Destiny and Desire (42 page)

“Sometimes, Josué, they give us the wrong address, or one that doesn’t exist, the letter never arrives, and then things as sad as forgetting can happen, or as violent as wreaking vegeance on the scribe responsible for the letter’s not reaching its destination—even if it didn’t really have any destination at all.

“And what is destination, or destiny?” continued the voice I tried to locate, to recognize, in the row of people’s scribes sitting in front of the old building of the Inquisition. “It isn’t fate. It is simply disguised will. The final desire.”

Then I was able to unite voice and eyes. A small man, bald but in a borrowed hairdo, his bones brittle and his hands energetic, white-skinned though tending to a yellowish pallor, for a couple of Band-Aids covered tiny cuts on one cheek and his neck, dressed in an old black suit with gray stripes, a shirt with a too-large collar unbuttoned at his throat and adorned by a wide, out-of-fashion tie that actually looked more like the covering for a defeated, emaciated chest, mortified by blows of contrition. Borrowed apparel. Secondhand clothes.

Our eyes met and I recognized old Father Filopáter, the guide of generous meticulousness during the early youth of Castor and Pollux, Josué and Jericó. I held back my tears, took Filopáter’s hands, and was about to kiss them. I don’t know what held me back. Shyness or distrust of his nails that in spite of being cut short showed signs of grime at the corners. Though this, perhaps, was due only to his work on an old typewriter and an apparently rebellious two-color ribbon, for when Filopáter pressed a key thoughtlessly, the entire ribbon unrolled into something resembling infinity.

“Maestro,” I murmured.

“The maestro is you,” he replied, smiling.

He accepted my invitation. We sat down in a café on Calle de
Brasil, Filopáter with his heavy typewriter (as big as his head) under his arm and eventually occupying a chair at our table, mute now but invited.

He looked at the typewriter. “Do you know? Each word you write strikes a blow against the Devil.”

I wanted to laugh, amiably. He extended his hand and stopped me.

“As always, I listen to you with respect, Maestro.”

I shouldn’t call him that, he replied with a moment of annoyance. He was only a scribe and that, he said, was enough (he wanted to hurry on to two things) to explain his history. When we were served our coffee, he evoked Saint Peter, “If you cannot be pure, be careful,” and concluded with the words of Saint Thomas, “Only virginity can make a man equal to an angel.”

“What do you want to tell me, Father?”

He resigned himself to my calling him that as long as I forgot about “Maestro.” He was about to sigh. He looked at me like someone picking up an old conversation. As if no calendars had intervened between today’s and yesterday’s words.

“I would like to have been a Trappist,” he said with a smile. “The brothers of La Trappe can communicate only with feet or hands, gestures and whistles. On the other hand, look at me. If not a Trappist then trapped in the trammels of the word …”

“You taught us not to be afraid of words,” I recalled with good intentions.

“But there are those who do fear the word, Josué, and I say this intentionally. Jesus said ‘I am the Word’ and he meant several things—”

“He meant that he was part of the Trinity,” I recalled and repeated with a kind of red-faced enthusiasm, as if not only my youth depended on this memory but my farewell to it: The reencounter with our teacher indicated to me that a cycle was ending but the next one was slow in showing itself.

“I mean that the Trinity is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit … and the Word is an attribute of the Spirit but is shared in by the Father, the Son …”

I wanted to see admiration in Filopáter’s eyes. I found only compassion.
Because he knew what I meant, he was going to say the same thing, and we felt sorry for each other for knowing and saying it, as if we could be not only pre-Christians but true pagans, absent from faith in Christ because we were ignorant of it, but condemned to being absent even if we did know about it.

“The Trinity is a mystery,” he began to speak again. “It cannot be known by reason. It is a revealed truth. It puts faith to the test. Either you believe, Josué, or you don’t believe.”

I wasn’t going to tell him I had stopped believing because he knew I had never believed. That’s why he immediately said: “The surprising thing is that, at the same time, the Trinity, the Word, transcends reason but is not at war with reason.”

