Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

I didn’t change my expression. “I’ll leave today.”

Jericó had the grace to lower his head. “No. I’m the one who’s leaving. You stay here. It’s just”-he looked up-“I’ll be traveling a lot around the country.”

“And?”

“And I’ll be receiving all kinds of visitors.”

“You have an office.”

“You understand what I’m saying.”

I didn’t want to linger over the obvious and think that Jericó needed to move to have greater erotic freedom. Perhaps he’d already had it while I was devoted to Lucha Zapata and now, without her, the promise of my constant presence had cost him a couple of “romances.”

I realized there was something more when Jericó said abruptly, “Nothing obliges me to live against myself.”

“Of course not,” I agreed with gravity.

“Against my own nature.”

It didn’t even occur to me that my friend was going to reveal homosexual inclinations. Images return to my memory of the shared shower at school and, more provocatively, our eroticism with the woman who had the posterior bee. I also recalled what he said when he returned from his years of study in Europe, a trip planned with as much mystery as his return, a mystery deepened by a certain falsity I intuited-I didn’t know, I only intuited-in the Parisian references of a young man who didn’t know French argot but did use American slang, as he did now:

“Look, as Justin Timberlake sings: ‘Daddy’s on a mission to please.’ Don’t be offended.”

“Of course not, Jericó. You and I have had the intelligence never to contradict each other, knowing that each of us has his own ideas.”

“And his own life,” my friend said exultantly.

I said that was true and looked at him without any expression, asking him rhetorically: “His own nature?”

I didn’t say it trying to trap him, or with ill will, or deceitfully, but really wanting him to explain to me what “his own nature” was.

“We’re not the same,” he said in response to my tacit question. “The world changes and we change along with it. Do you remember what I said, right here, when I came back to Mexico? I asked you then, What do we have? A name, an occupation, status? Or are we a wasteland? A garbage dump of what might have been? A canceled register of debits and credits? Not even the bottom of the stewpot?”

I stopped him with a movement of my hand. “Take a breath, please.”

“We need a position, Josué. We can’t give as our occupation ‘I think’ or ‘I am.’ ”

“We can turn into young old men, like some musicians, Compay Segundo or the Rolling Stones, why not? didn’t I warn you?”

“Don’t joke around. I’m serious. The time has come for us to apply ourselves to action. We have to act.”

“Even though we betray our ideas?” I said with no mean-spirited intention.

He didn’t take it badly. “Adapting ourselves to reality. Reality is going to demand things in line with our talents though opposed to our ideals.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to do, I’m going to act in accordance with necessity and try, as far as possible, to maintain my ideals. What do you think?”

“And if your ideals are bad ones?”

“I’ll be a politician, Josué. I’ll try to make them less bad.”

I smiled and told my friend we really were faithful to our Catholic education and the morality of the lesser evil when it’s necessary to choose between two demons. Were we Jesuits ?

“And besides, the Jesuit goes where the Pope orders him to, without protest, without delay.”

“But that order was to save souls,” I said with the irony his words provoked in me.

“And souls aren’t saved passively,” he replied with conviction. “You must have absolute faith in what you’re doing. Your ends must be clear. Your actions, overpowering. A country isn’t built without implacable acts. In Mexico we’ve lived too long on compromise. Compromise only delays action. Compromise is wishy-washy.”

He was agitated, and I looked at him with distress, almost out of the corner of my eye.

He said that in every society there are the dominant and the dominated. The unbearable thing is not this but when the dominant don’t know how to dominate, abandoning the dominated to a fatal or vegetative existence.

“One must dominate to improve everyone, Josué. Everyone. Do you agree?”

Smiling, I accused him of elitism. He answered that elites were indispensable. But it was necessary to unite them with the masses.

“A more mass-oriented elite,” Jericó declared, moving like a caged animal around a place, ours until then, that he apparently was transforming now into a prison ready to be abandoned. “Do you think you’re immortal?” he asked.

I laughed. “Not at all.”

He waved his finger in my face. “Don’t lie. When we’re young we all think we’re immortal. That’s why we do what we do. We don’t judge. We invent. We don’t give or take advice. We do two things: We don’t accept what’s already been done. We renovate.”

I laughed in spite of myself.

Me too-I said to myself-I think I’m going to live forever, I feel it in my soul though my head tells me otherwise.

“Do you think it’s legitimate for the old to control everything, power, money, obedience? Do you?”

“Ask me that on the day I become old.” I tried to be amiable with a friend whose belligerent face, so impassioned it changed color, distanced him from me by the minute.

Jericó realized I was looking at him and judging him. He tried to calm down. He made a sacrilegious joke.

“If you believe in the Immaculate Conception, why not believe in the Maculate Conception?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, a little shocked in spite of myself.

“Nothing, pal. Only that life offers us a million possibilities on every corner. Or rather, on every plaza.”

His eyes were shining. He said to imagine a circular plaza-

“A rond-point ?” I asked deliberately.

“Yes, a circle out of which, say, four or six avenues emerge-”

“Like the Place de l’Etoile in Paris.”

“Ecole,” he said enthusiastically. “The point is, which of the six avenues are you going to take? Because when you choose one, it’s as if you’ve sacrificed the other five. And how do you know you’ve made the right choice?”

“You don’t know,” I murmured. “Except at the end of the avenue.”

“And the bad thing is you can’t go back to the starting point.”

“To the original plaza. La Concorde,” I said with a smile and, unintentionally, with irony.

He kept looking at me. With affection. With defiance. With an unspoken plea: Understand me. Love me. And if you love and understand me, don’t try to find out any more.

There was a silence. Then Jericó began to pack his things and the conversation resumed its usual colloquial tone. I helped him pack. He told me to keep his records. And his books? Those too. But then he looked at me in a strange way I didn’t understand. The books were mine. And him, what was he going to read from now on?

“Let’s be baroque,” he said with a laugh, shrugging his shoulders, as if that definition would transform the history of Mexico and the Mexicans into chicken soup.

“Or let’s be daring,” I said. “Why not?”

“Why not?” he repeated with a light laugh. “Life is getting away from us.”

“And to hell with the consequences.” I considered the unpleasant scene to be over. I touched my friend’s shoulder.

I offered to help him carry down the two suitcases.

He refused.

I PROPOSED SHOWING indifference to beauty, health, and fortune. I wanted to transform my indifference into something distant from vice and virtue. I was afraid to fall into solitude, suicide, or the law. I wanted, in short, to avoid the passions, considering them a sickness of the soul.