Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

I didn’t see much more, as I say, because as soon as we were undressed, the woman disappeared amid Jericó’s kisses and my timid caresses, the two of us naked without any previous order or decision, naturally stripped of everything except our skin, avid to kiss the woman, touch her, in the end possess her.

And never speak to her. The veil that covered her mouth also sealed it. She did not allow a sigh, a moan, a reply to escape. She was the object-woman, something volunteered, made for the pleasure-that first night-only of Jericó and Josué, Castor and Pollux, here and now again the children of Leda, whore to the swan, born in this instant of the same egg, the Dioscuri in the act of being born, crushing the flowers and grass, shattering the eggs of the swan so that from her would be born love and conflict, power and intelligence, the tremor in the thighs, the fire on the roofs, the blood in the air.

We followed each other in love.

Only later did I try to reconstruct in memory what existed outside my body, as if in the act itself any impression other than pleasure would extinguish it. The woman behind the veil was inanimate though endowed with a labored indolence. She adopted mechanical poses that left the initiative to the two of us. Even so, my love was abrupt, spasmodic, obliging me to imagine Elvira’s lack of haste.

“Can you say something to her that will make her tremble?” Jericó whispered in my ear, he and I facing each other with the woman between us, the two friends head to head, panting, trying in vain to smile, naked in our carnal blindness, our hands resting on the woman’s waist, fingers touching, I looking out of the corner of my eye at the bee tattooed on one of the whore’s buttocks, our mouths joined by respiration that was shared, yearning, suspicious, shy, ardent.

“Can you imagine all the men who’ve had her? Doesn’t it excite you to know the road of her body has been traveled by thousands of cocks? Does it bother you, interest you, repel you? Only you and I become emotional? Are we going to find our pleasure separately or at the same time?”

I would like to believe, at a distance, that those nights at La Hetara on Calle Durango sealed forever the fraternal complicity (that had already existed since school, since our readings, since our conversations with Filopáter) between Jericó and me.

Still, there was something else. Not only the postcoital sadness I didn’t feel with Elvira and did now, but an ugliness, a vulgarity that Jericó himself took care to point out to me.

“Do you want to believe?” He coughed with a caricatured, pompous cough while the woman lay facedown in the bed. “Do you want to believe that sex is like a great baroque poem whose exterior is the insidious ornamentation on limpid profundity?”

He made a disagreeable face so I would laugh.

“Then take a look at Hetara at dawn, without the night’s makeup. What will you see? What will it taste of? A roll dipped in perfume. And what will you find if you tear off the veil? A revolting face.”

He indicated the woman’s backside. She had a queen bee tattooed on her left buttock. He didn’t know I had seen it, which is why he pointed it out to me.

“Everything’s varnish, my dear Josué. Lose your illusions and say an affectionate goodbye to the veiled woman.”

Only later did I remember that when I made love to her I closed my eyes, knowing that he, Jericó my friend, made love with his eyes open and came without making noise. Even though he came. She did not.

“Like clockwork.”

WHEN WE GRADUATED from prep school, we would matriculate in the Faculty of Law. We took that for granted.

Our earlier philosophical meanderings-the reading of Saint Augustine and Nietzsche, the discussions with Father Filopáter, the magnet of Spinoza-convinced us that the framework of ideas was like the skeleton in a body that now required the flesh of experience. And without having read Spinoza, experience could be had by a bus driver or a cook. We-Jericó and I-ran the risk of believing that ideas were enough in themselves: splendid, eloquent, astral, and sterile. To give reality to our thoughts, we decided to study law as the option closest to our shared intellectual vocation.

Because we could share a woman or an apartment. This was almost child’s play compared to the brotherhood of thoughts-Castor and Pollux, children of the swan, the Dioscuri born of the same ovary, causing flowers and grasses to burst forth in the world, attending the birth of love and conflict, power and intelligence. Because they were so united, they decided our next step: to be lawyers in order to give reality to our ideas.

I was certain about our shared purpose. Still, I noticed in my friend, during the months of vacation between our leaving prep and matriculating at the university, a growing disquiet manifested in isolated phrases when we ate, showered, walked through the neighborhood, went into one of the increasingly rare bookstores in the city, and invaded (or allowed ourselves to invade) spaces devoted to popular music, videos, and gadgetry. There was no lack of street life on the way to our old prep school. Vast, swarming, moving like an undisciplined army of ants, the street gave an accounting of increasingly greater differences of class. There was an abyss between the motorized world and the world on foot or even between those in cars and those on a bus. The Mexican contrast, far from ebbing, increased, as if the country’s “progress” were an optical illusion, calculated on the number of inhabitants but not the sum total of their welfare.

The working-class city increased its numbers. The privileged city isolated itself like a pearl in the urban oyster (cloister). Jericó and I went to a cineclub and saw Fritz Lang’s Metropolis , with its two rigidly separated universes. Above, a great penthouse of games and gardens. Below, an enormous underground cave of mechanized workers. Superficially gray, at bottom black. Or rather, without light.

In our city, the young who were neither poor nor rich rubbed elbows with the wealthy in discotheques and wandered solitary and joyless through the commercial centers, the large groupings of stores, movie houses, and cafés under the common roof of provisional protection. Outside, an option was waiting for the young in stylish clothes: Move up, move down, or stay where you are forever.

For all these reasons, Jericó and the one who is narrating this story to you, gentle survivors, felt privileged. I had lived in protected comfort in the house on Berlín. Now, I shared the apartment on Praga with my friend. I hadn’t known the source of Jericó’s income. Now I had a suspicion that I didn’t have the courage to share with him. On the fifteenth of every month an envelope appeared in the mailbox with a check made out to me. I confess I cashed it in secret and didn’t tell Jericó. But I imagined that periodically he received similar assistance and even went so far as to think, with no proof at all, that the source of our controlled income might be the same. The truth is that the amount I had at my disposal was enough for my immediate needs and nothing more.

Since my friend and I led twin lives, I supposed his income was not very different from mine. What we did share was the mystery.

I was saying that during the months of vacation, Jericó began to let slip phrases without precedent or consequence. They seemed directed at me, though at times I considered them mere expressions in viva voce of my friend’s thoughts and concerns.

In the shower: “What do we fear, Josué?”

At breakfast: “Never leave yourself open to an ambush.”

Having lunch at three o’clock: “Don’t let anyone impose opinions on you. Be independent.”

Walking together through the neighborhood: “Don’t feel superior or inferior to anybody. Feel equal.”