Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

“For whom?” I prompted.

“For the poor and the ambitious who have lost their way and their faith in others. Especially for them.”

I thought of Filopáter and his own forsaken priesthood. At that moment, the group of three little boys laughed behind the door of the tiled kitchen and Sanginés put on an astonished face. The children ran to him, climbed on his lap, his shoulders, mussed his hair, and they all laughed.

I realized, thanks to my prolonged absence, that these three children were still between four and seven years old. Just like the last time. Just like every time.

Sanginés caught the surprise in my gaze.

He laughed.

“Look, Josué: Every couple of years I renew my offspring. Three children I manage to rescue from the Aragón prison. You saw the subterranean pool where these poor kids play and sometimes are thrown into the water and sometimes swim and save themselves and sometimes drown, reducing the prison population…”

He saw the horror in my eyes. His begged me to understand the pity that allowed him, every two or three years, to save two or three children from the horror.

“And then?” I asked.

“Another destiny,” he said summarily.

“And Jericó’s destiny?” I dared to say angrily.

“In a safe place.”

He took my hand. “I’ve never married. I appreciate your discretion. Have a good trip…”

“What?” I was surprised. “To where?”

“Aren’t you going to Acapulco?” Sanginés feigned a not very credible surprise.

I DREAMED. AND in dreams, as everyone knows, figures enter and leave with no explicable order, voices are superimposed, and the words of one follow on the tail of another before beginning again, in a different tone, in another voice, other voices…

The space I inhabit (or that I only think or dream) is as transparent as water, as solid as a diamond. It is a frozen space, in every sense of the word: You have to move your arms vigorously to advance, you have to let yourself be carried by the current, to get anywhere you have to touch bottom knowing it doesn’t exist… The near and the far succeed each other like a single reality and I don’t know to whom to attribute the voices I haven’t quite defined because they join in and vanish in the blink of an eye.

The voices speak in the peremptory tones of a lawyer or judge but dissipate with the advance of the whitish figure with the large, bald head sunk into his shoulders, similar to a self-portrait of Max Beckmann in which the light of the face barely reflects the external shadow that illuminates it: bald, with heavy eyelids and an inexplicable smile, Beckmann wants to reflect in his face the constant theme of his work: cruelty, the trenches and corpses of war, the erratic sadism of men against men. What does Max Monroy reflect?

At this moment in my dream, the self-portrait of Max Beckmann assumes the form of Max Monroy, fleeting, gray, slave to uncertain displacements, seized by a physical pain that has set him between movement and repose, possessed of a dignity in brutal contrast to the parrot chatter of the other fleeting figures in the dream, were they Asunta Jordán, Miguel Aparecido, Antigua Concepción affirming, interrogating me, discordant, accusatory, vulgar voices, so different from the quasi-ecclesiastical dignity of the gray figure of Max Monroy? asking me questions, blaming this man who had been revealed as my father, accusing him as if to tell me not to believe in him, not to approach him, no matter how the present dignity of the man and my oneiric proximity to his figure appeared to be the scenario of the encounter we both, father and son, required, interrupted by the voices.

Do you believe Max Monroy is a generous individual? Do you believe he visits his wife Sibila Sarmiento out of pure charity? Or because the measure of his sadism fills to overflowing when he fucks a prisoner, a woman with no will who is also the mother of his three sons? What do you think? Do you think that out of pure beneficence Max kept his other two sons, Jericó and you, at a distance, supposedly so you’d grow on your own, with only the help that was absolutely necessary, free of the burden of being the sons of Max Monroy, rich kids with a Jaguar and a plane, broads and travel, contempt and bribes, you and he making yourselves with your own efforts, your own talents? Do you believe that? No way! He did it because he’s a miserable man, like an entomologist who puts his spiders down in the courtyard to run around just to see what they can think of to survive, to see if they save themselves by scurrying along the walls, to see if a shoe doesn’t squash them, to see, to see… He plays, Max plays with destinies. And do you know why? I’ll tell you: Because that’s how he takes his revenge on his dear old mother Antigua Concha, takes his revenge for how the old bitch manipulated him, imposed her will on him, handled him like a puppet at a fair, one of those from the old days with pink stockings and a bullfighter’s costume that are still seen at village fiestas. I try to view Max Monroy’s life like a long, very long revenge against his mother, the revenge he couldn’t take while Doña Concepción was alive and filled the world with an imperious will, tall and strong and unpredictable like a gigantic wave made of skirts and scapularies and broken nails and the sandals of a feverish nun, Antigua Concepción: Who can endure being conceived not once and for all but all the time, conception after conception, born morning noon and night, the imposed obligation not only to love or even venerate his sainted mother but to obey her, you hear me? even in what she didn’t command. Obliged to imagine what his sainted mother asked of him even when she wasn’t asking anything. Do you believe when Antigua Concepción died Max Monroy freed himself of her influence? Well, don’t go around thinking that. At times I surprise him muttering to himself, as if he were speaking to an invisible being. And when I spell out his words I know he’s talking to her, he asks forgiveness for disobeying her, he admits she would have done things better or in another way or wouldn’t have done anything at all, she would have known when to act and when to do nothing, letting the entourage pass without hearing the band, as hypocritical as a scorpion before it strikes and then Max Monroy behaves as if the insect had bitten him, except he differs from his mother in that she was a showy creature, as ostentatious as a band of clownish mariachis, and he, by way of contrast, is serene, calm to the point of perversity, astute, still, as if only in this way, as you have seen, he could differentiate himself from his mother without offending his parent’s sainted memory, be himself without turning against her… “One makes haste slowly.”

“Do you know where the señora is buried?” I asked with an air of innocence.

“Nobody knows,” the voice of voices continued. “Not even Max. He handed the body of Señora Concepción to a group of criminals he got out of prison with the promise to free them and told them to bury Concepción’s corpse wherever they liked, but never to tell him about it… or anyone else. It goes without saying.”

“What trust in-”

“None at all. Instead of freeing them, he abducted them. Nobody knows where they ended up. They were never heard from again. Just imagine.”

“But Miguel’s there, he’s in prison…”

“Miguel Aparecido is the only person Max Monroy couldn’t handle. Miguel Aparecido chose to remain locked in a cell in San Juan de Aragón as a precaution against his own desire to get out and murder his father, and his father accepted his release, or his imprisonment, as a compromise between two certainties: his and Miguel’s. Max didn’t liquidate Miguel and Miguel didn’t annihilate Max. But Max served an infinite sentence, worse than death itself, and Miguel lived his life creating an empire inside prison.”