Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

“That’s the way it is,” Sanginés repeated and left without saying goodbye.

I asked myself if I could live with so many unanswered questions. I saw myself lost in the big old house, left to my own devices and the question Sanginés had posed: What were my needs?

As soon as the lawyer had left, the usual maid came in and, without saying a word, began her work. I believe it was this resumption of custom in the midst of an unaccustomed situation that disconcerted me more than anything else. The attempt to mollify me by assuring me everything would be the same did not resolve the mysteries I found troubling. Who was María Egipciaca? Where was she? Had she died? Had she been dismissed? Would I see Nurse Elvira again? Who was I? Who was supporting me? Who was the owner of the house I lived in? How did those proverbs end?

“… does dawn come earlier.”

“… wakes up crazed.”

“… the old woman’s in the cave.”

“… lets in no flies.”

“… shuffling the deck.”

Jericó completed the proverbs María Egipciaca had left dangling and gave me an order:

“Come live in my apartment.”

“But the lawyer-”

“Pay no attention to him. I’ll arrange it.”

“And if you can’t?”

“That can’t happen. You have to learn to rebel.”

“And be left without-”

“You won’t lack for anything. You’ll see.”

“You’re pretty rash, Jericó.”

“Sometimes you have to take a risk and ask yourself: Who needs whom? Do they need me or do I need them?”

“Us?”

He looked with contemptuous eyes at the empty rooms in the house on Berlín.

“You’ll go crazy here. It’ll be like clockwork.”

JERICÓ LIVED ON the top floor of a crumbling building on Calle de Praga. The green tide of the Paseo de la Reforma could be heard in perpetual conflict with the gray traffic of Avenida Chapultepec. In any event, living on the seventh floor of an apartment building with no elevator had something about it that isolated us from the city, and since on the other floors there were only offices, after seven in the evening the building was ours, as if to compensate for the cramped arrangement of a living room integrated with the kitchen-stove, refrigerator, pantry-separated only by the high counter we used as a table, integrated in turn by two high stools that resembled the racks where they placed heretics, to the derision of the people, and the punished, to the mockery of their masters.

What else? Two bedrooms-one smaller than the other-and a bathroom. Jericó offered me the larger room. I refused to displace him. He suggested changing beds every seven days. I accepted, not understanding the reasoning behind the offer.

We also shared the closet, though I brought from Berlín to Praga (from Döblin to Kafka, one might say) more clothing than the very few items my friend had.

And we shared women. I should say, a single woman in a single house on Calle de Durango, the brothel of La Hetara, a name of ancient lineage, according to my friend, for at the dawn of Mexican time two women fought for control of whoredom in the city: La Bandida, a famous madam celebrated in boleros and corridos and, much more discreet, La Hetara, to whose house Jericó took me one night.

“You’re like a lamb going to slaughter, and I know why. You fell in love with the nurse Elvira Ríos. You didn’t realize that the nurse, the doctor, the entire house on Berlín, and of course your jailer Doña María Egipciaca were all passing illusions, phantoms of your childhood and early youth, destined to disappear as soon as you reached the ‘age of reason.’ ”

“How do you know that?” I asked without too much surprise, since to me the speed of my friend’s associations and conundrums was already proverbial.

“Aaaah. The fact is your case is mine… I believe…”

With growing perplexity I asked him to explain. I had grown up in a mansion in the care of a strict tyrant and he, apparently, had been freer than the wind, giving the impression-underscored by his apartment, his vital ease in speaking, living, going to see whores, walking between the Zona Rosa and Colonia Roma as if there were no (were there any?) urban frontiers-that he had appeared in the world totally prepared, with no need for family, antecedents… or a last name.

All the entrance bells at the building on Praga had the names of individuals, companies, legal offices. The top floor said only PH-Penthouse. Ever since school, and above all after the incident with the young administrator whom I asked about Jericó’s last name, I did not have the courage to investigate any further. It cost the administrator his job. After my question we didn’t see him again, not even hidden behind his officious little window. I deduced that just as the school secretary had vanished, I could disappear too if I inquired about the last name and therefore the origins of my straightforward though mysterious friend Jericó.

And yet, here we were together in the garret (penthouse) on Calle de Praga between Reforma and Chapultepec, sharing roof, bathroom, meals, readings, and, finally, women. Or rather, woman. Just one.

Jericó pushed aside the beaded curtain and moved easily among the twenty or so girls gathered in the parlor of La Hetara. He told me-noticing my glances-to close my eyes. Why? Because we were going directly to the room where our friend was waiting for us. Friend? Our? Our whore, Josué. Our? Mine is yours. I forbid you to choose. I already chose for you, he went on, opening the door of a bedroom that had a thick, mixed aroma (perfume, sweat, starch) slathered on the walls, which no one and nothing, except the collapse of the house, could eliminate.

It was a room overloaded with heavy curtains on the walls, an effort at the kind of Oriental luxury I would later appreciate in the paintings of Delacroix crowded with silks, draperies, carpets, incense burners, fans, odalisques, and eunuchs… except in this room everything was sensually olfactory and barely visible, so great was the pileup of pillows, carpets, poufs, mirrors with no reflection, and the smell of cat piss and fast food, as if, when the act was over, the prostitute’s solitude was compensated for only by an appetite contrary to the insatiable hunger that is the rule for the modern woman, molded by models who look like broomsticks and lead the daughters of Eve to bounce back and forth between bulimia and anorexia.

What awaited us? Was she fat or thin? Because in the darkness of the room, which was not even half-lit, it was difficult to find the dependable object of Jericó’s desire transformed, with fraternal tyranny, into my own.

I allowed myself to be led. I recognized my position as student with barely one flower in my buttonhole, the deflowered and lamented Elvira, while Jericó strolled through this brothel like a sheikh in his harem with an unpleasant self-assurance that owed a good deal to his nineteen years. He was the sultan, the qaid , the chief, the top dog. Would his age humble him or exalt him even more on this, my first night as an eighteen-year-old adolescent in a whorehouse?

With a dramatic gesture, Jericó took a heavy silk bedspread and pulled it aside, revealing the woman protecting herself beneath and behind this large scenic device.

How much was revealed to me? Very little. The woman was still covered from the waist down, only her bare back gleamed, in the dusky light, like a forgotten moon, and her face was covered by a veil that concealed her from nose to shoulder. The only things visible were the eyes of a winged beast, black, large, cruel, mindless, and indifferent, as mysterious as the hidden half of her face, almost as if from the nose down this woman had an appearance that denied the great unknown of her gaze with a vulgarity, simplicity, or stupidity unworthy of her enigmatic eyes.