Don Juan! I loved Mozart’s opera though I was astounded that in it the seducer seduces no one: not the disdainful Doña Ana, or the peasant Zerlina, or his former lover Doña Elvira, bent now on revenge.
Stripped of literary, oneiric, onanist, fetishist, etcetera words and opportunities, what remained for me, I ask the reader, but to return to the attack, be brave, take the citadel by force? In other words, have the audacity to return at midnight to the Castle of Utopia, the palace inhabited by Asunta on the thirteenth floor, where one day I had ventured to contemplate and touch and smell my lady’s underthings, risking ridicule at entering her bedchamber and taking her by dint of strength—or the success of being accepted because, ladies and gentlemen, this was what she secretly hoped for from me: audacity, risk, daring, boldness, all the synonyms you like to supplant and sustain the pure, simple desire of tasting the flesh and dominating the body of a woman named Asunta.
I had, thanks to my administrative duties in the company, master keys. I could go into Asunta’s apartment and move around like a thief who has cased the terrain, even my beauty’s bedroom. On the way I grew accustomed to the darkness, so when I reached the bedroom I was aware of Asunta’s absence. The bed was perfectly made. No proof existed that she had slept here.
This simple fact unleashed in me a storm of jealousy and aberrant suppositions. If she wasn’t here, where could she be gallivanting at one-thirty in the morning? I rejected the more obvious explanations. She was at a dinner. Why hadn’t she told me about it? Because she had absolutely no obligation to let me know about her social activities. Had she gone on vacation? Impossible. I knew her schedule better than my own. Asunta was a workaholic who did not miss a single minute of her work schedule. Ah, the bathroom … Not there either. I opened the door and saw a dry, clean place free of humanity (or rather, the humanity I longed for). I had the sensation of how similar an empty bathroom was to a morgue. I lost my mind. No doubt Asunta was hiding under the bed to mock me. No. She went into her closet because, perversely, she liked to smell and feel herself enveloped by the clothing that once, when she was a little provincial wife, she could not have. Not at all. Behind a curtain, hiding from herself? Ridiculous.
What was left to explore? My exalted spirit, my jealousy coming in vague waves, my desire in tempestuous agitation, my loss of all common sense, were manifested in the uncontrollable movement of my body, the sweat that ran down my neck and armpits, the nerves roused in my arms and legs, the mute excitation of my sex, tense in secret repose, saving itself for the great fiesta of love waiting for me, I was certain, in some corner of this false utopia in Santa Fe.
“Max Monroy is a strong, secure man, Josué. So much so that he never locks the door of his apartment, up on the fourteenth floor.”
I knew that on the roof of the building there was a helicopter waiting for Max’s orders and a wing for the services and rooms of his cooks, bodyguards, servants, and pilots. Also, I repeat, I knew his immense self-confidence (the vanity of the powerful man) kept open the doors of his apartment, which I now penetrated with the supreme audacity of a desire that drove away any feeling of danger as I blindly crossed what I supposed was a living room: The TV screens shone solitary in the night, as if they could not resign themselves to being turned off and would continue transmitting day and night commercial announcements, soap operas, political commentary, news, old movies, with an innocent longing, failed from the start, to find a conclusion.
I left out the dining room with its twelve chairs. The library with the gleaming backs of its books. The illuminated paintings of Zárraga, Soriano, and Zurbarán (I respected them as if they were a trio of singers). I dared to approach a door that announced repose and isolation.
I opened it.
They ignored me.
What I heard when I opened the door, Asunta’s words of love for Max, readers must imagine …
I CLIMBED INTO the helicopter behind Asunta. She sat in the back of the craft, beside a shadow named Max Monroy. I had no time to greet him. I took a seat next to the pilot as the propellers made the sound of a hurricane and conversation—even the most elementary, like good morning—became impossible.
The helicopter made an alarming vertical ascent that seemed to pierce the sky and eternity for a vague instant before the low, dangerous, turbulent flight, difficult and problematic, that carried us from Santa Fe to Los Pinos, the offices of the honorable president of the republic Don Valentín Pedro Carrera, that is, to a bare, paved-over space surrounded by squat, reinforced buildings and protected, at the exit, by a blur of mastiffs howling so loudly they eclipsed—and almost demanded silence from—the helicopter’s engines.