“The dogma of the Trinity is not incompatible with reason?” I asked, because I wanted to push Filopáter’s words to a proposition that wasn’t a conclusion but a confrontation. His current state told me clearly that something serious had occurred to make him abandon teaching, which had been his vocation since his youth, when he taught the Pizarro Leongómez brothers at the Javeriana in Bogotá and then, when the rough tides of Colombian politics washed him up in Mexico, he landed in our secondary school.

“No,” he said with renewed energy. “It isn’t. But that is the truth clerical intolerance can employ against a person if he attempts to reconcile the truth of faith and the reason of truth. It is not only easier”—did I detect an unusual disdain in the priest’s voice?—“it is more cowardly. For as long as we maintain that faith is true though it may not be factual, you will be protected by a dogma that is a paradox we owe to Tertullian: ‘It is certain because it is impossible.’ A definition of faith …”

The coffee was bad, with milk it was worse. Filopáter sipped it almost as a sacrifice. He was Colombian.

“If you wager, on the other hand, on the rationality of faith, you expose yourself to the censure of those who prefer to deny reason to religion only because they wouldn’t know how to explain their faith rationally, and therefore opt for a blind faith, an ignorant faith.”

Filopáter became excited.

“No.” He banged on the table and knocked over the glass bowl
of sugar, spilling it. “One must sustain the mystery with reason and fortify reason with mystery. Faith does not exclude reason and reason does not destroy faith. Saying this exposes the dogmatic man, the passive man, the man who wants to impose a truth like the Inquisitors beneath whose walls you found me sitting this morning, or hides behind the wall denying the work of God—”

“What is it?” I asked with a certain impertinence. “The work of God, what is it?”

“The redemption of the world by means of the wearisome affirmation of human reason.”

The glass sugar bowl had rolled off the table onto the floor, where it shattered, granulating the floor like a snowstorm that has lost its way in the tropics.

The owner of the café hurried over, alarmed, annoyed, a woman submissive to patrons.

“
Pro vitris fractis,
” Filopáter said solemnly. “Impose a surcharge for the broken glass, Señora.”

MOVE
LIKE
TIGERS
. Study the sites. They walk through public offices. They find out. Where are the telephone and telegraph installations? Which seem the places of least resistance? The Zócalo? The Paseo de la Reforma? The distant shantytowns, Los Remedios, Tulyehualco, San Miguel Tehuizco? The government ministries of state, post offices, private businesses, apartment houses? Study them all. Tell me which ones you like. Recruit in the penitentiaries. I, Jericó, will see to it that by my order Maxi Batalla, Sara Pérez, Siboney Peralta, Brillantinas, Gomas, and Ventanas are released, an order from the office of the president, signed by me, is enough, and the president will never know. Let the criminals join up with the laborers who can’t get across the border; promise them good jobs in California; promise the unemployed in Mexico City, the unsatisfied workers, that they’ll be rich and won’t have to work; promise: promise the migrant workers thrown out of the United States, their families who will no longer receive dollars every month, those who can’t find work in Mexico and see only a horizon of hunger: promise. Begin with work stoppages, slowdowns, stealing parts, voluntary accidents,
intentional fires, until the city is set on fire and comes to a halt. You, Mariachi Maxi, go from business to business; you, Brillantinas, print up some fake passes; you, Siboney, go to funerals and see who you can recruit; you, Gomas, go from barbecue to barbecue, inventing rumors, the government is falling, there’s repression, there are strikes, where? there? go on! arm and recruit impoverished young men, give them love, tell them now they’ll have respect because of their pistols. Rancor. Rancor. Rancor is our weapon. Exalt rancor. Mexican resentment is the fertilizer of our movement. Ask each boy: Do you want to ruin somebody, do you want to take revenge on somebody, do you want to get what you deserve, what is denied to you by injustice, wickedness, envy, inequality, your parents, your bosses, these young millionaires, these corrupt politicians? Rancor. The damned tradition of rancor. The most constant Mexican tradition. Take the pistol I’m going to give you, take the Uzi, take the club, the bludgeon, the lasso, they’re all good for attacking, make lists, boys, who do you want to ruin, who do you want to pay for their faults? Make lists! Find the places of least resistance, the most vulnerable, hospitals, pharmacies, commercial centers. Do you think we can take the airport? Ha-ha-ha, make yourselves invisible, don’t look at one another until it’s time for the attack, cut off the water, gas, electricity, isolate the districts in the city, isolate the center, the middle-class districts, the nameless ghost settlements where the city dies: feel united and don’t give up. Personal vendettas allowed.

