Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

“ ‘Don Juan went to hell, Max.’

“ ‘Who’s to say he didn’t arrive in hell and transform it to his image and likeness?’

“ ‘Perhaps he already was living his own hell in the world.’

“ ‘It’s possible. People live, or invent, their heavens and hells on earth.’ ”

“ ‘Thy Heaven Doors are my Hell Gates,’ wrote William Blake,” I recited, and added, pretentiously: “It’s poetry.”

I winked at Asunta and immediately regretted it. She looked at me gravely. How did you fight this bull? Because she was a bull, not a cow. Or was she a clever ram that is a ewe?

“I don’t believe Max Monroy reads poetry. But he knows very well the gates of heaven and the walls of hell in the world of business.”

I let Asunta know I was prepared to learn.

“ ‘The position of the stars is relative,’ Max always tells me, and I think that’s why he’s never said ‘Do this,’ but only ‘It would be better if…’ ”

“Then you don’t feel inferior or subject to him, like a simple employee of Max Monroy?”

If Asunta was offended by my words, she didn’t show it. If she intended to be offended, she smiled back at me.

“I owe everything to Max Monroy.”

She looked at me in a forbidding manner. I mean: Her eyes told me Go no further. Stop there. Still, I detected something in them that asked me to postpone, only postpone, the matter. She moved her body in a way that let me know her spirit’s willingness to answer my questions, she was asking only for time, time for us to know each other better, to become more intimate… That’s what I wanted to believe.

I mean: That’s what I read in her posture, in her way of moving, turning away from me, looking at me out of the corner of her eye, sketching a sad smile that would give promise and grace to a bygone, serious tale.

“The interesting thing about Max Monroy is that even though he could have established himself at the top from the very beginning, he preferred to go step by step, almost like an apprentice to the guild of finance. He knew the danger facing him was to sit at a table prepared ahead of time, when the butler named Destiny orders: Eat.”

Did Asunta smile?

“Instead, he went out to hunt the stag, butchered it himself, took out the innards, cooked the meat, served it, ate it, and placed the horns over the fireplace in the dining room. As if none of it really mattered.”

Asunta said this with a kind of administrative sincerity that irritated me a good deal. As if her admiration for another man, even though he was her boss and she “owed him everything,” took away from me the position, perhaps a small one, that I wanted to obtain.

“Doesn’t Max Monroy ever make mistakes?” I asked, very stupidly.

“I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you the truth. It isn’t that he makes or doesn’t make mistakes. Max Monroy knows how to escape the demands of the moment and see farther than other people.”

“He’s perfect,” I remarked, marinating my own attraction to Asunta in more and more stupidities.

She didn’t take offense. She didn’t even doubt my intentions, irritating me even further. Did this woman consider me incapable of an insult?

“He escapes the exigencies of the moment. He moves forward. You understand that, don’t you?” she asked, and I realized that with her question she was telling me she knew what I was attempting and, incidentally, didn’t care. Max Monroy anticipates.

Asunta looked at me seriously.

“He moves ahead of the times.”

“And what happens if you change over time?”

“You’re defeated, Josué. Time defeats you.”

“ ‘Think, Asunta, of the speed of things. Just in my lifetime Mexico has moved from being an agricultural country to an industrialized one. Once the cycles were very slow. A cycle of centuries (Max likes alliterations, Josué) for the agricultural country. A dozen decades for the industrialized one. And now, Asunta, now…’ ”

An exceptional gesture: Max Monroy slams his fist into the open palm of his other hand.

“ ‘And now, Asunta, a time of speed, a global race without borders, without flags, without nations, to the world of technology and information. China, Japan, even India, even Russia…’-he didn’t mention the United States, it would have been redundant-‘The global world is a techno-informational world, and whoever doesn’t get on the train in time will have to walk barefoot and arrive at his destination late.’ ”

“Or not travel,” I commented.

“Or at least buy a pair of huaraches,” she said with a smile.

“ ‘Asunta, there are things I don’t say but that you know. Understand them and we’ll get along very well. Let’s work together. In Mexico, in all of Latin America, we mistake rhetoric for reality. Progress, democracy, justice. It’s enough for us to say them to believe they’re true. That’s why we go from failure to failure. We indicate a goal for Mexico, Brazil, Argentina… We convince ourselves that with words, favorable laws, the ribbon cut, and immediate forgetfulness we’ve achieved what we said we wanted… We say words that mock reality. In the end, reality mocks our words.’ ”

“Max Monroy wins out over reality?”

“No, he anticipates reality. He admits no pretexts.”

“Only texts,” I stated clearly.

“What he doesn’t admit is the madness of the simulations our governments and some entrepreneurs are so fond of.”

Asunta was telling me that Max Monroy was everything Max Monroy distanced himself from, and what he distanced himself from was the illusion and daily practice of Latin American politics.

“He moves ahead of his times,” the woman I desired said with irritating admiration.

“His times never defeat him?”

“How?” she said with feigned surprise. “Just watch my lips. Let’s see, with what? Please, just tell me that.”

With old age, I said, with death, I said, with rage, more magnetized by the desire to love Asunta than by the respect I owed Antigua Concepción, my radical interlocutor, that is, the root of my possible wisdom, my fortune, my destiny.

And in your mind, boy, do you think you can visit my grave with impunity?

“No, Señora, I don’t think that, forgive me.”

Then respect my son and don’t rush things, asshole.

Was I the secret emissary of Antigua Concepción in the world her son Max inherited and strengthened? I asked myself about my part in this soap opera, and what disturbed me most was my carnal desire for a woman who bored me: Asunta Jordán.

I’M GOING TO let Sara Pérez speak, Sara P., Nazario Esparza’s second wife. I confess her vocabulary offends me, though less than the facts the words ostentatiously display. Ostentatious: Sara P. takes pride in her virtues: The ones that stand out are vulgarity, cynicism, ignorance, perhaps black humor, possibly a hidden desire for seduction, I don’t know…

First of all, I’ll correct my previous affirmation. Jericó begged off accompanying us to the Esparzas’ house. “I don’t have time” was the message he sent to Sanginés and me. “The president’s office is very demanding. Besides, I don’t know what I can contribute… Sorry.”

We couldn’t find Errol. Sanginés sent a real expeditionary force to all the old nightclubs in the city and to the new ones in outlying neighborhoods, the tony ones and the dives: Our friend couldn’t be found anywhere, he had vanished, the city was very large, the country larger still, the borders porous. Errol could have been in any city in the United States or Guatemala. You’d have to be a new Cabeza de Vaca to go out and find him. And in our century there was no El Dorado as there had been in the sixteenth, except for the name of some casino in Las Vegas.