I got out before anyone else and saw Max Monroy for the first time. Asunta climbed down and offered her hand to the spectral being at the back of the craft who appeared before me like a shadow, perhaps because that is what Max Monroy had been—had always been—for me until then, so that his physical presence affected me as if my own soul had been revealed to me, as if this phantom, upon becoming corporeal, gave me a physical reality I had not known in myself before.
Asunta offered him her arm. Monroy refused with an energetic chivalry verging on rudeness. He walked along the pavement without looking at anyone but looking straight ahead, as if for him terrestrial accidents did not exist. Asunta was at his side, with a visible, irritating preoccupation very inferior to the serious—not to say severe—care the nurse Elvira Ríos had offered me. I walked behind the pair. Preceding all of us was an army officer—I couldn’t read his rank—but I had eyes only for Max Monroy, dressed in black with a white shirt and a blue bow tie with white dots.
He walked upright, not saying a word. His head rested on his shoulders like a pumpkin on dark soil. He had no neck. His clothes were at once too short and too long, obliging me to wonder about his height. He wasn’t tall. He wasn’t short. He was as ambivalent as his attire, clothes that could seem stripped of personality if they hadn’t been worn and therefore personalized by this precise human being who consequently seemed at that moment a man in disguise, but disguised as himself, as if he were crossing the stage of the great theater of the world knowing it was a theater, while the rest of us believed we were in and living with reality.
Knowing the world is a theater and giving it the advantage of knowing itself to be reality though we know it isn’t … I wonder to this very day why, seeing Max climb out of the helicopter and advance along the landing strip with the firm though mortal step of a man in his eighties, my own clothing didn’t make me laugh, along with the clothes of Asunta and the pilot who remained on the strip looking at us with a smile I chose to judge as skeptical. And the smile of the presidential guard ahead of us, leading the way. For in Monroy’s body, his way of being and walking forward, I guessed at the multiple paradox of our knowing we were disguised not when we go to a carnival but when we dress every day to attend to our jobs, our loves, our diversions, our sorrows and joys. And when we see ourselves naked? Isn’t this the primeval disguise, the toga of external skin that masks our organic dispersion of brain, bones, viscera, unattached muscles, like the contents of a shopping basket spilling out on the floor if not for the corporeal container?
The mastiffs barked. As Max approached, they maintained a silence of slavering lower jaws, allowed us to pass, retreated. No doubt the presidential guard walking ahead of us quieted them. It didn’t fail to attract my attention, however, that Monroy had not, even for an instant, slowed his pace or looked at the dogs, moving forward at the speed he had settled on as if obstacles or dangers did not exist. Have I invented what I’m saying? Does it obey a reality and not my interpretation of reality? And wasn’t this the dilemma Max Monroy had put in my hands: the eternal problem of knowing the line between reality and fantasy, or rather, between reality and a perception of reality? Was all of reality a fantasy in which a man like Max Monroy, in possession of the central character in the drama, assumes as true his own fantasy and leads the rest of us into being phantoms of
a phantom, the cast that is secondary to the star of an auto sacramental pompously called Life?
In this state of mind, how could I not recall my youthful reading of Calderón de la Barca and his Great Theater of the World: The protagonist humanity waits impatiently behind the scenes until the supreme director of the drama, God himself, invents humankind and says: “Action! On stage!” But since “humanity” is an abstraction, what God really does is assign a role to each and every one of his creatures—Max Monroy, Asunta Jordán, Jericó, me … the entire extensive cast of this novel that well could be a short film of the superproducer God, Inc., L.L.P.
A preview. A trailer. But with a warning: The star is named Max Monroy. The rest are secondary roles and even extras. We who carry the spears. The ones in the chorus. The ones in the crowd.
