Destiny and Desire

by Carlos Fuentes

  “And you?” I asked Asunta with a mixture of boldness and stupidity. “What floor do you live on?”

  She looked at me with her eyes of an overcast sea.

  “Repeat what you just said,” she ordered.

  “Why?” I said, more fool me.

  “So you’ll realize your stupidity.”

  I admitted it. This woman, with whom I had fallen in love, was educating me. She led me through the twelve permitted floors, from the entrance on the Plaza Vasco de Quiroga, greeting the guards, the concierge, the elevator operators, and from there to the second, third, and fourth floors, where female secretaries had abandoned typing and stenography for the tape recorder and the computer, where male secretaries signed or initialed correspondence with a flourish and also dictated it, where file clerks transferred the old, dusty correspondence of a company founded by Max Monroy’s mother (my secret interlocutor in a nameless graveyard) almost ninety years ago onto tapes, diskettes, and now iPods, blogs, memory sticks, USB drives, external disks, and from there to the fifth floor, where an army of accountants was at work, to the sixth, offices of the lawyers in the service of the enterprise, to the seventh, from which Max Monroy’s cultural concerns—opera, ballet, art editions—radiated outward, to the eighth, a space dedicated to invention, to the ninth and tenth, the floors where practical ideas were devised for modern technologies.

  On the eleventh floor I worked with Asunta Jordán and an entire executive army, one floor below the thirteenth and fourteenth floors inhabited, as far as my imagination could tell, by Bluebeard and his disposable women.

  Was Asunta one of them?

  “You’re not a seminarian or a tutor,” she said as if she could sense in me a hero of a nineteenth-century novel as embodied by Gérard Philipe. “You’re not an ordinary run-of-the-mill employee because you were sent here by Licenciado Sanginés, whom Max Monroy loves and respects. And you’re not socially inferior, though you’re not actually socially superior either.”

  She looked me over from head to toe.

  “You have to dress better. And something else, Josué. It’s better not to have been born than to be ill bred, do you understand? Society rewards good manners. Appearances. Speaking well. Good form. Form is part of our power, even if we’re surrounded by fools or perhaps for that very reason.”

  She elaborated—from floor to floor—speaking about the Mexican cultivation of form.

  “We’re the Italians of America, more than the Argentines,” she said in the elevator, “because we were a viceroyalty and above all because we descended from the Aztecs, not from boats.”

  “An old joke,” I dared to say. Asunta seemed to be repeating something she had learned.

  She laughed, as if in approval. “Since you’re none of that, it’s right for you to learn to be what you’re going to be.”

  “And what I want to be?”

  “From now on, that’s no longer different from what you’re going to be.”

  To that effect—I suppose—Asunta took me to social functions she considered obligatory, in other offices and hotels, with powerful and sometimes pretentious people with a yearning for elegance, a subject that awakened in Asunta’s gaze and facial expression a series of reflections that she communicated to me in a very quiet voice, both of us surrounded by the rapid sound of the social hive, as she tasted the glass of champagne in which she only wet her lips without ever drinking from it: When she set down the glass, the level of the drink was always the same.

  “What is luxury?” she would ask me on those occasions.

  Surrounded by clothes, aromas, poses, strategies, Hispanic canapés and Indian servers, I didn’t know how to answer.

  “Luxury is having what you don’t need,” she declared, her eyes hidden behind her raised glass. “Luxury is poetry: saying what you feel and think, without paying attention to the consequences. But luxury is also change. Styles change. Tastes change. Luxury tries to move ahead or at least catch up with style, creating and inviting it …”

  She spoke of luxury not as if she had invented it but because she was inaugurating it.

  “ ‘Luxury does not know that style and death are sisters,’ ” I said, citing Leopardi and testing her.

  “It’s possible.” Asunta’s expression did not change, and I recalled old conversations with Jericó and Filopáter.

