Destiny and Desire

by Carlos Fuentes

  This was the very mark of my relationship with Lucha Zapata, and if she was writing to me now she did so, I’m certain, in the name of chance and freedom. She did not betray herself. She was tossing a bottle into the sea. Would I read these pages? It would not depend so much on my desire as on my destiny. If I had not walked the streets of the Historic Center in search of clues to what Jericó was preparing (and wasn’t this, no matter how I disguised it as official duty, a sickly form of disloyalty to a friend?) I would not have run into Father Filopáter on the Plaza de Santo Domingo. He could have rejected my approaching him. Out of a sense of decency. Because his new life was a break from his former one. Because I had no right to resurrect the past.

  It didn’t happen that way. He received me, recognized me, remembered me, led me to his poor lodgings at the rear of a poisonous garden on Calle de Donceles where Filopáter imitated the life of Spinoza, grinding lenses.

  This matter could have ended there. If I hadn’t seen my old teacher for eleven years, why wouldn’t I have left him forever following our brief, accidental meeting? This is the question and no one is shielded from it. We met. We didn’t meet. If we didn’t meet, what things would not have happened? What opportunities would have been lost? What dangers avoided? But if we did meet, what things would happen? What opportunities would present themselves? What dangers would be realized?

  Jericó was right: Perhaps we’re always at a great crossroads, a circular plaza with avenues radiating from it, each one leading in turn to other plazas from which other avenues radiate. Six, thirty-six, two hundred sixteen, infinite plazas, infinite avenues for a finite life guaranteed a direction only by what we make with our hands, our ideas, our words, forms, colors, sounds, not what we do with sex, social relationships, family life: These evaporate and no one remembers anyone after the third or fourth generation. Who was your great-grandfather, what was the name of your great-great-grandfather, what face did your most remote ancestor have, the one who lived before photography, the one who wasn’t lucky enough to be painted by Rubens or Velázquez? We are part of the distribution of the great collective forgetting, a telephone book with no numbers, a dictionary of blank pages where not even the fingerprints of those who turned them remain …

  Why, then, did Lucha Zapata leave me this letter-confession in which she detailed her criminal life with individuals I came to know through the brothel life of my early youth, my visits to the Esparza house and the San Juan de Aragón Prison? Why did Lucha break the silence, the music of our love affair, with a criminal tale? Here Lucha Zapata appeared training in crime, first as one of the gangs of beggars, false blind men, cripples, the destitute, the incurable, whatever they desire, whatever destiny grants us. Lucha eating the bread of affliction on busy corners, from Avenida Masaryk to the road to the airport, her hand outstretched, reciting prayers, doggerel, God bless you, whatever Your Grace can spare, praise God, simulating bloody sores at the entrance to churches, hernias at the entrance to hospitals, fevers at the entrance to restaurants, allying herself in an ascending scale with thieves, thugs, pimps, houseboys who specialize in robbing houses, the pious who steal in churches, apostles who know how to use picklocks and open doors, bullfighters who steal from pedestrians in the light of day; hoodlums, paid killers, experts in knife fights, panderers, boys who work in brothels, aimless young people and old criminals as well who have no recourse but crime, old soldiers, ruined pensioners, those hounded by bankruptcy, late payments, overdue mortgages, devaluated currency, evaporated savings, discontinued jobs, nonexistent insurance, you see, Josué, how intertwined are virtue and destiny, chance and necessity, innocence and guilt in the legion of those who rob out of necessity because others, you know? need to steal or steal without need, as others kill for pleasure and others unnecessarily and others because they need to kill, are you charitable, do you understand, do you have enough charity to forgive if you know, Josué, or can you love only if you don’t know? Can you love Lucha Zapata only if you know nothing about Lucha Zapata?

  Yes, she was a vision, an aviator expelled from the airfield for attempting to steal a twin-engine plane from a hangar, a specter in a cap and goggles and leather jacket who fell by chance into my arms when I said goodbye to Jericó who was flying off to study in France and I saw Sara P. pass by preceded by a false porter who turned out to be the bandit and mariachi Maxi Batalla. Was this the truth? Everything else fiction? The mariachi wasn’t beaten and mute as his poor mother thought but alive and well? Sara P. was part of the criminal gang organized by Jericó to attack power with violence because legality seemed useless to him and he confused revolutionary action with a police problem, which is what he received in return: disaster, flight, prison?

