she herself called those enormous, immobile tubercles that peeked out, fixed like a double gravestone where lay buried the natural sensuality of this artificial being, similar to a mechanical doll that had to be wound up each morning with a gold key: Sara P. had, mounted on top of her corporeal extravaganza, a relatively small head made larger by the curls of blond hair that ascended like mountain ranges to a smooth forehead, lifted for its crown of black pearls, giving the terrifying impression that the jewels were eating her hair, all of it to sanctify a rigid, tightened face, beautiful in a vulgar, obvious way, like a farewell sunset in the movies, like a garage calendar, like the picture of a soldier, a cabdriver, a mechanic, or a teenage anarchist.

  The firm gaze fixed, the full mouth like a paralyzed cherry. The uncontrollable nose nervous. Ears buried by the heavy weight of tri-colored earrings: strange, obvious, unpleasant pendants in the colors of the national flag. For the first time
I saw her up close, in detail.

  She was a camouflaged woman. Smells. Wrinkles. Laughter. Everything was controlled, rigid, remade as if by enchantment.

  She spoke, and from the beginning I sensed her words were at once the first and final ones of her life. Both a baptismal and sepulchral discourse.

  Doña Hetara, the madam of the bordello on Durango, ministered to the tastes of her clients and the fortunes of her girls. She wasn’t one of those brothel owners who simply run a business with whores. Much abused, Doña Hetara. Lots of bluster. Nothing of the fool about her. She would always say: Di-ver-si-fy. And so she managed not only a whorehouse but a nuns’ school where Doña Hetara, who was very charitable, sent the old hookers to dress as religious and pretend to educate the young hookers who were looking for husbands. Because basically there is no whore who does not aspire to matrimony. It infuriates them that men don’t call them “women” but “broads.” Being a “broad” is being a whore, trash, tamale wrapper, mole pot. Being a “woman” is being a girlfriend who can become a wife and mother.

  After a period of time to toughen her up in the brothel on Calle de Durango, Sara was sent to the aforementioned nuns’ school to be refined, and there Don Nazario Esparza met her, for he was always on the lookout for new sensations and fresh meat for his “insatiable appetite” or, in other words, what good were all the furniture stores, hotels, movie houses, and commercial centers, what good were beds if he couldn’t use them to have fun with a good “broad”?

  “Don’t trouble yourself, Don Nazario. Search no further, I’ll take care of everything. Don’t torture yourself. Take it slow. Buy into the idea that you’re still a great lover. You’re in great shape, that’s the truth. A real cocksman.”

  And so the millionaire was seduced by the convent girl Sarita, who lived in a monastery where her parents had abandoned her.

  “They abandoned her, Señora?”

  “Let’s say they made a present of her.”

  “Haven’t they seen her again?”