Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

What shall we do? he repeated. There are many possibilities for success. Which are yours and mine? Or rather, Josué, which success is worthy of you and me?

I wasn’t going to answer with the reasons I’ve just given you, which can be summarized in the word “experience,” for only on that basis did my expectations, though still vague, begin to take shape. I knew Jericó would not share much in the recounting of his European experiences, which (I was beginning to realize) he would never reveal beyond the brief tour he had just offered. His years of absence were going to be a mystery, and Jericó didn’t even challenge me to penetrate it. There was in this attitude I’ve called Byronic a wager: The past has died and the future begins today. Make whatever guesses you like.

As a consequence, I changed my attitude. Instead of asking about his past, I proposed sharing our future.

“What do we want?” he repeated, and added: “What are we afraid of?”

He continued saying that he and I knew-or ought to know-what we could be or do. He recalled an earlier conversation about “not ever going to a quinceañera , a thé dansant, a baptism, the opening of restaurants, flower shops, supermarkets, bank branches, the celebration of university classes, beauty contests, or meetings at the Zócalo.” Never being interested in the rock-and-roller Tarcisia who married the Russian millionaire Ulyanov, both of them barefoot, with Hawaiian leis around their necks and guests who welcomed the dawn dancing hip-hop on the sand at seven in the morning.

“Now, Jericó, how did they serve the stew to honor the father of the bride-”

“Who is a native of Sonora. Did you turn down the invitation?”

“No, Jericó, not at all, I’m not interested in being-”

“Not even if it’s your own wedding?”

I smiled, or tried to. I remembered how I had admired Jericó’s capacity for taking life very seriously.

I said I felt I had gone past those tests, didn’t he? I refrained for the moment from mentioning Lucha Zapata, Miguel Aparecido, the children in the sinister pool at San Juan de Aragón. Perhaps Jericó responded indirectly, saying it wasn’t enough not doing what we didn’t do. Now we ought to decide what we were actually going to do. He stood and grasped my shoulders. He looked at me with his Delftware eyes. We didn’t have, that was apparent, a talent for music, literature, tennis, water- or downhill skiing, racing cars, or directing films, we didn’t have the soul of actuaries, accountants, real estate agents, porters, and all the sad people who accept their small destinies… he said.

“What do we have left?”

I told him to tell me. I didn’t know.

“Politics, Josué. It’s self-evident, brother. When you’re no good as a street sweeper or a composer, when you can’t write a book or direct a movie or open a door or sell socks, then you devote yourself to politics. It’ll go like clockwork.”

“That’s what we’re going to do?” I said, with false astonishment.

Jericó laughed and let go of my shoulders.

“Politics is the last resort of intelligence.”

He winked. In Europe he had learned, he said, that the mission of the intellectual was to torment power with words.

“Then what do you want to do?” I asked.

“I don’t know yet. Something huge. Give me time.”

I thought without saying so that freedom is uncertainty. That is something I had learned.

He didn’t read my thoughts:

“There can be many attempts at success. Which is worthy of you and me?”

I didn’t know what to say. I was held back by another feeling. Above and beyond the words and attitudes, that morning of our reunion in the garret on Calle de Praga remains in my mind, especially now that I’ve died, as a moment of terror. Could we resume our intimacy, the common respiration that had joined us when we were young? Could we feel again the primary emotion of youth? Was everything we had lived only a prologue, a preparation for a goal we didn’t really know yet how to define? Was our friendship the sole, poor shelter of our future?

Jericó embraced me and said in English, as if responding to all my questions, Let’s hug it out, bitch.

STUNNED BY AERIAL excursions on the wings of the prophet Ezekiel and landings in the deep earth where Doña Antigua Concepción lies, exhausted by so much sky and so much history, disheartened by great promises, I walked very slowly toward Colonia Juárez and the apartment on Calle de Praga without knowing where I was coming from or the location of the secret grave that soon dissipated in the noise of engines, exhaust fumes, the ring-ring of bicycles, and thunder in the clouded sky, trying to leave behind the experience I had gained and concentrate on particular accidents, the personal inadequacies and small vices and virtues of men and women with their own names though lacking a historic surname.

Drunk on the chronological history of Antigua Concepción and inebriated by the undated apocalypse of the prophet Ezekiel, with infinite patience and humility I climbed the stairs of the house on Praga, prepared to focus my humanity again on Jericó’s friendship and my care of Lucha. These were my priorities, soon dissolved by Jericó’s urgent expression when he greeted me.

“Let’s go to Pedregal. Errol’s mother has died.”

Years had gone by without our returning to the ultramodern mansion turned into a neobaroque mess by the dictatorial bad taste of Don Nazario Esparza. “Act as if you haven’t seen anything” was Errol’s recommendation to us, referring either to the arguments of his parents or the Transylvanian horror of his house. I remembered the lack of any initiative on our friend’s part once he had provoked an altercation between his parents. Or perhaps I was misremembering. It had been six, seven years since I had seen my old classmate or visited his house.

Now, from the entrance door, black crepe announced the family’s mourning. I thought the house had always been in mourning, locked with padlocks of avarice, lack of compassion, suspicion, meager love, scant serenity. Except that as I approached the coffin of Doña Estrellita de Esparza, with Jericó ahead of me, I felt that compassion and serenity, at least, had in fact inhabited this lugubrious mansion but were virtues that lived waiting for the death, and only in the submissive, preoccupied presence, of Doña Estrellita.

I looked at her corpse. Her waxen face had been blurred even more by the cold hand of Death, the Ashen-Faced, and caricatured by the rouge and lipstick the funeral director (or damned Don Nazario) had smeared on the grayish features. Doña Estrellita wore a hairdo that looked false, very 1940s, very Joan Crawford, high and full. Her ghostly hands rested on her chest. With a start, I realized the Señora had on her housewife’s, maid’s, and cook’s apron, and this, I wanted to say to Jericó, this definitely was a final mockery by the sinister Don Nazario, prepared to send off his wife as maid to Eternity and celestial housewife. Don Nazario received without emotion or even the blink of an eye the condolences of his previously mentioned clientele, who expressed their sympathy and then dissolved again behind a veil of murmurs, inaudible conversations, and the passing of canapés, with the collective obsequiousness of a relative and the singularity of dissimilar manners and fashions, for those who had known him since his humble beginnings and those who acknowledged him at his present heights ranged from the owners of transient hotels to managers of hotel chains.

I looked at Doña Estrellita in order not to look at the crowd.

In spite of everything, the body continued to display a simulation of beatitude and the perpetual smile of someone going to a wedding of people she doesn’t care about but who deserve courtesy. In death, Doña Estrella was confident in her boredom, and if she had lost the habit of crying, the fault was not hers. There was only one dissonant detail, because the apron was like a uniform. The Señora had a bright scarf tied around her neck.