Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

How to know if Sanginés sighed when the rain turned into hail, striking the roof and windows of the car like the drum of God?

Political bosses. Governors. Entrepreneurs. How did Monroy win? By hating what they did but beating them at their own game. Before the boss of San Luis acted on his own, Max sent him an army general to take charge of the plaza “for your own security, Governor.” When the cacique of Tabasco was preparing to buy legal decisions in the capital to build the highway fifty-fifty, Max got ahead of him by acquiring the construction company that gave the costly gov only twenty-five percent. Etcetera. I’ll make it brief. In this way Max was transformed into an intermediary, a creator of coalitions ( non sanctas , if you like) between the federal and local governments, keeping the lion’s share, not only financially but politically. Becoming indispensable to everyone.

In order not to become lost in Sanginés’s memory-filled account, was it the Academy de las Vizcaínas, a refuge for poor girls and rich widows, that obliged me to think of Esparza’s two wives, Doña Estrellita the saint and the dirty whore Sara P., both from real or apocryphal convents like this one, whose oculi and pinnacles became invisible in the rainy twilight? Did I want to think about this, about them, because I was afraid, for no obvious reason, of what Professor Sanginés’s words would reveal to me?

Didn’t I want to think about another extension of prison, about the asylum where Sibila Sarmiento, the mother of Miguel Aparecido, had been locked away?

Sanginés continued. Broker. Agent. Intermediary, and his mother’s heir. I imagined a young Max Monroy, hiding the public secret of his inherited fortune in order to act as an ambitious beginner: Wasn’t this what the fearsome Concepción wanted, to have her son earn his inheritance from the bottom, with effort, compromising himself, getting dirty if need be, just like everyone else?

“He invented companies out of nothing,” Sanginés continued. “For each one he received capital that he invested in other new companies. He shuffled the names of businesses. He justified himself by telling himself-telling me, Josué-the country of misery had to be left behind, Mexico’s closed shop had to be broken, markets created, price fixing broken, communiqués communicated, modernity brought to the country.”

Modernity opposed to the closed shop. Communicating. The wrinkled parchment of mountains and precipices, forests and deserts, valleys and volcanoes that with a blow of his fist Cortés the Conquistador described to Carlos the Emperor: A wrinkled parchment, that’s what Mexico is. How to smooth it out?

“He was animated, Josué, by the dream and desire to found a collective kingdom together with a private empire. Is it possible?”

The capricious hail returned, like a purely nominal reality, to the Salto del Agua Fountain beside the Chapel of the Inmaculada Concepción, and I imagined a country filled with thirst as a condition of purity. A parchment country.

“I don’t know, Maestro…”

He ignored me.

“A collective kingdom. A private empire. Ah! Impossible, my dear Josué, without the necessary final submission to political power. Except Max guessed what the change in Mexico would consist of: from a bourgeoisie dependent on the state to a state dependent on the bourgeoisie.”

“Without realizing,” I dared to interject, “that private empires are built on quicksand?”

I saw Sanginés smile. “You had to count on incalculable factors…”

“And fame? How did Monroy administer his fame?”

Now Sanginés burst into laughter. “A great reputation is worse than a bad one, which is better than no reputation at all. You must realize that Max Monroy opted for divine imitation. Like God, he is everywhere, and no one can see him.”

I caught the double meaning of the phrase. I abstained from commenting. I fought against the comfort of the Mercedes whose springs were putting me to sleep. I had said enough when I suggested Max didn’t know that the foundations of all power are pure illusion. The emperor has no clothes. We are the ones who dress him. And then, when we demand that he return them, the monarch becomes angry: The clothes belong to him.

“Max Monroy,” continued Sanginés, “realized something. His peers, adversaries, accomplices, subjects, did not read and were not thoroughly informed, they navigated by trusting in pure instinct. Max transformed Unamuno into a kind of personal Bible that gave him, like an aureole of the spirit, the tragic sense of life. From this repeated reading he drew certain conclusions that differentiate and guide him, Josué. The worst vices are purity and presumption. Sharing sorrows is no consolation. And the question is this: How can we master our passions without sacrificing them?”

Behind the blurred windows of the car, the equally blurred forbidden images returned of Max Monroy and Asunta Jordán joined in the darkness of sex, blacker than the darkness in the bedroom, and when I once again expelled this vision from my mind, Sanginés was commenting, as if he had read my indecent thoughts, that Max Monroy does not permit ambition and lust to impose on his reason.

“They can impose on his virtue. Not his reason.”

I remarked with audacity that our desires are one thing and our loyalties something else entirely, evoking the figures of Asunta Jordán and Lucha Zapata side by side.

“He doesn’t attempt to correct the errors of others,” Sanginés said with a smile, “and he rejects well-known pleasures. Do you know something? Monroy has never gone to Aspen, where our wealthy feel they’re from the first world because there’s snow and they go skiing. He has never gone to Las Vegas, where our politicians return to chance what they seize from necessity.”

“What makes him happy, then?” I said as if I didn’t know, and emboldened, for no reason other than the severity of the words, by the name of Arcos de Belén that redeemed me from the anonymity of the nearby Plaza of Capitán Rodríguez M. beside the Registry Office. This enigma shifted my thoughts languorously: Who was Captain Rodríguez M., who could he have been to deserve his own plaza?

I don’t believe Sanginés left his own question unanswered. He guessed it in my ignorance, and knowing it gave me a strange, quieter emotion. The lawyer went off on a tangent. He told me the penthouse occupied by Monroy in the Utopia building was the entrepreneur’s own utopia, as far as possible from what he called “the damn streets,” these same arteries along which Sanginés and I were now driving, the “damn” streets Monroy saw from above with those eyes of broken glass.

“ ‘I forget the names of the streets,’ is what Max Monroy says from his vantage point. And it’s true.”

Sanginés took my hand and immediately let it go.

“He’s beginning to be distracted. At times, I confess, he becomes incoherent…”

His words shocked me. “Why are you telling me this?”

“He says he no longer drinks because alcohol causes mental lapses and he doesn’t want to neglect his life and legacy. Things like that.”

“Asunta is his heir?” I asked, impertinent.

“He says old age is like a smuggler who puts ideas that aren’t yours into your head. He says his organs get ahead of his death.”

“Asunta is his heir?” I insisted.

I didn’t want to see Sanginés’s twisted smile.

“At times he’s delirious. He says he’s walking alone and naked and crazy through a large empty plaza. That’s when Asunta protects him from himself.”

“You haven’t answered-”

“I heard him say to Asunta, ‘Will you live without me?’ ”

“What did she say?” I asked avidly, as if, when Max died, Asunta would really be bequeathed to me.