Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

How could I approach her beyond our daily working relationship? By imagining her reality or realizing her imagination?

I tried to approach her by approaching those who worked in the Vasco de Quiroga building, as if the undesired origin of the desired woman would come alive in the origin of Monroy’s employees in the Utopia building. As if on knowing them, I would see a lessened Asunta, still without power. As if, in my mean-spirited rancor, I desired to see her expelled from Olympus and returned to the minihell of anonymous work.

I WAS RESTING, my arms crossed above me and my hands forming a kind of pillow, when I heard footsteps on the stairs and identified them with Jericó. They were phantom steps that sent back to me an echo of my best friend and, perhaps, my best years. Everything was thrown into turmoil (for nostalgia should not last too long) by the sensation that Jericó not only had reached the apartment on Calle de Praga we once shared but was opening the door with the key we also had shared.

I felt a certain uneasiness: I was the one who lived here now, and this was the place I left to go to work at the San Juan de Aragón Prison or the Santa Fe offices. For the first time, I was the master of the house. Jericó’s key going into the lock on the door was like a physical and spiritual violation. He came in and made himself right at home. He had told me, from the beginning, that the place needed his noise even though he shared it with me, the newcomer, the stone guest, the Tancredo of bullfighting.

“Wake up, Josué,” he said from the door, raising his hand to his forehead in a kind of pseudomilitary salute.

“I am awake,” I said reluctantly, looking at the advancing shadow out of the corner of my eye.

“Did you eat yet?” he persisted and didn’t allow me to answer. “Because I ask you, pal, who digests better: the man who sleeps after a banquet or the one who goes out to hunt?”

I shrugged. Jericó was interrupting a daydream dedicated to Asunta, what she was like, how I could have her, would she love me again, or was our encounter only a passing quickie, informal, without consequences?

I was recalling and consecrating it, Asunta’s body, and now Jericó proceeded with anatomical brutality: “Are you going out to hunt, are you coming home to sleep? How do you know?”

He poked my navel and drew a line between my ribs.

“By opening up your belly.”

He laughed.

“There’s the proof.”

I emerged from my lethargy. I sat on the edge of the bed. Jericó prepared coffee. He had taken possession of something that, I told myself, offended, he had never left. I was the intruder. I was practically the vagrant.

“What do you want?” I said, longing to annoy him.

His expression didn’t change: “I want you.” He offered me a steaming cup of instant coffee.

“Why?”

He launched into a discourse that seemed interminable. Who were we? Two people shipwrecked from paternal authority. That’s what makes us brothers. We lack a family. We didn’t have an old man. We were abandoned, liberated, set adrift.

“Whatever you like.”

“And?”

“That obliges us to know our internal limits. You realize that the majority of human beings never seriously ask themselves: Who am I? What are my limits? Why? Because family and society have marked out the path and boundaries for them. Here, kid, don’t step off the path, look as far ahead as you like, but don’t look right or left. Eyes fixed on the horizon we presented to you because we think about you, son, and want the best for you, don’t think about anything, everything’s been thought about in advance, my boy, it’s for your own good, don’t stray, don’t venture anything, don’t turn away from a destiny you don’t deserve to know independently, why would you, boy, if we’ve already prepared it for you? We prepared the future for you the way you make a bed, here are the pillows, here are the covers, get in and sleep, baby, don’t disturb the bed, after all, it took a lot for us to arrange it for you and have it ready so you can sleep peacefully, sleep and sleep and sleep, youngster, kid, baby, boy, son, and not worry about a thing.”

He made a nasty face and then burst into laughter.

“Wake up, Josué, arise and walk!”

I told him I was listening. He didn’t expect any words from me. He had brought his own speech and my job was to listen to him and not make a sound.

“I continue: You and I weren’t born for domesticity. Consider your sexual life. From pillar to post, here a vagabond, there a whore, here a nurse, there a secretary…”

“I do better than you, a really solitary plainsman,” I grumbled, angry that he knew what I thought he was unaware of.

“We have no friends,” he said, somewhat disconcerted.

“Do you think we’re part of a vanished civilization?”

“We’re always obliged to correct the errors in our destiny, whatever it may have been, Josué. So it’s more than the truth…”

“A different destiny? How?”

“By getting together with people. Organizing the people. Taking a bath with the masses, like the showers you and I used to take together, but now with millions of human beings who want to be redeemed.”

“Won’t they be redeemed better on their own?”

“No,” Jericó almost shouted. “What’s needed is the head, the leader!”

“The Duce, the Fuehrer,” I said with a skeptical smile.

“The country is ripe,” Jericó asserted, corrected his course, and returned to him and me.

“Yes, I swear to you, God’s truth, only you, and only I, we weren’t born to be husbands or fathers or even faithful lovers. You and I, Josué, were born for freedom, without ties, the road cleared to be and act without reporting to anyone, do you understand? We are free, old friend, free as the air, the rain, the sea, the birds!”

“Until a hunter shoots you, and you fall and become supper. Sure…”

“Risks,” Jericó said with a laugh, “and the air can be disturbed by a cyclone, the rain can be stormy, the sea rough, and the bird, with luck, unconquered and flying toward freedom.”

“An old bird, you mean,” I said to harmonize with the jubilation of my old companion. I even sang: “Wounded bird of the dawn…”

“In other words, Josué, do you believe you and I have a special mission, since love, home, marriage are forbidden to us?”

“Friendship would be enough,” I murmured with no desire to offend or even inquire.

He slammed one fist with the other. It was a gesture of action, of virtue, of energy, of a voluntary desire to lead. To lead me to him and himself to me as well.

He said the country was not advancing. Why? The president is weak. He hasn’t governed with energy. We did everything halfway. You and I? No. Those who governed us. Everything halfway, everything mediocre. We though we were king of the world because we had oil. We sold it for a lot of money. With the profits, we bought nothing but trinkets. A luxury six-year term. We behaved like nouveaux riches. There was no “tomorrow.” The price went down. Debts remained. A new horizon. Commerce. A quick treaty, to deck out another six-year term. Things are free to move about. Not people. Currency, stocks, objects move. Workers remain stationary, though they’re needed in the USA. Come because we need you. But if you come, we’ll kill you. Okay? Fair enough? Since then we simply fill in one hole before the next one opens. We’re like the little Dutch boy in the story, his finger stuck in the hole in the dike to avoid the inevitable flood. But we only put our finger deep in our asshole. And it smells bad.

Theatrically, my friend Jericó pulled aside the curtain in the room to reveal, from our high perch, the omnipresent urban chaos of Mexico City, the great deep pyramid of Cementos Tolteca and Seguros América and Avenidas Cuauhtémoc, the fragmented pyramid sunk in primeval mud and asphyxiated in secondary air, the clogged traffic, the overflowing buses, the streets numerous but uncountable: the lines of workers at five in the morning waiting to go to their job and return at seven at night in order to return at five… Six hours for working. Eight for commuting. Life.