  Everything eventually tied in a bundle that gathered up the threads of the plot in this chance encounter with Filopáter and the reading, even more fortuitous, of a letter Lucha Zapata wrote to me without losing hope I would read it one day? “You don’t remember me” was the refrain of the letter. And again: “You gave me the pulse of happiness,” and once again: “I had to suffer to love you.”

  A letter dictated to Filopáter by Lucha.

  Why? What did she know?

  Couldn’t she write without needing an amanuensis?

  Did Filopáter have to be the scribe of our destiny?

  Or was this a way to confess what she never would have told me in person, since our dealings with each other, you remember, went beyond all reference to the past? But the element of chance prevailed over Lucha’s desire. Perhaps I would never have walked through the Plaza de Santo Domingo. Perhaps I would never have seen Filopáter again. This was the point at which our desire—Lucha’s and mine—and chance coincided. Dictating a letter to a public scribe in the hope I would find him and he would give me the letter to read. Like now, fulfilling a prophecy more than engaging in a coincidence, I did it, I read the letter.

  At the beginning of everything, was there a kindergarten? Was there a hostile mother, embittered because youth is a seduction that doesn’t last, because her daughter felt sad and solitary and wanted to expel the shadows and the mother told her Don’t show your breasts and she told her mother I hate how you dress and they said things to each other like love is when things turn out well so the mother would return to her responsibility, didn’t I tell you, didn’t I say you could only live at your mother’s side? And Lucha wanted to preserve a moment, just one, precisely the one when mother and daughter were admired together, at the same time, what a nice pair, they look like sisters, expelling the shadows, the threat, the deception, Didn’t I tell you you could only live with your mother? before throwing herself out on the street, into voluntary beggary, crime, the company of Maxi Batalla and Sara P. and Siboney Peralta, Brillantinas and Gomas, the roguish and violent licenciado Jenaro Ruvalcaba of sad memory in this my course in criminality subject to the prison control of Miguel Aparecido but free, outside prison, free as a pack of hungry beasts, fangs sharpened, mouths slavering, eyes reddened by unwanted wakefulness, by Jericó’s political ambition.

  I was part of all this history. I knew the distribution of desire and also of destiny. I had loved this woman who saved herself from crime and punishment thanks to her chance encounter with me in the airport and thanks to our life together, uneven, a real roller coaster of emotions, alcohol and drugs, good food and better sex: What did I have to complain about if I knew how to avoid the vices and enjoy the virtues? What?

  ASUNTA JORDÁN CAME into the apartment on Calle de Praga with all the authority of her bold gestures, imperiously clicking high heels, uniform of a high-level employee, ill-tempered face, eyes that managed to see my friend and me at the same time. She was peremptory and there was nothing to say. An armored car was waiting downstairs escorted by two more cars carrying armed people. I resigned myself. Jericó had a nervous reflex like that of a trapped animal. She played for a moment with my resignation and his fatal rebelliousness.

  It wasn’t what we feared. Jericó was protected by Max M
onroy from the presidential decision to annihilate him. Judas. Jericó was driven to Max’s building on Plaza Vasco de Quiroga, in the direction of Santa Fe. Asunta was in charge of the operation. Jericó, until he heard otherwise, would be hidden in an apartment in the Utopia building next to the one occupied by Asunta. I, with a bitter taste in my mouth, decided to remove myself, go to Filopáter’s house, spend a week in that corner at the rear of the covered garden on Calle de Donceles and then return, perhaps purified, to the Santa Fe building. I read Lucha Zapata’s letter.

  On my return I entered a rarefied atmosphere.

  Asunta received me in her office without looking up from the computer that distracted her.

  “He’s in the apartment on the thirteenth floor, next to mine. Take the keys.”

  She tossed me a key ring and I picked it up, trying to guess her intention. I didn’t need keys. Max Monroy had a yen to live with open doors: “I have nothing to hide.”

