Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

A pelican totters near the coast.

Its voice reaches me.

“The worm is an error,” it says.

And these words are enough to return me to the site where I find myself and the terrible loss of life, the endless holocaust of the inexplicable death of us all, of human beings… And then not alternative immorality, or the horses of the sea, or the mast of fire, or the fear of killing or being killed when I am no longer immortal, none of that is present, only this lying here, a head cut off by a machete, and the thing that is not here, a lost body, a trunk of hollow cavities divided by the diaphragm, the mortal depository of the heart, lungs, pleura, antechamber of the stomach, liver, bladder, intestines, kidneys, what’s left?

Aaaaah! I am satisfied. I am master of my head, no matter how decapitated it may be. Splenius, trapezius, trachea. The hyoid bone continues to hold up my tongue. My face has a mouth. My skull contains the encephalon. My brain, my brain lying here still has a cortex of gray matter that escapes through my nostrils, no longer encloses the white matter that comes out through my eyes. What happened to the cerebellum that controlled the movement of what I have lost: my body? What posture, no balance at all?

To breathe. Circulate. Sleep. What sorrow to have lost everything. What an illusion to believe new areas of my head can be lost only to give active life to the older ones… Skin. Orifices. Head. Trunk. Extremities. They were me. At first I saw myself in my bathroom mirror. I am twenty-seven years old. I caress my cheeks. I shave my chin and upper lip. I remember I must rescue my appearance before it is too late. I close my eyes. I imagine my face. An Indian thatch of black hair. Dark eyes sunk into the sockets of an almost transparent facial skeleton. Invisible eyebrows. A pleasant mouth. Thin. Smiling. Ears neither large nor small. A skinny face. Skin stuck to the bone. Hair sprouting like nocturnal thickets that grow at the bottom of the sea with the small amount of light that penetrates to the depths.

The great Sargasso of anticipated death.

The sea that ascends in brief surges, obliging me to swallow before it reaches the orifices of my large nose, big-nose, beak, snout, schnozz…

THEN THE IMMENSE black seaweed emerged at the same time from the sea and the sky and the miracle occurred: In the air, my unattached head and body reunited and the voice I already knew and recognized told me heaven is opening, the time of exile is over, the tempestuous winds carry us away, do you remember me? I am Ezekiel, the prophet who joins the wings of the world and saves man from the fire and the waves, returning you, Josué, to the air that belongs to you and where you will have new companions: What a mistake, what a huge mistake to believe souls go to heaven or to hell, to new cloisters of cloud or flame! Souls do not fit into heaven or hell, which are enclosed spaces. Souls inhabit infinite space. Listen to the sound of my wings, listen to the voices of all that has existed. I will speak to you but you will see, Josué. You will see hard faces and unyielding hearts. You will see your rebel house. Your father. Your brothers. The whore of Babylon. They do not know there is a prophetess who watches them and protects you. They are seated on scorpions. They eat paper and believe it is ambrosia. They do not listen to you because they do not want to. Speak to them even though they do not listen to you. You are the great rumor, you are the great warning. The city is dying, you warn them, Josué, on the wings of the prophet Ezekiel who I am, the city will place obstacles before you, the city will be on guard because the spirit has entered you and therefore you disobeyed, you did not submit to the house of order, ambition, promotion, advantage, compromise, Josué, you did not lock yourself in your house, you did not cleave your tongue to your palate, you fasted, you saw the sanctuary defiled by plague and war, ruin and ignominy, crime, the desolation of the temples, the living corpses prostrate before idols, look, Josué, look from the air at the dolorous city, malodorous city, do you believe you have abandoned it forever? Do you believe you have left your house without finishing its construction? Ah, Josué, only death allows us to see the future; if we lived forever we would be the future and not know, if we continued on earth we would continue to believe in our individuality and not see the truth that accompanies us: the truth is another person, perhaps other persons, but undoubtedly there is one person, delegated by Providence, designated by the gods, made by Nature, the person who watches over you, not like an angel but like a good demon, the presence that accompanies you, the little devil you saw and did not see, knew and did not know, embraced and abandoned, the woman who gave herself completely to you, tested and proved you as a man and left you when it was necessary for you to draw near alone, as we all draw near, above all prophets like me, to the angels, to our destiny… She left. She lied to you so you would not miss her. She always guessed your necessity, Josué, your reason for waging war in the lands of Judea from the mountains of Nero and Pisgah to the edge of the sea, your personal war, Josué, the war of your unrepeatable but not solitary individuality, you have had a companion, Josué, the close assistance of the only person you really loved and who really loved you, with surrender, with rebelliousness, perhaps with vexation, always with passion and it was this, the passion that is a passage through life, suffering, enduring reversals, suffering disease, moving the soul to pleasure and to pain, desiring, becoming passionate, who was the demon of your passion?

Lost in the daily passage of life, perhaps you did not realize, Josué, that someone met you and from then on accompanied you, even in absence, invisible but always present: your woman-demon, your personal she-devil… Because when you lived, violence and habit, habit interrupted by violence, or vice versa, Josué, prevented you from distinguishing, until very late, until the final hour of your life, between the good and evil demon. Your ruthless guardian María Egipciaca, your fleeting nurse Elvira Ríos. Your contradictory, wise, and accommodating teacher Antonio Sanginés. Your dark brother Miguel Aparecido, imprisoned by himself and in himself. Your other brother Jericó, whom you loved so well, hated so well, and who in the midst of it all served you so well in measuring the infinite degrees of a man between love and hate. Your unknown mother Sibila Sarmiento to whom you can dedicate only the requiem of pity. Your distant father Max Monroy, so impenetrable because he is his own political party, the only party, so sure of never losing, turning lies into truth and truth into lies in order to move from there and affirm the power of the old, fearful the young threaten them, turning upside down the proven origin of all the things they created: This is what Max feared, he did not put you and your brother to the test to see if you waged war counting on all the comforts except that of knowing who you were, not because he wanted to avoid the brutal, inhuman destiny he imposed on Miguel Aparecido, no, but because of his fear of you if he set you free without the ties that eventually, with crumbling sophistry, he imposed on you: I will give you everything to live except what threatens me. Asunta knew this, you know? She knew the old man was afraid of you and perhaps, if she annihilated the two of you so you would not inherit, Max would understand it as another act of her loyalty: not so you would not inherit, only so you would not present yourselves as what you were and Jericó once was: the sons of Monroy whom Monroy did not put in prison, because in Miguel Aparecido’s destiny you and your brother Jericó must see not what did not happen to you but what could happen: fathers and sons devour one another, the rebel house will sit on scorpions, desolate hearths will be extinguished, corpses will bow before idols, and houses will be beacon lights…