Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

In short: Only Sanginés and I showed up, escorted by the police and the court secretaries to hear Sara Pérez de Esparza’s statement. She was seated on a kind of throne placed in the center of the reception room that I remembered in another time, presided over by the timid chastity of Esparza’s first wife, Errol’s mother, and now by the female I could not help associating, in retrospect, with an act of coarse sexuality in the closet of a men’s room in the Benito Juárez International Airport; with a hurried walk, preceded by a porter and dressed like Judith on her way to Bethulia, “for a chat,” along the immense, crowded corridors of that airport; with a sorrowful day in memory of her predecessor Doña Estrellita; with another walk through the airport on the day I ran into Lucha Zapata for the first time; and finally, with the night on which Jericó and I fucked this same woman in La Hetara’s brothel.

But back then she wore a veil and I could identify her only by the bee tattooed on her buttock, which I saw again during the absurd scene in the airport bathroom.

Now, Sara Pérez de Esparza was seated on her semi-Gothic and pseudo-Versaillesque throne, appropriate to her strange mixture of omnivorous tastes, for I was beginning to think everything could be found in this woman, the worst and the best, the most vulgar and the most refined, the most desirable and the most repugnant, without passing through any nuance of common sense. Seated on her throne, scratching at her forearms with silvered nails as long as scimitars, dressed like a star in La Dolce Vita in 1960s palazzo pajamas, black and gold with dolphins swimming between her bosom and her back, between her knee and her coccyx: the strangely out-of-fashion outfit with a loose shirt to generously display her breasts, and wide sailor’s pants. Barefoot, though she had rings on four toes of each foot, a brilliant little jewel encrusted in each small toe, and several slave bands around her ankles, matching the entire metallic orchestra sounding at her wrists and competing with the sepulchral silence of her heavy rings and everything contrasting with the bareness of her neck, as if Sara wanted nothing to distract from the attention due her décolletage, the pride she took in her tits, boobs, melons, jugs, knockers, who knows what she herself called those enormous, immobile tubercles that peeked out, fixed like a double gravestone where lay buried the natural sensuality of this artificial being, similar to a mechanical doll that had to be wound up each morning with a gold key: Sara P. had, mounted on top of her corporeal extravaganza, a relatively small head made larger by the curls of blond hair that ascended like mountain ranges to a smooth forehead, lifted for its crown of black pearls, giving the terrifying impression that the jewels were eating her hair, all of it to sanctify a rigid, tightened face, beautiful in a vulgar, obvious way, like a farewell sunset in the movies, like a garage calendar, like the picture of a soldier, a cabdriver, a mechanic, or a teenage anarchist.

The firm gaze fixed, the full mouth like a paralyzed cherry. The uncontrollable nose nervous. Ears buried by the heavy weight of tri-colored earrings: strange, obvious, unpleasant pendants in the colors of the national flag. For the first time I saw her up close, in detail.

She was a camouflaged woman. Smells. Wrinkles. Laughter. Everything was controlled, rigid, remade as if by enchantment.

She spoke, and from the beginning I sensed her words were at once the first and final ones of her life. Both a baptismal and sepulchral discourse.

Doña Hetara, the madam of the bordello on Durango, ministered to the tastes of her clients and the fortunes of her girls. She wasn’t one of those brothel owners who simply run a business with whores. Much abused, Doña Hetara. Lots of bluster. Nothing of the fool about her. She would always say: Di-ver-si-fy. And so she managed not only a whorehouse but a nuns’ school where Doña Hetara, who was very charitable, sent the old hookers to dress as religious and pretend to educate the young hookers who were looking for husbands. Because basically there is no whore who does not aspire to matrimony. It infuriates them that men don’t call them “women” but “broads.” Being a “broad” is being a whore, trash, tamale wrapper, mole pot. Being a “woman” is being a girlfriend who can become a wife and mother.

After a period of time to toughen her up in the brothel on Calle de Durango, Sara was sent to the aforementioned nuns’ school to be refined, and there Don Nazario Esparza met her, for he was always on the lookout for new sensations and fresh meat for his “insatiable appetite” or, in other words, what good were all the furniture stores, hotels, movie houses, and commercial centers, what good were beds if he couldn’t use them to have fun with a good “ broad”?

“Don’t trouble yourself, Don Nazario. Search no further, I’ll take care of everything. Don’t torture yourself. Take it slow. Buy into the idea that you’re still a great lover. You’re in great shape, that’s the truth. A real cocksman.”

And so the millionaire was seduced by the convent girl Sarita, who lived in a monastery where her parents had abandoned her.

“They abandoned her, Señora?”

“Let’s say they made a present of her.”

“Haven’t they seen her again?”

“Don’t worry, Don Nazario. We demanded a tidy sum for accepting the present and didn’t let them see her again. Sarita is all alone. She’ll have only you, Señor.”

According to what he himself said and his son Errol told us.

You and a motley band of mariachis, thieves, bums, crazies, drug addicts, pimps, bongo players, and all those she hadn’t met but imagined, for more men passed through her head than there were in an army, those who had fucked her and those who would have fucked her if they had known the tricks lodged in the well-disposed body of Sara P. Like a beautiful butterfly that could turn into a caterpillar of pleasure, imitate to perfection the manners of the upper class, and engage in all the wicked lower-class vices. I saw her as a funereal hostess on the day of Doña Estrellita’s obsequies, she was refined but sham refined, something was out of place in her gestures, her dress, above all in the way she gave orders and treated the servants, the arrogant contempt, the lack of courtesy, the essential bad upbringing of Sara P. exposed with a disdain that assimilated her into what the stupid woman believed she despised.

Of course Sara came to the mansion on Pedregal with her virginity intact, and Don Nazario enjoyed the privilege of deflowering her. She was a Scotch tape virgin, astutely fabricated by the false nuns of the dissolute convent, who restored maidenheads as easily as they cooked mole . How could Don Nazario know? He hadn’t fornicated with a virgin in his whole damn life except for the chaste but narrow Señora Estrellita, who had a psychic padlock between her legs, and since Sarita gave him that unheard-of pleasure, from then on he became a slave to his wife the false nun. Nazario, who was a Roman emperor accustomed to tossing coins into the crowd. Nazario, who demanded to be the center of attention. Nazario of the choleric temperament and blind rage. Transformed into a poodle, a lapdog, a plaything of the whorish, sensual, voracious, impassive Sarita: the pontiff vanquished by the unaccustomed lechery of the false priestess who gradually bared her soul, provoked lust, vomited filthy words, demanded animal positions, Make me the lioness, Nazario, make me what all men like, tiger, not just you, enjoy my cunt, I want to enjoy it, I want everybody to enjoy it, the mariachi, the porter, the cabdriver, the potter: Shape me, Nazario, like I was your flowerpot .