Destiny and Desire

by Carlos Fuentes

“You don’t say.”

  An intolerant minority, Jericó told me, that’s the key for coming to power, you have to energize the base with the example of an energetic minority, you have to favor the prejudices of the resentful, you have to demonize power: Saints don’t know how to govern.

  What did Jericó expect? The president, quite simply, made use of the army. Soldiers occupied highways, bridges, large houses, food depositories, munitions depositories, major intersections, banks: The army surrounded Jericó’s followers as if they were mice in a trap. They prevented them from leaving, they gave them an ephemeral empire around the Zócalo that did not even interrupt the work of Filopáter and the other scribes on the Plaza de Santo Domingo. Fireworks, smoke, folk dances, an exceptional holiday, an obligatory alliance between Monroy and Carrera, as ephemeral as Jericó’s frustrated rebellion.

  The groups gathered together by Jericó were isolated in the center of the capital between the Zócalo and Minería, they never managed to communicate with the supposedly rebellious and certainly wronged masses, Jericó had operated on the basis of a fantastic ideology and a revocable power: the ideology decanted from his readings and his position inside the ogre’s mouth: the office of the president.

  Now I listened, thought, saw, and felt a profound sadness, as if Jericó’s defeat were mine. As if the two of us had lived a great intellectual dream that, in order to exist, did not tolerate the test of reality. In the final analysis, were my friend and I barely hangers-on of anarchy, never makers of revolution? Did ideas we had read, heard, assimilated lose all value if we put them into practice? Was our confusion of ideas and life so great? Didn’t those ideas resist the breath of life, collapsing like statues made of dust as soon as reality touched them? Were we becoming illusions?

  The gang of the Mariachi and Sara P., Siboney Peralta, Brillantinas, Gomas, and Ventanas returned to the San Juan de Aragón Prison. Miguel Aparecido was waiting for them there.

  The president withdrew first from the Castle, muttering to himself (Asunta heard him), “In the old days the hangman sold the boiled flesh of his victims,” and Max, who followed seconds later, remarked to Asunta: “It’s one thing to be based in reality. It’s another to create reality.”

  And right after that: “Let’s go, the sun’s very strong and in the light of day one makes many mistakes.”

  The president simply sighed: “Making decisions is very boring. I swear …”

  He was on his way out.

  “MISERABLE OLD FOOL. Useless old bastard. Damn mummy.”

  Miguel Aparecido punched the wall of his cell, speaking in a wounded, vengeful tone of voice, sonorous and stifled, as if rather than words coming out of his mouth there were animals: insects, rodents, turkeys, grebes, bustards, and mandrakes, so intimate to his mind was the word and so desperate was it to find ways out, similes, survivals.

  “Lock up a man whose hands are tied with a cat, then ask him to defend himself.”

  He looked at me with ferocity.

  “He’ll defend himself with his teeth. There’s no other way.”

  What had disturbed him so much? He had won. The criminals released through Jericó’s influence were back behind bars and I wouldn’t guarantee their future. Jericó’s transient power—his whim—had done something more than free a gang of bandits. It had violated the will of Miguel Aparecido, the master of the prison, the top dog, the big fucker inside these walls. Miguel felt mocked.

  Still, there was something in his rage that went beyond Jericó, the flight from and return to prison of the criminals, the mockery of the very will of the man with the olive skin and yellow eyes and self-willed muscles, kept hard and flexible thanks to the discipline of imprisonment, as if the days and months and years of prison counted in a rogue’s exercises, his knee flexions, air punches, arms extended in extremely hard flexion against prison walls, imaginary jump ropes, like a boxer who prepares for the big fight, overcoming through an act of will the noise of the city that filters through the corridors and catacombs of the prison.

  He grabbed the newspaper. “Look,” he said, poking at the image of Max Monroy and, in passing, that of the president. “Look.”

  I looked.

  “Do you know he’s never allowed his picture to be taken?”

  “The president? He’s always in the papers, on television, in displays … All that’s left for him is to announce the lottery.”

