Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

I looked at Asunta. Had she succeeded in uprooting desire and fear? Was this true happiness, not to desire, not to fear? Was this serenity? Or was it simply the disguise of a passivity that counts happiness as the absence of fear and the absence of desire? If ataraxia signified serenity, perhaps the price was passivity. Asunta’s calm, I knew, I learned, was the result of a forced and forceful desire. It was a satisfaction that rewarded her for having overcome the mediocrity of her matrimonial past. It was also a dissatisfaction that in the name of gratitude to Max distanced itself from the free enjoyment of love chosen by her.

Did she love me?

She read my mind. “I hope you don’t have any hopes, my poor Josué.”

I said I didn’t, lying.

“If I went to bed with you,” she didn’t look up, “it was because Max allowed me to. Max allows me sexual pleasure with young men. He knows the limitations of his, well, his third age. He lets me have pleasure. The pact with him is permanent. With the others, it’s temporary.”

It occurred to me there was certainty in her mind: Max knew about her loves, he permitted them, he respected them. Perhaps he even enjoyed them, as long as they didn’t interfere with her professional relationship. Perhaps the proof of her love for Max consisted in being unfaithful to him, certain that for him this was part of love. I believe I understood, thinking about Max and Asunta, that loving each other a great deal and getting along well can lead to indifference and hatred. Max Monroy must tolerate Asunta’s “betrayals” because he wants and needs them.

“ Solamente una vez, ” I managed to sing: “Only once,” as if the words to a bolero could sublimate all our emotions.

“Exactly. Like in the song.”

“And Jericó?”

“What about Jericó?”

Why did Asunta present herself to him as my lover, unleashing a mortal hatred that was, in the end, more than my lack of solidarity with his political project, the thing that ended our longstanding friendship?

“Why?”

She refused to look at me. This time I understood the reason. Before, she didn’t look at me because she was haughty and powerful. Now her absent gaze was shameful and shamefaced. Then she had the courage to raise her head and look straight at me.

“I belong to Max Monroy. I owe him everything. It’s shit to owe everything to one person. It’s shit.”

When I heard her say this, I knew Asunta was both happy and unhappy. Her passion disturbed me more than her indifference. With me, she made love with her eyes open.

That’s why she didn’t need to explain anything else to me. I understood Asunta lied to Jericó when she told him I was her lover, and to me when she told me only one night was mine to win, my God, I understood, it hurt me, it stripped my life bare to understand it, to gain a position of freedom before Max without harming Max but irreparably harming the ancient fraternity of Josué and Jericó, Castor and Pollux.

Cain and Abel.

Did Asunta realize what she had unleashed? Perhaps her egotism became confused with her true satisfaction, the cliff’s edge of happiness to which she believed she had a right, even at the cost of a fratricidal war that in her eyes was, perhaps, barely a genteel war, one of those waged as if it were a game, with no real risk… And the abyss?

She didn’t realize. I felt a kind of compassion for Asunta Jordán and a destiny she valued, perhaps, only by comparison. It was in reality a destiny, I thought then, that was despicable, deceptively liberated, in fact alienated.

“Who was your friend Jericó with before all this?”

“Who was he with?”

“Women.”

“Whores. Only whores.”

“The imbecile fell in love with me.”

I didn’t believe it and didn’t interrupt her.

“He told me he was falling in love with a woman for the first time.”

“What did you say to him?”

“You already know. That I belonged to you, Josué.”

And immersed again in her papers, she added:

“You have nothing to worry about. We have him in a safe place.”

I DON’T KNOW if memory is a form of incarnation. In any case, it must be a stimulus for the spirit that by means of recollection manages to revive. Though perhaps memory consists only in holding on to an instant and immediately returning movement to the moment. Is memory barely a scar? Is it the past I myself don’t recognize? Though if I don’t know it, how can I remember it? Is memory a mere simulation of recalling what we have already forgotten or, what’s worse, have never lived?

