Destiny and Desire (30 page)

Intention and intelligence. I believe my friend and I, in a long relationship begun in the schoolyard of a religious academy, did not need to pronounce those words to comprehend and live them. They weren’t the only basis of our understanding, affirmed the day I went to live with him on Calle de Praga. Today, however, two or three days after hearing the damned (or was she blessed in her compassion?) Sara Pérez de Esparza, Jericó came into our shared apartment and said point-blank that the time had come for us to live apart.

I didn’t change my expression. “I’ll leave today.”

Jericó had the grace to lower his head. “No. I’m the one who’s leaving. You stay here. It’s just”—he looked up—“I’ll be traveling a lot around the country.”

“And?”

“And I’ll be receiving all kinds of visitors.”

“You have an office.”

“You understand what I’m saying.”

I didn’t want to linger over the obvious and think that Jericó needed to move to have greater erotic freedom. Perhaps he’d already
had it while I was devoted to Lucha Zapata and now, without her, the promise of my constant presence had cost him a couple of “romances.”

I realized there was something more when Jericó said abruptly, “Nothing obliges me to live against myself.”

“Of course not,” I agreed with gravity.

“Against my own nature.”

It didn’t even occur to me that my friend was going to reveal homosexual inclinations. Images return to my memory of the shared shower at school and, more provocatively, our eroticism with the woman who had the posterior bee. I also recalled what he said when he returned from his years of study in Europe, a trip planned with as much mystery as his return, a mystery deepened by a certain falsity I intuited—I didn’t know, I only intuited—in the Parisian references of a young man who didn’t know French argot but did use American slang, as he did now:

“Look, as Justin Timberlake sings: ‘Daddy’s on a mission to please.’ Don’t be offended.”

“Of course not, Jericó. You and I have had the intelligence never to contradict each other, knowing that each of us has his own ideas.”

“And his own life,” my friend said exultantly.

I said that was true and looked at him without any expression, asking him rhetorically: “His own nature?”

I didn’t say it trying to trap him, or with ill will, or deceitfully, but really wanting him to explain to me what “his own nature” was.

“We’re not the same,” he said in response to my tacit question. “The world changes and we change along with it. Do you remember what I said, right here, when I came back to Mexico? I asked you then, What do we have? A name, an occupation, status? Or are we a wasteland? A garbage dump of what might have been? A canceled register of debits and credits? Not even the bottom of the stewpot?”

I stopped him with a movement of my hand. “Take a breath, please.”

“We need a position, Josué. We can’t give as our occupation ‘I think’ or ‘I am.’ ”

“We can turn into young old men, like some musicians, Compay Segundo or the Rolling Stones, why not? didn’t I warn you?”

“Don’t joke around. I’m serious. The time has come for us to apply ourselves to action. We have to act.”

“Even though we betray our ideas?” I said with no mean-spirited intention.

He didn’t take it badly. “Adapting ourselves to reality. Reality is going to demand things in line with our talents though opposed to our ideals.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to do, I’m going to act in accordance with necessity and try, as far as possible, to maintain my ideals. What do you think?”

“And if your ideals are bad ones?”

“I’ll be a politician, Josué. I’ll try to make them less bad.”

I smiled and told my friend we really were faithful to our Catholic education and the morality of the lesser evil when it’s necessary to choose between two demons. Were we
Jesuits
?

“And besides, the Jesuit goes where the Pope orders him to, without protest, without delay.”

“But that order was to save souls,” I said with the irony his words provoked in me.

“And souls aren’t saved passively,” he replied with conviction. “You must have absolute faith in what you’re doing. Your ends must be clear. Your actions, overpowering. A country isn’t built without implacable acts. In Mexico we’ve lived too long on compromise. Compromise only delays action. Compromise is wishy-washy.”

He was agitated, and I looked at him with distress, almost out of the corner of my eye.

He said that in every society there are the dominant and the dominated. The unbearable thing is not this but when the dominant don’t know how to dominate, abandoning the dominated to a fatal or vegetative existence.

“One must dominate to improve everyone, Josué. Everyone. Do you agree?”

