Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

“Do you realize?” Jericó exploded and I saw him this way, now, in shirtsleeves, his shirt open to his navel, his hairless chest demanding the heroism of bronze, the childish cheeks, subtly stripped of baby fat, of a face consumed by the heroic gesture and the intense brilliance of his pale eyes.

Did I realize? he asked rhetorically, pointing down and into the distance, a country of more than a hundred million inhabitants that cannot provide work, food, or schooling to half the population, a country that does not know how to employ the millions of workers it needs to build highways, dams, schools, housing, hospitals, to preserve forests, enrich fields, construct factories, a country where hunger, ignorance, and unemployment lead to crime, a criminality that invades everything, the police are criminal, order disintegrates, Josué, the politicians are corrupt, the canoe has sprung a leak, we live in a Xochimilco with no Dolores del Río or Pedro Armendáriz or pigs to save us: The canals are filled with garbage, they were choked by filth, abandonment, thorns, the corpses of piglets, chicken bones, the remains of flowers…

He came up to me but didn’t touch me.

“Josué. This year I’ve traveled the country from one end to the other. The president gave me the job of forming groups for celebrating fiestas. I betrayed him, Josué. I’ve gone from village to village to form combat groups, organizing immigrants who find no way out, campesinos ruined by the Free Trade Agreement, discontented workers, inciting all of them, my brother, to slowdowns, to boycotts, to stealing parts, to self-inflicted accidents, to arson and murder…”

I listened to him with a mixture of fascination and horror, and if one impelled me to distance him, the other led me to an embrace, a mixture that was idiotic but explicable of what in me refused and what in me desired. From village to village, he repeated, recruiting at funerals, churches, dances, barbecues…

“Following the orders of El Señor Presidente, you understand? preparing the festivities that matter to him so much in order to distract, deceive, put blinders on the mule, Josué, without realizing that here we have a gigantic force for action, a force of people who are fed up, forsaken, desperate, ready for anything…”

I asked without saying a word: Anything?

“For submission and abandonment, because that has been the rule for centuries,” he continued, reading the question in my gaze. “For the festive deceit, which is what the president wants.”

“And you?” I managed, finally, to squeeze in a word.

I didn’t have to say what I was going to say.

And you?

“If you don’t want to hear the answer, don’t ask the question,” said Jericó.

“DON’T TOUCH MY face.” “Don’t open your mouth.” “Don’t say anything.” All these prohibitions from Asunta excited my imagination and I reproached myself, wondering if I could be so boorish that I was not satisfied with her sex but demanded of her a chatter that was, barely, a complement to my own “lyric poetry”: the words that in my sentimental fictions corresponded to physical love. I felt in me a fountain of poetic chivalry that I wanted to accompany the more bestiarium , the animal custom that sex is, with a verbal reduction something like the musical accompaniment to a bolero, or the background music in a film… in any case, more angelicarum .

And Asunta asked for silence. She cut off my words and left me perplexed. I didn’t know if the demand for silence was the condition of a promise: Be quiet and you’ll see me again. Or a condemnation: Be quiet because you won’t have me again. Was this the sublime coquetry of the woman, the doubt that left me hanging and allowed me to guess at the worst and the best, repeated delight or exile from pleasure, heaven with Asunta and hell without her?

I wanted to believe I was a ludic subject of the enchantress, that I would return to her bed, her graces, her blessing, on a night when I least expected it. That, in a sense, she would put me to the test. That my virility had seduced her forever. That in secret she would tell herself, I want more, Josué, I want more, though her coquetry (or her discretion) moved her to circumspection in order to transform the wait into pleasure not only renewed but multiplied… It was enough for me to believe this in order to arm myself with patience and, with patience, to obtain many favors. The first, the gift of virtue. I deserved her love because I was faithful and knew, like an ancient knight, how to wait and not despair, stand vigil over the weapons of sex, respond calmly to the call of my lady. This idea of chaste love hampered my imagination for a few days. I launched into the reading and rereading of Don Quixote , above all reading aloud the passages of love and honor dedicated to Dulcinea.

I’ll tell you, this mania did not last very long, because my flesh was impatient and my heart less strong than I had thought, so Asunta stopped being Dulcinea-Iseult-Heloise and became a base fetish, to the extent that her photograph at the head of my bed occupied a quasivirginal spot, and I say “quasi” because on a few nights I did not resist the temptation to masturbate looking at her face (upside down, it’s true, given that my jerking off occurred while I was lying in bed and Asunta’s image hung vertically, held up by a tack) and surrendering, in the end, to solitary pleasure, forgetting Asunta, reproaching myself for my weakness though repeating that line about “Things are known to Onan unknown to Don Juan.”

Don Juan! I loved Mozart’s opera though I was astounded that in it the seducer seduces no one: not the disdainful Doña Ana, or the peasant Zerlina, or his former lover Doña Elvira, bent now on revenge.

Stripped of literary, oneiric, onanist, fetishist, etcetera words and opportunities, what remained for me, I ask the reader, but to return to the attack, be brave, take the citadel by force? In other words, have the audacity to return at midnight to the Castle of Utopia, the palace inhabited by Asunta on the thirteenth floor, where one day I had ventured to contemplate and touch and smell my lady’s underthings, risking ridicule at entering her bedchamber and taking her by dint of strength-or the success of being accepted because, ladies and gentlemen, this was what she secretly hoped for from me: audacity, risk, daring, boldness, all the synonyms you like to supplant and sustain the pure, simple desire of tasting the flesh and dominating the body of a woman named Asunta.

I had, thanks to my administrative duties in the company, master keys. I could go into Asunta’s apartment and move around like a thief who has cased the terrain, even my beauty’s bedroom. On the way I grew accustomed to the darkness, so when I reached the bedroom I was aware of Asunta’s absence. The bed was perfectly made. No proof existed that she had slept here.

This simple fact unleashed in me a storm of jealousy and aberrant suppositions. If she wasn’t here, where could she be gallivanting at one-thirty in the morning? I rejected the more obvious explanations. She was at a dinner. Why hadn’t she told me about it? Because she had absolutely no obligation to let me know about her social activities. Had she gone on vacation? Impossible. I knew her schedule better than my own. Asunta was a workaholic who did not miss a single minute of her work schedule. Ah, the bathroom… Not there either. I opened the door and saw a dry, clean place free of humanity (or rather, the humanity I longed for). I had the sensation of how similar an empty bathroom was to a morgue. I lost my mind. No doubt Asunta was hiding under the bed to mock me. No. She went into her closet because, perversely, she liked to smell and feel herself enveloped by the clothing that once, when she was a little provincial wife, she could not have. Not at all. Behind a curtain, hiding from herself? Ridiculous.