Destiny and Desire

by Carlos Fuentes

He said he felt content that Brillantinas and Gomas, Siboney Peralta, and the whole damn troop who accompanied Sara P. and the Mariachi Maximiliano Batalla in their catastrophic attempt at rebellion were back in prison.

  I told him I had seen them in passing, behind bars, as I came to see him now.

  “Well, take a good look at them, my brother, because you won’t be seeing them again.”

  He looked at me in a way that meant I couldn’t avoid the cold at my back. At that moment I knew the gang of Sara P. and the Mariachi wouldn’t leave jail except feetfirst.

  “And Jericó?” I dared to say, abruptly.

  “They were his people,” replied Miguel Aparecido. “He got them out of prison from the office of the presidency. He organized them. They were his people.”

  He looked at me with those blue-black eyes I’ve mentioned, and the yellow flecks acquired their own life of never-satisfied intelligence.

  “He didn’t calculate. He didn’t realize. He had a half-baked idea that if a vanguard acts, the masses will follow. He was wrong. He believed that by penetrating as he did the offices of power, he himself could rise to power. Very smart, sure … It’s your ass, Barrabás!”

  I said it was an old sickness to believe power is contagious … He didn’t realize that power doesn’t commit hara-kiri. Power protects itself.

  “Understand what the public meeting of President Carrera and the magnate Monroy in Chapultepec meant,” Sanginés had said to me. “Neither went to see the other for pleasure. They’re rivals. But each understands that the other has his own dynamite factory, and dynamite factories have to be placed at a distance so they don’t blow one another up. Each part—Carrera, Monroy, power, business—has a kind of veto over the other. They join together when they feel threatened by a third exogenous force, a stranger to the inbreeding of power. Power originates in power, not outside it, just as a cell forms inside another. This is what Jericó didn’t understand. He believed he could head a popular force that would carry him to the top. He didn’t understand that the movement of the people, when it occurs, is necessary, not artificial, not a product of a messianic desire.”

  “Revolutions also create elites,” I noted.

  “Or elites head them.”

  “Though they also erupt from the people.”

  “Yes,” Sanginés acknowledged. “The ruling classes have to be renewed in order not to be annihilated. They can do it peacefully, as has occurred in Mexico. They can do it violently, as has also occurred in Mexico. The revolutionary knows when he can and when he cannot. His political talent consists in that: when to and when not to.”

  “If all of you knew that, I mean, Carrera as well as Monroy, why didn’t you let Jericó fade away all by himself with no followers except this gang of hoodlums imprisoned here? Why?”

  Sanginés replied with the wisest of his smiles, the one I remembered from his classes at the law school, far from the awful grimace that deformed his spirit when he followed me in the darkness up the staircase on Praga. The smile I admired.

  “I have confidence in both houses, the house of political power and that of entrepreneurial power,” he continued.

  He closed his eyes blissfully. I already knew that.

  “And do you know why they trust me?”

  I didn’t want to answer with some offensive joke.

  “No.”

  “Because they know I possess all the information and don’t trouble anyone with what I know.”

  “And what’s that?” I wasn’t pretending innocence: I was innocent.

  He said in Mexico, in each Latin American country, rebellions are being forged day and night, in the hope of marking an until here and a from now on as, let’s say, Bolívar or Castro did. He said he wouldn’t go into the reasons why it was difficult for revolutions “like the ones in the old days” to occur again. Present-day power is more sophisticated, better informed, societies have higher expectations, the left is familiar with electoral routes, but the right will have to have its innate voraciousness limited from time to time by a little fear.

  “It seemed to me, Josué, that Jericó’s little adventure, so secondary, so minimal, so directed toward failure, ultimately so lacking in danger, offered me the opportunity to alert power without undue cost and give the right a shock. And in passing, to deflate the grotesque vision the extremely ambitious Jericó had acquired of himself.”

  Sanginés’s smile was very offensive.

  “He read Malaparte and Lenin. He felt like a little local Mussolini. Poor kid!”

  “But in reality there was no danger,” I insisted, moved, in spite of myself, by a feeling for Jericó that went beyond fraternity and simply called itself friendship.

  Sanginés knew how to disguise his smiles. “Exactly. Because there wasn’t, we could pretend there was.”

