Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

I had the pass Professor Sanginés had given me. I went from grating to grating until I reached Miguel Aparecido’s cell. The prisoner stood when he saw me. He didn’t smile, though in his face I saw an unusual amiability. We exchanged glances before I went into the cell. It was evident we wanted to please each other. What did he want from me? I, from him, wanted only more information for my thesis, though now that Sanginés had decided the topic-Machiavelli and the creation of the state-I wondered what the Florentine thinker had to do with the Mexican prisoner.

It didn’t take me long to find out.

Miguel Aparecido had a certain manner that really consisted of a series of digressions, intended perhaps to educate me. His strong, masculine figure, possessed of an aura of fatality together with an appearance of will, stood as he received me, his arms crossed and his sleeves rolled up, revealing arms covered with hair that was almost blond in the uncertain light of the cell, in contrast to the criminal’s Gypsy air, olive skin, and his eyes: blue-black with yellow flecks.

“He doesn’t want to leave prison,” Sanginés had told me. “The day he completed his first sentence and left, he immediately committed a crime so he could return.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea! I’m confused.”

“Are you his attorney, Maestro?” I asked with a certain audacity.

“He has given me instructions to save him from freedom.”

“Why?”

“Ask him.”

I did, and Miguel Aparecido gave me an obscure smile.

“So, kid, why do I like prison? I could tell you things like this. Because I’m free of appearances. Here inside I don’t have to pretend I’m what I’m not or that I’m what other people want me to be. Here I can laugh at all the conventions of courtesy, the how are things, how nice, at your disposal, at your service, let’s make a date to get together, how’s everybody at home, where are you going on vacation? how much did that beautiful watch cost? I’m not holding you up, am I?”

I laughed without wanting to and he became serious.

“Because I’m free of belonging to any class but especially the middle class we all aspire to. They want to be free, imagine. I want to be a prisoner.”

“There are many classes in the middle class,” I dared again. “Whom do you wish to be free of?”

He smiled. “Use tú with me or I’ll kick your ass right here.”

He said it in a savage tone. I didn’t let myself be intimidated. I don’t know what I had on my side. The assignment from Professor Sanginés. My differences with Jericó. The daily, fortifying trial of tending to Lucha Zapata. Or a recent confidence in my own superiority as a student, a free man, a citizen capable of confronting a recidivist criminal whose stake in the terrain of greatness was the decision to remain in prison. Forever? For how long?

Miguel Aparecido did not take long to return fire even before I could open the first document. He said I was very young but perhaps I hadn’t fully understood something. What? That youth consists of daring. Growing old means losing one’s audacity, he continued.

“What did you dare to do?” I asked, using tú , difficult with a person as forbidding as he was.

“I killed,” he said with simplicity, aplomb, and finality.

I didn’t dare to continue with a “why?” or a “whom?” which from the first had no answer. I concluded then and there that Miguel Aparecido left this question hanging because answering it meant knowing the fatality of the plot and I-who had just moved from usted to tú -had a right only to the prolegomena.

“Do you know what’s fucked up in prison?” he resumed. “Here you’re not anything anymore. First, you’re not anybody. You’re separated from the world. You have to invent another world and then make a new relationship for yourself with a world that matters only if you’ve created it yourself, you know, boy?”

“Licenciado,” I said with dignity.

He laughed. “Fine, Lic. You come here and first you ask yourself, who’s protecting me? After a while, after humiliations, blows, lies, unkept promises, solitudes, tortures, punches, moans and you can’t tell if they’re from taking a shit or jerking off, the arrogance of the guards, the sadism of the other prisoners, you learn to protect yourself. How?”

He took me by the shoulders. I was afraid. He did it only to move me over and stare right into my eyes, not accepting any evasion in my gaze. If my life ended with my being smacked by the undertow on a Guerrero beach, I should add that in this scene with the ill-tempered Miguel Aparecido, I truly began to drown far beyond any previous circumstance in my life.

“Are you imprisoned unjustly?” said the classicist in my heart.

He replied that in a certain way yes, but in the long run, not really.

He read the serious questioning in my face.

“I’m here because of a great injustice,” he said.

“But you’re still here because you want to be,” I added unemphatically.

He shook his head a little. “No. Because of my will.”

“I don’t understand.”

He took a few steps in a circle. “First it makes you angry. You’re suffocating.”

He was timing his words to his turns around the cell, and these movements frightened me more than his words. He squared his jaw. His straight nose quivered.

“Then you’re stunned at being here and surviving the initial horror and your permanent impotence, asshole… I mean, Licenciado.” He smiled, looking at me. “Right after that you feel defeated, absolutely fallen into misfortune.”

He stopped and gave me a very ugly look.

“Finally you go back to anger, but this time in order to take your revenge.”

“On which people?” I said, about to fall into the trap of the Count of Monte Cristo.

“On which person , asshole, just one person. Only one.”

I looked at him expectantly. We both knew there were no premature answers and this would be the code of “honor” between us: Nothing before its time.

As I had thought of Edmond Dantés earlier, now I tended toward Doctor Mabuse, the prisoner who directs his crimes from a Berlin cell. Is there anything new in these prison stories? Looking at Miguel Aparecido, I told myself there was. The plots resemble one another because they are part of the same destiny: lost freedom. In prison, more than anywhere else, we realize there is no freedom because we live day by day, because our goals are futile, fragile, and in the end unattainable, because death takes responsibility for canceling our contract and when we’re dead we’re not aware of what has survived us, what has perished with us, and, at times, before us. It’s enough to walk down a busy street and attempt, in vain, to give transcendence to the lives passing by on their way to death, anticipating it, trying to deny it, all subject to disappearing into a vast, collective anonymity. Except the musician, the writer, the artist, the philosopher, the architect? Even them, how long will they endure? Who, recognized today, will be unknown tomorrow? Who, ignored today, will be discovered tomorrow? Few political and military figures survive. Who was Elizabeth I’s chamberlain when Shakespeare was writing, who the North American secretary of state at the time of the obscure sailor and scrivener Herman Melville, who the secretary general of the National Peasant Union when Juan Rulfo wrote Pedro Páramo ? Eheu, eheu: transient, I learned in the famous class on Roman law: transience is our destiny but freedom is our ambition, and it will take us a long time-I understood this in a flash looking at the prisoner-to comprehend that the only freedom is the struggle for freedom.