Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

She smiled. “Imagine Sibila Sarmiento wandering here, not knowing where she is, not even looking at the ocean, distant from the moon and the sun, prisoner of nothingness or of a hope as crazy as she is. The hope Max will return and rescue her from the asylum. Or at least make her another son. Another heir!

“Thank me, Josué… I flew here to prepare the house for you so you’ll be comfortable. It was sealed tight, as if with a cork. And in this heat? Air it all out, dust off the furniture, smooth out the sheets, put out towels and soap, just look, everything to receive you as you deserve…”

Who knows what she imagined in my gaze that obliged her to say: “Don’t worry. All the servants have gone. We’re alone. All, all alone.”

She caressed my cheek. I didn’t move.

She said not everything was ready.

“Look. The pool is empty and full of leaves and trash. There’s an air of abandon in spite of all my efforts. The grass is uncut. The palm trees are gray. And Max always said things like ‘I want to be buried here.’ How curious, don’t you think? To be buried in a place he never visited…”

“Nobody looks forward to the cemetery,” I dared to say.

“How true!” the voice declared. “Didn’t I always tell you? You’re smart, you asshole Josué, you’re really smart, good and smart.”

And she threw the contents of the whiskey glass at my chest.

“Just don’t get too smart.”

I maintained my calm. I didn’t even raise my hand to my chest. I looked, distracted, at the setting sun. She resumed the air of a tropical hostess.

“I don’t want neighbors,” Max had said.

She made a panoramic gesture.

“And he did it, Josué. There’s nobody here. Only a high mountain and the open sea.”

“And a beach down there,” I added, not to leave anything out, and I sensed Asunta becoming uncomfortable.

“Don’t expect anyone to stop there,” she said in a rude tone.

I tried to be frivolous. “Your company’s enough for me, Asunta. That’s all I ask.”

The shirt stuck to my chest.

“You can have champagne for breakfast,” she said in a tone between diversion and menace. “In any case,” she sighed and turned her back on the sea, “enjoy the luxury. And think of just one thing. Luxury is acquiring what you don’t need. On the other hand, you need your life… Right?”

She laughed. Her soul was being laid bare, little by little. Not all at once, because I had been observing her since I first met her, disdainful and absent, walking through cocktail parties with her cellphone glued to her ear, imposing silence, not entering into conversation with anyone. I had to understand her as she was and for what she was. An attentive woman and for that reason dangerous. Because extreme attention can unleash violent, unexpected reactions: It’s the price of being aware, of being overly aware.

If, like an adolescent, I fell in love one day with this woman and her visible attributes, if she ever had them, she had been losing them gradually until she played the sinister game of presenting herself as my lover to Jericó and driving my brother mad with the first great passion of his strange life of austerity without purpose, lust without enthusiasm, a lover without love. I knew Asunta’s malice exceeded both my capacity for loving and Jericó’s icy ambition. We were, in some way, pawns in a vast chess game that led to the solution, apparently ritualized, of “putting in a safe place.”

“And Jericó?” I insisted. “In a safe place as well?”

“We don’t speak of that.”

“In a safe place? What? How? Isn’t anybody going to tell me?”

“I can show you.”

“What? Not in…?”

“What it is to be put in a safe place? Wait just a little…”

“And what it is to go to bed with Max, like you?”

“What do you know-”

“I heard you.”

“Did you see us?”

“It was very dark. Don’t fuck around.”

“Black. It was black, you spying bastard!”

“Go on, don’t play around, answer me.”

“Don’t be a snoop, I’m telling you. Big nose!”

“All that not to go back to the hellhole in the desert, Asunta, the town in the north where you were nobody and put up with a macho, presumptuous, hateful husband? All that out of gratitude to the man who took you away from there and put you on your little peak of business and influence…?”

“I would have left there with or without him,” Asunta said, her face extremely tense.

“I don’t doubt it. You have a lot of guts.”

“I have smarts. I have a very clever brain. But Max was a stroke of luck that came to me. There would have been other opportunities.”

“How can you trust in chance?”

“Necessity, not luck. I would have found the means to escape.”

Mistress of the game? Even of the great Max Monroy? These questions teemed in my mind during this twilight facing the Mexican Pacific.

As if she had read my thoughts, she exclaimed: “Nobody blessed me. Nobody chose me. I made myself on my own. I think-”

“You’re the creation of Max Monroy,” I said, taking her by surprise.

“Nobody blessed me. I made myself on my own!” She grew angry.

“I can see you now, abandoned in Torreón without Max Monroy, damn dissatisfied provincial…”

I don’t know if this defense of my father came from some corner of my soul, though I realized Asunta would come at me and scratch my eyes out… I restrained her. I lowered her arms. I obliged her to leave them hanging by her hips. I kissed her with some passion, some disdain; in any case, an uncontrollable mixture of my own feelings, which may not have been very different from the emotion any man can feel if he is embracing a beautiful woman, no matter how much of an enemy she may be, no matter how…

For a moment I suspended my reason and liberated my senses. We all have a heart that doesn’t reason, and I didn’t care that Asunta didn’t respond to my omnivorous kisses, that her arms didn’t embrace me, that I forgot myself before repenting of my actions, before thinking she was responsible and that in this entire situation-I felt this as I was chewing the lipstick on her lips-we had all been concealing the most secret secret of our souls…

Because a personal emotion let loose like an animal, even though it isn’t returned, can abolish for an instant the customary hierarchies of love, power, and beauty. Why did Asunta let herself be kissed and groped without responding but allowing me to continue?

I moved her away, imagining she would say something. She said it.

“I have the bad habit of being admired,” she informed me with a cynical, even happy air of self-sufficiency. “It’s useful…”

“Sure. The bad thing is your appearance doesn’t manage to disguise your real desires. I believe-”

“What are they?” She stopped me. “What are they? my desires?”

“Serving Max Monroy and being independent of Max Monroy. Impossible.” I affirmed my own intelligence in the matter, I defended it as if it had been cornered.

“Max protects me from myself,” was her reply. “He saves me from bad luck. From my bad luck, you’re right, the misfortune of my previous life…”

“There are people who are like screens for other people. You’re Max’s screen. You don’t exist.” I spat the words at her with a kind of frivolous rage, as if wanting to bring the scene to an end, get away, conclude the farce, pick up my suitcase and my books and get away forever from the spider’s web woven by Asunta around a man, Max Monroy, who had been revealed as my father and, I told myself confusedly, whom I ought to honor, know and honor, get close to instead of Machiavelli, damn it, what was I thinking of? I thanked her, Asunta Jordán, for shaking me, taking me out of the vast juvenile illusion that I could go on with my life as if nothing had happened, write my thesis, graduate… And then, and then?