Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

“Believe me, Josué, Max felt responsible for the destiny of Miguel Aparecido, Miguel threatened him with death, Max knew the fault lay with Doña Concepción, he didn’t want to blame her, he wanted to make himself responsible, and the way to take on the obligation was to take charge of you and Jericó, making certain you wouldn’t lack necessities but that extravagance wouldn’t make you slack, this was his moral intuition: You should be free, make your own lives, not feel grateful to him…”

Sanginés said this to me in the stairwell.

“Did he intend to reveal the truth to us one day?” I became confused and was angry with Sanginés. “Or was he going to die without telling us anything?”

I regretted my words. When I said them I understood I had associated fraternally with Jericó, and I knew if Sanginés revealed Max’s secrets it was because Max had already exiled Jericó, as if he had tested us all our lives and only now Jericó’s gigantic, crucial mistake gave me primogeniture. Jericó-it was the sentence without reason or absolution-had been put in a safe place… What did it mean? My uneasiness, at that moment, was physical.

There was an anxious pulse similar to a heartbeat in Sanginés’s words. “Max allowed desire and luck to play freely in order to form destiny-”

“And necessity, Maestro? And damned necessity? Can there be desire or destiny without necessity?” I looked at him again without really making him out in the gloom, believing my words were now my only light.

“You didn’t lack for anything…”

“Don’t tell me that, please. I’m speaking of the necessity to know you are loved, needed, carnal, warm. Do you understand? Or don’t you understand anything anymore? God damn!”

“You didn’t lack for anything,” Sanginés insisted as if he would continue, to the last moment, fulfilling his administrative function, denying the emotions revealed by his avid, nervous, anxious figure, I don’t know, distant from what he was but also revealing what he was.

“And Jericó?” I stopped, photographed in front of myself like a being of lights and fugitive shadows.

“He’s in a safe place,” Sanginés repeated.

The phrase did not calm the vivid but painful memory of my fraternity with Jericó, the intense moments we had together, reading and discussing, assuming philosophical positions at the request of Father Filopáter. Jericó as Saint Augustine, I as Nietzsche, both led by the priest to the intelligence of Spinoza, transforming the will of God into the necessity of man. Were we, in the end, loyal to necessity in the name of will? Was this what my brother and I desired as a goal when we loved each other fraternally? Did our great rapport consist of this, associating necessity with will?

One scene after another passed through my mind. The two of us united at school. The two of us convinced not having a family was better than having a family like the Esparzas. We had signed a pact of comradeship. We felt the warm teenage satisfaction of discovering in friendship the best part of solitude. Together we made a plan for life that would bring us together forever.

“Maybe there will be, you know, separations, travel, broads. The important thing is to sign right now an alliance for the rest of our lives. Don’t say no…”

For the rest of our lives. I remember those afternoons in the café after school and the other side of the coin gleams opaquely. An alliance for the rest of our lives, a plan for life to keep us together forever. But on that occasion, hadn’t he proposed obligations all imposed by him? Do this, don’t do the other, turn down frivolous social invitations. And you’ll also despise “the herd of oxen.” But let’s also make a “selective, rigorous” plan for reading, for intellectual self-improvement.

That’s how it was, and now I’m grateful for the discipline he and I imposed on ourselves and deplore the docility with which I followed him in other matters. Though I congratulate myself because, when we lived out our destinies, he and I respected our secrets, as if part of the complicity of friendship included discretion about one’s private life. He didn’t find out about Lucha Zapata and Miguel Aparecido, or I knew nothing about Jericó’s life during his-how many were they?-years somewhere else. Europe, North America, the Border? Today I couldn’t say. Today I’ll never know if Jericó told me the truth. Today I know nothing about Jericó’s identity except the blinding truth of my fraternal relationship with him. I couldn’t blame him for anything. I had hidden as much about myself as he did. The terrible thing was to think that, “put in a safe place,” Jericó would never be able to tell me what he didn’t know about himself, what, perhaps, he would dare tell me if he knew, as I did, that we were brothers.

Understanding this filled me with rancor but also with sorrow. Once, when he had returned to Mexico, I wondered if we could take up again the intimacy, the shared respiration joining us when we were young. Was all we had lived merely an unrepeatable prologue? I insisted on thinking our friendship was the only shelter for our future.

It was hard and painful for me to think our entire life had resolved into terms of betrayal.

And too, as if to soften the pain, the moments returned of a strange attraction that did not lead to the encounter of bodies because a tacit, equally strange prohibition stopped us at the brink of desire in the shower at school, in the whore’s bed, in our cohabitation in the garret on Praga…

Had friendship stopped at the border of a physical relationship subject to all the accidents of passion, jealousy, misunderstanding, and attribution of unproven intentions that torment yet attract lovers? In mysterious ways, the desire felt under the shower or in the brothel was subject to this mysterious prohibition, as strong as the desire itself. A desire that, seen from a distance, is the first passion, the passion for cohabitation and contiguity, while the incestuous desire is confused with these virtues and therefore prohibited with a strength that can deny fraternity itself…

What could we do then, he and I, except feel like forbidden gods? We had the permanent possibility of violating the commandment regarding a prohibition only the gods can transgress against without sin. Who prevented us? How easy it would be for me today, after everything that has happened, to imagine it was the “call of the blood” holding us back. The feeling in the deepest part of ourselves that we were brothers without ever knowing it… Or perhaps he and I had no reason to turn to incest, since incest between siblings is a rebellion against the parents (says Sigmund from the couch) and we did not have father or mother.

The truth, I tell myself now, is that time and circumstances moved us away from all temptation: When Jericó returned from his absence (Europe? the United States? the Border?), facts themselves gradually divided us, doubts began to appear, perhaps Jericó’s Naples wasn’t Naples, Italy, but Naples, Florida, and his Paris was in Texas… Elective affinities emerged first with cordiality, then with growing antagonism in our workplaces, in my slow apprenticeship in the Utopia tower while he ascended rapidly in the Palace of La Topía. I was an open book. Jericó was a message in code. Perhaps this was what I wanted. Wasn’t my life a secret to everyone except me, and if it no longer was it’s because now I’m telling and writing it. Perhaps Jericó, like me, is the author of a secret book like mine, the book I knew nothing about as he knew nothing of mine. The sum of secrets, however, did not abolish the remainder of evidence. Jericó had wielded a real influence on presidential power. He had felt authorized to go beyond the power granted him to the power he wanted to grant himself. He made a mistake. He thought he would deceive power but power deceived him. And when he found out about it, my poor friend, cornered by the reality his illusions disdained, the only recourse he found to save his personality was to fall in love with Asunta… He wanted to defeat me in the final territory of triumph, which is love. And even there, Asunta handed me the victory. She defeated Jericó by telling him she was my lover.