Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

Ruddy, tall, florid, Don Nazario received the customary condolences. I would have liked to avoid it. I couldn’t escape the line of mourners. Jericó was ahead of me, his face composure itself though with a sarcastic line along his upper lip. Don Nazario extended his hand without glancing at me. I gave him mine without glancing at him. I looked for Errol.

“He isn’t here,” Jericó murmured.

“What do you think of that?” I asked.

“Were you expecting him to come?”

“To tell you the truth, yes,” said my feelings and not me. “She was his mother…”

“Not me,” Jericó declared over and above my opinion.

We made our way through the crowd of mourners. You could see it in their faces: No one loved this family. Not Don Nazario and not Doña Estrella. Much less Errol, the dispensable rock-and-roller fag. They were all there out of obligation and necessity. They all owed something to Nazario Esparza. Don Nazario controlled them all. There was no love. No grief. No hope. What did we expect? my eyes asked Jericó as we walked through the crowd, all of them surrounded by the forest of funeral wreaths that turn Mexican funerals into a boon for florists. Become a florist and make your fortune: We are all passing through.

In the middle of the funeral forest I bumped into a woman and offered my excuses. Out of place, she was carrying a cigarette in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other. She bumped into me, the ash fell onto my lapel and a downpour of La Veuve onto my tie. The woman stopped and smiled. I made a useless effort to recognize her or to ask myself, Where have I seen her before? never addressing her directly, “Where have we seen each other?” because of a kind of tacit precept I couldn’t explain to myself and that did not correspond to the amiability of the beautiful woman who approached like a panther, a predatory animal. A fake blonde, light tan touched with sun in her hair, and artificially moist lips.

“Listen,” she ordered a waiter, “bring a drink for the Señor.”

“Excuse me. This isn’t the time,” I said.

“A drink,” she gave the order again, and the waiter inquired as if he hadn’t heard her clearly:

“Pardon me, Señora?”

“A drink, I said. Go on.”

The waiter didn’t answer. He looked at me and Jericó, who was behind me now, understanding less than I did about the new scenario in the Esparza mansion.

The waiter said: “Welcome, Don Jericó, Don Josué. You’re always welcome here.”

And he went for the drinks ordered by the Señora, who already had champagne in her hand, a cigarette in her mouth, and the Chanel uniform of a black dress. She looked at us with a mix of charm and irony.

“Are you looking for Errol?” said this cunning woman.

We nodded.

“Look for him in a cheap cabaret on the streets of Santísima. He plays the piano there. It’s your ass, Barrabás!”

She aimed an artificial laugh at us and, turning her back, hummed as she moved through the mourners, who instinctively made way for her, as if they already knew her and, what is more, respected her, and what is worse, feared her…

My friend and I looked at each other with unspoken questions. At a distance, Don Nazario was receiving condolences with his bottle-bottom eyes. From a distance, he smelled of vomit. From a distance, one could hear the jangle of his key ring.

We passed the wall of bodyguards protecting entrances and exits, recalling Doña Estrella thanks to a tacit memory: No one, except her son and the waiter, perhaps, remembered her for the many details that now, in her honor (and ours) we evoked as if we were sharing them with our pal Errol, the bald kid from secondary school.

She never laughed at jokes because she didn’t understand them.

She believed everyone forgave her for her life.

Her husband had said once that as a young woman she was stupid but charming.

She guarded this phrase as if it were a treasure.

For the rest of it she always felt she was out of place.

She didn’t understand the word “superfluous.”

She didn’t even know how to mistrust the maids (the opposite was obvious to us).

When she was reprimanded, she sang as if she were involved in something else.

“What do you think of papa’s fortune?” “Very nice.” “No, its origins.” “Oh, son, don’t be that way.” “What way?” “Ungrateful. It’s why we eat.” “Shit.” “Don’t be vulgar. We owe everything to your father’s efforts.” “Efforts? Is that what they call crime now?” “What crime, son?” “Papa is a pimp, a lenón. ” “A león , a lion?” “No, a musician, John Lennon.” “I don’t understand.” “Or a revolutionary, Lenin.” “Son, you’re making my head spin.”

When we were on the street, cold and empty that night, Jericó asked:

“Listen, what does that red scarf mean that they put around her neck?”

I didn’t know, and on Calle del Pedregal there were only long lines of luxury cars and bored chauffeurs.

WHEN JERICÓ RETURNED I didn’t know whether to reveal to him my relationship with Lucha Zapata or keep it a secret. I opted for discretion. Ever since school, my friend and I had shared everything, ideas as well as whores, focusing on a fairly ascetic life of intensive studies and still unformed goals we didn’t dare call ambitions. Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri, sons of a god and a bird, two mortals worshiped as divinities, though they were not. Famous for their valor and skill. Exiled by Zeus to live alternate days in heaven and in hell.

The reader knows to what degree the fraternal union of Castor and Pollux, of Josué and Jericó, excluded many relationships common in boys our age. No family, no girlfriends, no friend except Errol and the shared teachings of Filopáter. Now, however, we were separated by years in which I acted without him and so could let myself be guided by Antonio Sanginés, penetrate the prison of San Juan de Aragón, interview the convicts, allow myself to be impressed by Miguel Aparecido’s diabolical personality and, above all, take responsibility for Lucha Zapata.

I decided to keep to myself the existence of the red-haired woman who lived beside the Metro.

Telling Jericó about it would have put me at the disadvantage of letting him know my business without the reciprocity of learning almost anything about his. Because the superficial humor with which my friend recounted his European experience did not suit his conflictive, penetrating, bold, and ironic personality. I came to think that Jericó was lying to me, that perhaps he hadn’t spent years in Europe, that someone else had sent the postcards in his name… How strange. All this came to mind because when he returned, as you remember, Jericó said a sentence in English that sounded strange to me,

Let’s hug it out, bitch ,

a sentence I didn’t understand and couldn’t translate, but that didn’t fit into either European or Latin American culture. By elimination-I deduced, thinking like Filopáter-it could only be North American.

I didn’t attribute too much importance to this, even though the matter remained suspended in my mind waiting for a clarification that would or would not come, because what Quixote says to Sancho about miracles-they rarely happen-can be transferred to mysteries-when they are revealed, they cease to exist-and I confess here and now that I wanted Jericó to have a truth hidden from me, since I had one hidden from him, and her name was Lucha Zapata.

I’m not ignoring the fact that Zapata’s character put me to the test, at times making me want to leave her or at least share the burden and with whom but Jericó. I’m saying I kept the secret because not only my own dignity before my friend but the very essence of my relationship with her demanded it. This is another way of saying that in recent months, Lucha Zapata had come to depend more and more on me, and that had never happened to me before. Once I had depended on others. Now, a helpless woman, constricted into herself and emerging from that constriction only because of my presence (I thought then), depended on me for salvation.