Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

I got out of this illusion by telling myself duty is independent of desire. Bad luck. But that’s the way it is.

Who knows what Asunta read in my gaze. I saw her with a background of sudden madness.

“You’re too intelligent to be loved,” I told her as a logical consequence of my own thoughts. “What does Max Monroy think of that?”

She began to speak with unusual nervousness, as if the answers to my question were, all at the same time, an invocation to the sun to disappear immediately and leave us in the most profound darkness, yes, though they were also disconnected phrases, disguised words I had forgotten because eventually Asunta returned to her implacable, affirmative logic.

The madwoman Sarmiento was locked away forever in the asylum, she said, and the end of the day resonated in her voice.

Your brother Jericó has been put in a safe place, she said, and an armada of dark clouds announced the coming night.

Your brother Miguel Aparecido languishes in an Aragón cell and won’t come out because he’s afraid of killing his father Max Monroy.

“And Max Monroy, what about him?”

“I’ve already told you there are things Max Monroy doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want to know he’s going to die. Sanginés has prepared a will for him in which the heirs are Sibila Sarmiento, Miguel Aparecido, Jericó Monroy Sarmiento, and Josué Monroy Sarmiento…”

“And you, Asunta?” I asked without too much premeditation.

“I’m at the tail end,” said the poor girl from the north, the provincial I saw now disguised as an important executive, without her palazzo pajamas, her omnipresent cellphone, the glass in her hand: I saw her in a little percale dress, flat shoes, permanent-waved hair, rouged face, porcelain earrings, and a gold tooth.

That’s how I saw her and she knows I saw her that way.

My imagination had stripped her and returned her to the desert.

“And you, Asunta?”

“Don’t you dare mock me,” she said with icy fury. “I’m always at the tail end. I inherit only a handout.”

“And do you want to inherit it all?”

“Because I deserve it all. Because no one has done as much as I have for Max Monroy.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I want to inherit it all.”

“What are you going to do?”

“You know.”

“You won’t dare. I know what you want. I’ll speak to Max. I’ll…”

No, she shook her head, agitated, her gaze cold, nobody will say anything to Max, nobody, because there won’t be anybody, nobody but me, she kept saying with a maddened desire and a gaze of the most terrible evil, radical egotism, the certainty that the world is there to serve us along with the frightful uncertainty that the world might leave us out in the cold, a handful of dust in a chalky desert instead of the leafy paradise that was and had been the face of Asunta, two gardens in one or a single fierce wasteland of her youthful imagination… The face of Asunta Jordán. I don’t know if the dying light of day gave her the almost mythological air of a great avenger: a Medea maddened not by sexual jealousy but by monetary jealousy, the yearning to be the heir to the vast amount, not knowing that money belongs to no one, it circulates, is consumed, and will end up in the immense ocean of trash. Perhaps because she knew this, she elevated herself from a jealous Medea to an enveloping Gorgon of power, queen of an empire that would slip from her hands if she did not endow herself with bloody eyes, a terrifying face, and hair made of serpents, crowned by this sunset and this ocean. Loved by Poseidon, possessed by our father Monroy, did she have to be killed so that from her blood would be born a gold dagger that would kill her before she killed me, Miguel Aparecido, Sibila Sarmiento, and Max Monroy himself, as she had perhaps already killed Jericó? In the flashing darkness of Asunta Jordán’s eyes I saw the simplicity of destiny and the complexity of ambition. Or would Asunta Jordán have time to look at me and turn me into stone? And wasn’t it true that…?

“Even if you kill me, I’ll go on looking at you,” she said with a whiskey and lipstick breath when I moved away from her, called by the sound of footsteps on branches that increased behind me, giving way to the face of Jenaro Ruvalcaba, agile and blond, followed by a confused gang of sweating dark people, all armed with machetes, and Ruvalcaba himself swung his machete at the back of my neck, sending me with a bleeding head into the well of the empty pool surrounded by empty bottles and the grass that grew in a jumble from cracks in the cement…

Here is my decapitated head, lost like a coconut at the edge of the Pacific Ocean on the Mexican coast of Guerrero.

My head not only misses my body. I don’t know where I ended up from the neck down. Perhaps my headless corpse has also been put “in a safe place.” Perhaps, however, the sacrifice of the body has been the condition for my soul to be liberated from a purely vegetative existence and assume a new life of connection. A life of connection: Isn’t this the life typical of the animal? Is it wishful thinking to believe that now that my body is lost, my spirit will ascend to a region inhabited only by anima? And, to begin with, isn’t anima animal?

Anima. How curious, how unexpected, the way the mind, if it does not return to, at least approaches knowledge acquired years before, the youthful readings I have mentioned so often in this my manuscript of salt and foam! Matter and form. Potentiality and act. Only death confirms for me that now I am no more than a potential act, matter in pursuit of its own form. Now I feel my soul as the promise of a restored sense, but without content now and therefore ready to receive all contents. I am something possible, I tell myself in this extremity of my existence. I do not yet exist. Even if I am, perhaps, immortal because of the paradox of having died, only for that reason…

Soul anima animal: My head lies on the beach, bathed by the tepid waves of the Southern Sea. I no longer know if I’m confused, if I speak of my anima and speak at the same time of my animal. But if I have once again become anima of animal, that means I have returned to the embryo, to the formation of animal and man, to the instant of similarity between species: their brotherhood.

I will stop there because the idea is enough to accelerate my mind and send me to an evolutionary aftermath I don’t desire because I feel it moves me away from an obscurely recovered fraternity with the world, yes, but with my brothers as well. What were their names? How many were we? Two, three…? The great ocean transforms my decapitated head into a seashell and repeats ancient stories to me that the sea alone preserves and the waves murmur… Two brothers… Their faces return, their bodies return, their names return in each beat of the benevolent, brutal surf that impels forward and drives back the entire movement of the universe…

An insane idea crosses my mind. Castor and Pollux. My brother Jericó and I enjoyed immortality only on alternate days. I feel terror. Can I keep immortality more than one day and consequently deny it to my brother? Can he do the same and leave me abandoned forever, adrift without one more day of life? I express this horrible thought looking at a mad rush of horses galloping over the waves shouting for water, water, though water surrounds them, you will not drink this water, you will gallop rapidly the length of this water, you will cut through the sea and protect the sailor with the fire of your memory setting the top of the mast ablaze, we, you and your brother, will give each other the emotion of life, love, combat, power, glory, the abduction of women, we will grasp the mast of fire and the steeds of the sea will drag us to a destiny I can see on the same beach I came to, already being there…