Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

“Thank you, Savior. Do you know what I’m going to do?”

“No.”

“I’m free and I can choose. A ranchera singer? A poet?”

“You decide.”

“Do you know I’ve been invited to be on a reality show?”

“No. What’s that?”

“You have to show the most humiliating aspect of your character. You ask to eat on your knees. You fall down drunk.”

El Salto de Agua. Los Arcos de Belén. José María Izazaga. Ancient domes. Modern ruins. Nezahualcóyotl. La Candelaria.

“You pretend,” Lucha Zapata continued. “Don’t pretend. It’s like living in a Nazi concentration camp. That’s television. An Auschwitz for masochists. You deprive yourself. You animalize yourself. You eat rancid food. Your towels are smeared with shit. Your clothes are infested with bugs. They don’t let you sleep. Ambulance sirens sound day and night.”

She shouted: “They turn night into day!”

The driver didn’t stop driving but turned to look at me.

“What’s wrong? Is the señora all right?”

“It’s nothing. She’s just sad.”

“Ah,” the driver said with a sigh. “She’s going on a trip.”

He whistled some of “Beautiful, adored Mexico, I die far from you.”

I calmed her. I caressed her.

“You know? In the United States they call women a ‘number.’ What’s my number, do you think?”

“I don’t know, Lucha.”

It seemed useless to talk. She, dressed as an aviator, looked very tired, very disillusioned, like Dorothy Malone in 1950s films.

“I don’t know how to reason anymore.”

“Easy, Lucha, take it easy.”

From Calzada Ignacio Zaragoza we drove onto the long avenue that leads to the airport.

“I don’t want to end up a fly in a bar.”

“A what?”

“A barfly, Savior,” she said in English.

The driver whistled, “Let them say I’m sleeping and have them bring me here…”

We arrived. The lines of taxis and private cars made me think that heaven was far too small for so many passengers.

I helped her out.

She adjusted her helmet and goggles.

“Where shall I take you?”

“With women you never know.” She smiled.

“Shall I wait for you to come back?” I said as if I hadn’t heard her.

“Aviation teaches you to be fatalistic,” she concluded, and began walking away alone, hugging herself, and she staggered a little. I moved forward to help her. She turned to look at me with a negative gesture and moved her fingers tenderly, saying goodbye.

She became lost in the crowd at the airport.

And once again, as in one of those dreams that recur and dissolve into oblivion only to be sketched out in the second repetition, my eyes met those of a woman walking behind a young porter whose movements were gallant, as if transporting luggage inside the airport were the ultimate glamorous theatrical act. This woman, modern, young, swift, elegant, with the movements of a panther, an animal of prey, worriedly followed the porter.

I looked at her just as before. Except this time I recognized her.

It was the new Señora Esparza. La Sarape. The hostess at the wake of Nazario Esparza’s first wife. The successor to the mother of our old buddy Errol. But now, when I saw her again, I knew something thanks to the prisoner in San Juan de Aragón, Miguel Aparecido.

The woman was a killer.

It’s possible I vacillated for an instant. It’s possible that when I “vacillated” I lingered too long on the word that among Mexicans acquires the meaning of rowdiness, anarchy, mockery, disorder: vacile (fun), vacilador (carouser), vacilón (spree), a verbal avenue that leads directly to the plaza of “dissipation” and its side streets “dissolute” and “disorderly,” which reduce the world to chaos, ridicule, and senselessness, leaving behind another paraphrase, “hazard,” whose straight meaning is chance or risk but in recurrent Mexican speech is a play on words with double and triple meanings, don’t fuck with my asshole, then don’t be a freeloader, then don’t jerk off so much, will you pass me the pan? pancho’s fucking tonight, don’t fuck around, no ticket no fucking, no fucking way, and fuck you very much, ay Sebastián! done, which tests street ingenuity because in the salons it is dangerous and can lead to violent quarrels, duels, and assassinations.

“Do you see that woman going into the bar? Well, in the old days she couldn’t get enough of my dick.”

“Listen, that’s my wife.”

“Ay, how she’s grown…”

I’ve said all this so survivors can understand why I wasted precious minutes after seeing Nazario Esparza’s second wife following a porter, knowing she had killed Errol’s mother according to the more than reliable version of Miguel Aparecido in the San Juan de Aragón pen and being immediately obliged to stop her by force, drive out any fear the porter would defend his customer (why did something so improbable occur to me?), confront her, if not with facts then with my sheer physical strength (would it be superior to hers?), and take her to the security office in the airport, denounce her, bring justice to my pal Bald Errol and his dear deceased mama, all this crossed my mind at the same time that a mariachi band interposed itself between my vacillation and my haste, six characters dressed as charros, striped trousers and black jacket, silver buttons and six roof-size hats embroidered in waves of gold, hiding faces I didn’t have the slightest desire to see, perhaps fearing I’d recognize the famous Maximiliano Batalla escaped or freed unjustly from the previously mentioned prison and the presumptive killer of the similarly cited Doña Estrella de Esparza…

The criminal Sara P. disappeared among the mariachis who advanced (as if their outfits and hats were not enough) with the resonant outrage of their instruments, far from their historical origins as wedding bands, musique pour le mariage of the occupation troops of the French, Austro-Hungarian, Czech, Belgian, Moravian, Lombard, and Triestine Empire who contracted matrimony with pretty Mexican girls to the sound of the marriage-mariachi and now were passing by, interfering with the justice of my desire to apprehend the presumed or proven criminal, made impossible by the stanzas bellowed out by the musical advance of the band as it sang:

to welcome the slim man, smiling though melancholy, with a fresh scar on his cheek, his hair plastered with gum tragacanth, lifted high by the mob of admirers who carried him shouting “torero, torero” while the above-mentioned bullfighter seemed to doubt his own fame, scattering it with an airy wave of his hand as if he were prepared to die the next time, as if he were laughing sadly at the glory given him by the aficionados who carried him and the mariachis who now attempted to play an out-of-tune pasodoble while the bullfighter reluctantly waved and rather than celebrating a victory seemed to be bidding farewell to the world at the opportune time to the uncomprehending astonishment of the flocks of tourists, Gringo, Canadian, German, Scandinavian? tanned, immune to climate changes, who formed into groups of young people and old people who wanted to be young, in beach sandals, T-shirts with the names of hotels, clubs, places of origin, colleges, first, second, third, and no ages confused in the forced gaiety of having enjoyed vacations, coming from a country, the USA, miserly in granting them, fatiguing its workers with the challenge of crossing an interminable continent that extends from sea to shining sea, while the Europeans formed a line as if they were receiving a well-deserved prize and a summer consolation won, without their knowing it, by the French government of the Popular Front and Léon Blum (who was Léon Blum?) in 1936, when paid vacations were first granted.