Smiling, I accused him of elitism. He answered that elites were indispensable. But it was necessary to unite them with the masses.

“A more mass-oriented elite,” Jericó declared, moving like a caged animal around a place, ours until then, that he apparently was transforming now into a prison ready to be abandoned. “Do you think you’re immortal?” he asked.

I laughed. “Not at all.”

He waved his finger in my face. “Don’t lie. When we’re young we all think we’re immortal. That’s why we do what we do. We don’t judge. We invent. We don’t give or take advice. We do two things: We don’t accept what’s already been done. We renovate.”

I laughed in spite of myself.

Me too—I said to myself—I think I’m going to live forever, I feel it in my soul though my head tells me otherwise.

“Do you think it’s legitimate for the old to control everything, power, money, obedience? Do you?”

“Ask me that on the day I become old.” I tried to be amiable with a friend whose belligerent face, so impassioned it changed color, distanced him from me by the minute.

Jericó realized I was looking at him and judging him. He tried to calm down. He made a sacrilegious joke.

“If you believe in the Immaculate Conception, why not believe in the Maculate Conception?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, a little shocked in spite of myself.

“Nothing, pal. Only that life offers us a million possibilities on every corner. Or rather, on every plaza.”

His eyes were shining. He said to imagine a circular plaza—

“A
rond-point
?” I asked deliberately.

“Yes, a circle out of which, say, four or six avenues emerge—”

“Like the Place de l’Etoile in Paris.”

“Ecole,” he said enthusiastically. “The point is, which of the six avenues are you going to take? Because when you choose one, it’s as if you’ve sacrificed the other five. And how do you know you’ve made the right choice?”

“You don’t know,” I murmured. “Except at the end of the avenue.”

“And the bad thing is you can’t go back to the starting point.”

“To the original plaza. La Concorde,” I said with a smile and, unintentionally, with irony.

He kept looking at me. With affection. With defiance. With an unspoken plea: Understand me. Love me. And if you love and understand me, don’t try to find out any more.

There was a silence. Then Jericó began to pack his things and the conversation resumed its usual colloquial tone. I helped him pack. He told me to keep his records. And his books? Those too. But then he looked at me in a strange way I didn’t understand. The books were mine. And him, what was he going to read from now on?

“Let’s be baroque,” he said with a laugh, shrugging his shoulders, as if that definition would transform the history of Mexico and the Mexicans into chicken soup.

“Or let’s be daring,” I said. “Why not?”

“Why not?” he repeated with a light laugh. “Life is getting away from us.”

“And to hell with the consequences.” I considered the unpleasant scene to be over. I touched my friend’s shoulder.

I offered to help him carry down the two suitcases.

He refused.

I
PROPOSED
SHOWING
indifference to beauty, health, and fortune. I wanted to transform my indifference into something distant from vice and virtue. I was afraid to fall into solitude, suicide, or the law. I wanted, in short, to avoid the passions, considering them a sickness of the soul.

The deafening failure of these, my new intentions (my doubt), had to do with the mere presence of Asunta Jordán. From nine to two, from six to nine, from the afternoon to midnight, I was never far from her during my period of initiation in the offices of the Vasco de Quiroga building in the Santa Fe district. The building itself consisted of twelve floors for work and another two for the residence of the president of the enterprise, Max Monroy, in addition to a flat roof for the helicopter.

“And you?” I asked Asunta with a mixture of boldness and stupidity. “What floor do you live on?”

She looked at me with her eyes of an overcast sea.

“Repeat what you just said,” she ordered.

“Why?” I said, more fool me.

“So you’ll realize your stupidity.”

I admitted it. This woman, with whom I had fallen in love, was educating me. She led me through the twelve permitted floors, from the entrance on the Plaza Vasco de Quiroga, greeting the guards, the concierge, the elevator operators, and from there to the second, third, and fourth floors, where female secretaries had abandoned typing and stenography for the tape recorder and the computer, where male secretaries signed or initialed correspondence with a flourish and also dictated it, where file clerks transferred the old, dusty correspondence of a company founded by Max Monroy’s mother (my secret interlocutor in a nameless graveyard) almost ninety years ago onto tapes, diskettes, and now iPods, blogs, memory sticks, USB drives, external disks, and from there to the fifth floor, where an army of accountants was at work, to the sixth, offices of the lawyers in the service of the enterprise, to the seventh, from which Max Monroy’s cultural concerns—opera, ballet, art editions—radiated outward, to the eighth, a space dedicated to invention, to the ninth and tenth, the floors where practical ideas were devised for modern technologies.

