Destiny and Desire

by Carlos Fuentes

  “For God’s sake, Miguel …”

  I walked forward to embrace him, with a natural instinct to provide relief. He did not want help. He repulsed me brutally. I looked away, knowing he looked at me without affection.

  Then something inside me said, “Don’t look away. Look directly at him. Look at him as if you’ve seen him before. Like a vulnerable, bewildered human being in pain who rejects your affection only because he needs it, because he has no other support but you, just you, my poor Josué, double of himself.”

  I thought this and felt what we all know but never say aloud, because it is both a mystery and self-evident. I looked at Miguel Aparecido and saw myself reflected in him not as in a mirror but only in a question: We are body, we are soul, and we will never know how flesh and spirit are joined.

  I looked at the unaffectionate eyes of Miguel Aparecido, feverish with the terror of the day, and for an instant I saw myself in them … I saw that both of us, I a free man, he a prisoner, were concerned with the same dilemma: Did we all deserve to be punished for the crime of a single man? Could the soul be saved if the body wasn’t saved too? Could our body commit offenses without punishing the soul? Could the soul sin and the body remain free of transgression?

  When I say I saw all this in Miguel Aparecido’s gaze, I mean I was seeing it in the reflection that returned to my eyes from his. I recalled Filopáter and his reading of Saint Augustine: Sooner or later, human misery always requires the solace, the relief, the consolation religion offers through the promise of the resurrection of the flesh and the world with the promise of freedom in this life. Looking again (I don’t know if for the first time) at Miguel Aparecido this afternoon, I thought religion and freedom resemble each other inasmuch as they believe in the unbelievable: the resurrection of the flesh or the autonomy of the individual. Perhaps the second is the greater mystery. Because we cannot know if we are going to be resurrected, we accept the secret of faith. But knowing we can be free, the absence of freedom opens before us an entire hand of anguished possibilities: to struggle for freedom or to renounce it; to act or abstain; to dirty one’s hands or use gloves … If we choose one card, we sacrifice the rest. In life there is no change in cards. If you get four aces, you fucking win. If you get a weak hand, you’re fucked. Though at times you win the game and save your life with a pair of fives. You play the hand you’re dealt, and if you think you can ask for a different one, you’re mistaken. Whoever deals the cards does it only once. We have to play the weak or winning hand destiny gave us.

  Did I see in this man wounded both externally and internally the fatality of an existence I really had not known until now? Miguel Aparecido appeared (so to speak) to me like a strange but always serene being, master of a secret and comfortable with his own mystery, jealous of what he kept hidden in his bosom, intolerant when he was offered freedom, enigmatic when he decided to be a prisoner.

  This was my idea of the man. I looked at what I saw before me when I entered the cell.

  The earlier Miguel was not the present one and I could no longer wager on the truth. Was Miguel the severe, fatalistic man of yesterday? Or was he the destructive, beaten animal of today?

  It is strange how, when a human being is set loose from acquired habits and customary masks are removed, barbaric feelings spring up, not in the usual sense of savagery or atrocity, but in the fuller meaning of existing earlier than convention, limits, and above all, the idea of the person. That was this Miguel Aparecido, a man earlier than himself, as if everything the world (and I) knew about him was a great deception, pure appearance, the skin of a phantom whose concealed body and soul belonged to someone else. This man.

  Looking at him with great intensity, I thought of his decisive words. He counted on the loyalty of the other prisoners. Brillantinas and Gomas. Ventanas. Siboney Peralta. El Negro España and La Pérfida Albión. Then he had told me, boy, nothing happens here that I don’t know about, and nothing I don’t want to or can’t control.

  “Know this: even unexpected riots are the work of my will.”

  He had told me earlier he could smell the air and when the atmosphere in the prison became very heavy, a great internal fight was needed to clear the air. There were serious riots here when necessary, and then peace returned. Because peace, he said, was a necessity in prison.

  “Many innocents come through here. They have to be respected.”

  I had seen the children in the swimming pool. They shouldn’t be in prison forever.