  “And because style is change, it affects our business. What do we offer the consumer? The most modern, the most advanced, at times the most useless, because tell me, if you already have a black telephone, why do you want a white one? I’ll tell you: Because choosing between two phones today is choosing among a hundred phones tomorrow. Do you see? Luxury creates necessity, necessity creates luxury, and we produce and win. There is no end to it! There’s no reason for it ever to end! Ha!”

  She didn’t say these words as an exclamation. Her behavior at these social events was very distinctive. She knew she was looked at and even guessed at. Over and above the conversations, the clink of glasses, the scent of lotions and perfumes, the taste of sausages and quesadillas, Asunta Jordán circulated in a kind of light, as if a theatrical spot were following her, always looking for the best angle, making her hair shine, resting like an insolent bee on her plump red lips à la Joan Crawford, hot or cold? That was the question others asked as they watched her go by, does Asunta Jordán kiss hot or cold? murmuring in secret to Josué, exciting the curiosity of the guests, Ask yourself, Josué, who’s looking at you, where are they looking at you from? Ask yourself but don’t look at anybody, act in public as if you had a secret and wanted them to guess what it is.

  She offered no opening. She let them look at her. She imposed silence as she passed. And if she held my arm, it was as if I were a cane, a walking puppet, a theatrical prop. She needed me to circulate through the reception with no need to speak with anyone, exciting everyone’s curiosity each time she said something to me in a quiet voice, smiling or very, very serious. I was her support. A straight man.

  In the real world (for me these excursions into society were almost imaginary) Asunta brought me up to date on my duties with rapid efficiency. There existed a national and global market of young people between twenty and thirty-five, Generation Y, given this name because they succeeded Generation X, who were now past forty and even though everybody adjusts to the customary until they fear that the newest thing will bite them, the twenty-year-olds are the primary target of consumer advertising. They want to make their debut. They want to be different. They want brand-new objects. They need technologies they can control immediately and that are (at least in their youthful imaginations) forbidden to “the older generation.”

  The notable thing—Asunta continued—is that in the developed world each generation of the young is smaller than the one before because of the decline in population. New families, more divorce, more homosexual couples, fewer children. On the other hand, in the world of poverty—ours, the Mexican world, Josué, don’t kid yourself—the population increases but so does poverty. How can we combine demography and consumption? This is the problem set forth by Max Monroy, and your job, my young friend, is to solve it. How to increase consumption in an impoverished population?

  “By making them less impoverished,” I dared to remark.

  “And how do we do that?” the queen bee insisted.

  I opened my eyes to think clearly. “By taking the initiative? By opening limited credit for them and giving them short-term cards? By educating. Preparing. Communicating.”

  “Communicating,” she moved ahead. “Letting them know they can live better, that they deserve credit, cards, consumption, just like the rich …”

  I tried to look intelligent. She moved ahead of me like an Alfa Romeo passing a Ford.

  “And how do we do that?” she said again.

  Asunta was enthusiastic, dazzling me because I desired her, but I understand now that to have her I would have to respect her for what she was, an executive woman, an arm in the enterprises of Max Monroy t
hat, like the goddess Kali, has as many arms as it has needs.

  I was content with two, ready to love, caress, strangle me. She looked at me, confusing my desire with ambition. They’re not the same thing.

  “I’ll tell you how,” and she snapped her fingers, on the offensive. “Move ahead. Give them the medium of communication. Send an army of our employees from village to village, settlement to settlement. Bring in trucks loaded with handheld devices. Like tire salesmen did when the first highways and cars were promoted by Doña Concha, Max’s mother, in the 1920s. Like the Christian missionaries did, so long ago, when they brought the Gospel to the conquered Indians. Now, Josué, we’re going to bring in the medium of communication, the tiny device, call it Creative Zen, YP-Tq, LGs, whatever you like, the toy, show it to the poorest campesino, the most isolated Indian, the illiterate and the semiliterate, who by touching this button can express their desires and by pressing the other receive a concrete response, not dead promises but the living announcement: Tomorrow we’ll install what you asked for, we’ll give you a cellphone, an iPod so you can hear already programmed music, we know your tastes, an iPhone so you can communicate with your friends, and by God, Josué, break the isolation in which your, our, compatriots live, and once you give them the devices free of charge you’ll see how demand is born, credit is given, a habit is created …”

  “And generations will be in debt to us,” I said with healthy skepticism.