On the eleventh floor I worked with Asunta Jordán and an entire executive army, one floor below the thirteenth and fourteenth floors inhabited, as far as my imagination could tell, by Bluebeard and his disposable women.

Was Asunta one of them?

“You’re not a seminarian or a tutor,” she said as if she could sense in me a hero of a nineteenth-century novel as embodied by Gérard Philipe. “You’re not an ordinary run-of-the-mill employee because you were sent here by Licenciado Sanginés, whom Max Monroy loves and respects. And you’re not socially inferior, though you’re not actually socially superior either.”

She looked me over from head to toe.

“You have to dress better. And something else, Josué. It’s better not to have been born than to be ill bred, do you understand? Society rewards good manners. Appearances. Speaking well. Good form. Form is part of our power, even if we’re surrounded by fools or perhaps for that very reason.”

She elaborated—from floor to floor—speaking about the Mexican cultivation of form.

“We’re the Italians of America, more than the Argentines,” she said in the elevator, “because we were a viceroyalty and above all because we descended from the Aztecs, not from boats.”

“An old joke,” I dared to say. Asunta seemed to be repeating something she had learned.

She laughed, as if in approval. “Since you’re none of that, it’s right for you to learn to be what you’re going to be.”

“And what I want to be?”

“From now on, that’s no longer different from what you’re going to be.”

To that effect—I suppose—Asunta took me to social functions she considered obligatory, in other offices and hotels, with powerful and sometimes pretentious people with a yearning for elegance, a subject that awakened in Asunta’s gaze and facial expression a series of reflections that she communicated to me in a very quiet voice, both of us surrounded by the rapid sound of the social hive, as she tasted the glass of champagne in which she only wet her lips without ever drinking from it: When she set down the glass, the level of the drink was always the same.

“What is luxury?” she would ask me on those occasions.

Surrounded by clothes, aromas, poses, strategies, Hispanic canapés and Indian servers, I didn’t know how to answer.

“Luxury is having what you don’t need,” she declared, her eyes hidden behind her raised glass. “Luxury is poetry: saying what you feel and think, without paying attention to the consequences. But luxury is also change. Styles change. Tastes change. Luxury tries to move ahead or at least catch up with style, creating and inviting it …”

She spoke of luxury not as if she had invented it but because she was inaugurating it.

“ ‘Luxury does not know that style and death are sisters,’ ” I said, citing Leopardi and testing her.

“It’s possible.” Asunta’s expression did not change, and I recalled old conversations with Jericó and Filopáter.

“And because style is change, it affects our business. What do we offer the consumer? The most modern, the most advanced, at times the most useless, because tell me, if you already have a black telephone, why do you want a white one? I’ll tell you: Because choosing between two phones today is choosing among a hundred phones tomorrow. Do you see? Luxury creates necessity, necessity creates luxury, and we produce and win. There is no end to it! There’s no reason for it ever to end! Ha!”

She didn’t say these words as an exclamation. Her behavior at these social events was very distinctive. She knew she was looked at and even guessed at. Over and above the conversations, the clink of glasses, the scent of lotions and perfumes, the taste of sausages and quesadillas, Asunta Jordán circulated in a kind of light, as if a theatrical spot were following her, always looking for the best angle, making her hair shine, resting like an insolent bee on her plump red lips à la Joan Crawford, hot or cold? That was the question others asked as they watched her go by, does Asunta Jordán kiss hot or cold? murmuring in secret to Josué, exciting the curiosity of the guests, Ask yourself, Josué, who’s looking at you, where are they looking at you from? Ask yourself but don’t look at anybody, act in public as if you had a secret and wanted them to guess what it is.