  It was his best disguise, I had understood that. The fact that the probable presence of Jericó required keys and locked doors alarmed me as we may be alarmed by the presence in our house of a ferocious animal we feed so it will survive but that we keep locked up so it doesn’t kill us.

  I recalled the news item from the zoo. A tiger killed by the bites of other hungry tigers. Five tigers. Why was the devoured tiger attacked, why that tiger and not any of the four attackers? What united the aggressors against an animal of their own kind? Was it pure chance, the bad luck of the fifth tiger? Could the victim have been the killer of another tiger?

  The image of a caged Jericó produced in me the memory of an invisible figure, mobile in the extreme, my friend, who came and went in the city and the world without explanation, without identity papers, without even a second name: just Jericó, the perfect symbiosis of desire and destiny, free as the wind, without family ties, without known loves. Almost, if he weren’t so tangible in our familiarity, a phantom: my spectral brother, half of Castor and Pollux, the fraternal duality inconceivable in separation … Who had imprisoned the wind? Who had the free spirit under lock and key?

  I knew the answer. Max Monroy. And the answer was added to the legion of questions I was asking myself at this time. What interest did Max Monroy have in rescuing Jericó and bringing him here, to the bosom of the large family, enterprise and home of Utopia? I imagined for a second it was all a ruse of Monroy’s to defy the president, demonstrating where real power was to be found. Did Monroy plant Jericó in the offices at Los Pinos only so my friend would deceive the president, making him believe in a false loyalty and using the springboard of power to stage an unsuccessful, ridiculous coup, failed beforehand, as Monroy expected, proving to the president that he, Monroy, possessed the information leading to the crisis, and by possessing the information he possessed real power: calibrating the threat, letting ambushes pass when they had no future, suffocating rebellions in the cradle, and cutting off their heads if they arose? Had it all been Monroy’s great masquerade for Carrera, a demonstration of where real power was to be found?

  Or had Jericó’s actions been independent of Monroy? Had my friend acted, unsuccessfully, on his own, caught up in a dead illusion of revolt, impossible in the modern world of information and power, omnipresent under all circumstances, Orwell’s 1984 staged every day, without drama, without unnecessary symbols, without totalitarian cruelties, but disguised in the most absolute normality and accustomed to the technique of white-gloved castration?

  Asunta Jordán did not look at me. Her complete attention was dedicated to reading the digital print, skipping the password, depending on two gigabytes of memory, connecting with the wireless net, showing me without even looking at me that the ideological world inhabited by poor Jericó was an illusion of the past, something as ancient as the pyramids.

  “Older than a forest,” Max Monroy said about himself.

  But if Jericó was an agent removed from both Carrera’s presidential and Monroy’s entrepreneurial power, whom did he represent? Himself, only that? You are aware of the mutual respect my friend and I had for each other. He did not inquire into my personal life and I did not try to find out about his. The question that remained shrouded was, of course, Jericó’s life during the obscure years of his absence. I acted in good faith. I loved my friend. I loved our old friendship. If he said he had been in France during that time, I believed him, no matter how false his French culture seemed to me and how conclusive his pop cultural references to the North American world. Did Jericó let slip Gringo exclamations intentionally—Let’s hug it out, bitch—and never French ones? Did he want me to know I was deceived, did his old habit of playing with reality get the better of him, deceiving to amuse, masking to reveal? Did he want to seduce me, put me in the position of asking about him, transform him into my own mystery, transfer to Jericó the questions I did not ask myself? Did he know perhaps that my mysteries were nonexistent? Did he know what I’ve recounted here, everything you know: my affair with Lucha Zapata, my relationship with Miguel Aparecido, my employment in Max Monroy’s enterprise, the recent revelation of Miguel Aparecido’s relationship to Monroy, my secret talks with Monroy’s mother, Doña Antigua Concepción, and finally my infatuation with Asunta Jordán, the pleasure of the night and the humiliation of the next morning, the fugacity of my pleasure with her, and Asunta’s brazen, frightening giving of herself in her relationship of gratitude with the ancient tribal chief: Max Monroy?

  Perhaps, with these questions, I disguised my own mystery, my origins prior to my life with María Egipciaca in the mansion on Berlín.