  “And so?” She managed to smile despite herself. “You and I will be dead.”

  “And while we’re alive?” I said, not expecting a reply, since Asunta Jordán’s program seemed to run out in this life, not the next.

  Still, when I thought this, it occurred to me that at the age of eighty-three, Max Monroy had already considered the future, had already made a will. Who would be his heirs? What would Asunta obtain in Max’s will, if in fact Max left her anything? And to whom else could Max leave his fortune? I laughed to myself. Public welfare. The National Lottery. An old age home. His own business, recapitalizing it. His loyal collaborator Asunta Jordán?

  I digress.

  —

  I OUGHT TO have imagined, oh woe is me, that in a fashion parallel to my technosentimental education at the hands of the beautiful, crepuscular Asunta Jordán in the fiefdoms of Max Monroy, my old friend Jericó must have been receiving political instruction at the hacienda of our joker president.

  Maestro Don Antonio Sanginés informed me that Jericó was still working in the presidential offices at Los Pinos. One night he invited me to supper at his mansion in San Angel, and after the previously mentioned patrol of children—they were already in their pajamas—he sent them away and sat me down to a meal not only of dishes of food but of biographies, as if, since he was the conductor of the destinies allotted to me and Jericó, it was now time for him to turn to a new function: the president’s biography.

  “How much do you know about President Valentín Pedro Carrera?” he asked before attacking a consommé with sherry.

  “Very little,” I replied, my spoon at rest. “What I read in the papers.”

  “I’ll tell you about him. So you’ll know where and with whom your friend Jericó is working: Valentín Pedro Carrera won the presidential election with the invaluable assistance of his wife, Clara Carranza. In the pre-election debates, each candidate boasted of his marvelous family life. The children were a delight”—Sanginés’s eyes gleamed, and from the top floor we could still hear the prenocturnal tumult of his youngsters—“his wife was the ideal woman, a loving mother, a disinterested colleague, a First Lady because she was already his first companion (relatives had to be hidden).”

  All the candidates fulfilled these well-known formalities. But only Valentín Pedro Carrera could swallow with difficulty, suppress a fat tear, take out a large colored handkerchief, blow his nose vigorously, and announce:

  “My wife, Clara Carranza, is dying of cancer.”

  At that instant, our current leader won the election.

  Who will vote, perhaps not for the candidate but no doubt for the health, agony, and probable death of Doña Clara, elevated to a combined sainthood and martyrology by that television moment when her husband dared say what no one knew and, if they did, had kept hidden in the old closets of discretion?

  The candidate is married to a heroic, stoic, Catholic woman who may very well die before the election—vote for widower Carrera—after the election—what will happen first, the funeral or the inauguration?—during the ceremony—how brave Doña Clara was, she got out of her bed to support her husband when he rendered his affirmation that he would protect the Constitution and the laws emanating thereof!—or in the first months of the new government—she clutches at life, she doesn’t die so as not to discourage the president—or when, at last, the señora gave up the ghost and Valentín Pedro Carrera transformed personal grief into national mourning. There was no church without a requiem, no avenue without posters with photographs of the transient First Lady, no office without a black bow in the window, no barracks without its flag at half-mast, no private residence without its crepe.

  Virtuous, intelligent, charitable, devoted, loyal, what virtue did not come to rest, like a pigeon on a statue, on the spiritual eaves of Doña Clara Carranza de Carrera? What sorrow was not drawn on the distressed though ecstatic face of the commander in chief of the nation? What Mexican did not weep seeing on TV the repeated images of a saintly life dedicated to doing good and dying better?

