Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

He dropped the check and embraced me, I don’t know if with emotion but certainly with force. We were embracing our shared past. As well as the future that always united us, though time and distance might separate us. Paris, London, Florence, Rome, Naples, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, the postcards allowed me to follow the route of his travels, though his permanent residence was the Rue Poissonnière in the Deuxième Arrondissement in Paris.

Could he be carrying all those cities, all those addresses, in his young twenty-five-year-old gaze?

He was slimmer. The permanently plump cheeks of the childhood that is not completely resigned to abandoning our features had, in defeat, ceded his facial structure to a slender fiction of adolescence, as if time had a chisel that keeps sculpting the face we will eventually have and for which, at a certain point, we become responsible. He did not have a beard or mustache. And his head was shaved like an army recruit’s. Perhaps because of that facial nudity his light eyes shone more than ever, playing the principal role in an appearance not distinguished by his snub nose or thin lips. A shaved skull. Brilliant eyes, the same but different, guardians of both a youthful past and a mature future.

He embraced me and I smelled the remembered sweat.

Jericó had come back.

“You look like a poor fool in an asylum,” I told him.

“Punched in,” he said in English, and immediately afterward, as if recalling and correcting: “It’ll go like clockwork.”

I CONFESS THAT the return of Jericó produced contrary feelings in me. After his absence, we were both entering our mid-twenties with a separation that put our youthful friendship to the test. In principle this impinged on any other consideration, though he and I-I imagined-were not strangers to the usury of time. The second consideration, however, had to do with my closeness to Lucha Zapata and the daily, vital question of knowing where I would brush my teeth, in the apartment on Praga, with him, or the little house in Chimalpopoca, with her.

At first I didn’t permit the choice between them to be a problem that would interfere with my joy. Seeing Jericó again not only renewed my own youth but, in particular, rescued and prolonged it, though with a bittersweet anticipation that I would also begin to lose it. Until the moment of his departure, my friend was what you already know because you read it here: the independent, audacious boy who gave me my place in secondary school, saving me from being the scapegoat of the gang of bastards who were going to feed on me and my prominent nose as they would have taken advantage of somebody who was cross-eyed or crippled. Jericó stood firm “in the middle of the arena,” obliged the “good-for-nothings,” as Doña María Egipciaca would have called them, to respect me. We initiated the comradeship that now, after our separation, his return would put to the test.

I admit as well that a series of ambivalent impressions followed one another in my mind on the day I found my friend back in the apartment on Praga. His physical appearance was different. I don’t know if it was better. Yes, he had lost some of the persistent baby fat on his face. He looked more angular, more tense, more reserved. I don’t know if his shaved head suited him or not. I could lean toward the side of fashion and accept it as one of the many ways of making a statement with one’s hair at the time: long manes, shaved heads, multicolored locks, afros, Mohawks, Roman consuls, rebel dreadlocks, except that the combination of his shaved head and slender face emphasized the strangeness of his naked gaze. His eyes, blue, round, fixed, immeasurably enlarged by the nakedness of his entire head, created a contradictory impression in me. I saw in those unprotected eyes an unusual innocence transformed with a mere blink into a cynical, threatening, and wise gaze. I confess I marveled at that instantaneous transition of a psychological profile, not only the next one but its opposite.

The strange thing (or is it reasonable?) is that his words when he returned to Mexico also blinked, passing from an ingenuousness that seemed out of place in the cynical, daring man I had known, to a gravity it took me a while to identify with the actual name of ambition. Could we reestablish our intimacy?

He recounted naïve things to me, for example that when he arrived at the Place de la Concorde he kneeled and kissed the ground. I laughed: As an act of freedom? Not only that, he replied: As an act of fidelity to the best in the Old World (I hid a nervous twitch of disapproval: Who would ever call Europe “the Old World”?) and above all, he continued, to France and the French ability to appropriate everything by redeeming the crime in culture.

“There’s a Napoleon brandy. Can you imagine a Hitler brandy?”

I wasn’t going to discuss the enormous difference between the “good” Bonapartist tyrant and the “bad” Nazi tyrant because in his tirade Jericó was already immersed in an amusing comparison of national European profiles and the clichés that went with them (the French have a sex life, the English have hot water bottles), leading to feverish amazement at having heard “all the languages we see at the movies” and the enumeration of Rue Lepique, Abbey Road, Via Frattina, Puerta del Sol, and above all the streets, the squares of Naples where, he said, he identified with the possibility of being corrupt, immoral, a killer, a thief, and a poet without consequences, as part of custom and perhaps the landscape of a liberty so habitual it leaves no trace of mortality, surviving, he said, in tradition.

“Why can’t we be Neapolitans?” he exclaimed with a certain grandiloquence, appropriate to the friend who faced me with the arrogance of a Byron that I viewed as an antipoetic pose and, what is worse, as simple-minded, naïve, unworthy. Why are we, in Europe, nothing but Comanches, mariachis, or bullfighters?

He laughed, redeeming himself. “We ought to guard against being part of the national folklore.”

This was Jericó, my old companion, passed through the sieve of an experience that he wanted, as I understood it, to share with me at a level of exaltation and camaraderie that would lead him to tear off his shirt, gesticulate, and assume the caricature of a bedazzlement that ought to end-I knew Jericó-with an excessive, ironic action, one that in a certain sense flagellated his own ego.

“On my knees in the Concorde,” he repeated, kneeling in the middle of the living room with his arms stretched wide in an act at once grotesque and tender, and which I understood without understanding it, like a farewell to youth, a stripping away of the vestments of a tourist, the rustic skin that covers the traveler in transit, the soul of the “Argentine we all carry inside us”: the superego.

Knowing Jericó, this display as part of his weaknesses did not fail to surprise me. Perhaps he wanted to indicate that beneath the appearance of return was a companion who had never left. Or, on the contrary, knowing it was impossible, he was asking for help in getting rid of distance and his experiences and returning to the point at which we had separated. We were the same but different. I had experienced studying at UNAM, the tutelage of Sanginés, the visit to San Juan de Aragón, the mysterious encounter with Miguel Aparecido, the strange, committed relationship with Lucha Zapata. What did Jericó have to offer, aside from the postcard he had just given me?

“Freedom,” he said, as if he had read my thoughts.

“Freedom is kneeling down to give thanks in the Place de la Concorde?” I said, not very pleasantly.

He nodded, his eyes lowered.

“What shall we do?” he said then, and our life changed.

Jericó changed it as he himself, his physical attitude, his appearance changed in the next moment, when he let fly the issues he wanted to communicate after his prologue on the stage of touristic minimization and mental abandon.