  “Monroy,” said Miguel, as if all the bitterness in the world were concentrated in that name. A yellowish saliva ran along the prisoner’s lips. The tiger devoured by other bloodthirsty beasts in the Chapultepec zoo appeared, duplicated, in his eyes. “Monroy … motherfucker, at least he used to be discreet enough not to be photographed, the decency not to let himself be seen, the old bastard son of a bitch mother …”

  I confess my discretion. Or my cowardice. I didn’t jump to the defense of my old friend from the graveyard, the “bitch mother” of Max Monroy, Antigua Concepción.

  “And worse, even worse,” Miguel said syllable by syllable, “even worse is that son of the great bitch whore, Max Monroy’s son.”

  “Who is he?” I said, innocent (but uneasy?).

  This is the story Miguel Aparecido told me that afternoon in a cell in the San Juan de Aragón Prison, after going on a while longer in his diatribe, the asked-for explanation and the unasked-for one as well. I felt a strange emotion: Miguel Aparecido seemed like an hourglass anxious to empty the contents of one hour into another, though anguished by the fatal flight of time. The flight of time was the evasion in his narrative and if I was his privileged listener, at that moment I still did not know to what degree, so intense, so personal, Miguel’s narration concerned me.

  I thought at first he vacillated between emptiness and incoherence. I wanted to believe that at the end of the story both of us, he who was talking and I who was listening to him without saying a word, could find in ourselves something resembling compassion and from there pass on to comprehension. Now this was merely a desire (even an intention) of mine. Miguel Aparecido’s discourse took another direction.

  He said he was imprisoned by order of Max Monroy. He quickly cut me off: Of course judicial requirements had been met. Of course he had a trial. Of course testimony was heard and a sentence was announced. “Of course I was condemned to thirty years in prison for a crime I didn’t commit … three decades of confinement starting at the age of twenty,” he remembered, but in the voice of someone who, when recalling, also commemorates.

  He looked at me with a defiant air. “I behaved well, Josué. I swear I made an effort. I intended to be the best inmate in the pen. Punctual, hardworking, obliging. All of it contrary to my own character: cleaning toilets, removing excrement, mopping up vomit … All of it to get out of here. Get out for only one purpose.”

  He was about to lower his eyes.

  He didn’t.

  “To kill. I wanted to get out to murder Max Monroy. For having accused me falsely. Of attempted murder. Now I wanted to deserve the accusation. I got out. I prepared for the act, and now I was serious. I haunted the Utopia building. I imagined a thousand ways to eliminate the son of a bitch. Suddenly he intuited it, he didn’t find out, he just smelled that something was going on because he knew I was free. He had to have thought: What do I do to lock up this bastard again? Because he had to have realized that in this second round, either he’d kill me or I’d kill him …”

  Miguel Aparecido was making a great effort to keep his gaze fixed on me, eyes wide open, as yellow as those of a canid race, Miguel-wolf with the jaw as strong as a padlock, arms and legs imprisoned but longing to get out and race toward his prey, but sad, afflicted by the confinement he had imposed on himself, he reveals to me now, he stopped prowling around the offices of Max Monroy, returned to prison, asked for the help of Antonio Sanginés, I want to go back to the pen, Licenciado, please have them take me back into jail, I beg you for your mother’s sake, please, save me from the crime, I don’t want to kill my father, if
you really love Max Monroy return me to the pen, Lic, you can do it, you have influence, do me this favor, save me from sin by locking me up right away, accuse me of whatever you like, get me out of freedom, take away my desire to kill, save me from myself, put the chains of my freedom on me …

  “I returned to prison, Josué. Sanginés invented some crime for me. I don’t know which. I don’t remember anymore. I think he revived the earlier sentence for reasons that escape me. Sanginés is a shyster. He knows all the tricks. He can resurrect the dead. He can get water from a stone. But he can’t erase the memory you drag behind you whether you’re free or in prison …”

  SIBILA SARMIENTO WAS twelve years old when they decided she should be married. They all agreed that matrimony was very desirable but it would be better to wait for the girl to grow. For her first menstruation. For hair to grow under her arms. All of that. Sibila still played with dolls and sang children’s songs. Matrimony was desired. It was also premature, said the girl’s family.

