Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

Ezekiel, who’s a real pal (a good guy, but draped in togas, that is, sheets with Grecian borders like the ones James Purefoy wears on the television series Rome ), asked to go with me because, he said, his territory had been ancient Jerusalem and he had never crossed the borders of Moab, Philistia, Tivia, and Sidon, all enemies of Israel, and the deserts that lead to Riblah, a city Yahweh promised to exterminate in order to demonstrate who was top dog in the Old Testament (in the New, Jesus Christ is the superstar).

Of course he wanted to see Mexico City, a place the most ancient chronicles don’t mention, even though in questions of legends all of them end up resembling one another: Cities are founded, expand, grow, reach their high point, and fall into decadence because they were not faithful to the promise of their creation, because they wear themselves out in battles lost before they’re started, because the horse was not shod in time, because the queen bee died and the caste of drones perished with her… Because the fly flew away.

Yes, I told my new friend the prophet Ezekiel, I’ll take you to a city that goes out of its way to destroy itself but cannot succeed. It changes a great deal but never dies. Its foundation is peculiar: a lagoon (which has dried out), a rock (which was turned into a residential neighborhood), a nopal cactus (which is used to prepare lamb’s quarters and stuffed chiles), an eagle (a species on the verge of extinction), and a serpent (the only thing that survives).

I shouldn’t have said that. Ezekiel exclaimed that the serpent was the protagonist of paradise, the star of Eden, the most historic reptile in history, there are two thousand seven hundred species of serpents gathered, to simplify matters, into ten family groups, they crawl but listen, Josué, are you listening to me? the serpent is an animal that hears, it has auricular openings, eardrums, tympani, cochleae that sing and pick up the vibration of the earth: They know when there will be an earthquake, they count the shovels of earth at burials, they endure being covered over with asphalt superhighways, they survive everything and wait for us blinking, with eyes of glass. They don’t taste with their tongues, those fuckers: They detect odors, serpents have a sense of smell, Josué, in their tongues, they swallow everything because they can extend their lower jaw and catch an eagle, yes, take revenge on the flying animal that has the criminal astuteness of the animal that crawls on the ground.

Ezekiel looked at me half amused and half amazed.

“They have a double penis. Hermipenes, they’re called.”

I didn’t laugh. He became impatient.

“What am I good for?”

“For flying, Prophet.”

I showed him-like this, with my hand raised and the cards fanned out-my winning hand: angel poker, four angels, four faces, four wings, faces of a man, a lion, a bull, an eagle, and the four wings with their four faces joined together as in a nervous fan ready to escape my hands, taking flight with Ezekiel clutching my heels, discovering that the marvelous wings of the cards not only had faces but men’s hands to open the sky (which is a constellation of eyes, in case you didn’t know) and let us be carried by a tempestuous wind until we flew over a valley smothered in mists of burnt-out gas, surrounded by eroded mountains. A place difficult to distinguish though I knew it all too well. A noisy receptacle of fiery arrows calling from the glowering sky we pierced with our wings. Ezekiel and I, the prophet growing more and more animated, in his element, a lame biblical demon capable, I guessed, of raising the roofs of rotting tiles in Mexico Federal District Titlán de Tenoch Palaces city of the besieged City Das Kapital of the Commonwealth, Res Publica, public bull, Confined Bull, listening to the thundering voice of the not very optimistic prophet Ezekiel, move away from the appearance of your city,

(Praga between Reforma and Hamburgo).

Carried away by his prophetic passion (professional and innate in him), Ezekiel exclaimed they are rebel houses, founded on scorpions, they are thrones of dust, they will set obstacles before you, be on guard, endure the fault of the city, do not anticipate ruin and ignominy, rather live and let live but one day let them know the abominations of their parents, the names of the mobs, take out your roll of paper and write, Josué…

Ezekiel seized me by the back of my neck and then dropped me into the void.

I fell on my face.

I heard his voice: Lock yourself in your house.

I thought: I’m going to disobey you, Prophet.

I couldn’t because my tongue cleaved to the roof of my mouth.

Then I heard the sound of wings, the great noise that moved away behind me, and though I was prostrate, I felt something that called itself spirit enter me as Ezekiel returned to heaven where prophets write, like novelists, the history of what could have been.

I had paper in my mouth. And I did not remember the face of the prophet.

I HAD PAPER and I had earth. I fell flat on my face where Ezekiel threw me: a gravestone. Blood ran from my lips onto the grave and washed off the writing. If the prophet commanded me “Write,” present circumstances now told me “Read.”

It took me some time to understand. The night was a dark fire like the aforementioned hell of the Catholics, though the light that fell where I lay foretold the coming dawn and the imminent sun urged me to be, for a few minutes, the thief of the night that the great poem of the world, written by the living for the dead but also by the dead for the living, confuses with sleep.

Look at me, readers, read with me as the dawn with its long-nailed fingers tears away the nocturnal veil and the wind of the plateau carries away the dust that covers the grave where I lie, facedown, scratching to read with difficulty the inscription that says, finally,

ANTIGUA CONCEPCIÓN

and under that, in smaller letters

Born and Died with No Date

The mystery of this stone was enough in itself. If that was the instruction of the dead woman, I immediately disputed it. The dry announcement on the grave of the so-called Antigua Concepción (was “Ancient Conception” a name, a title, an attribute, a promise, a memory?) woke in my spirit, agitated by the adventure with Ezekiel, a continuity of mystery. The prophet had placed the seed there… the “Antigua Concepción” made a tree grow in my chest. Who was it?