Then who was this man who advanced between hidden weapons, silenced dogs, and a minimum escort: the officer, Asunta, and me? If he was a man in disguise, was the immense dignity with which he climbed the stairs to the president’s office, his clenched jaw, his closed mouth with tight, invisible lips also a disguise? He walked forward and entered the office of the president, who was accompanied only by Jericó, not looking at Jericó and looking at the president with deep eyes, and when Valentín Pedro Carrera welcomed him and offered his hand, Max Monroy did not return the greeting, and when the president invited us to take a seat and he himself sat down, Max Monroy looked at him with that deep gaze filled with memory and foresight.
“Remain standing, Mr. President.”
If Carrera was disconcerted, he hid it very well.
“As you choose. Do you prefer to speak standing?”
Monroy settled into a chair.
“No. I sit. You stand, Señor.”
We looked at one another for a moment. Jericó looked at me and I at him. Asunta at the president and the president at Monroy. Max looked at no one. And not as proof of crushing pride but, on the contrary, as if it pained him to see and be seen, obliging me to realize, at that moment, why he never allowed himself to be seen. The gaze of others hurt him. It wounded him to see and be seen. His kingdom was one of absence. And yet, and this was the greatest paradox, his business was sight, sound, spectacle: He lived by what he was not; by what perhaps, repelled him.
For a moment I lost track of what was going on. Monroy was humiliating the president of the republic, whose only response as he remained standing before a seated Monroy was to order the officer who had brought us here:
“You may withdraw, Captain.”
LEAVING BEHIND MY fraternal relationship with Jericó, a double movement impelled me both forward and back.
Forward: my fairly fleeting contact with other workers in the office of Max Monroy. Since I had grown up in the well-provided isolation of the house on Berlín, with no company other than the severe María Egipciaca and no friendships but those at school—Errol and Jericó—my contact with other young people had been, if not nonexistent, then barely sporadic. I don’t know, vigilant readers, if when I have exercised the right of the narrator—an amiable authoritarian—to select the stellar scenes in my life, I have left in novelistic limbo the other persons who surrounded me at schools, in offices, on the streets.
I have already recounted the intense desires that carried me, at a given moment, from the house on Berlín to the apartment on Praga to the prison at San Juan de Aragón to the Cerrada de Chimalpopoca to the office of Max Monroy. But since I had been in that office for almost two years (and though my primary relationship was with Asunta Jordán and, through her, with a Max Monroy who assumed in my imagination the hazy trappings of a phantom), I could not fail to observe, though to a lesser degree than what I’ve said here, my colleagues at work and how I got along with them.
I should indicate here that my anxieties and concerns, enigmas and humiliations sought an outlet on two very distinct levels—contrary, I should say.
I spent some time ingratiating myself with my colleagues. Please remember that Jericó and I were brought up in a kind of hothouse, I with very little contact beyond the house on Berlín and my jailer María Egipciaca, and he in the enclosure of the garret on Praga. And this happened not because of a predetermined plan but in a natural way. I’ve already told how, at school, Jericó and I gravitated toward each other to the exclusion of the “high-spirited boys” more interested than Jericó and I in sports, tiresome jokes, and, in any case, family life, and we were soon connected by intellectual curiosity and the tutoring of Filopáter. We were closer to Nietzsche and Saint Thomas than to our classmates Pecas and Trompas, and our contact with the other teachers occurred only in class or when the innocent pervert Soler hefted our balls before we played sports.
Errol Esparza had been our only contact with a family life that, to judge by his, it was better not to have. Living domestically, as Errol did with Don Nazario and Doña Estrellita, was a hymn to the benefits of orphanhood. Though being an orphan may mean being abandoned to the expectation of recovering lost parents or a habitual resignation to never seeing them again.
I don’t know if these ideas crossed the minds of those who one day compared themselves to Castor and Pollux, the mythical offspring of a queen and a swan. I lost sight of Jericó for years and still don’t know for certain where he lived and what he did, since his memories of his time in France were patently illusory: There was no City of Light in his tale except as a reference so literary and cinematic that the contrast was obvious to the North American references he knew about. Jericó’s Baedeker reached as far as the United States and did not cross the Atlantic. I came to this conclusion but never wanted to test it directly. As I’ve said, I didn’t ask Jericó anything so he wouldn’t ask me anything either.