  The mother of the presumptive groom became enraged. An offer of marriage in the name of her son was not something you turned down. Marriage was not a question of hair or periods. It was an act of convenience. Sibila Sarmiento’s family knew perfectly well that only the wedding of their children, right now, without delay, would join the names and properties of the Sarmientos and the Monroys and the great unity and productivity of their lands—Michoacán, Jalisco, Zacatecas—would triumph in hard cold liquidity before the law of the market and succession divided them into parcels, or an act of reiterated demagoguery gave them to the campesinos, transformed them into communal lands, and threw us all into poverty.

  “Do you know the song? ‘Just four milpas are left …’ Well, unite the children so the lands can be united, and when the inevitable fragmentation comes we’ll have something more than four cornfields left … After the storm …”

  The squall was nothing less than the extension of the cities, urban sprawl, an exploding population, but Antigua Concepción persisted in her vocabulary at once revolutionary and feudal, agrarian and suspicious of the cities: She was crazy! She said another agrarian storm, recurrent in Mexico, was coming. They would declare null and void all appropriations of lands, water, and forests belonging to villages, settlements, congregations, or communities made by the previous power in violation of the law and abolished by the new power in confirmation of the law. She became confused. That’s the bad thing about living so many years. And still, she had a witch’s reasoning: She guessed with metaphors. The migrants were returning to Mexico and didn’t find land or work. Gringo corn was wiping out the Mexican milpa. Villages were dying. Living in the past, Antigua Concepción prophesied the present. Like all prophets, she contradicted herself and became confused.

  “The land would pass from few hands to fewer hands, passing through many hands, according to her,” Sanginés explained. “Exempted was control exercised over no more than fifty hectares and for more than ten years. This reasoning was invoked by Señora Concepción, who was possessed by a kind of ravening madness in which past and future times, agrarian reform and the urban explosion, the place of inheritance and the will to begin again, mature sex and infantile sex were all mixed together: She imposed herself on her son because at heart she desired her son and wanted to castrate him by marrying him to a prepubescent child, incapable of giving or receiving satisfaction … Just to annoy …”

  By uniting the Sarmiento and Monroy patrimonies, forty-nine hectares were joined, those remaining were deeded to agrarian communities, one came out well with God and the Devil and offered an example of social solidarity by sacrificing something in order to save something, and the condition was the consolidation of protected lands through the marriage of a twelve-year-old girl, Sibila Sarmiento, and a forty-three-year-old man, Max Monroy, by means of matrimonial documents that could be disputed given the age of one contracting party but existed by virtue of the dishonesty of civil and ecclesiastical authorities in the desolate fields of central Mexico and, above and beyond everything else, even though one contracting party was a minor, the union of fortunes was consummated and the foresight of Doña Concepción, Antigua Concepción, proved correct: “I have what I want: The lands are ours and we can parcel them out; the marriage is theirs and let them arrange things the best they can. Get down to fucking, as they say.”

  “You didn’t know my grandmother,” said Miguel, and I didn’t dare contradict him. “She was a witch, she had a pact with the Devil, she proposed something and achieved it, no matter who fell, she was insatiable, she never had enough money, if she had a lot she thought it was a little and wanted more, using every deception, the most sinister schemes, the most corrupt pacts as long as she not only preserved but augmented her power. And all of that with no reference to historical and political reality. She lived in her own time, the time of her making. Sibila Sarmiento was indispensable for mocking all the laws: childhood, marriageable age, agrarian law, even the personality of her son, in order to obtain what she wanted: another piece of earth. And I say ‘earth’ and not ‘land’ because each piece of land my damn grandmother acquired was for her the earth, the entire world, a universe embodied in every inch of earth, the earth was her flesh, it embodied her, and though I don’t know where she was buried, I suspect, Josué, that for her the grave is another ranch she wants to own. And listen, never for her own benefit but for the sake of ‘the revolution,’ the entelechy she believed she was promoting by associating her desire with her destiny. That’s how they were.” I believe Miguel Aparecido sighed. “That’s how they built our country. Telling themselves: If it’s good for me, it’s good for Mexico. Tell me, what conscience isn’t salved if this credo is repeated until you believe your own lie? Isn’t this the great Mexican lie: I steal, I kill, I imprison, I amass a fortune, and I do it in the name of the country, my benefit is the nation’s, and therefore the nation ought to thank me for my pillaging?”

