Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

Without saying goodbye, Jericó jumped on a moving bus with dangerous agility and I hailed a taxi to return to Lucha Zapata’s house, undecided now as to my home and real address.

Unless, I smiled, it was the penitentiary where Miguel Aparecido-who knows to what end-was waiting for me.

“It’s going like clockwork,” Jericó shouted from the bus. “ Hug it out! ”

I NOTICED THAT Lucha Zapata was nervous, strange, different, and distant when I returned that night to the house on Cerrada Chimalpopoca next to the noisy Metro de los Doctores. She was involved in the ecstatic movements of preparing lunch, not looking at me as she cut the avocados in two, heated the tortillas, smeared them with the green flesh of a buttery fruit that relieves the acidity of Mexican corn. She knew I admired-and marveled at-this homemaking “professionalism” in my friend. She possessed a kind of domestic discipline contrary to the disorder of her life as an alcoholic and drug addict. She was an excellent cook and I arranged to have her cupboard always stocked with all the pleasures of the market that transform Mexican food into a gift of the gods for a country of beggars.

My mouth waters: jalapeño chile, habanero chile, saffron, jitomate, huitlacoche fungus, epazote tea, machaca dried beef, cochinita pork, chotes, chicharrón cracklings, oregano. I bought them at La Merced very early in the morning, assisted by a lively old woman with a straw-colored braid, Doña Medea Batalla. She appeared before me with her black cherry eyes and said: “Let me help you, Licenciado.” “How do you know?” I said with a look. She touched one eye. “I know you all, Licenciado. You can spot a licenciado a mile away… just the way I can smell out villains.”

I confined myself to placing produce in the basket. Lucha would transform it into blind mason’s sauce, soup of corn ears and roasted chiles, uchepos or Michoacán corn tamales, Morelian enchiladas, enchiladas de plaza, and stuffed chayotes. I admired her concentration and skill, which contrasted so strongly with her life’s disorder, wondering if asking her where she had learned to cook was the pretext for controverting the forgetfulness on which she insisted.

She defended herself. Her memory was locked away and her cuisine, she gave me to understand, was part of an atavistic, popular wisdom that wasn’t taught. One is born, in Mexico, knowing how to cook. That was why I took pains to bring her the best produce, with the implicit hope that one day, eating well, she would remember something and live better.

It was a thin hope, not to mention a vain one.

“Did you bring beer?” she asked, standing, tottering.

“I forgot,” I said, having just come from the interview with Sanginés and Jericó.

“Poor devil,” she smiled with twisted lips. She laughed. “Beer makes you cold inside,” she added for no reason.

I asked her to be calm, to lie down, what did she want? knowing that asking a person like her for “calm” was the same as telling her: You’re crazy.

She said with sudden sweetness that she had a weakness for avocados. I told her I’d go out and buy a good supply right away. I regretted it. Lucha needed me there. She was helpless, a step away from death…

“What do you want from me?” she spoke from inside an internal cave.

I said nothing.

“My past. You’re hungry for my past. You’re a snoop,” she said, reproaching me for what I wasn’t, as my life with Jericó demonstrates. “A snoop. A meddler. You stick your big nose in.”

She attacked my nose violently. It wasn’t difficult for me to push her hand away. She fell onto the mat. She looked at me with immense sorrow and even greater resentment, not free of that great pretext for Mexican failure: feeling defeated, always being the loser, and obtaining salvation, perhaps, thanks to the blessing of defeat. We don’t celebrate success except as a passing announcement of eventual defeat in everything.

“You see,” she murmured. “You’re the powerful one, the arbitrary one. You push me. You throw me to the floor. Do you see why I live the way I live? Because power is arbitrary, arbitrary, arbitrary…”

“Capricious,” I said in a stupid eagerness to find synonyms for defeat.

“A caprice?” Lucha Zapata twisted what I said. “Do you think that living and dying is just a caprice?”

“I didn’t say that.” Clumsily I tried to apologize, standing while she knelt on the mat, looking up at me from the floor.

“Then what?” she asked in a voice at once defeated and victorious, ardent and dry.

I didn’t say anything and she embraced my knees murmuring Love me Savior, I have only you, don’t leave me, what do you need to love me more? what do you need to know I need you?

She looked at me as I believe one kneels and really looks at the “Savior,” as she called me.

Did I want to know about her past? Like in the song, only if I got her what she needed, “Savior, I depend on you, I don’t want to go out on the street, I’m here with you but you have to give me what I need, please, Savior, help me recover the good and leave the bad behind, first I need relief, then I swear I’ll settle down, I’ll be good, I won’t hurt myself anymore, Savior, Salvador, go out and get me what I need and I swear I’ll reform, understand that I have two I’s like the cartoon El Señor Merengue, and the other I commands more than I do myself, what am I leaving behind? help me recover my soul, Savior, you know I’m good, don’t think I have a taste for what’s bad, don’t think I like what’s ugly, it’s in spite of myself, I want to be good, look, I want to have a baby with you, Savior, make me a baby right now so I’m redeemed…”

She fell asleep. I already knew her sleep was a foretaste of death. I went out to get what she wanted. I came back. I watched over her. I spent the night watching. At six in the morning, Lucha Zapata woke, looked at me in anguish from the bare mat, and I soothed the entreaty in her eyes right away, giving her the injection and the syringe, helping her tie up her arm, watching her travel from hell to heaven and fall back to sleep.

I came back that night. She was sitting in one of those little Mexican chairs with a straw seat and brightly colored back, like a little girl being punished. I smiled at her. She looked up. A venomous sky struggled between her lids. She hugged herself with contained violence.

“You want me to repent just to give you pleasure,” she spat at me. “You’re like everybody else.”

I caressed her head. She moved away contemptuously.

“You think you can control me?” She laughed. “Not even love controls me. Falling in love is submitting. I’m independent.”

“No,” I said without sadness. “You depend on drugs. You’re a poor slave, Lucha, don’t pretend to be independent. Don’t make me laugh. You make me sad.”

She let out an animal shout, the authentic howl of a wounded beast, arbitrary, arbitrary, she began to shout, you think habit can control, nothing controls me, where did you put my aviator helmet? only flying pacifies me, take me to the airport, give me a plane, let me fly like a free bird…

She stood and embraced me.

“Do it for your sweet mamacita.”

“I don’t know her.”

“Then for charity.”

“I don’t have any.”

“What do you have?”

“Love and compassion.”

“Have compassion for yourself, asshole.”

And the demon of consequences, what about him?

MY DISTINGUISHED READERS will say that going from Lucha Zapata’s house to the prison of Miguel Aparecido was like passing from one hell to another. Not at all. Compared to the house on Cerrada de Chimalpopoca, the San Juan de Aragón prison was barely a purgatory.