Carlos Fuentes: Destiny and Desire

Think, Joshua: How will you return my land to me? How will you avoid making my destiny tomorrow the one that is yours forever? Will you occupy my land only in order to forget that no one gave you one of your own?

Joshua listened attentively to Hetara and told himself that this night of forbidden pleasure was the price of permitted victory. Hetara knew everything and forgave nothing. Joshua saw it in her dark eyes, he pulled the red ribbon from her dark hair and said:

“Do me one last favor. Hang the red ribbon from the roof of your house.”

“Will my family be saved, and my clients?”

“Yes, you will be saved. I swear it.”

In this way Joshua justified his night with the whore of Jericho, returned to the mountain, and told the Jews: Truly, Jehovah has delivered the land into our hands. And they all followed him to the banks of the Jordan and shouted with a great shout, convinced that God had promised them victory in battle, and the priests sounded the trumpets. Then the walls of Jericho fell with a great noise, as if the voices and the trumpets were the arms of God, and the Jews entered Jericho and destroyed the city, put men, women, and children to the sword, old people, oxen, sheep, and asses, respecting only Joshua’s order:

“Do not touch Hetara the prostitute.”

And Hetara went to live among the Jews and learned that her city would never be seen again, because Joshua decreed that whoever rebuilt it would be cursed in the eyes of the Lord.

THIS WAS HOW Jericó and I became friends. We discovered everything we had in common. Our age. Sixteen and seventeen years old. Books we had read, not only as children but those we shared now, though he had a year’s advantage on me, which in adolescence is a great deal. He lent me-annotated-books he had already read. We commented on them together. And a similar attitude in and out of school. Being independent. We discovered that we would not permit anyone to inculcate in us opinions that weren’t ours or had not at least been screened by our own critical sense. Further, we thought our opinions were not opinions alone but doubts as well. This was the firmest ground of our friendship. Almost instinctively, Jericó and I understood that each line we read, each idea we received, each truth we affirmed, had its opposite, as day had night. In that final year of secondary school, we did not allow a single line, idea, or truth to pass without submitting it to judgment. We had not yet calculated how much this attitude would help us-or hurt us-when we were out in the world, away from the sheltered nest of school. For now, being dissidents inside it distinguished us with a still adolescent, pedantic, excessive air from the student mob that surrounded us and then, after Jericó’s defense of me and the bloodied nose of the bald aggressor, stopped interfering with me or my nose and looked for new odious marks to fight, as long as they could isolate the victim and present themselves as an unidentifiable and consequently unpunishable mass.

Eventually even the famous bald kid approached us with an amusing false piece of news.

“They’re saying you two are always together because you’re fags. I want to be your friend and see if they dare to say that about me too.”

He accompanied his words with terrible grimaces of ill will and the torpid agility of a budding champion.

We asked him with false astonishment if he was safe from all aggression and he said yes. Why? we insisted. Because I’m very rich and don’t brag about it. He pointed, his hand perpetually bloodied or covered with scabs, to the street:

“Do you see a black Cadillac parked there at the exit?”

Sure. By now it was part of the landscape.

“Have you seen me get into it?”

No, we had seen him waiting for the bus at the corner.

“Well, it’s my father’s car. It comes for me every afternoon. The chauffeur sees me come out and he gets out and opens the door for me. I go to the bus stop and the Cadillac goes home empty.”

I thought about the useless waste of gasoline but said nothing, thinking that for now the boy deserved all our curiosity. He placed his hands on his hips and looked at us with an appealing-or perhaps pathetic-need for approval. Lacking our applause, he gave in and introduced himself.

“I’m Errol.”

Now Jericó and I did smile, and our friendly smile was a request: Explain that to us.

“My mother has been a fan of Errol Flynn her whole life. Now nobody even remembers Errol Flynn. He was a very famous actor when my mother’s mother was young. She told her she never missed an Errol Flynn movie. She said he was very handsome and “nonchalant,” that’s what they called him in movie magazines. He was Robin Hood, and he swung from tree to tree dressed in green, as camouflage, ready to steal from the rich and give to the poor, an enemy of tyranny. And my mother inherited her mother’s taste.”

A dreamy look passed over the eyes of the aggressive bald kid who was introducing himself now as Errol Esparza and offering us both his friendship and a summary of his life, the three of us sitting on the steps of the schoolyard during the final year of our secondary education, ready to assume the duties (and the airs) of the preparatory school in this same building, with the same professors and classmates, no longer identical to themselves but to the changing mirror of early youth, when a thousand insistent signs of childhood persist in obstructing the face that struggles to break through and tell us: We’ve grown up. Now we’re men.

That is why the final year of secondary seemed so long and the first of preparatory so uncertain and distant. Not because of essential realities in one or the other level of education, but because of the accidental facts that we were ourselves: chubby-cheeked Jericó, bald Errol, and me, skinny Josué, the three of us surprised at the changes our bodies and souls were experiencing, though all three, each in his own way, pretended to accept the transformations without amazement, with natural dispassion, even with a certain indifference, as if we knew beforehand what we would be in the coming year and remained overwhelmingly ignorant of what we still were.

Errol suggested the real pitfall. He invited us to his house. It was an invitation made with a strange air of irony mixed with indulgence concealing a poorly disguised embarrassment. Implicitly, he was expecting to be invited to our houses, believing that our friendship would last only if we knew a sixteen-year-old boy’s worst secret: his family. With this trauma overcome, we could move on to the next stage. Being adults and being friends.

The good Errol’s good faith-not to call it innocence-was beyond any doubt. I knew that everything unsaid by the boy with the shaved head did not live in the basement of bad faith. Errol behaved honorably. In any case, Jericó and I were the ones walking twisted paths.

“Errol Esparza.”

“Josué Nadal.”

“Jericó.”

You who survive me can imagine that when I became Jericó’s friend, I asked him what his last name was and he replied Just Jericó, no last name. I wasn’t satisfied, I felt curious, I went to the admissions secretary at the school and asked outright,

“What’s Jericó’s last name?”

The secretary was a young, attractive man who seemed out of place in the small records office, behind a corrugated glass panel near the school entrance, where half his face and an entire hand would appear, upon request, to attend to the public. He hastily withdrew hand and face and his voice acquired a neutral but forced tone.

“That’s Jericó’s name: Jericó.”

Although it was during office hours, the secretary closed the small window. Soon afterward I sensed both an offensive and defensive attitude in my friend Jericó. I attributed it to the secretary’s indiscretion, though I had no proof. The fact is that Jericó, letting a few days pass through the sieve of an unaccustomed seriousness in our dealings with each other, which I attributed to my own indiscretion as well as the secretary’s (a position normally filled by embittered women in their forties with no hope of finding a husband), asked me to go with him to the café on the corner, and once we were seated in front of two tepid, tasteless, decaffeinated concoctions, he gave me an intense look and said that during the past semester he and I had naturally cemented a friendship that he wanted to know was solid and lasting.