  A stupid woman, ignorant, foolish, and ugly, from whom unpleasant odors emanated. A strange, unintelligible woman because of her mania for always speaking in profile. A spur, however, to a mediocre, neurotic man like Valentín Pedro Carrera.

  “What memories do you have, you dummy?” she would say at the private dinners Sanginés attended.

  “I have a longing to be a nobody again,” he would respond.

  “Don’t kid yourself. You are a nobody. Nobody, nobody!” the lady would begin to shriek.

  “You’re dying,” he would reply.

  “Nobody, nobody!”

  Sanginés explained the obvious. The lust for power leads us to hide defects, feign virtues, exalt an ideal life, put on the little masks of happiness, seriousness, concern for the people, and always find, if not the phrases then the appropriate attitudes. The fact is that Valentín Pedro Carrera exploited his wife, and she allowed herself to be exploited because she knew she would not have another opportunity to feel famous, useful, and even loved.

  Neither one was sincere, and this confirms that in order to achieve power, a lack of sincerity is indispensable.

  “Valentín Pedro Carrera was elected on a corpse.”

  “Nothing new, Maestro,” I interrupted. “It was the rule in Mexico: Huerta kills Madero, Carranza overthrows Huerta, Obregón eliminates Carranza, Carranza ascends on the corpse of Obregón, etcetera,” I repeated like a parakeet.

  “A bloodless etcetera: the principle of nonreelection saves us from succession by assassination, though not from ungrateful successions of heirs who in the end owe power to their predecessor.” Sanginés finally tasted his cold consommé.

  “The obligation to liquidate the predecessor who gave power to his successor,” I completed the thought.

  “Rules of the Hereditary Republic.”

  Sanginés smiled before continuing, having tasted with that spoonful my elementary political knowledge due, as you all know, to the secret information Antigua Concepción gave me in a nameless graveyard.

  Many jokes were made about the presidential couple. Doña Clara loves the president and the president loves himself. They have that in common. And the black humor was profitable. In La Merced they sold dolls of the president run through with pins by his wife, with the legend: You die first.

  Which is what really happened. Without the amulet of his dying wife, and as the memory of Clara Carranza, the martyr of Los Pinos, and the concomitant sorrow of Valentín Pedro Carrera began to fade, he was left without h
is saving grace, which consisted of living through the agony of waiting. At times you could say the president would have wanted to live the agony of Doña Clarita himself, make certain she continued to suffer, continued to serve him politically and not constantly threaten him:

  “Valentín Pedro, I’m going to kill myself!”

  “Why, my love, what for …”

  “The fact,” Sanginés continued, putting aside the consommé, “is that the weaknesses of Valentín Pedro Carrera wasted no time in appearing, like cracks in a wall of sand. Issues came up that required the decision of the executive. Promulgating and executing laws. Appointing officials. Naming army officers. Conducting foreign policy. Granting pardons and privileges and authorizing exemptions and import duties. Carrera let them slide. At most, he passed them on to his ministers of state. When he didn’t, the ministers acted in his name. At times what one minister did contradicted what another said, or vice versa.”

  “We’re negotiating.”

  “Enough negotiations. We must be firm.”

  “We have an agreement with the union.”

  “Enough coddling of the union.”

  “Oil is a possession of the state.”

  “Oil has to be opened to private initiative.”

  “The state is the philanthropic ogre.”

  “Private initiative lacks initiative.”

  “There will be a highway from Papasquiaro to Tangamandapio.”

  “Let them travel by burro.”

  “Let us collaborate with our good neighbors.”

  “They’re the neighbors. We’re the good ones.”

  “Between Mexico and the United States, the desert.”

  The truth, Sanginés continued, is that the president made the mistake of forming a cabinet composed only of friends or people of his generation. This formula had fatal results. Friends became enemies, each one protecting his small plot of power. The generational idea did not always get along with the functional one. Being from a generation is not a virtue: it is a date. And you don’t play with dates, because none possesses intrinsic virtues beyond its presence—no matter how fleeting—on the calendar.