Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

I opened the door to the apartment nervously, hurriedly. I put the keys in my pocket and before I turned on the lights Jericó’s voice asked me-ordered me-from the darkness: “No light. Don’t turn on the light. Let’s talk in the dark.”

I accepted the invitation. Little by little, as usual, my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and Jericó’s shadow was outlined with greater clarity.

But not much. The man, my friend, set aside an area of his own darkness that protected him from a world turned hostile. As if I didn’t know. The arrest order had come from the office of the president with the fury reserved for a traitor.

From then on “Judas” would be the presidential term used to refer to Jericó, “Judas.”

Now Jericó Iscariot was hiding in the most obvious and therefore most concealed place: our apartment on Calle de Praga.

“Do you remember Poe? We read him together. The purloined letter is in sight of everyone and therefore nobody sees it.”

“You’re taking a risk,” I said with a reverberation of affection from my heart but not daring to say: Run away. I didn’t want him, a fugitive, to feel expelled as well. What would I do except respect Jericó’s desire, even knowing I might seem like his accomplice, his harborer?

“Get away. Don’t compromise me.”

I didn’t dare say that.

He said it for me.

He saved me the grief.

“You know, old pal. We wanted so much in life, we read, studied, discussed so much, and ended up only being worth what you pay an informer.”

I became angry. “I’m no Judas.”

He became angry. “That’s what they call me in the president’s office.”

“I had nothing to do…” I stammered. “I’m not a traitor. I don’t work in the government.”

“Then are you my accomplice?”

“I’m your friend. Not a traitor and not an accomplice.”

I asked him without words to understand me. I didn’t want to ask him to leave. Where would he go? He knew I wouldn’t turn him in. He took advantage of our friendship. Did he sacrifice it? I rejected this idea, seeing Jericó cornered by shadows, failed in his illusory takeover of power, the act of an inopportune fascist fascination impossible in our time, the product of an imagination, as I now understood it, exalted by itself, by the past, by a feverish, perversely idealistic intelligence. My friend Jericó with no last name. Like kings. Like sultans. Like Asian dictators.

“Thanks, Monroy. Your monitoring has allowed us to keep an eye on all of Judas’s preparations.”

Max Monroy didn’t tell the president that having access to all the strands of information was useful for something.

Valentín Pedro Carrera couldn’t help making a joke.

“You kept the information till pretty late, Don Max. This Judas almost had his way and turned us into Christ, damn it.”

Monroy shook his head, sunk deep into his shoulders.

“Nobody has his way anymore,” he declared. “Everything’s on file. There’s no subversive movement that isn’t known. If I was late in informing you, it’s because most of these revolutions abort right away. They last as long as Indian summer. Why add to your worries, Mr. President? You have enough with preparations for your popular festivals.”

The president did not respond to the blow. He owed Monroy too much. Monroy felt just a little embarrassed, as if he had abused his own power.

“When it’s a question of serious matters, I’m at your disposal, Mr. President.”

“I know, Don Max, I know and I appreciate it. Believe me.”

Hadn’t Jericó, dressed in shadows, known what I knew in Monroy’s office thanks to Asunta’s information?

“Were we in the wrong age?” I asked with no irony.

He went on as if he hadn’t heard me. “Were we born in time or out of time?”

He said it was important for him to know that.

He evoked our childhood and early youth, both of us brought up without a family, without knowing our parents, without even knowing if we had parents, never knowing who supported us, paid for our schools, clothes, food…

“Because somebody supported us, Josué, and if we didn’t find out who for the sake of convenience pure and simple, because it was totally awesome to receive everything and owe nothing, we didn’t ask and nobody asked us either, our table was set, and did we deserve it, champ? Didn’t the moment come to rebel against a destiny others had made for you and go out and create your own destiny?”

I didn’t know what to say to him, except that his presence at that moment was for me like a tribute to the past he and I had shared. It was a way of telling him I had doubts about our friendship in the future. This was, after all, a moment of melancholy.

Jericó wasn’t a fool. He grasped my words at once and adapted them to his own situation, he was here and was the friend I avoided in order not to harm him and he, now, was seizing his neck as the rebellious poet seized the swan “with deceitful plumage.” Jericó wanted to twist his own neck, that was his dramatic vocation.

“Do you remember our first meeting, Josué? Remember it and then add on the facts of our relationship. Do you agree I was always the one who pushed you to act? Against school authority, against conventions of thought, against good manners, do you agree I always pushed you toward the path my life was opening for us?”

“It’s possible,” I replied, testing the shifting ground that spread before me.

“No,” he said fiercely. “Not possible. True. That’s how it was. I always went first, of course I did.”

“To a point.” I wanted to play along because I didn’t want the stormy confrontation Jericó’s gaze was sending out to me from the darkness.

“Believe it even if you don’t believe it.”

He laughed. I don’t know if he laughed at the situation, at me, or at himself.

“You stopped, Josué. You didn’t follow me to the end of the road.”

“The fact is there was a cliff at the end of the road,” I said with no desire to condemn him.

He took it differently. “You didn’t have the courage to walk with me to the end of the road. You didn’t cross the frontier with me, Josué. You didn’t have the courage to explore the evil in yourself. Because both of us always knew that just as we did good, we could do evil. Even more: the ‘better’ we were, the less complete we would be. Each action in our lives means roads to the edge of the abyss. One precipice is good. The other is evil. Don’t be confused, brother. You and I did not fall into good or evil. We simply walked along the street of ambiguity, both yes and no… A decision had to be made. There’s a moment that demands definition from us. Does it depend on where we are, whom we’re with, what influences us? Sure, I found myself at the center of political power. And from there, Jericó, my only option to be myself, to not turn into a puppet of power, was to oppose power with power, power of another kind, Jericó, the power of evil, because look, the power of good, where has it brought us? To a democracy that resembles a wheel with a mouse inside that runs and runs and doesn’t get anywhere. And did I opt for a different action? And did that action lead to the stigma of evil? Reclaim it for me, if you like. Go on. Ándale. ”

He breathed like a tiger. “Yes. That’s what I did. Explored the evil in myself. I descended to the depths of my own evil and discovered that evil is the only valid enemy for a brave man. Evil as valor, do you understand? Evil as proof of your manhood.”

I reacted with modest annoyance.

“I don’t want the killing to go on, that’s all. I don’t want to smell more blood after the century we were born into, Jericó, the time of evil carried to the extreme of knowing itself as evil and celebrating evil as the great good of desire and destiny… It makes me sick, what about you, you bastard?”