  “I don’t understand, damn it.”

  Sanginés didn’t celebrate his small logical triumph. “The greatest threats are fought in secret. The lesser ones should be denounced as a warning to the greater ones that we know what they want and control what they do. And to let the public know they are, at the same time, both threatened and safe.”

  I looked at Sanginés with unaccustomed fury.

  “He’s my brother, Maestro, he’s worthy of a little respect—some compassion—a—”

  Sanginés continued as if he had heard nothing.

  “Carrera and Monroy may be rivals, but they won’t be each other’s victims. Stopping Jericó is effective proof of this. At the moment of danger, the two powers unite.”

  “He’s my brother,” I insisted.

  And he was Monroy’s son.

  Sanginés looked at me with burning coldness.

  “He was Cain.”

  Was Cain our brother? I wanted to ask Miguel Aparecido in the cell in Aragón and didn’t dare. There was a prohibition in his blue-black gaze. If Jericó was Cain, he and I were not Abel.

  “Was he Cain?” I insisted to Sanginés.

  “He was your brother,” the lawyer Sanginés agreed with salutary cruelty, telling me there was no better example than this to teach a probative lesson regarding the futility of rebellion and the cowardice of a response without balls. The winners were the Statesman and the Entrepreneur, like that, capitalized.

  Cain and Abel.

  I read this with vast, indescribable clarity in the gaze of my brother Miguel. We were not Abel. We hadn’t saved ourselves skillfully from either the curse or the good fortune. We had assumed, without fully realizing it, the responsibility of caring for our brother. Wasn’t Jericó our brother?

  “He was Cain,” said Miguel Aparecido.

  I didn’t have to ask for explanations. I remembered the curse Jericó had hurled at me from Asunta’s bed, with a murderous look and a disdain revealed by the mask of hatred. Jericó naked on all fours, a captured animal, threatening me—I’m going to kill you, fucking cocksucker—slavering, frustrated. The concentrated hatred of my brother Cain. And my painful doubt: Had the hatred he showed me the last time always been inside Jericó? Did he “patronize” me when we were young, look down on me, despise my independence and my supposed sexual triumph with Asunta?

  Was this the end of the story? No. I didn’t know what had happened to Jericó. The question ate through my entire body like a restless acid concentrating in my heart only to flee my soul and remind me, my soul, that it was captive in a body.

  I knew Miguel Aparecido’s response before he gave it. It seemed to be the answer agreed on by all of them, by Sanginés, by Asunta, by Miguel.

  “Where is Jericó? What has happened to Jericó?”

  “He’s been put in a safe place,” Miguel Aparecido replied.

  In spite of this definitive statement, I knew the story would never end.

  I wanted to assuage my own fears by saying: Just like Sara and the Mariachi and Gomas and Siboney? Put in a safe place? All of them imprisoned? All of them at peace?

  Then Miguel Aparecido looked at me with a strange mixture of
contempt and compassion.

  IN SPITE OF this categorical statement, I knew the story never ended.

  “The worst one of all is walking around free,” said Miguel Aparecido, and I didn’t want to put a name to anyone I knew, because my spirit could not tolerate more guilt, more shame, more capitulation.

  “Who?” I said in haste. “Everything’s in—”

  He cut me off with a forgotten name: Jenaro Ruvalcaba.

  With an effort the scoundrel I met once during my first visits to the San Juan de Aragón Prison returned to my memory. Licenciado Jenaro Ruvalcaba was a criminal lawyer of scant renown. He received me courteously in his cell. He was agile and blond, about forty years old. He told me the prison population consisted of complaining, stupid people who didn’t know what to do with freedom.

  “And how do you manage?”

  “I accept what prison gives me.” He shrugged and proceeded to a reasonable analysis of how to behave in prison: Don’t accept visitors who came out of obligation, doubt the fidelity of the conjugal visit …

  “Both will betray you,” he shouted suddenly.

  “Who?”

  “Your wife and her lover.” He stood and put his hands to his head. “Traitors!”

  He closed his eyes, pulled at his ears, and attacked me with his fists before the guard hit him with his club on the back of the neck and Ruvalcaba fell, weeping, on the cot.

  “He’s free?” I said to Miguel without hiding my terror, for this attorney was a proven menace.

