Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

The questions remained unresolved because of a new development.

It seems our garret, so bare at the beginning, was filling up with gadgets that came to our door in delivery trucks and then were carried up to our nest by dark men with strong backs and sparse mustaches.

Who sent us a laser fax machine, a television set with a 46 (or 52 or 70) inch screen? Who replaced our useless old black telephone with a white one from an Italian movie and then presented us with a couple of Sony Walkman portables and then-Creative Zen, Samsung YP-T9-others even more modern, with music, movies, calendars, and addresses? The last particularly interested me. What addresses did I have except for mine and Lucha Zapata’s? It didn’t take long for the light to go on. Or rather, the Sony Walkman with the name on the little screen of Maestro Antonio Sanginés and the phone numbers of his residence, his house in Coyoacán, and his offices on the Paseo de la Reforma.

Right there the message appeared that said:

I EXPECT YOU BOTH AT MY HOME ON JULY 2 AT 6:00 PM.

LIC. ANTONIO SANGINES.

I expect you both. Not I expect you . You both . Plural.

Now I waited for Jericó. He came in with his head high, laughing.

So then, once again, the two of us.

The maestro received us in his big old house in Coyoacán, surrounded as always by his noisy progeny, little children racing on tricycles, flying with arms spread, making engine noises, and eventually climbing on the professor’s wingback chair, lying peacefully on his lap, or threatening a catastrophe from the top of the chair.

“Outside, boys,” said Sanginés, laughing, and looked at Jericó and me when, in the same breath, he said:

“Come in, boys.”

He wanted to position us immediately in what Roman law calls capitis diminutio , a kind of diminution of personality, due to the loss-Rudolph Sohm dixit-of the legal rule of freedom, of citizenship, or because of the minimal alteration of being expelled from the family.

More than enough for me. I was his student in the law faculty, he was my adviser in reading and my professional mentor. He sent me to do the famous “forensic practice” in the prison of San Juan de Aragón. He was directing my professional thesis. But Jericó? What relationship could he have with Sanginés? I tried to determine this in the form of greeting, always so revelatory in a country of embraces, pats, diminutives and augmentatives, remote suspicions, dissimulated gloating: Iberian America is also Italic America, a land of elegant appearances, the cult of the bella figura , and the memory of serial Machiavellianisms modulated to remember debts or forget grievances.

The fact is that Sanginés said only “Come in, boys,” with an implicit “take a seat” in two leather chairs facing our host’s wingback. We were simply two students subject to a certificate of proficiency examination.

The children left. The students sat down. I’ll cut the message short: Sanginés believed we had completed an apprenticeship. With which I felt I was on the rungs of a medieval guild asking myself if this relationship was not, in fact, a transcription, though within the university, of the medievalism that is the watchword and perhaps the pride of Latin America, a continent that, unlike the United States of America, a nation with no antecedent more powerful than itself, did have a Middle Ages and as a consequence has-we have-from Mexico to Peru, mental categories that exclude a will not arbitrated by the Church or state. The Gringos are Pelagians without knowing it, descendants of the heretic who postulated individual freedom without the need for institutional filters, as opposed to his conqueror Augustine of Hippo, for whom grace was not individually achievable without the intervention of the Church. The North Americans, who don’t have Pelagius or the Middle Ages, do have Luther, the Reformation, Puritanism, Calvinism, and all the heresy (I repeat: choos-ing ) necessary to dictate with a very wide margin rules of conduct at the edge of institutions. We do not. Though the reader will note the constant benefit of Father Filopáter’s lessons in preparatory school.

I believe Sanginés read my thoughts, because he immediately decided my destiny. I would finish the course of study (I needed only a year and a couple of classes I could pass in a proficiency exam) and conclude forensic practice in the prison of San Juan de Aragón.

“Begin to prepare your thesis. The subject is Machiavelli and the creation of the state,” he pronounced, adding: “It is necessary for you to conclude your interview with Miguel Aparecido,” before turning to Jericó and saying: “You have refused to follow a career. You believe experience is the best university. I am going to test you. Tomorrow go to the offices of the Presidency of the Republic in Los Pinos. They are expecting you.”

And returning to me.

“And they are expecting you, Josué, in the office of Don Max Monroy in the building in Colonia-I should say the new city-of Santa Fe.”

He sighed, as if longing for a modest city that could not exist again, rose to his feet, and brought the interview to an abrupt end, leaving me with a certain bad taste in my mouth; I didn’t know whether to attribute it to an attitude unlike the normally amiable behavior of Professor Sanginés, or, more seriously, to a melancholy very similar to the sadness of goodbyes, as if a period in my life had just ended.

Jericó and I walked, looking for a taxi, toward Avenida Universidad, and were distracted as we crossed the Viveros de Coyoacán Park, breathing deeply, with no set purpose, because we were in one of the few lungs of an asphyxiated metropolis.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“Well,” I shrugged. “I’ll be doing the same things.”

“No, the one who’ll change is you. Max Monroy is a very powerful man.”

“Bah. I may never even get to meet him.”

Then I added: “Knowing you, Jericó, I think you’ll not only get to meet the president-”

He interrupted: “He’ll know me even if he doesn’t see me,” and added: “Look, hurry up and finish your degree. We’re twenty-five years old. We can’t go on waiting. We need a position. We can’t give as an occupation ‘I think’ or ‘I am.’ We have to be and do.”

I smiled in return. “One can always turn into a perpetually young old man, like Jelly Roll Morton, Compay Segundo, or Mick Jagger.”

The reader will note that I wanted to test the connection I had suspected in Jericó with North American pop culture instead of a pretended French affiliation that, as I’ve already told you, seemed suspect to me. The problem is, if you talk about jazz and rock, of necessity you land in Anglo-American territory. France loves jazz but doesn’t give it anything but love.

Jericó paid no attention to me. Who are we? What do we have? Name, occupation, status? Are we a vacant lot?

“ Terrain vague, ” I said with my comic suspicions.

Jericó was unfazed. “A garbage dump of what could have been? A catalogue of debits and losses? Even the bottom of the barrel? So what’s going on? I like it!”

“A hoarse-voiced basket where things accumulate?” I added, quoting Neruda but thinking of tasks I still had to do, not only the course of study in law, not only the mysterious prisoner Miguel Aparecido, but in particular my unspeakable commitment to a woman who required protection, whom I could not leave alone, at large, helpless…

“Lucha Zapata” was the name on the tip of my tongue like a bird in an open cage who doesn’t really know whether his well-being depends on flying away or remaining locked up and at the mercy of birdseed.

Jericó didn’t go any further. There was in him, when we left the large Jardín de los Coyotes, a new, atypical reserve that undoubtedly had to do with the position Sanginés had just offered him and that now occupied our minds. Though in retrospect, I wondered if the maestro’s unusual coldness was due to the unpublished presence of Jericó, which had skewed his behavior and evoked in my heart a dual feeling of nostalgia for the attention my teacher had previously paid me and reproach for his current manner.