  “But if chaos did exist here, that would be because I am powerless to assure the order indispensable for the San Juan de Aragón Prison not to be heaven or hell but, and it’s saying a lot, a goddamn purgatory.”

  On that occasion he had taken me by the shoulders, looking at me as if he were a tiger.

  “When something happens here that slips through my fingers, it makes me furious.”

  Furious. The riot of broken chairs banging against the walls. The tables in the dining room smashed to pieces. Injured, dying, dead police. Padlocks first filed, then opened. Filed clean away.

  Maximiliano Batalla. The Mariachi’s Band. Brillantinas and Gomas. Ventanas. Siboney Peralta, who strangles and sings. Even La Pérfida Albión and El Negro España. Above all Sara P., the widow of Nazario Esparza and killer, along with Maxi Batalla, of Doña Estrella de Esparza, Errol’s mama …

  All of them. All of them. They escaped San Juan de Aragón. This time Miguel Aparecido did not provoke or control the riot. Maxi and Sara learned the lesson, they unleashed the barely contained fury of the criminal population, got the prisoners together, organized the riot, wreaked destruction, escaped.

  “Who?” I asked, enraged by him, like him, Miguel Aparecido.

  He looked at me like a dead man who has not lost the hope of resurrection.

  “You, Josué.”

  No, I shook my head, astonished, not me.

  “You, Josué, you have to find out what happened. How Maxi Batalla and Sara the whore were able to organize the escape. Why my allies abandoned me. Who organized them, who helped them, who opened the doors for them?”

  He looked at me in an enlightened, perverse way, passing on to me the obligation that he, from prison, could not carry out, granting him a kind of vengeful halo with the desire to deceive me, make me believe that if I discovered the truth outside these walls it would also reveal the truth that remained here, confined, not so much inside the walls of the prison as inside the walls of Miguel Aparecido’s head.

  I could not see the weakness of the tiger that looked at me with the dissatisfaction of not having eaten because it had not killed. I could not see that the real menace of Miguel Aparecido consisted in telling the truth.

  I understood only that it was not the flight of Sara P. and the Mariachi, or even—and this was worse—of Brillantinas and Gomas, Siboney and Ventanas, Albión and España that drove me mad, but the collapse of my illusion: Miguel was not, as he believed, the overseer of the penitentiary, the top dog, the sheikh. That is what infuriated him: the collapse of his jailhouse authority. The loss of the kingdom created by the sacrifice of his freedom. Being the head of the interior empire of the prison.

  “I’m here because I want to be.

  “I’m the head.

  “When something happens here that slips through my fingers, I become furious.

  “Fu-ri-ous.”

  A year went by following the events I have narrated so far. Perhaps things occurred in all the chapters of my life. I didn’t return to Antigua Concepción in the nameless burial ground. I never heard from my increasingly sentimentalized Lucha Zapata, who flew away with the fugacity of a bird with a damaged wing. I had completely forgotten about my sinister jailer María Egipciaca. I knew that Elvira Ríos, my nurse, was barely a decisive though fleeting traffic accident. Doña Estrellita de Esparza lay buried, her despicable husband Don Nazario had been roasted alive in his own courtyard by the very incarnation of immorality, the vile and ridiculous Sara P., the Lady Macbeth of Ma
riachiland imprisoned after a macabre, imbecilic confession in the San Juan de Aragón Prison together with her partenaire in mischief, the immortal Mariachi Maxi, who escaped with this same Sarape and an entire gang of criminals, to the rage and despair of the presumptive capo of the penitentiary, my friend Miguel Aparecido, mocked by a band of thugs and thrown into a physical and moral anguish whose dimensions (I guessed) I would never know, no matter how, from his eyes of a caged tiger, a secret would peer out, veiled with difficulty by his bluish eyelids. Licenciado Antonio Sanginés, source of so much news and guidance in my life, had absented himself (for the moment) and the truth is that none of what I’ve just said mattered to me very much for a simple reason.

  I was in love.