  Miguel Aparecido looked down, away from me, as I looked away from him during this discourse.

  Miguel continued: “Her voracity went mad on this subject: acquiring properties, adding land, as if the secular tradition of basing one’s fortune on owning land depended on this alone, as if she had already foreseen the moment when the great fortunes no longer depended on owning land but also on factories and now communications: This was,” Miguel said in summary, “Max Monroy’s conclusion. Not to be like his mother. To change the orientation of his wealth. Abandon the countryside and industry. Dedicate himself to communications. Build an empire of the future, far from the land and the factory, an almost impalpable universe barring his mother’s way, a world of cellphones and the Internet that offered, instead of mudholes and smoke, videos, webs, music, games, and above all information along with the right to two hundred free messages and half an hour unlimited calling to each owner of a Monroy mobile.”

  And Sibila?

  Imagine night falling on a face. Night fell on the face of Miguel Aparecido. He tried to rescue his account interrupted by all kinds of emotions, stammering and therefore unusual in him, even alien to the man I knew.

  Sibila Sarmiento, a mother at fourteen. Deprived of her child at fifteen. Condemned to wander like a ghost, without understanding what had happened, through an abandoned ranch house stripped of furniture, in the care of absent servants who did not say a word to her. Did her husband, Max Monroy, understand what had happened? Or did he too absent himself from a situation that was nothing but the coarse, powerful whim of his mother, the monstrous old matriarch enamored of her own desire, her ability to show her own power at every opportunity so she would compare favorably to her husband the general, an irresolute womanizer, to believe she was ahead of events and mistress of the crystal ball, that reality did as she ordered because she did not endure reality, she created it, her caprice was law, the most capricious caprice, the most gratuitous cruelty, the least trustworthy desire, the most irrational reason: Now I’ll take over the Sarmiento lands, now I’ll marry my forty-
year-old bachelor son to a twelve-year-old girl, now I’ll declare the kid crazy and have her locked up at the Fray Bernardino because the poor idiot doesn’t distinguish between the solitude of a ranch house and the helplessness of a lunatic asylum, rot there, imbecile, die there without realizing it, let’s see who can do anything against the desire, the power, the caprice of a woman who has overcome every obstacle with the strength of her will, a female who rids herself of any unnecessary obligation; the child’s mother to the funny farm; the child to the street, let him manage on his own, without help, let him become a little man without anybody’s protection, let’s see how he does, damn brat, if he has the right stuff he’ll get ahead, if not, well then he can go to hell: all for you, Max, all so you can grow up and assert yourself without ballast, without family obligations, without children to take care of, without a wife to annoy you, nag at you, weigh you down, you’ll be free, my son, you’ll owe supreme thanks to the will of your magnificent mother Antigua Concepción, not Concha, not Conchita, no, but the mother of will, of whim, of caprice, of creation itself, of determination … The mistress of destiny. The overseer of chance.

  “I made myself in the street, Josué. I grew up however I could. Perhaps I’m even grateful for being abandoned. I’m grateful for it but don’t forgive it. I’ll defend myself with my teeth.”

  I RETURNED WITH Father Filopáter to the Santo Domingo arcades. I wondered what brought me back. I guessed at some reasons: My interest in him and his ideas. The mystery surrounding his exclusion from teaching and from his religious order. Above all (because Filopáter was something like the final recollection of my youth), the memory of the moment when I learned to read, to think, to discuss my ideas, to feel, if not superior to then independent of the afflictions of childhood: subjection to a domineering housekeeper and especially ignorance of my origins. María Egipciaca was not my mother. My bones knew it. My head knew it when my confidence was withdrawn from the tyrannical housekeeper on Calle de Berlín. This did not resolve, of course, the enigma of my origins. But that mystery allowed me to uproot my life on the basis of an initiative determined by me, by my freedom.