On the other hand, a good deal had happened to me. Lucha Zapata and the little house in the district of Los Doctores. Miguel Aparecido and the penitentiary of San Juan de Aragón. I realized all this experience was in no way ordinary. Lucha was a lost, weak woman, while Miguel and the prison population were, by definition, marginal and eccentric beings. That gave rise to my decision to visit, floor by floor, office by office, the employees in the building on Plaza Vasco de Quiroga in the Santa Fe District, seat of Max Monroy’s empire: Who were the others?
It was difficult to classify them. Except for the architects, who generally came from families with money and sometimes with a pedigree. The profession sheltered many scions of old, half-feudal nineteenth-century families who had disappeared with the revolution and were anxious to recover the stature they had lost by having their sons and grandsons follow a career “for decent people,” which was the general view of architecture. You should note that the beach, country, and city houses of the new rich were the work of architects who were the children of the old rich (or the new poor). Those lodged in Monroy’s offices were no exception. Their tailors had adorned them with elegantly cut suits, their shirts were discreet, rarely white, their ties had a foreign label, their shoes were Italian loafers, their hair was cut with a razor.
They were the exception. The lawyers in the company, the accountants, the secretaries, were the children of other lawyers, accountants, or secretaries, but their variety fascinated me: I visited them to learn about and be amazed at the upward mobility available to a part of our society. Drinking coffee, asking for a favor, receiving a report, going up and down the honeycomb of the Utopia building like a bumblebee, I met the son of the shopkeeper, the shoemaker, the mechanic, and the dentist, the daughter of the dressmaker, the receptionist, and the employee of the beauty salon and again the children of clerks at Sears, minor bureaucrats, and peddlers. Offspring of Ford, of Volkswagen of Mexico, of the Ceranoquistes of Guanajuato, of Millennium Perisur, of tourist agencies and hospitals, armed with Nivada watches and Gucci shoes, Arrow shirts and Ferragamo ties, driving their Toyotas bought with a down payment of three thousand pesos, taking their family on vacation in an Odyssey minivan, using credit from Scotiabank, celebrating festive occasions with a basket of imports from La Europea, they were
men and women of all sizes: tall and short, fat and thin, blond, brunet, dark-skinned and chestnut-haired, no one younger than twenty-five or older than fifty: a young group, modern, stylish, embedded in the social life of national capitalism (sometimes neocolonial and often globalized), possessing generally good manners, though at times the women demonstrated a certain chewing-gum vulgarity in their fishnet stockings and high heels (like my never carefully considered Ensenada de Ensenada de Ensenada), most of them with a professional appearance, tailored suits, and severe hairstyles, as if copying the model of the principal Lady of the Enterprise, Asunta Jordán. And the men generally courteous, well-spoken, and even relishing their innate amiability, though as soon as they found themselves only with men they reverted to the vulgar language that certifies friendship among Mexican machos (among other reasons, in order to dispel any suspicion of homosexuality, above all in a country where greetings between men consist of an embrace, an unusual act for a Gringo and one repellent to an Englishman).
Let’s say then that on the twelve floors permitted to me in the Utopia building, I tried to be a model of circumspection and affability, without any familiarity, cronyism, fake intimacies, or vulgar winking. On the other hand, my sentimental soul, wounded by Asunta’s disdain, searched for the lowest, most falsely compensatory comfort: the return to the brothel of my adolescence, but this time only to be taken in and muddied up to my ears. I made a move toward the past in Hetara’s house, where Jericó took me for the first time as a teenager and I fornicated with the woman with the bee on her buttock who one day reappeared as the second Señora de Esparza and then as the lover and partner of the gang leader Maxi Batalla, eventually becoming a prisoner and then a fugitive. Where were they now, she and the Mariachi? What surprises were they preparing for us?
I have left for the end my most laudatory thoughts about Max Monroy and his enterprise. I say this to purge myself of my sins and reappear before all of you in a dignified light. Many excellent young Mexicans, scholarship students, were educated in foreign universities. They attend centers of learning such as Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, and Caltech. They acquire formidable scientific knowledge. They return to Mexico and cannot find a position. The large national firms import technology, they don’t generate it. The young people educated in Europe and the United States stay and cannot find work or leave again.
Destiny and Desire Page 30