  I could fail in sincerity with you, patient readers, both absent and present (present if you are kind enough to read me, absent if you do not and at times even when you do), and tell you whatever I feel like. In the course of a year, twelve months, three hundred sixty-five days, eight thousand seven hundred sixty hours, five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes, thirty-one million five hundred thirty-six thousand seconds, what can’t an individual do, especially if he is author and protagonist of a novel dictated from and for death? What action is forbidden to him in my tale? What lie does not overcome my memory? What recollection of the past, what desire for the future? Don’t you see: I persist, to my own despair (and, with luck, to yours), I am here, writing away, desiring the past at the same time I remember the future.

  Desiring the past.

  Remembering the future.

  This, I assure you, is the paradox of death. Except that you have to die to know it.

  What I want to say now is that for an entire year, dedicated to working in the offices of Max Monroy in the noble (but resurrected) region of Santa Fe, ancient seat of the Renaissance utopia of Fray Vasco de Quiroga in New Spain, I too was reborn. Reborn to love. I fell madly in love with Asunta Jordán. And from this fact my story hangs.

  I have already recounted the experience of my training to be worth something in the business empire of Max Monroy. At first, desiring to show my energy and goodwill, I ran (two steps at a time) from floor to floor. Gradually I learned the lessons of the business, its phrasing, its designations: verbs, adjectives, and especially adverbs, not only endless but without end: The suffix “-ly,” I realized very quickly, was not used in these offices. One said “recent” but not “recently”; “patient” without “-ly” and “original,” “definitive,” “occasional,” or “formal” with no lymology at all. But don’t think the elimination of the ending was the death of adverbial agency—rather, it was its elevation to the level of the implicit. By eliminating the adverb, all its protagonistic quality was given to the verb: to define, occasion, form, patient, and if not “to recent,” then at least to bring everything to a today pregnant with tomorrow and sterilized and free of useless, nostalgic yesterdays, mere commemorations.

  “Yesterday” did not register on the office calendars. It was as if Monroy’s power expanded to turn to ash the pages of the past, convincing everyone that everything was today (and never the rhetorical today-today-today of an incinerated past), only the today of today, the instant with all its promises of the future so a well-made today would disappear in a fog denser than any forgetting.

  And therefore everything was innovation in this business. And innovation consists in constantly expanding what was done today to what is done tomorrow. The miniaturized blog would end up hidden in a woman’s handbag. Personal cameras transformed us all into instant paparazzi. MySpace, mySimon, and Deal Pilot pages allow us to compare prices, products, and possibilities instantly, and the multiplications of acronyms and headings—KDDI, XAML (the Facebook entry), ebXML, Oracle, Novell—would in the end be deciphered, like the Egyptian name of RosettaNet, into a single designation.

  Everything, a great paradox, was destined to accentuate the greatest privacy as it transformed us all into public personages. Once we had entered the blogosphere, who could ever be an enigma again? If our lives are being filmed, what secrets can we keep? Was this the greatest challenge of Max Monroy and his industries? To strip us to the point where our essential privacy would be revealed and protected?

  Was this a paradoxical invasion of private life intended to isolate and protect the most secret part of ourselves, the part that could resist any public notification? Our souls? Or would this combination of innovations and mysteries go into the public, popular sphere, guaranteeing each citizen direct access to the information once reserved to governments and managed by elites?

  In short, was Max Monroy the emblem of the most inflexible authoritarianism or the most expansive democracy?

  It would not take long to find out.

  Everything is known. Everything is seen. There will be no more closets, much less skeletons in them. We ought to take the best possible care of the remains of our private life, invaded by the eye of the camera that is today—the camera—the Grand Inquisitor. And what does Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor do? He protects faith with what offends it. Uses the weapons of the most material power to defend the most spiritual: faith.

  Faith—I remembered the old talks with Father Filopáter—consists in saying and thinking: “It is true because it is incredible.” Then can there be a faith that proposes being credible thanks to the natural existence of objects that prove it? But doesn’t this faith subscribe to the concept of progress as a guarantee of universal life? We constantly move forward, nothing can stop us, human development is inevitable and ascendant. Even though a crematorium oven, a concentration camp, an Auschwitz, a Gulag, an Abu Ghraib, a Guantánamo, demonstrate the opposite … How I longed, in moments of doubt like this, to count on the voice of Father Filopáter and recover, in dialogue with him, my youthful camaraderie with my brother Jericó! To be again the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, the founding brothers, two luminous phantoms that gave victory to the Roman Republic in the battle of Lake Regillus.

