Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

He said he felt content that Brillantinas and Gomas, Siboney Peralta, and the whole damn troop who accompanied Sara P. and the Mariachi Maximiliano Batalla in their catastrophic attempt at rebellion were back in prison.

I told him I had seen them in passing, behind bars, as I came to see him now.

“Well, take a good look at them, my brother, because you won’t be seeing them again.”

He looked at me in a way that meant I couldn’t avoid the cold at my back. At that moment I knew the gang of Sara P. and the Mariachi wouldn’t leave jail except feetfirst.

“And Jericó?” I dared to say, abruptly.

“They were his people,” replied Miguel Aparecido. “He got them out of prison from the office of the presidency. He organized them. They were his people.”

He looked at me with those blue-black eyes I’ve mentioned, and the yellow flecks acquired their own life of never-satisfied intelligence.

“He didn’t calculate. He didn’t realize. He had a half-baked idea that if a vanguard acts, the masses will follow. He was wrong. He believed that by penetrating as he did the offices of power, he himself could rise to power. Very smart, sure… It’s your ass, Barrabás!”

I said it was an old sickness to believe power is contagious… He didn’t realize that power doesn’t commit hara-kiri. Power protects itself.

“Understand what the public meeting of President Carrera and the magnate Monroy in Chapultepec meant,” Sanginés had said to me. “Neither went to see the other for pleasure. They’re rivals. But each understands that the other has his own dynamite factory, and dynamite factories have to be placed at a distance so they don’t blow one another up. Each part-Carrera, Monroy, power, business-has a kind of veto over the other. They join together when they feel threatened by a third exogenous force, a stranger to the inbreeding of power. Power originates in power, not outside it, just as a cell forms inside another. This is what Jericó didn’t understand. He believed he could head a popular force that would carry him to the top. He didn’t understand that the movement of the people, when it occurs, is necessary, not artificial, not a product of a messianic desire.”

“Revolutions also create elites,” I noted.

“Or elites head them.”

“Though they also erupt from the people.”

“Yes,” Sanginés acknowledged. “The ruling classes have to be renewed in order not to be annihilated. They can do it peacefully, as has occurred in Mexico. They can do it violently, as has also occurred in Mexico. The revolutionary knows when he can and when he cannot. His political talent consists in that: when to and when not to.”

“If all of you knew that, I mean, Carrera as well as Monroy, why didn’t you let Jericó fade away all by himself with no followers except this gang of hoodlums imprisoned here? Why?”

Sanginés replied with the wisest of his smiles, the one I remembered from his classes at the law school, far from the awful grimace that deformed his spirit when he followed me in the darkness up the staircase on Praga. The smile I admired.

“I have confidence in both houses, the house of political power and that of entrepreneurial power,” he continued.

He closed his eyes blissfully. I already knew that.

“And do you know why they trust me?”

I didn’t want to answer with some offensive joke.

“No.”

“Because they know I possess all the information and don’t trouble anyone with what I know.”

“And what’s that?” I wasn’t pretending innocence: I was innocent.

He said in Mexico, in each Latin American country, rebellions are being forged day and night, in the hope of marking an until here and a from now on as, let’s say, Bolívar or Castro did. He said he wouldn’t go into the reasons why it was difficult for revolutions “like the ones in the old days” to occur again. Present-day power is more sophisticated, better informed, societies have higher expectations, the left is familiar with electoral routes, but the right will have to have its innate voraciousness limited from time to time by a little fear.

“It seemed to me, Josué, that Jericó’s little adventure, so secondary, so minimal, so directed toward failure, ultimately so lacking in danger, offered me the opportunity to alert power without undue cost and give the right a shock. And in passing, to deflate the grotesque vision the extremely ambitious Jericó had acquired of himself.”

Sanginés’s smile was very offensive.

“He read Malaparte and Lenin. He felt like a little local Mussolini. Poor kid!”

“But in reality there was no danger,” I insisted, moved, in spite of myself, by a feeling for Jericó that went beyond fraternity and simply called itself friendship.

Sanginés knew how to disguise his smiles. “Exactly. Because there wasn’t, we could pretend there was.”

“I don’t understand, damn it.”

Sanginés didn’t celebrate his small logical triumph. “The greatest threats are fought in secret. The lesser ones should be denounced as a warning to the greater ones that we know what they want and control what they do. And to let the public know they are, at the same time, both threatened and safe.”

I looked at Sanginés with unaccustomed fury.

“He’s my brother, Maestro, he’s worthy of a little respect-some compassion-a-”

Sanginés continued as if he had heard nothing.

“Carrera and Monroy may be rivals, but they won’t be each other’s victims. Stopping Jericó is effective proof of this. At the moment of danger, the two powers unite.”

“He’s my brother,” I insisted.

And he was Monroy’s son.

Sanginés looked at me with burning coldness.

“He was Cain.”

Was Cain our brother? I wanted to ask Miguel Aparecido in the cell in Aragón and didn’t dare. There was a prohibition in his blue-black gaze. If Jericó was Cain, he and I were not Abel.

“Was he Cain?” I insisted to Sanginés.

“He was your brother,” the lawyer Sanginés agreed with salutary cruelty, telling me there was no better example than this to teach a probative lesson regarding the futility of rebellion and the cowardice of a response without balls. The winners were the Statesman and the Entrepreneur, like that, capitalized.

Cain and Abel.

I read this with vast, indescribable clarity in the gaze of my brother Miguel. We were not Abel. We hadn’t saved ourselves skillfully from either the curse or the good fortune. We had assumed, without fully realizing it, the responsibility of caring for our brother. Wasn’t Jericó our brother?

“He was Cain,” said Miguel Aparecido.

I didn’t have to ask for explanations. I remembered the curse Jericó had hurled at me from Asunta’s bed, with a murderous look and a disdain revealed by the mask of hatred. Jericó naked on all fours, a captured animal, threatening me-I’m going to kill you, fucking cocksucker-slavering, frustrated. The concentrated hatred of my brother Cain. And my painful doubt: Had the hatred he showed me the last time always been inside Jericó? Did he “patronize” me when we were young, look down on me, despise my independence and my supposed sexual triumph with Asunta?

Was this the end of the story? No. I didn’t know what had happened to Jericó. The question ate through my entire body like a restless acid concentrating in my heart only to flee my soul and remind me, my soul, that it was captive in a body.

I knew Miguel Aparecido’s response before he gave it. It seemed to be the answer agreed on by all of them, by Sanginés, by Asunta, by Miguel.

“Where is Jericó? What has happened to Jericó?”

“He’s been put in a safe place,” Miguel Aparecido replied.