Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

Was I?

Could I close my eyes and see Asunta?

Could I open my eyes and feel her absence?

La Pancho Villa warned me:

“All the others come from Río de la Plata, Argentina exports all kinds of skin. Only I have an authentic Mexican ass. Come and find it. Ah! Sex goes with us and doesn’t step aside.”

Lunch, la comida , is a great ceremony in Mexico City. You could say it is the ceremony of the workday. In Spain and Spanish America it is called almuerzo . The verb is almorzar . In Mexico, it is comer . One eats la comida with an ancestral verbality that would be cannibalistic if it were not domesticated by a variety of foods that summarize the wealth of poverty. The food of destitution, Mexican cuisine transforms the poorest elements into exotic luxury recipes.

None is greater than the use of worms and fish eggs to create succulent dishes. That is why this afternoon (a respectable Mexican lunch does not begin until 2:30 in the afternoon or end before 6:00 P.M., at times with supper and cabaret extensions) I am sharing a table in the immortal Bellinghausen Restaurant on Calle de Londres, between Génova and Niza, with my old teacher Don Antonio Sanginés, enjoying maguey worms wrapped in hot tortillas plastered with guacamole and waiting for a dish of fried lamb’s quarters in guajillo chile sauce.

I am going to contrast (because they complement each other) this lunch at three o’clock in the afternoon with the nocturnal meeting on the open terrace of the top floor of the Hotel Majestic facing the Zócalo, the Plaza de la Constitución, where traditional appetizers do not mitigate the acidic perfumes of tequila and rum, nor does the immensity of the Plaza diminish Jericó’s presence.

Don Antonio Sanginés arrived punctually at the Bellinghausen. I got up from the table to greet him. I tried to be even more punctual than he was, in a country where P.M. means puntualidad mexicana , that is, a guaranteed, expected, and respected lack of punctuality. Some people, Sanginés first of all, followed by the presidents-the attorney because of good manners, the leaders because the general staff imposes manu militari -are always on time, and I had allowed myself to reserve a table for three in the hope Jericó would join us as stated in the invitation I left for him at Los Pinos. The end-of-year holidays were approaching, and something in the extremely formal and conventionally friendly spirit of the season led me to hope our teacher and his two students would get together to celebrate.

I hadn’t seen Jericó since the tense meeting at Los Pinos between President Carrera and my bosses Max Monroy and Asunta Jordán, whom I had seen then for the first time since the nocturnal digressions I have already recounted, which left me in such poor standing with myself as a peeping tom, that is, an immoral and sexual unfortunate to the sound of a bolero. “Just One Time,” like the widows whose groom dies on their wedding night. And so I appeared with my best wooden face, like a little monkey that does not see, hear, or say anything. I knew on that same night Jericó had made a date with me at the Hotel Majestic downtown. My spirit insisted on waiting for him at lunchtime, for the sake of resurrecting the most cordial memories and hopes that year after year throw us into the arms of Santa Claus and the Three Wise Men. “The Infant Jesus deeded you a stable,” wrote López Velarde in La suave patria . And added, to qualify his irony: “and oil wells come from the Devil.” I ought to tell you in advance I came to lunch with the first stanza, suspecting the second would be imposed at night.

“And Jericó?” I said innocently as I took my seat in the restaurant.

“This is about him,” replied Sanginés. He remained silent, and after ordering the meal he grew more animated.

Days earlier the lawyer had been at a meeting in the presidential residence with Jericó and Valentín Pedro Carrera. While Sanginés advised prudence in response to Max Monroy’s actions, Jericó invited him to retaliate against the businessman.

“I was looking for a point of agreement. The fiestas ordered by the president served a purpose.”

“Circuses without bread,” Jericó interrupted.

I went on. “Politics is a harmonizing of factors, a synthesis, the use of one sector’s advantageous ideas by the other. We live in an increasingly pluralistic country. You must concede a little in order to gain something. The art of negotiation consists in coming to agreements, not out of courtesy but by taking into account the legitimate interests of the other sector.”

“Following that course of action, the only thing you achieve is stripping the government of legitimacy,” Jericó said petulantly.

“But the state gains legitimacy,” countered Sanginés. “And if you had attended my classes at the university, you would know that governments are transitory and the state is permanent. That’s the difference.”

“Then we have to change the state,” Jericó added.

“Why?” I asked with feigned innocence.

“So that everything will change,” Jericó said, turning red.

“To what end, in what sense?” I insisted.

Jericó stopped addressing me. He turned to the president.

“The question is knowing what forces, good or bad, are at work at a given moment. How to resist them, accept them, channel them. Are you aware of those forces, Mr. President, do you believe they’ll be content with the diversions of the carousel and the wheel of fortune you’re offering them?”

“Ask yourself, I’ve asked Carrera,” continued Sanginés, “how ready these forces are for compromise.”

“Compromise, compromise!” Jericó exclaimed that night as we ate at the restaurant on the Hotel Majestic roof. “Compromise isn’t possible anymore. President Carrera is a coward, a superficial man who squanders opportunities.”

I smiled. “You’re helping him, buddy, with your famous popular festivals.”

He looked at me with a certain swaggering air and then burst into laughter.

“You believe that story?”

I said I didn’t but apparently he did.

Jericó stretched his arm out from the table on the terrace toward the immense Zócalo of the capital.

“Do you see that plaza?” he asked rhetorically.

I said I did. He went on. “We’ve used it for everything, from human sacrifice to military parades to ice skating rinks to coups d’état. It’s the plaza of a thousand uses. Any clown can fill it if he yells long and loud. That’s the point.”

I agreed again, without asking the tacit question: “And now?”

“Now,” said Jericó in a tone I didn’t recognize, “now look at what you don’t want to see, Josué. Look at the adjoining streets. Look at Corregidora. Look at 20 de Noviembre. Look to the sides. Look at the Monte de Piedad. Look at the Central Post Office.”

I tried to follow his urban guide. No, don’t stop to look, don’t distract me. Now look farther, at Correo Mayor, Academia, Jesús María, Loreto, Leona Vicario. What did I see?

“The same as always, Jericó. The streets you’ve mentioned.”

“And the people, Josué, the people?”

“Well, passersby, pedestrians…”

“And the traffic, Josué, the traffic?”

“Well, focusing a little, it’s very light, not many cars, a lot of trucks…”

“Now put it all together, Josué, put together the people scattered along the streets around the Zócalo, close off the plaza with the trucks, have armed guards climb down from the trucks, together with police and the people who are my people, Josué, do you understand what I’m saying? People placed by me at the four corners of the plaza, armed with pistols and studded clubs and brass knuckles and bludgeons, put them together with the people climbing down from the trucks armed with magnums, Uzis, and carbines. Look at the machine gun posts at the Monte de Piedad, City Hall, right here at the hotel. Try to listen to the cathedral bells. Don’t you hear anything?”