“Do you really believe the masses will follow you, Jericó?”

“Distinguish between rhetoric and reality. I have to invoke the masses to justify myself. I need only a shock corps to triumph. A small, determined group. All of that about a class in the vanguard is late-night Marxist rhetoric. If you wait for the masses to act, Josué, you’ll wait till the cows come home.”

Once again, his world of North American sayings and references surprised me. Wait till the cows come home.
Espera a que las vacas regresen
.

“All the people,” I said to introduce an idea (let’s see if it sticks). “The mass of workers.”

“All the people are too much.”

“Who then?”

“A small group,” said Jericó, “a small, cold, violent group for insurrectionary tactics.”

“The mass of workers …”

“I don’t need them!” Jericó exclaimed. “An assault group is enough. The assault group represents the mass of the dissatisfied. Do you realize that half a million workers have returned to Mexico from the United States and don’t find anything but poverty and unemployment?”

“Detachments?”

“Armed. It’s enough for me to say from Los Pinos: Distribute weapons to defend the chief of state.”

I repressed my laughter. I transformed it into doubts. I managed to say: “They won’t pay attention to you.”

He turned red. Enraged. I saw something crazy in his eyes. As if saying to himself and saying to me, They are going to obey me.

“A few people,” he said as if he were praying. “Limited terrain. Clear objectives, the vanguard forward, the masses back.”

In the meantime, I should say that more than the insurrectionary tactics foreseen by Jericó, Jericó himself interested me, his evolution, his ambition. Should I have been surprised? Hadn’t he been my first friend? Wasn’t Jericó the one who gave me his hand in school, protecting me against the damned bullies? Wasn’t Jericó the one who took me to his apartment when “the House of Usher” fell on Calle de Berlín? Wasn’t he the one who introduced me to fundamental readings? Didn’t we argue together with Father Filopáter? Didn’t we see each other naked in the shower? Didn’t we fuck as a team the whore with the bee on her buttock? Weren’t we Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri, founders of cities, Argonauts equal to Jason and the archer Phalerus and Lynceus the lookout and Orpheus the poet, and the herald, son of Hermes, and the courier of Lapida who had been a woman and Atalanta of Calydon, who still was: Argonauts plowing the seas in search—you Jericó and I Josué—of the Golden Fleece that hangs in a distant olive grove, guarded night and day by a sleepless dragon? I looked intently at Jericó, as if a direct
gaze were still the guarantee of truth, the beacon of certitude, as if the most malicious men in the world had not understood—from the very beginning—that the direct gaze associated with frankness, humility, understanding, and friendship is the mask of falsehood, pride, intransigence, and enmity. I should have known it. I didn’t want to know it. Until this very moment when I’m narrating what happened, I insisted on evoking our youth as students as the most valuable part of our past, the friendship that was the reason for being, the watchword, the birth certificate of the relationship between Josué and Jericó. A reality that had to be expressed thoroughly and to the very last moment—I told myself—under penalty of losing my soul.

My references to the ideas and images that united us were only a way of telling myself and telling Jericó: “Every friendship rests on a myth and represents it.”

I asked: “In addition to the fleece, whom did the beast guard?” I answered myself: “A ghost. The specter of an exiled king whose return would bring peace to the kingdom.

“Recovering a ghost in order to sacrifice a republic,” I murmured then, and Jericó simply asked me: “What was more interesting, recovering the fleece or bringing back the ghost?”

“Crowning a specter?”

I understand now that this question has hung over our destinies because Jericó and I were Castor and Pollux, part of the eternal expedition in search of desire and destiny, a mere pretext, however, for recovering a specter and bringing him back home.

“Did you see this?” I handed him the newspaper across the table.

“What?”

“What happened at the zoo.”

“No.”

“A tiger died after being attacked by four other tigers.”

“Why?”

“They were hungry.”

I pointed.

“They ate his entrails. Look.”

Perhaps I just wanted to indicate that he and I became friends because of a
debt
. That brought us together. We established a lifetime alliance on the basis of that debt.