Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

If Carrera was disconcerted, he hid it very well.

“As you choose. Do you prefer to speak standing?”

Monroy settled into a chair.

“No. I sit. You stand, Señor.”

We looked at one another for a moment. Jericó looked at me and I at him. Asunta at the president and the president at Monroy. Max looked at no one. And not as proof of crushing pride but, on the contrary, as if it pained him to see and be seen, obliging me to realize, at that moment, why he never allowed himself to be seen. The gaze of others hurt him. It wounded him to see and be seen. His kingdom was one of absence. And yet, and this was the greatest paradox, his business was sight, sound, spectacle: He lived by what he was not; by what perhaps, repelled him.

For a moment I lost track of what was going on. Monroy was humiliating the president of the republic, whose only response as he remained standing before a seated Monroy was to order the officer who had brought us here:

“You may withdraw, Captain.”

LEAVING BEHIND MY fraternal relationship with Jericó, a double movement impelled me both forward and back.

Forward: my fairly fleeting contact with other workers in the office of Max Monroy. Since I had grown up in the well-provided isolation of the house on Berlín, with no company other than the severe María Egipciaca and no friendships but those at school-Errol and Jericó-my contact with other young people had been, if not nonexistent, then barely sporadic. I don’t know, vigilant readers, if when I have exercised the right of the narrator-an amiable authoritarian-to select the stellar scenes in my life, I have left in novelistic limbo the other persons who surrounded me at schools, in offices, on the streets.

I have already recounted the intense desires that carried me, at a given moment, from the house on Berlín to the apartment on Praga to the prison at San Juan de Aragón to the Cerrada de Chimalpopoca to the office of Max Monroy. But since I had been in that office for almost two years (and though my primary relationship was with Asunta Jordán and, through her, with a Max Monroy who assumed in my imagination the hazy trappings of a phantom), I could not fail to observe, though to a lesser degree than what I’ve said here, my colleagues at work and how I got along with them.

I should indicate here that my anxieties and concerns, enigmas and humiliations sought an outlet on two very distinct levels-contrary, I should say.

I spent some time ingratiating myself with my colleagues. Please remember that Jericó and I were brought up in a kind of hothouse, I with very little contact beyond the house on Berlín and my jailer María Egipciaca, and he in the enclosure of the garret on Praga. And this happened not because of a predetermined plan but in a natural way. I’ve already told how, at school, Jericó and I gravitated toward each other to the exclusion of the “high-spirited boys” more interested than Jericó and I in sports, tiresome jokes, and, in any case, family life, and we were soon connected by intellectual curiosity and the tutoring of Filopáter. We were closer to Nietzsche and Saint Thomas than to our classmates Pecas and Trompas, and our contact with the other teachers occurred only in class or when the innocent pervert Soler hefted our balls before we played sports.

Errol Esparza had been our only contact with a family life that, to judge by his, it was better not to have. Living domestically, as Errol did with Don Nazario and Doña Estrellita, was a hymn to the benefits of orphanhood. Though being an orphan may mean being abandoned to the expectation of recovering lost parents or a habitual resignation to never seeing them again.

I don’t know if these ideas crossed the minds of those who one day compared themselves to Castor and Pollux, the mythical offspring of a queen and a swan. I lost sight of Jericó for years and still don’t know for certain where he lived and what he did, since his memories of his time in France were patently illusory: There was no City of Light in his tale except as a reference so literary and cinematic that the contrast was obvious to the North American references he knew about. Jericó’s Baedeker reached as far as the United States and did not cross the Atlantic. I came to this conclusion but never wanted to test it directly. As I’ve said, I didn’t ask Jericó anything so he wouldn’t ask me anything either.

On the other hand, a good deal had happened to me. Lucha Zapata and the little house in the district of Los Doctores. Miguel Aparecido and the penitentiary of San Juan de Aragón. I realized all this experience was in no way ordinary. Lucha was a lost, weak woman, while Miguel and the prison population were, by definition, marginal and eccentric beings. That gave rise to my decision to visit, floor by floor, office by office, the employees in the building on Plaza Vasco de Quiroga in the Santa Fe District, seat of Max Monroy’s empire: Who were the others ?

It was difficult to classify them. Except for the architects, who generally came from families with money and sometimes with a pedigree. The profession sheltered many scions of old, half-feudal nineteenth-century families who had disappeared with the revolution and were anxious to recover the stature they had lost by having their sons and grandsons follow a career “for decent people,” which was the general view of architecture. You should note that the beach, country, and city houses of the new rich were the work of architects who were the children of the old rich (or the new poor). Those lodged in Monroy’s offices were no exception. Their tailors had adorned them with elegantly cut suits, their shirts were discreet, rarely white, their ties had a foreign label, their shoes were Italian loafers, their hair was cut with a razor.

They were the exception. The lawyers in the company, the accountants, the secretaries, were the children of other lawyers, accountants, or secretaries, but their variety fascinated me: I visited them to learn about and be amazed at the upward mobility available to a part of our society. Drinking coffee, asking for a favor, receiving a report, going up and down the honeycomb of the Utopia building like a bumblebee, I met the son of the shopkeeper, the shoemaker, the mechanic, and the dentist, the daughter of the dressmaker, the receptionist, and the employee of the beauty salon and again the children of clerks at Sears, minor bureaucrats, and peddlers. Offspring of Ford, of Volkswagen of Mexico, of the Ceranoquistes of Guanajuato, of Millennium Perisur, of tourist agencies and hospitals, armed with Nivada watches and Gucci shoes, Arrow shirts and Ferragamo ties, driving their Toyotas bought with a down payment of three thousand pesos, taking their family on vacation in an Odyssey minivan, using credit from Scotiabank, celebrating festive occasions with a basket of imports from La Europea, they were men and women of all sizes: tall and short, fat and thin, blond, brunet, dark-skinned and chestnut-haired, no one younger than twenty-five or older than fifty: a young group, modern, stylish, embedded in the social life of national capitalism (sometimes neocolonial and often globalized), possessing generally good manners, though at times the women demonstrated a certain chewing-gum vulgarity in their fishnet stockings and high heels (like my never carefully considered Ensenada de Ensenada de Ensenada), most of them with a professional appearance, tailored suits, and severe hairstyles, as if copying the model of the principal Lady of the Enterprise, Asunta Jordán. And the men generally courteous, well-spoken, and even relishing their innate amiability, though as soon as they found themselves only with men they reverted to the vulgar language that certifies friendship among Mexican machos (among other reasons, in order to dispel any suspicion of homosexuality, above all in a country where greetings between men consist of an embrace, an unusual act for a Gringo and one repellent to an Englishman).