Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

What was left to explore? My exalted spirit, my jealousy coming in vague waves, my desire in tempestuous agitation, my loss of all common sense, were manifested in the uncontrollable movement of my body, the sweat that ran down my neck and armpits, the nerves roused in my arms and legs, the mute excitation of my sex, tense in secret repose, saving itself for the great fiesta of love waiting for me, I was certain, in some corner of this false utopia in Santa Fe.

“Max Monroy is a strong, secure man, Josué. So much so that he never locks the door of his apartment, up on the fourteenth floor.”

I knew that on the roof of the building there was a helicopter waiting for Max’s orders and a wing for the services and rooms of his cooks, bodyguards, servants, and pilots. Also, I repeat, I knew his immense self-confidence (the vanity of the powerful man) kept open the doors of his apartment, which I now penetrated with the supreme audacity of a desire that drove away any feeling of danger as I blindly crossed what I supposed was a living room: The TV screens shone solitary in the night, as if they could not resign themselves to being turned off and would continue transmitting day and night commercial announcements, soap operas, political commentary, news, old movies, with an innocent longing, failed from the start, to find a conclusion.

I left out the dining room with its twelve chairs. The library with the gleaming backs of its books. The illuminated paintings of Zárraga, Soriano, and Zurbarán (I respected them as if they were a trio of singers). I dared to approach a door that announced repose and isolation.

I opened it.

They ignored me.

What I heard when I opened the door, Asunta’s words of love for Max, readers must imagine…

I CLIMBED INTO the helicopter behind Asunta. She sat in the back of the craft, beside a shadow named Max Monroy. I had no time to greet him. I took a seat next to the pilot as the propellers made the sound of a hurricane and conversation-even the most elementary, like good morning-became impossible.

The helicopter made an alarming vertical ascent that seemed to pierce the sky and eternity for a vague instant before the low, dangerous, turbulent flight, difficult and problematic, that carried us from Santa Fe to Los Pinos, the offices of the honorable president of the republic Don Valentín Pedro Carrera, that is, to a bare, paved-over space surrounded by squat, reinforced buildings and protected, at the exit, by a blur of mastiffs howling so loudly they eclipsed-and almost demanded silence from-the helicopter’s engines.

I got out before anyone else and saw Max Monroy for the first time. Asunta climbed down and offered her hand to the spectral being at the back of the craft who appeared before me like a shadow, perhaps because that is what Max Monroy had been-had always been-for me until then, so that his physical presence affected me as if my own soul had been revealed to me, as if this phantom, upon becoming corporeal, gave me a physical reality I had not known in myself before.

Asunta offered him her arm. Monroy refused with an energetic chivalry verging on rudeness. He walked along the pavement without looking at anyone but looking straight ahead, as if for him terrestrial accidents did not exist. Asunta was at his side, with a visible, irritating preoccupation very inferior to the serious-not to say severe-care the nurse Elvira Ríos had offered me. I walked behind the pair. Preceding all of us was an army officer-I couldn’t read his rank-but I had eyes only for Max Monroy, dressed in black with a white shirt and a blue bow tie with white dots.

He walked upright, not saying a word. His head rested on his shoulders like a pumpkin on dark soil. He had no neck. His clothes were at once too short and too long, obliging me to wonder about his height. He wasn’t tall. He wasn’t short. He was as ambivalent as his attire, clothes that could seem stripped of personality if they hadn’t been worn and therefore personalized by this precise human being who consequently seemed at that moment a man in disguise, but disguised as himself, as if he were crossing the stage of the great theater of the world knowing it was a theater, while the rest of us believed we were in and living with reality.

Knowing the world is a theater and giving it the advantage of knowing itself to be reality though we know it isn’t… I wonder to this very day why, seeing Max climb out of the helicopter and advance along the landing strip with the firm though mortal step of a man in his eighties, my own clothing didn’t make me laugh, along with the clothes of Asunta and the pilot who remained on the strip looking at us with a smile I chose to judge as skeptical. And the smile of the presidential guard ahead of us, leading the way. For in Monroy’s body, his way of being and walking forward, I guessed at the multiple paradox of our knowing we were disguised not when we go to a carnival but when we dress every day to attend to our jobs, our loves, our diversions, our sorrows and joys. And when we see ourselves naked? Isn’t this the primeval disguise, the toga of external skin that masks our organic dispersion of brain, bones, viscera, unattached muscles, like the contents of a shopping basket spilling out on the floor if not for the corporeal container?

The mastiffs barked. As Max approached, they maintained a silence of slavering lower jaws, allowed us to pass, retreated. No doubt the presidential guard walking ahead of us quieted them. It didn’t fail to attract my attention, however, that Monroy had not, even for an instant, slowed his pace or looked at the dogs, moving forward at the speed he had settled on as if obstacles or dangers did not exist. Have I invented what I’m saying? Does it obey a reality and not my interpretation of reality? And wasn’t this the dilemma Max Monroy had put in my hands: the eternal problem of knowing the line between reality and fantasy, or rather, between reality and a perception of reality? Was all of reality a fantasy in which a man like Max Monroy, in possession of the central character in the drama, assumes as true his own fantasy and leads the rest of us into being phantoms of a phantom, the cast that is secondary to the star of an auto sacramental pompously called Life ?

In this state of mind, how could I not recall my youthful reading of Calderón de la Barca and his Great Theater of the World: The protagonist humanity waits impatiently behind the scenes until the supreme director of the drama, God himself, invents humankind and says: “Action! On stage!” But since “humanity” is an abstraction, what God really does is assign a role to each and every one of his creatures-Max Monroy, Asunta Jordán, Jericó, me… the entire extensive cast of this novel that well could be a short film of the superproducer God, Inc., L.L.P.

A preview. A trailer. But with a warning: The star is named Max Monroy. The rest are secondary roles and even extras. We who carry the spears. The ones in the chorus. The ones in the crowd.

Then who was this man who advanced between hidden weapons, silenced dogs, and a minimum escort: the officer, Asunta, and me? If he was a man in disguise, was the immense dignity with which he climbed the stairs to the president’s office, his clenched jaw, his closed mouth with tight, invisible lips also a disguise? He walked forward and entered the office of the president, who was accompanied only by Jericó, not looking at Jericó and looking at the president with deep eyes, and when Valentín Pedro Carrera welcomed him and offered his hand, Max Monroy did not return the greeting, and when the president invited us to take a seat and he himself sat down, Max Monroy looked at him with that deep gaze filled with memory and foresight.

“Remain standing, Mr. President.”