Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

The deafening failure of these, my new intentions (my doubt), had to do with the mere presence of Asunta Jordán. From nine to two, from six to nine, from the afternoon to midnight, I was never far from her during my period of initiation in the offices of the Vasco de Quiroga building in the Santa Fe district. The building itself consisted of twelve floors for work and another two for the residence of the president of the enterprise, Max Monroy, in addition to a flat roof for the helicopter.

“And you?” I asked Asunta with a mixture of boldness and stupidity. “What floor do you live on?”

She looked at me with her eyes of an overcast sea.

“Repeat what you just said,” she ordered.

“Why?” I said, more fool me.

“So you’ll realize your stupidity.”

I admitted it. This woman, with whom I had fallen in love, was educating me. She led me through the twelve permitted floors, from the entrance on the Plaza Vasco de Quiroga, greeting the guards, the concierge, the elevator operators, and from there to the second, third, and fourth floors, where female secretaries had abandoned typing and stenography for the tape recorder and the computer, where male secretaries signed or initialed correspondence with a flourish and also dictated it, where file clerks transferred the old, dusty correspondence of a company founded by Max Monroy’s mother (my secret interlocutor in a nameless graveyard) almost ninety years ago onto tapes, diskettes, and now iPods, blogs, memory sticks, USB drives, external disks, and from there to the fifth floor, where an army of accountants was at work, to the sixth, offices of the lawyers in the service of the enterprise, to the seventh, from which Max Monroy’s cultural concerns-opera, ballet, art editions-radiated outward, to the eighth, a space dedicated to invention, to the ninth and tenth, the floors where practical ideas were devised for modern technologies.

On the eleventh floor I worked with Asunta Jordán and an entire executive army, one floor below the thirteenth and fourteenth floors inhabited, as far as my imagination could tell, by Bluebeard and his disposable women.

Was Asunta one of them?

“You’re not a seminarian or a tutor,” she said as if she could sense in me a hero of a nineteenth-century novel as embodied by Gérard Philipe. “You’re not an ordinary run-of-the-mill employee because you were sent here by Licenciado Sanginés, whom Max Monroy loves and respects. And you’re not socially inferior, though you’re not actually socially superior either.”

She looked me over from head to toe.

“You have to dress better. And something else, Josué. It’s better not to have been born than to be ill bred, do you understand? Society rewards good manners. Appearances. Speaking well. Good form. Form is part of our power, even if we’re surrounded by fools or perhaps for that very reason.”

She elaborated-from floor to floor-speaking about the Mexican cultivation of form.

“We’re the Italians of America, more than the Argentines,” she said in the elevator, “because we were a viceroyalty and above all because we descended from the Aztecs, not from boats.”

“An old joke,” I dared to say. Asunta seemed to be repeating something she had learned.

She laughed, as if in approval. “Since you’re none of that, it’s right for you to learn to be what you’re going to be.”

“And what I want to be?”

“From now on, that’s no longer different from what you’re going to be.”

To that effect-I suppose-Asunta took me to social functions she considered obligatory, in other offices and hotels, with powerful and sometimes pretentious people with a yearning for elegance, a subject that awakened in Asunta’s gaze and facial expression a series of reflections that she communicated to me in a very quiet voice, both of us surrounded by the rapid sound of the social hive, as she tasted the glass of champagne in which she only wet her lips without ever drinking from it: When she set down the glass, the level of the drink was always the same.

“What is luxury?” she would ask me on those occasions.

Surrounded by clothes, aromas, poses, strategies, Hispanic canapés and Indian servers, I didn’t know how to answer.

“Luxury is having what you don’t need,” she declared, her eyes hidden behind her raised glass. “Luxury is poetry: saying what you feel and think, without paying attention to the consequences. But luxury is also change. Styles change. Tastes change. Luxury tries to move ahead or at least catch up with style, creating and inviting it…”

She spoke of luxury not as if she had invented it but because she was inaugurating it.

“ ‘Luxury does not know that style and death are sisters,’ ” I said, citing Leopardi and testing her.

“It’s possible.” Asunta’s expression did not change, and I recalled old conversations with Jericó and Filopáter.

“And because style is change, it affects our business. What do we offer the consumer? The most modern, the most advanced, at times the most useless, because tell me, if you already have a black telephone, why do you want a white one? I’ll tell you: Because choosing between two phones today is choosing among a hundred phones tomorrow. Do you see? Luxury creates necessity, necessity creates luxury, and we produce and win. There is no end to it! There’s no reason for it ever to end! Ha!”

She didn’t say these words as an exclamation. Her behavior at these social events was very distinctive. She knew she was looked at and even guessed at. Over and above the conversations, the clink of glasses, the scent of lotions and perfumes, the taste of sausages and quesadillas, Asunta Jordán circulated in a kind of light, as if a theatrical spot were following her, always looking for the best angle, making her hair shine, resting like an insolent bee on her plump red lips à la Joan Crawford, hot or cold? That was the question others asked as they watched her go by, does Asunta Jordán kiss hot or cold? murmuring in secret to Josué, exciting the curiosity of the guests, Ask yourself, Josué, who’s looking at you, where are they looking at you from? Ask yourself but don’t look at anybody, act in public as if you had a secret and wanted them to guess what it is.

She offered no opening. She let them look at her. She imposed silence as she passed. And if she held my arm, it was as if I were a cane, a walking puppet, a theatrical prop. She needed me to circulate through the reception with no need to speak with anyone, exciting everyone’s curiosity each time she said something to me in a quiet voice, smiling or very, very serious. I was her support. A straight man.

In the real world (for me these excursions into society were almost imaginary) Asunta brought me up to date on my duties with rapid efficiency. There existed a national and global market of young people between twenty and thirty-five, Generation Y, given this name because they succeeded Generation X, who were now past forty and even though everybody adjusts to the customary until they fear that the newest thing will bite them, the twenty-year-olds are the primary target of consumer advertising. They want to make their debut. They want to be different. They want brand-new objects. They need technologies they can control immediately and that are (at least in their youthful imaginations) forbidden to “the older generation.”

The notable thing-Asunta continued-is that in the developed world each generation of the young is smaller than the one before because of the decline in population. New families, more divorce, more homosexual couples, fewer children. On the other hand, in the world of poverty-ours, the Mexican world, Josué, don’t kid yourself-the population increases but so does poverty. How can we combine demography and consumption? This is the problem set forth by Max Monroy, and your job, my young friend, is to solve it. How to increase consumption in an impoverished population?