I would have liked to give to memory the surname of imagination. Sanginés did not permit me to. In that slow trip from the Danubio on Calles de Uruguay to my cloistered garret on Calle de Praga, the lawyer said what he said because what occurred had occurred. The fraternity of Castor and Pollux had been transformed into the rivalry, the hatred of Cain and Abel. Passing memories, a different script, what was the difference, the profound difference, not the obvious, computable one?

I will try to reproduce, in my own words, from the scar of my memory, what Sanginés told me that afternoon when the rain made everything vanish like a sleeve of water on an immobile mirror.

I knew the history of Miguel Aparecido, which he himself recounted behind bars in San Juan de Aragón Prison along with terrible evocations of his grandmother, Antigua Concepción, that surfaced like an earthquake from the hidden grave where the not very venerable señora lay, creator of the Monroy fortune, despite her husband the general’s violent frivolity, for the sake of her pampered son Max Monroy, whom the deceased manipulated as she chose, to the extreme of marrying him at the age of forty to an adolescent in order to appropriate the girl’s lands, with no consideration at all of the feelings or desires of the innocent Sibila Sarmiento or of Max himself, unmarried until that moment through the power and grace of his mother’s implacable will: will and destiny associated like a single figure in the mind of Antigua Concepción. She operated with both when she bought real estate with the Monroy fortune and passed it on to her son. The condition was that, he, Max, would submit to his mother’s will in order to inherit. And if an intrusive, unpleasant, punishable, irritating, ungrateful necessity should filter down between them, the old matriarch in her Carmelite habit would bow before it with a gesture of repugnance, holding her nose, certain her son Max would thank her one day for the necessity in the name of his fortune.

The helpless Sibila Sarmiento locked away in an asylum, the son of Max and the madwoman abandoned to grow up fighting on the besieged, murderous streets of the capital: I travel with Sanginés through the city of the moon, if the moon had a city. Or better yet, if the moon were a city, it would not only be like this one. It would be this one. The dolorous city (malodorous city?) through which Antonio Sanginés’s Mercedes drives me: the trip of postponed recollection, the expedition of memory as an unrenounceable past.

The Mercedes is driven by a chauffeur. Sanginés raises the glass that separates us from the driver and continues: “A moment arrived when the powerful matriarch decided her son Max could walk alone without maternal props, with his own destiny, freed of the necessity she assumed without thinking about it twice, though the third time she said to herself:

“In exchange for necessity I’ll leave Max my desire and my destiny.”

Desire and destiny, murmured Antonio Sanginés.

Max Monroy.

“He is master,” Sanginés began his tale during our slow progress from the Historical Center to the Zona Rosa, “of a self-assurance that is in no way ostentatious. It is invisible. You saw him when he met with President Carrera in the Castle of Chapultepec. Where does it come from? He didn’t inherit it from his mother, who was like a cross between the devouring Aztec goddess Coatlicue and the national patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe. He had to pass, however, through a period of becoming detached. Inheriting from his mother but distancing himself from her. Only the death of his mother Doña Conchita eventually allowed him to do that. Before then, like her, in order to prove himself to her-I tell you so you’ll know-he allowed corruption. He had to submit to political chiefs and bosses, just as his mother had. He didn’t kill them. He bought them. Energetically. Astutely. He knew they were for sale. He permitted them to steal but on the pretext that when they did-just listen to the national paradox-they were building, creating. He understood his mother’s lesson: They had to be transformed into revolutionaries without a revolution. What are they afraid of? The middle class won the revolution just as they had in France and the United States. There is no revolution without the middle class and Mexico was no exception. The revolution that excludes the middle class is not a proletarian revolution. It is a dictatorship ‘of the proletariat.’ In Mexico, the heroes died young. The survivors grew old and became rich. Max Monroy bought, suggested, insinuated, threatened, and also built and knew where to walk. He guessed the future faster than the rest and deceived the rest by making them believe the present was the future.”