Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

“Then what do you see, Señora?”

Ay , I see ignorance about yourself. You don’t know who you are. You still don’t know. Artemio Cruz had an open love wound and spent his life trying to close it. He failed. And it was his own fault he failed. That’s all. He had a brave son. He lost him. On the other hand, that caliph of the northern border, Leonardo Barroso, that one has no excuse. He was a thug who never had a day of compassion, not even for his own impaired son, he took his wife away and prostituted her, are you listening to me? one Michelina Laborde, one of those little society whores sold to the highest bidder with no shame at all because in order to feel shame you have to have some smarts, just a little bit of brain, that’s all, and these little society ninnies move their necks and you hear a marble rolling around though their eyes blink like calculators. Leonardo Barroso was a miserable asskisser to the Gringos, father of another cruel, misogynistic son, son and grandson of incest with the aforementioned Michelina but grandfather to a brave, astute, and perverse woman, María del Rosario Galván, whom you will suddenly meet in your new life. Generation after generation, degeneration!

I questioned in silence. She read the silence.

You know, my boy? Sometimes I feel… well, nostalgia for times gone by. Except we no longer have gold coins, like in the old days, to memorialize what we have lived. We have photos, we have movies, we have TV. That was our memory: photographable, filmable, archivable. Now everything has changed, and here comes the story of my son Max Monroy. The fruit doesn’t fall far, etcetera. Except Max is no fruit. He’s a trunk. He’s like the Tree of Tule in Oaxaca, a gigantic cedar forty meters high and forty-two meters around and two thousand years old. And though Max Monroy is only in his eighties, it’s as if he incarnated two millennia because he’s so sharp and such a bad fucker though he’s my son and that’s the way he is because fortunately he inherited nothing from his father except the vague memory of a country destroyed by its own epic, kid, you can’t live on that forever, I mean on an epic, and in Mexico the epic of the revolution justified everything, progress and backwardness, construction and corruption, peace and politics. Everything in the name of the revolution. Until the Tlatelolco Square massacre left the revolution stripped bare. Stripped bare but shitting blood, of course.

“How do you compete with an epic?”

The señora’s voice trembled, and in it she did not hide a certain satisfaction with herself, about herself.

By moving ahead-she affirmed from the grave-as I did. I’ve already told you about that. I moved ahead of everything and that’s why I could leave my son Max Monroy an independent fortune not subject to presidential favor or political changes. That exhausted my miserable husband. The general lived in a world of torments, tormented by insults, physical challenges, excessive praise, toadies, eventual guilt-when they were alone, do you think all the sons of bitches we’ve had in Mexico never felt guilty, do you think that?

Max Monroy, his invisible but indefatigable mother exclaimed from the grave, Max Monroy!

And then in a very low voice and jumbling together eras, dead dry fields, lost harvests, orphaned children, everyone to the mountains, always fleeing, children, women, cows, to the mountains, the mountains, the mountains… One day we had to be still, resigned, obedient… The nation was worn out. Or it was worn out by the marriage of indigence and injustice. Who knows?

The voice was fading.

The señora was lost in memories of what she wanted to forget.

It was all unpredictable…

“It still is, Señora,” I dared to contribute.

Death, harvests, descendants…

“Do you want me to tell your son anything? A message?”

The sepulchral silence was followed by vast laughter.

Our souls hover like vampires…

When they cross the river, the dogs stay behind the soldiers…

The soldiers skinning goats, roasting pigs, it’s over!

My tits swelled for a whole year.

To nurse my son.

Go on, three times around my grave.

I WOKE ON the mat in Lucha Zapata’s house and looked, bewildered, at the light of dawn. My immediate memory did not hold the cemetery or the address or zip code of where I came from but only a nonexistent river on this desolate, dry, and stifled mesa. A river like a truncated finger pointing the way to the sea.

You, who already know my end, may think I’m inventing a posteriori the events of the past. I swear to you I’m not. And the reason is this: At dawn there was a recurrence of astonishing continuities between my hours at Antigua Concepción’s grave and my waking in Lucha Zapata’s house.

As if the voice of Max Monroy’s dead mother continued in the voice of the living lover of Josué Nadal, who is myself, the narrator of this tale, Lucha Zapata, in a white nightgown, walked barefoot from the mat to the kitchen and back to the mat describing, evoking, as dazed as a sleepwalker, an encounter on an old forgotten street, sordid and dissolute. Lucha finds in a corner of the night (that’s what she said, now these are her words, not mine) a man in rags and covered by newspapers. It is very dark. The man’s eyes are very black and shining. Everything about him is exhausted except his gaze.

They look at each other. He gives his hand to Lucha. He stands without saying a word and leads her along the streets of the night. They stop in front of a lighted window. Inside people are holding a party. It is probably a family occasion. A girl of about eight or nine entertains the others by prancing about, telling jokes, and singing songs. Lucha seems charmed, she opens the door (which was already ajar) and goes in, moving toward the little girl who is the center of attention. Lucha approaches. The girl looks at her and retreats, farther and farther back, into a dark corner of the room.

When Lucha has her cornered, the girl sits down on a hard chair. She looks as if she were being punished. Lucha tells me the little girl is there, though in reality she is very far away. She hugs a stuffed bear and covers herself with her security blanket.

“Who are you?” the girl asks Lucha. “What are you doing here? We don’t want you. Go away.”

Lucha tries to say something but can’t get the words out. Lucha doesn’t understand the reason for the girl’s rejection. She feels humiliated. She runs out. She trips over a white tricycle decorated with a flowered basket. She gets up and in the street she falls into the arms of the dark man who leads her far away.

The road descends abruptly. A gigantic night surrounds them, as irresistible as a carnival: Lucha allows her thoughts to carry her along, her thoughts carry her very far from the place where she is. The night is transforming her-she says, she tells me this morning-leading her to a world where her senses enjoy peace and sufficiency at the same time they are cruelly stirred, demanding more, always more…

Suddenly she addresses me. “You know, Savior? Pleasure is a little pride and another little bit of self-hatred. A feeling of desperation. Along with a childish sensation of eternal life…”

She says she was a member of a gang that protected her and gave her what she needed. She compared her earlier solitude and forgot the familial warmth. Now she was part of a gang.

She gave names: “Maxi Batalla. El Florido. El Tasajeado. El Cacomixtle. El Sabor de la Tierra.”

They meant nothing to me. She knew that and went on.

“You become part of a legion of outsiders, of strange people or strangers, whatever you prefer. Your life belongs to no one. During the day you sleep.”

One night-she continues-from that anonymous, faceless group, an individual emerges. A dark boy, tall and slim. She says that between the two of them a feeling is born of love, tenderness, and mutual appreciation. An attraction.