Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

“Stay. Don’t leave me.”

How could I abandon her, I who longed to be responsible for someone since I couldn’t be responsible for unknown relatives (who had been, in my opinion, humiliatingly, generously, shamefully responsible for me), or occasional though respected teachers (Filopáter, Sanginés), or transitory friends (Errol Esparza), or healers who were both generous and aloof (Elvira Ríos), much less jailers as odious as María Egipciaca? What remained? Jericó’s friendship, firm and constant since the days of secondary school. But Jericó wasn’t here.

And now this fragile woman, inert in bed one day and the next as vibrant as an unattached electrical cable. At first in the little house in Colonia de los Doctores (symbol of a lost city, generous and ordered in the name of medical science, with one-story buildings and discreet façades, and an occasional gray residence built of stone) Lucha Zapata lived with me regaining her strength. I was afraid that when she recovered her stamina she would undertake adventures like the battle in the airport, for which I did not feel qualified. But for the moment, delicate and sweet, sometimes shaping unassuming movements, lying on the mat with a blue pillow under her head, Lucha Zapata told me, recalling our encounter, that if she went to the airport, exposing herself to danger, it was because aviation teaches us to be fatalistic, which gives me a reason for living in spite of the fatality all around us.

I talked to her, sharing the gourd of yerba maté Lucha always had in her hand and expounding on the openings or bases she constantly supplied, ideas about the fated as opposed to the voluntary, the free, and the virtuous, a distinction that pleased her a great deal, and she would ask me to explain: What I want can be good or bad, I told her, but it expresses my will. Does that mean that whether it’s good or evil, what I do is free? How do I make my freedom not only free but virtuous? Freedom for evil? Or is evil not free precisely because it is evil?

“Don’t get all excited,” Lucha said with a laugh. “Whatever you do, things are going to happen with or without you.”

“And so?”

“Don’t get all excited. Let life happen, Savior.”

That’s how she spoke to me, with affection and a dose of simplification that could not demolish my theoretical constructions but solidified them even more. I mean to say, reader, that Lucha’s “common sense” was necessary for my “theoretical sense” and both of them joined, perhaps, in an “esthetic sense” that was nothing other than the art of living: how one lives, why, and to what end. Big questions. Small realities. She, with a certain mystery, confronted my abstractions and I, with fewer shadows, confronted her mysteries.

Because I had no doubt that in Lucha Zapata was a mystery she did not guard zealously. She did not guard it: she canceled it. It was not possible to penetrate, in conversation with Lucha, the veil of a past revealed, perhaps, in the scars on her graceful, long-suffering body, but never in reminiscence. Lucha did not refer to her past. And I asked myself whether this wasn’t the most eloquent way to unveil it. I mean: Because of everything she did not say, I could imagine whatever I wanted and create a biography of Lucha Zapata for my own use. A piece of foolishness that, in view of the silent curtains of her nakedness, revealed her to my complete pleasure.

I believe she guessed my strategy because in the afternoons, seeing me deep in thought, she would say: “With women you never know.”

You never know… I was young and understood that youth consists of choosing what was at hand or deferring it in favor of the future. This reflection made no sense for Lucha for the simple reason that when she erased the past from her life she also eliminated the future and installed herself, as if on her mat, in an eternal present. I knew this was how she lived now: letting herself be carried along by the minute hand of life, by everything occurring in the present moment, though with references to the immediate past (the incident on the airfield, her relationship with me, so important she gave me the undeserved and somewhat absurd name of “Savior,” “Salvador”), and timid incursions into the future (“What do you want to eat, my Savior?”).

When we were lying on the mat at dawn, I liked to ask her half-captious questions to see if I could make her fall into remembering or looking ahead. What other airports have you assaulted, Lucha? Toluca, Querétaro, Guanajuato, Aguascalientes? The airport of the sun, Savior, she would reply. Didn’t you ever have a job, Lucha? I’m at leisure. I don’t need to work. Don’t you feel somehow excluded from society? I can invade society before society invades me. Do you feel an internal conflict, Lucha? I have a quarrel with the world. What do you reproach society for? I don’t want to be a perpetual debtor. That’s what you are in society. An eternal debtor.

My affection for Lucha Zapata, which by this time should be evident to the least clever reader, did not make me blind. She did everything I didn’t like. She was, let us say, a poly-drug user. Tobacco, heroin, cocaine, alcohol. When I met her she had well-stocked hiding places, so it wasn’t necessary to go out to buy anything. How had she obtained this treasure? The nugatory pact regarding the past kept me from asking what she wasn’t going to tell me. On the other hand, I came to appreciate deeply her domestic simplicity, her physical helplessness, and the mystery of her spiritual complexity.

In this way two years passed…

Once upon a time a man went down to hell and was received by a blond hostess wearing a miniskirt and a little blue cap with the English phrase WELCOME TO HELL. The hostess led the new arrival to a luxury suite with a king-size bed, marble bath, Jacuzzi, and a summer wardrobe for night and day, with labels from Madison Avenue, Calle Serrano, and Via Condotti, and sumptuous patent leather shoes, sandals, and moccasins. From there, the new arrival was led to a recreation area with an open bar and five-star restaurants along a tropical beach planted with palm trees, overflowing with stands of coconut palms and towel service.

“I was expecting something else,” said the new arrival.

The hostess smiled and led him to a spot hidden in the luxuriant growth where there was a heavy iron door that the girl lifted up, allowing to escape a terrible sudden burst of flame and the vision of a lake of fire where thousands of naked creatures writhed as they were tortured by red devils with sharp-pointed tails who taunted the damned, piercing them with pitchforks and reminding them that this prison was eternal with no possible remission: the lake, the darkness, the site of “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 25:30), the place of “the fire that never shall be quenched” (Mark 9:43). Whoever enters here does not leave, despite heretical theories of a final redemption of souls thanks to God’s universal mercy. For if God is infinite love, eventually He has to pardon Lucifer and free the souls condemned to hell. Anathema, let it be anathema. To the devil with anyone who believes in God’s mercy.

This is the hell for Catholics, said the hostess, closing the metal door.

It isn’t true.

I, who am dead, attest to that.

What happens, then? You, readers caught in the web of my novelistic intrigue, will have to wait for the last page to find out. I, Josué, who live in another dimension, can continue the interrupted story and ask for the help of one of my new friends, Ezekiel, whom I found playing with a Spanish deck of cards in a place whose name I have forgotten and that is clearly not of this world. I asked him to move from solitaire to tute , he agreed, he lost, and as payment I requested (since dollars, euros, and pounds are not in circulation there) that he lend me a pair of wings so I could fly over the world and in this way go on with my suspended tale.