  “He’ll never be free,” remarked Miguel Aparecido. “He’s the prisoner of himself.”

  Then he told me the following story.

  Ruvalcaba did not lack talent. He was shaped by misfortune. A criminal gang kidnapped his father, his mother. They killed his father. They let her go, so she would suffer. The mother was a brave woman, and instead of sitting down to cry, she decided to educate her son Jenaro and give him a career as a criminal attorney so he would defend society against criminals like those who killed his father. Jenaro studied law and became a penologist. Except as he was preparing to defend the law he wanted to be a martyr to the law. He felt equal admiration and revulsion for both his father and those who killed him.

  “The old prick, how could he let himself be kidnapped and murdered by that gang …? Fuck me …

  “My father was a brave man who let himself be killed so my mother could go free … Fuck me …”

  And so between admiration and contempt the divided, schizoid character of Jenaro Ruvalcaba was formed, at once defender and violater of the law: a poisoned fruit constantly fragmenting into inimical pieces.

  Miguel said to make a long story short, a division was created in Ruvalcaba’s mind between the forbidden and the permitted, which eventually resolved into a situation worthy of farce. Ruvalcaba sublimated his psychological schism by molesting women. His vice consisted in boarding public transport—the Metro, buses, collective taxis—and harassing women. Don’t ask me why he found in this activity the reconcilation of his contrary tendencies. The fact is his maniacal pleasure was to take the Metro or the bus and first look at women with an intensity that was troubling because more than anything else, it was intrusive. He leaned against the female passengers. He recriminated them if they gave him dirty looks. He put his hands on their hips. He pawed their buttocks. He went straight to the nipple with his fingers. At times it was furtive, at times aggressive. If they reproached him or complained about him, Ruvalcaba would say: “She’s an old flirt. She led me on. I’m a criminal lawyer. I know about these things. Old women in heat! Frustrated old women! Let’s see if anybody will do them a favor!”

  Ruvalcaba derived supplementary delight when the women began to defend themselves. Some stuck him with pins, others with hairpins. A few had rings with a cutting edge. All of this excited Ruvalcaba: He saw it as a counterpart to his own actions, a recognition of his own audacity, an involuntary conspiracy between victim and aggressor. The women liked to have their buttocks touched, their pubis rubbed, their breasts caressed. They were his accomplices. His accomplices, he would repeat, excited, my accomplices.

  “That was the reason,” Miguel continued, “for his astonishment at the inauguration of what was called ‘pink transport’ only for women. The sign ‘Ladies Only’ excited him in the extreme. Ruvalcaba disguised himself as a woman in order to ride on the Metro with impunity, causing a phenomenal disturbance when, made up and in a blond wig, he put his hand on a fat passenger and a commotion began that led to a free-for-all, a brawl that ended at the Metro stop and the collective turning over of Jenaro Ruvalcaba to the police.”

  As the scoundrel was an attorney, he convinced the judge that his disguise had as its object to make certain the law was fully complied with and that women, if threatened, were capable of defending themselves. The judge, because of machista prejudice, pardoned Ruvalcaba, but, feeling like a magistrate in a Cantinflas movie as guided by a play of Lope’s, he ordered him exiled to the western part of the country, where the indiscreet and duplicitous Ruvalcaba lost no time in establishing an association with the owner of an avocado plantation, a front for a drug trafficking operation presided over by Don Avocado himself, who was delighted to count on a shyster as skilled in deceptions as Lic. Jenaro.

  From the plantation in Michoacán, Ruvalcaba performed great services for Don Avocado by supervising drug shipments, money laundering, loans, investments in transport, and the constant reconstruction of the plantation so it would continue to be viewed as an emporium of avocado trees and not a rat’s market. Ruvalcaba took care of everything for Don Avocado: buying protection, relationships with Gringo buyers, the loading and unloading of high-speed launches, the acquisition of magnum revolvers and AR-15 assault rifles. He learned to kill. He shot numerous rivals of the drug dealer and developed a special liking for cutting off their heads after killing them.

  He did everything until Don Avocado told him things were turning ugly since in this business there were plenty of snitches and especially assholes who wanted to rise at the expense of the powerful man in charge, you know, get out of my way and let me in …

  “The upshot, my dear Jenarito, is that they have more on us than an old whore’s fart, and if we want to continue in this business our only choice is to change our face, I mean, put a knife to our puss, I mean, the plastic surgeon is waiting for us.”

