Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

Her family handed over Estrellita, received a check and some properties, and never concerned themselves about her again. Who were they? Who knows. They charged a good price to give her, chaste and pure, to a voracious, ambitious husband. The passion ended, though sometimes he looked at her with an intense absence. It wasn’t enough to avoid the repetition of the same battle every night, when Estrella still retained a shred of courage and dignity that served only to infuriate Nazario. The same battle every night until they found the reason for the next dispute, which was to postpone the obligation of sex that she needed not only as something new but because of the chaste obligation of the matrimonial sacrament and that he, perhaps, wanted to put off because of a strange feeling that in this way he was honoring the virginity of his wife, though it was clear to him that Estrella had come to the marriage bed intact and if she was impure, he had been the reason. None of this endured or had too much importance. He was plunging into a gross vulgarity, which Jericó and I had observed that night and Errol now expanded on for us.

“I loved her ten thousand enchiladas ago” was the husband’s response.

She took refuge in the renunciation of sex in the name of religion and set up a pious little shrine in the matrimonial bedroom that Nazario wasted no time in getting rid of with a swipe of his hand, leaving Estrellita resigned to finally seeing herself one night as her husband saw her. She no longer looked young to herself and was certain she looked like an old woman to him.

“Ten thousand enchiladas ago, while she prayed on her knees: ‘Neither for vice nor fornication. It is to make a child in Thy holy service.’ ”

She replaced the saints with pictures of Errol Flynn, whose erotic proclivities were unknown to both Estrellita and Nazario.

“Do you know what?” Errol continued. “I bet I can have a destiny that lets me overthrow my father. Do you like that word? Don’t we hear it every day in history class? Tom took up arms and overthrew Dick hoping that Harry would overthrow somebody else and so forth and so on. Is that history, dudes? A series of overthrows? Maybe so.”

He seemed to take a breath and say: “Maybe so. Maybe not…”

Without letting go of the guitar, he raised his glass: “I bet I can have a destiny that overthrows my father’s. Overthrowing a destiny, as if it were a throne. Maybe so! Suddenly! Or maybe not…”

He stretched out his arm and played the guitar, beginning to sing, very appropriately, the ballad of the disobedient son:

“Out of the way, father, I’m wilder than a big cat, don’t make me fire a bullet that’ll go straight through your heart…”

Voices rose, angry and gruff, in the hall between the Versailles salon and the refuge where we were sitting.

“Are you crazy? Give me that camera.”

“Nazario, I only wanted-”

“It doesn’t matter what you wanted, you’ve made me look ridiculous taking pictures of my guests! That’s all I needed!”

“ Our guests, it’s also my party-”

“It’s also your nothing, you old idiot.”

“You’re to blame. I don’t like receiving. I don’t like standing on that line. You do it just to-”

“If you did it well, you wouldn’t humiliate me. You’re the one who makes me look ridiculous. Taking pictures of my guests!”

“What does-?”

“You can blackmail somebody with a photograph. Don’t you realize?”

“But they all appear on the society pages.”

“Yes, you moron, but not in my house, not associated with me. ”

“I don’t understand…”

“Well, you should, you fool!”

Errol stood up and hurried to the hallway. He put himself between Nazario and Estrella.

“Mama, your husband is a savage.”

“Shut up, you bum, don’t butt into what doesn’t-”

“Drop it, son, you know how-”

“I know, and I can smell the vomit in the mouth of this old bastard. He stinks like a cave-”

“Shut up, go back to your asshole friends and keep drinking my champagne free of charge. Damn freeloaders! Dummies!”

“Leave us alone. This is between your father and me.”

Nazario Esparza’s eyes were as glassy as the bottom of a bottle. He put his hand in his pocket and took out (why?) a ring with dozens of keys.

“Get out, you’re a curse,” he said to Errol.

“I’d like to imagine you dead, Papa. But not yet a skeleton. Slowly being devoured by worms.”

These words not only silenced Don Nazario. They seemed to frighten him, as if his son’s curse resonated with an ancient, prophetic, and in the end a placating voice. Doña Estrella put her arms around her husband as if to protect him against their son’s threat.

Errol returned to the room and his parents dimmed like an empty theater. Jericó and I followed with wooden faces.

“You see,” said Errol. “I grew up like a plant. I’ve lived outdoors, like a nopal.”

It was obvious: Tonight was his and he wasn’t going to let us slip in a word.

He was as insistent as a rainstorm.

“Do you know the secret? My father wants to get rid of himself. That’s why I behaved the way I did. I have him all figured out and he can’t stand it. He’d like to be the product of his own past, denying what happened earlier but taking advantage of the results. Understand?”

I said no. Jericó shrugged.

“Who were those people?”

“Ah!” Errol exclaimed. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Do you know why my father forbids photographs at the parties he gives at home?”

“I have no idea,” said Jericó.

“You can’t imagine. Why do you think he gets all these people together, offers them champagne, but bans photographs? I can tell you because I secretly go through his papers and tie up loose ends. It just so happens that Don Nazario deducts-that’s what I said-he deducts these so-called ‘parties’ from his taxes. He classifies them as entertainment expenses and ‘office expenses,’ business meetings disguised as ‘cocktail parties.’ ”

“Who comes to a cocktail party to be ‘deducted’?” I insisted, interested in not having my sentimental education cut short.

“Everybody,” Errol said with a laugh. “But only my father is so clever that he bans publicity and closes the deal.”

His laughter sounded hollow and sad.

“I’ve got the old man by the balls! The old fucker!”

I managed to squeeze in a question: “Do you think you’re going to negate your father’s offenses?”

“No.” He shrugged. “I only want to push my differences with him to the limit. Understand? I’m rich, you’re poor, but I have more misery to overcome.”

He emptied his glass in one swallow.

“You should know you’re born with privilege. You don’t make it.”

And he looked at us with an intensity we had never seen in him before.

“Everything else is robbery.”

I TOLD YOU, my dear survivors, I went to the Esparza house that night to avoid my own home, if it can be called that. Dysfunctional and all the rest of it, Errol’s family was in the have column, if Cervantes was right-and he is-when he quoted his grandmother: There are only two families in the world, the one you have and the one you don’t have. Now, how do you quantify familial possession or dispossession? People’s opinion of the fair is based on whether they had a good time. I ought to explain-I owe it to those who are still alive and gather in cities, neighborhoods, families-that I grew up in a gloomy house on Calle de Berlín in Mexico City. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the country seemed to settle down after decades of upheaval (though it traded anarchy for dictatorship, perhaps without realizing it), the capital city began to spread beyond the original perimeter of Zócalo-Plateros-Alameda. The “colonias,” as the new neighborhoods were called, chose to display mansions in various European styles, especially the Parisian and another, more northern one whose origins lay somewhere between London and Berlin and its destiny in a district patriotically called Juárez, though devoted to baptizing streets with the names of European cities.