Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

Asunta Jordán.

“Why did you make Jericó believe you and I were lovers?”

“Aren’t we?” she said without raising her head from the papers.

“Only once.” I tried to hide my bad feelings.

“But intense, wasn’t it? Don’t say it was a quickie, all right?”

She meant resign yourself: only once, but enough for a lifetime. Is that what she wanted to tell me? I don’t know. She didn’t want to say what she was thinking. Asunta told Jericó she was my lover because in that way…

“I told him I was yours alone and couldn’t be his.”

“In other words, you used me.”

“If that’s what you think.”

“Whom do you love?” I asked insolently.

She looked at me at last and in her eyes I saw something like triumph in defeat, a victorious failure. Passing through Asunta’s eyes were her provincial childhood, her marriage to the odious and despicable owner of King Kong, her fortuitous meeting with Max Monroy, and the simple, available nakedness of Asunta, the innocence with which she stood in the middle of the dance floor and waited for the inevitable, yes, but also for the evitable, what could be and what could not be. Waited for Max Monroy to approach, take her by the waist, and never let her go again.

I believe that in the most profound depths of Asunta’s inner life, that instant defined everything. Max took her by the waist and the past became just that, a stony preterit, something that never happened. Max took her by the waist and she gave herself completely, without reservation, to what she desired most at that moment: a strong man, a protector who would shelter her from the miserable mediocrity of her destiny. But the woman I knew (and ay! knew only once, biblically) owed everything to Max Monroy, which humiliated her in a certain sense, made her inferior to herself, placed her in a situation of obligatory gratitude with Max but of obligatory dissatisfaction with herself, with her desire for independence.

At that moment I understood Monroy’s intelligence. The man who saved her did not demand banal gratitude from her. It was he who demonstrated total confidence in Asunta. He didn’t need to stress his age. He didn’t need to ask Asunta to give him what he needed from her. Constant professional rigor and sporadic erotic rigor. I was witness to both. Was there something else? Of course. Max gave Asunta power and sex. He also gave her independence. He let her love whomever she liked, on two conditions. He was not to find out anything about it. She could love another man knowing she could count on Max Monroy’s acceptance.

Jericó was one of many. But she knew Jericó had to be destroyed. And his destruction consisted in not only denying him sex but telling him her sex belonged to me, his brother Josué. In this way her obligation to Max and her personal freedom were satisfied, I understood it, but at the price of Jericó’s mortal enmity toward me. Castor became Cain.

She knew he would hate me. Jericó said it, on all fours and naked like an animal, there on the bed: He had always given me everything, he preceded me in everything, ever since we met, first him, then me. With Asunta he was second, not first. How would his infinite vanity tolerate that? A vanity, I knew, identical to blindness. The moral, political, human blindness of Jericó… I saw it only now. I swear I never suspected it before. How many things does the most intimate friendship conceal?

“But that isn’t true,” I said with brutality. “You belong to Max Monroy.”

She didn’t look up. “I belong to myself. I belong only to Asunta Jordán. Ta-dum. Curtain.”

It debilitated me, disconcerted me, infuriated me that she would say these things without looking at me, signing papers again, reviewing memos, marking dates on her calendar…

“And Monroy?” I asked with the blind vision of the coarse and bestial, compassionate and senile, artificial and devout love between Asunta and Max, buried in my obligatory silence, in my ridiculous sense of discretion…

That did oblige her to look at me again for an instant before returning to her papers. The look told me: “I belong to Monroy. I owe him everything. Besides, I’m like him. I’m also Max Monroy because Max Monroy made me what I am. I’m Asunta Jordán because this is what Max Monroy decided and wanted. Max Monroy took me out of the provinces and raised me to where I am now. You may think an administrative job, no matter how privileged, in Max’s huge organization, is minor in the general scheme of things, but learning to talk, to dress, to conduct myself with intelligence, coldness, and the necessary disdain… that’s something you can never pay for.”

She said it with a show of sincerity, though with a poorly disguised arrogance. She looked down. For her, being where she sat now was utopia, yes, the place of imaginary happiness, a satisfaction in the end comparative with respect to something earlier, which one left behind and to which one does not wish to return. Looking at her sitting there, immersed in her work, almost pretending I was not standing in front of her, made it difficult for me to separate Asunta’s person from Asunta’s function, and between the two, with the slim edge of a razor, I introduced the idea of happiness. Because when all was said and done, why did she work, why did this woman dress, style her hair, act, and lie except to maintain a position, yes, a position that assured her the minimum of happiness to which she had a right, above all comparatively. I thought of her history. The wife subjected to the vulgar, noisy machismo, hereditary and without direction, of a poor, unaware, difficult devil, her husband. Her destiny in the middle class of the arid society of the northern deserts. Mexico along the border, so smug about being the most prosperous part of the country, the industrial north, without Indians, without the extreme poverty of Chiapas or Oaxaca, bourgeois Mexico, self-satisfied in contrast to the outstretched hand of the beggar south. Mexico energetic and proud of it in contrast to the great devouring capital city, fat, dissipated, heavily made up, the urban gorilla of D.F. squashing the rest of the nation with its shameless buttocks…

But the same north from which Asunta came was south of the border with Yankee prosperity, it was “south of the border, down Mexico way,” the wealth of the Mexican north was the poverty of the North American border. The passage of clandestine workers through Arizona and Texas. The barbed wire fence. The coyote’s truck. The border guard’s bullet. The maquila in Ciudad Juárez. The drug dealer from Tijuana to Laredo. Gangrene. Pus. What Sanginés always recalled when we got together.

And from all this, she extracted a semblance of happiness. And what was happiness? I asked myself this morning, standing in front of Asunta’s desk, her own border facing the subordinate employee or the occasional lover. Was happiness an internal fact, a satisfaction, or was it an external fact, a possession? I didn’t see in Asunta a semblance of bliss if by bliss one understands happiness. Was happiness synonymous with destiny? Perhaps. To a certain extent. But in Asunta Jordán I saw a destiny too dependent on things that weren’t hers. For example, Max Monroy’s desire, origin of Asunta Jordán’s “happiness” in the sense of power, well-being. And inheritance? What would Max’s will say about Asunta’s destiny? And while we’re on the subject, would Max remember his son Miguel Aparecido, the voluntary prisoner in San Juan de Aragón? Would he remember?

She told me once: “I have alert sleep. I also have dreamy wakefulness. You should know that. God’s truth. Do you understand?”

“And what else?” I insisted so as not to give her the last word by giving it to her.

“Before I break my chains myself, Max frees me from them. But he gives me the keys so I have hope.”