  A limited hero, as I’ve said, who at first, filled with the professional ardor of the novice, ran up and down stairs. Eventually I decided to take the elevator. Only to the twelfth floor, as I’ve stated, since the two top floors were prohibited. There, as in fairy tales, resided the Ogre, perhaps a benevolent Bluebeard who, having eliminated his earlier women (how many “broads” in a decade, or on average, did a man past eighty come into contact with? what’s the ratio? what’s the compensation?) resided, or dwelled, though I don’t believe he had “settled,” with a single woman and she was my own beloved enemy, Asunta Jordán.

  Professional relationships can begin coldly and end with warmth, or at least congeniality. They can also begin cordially and end with hatred—or indifference. In any case, seeing each other’s masks every day is something paid for one way or the other. My relationship with Asunta had no temperature. It was exemplary in its tepidness. Neither hot nor cold. She had the obvious mission of demonstrating and explaining to me the functioning of the great corporate elephant called, impersonally, “Max Monroy,” with the purpose, no doubt, of preparing me to carry out functions: as a lowly nut and bolt, a perpetual stepping-stone, a midlevel official or, finally, as a chief, a functionary, a dignitary? Asunta’s expressionless face gave me no answer.

  Except that her perfect representation of the professional woman, her “official” permanent façade, without openings or windows (let’s not even speak of doors), excited my curiosity. And since my curiosity turned out to be inseparable from my desire, inseparable in turn from my erotic will to possess Asunta Jordán, no matter how, I took the first step toward the forbidden.

  During work hours I penetrated the darkness of Asunta’s bedroom.

  Nothing impeded me except the command of fables: Do not enter. But is there anything in a fairy tale that inflames more curiosity than a prohibition, anything more encouraging to the decision to violate the secret and break the imaginary lock than the warning: If you enter you will be punished? If you enter you will not come
out again? If you enter you will be a cold corpse if things go well for you, an eternal prisoner if they go badly?

  I called up some excuse to leave at twelve noon. I went up to the thirteenth floor, where Asunta Jordán had her rooms. I passed from the light of the living room to the darkness of the bedroom. I noticed there were no windows, as if the sleeping beauty of my dreams did not leave a single chink open to the curiosity of others, including the solar orb. I avoided looking at the bed. King-size, a marvelous size for a queen, queen-size. My eyes, my sense of smell, my desire, led me to the even darker area of clothing hung according to the seasons—touch allowed me to caress cottons, silks, cashmere, furs, and if I raised my hand a little, I touched hats of felt and straw, of mink and fox, baseball caps, visors, the unmistakable texture of a Panama, picture hats (from every wedding except hers and mine … ay …). None of that interested me. My fingers guided my eyes, and my eyes guided my sense of smell. At last my avid nose (long, pointed, my gentle readers will remember) came upon the perfume it was searching for.

  I opened the drawer where Asunta Jordán’s underthings were arranged. Dazzled, I closed my eyes and gave myself up first of all to the voluptuosity of smell, though my avid hands did not resist the desire to touch what I smelled, and in the combat between my nose and my hands, there was a delightful mixing of the aroma of lavender and the lace on panties, the scent of petals and breast cups, drops of anonymous perfumes and panties with Asunta’s name, silk camisoles and padded bras, thongs, bikinis, all the forms of interior-exteriority that was my only possible approximation to the body of my beloved, perhaps more powerful than the nakedness that not only eluded me but did not even invite me, did not even forbid me. Lace, nylon, silk. Half-slips. Garter belts.

  And so the interdiction flew over my excited approach to the drawers where Asunta’s intimate apparel lay in innocent demise. I believe at that moment my physical and mental exaltation was so huge that I began to desire this erotic consummation and not another, not a physical one, which undoubtedly would be less intense than the approach, essentially modest though mentally vehement and shameless, violating Asunta’s intimacy to incorporate it not into my own intimacy but into the vast territory of nameless desire.