Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

I closed my eyes. I breathed deeply. I closed the drawers, fearing to possess Asunta beyond this secret violation of intimacy. Fearful, above all, of myself, of my own desire and the limits or lack of limits that only desire could show me by inviting me, as it did at this moment, to be content with the objects I touched and smelled or take the step beyond the place where they intertwine and complicate the subjects of desire.

Asunta’s maid suddenly turned on the lights in the room.

“And what do you think you’re doing up here?”

WHAT HAVE I left in the inkwell? I mean, regarding my relationship with Jericó. Who defended me against the bullies at school, beginning with Errol Esparza in his earlier incarnation. Who took me in when I lost my orphan’s home with María Egipciaca (and much more). Jericó taught me to drive a car. He opened my ears to the classical music he collected in the attic on Praga. He opened my eyes to reproductions of the great paintings of the past he assembled on postcards. He pushed me to examine the philosophical seeds planted by Filopáter in our flowerpots. He extended our joint readings to Dickens and Dostoyevsky, Balzac and Beckett. He even taught me to dance, though with a warning at once ironic and forbidding.

One night he invited me to a cabaret, and instead of leading me into the dance hall he took me to a kind of office from which you could observe the couples dancing but not hear the music. I was disconcerted for a minute. Then I suffered an attack of laughter watching the poses, the contortions, the senseless, graceless comedy of couples captured in an aquarium by dancing they obviously deemed charming, gallant, sophisticated, sensual, liberated, and libertine: heads gyrating, eyes closed dreamily or open in false amazement, hands shaking as if to throw or catch invisible balls, shoulders in grotesque calisthenics, legs freed of all control, halfway between prayer and defecation. And the feet, cockroaches in shoes to avoid death by Flit, two-toned men’s shoes, cowboy boots, pointy-toed stiletto heels for the women, an occasional tennis shoe, all given over to the silent dance, the grotesque ritual of bodies deceiving themselves, feigning elegance, sensuality, good humor, which, stripped of accompanying sounds, reduced the dancers to a macabre imitation of an anticipated dance of death.

I thought that friendship was something fundamentally indecipherable. Pride, generosity, tenderness, accepted inadequacies, quiet reserves, the courage memory keeps acquiring-or the bitter absolution of its loss: everything united as in a chorus at once present and very distant, more eloquent in memory than in actuality, though with each gleam it brings the announcement of a future as unpredictable as a pistol going off at a piano concert.

“Let’s be independent,” Jericó fired at me. “Let’s not have opinions imposed on us.”

If the words surprised me, it was because they contained a tacit truth in our relationship. We had always been independent, I replied to my friend. He said I hadn’t: I had lived in a mansion like the prisoner of a tyrannical nanny and saved myself by coming to live with him.

“And you?” I asked. “Have you always been independent?”

Jericó looked at me with a kind of compassionate tenderness.

“Don’t ask me a question you could answer or be quiet about yourself, old pal. We’re independent? First ask yourself: Who has supported us for as long as we can remember?”

I interrupted him. “Lawyers. Licenciado Sanginés, the-”

He interrupted me: “Were they sent? All of them, servants, sent by someone else?”

“Physically or morally?” I attempted to lighten the unusual conversation; we hadn’t seen each other for more than a year, and this meeting in our old den on Calle de Praga was taking place on his initiative.

He ignored me. “We’ve assumed we have no past, that we live in the present, that the lawyers will provide and if we ask indiscreet questions, we’ll break the spell and wake up no longer princes in the bedroom but frogs in the ditch… and with no way out.”

I told him he was right. We had never inquired beyond the immediate situation. We received a monthly check. At times Sanginés led us to the doors of a mystery, but he never opened them. It was as if the two of us-Jericó, Josué-feared knowing more than we already knew: nothing. I suggested, before the ironic gaze of my friend, that perhaps our negligence had been our salvation. What or who would have answered our questions: Who are we, where do we come from, who are our parents, who supports us?

“Who supports us, Jericó?” I looked at him as if he were a mirror. “Are we innocent pimps? Are we better than La Hetara on Durango or the whore with the bee on her buttock?”

He remained silent, refusing to be surprised by my brusque remarks.

“Do you remember Father Filopáter when we were at school?”

I nodded. Of course.

Jericó said, after looking at the floor, that we had never understood-he spoke for the two of us-whether Filopáter pretended to be a false heretic to make faith palatable, like the false unbeliever who takes us down the path that leads to belief.

“Because Filopáter did two things, Josué. On one hand, he made us see the mindlessness of religion in the light of reason. But he also revealed the foolishness of reason in the light of faith.”

“Reason compromises faith and faith compromises reason,” I added without thinking too much about it, almost as a fatal, exact conclusion, that is, as dogma.

“Dogma.” Jericó read my mind. We were Castor and Pollux again, the mystic twins, the Dioscuri. The inseparable pair.

“Listen, who decides that a dogma is a dogma?” I asked, stepping back from the abyss of fraternity.

“Authority.”

“Force?”

“If you think so.”

I didn’t know where or by what route he wanted to take me. I said force isn’t enough. Force requires authority to be forceful.

“And authority without force?” Jericó asked.

“Is morality,” I took a risk with my words.

“And morality?”

“I won’t tell you it’s certainty, because then morality and faith would be the same.”

“Then, morality can be uncertain.”

“Yes. I believe the only certainty is uncertainty.”

“Why?”

“If you agree, Jericó, I’ll only ask you not to feel superior or inferior. Feel equal.”

“Do you remember when we were young we’d ask ourselves: What invalidates a man, what strips him of value?”

I nodded.

“Answer me now,” he said with a certain pugnacity.

“You and I are each embarked on his attempt at success. I sincerely think we haven’t defined ourselves yet. We’re always someone else because we’re always in the process of becoming.”

“I have.” Jericó intensified the conflict another degree.

“I haven’t.” I shrugged. “I don’t believe you, bro.”

“Do you want me to prove it to you?”

I looked at him with as much spirit (adverse, perverse, diverse?) as he showed looking at me.

“Sure, of course. I’ll envy you because I’m not as sure as you are. It’ll do me good.”

I waited for him to speak. We understood each other too well. He hesitated for an instant. Then he observed, smiling this time, that to be coherent, he would respond with actions, not words. I returned the smile and folded my arms. It was a spontaneous gesture but it indicated a certain permanence on my part at this time and in this place we had shared since we were nineteen years old.

“Don’t stop when you’re halfway there,” he said suddenly.

“You make the path as you walk, says the song.”

“You understand me.”

“Because I’m sitting here and you’re over there. All we have to do is change places and all the truth we’ve just said collapses, goes all to hell, becomes doubt.