Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

“I made myself in the street, Josué. I grew up however I could. Perhaps I’m even grateful for being abandoned. I’m grateful for it but don’t forgive it. I’ll defend myself with my teeth.”

I RETURNED WITH Father Filopáter to the Santo Domingo arcades. I wondered what brought me back. I guessed at some reasons: My interest in him and his ideas. The mystery surrounding his exclusion from teaching and from his religious order. Above all (because Filopáter was something like the final recollection of my youth), the memory of the moment when I learned to read, to think, to discuss my ideas, to feel, if not superior to then independent of the afflictions of childhood: subjection to a domineering housekeeper and especially ignorance of my origins. María Egipciaca was not my mother. My bones knew it. My head knew it when my confidence was withdrawn from the tyrannical housekeeper on Calle de Berlín. This did not resolve, of course, the enigma of my origins. But that mystery allowed me to uproot my life on the basis of an initiative determined by me, by my freedom.

Jericó was the symbol of my independence, of my promise of personal independence. But in the fraternal equation of Castor and Pollux, Father Filopáter, Trinitarian, intervened. He precipitated our intellectual curiosity, offered a port and a haven in what might have been aimless sailing regardless of the solidarity between the young navigators. If I had rediscovered Filopáter now, the event acquired an explanation: Jericó’s distance returned me to the priest’s proximity. Because if my friend and I had a “father” in common, it was this teacher at the Jalisco School, the priest who revealed to us the syntax of dialectic, the ludic element (in order not to be ridiculous) of ideological and even theoretical positions. To pit the philosophy of Saint Thomas against the thought of Nietzsche was an exercise, for Jericó and I were not Thomists or nihilists. The interesting thing is that Filopáter would find in Spinoza the equilibrium between dogma and rebellion, asking us, in a straightforward way, to be sure the ideology of knowledge did not precede knowledge itself, making it impossible.

“The truth is made manifest without manifestos, like light when it displaces dark. Light does not announce itself ideologically. Neither does thought. Only darkness keeps us from seeing.”

Had Filopáter’s position regarding dogma been what eventually excluded him from the religious community? Did the priest distance himself too much from the principles of faith in order to establish himself in the proofs of faith? These were the questions I asked myself when the chaotic or fatal events I have recorded here combined and broke the ties that until then had bound me to friendship (Jericó), sexual desire (Asunta), ambition (Max Monroy), and unspoiled charity (Miguel Aparecido).

What did I have left? The chance encounter with Filopáter appeared to me like a salvation, if by salvation you understand not a favorable judgment in the tribunal of eternity but the full realization of our human potential. To be what we are because we are what we were and what we will be. The question of transcendence beyond death is left hanging during the age of salvation on earth. Does the second determine the first? Does what happens to us after death depend on what we accomplish in life? Or ultimately, independent of our actions, is a final redemption valid when it is stimulated by confession, repentance, final awareness of the truth that pursued us from the beginning and which we believe only when we die?

Filopáter’s reply (and perhaps the reason for his exclusion) was that each human being was granted individual value independent of belonging to a group, party, church, or social class. The individual inalienable being could, in fact, affiliate with a group, party, class, or church as long as this radical personal value was not lost. Was this what the religious order could not forgive in Filopáter: the stubborn affirmation of his person without discrediting his membership in the clergy, his refusal to hand his personality over to the herd, disappearing gratefully into the crowd of the city, the monastery, the party? He had been faithful to what he taught us. He was the favorite son of Baruch (Benoît, Benedetto, Benito, Bendito) Spinoza, excommunicated from Hebrew orthodoxy, irreducible to Christian orthodoxy, a heretic to both, convinced that faith is consumed in obedience and expands in justice.

Back at Santo Domingo and in conversation with Filopáter, I expected what he offered as we walked from the plaza to Calle de Donceles along República de Brasil, a continuation of our earlier talk, though part of my attention was devoted to crossing the crowded streets, keeping the good father from being run down by trucks, cars, bicycles, or peddlers’ carts.

“I don’t want you going around in circles about the reasons for my exclusion,” he said then, and I understood that the miracle of his existence was not to die by being run down. “My crime was to maintain that Jesus is not a proxy for the Father. Jesus is God because he is incarnate and the Father does not tolerate that. Anathema, anathema!” Filopáter struck his emaciated chest, making the ancient tie fly up while I helped him cross the street. “And my conclusion, Josué. If what I say is true, God appears only to the most unworthy of men.”

“The most unbelieving?” I said, impelled by Filopáter’s words.

“I don’t believe in a totalitarian God. I believe in the self-contradictory God incarnated in Jesus. Thou hast had my soul even unto death , said Jesus the man in Gethsemane. And if he said Father, why hast thou forsaken me , what wouldn’t he say to all of us? Men, why have you forsaken me? Don’t you see I am only a helpless man, condemned, fatal, with no providence at all, just like you? Why don’t you recognize yourselves in me? Why do you invent a Father and a Holy Spirit for me? Don’t you see that in the Trinity I, the man, Jesus the Christ, disappear when made divine?”

When we finally walked through the large street door of number 815, Calle de Donceles, to a covered alleyway smelling of moss and rotting roots, Filopáter led me to a room at the rear of the crowded courtyard, avoiding with a glance I imagined as fearful the stairway that led to the residential floor, as if a ghost lived there.

Filopáter’s room was in reality a workshop with tables prepared for precise work: grinding lenses. A table, two chairs, a cot, bare walls unadorned except for the crucifix over the bed. Since I looked longer than I should have at the bed, Filopáter took me by the arm and smiled.

“A woman doesn’t fit in my bed. Imagine. Celibacy has been obligatory for priests since the Lateran Council of 1139, except that Henri, bishop of Liège in the thirteenth century, had sixty-one children. Fourteen in twenty-two months.”

“A woman,” I said just to say something, not imagining the consequences.

“Your woman,” Filopáter said to my enormous surprise.

He saw the astonishment followed by incomprehension on my face; before my eyes passed the gaze of Asunta Jordán, in my ears the voice of the nurse Elvira Ríos, in my nose the smell of Señora Hetara’s whores, but my sealed mouth did not pronounce the name Filopáter made himself responsible for saying:

“Lucha Zapata.”

And then he murmured: “Perhaps the voice of Satan said to Jesus on Calvary: ‘If thou be God, save thyself and come down from the cross.’ ”

I WAS AFRAID as I walked up to the apartment on Calle de Praga. On each stair a false step threatened me. In each corner an enemy lurked. I went up slowly, accompanied by a legion of demons unleashed by the visit to Filopáter’s hiding place in the center of the immense city. In the shadows, succubi adopted the intangible forms of women to seduce and condemn me. Worse were the incubi who offered themselves to me as satanic male lovers. And the horror of my ascent was that the incubi were men with the face of Asunta and the succubi women with Jericó’s features, as if I wanted to erase from my vision Lucha Zapata’s face, evoked by my visit with Filopáter on Calle de Donceles. Then I knew it was all a premonition.