  “You change your face, Don Avocado, you’re uglier than a fasting motherfucker, and don’t mess with my movie-star profile. What would my dear mama say, God rest her soul?”

  With these words Jenaro Ruvalcaba fled Michoacán and came back to Mexico City, where his deferred vice—putting his hand on women in Metro cars and buses—flourished in the most dangerous routine of collecting fares from and pinching women in collective taxis, counting at times on the complicity of the driver, at times running the risk that the driver would put him off because of his riders’ protests, searching for farcical ways out disguised as a woman or a boy sailor from whose short pants charms peeked out that were hardly a child’s.

  Until the vengeance of Don Avocado extended from Michoacán to D.F. and, denounced as a murderer, a trafficker, and worst of all, a transvestite and pedophile, Jenaro Ruvalcaba ended up in the Aragón prison.

  “Where I met him,” I said with troubled innocence.

  “And which he left thanks to the imprudence of our … Jericó,” Miguel Aparecido said with a certain uneasiness, for he had not resigned himself to sharing fraternity with either Jericó or me. It was as if his singularity as the son of Max Monroy had been in some way violated by the truth, and although he had esteemed me earlier, he was not inclined to extend his affection to a man who like Jericó did not need (it was the tombstone Miguel Aparecido erected for him) to be a glutton of his own ego.

  “You and I, on the other hand”—he embraced me—“we’ll eat from the same plate.”

  And he pulled away from me.

  “Take care, brother. Take care. Not everybody’s in a safe p
lace.”

  HOW LONG SINCE I had eaten at the home of Don Antonio Sanginés?

  Now as I return to the mansion in Coyoacán, I’m doing so, of course, at my teacher’s invitation and with the clear awareness that this time my brother Jericó would not be there and had not been invited. I didn’t have the courage to ask about him. I knew the answer formulated ahead of time and transformed into a slogan:

  “In a safe place …”

  The ambiguity of the expression troubled me. It meant precaution and care: a verbal “alert” that referred to being secure or watched over. The disturbing thing about the words was their not saying clearly if someone “put in a safe place” was secure, yes, taken care of, that too, locked in, perhaps, cared for, perhaps, by whom? to what end? With an involuntary shudder I imagined my old friend, recent enemy, and everlasting brother Jericó Monroy Sarmiento handed over to the perfect custody of death, the security of the sepulchre, the precaution of eternity.

  If this was what brought me back to Sanginés’s colonial house filled with books, ornaments, and antique furniture, he did not seem ready to fall into the repetition—exceedingly banal—of “in a safe place.” Soon the reason for his companionship appeared, and when I arrived, Sanginés led me to the breakfast area decorated in Pueblan tiles and came right to the point, saying, “The dream has ended.”

  The question surrounding my life authorized him to go on. The seventy years of moderate dictatorship in Mexico, beginning in 1930, had assured economic and social growth without democracy, but with security. Sanginés welcomed democracy. He lamented the lack of security because it identified democracy with crime …

  He looked at me with a strange dreaminess that spoke clearly of Sanginés’s decades of service as a professor of law, court adviser to presidents of the republic, member of the boards of directors of Monroy’s private enterprises. An entire career based on judicious opinion and opportune warning, on objective counsel and advice, with no interest other than the reconciliation of public and private concerns on behalf of the nation.

  He didn’t need to say it. I knew it. His eyes communicated it to me. But the sour expression on his face not only gave the lie to all I’ve just said: It misdirected, disputed, and desired it in spite of regrets. In spite of what could be viewed as accommodation, opportunism, flattery, the counselor’s vices stopped at the shore of the courtier to take on, in short, the adviser’s virtues of objective intelligence and reason indispensable to the good governance of the individual and the state, business and society. There was nothing to apologize for. If I didn’t know the rules of the game, it was time I learned them. If I didn’t want to learn them, I’d be left out in the cold, adrift. I thought of Sanginés imploring, uncharacteristically pleading for comprehension of Monroy in the stairwell on Praga. This supper at his house, I understood immediately, erased that scene on the stairs. As if it hadn’t occurred.