  I felt I had voluntarily erased all memory before the age of seven, though I also think before that age we have no memory at all except what our parents tell us. I had no parents. Jericó, apparently, didn’t either. I’ve already recounted how he and I would congratulate ourselves on not having a family if the family was like that of our friend Baldy Errol. This was one more disguise, perhaps the most sophistic of all. The fact is Jericó had no second name because he had renounced it. His example led me to mention only very occasionally the one I had in school, at the university, at work. Josué Nadal. Perhaps I rejected it to emulate Jericó. Perhaps a last name with no known ancestry made me uncomfortable. Perhaps he and I preferred to be Castor and Pollux, legendary brothers, without last names.

  In this gigantic puzzle, where was Jericó? Who was Jericó? I had the anguished feeling, located in the pit of my stomach, that I absolutely did not know the person I thought I knew better than anyone: my brother Jericó, protector of the fraternity of Castor and Pollux, Argonauts destined for the same adventure. Retrieving the Golden Fleece …

  The naked man, the animal that received me in the secret apartment in Utopia, was on all fours on a rumpled bed.

  I remembered him in the same posture, defiant but smiling, sure of himself, master of a future as mysterious as it was certain, in La Hetara’s whorehouse: Who knows what would happen, but it would happen for him, for Jericó, thanks to his desire and his destiny. And necessity? Could my friend exclude the necessary from the desired and the destined? I thought of him now as he was earlier, the day he announced his departure, moving like a caged animal around the space we shared, which had changed into a prison he was going to leave—without even imagining he would end up here, once more on all fours but this time really caged, shut in, a prisoner now as perhaps he always had been, of himself: Jericó under guard, mapping the prison of his bed.

  His whitish body ended in a furious, disheveled head with bloodshot eyes, enraged lips, and murderous teeth, as if he had just devoured the tiger at the zoo. His body looked grotesque, elongated, in distorted perspective behind the blond head that encapsulated Jericó’s entire person then, as if everything pulsating in him, guts and testicles, heart and skeleton, were concentrated in a monstrous, aggressive head that was intestines, balls, claws, and blood of the animal walking on the bed on all fours, fixed on me, taking pride in his verbal ferocity, his feverish dialect, there are men love
d by many women, Josué you bastard, there are men no woman loves, but I love just one, you’ve had them all, I love only one, let me have her, damn it, let me have her or I swear I’ll have you killed! Do you think you have a right to everything I didn’t have? You’re wrong, motherfucker! I’ll give you everything, like always, but let me have this woman, just one woman, why do you fuck with me, Josué you bastard, why don’t you let me have the only woman I desire, the only woman who’s made me feel like a man, the woman who captured me and mastered me and tore away from me mystery and the power to question, the woman who refuses to be mine because she says she’s yours and Asunta rejects me saying she belongs to you, she can’t be anybody else’s, you bastard motherfucker, free her you son of a bitch, let her go for my balls, aren’t we like brothers? Don’t we share whores? Why do you want Asunta all to yourself, damn miser, stop stabbing yourself, fucking pig, fix yourself up, Okay, that’s enough …

  And he let out a savage shout:

  “I’m going to kill you, you fucking pig, either you let me have that broad or I swear you’ll be pushing up daisies!”

  He said this in so horrible a way, on all fours, naked on the bed, his testicles bouncing between his legs, his face that of a ferocious animal, as if everything truly Jericó had come out to be depicted on the threatening face that no longer belonged to the valiant companion Pollux but to the murderous brother Cain.

  A naked Jericó slavered, in a bestial posture and concentrating on me, I realized, the frustrations so contrary to a life that took place on the stages of success, from school until today. Jericó the bold, the sharp, the triumphant, the protector, the mysterious, the one who didn’t show his cards and won the game with a poker face, was showing his cards now and he had nothing: not even a miserable pair of fives, not even when the lower numbers had been eliminated. It was this naked feeling—physically, morally naked—that concentrated the hatred of my brother Cain against me, and when Asunta appeared behind Jericó’s bed and I looked at her, I understood her perverse game. Whatever the motives of Max Monroy in saving Jericó from the president’s vengeance and bringing him to the shelter of Utopia, Asunta’s game, no matter how tangential to Monroy’s intentions, was what had mortally wounded Jericó.