Carlos Fuentes: Destiny and Desire

The self-assurance of my defender was transformed into authority over a herd that counted its own strength in numbers and not in courage. The professorial whistle for order finally sounded that afternoon, which otherwise was stormy because the morning sun was leaving to bathe in cataracts of punctual twilight rain.

“It’s the rainy season,” said my smiling defender, resting his hand on my shoulder.

I thanked him. He said he could not stand cowards who fight only in a gang. He became distracted and offered his hand to the bald kid to help him up.

“Don’t be late for class, asshole,” he said.

The bald kid wiped the blood from his nose, turned his back on us, and ran away.

Together my new friend and I walked the length of the large yard, a space surrounded by two floors of classrooms and auditoriums, with a frontón court at the end.

“If they were a little more educated, they’d have called you Cyrano.”

“They’re sons of bitches. Don’t give them any ideas. They’d call me Sir Anus.”

“And if you were lame, Nureyev.”

My savior stopped and looked at me astutely.

“You don’t have a big nose. It’s only a long nose. Don’t let that bunch of bums get to you. What’s your name?”

“Josué.”

I was going to add the standard “at your service” that dates from colonial Mexican courtesy, when my protector threw back his head and began to laugh.

That’s how I always want to remember him, the way he was at that moment. My height, but the reverse side of my coin. A face tending to plumpness, with the cheeks of an infant not yet weaned. Yes, the mouth of a nursing baby, and eyes so tender and bright they almost demanded a pacifier. His body, on the other hand, was vigorous, his walk decisive, perhaps too sure of his strong step and firm forward motion, while my movements tended to slip away from me, subtle and even a little hesitant, as if they weren’t sure if at my feet they would find earth or the void, solid ground or swamp, light or mud…

It was the first thing I noticed. My uncertain, short steps. The martial, even imperious walk of my friend.

I realized he hadn’t told me his name. I introduced myself again.

“Josué,” I said, still walking.

He stopped like a mock statue. I looked at him with some surprise.

“Josué. Josué,” I repeated, somewhat uncomfortable. “Josué Nadal.”

My friend convulsed. Laughter seized him, doubled him over, eventually it obliged him to raise his head, look at the increasingly cloudy sky, then look at my astonished face, laugh even more when he saw me, and provoke in me a certain feeling of annoyance at not being in on the joke, a pleasantry that was somewhat unpleasant for me.

“And you?” I managed to say to him, hiding my irritation.

“Je… Je…” he in turn managed to say between outbursts of laughter.

I was becoming angry: “Listen, I don’t find the joke…”

He took me by the shoulder: “It’s not laughter, compadre… It’s surprise…”

“Then stop laughing.”

“Jericó. My name is Jericó,” he said, suddenly serious.

“Jericó what?” I insisted.

“Just Jericó. No last name,” said my new friend with an abrupt, definitive air, as if in the act of opening a book the entire text had disappeared, leaving only the first name of the author but not his last.

“Jericó… We’ll get along like clockwork.”

THE RIVER OVERFLOWS its banks at harvest time. Now it is dry and the tribes can cross over. But first spies must be sent out to reconnoiter the area. Joshua crosses the Jordan disguised as a merchant and hides in a brothel in the city. The harlot lives there with her family. She is a simple woman and a generous one. With her body, her affection, her protection. She is accustomed to hiding fugitives, antagonistic husbands, drunkards who need time to recuperate. Impotent men who linger and wish to demonstrate the virility recovered with the affection and patience only a whore can offer because it is her vocation and not merely her profession. Does the harlot know that Joshua and his men are members of a wandering tribe halted on the banks of the Jordan, searching for the promised land? The whore, whose name is Hetara, does not believe there are promised lands or lost paradises. She knows about the madness of Israel and its prophets. They all want to leave the land that offers them hospitality and move on to the next nation of promise. But when they reach it, they immediately begin to dream of the next promised land and so on and so forth until they become exhausted in the desert and die of thirst and hunger. The great whore of Jericho does not want her city to be the final port of the tribes of Israel. Not because she despises them. On the contrary, she loves them because she loves the wandering vocation of Israel and does not want them to stay here only so they can go forward in fulfilling their interminable destiny.

Because she knows these things, the brothel’s clients consult her and she recounts fables. Some she has dreamed. Others she has remembered. But most of them she improvises in the heat of the visitors she receives. She is a sorceress, say her intimates who, like abandoned dogs, seek shelter in her sensual charity; she amazes whoever speaks to her and tells the fortune of her clients only on the basis of who those clients are. She is a realist. She would never give a man a destiny not already found in that man’s future. Because all she needs is a hint of each client’s past to imagine his future with certainty. She is not a cruel woman. She is prudent. When the future appears happy, she decreases the joy because she knows that any change in a life can unexpectedly darken it. When, on the contrary, the future is unhappy, she interjects a small dose of optimism, slips in a joke, shrugs her shoulders, and passes from prognostication to prostitution: her flesh, her mouth, her legs, these are the future…

Joshua came to Jericho with a pure intention: to explore the city and then take it in order to continue the reconquest of the land of Israel begun by Moses, whom Joshua served as a son and to whom he promised, at the hour of his death, to continue the tenacious path from the plains of Moab to the mountains of Nero to the summit of Pisgah. To conquer all the visible land from Gilead to Dan, the lands of Efrain and Manassas and the land of Judea to the sea. But first the city in view had to be vanquished, the first city, the city of palm trees: Jericho. Which is why Joshua was there, his purpose to reconnoiter the land and conquer it the next day. He felt protected in the generous brothel, with its pungent odors of sweat and excrescence, spilled wine, fried food, burned animal hair, smoke from slow fires, red roofs. He recalled, however, the admonition of Moses, his protector and guide, against the pleasures of sex and the orgiastic cult of Balaam. But the caresses of the great whore of the desert told him that thanks to her, her disloyalty, her protection, the city of Jericho would fall and the Jewish people could continue to follow their path of strength with justice and justice with strength. Joshua asked the prostitute what was at play that night, love or war. And she said that in each coupling in the world life and death were at play, pure, gratuitous pleasure alongside the obligation to give birth to the product of the coupling, the temporary suspension of obligation in the name of pleasure and its fatal resumption when the erotic couple separates and the world’s law is imposed. And beyond that? asked an eager Joshua, already captured between the legs of Hetara, which is what he decided to call her, in the fire of his pleasure and with the understanding that here, in the bed of this woman, he was preparing as much for victory as for defeat.

Would he attribute one or the other to this hour of pleasure? Would the victim forgive him his fleeting lust? Would it cost him dearly at the hour of defeat? Joshua hurried the act and Hetara felt authorized, sitting with her legs crossed on the straw pallet, to tell him, Joshua, you will win the battle but will not exhaust your fate. Your people will debate forever either remaining in one place or the promise of the next place to conquer, a place better than the previous one. And on and on forever. The exodus will be endless. And new. In their successive exiles, your descendants will enrich the land they walk on. They will be doctors and heal. They will be artists and create. They will be lawyers and defend. They will be successful and envied. They will be envied and persecuted. They will be persecuted and suffer the worst tortures. The great weeping of your people in which, for one tragic, happy moment, all the men, women, and children in the world will recognize themselves. All this I see, Joshua. I also see your people immobile, certain they have found a country and have no obligation to move on. That will be a deception. Israel is condemned to migrate, move, occupy lands in the same way you, tomorrow, will occupy mine. Our bodies have joined just as tomorrow my land and yours will be joined.