Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

“He didn’t control the sadists who killed the children…”

“It was part of the compromise.”

“What compromise?”

“Between Miguel and the authorities. I’ll give you this in exchange for that. A swap.”

“Are you telling me the jailers have the right to kill a few kids and Miguel has the right to save them?”

“He’s the big boss.”

“How do they choose?” I said with no horror in my oneiric voice, losing the order of the acts, the words attributable to Asunta, to Miguel, to Antigua Concepción, I don’t know…

“They choose at random. Eagle or sun. Heads or tails. This one stays in prison. That one drowns in the pool. The ones who don’t cross themselves are really lucky!”

“And the ones who know how to swim?” I said without much relevance.

“They’re saved too.”

The voice in my dream went on: “The worst criminals get away, led by the Mariachi Maxi and the whore with the bee, the damned Sara P… Not everything turns out the way we want, isn’t that right?”

“They’ve been put in a safe place,” the chorus repeated the sacramental phrase.

“In a safe place?”

“They belong to Miguel. I don’t guarantee their well-being.”

“Just like my brother? Just like Jericó?”

“We don’t talk about that.”

“In a safe place? What? How? Isn’t anybody going to-?”

“I can show you.”

“What? Not in…?”

The voices dissipated. They dissipated. Dissipated. They were insignificant voices that bring dreams to distract us from what wants to summon us and we can scarcely guess at.

On the other hand, the figure of Max Monroy advances toward me, shoulders high, head sunk into his body, defiant, as if wanting to tell me that insults, physical abuse, praise and blame did not even graze a man of action who was also a solitary man: Action and solitude, solitude and action, joined, are never used up, said Monroy’s voice in the dream, the record of a man’s motives is huge, there is avarice, desire, rancor, rarely complete satisfaction, Josué, if you fulfill a desire the desire engenders another desire and so on until sorrows flourish because the sun did not come out and we cannot understand that our desires are one thing and our loyalties something very different and in order to obtain what is desired you must separate it from all loyalty immediately, my son, without harming anyone. That is what those who detest, envy, or accuse me do not understand: I did not have to harm anyone to be who I am…

He advances toward me preceded by that strange odor of an animal recently emerged from a cave that Asunta evoked one day.

“Being old does not mean having impunity,” said the shade of Monroy. “Or immunity.”

In the logic of the dream, he launched into a list of his ailments and the medicines he took to alleviate them. I’m old, he said, the old feel threatened by the young. I’m ossifying. Go on, touch my bones. Go on. Ándale .

I didn’t dare. Or I experienced the illogical transitions in the dream. Max Monroy was saying things separated by the oneiric instincts that dissolve the concretion of things, new enterprises disturb the old order, the old resist them, I create them, I am my own opposition…

“I admit that advanced age develops greater doses of cynicism, a measure of skepticism, a degree of pessimism. Why?”

I said I didn’t know.

“You have to know how to say no.”

“Ah.”

“Being old does not mean having impunity. Or immunity,” he repeated. “You have to know how to look deep into my eyes to know who I am. Who I was.”

The voice resonated as if it were traveling the length of a gallery of mirrors.

He said his joints ached.

He said: “There are things I don’t want to know.”

I asked Asunta Jordán: “Why do you appear almost naked at parties and with me only in the dark?”

“Why is your penis so long?” I believe she asked him.

“To cool off my semen,” responded Monroy.

“What does it mean to be put in a safe place? Wait just a minute…”

“And what does it mean to go to bed with Max, like you do, Asunta?”

“What do you know-”

“I’ve heard you.”

“Have you seen us?”

“It was very dark. Don’t fuck around.”

“Black. It was black, you spying bastard!”

“Go on, don’t play dumb, answer me.”

“Don’t be a busybody, I’m telling you. What a meddler you are!”

This reproof, which seemed to come from Asunta, in fact was directed at me by Antigua Concepción: I felt the outrage of her wrinkled hand weighed down with heavy rings, almost in the posture, rather than attacking me, of defending her son Max, who advanced like a ghost, white as chalk, surrounded by the tolling of deep bells, disconcerted, with eyes that said,

“I feel like sleeping…”

Max Monroy came toward me, expecting to be interrupted, wanting it, anticipating it.

The bell rang with a muffled sonority.

Max said to me: “What, who is it tolling for?”

I had the courage to respond: “Who stopped destiny?”

“Your stopping mine or my stopping yours?” he said in a voice desperate with unwanted concern before the entire dream vanished…

THOSE WHO HAVE accompanied me throughout this… What to call it? Agony? Mental anguish, aching passion? Those who accompany me (you, semblance, brother, hypocrite, etcetera) know my internal chats all strive to be dialogues with Your Graces, efforts of desperate appearance and agonizing reality to escape the site of my epidermis and tell you what I tell myself, without the certainty of truth, with the insecurity of doubt.

How was the person of Jericó, put “in a safe place,” not going to return constantly to my soul as I walk slowly from the apartment on Praga to an uncertain destination? A pedestrian of the air, because while my feet trod the sidewalks of Varsovia, Estocolmo, and Amberes, my head had no compass. Or rather: North was Jericó, in more than one sense. The cardinal point of my life, the wind that cools it, pole star, guide, direction, and above all frontier, the limit of something more than territories, a frontier of exiles, distances, separations that the life of Jericó made irremediable…

Did our life end before our youth?

At what moment?

I loved and admired this man, my brother. Now I summarized my life with him in a question: Everything that happened to us, did it happen to us freely? Or, in the end, were we only a sum of fatalities? Did we rebel against particular destinies-masculine sex, orphans, aspirants to intelligence, I’ll say! translators of intellectual talent to practical life-We won’t be doctors or mechanics, Josué, we’ll be political men, we’ll influence the life of the city… the city he described to me from the terrace of the Hotel Majestic, lengthening it with a gesture of his arm, denying we were puppets of fatality, only to arrive, exhausted, at our destiny chosen as a compromise, as our personal will, to discover at the end of the road that all destiny is fatal, gets away from us, closes life like an iron door and says to us: This was your life, you have no other, and it wasn’t what you wanted or imagined. How long will it take us to learn that no matter how much will we have, destiny cannot be foreseen, and insecurity is the real climate of life?

And in spite of everything, Jericó, wasn’t there a certain equilibrium, an ultimate harmony, an involuntary measure in all you and I did and said? Necessity on one side, chance on the other, they go beyond us and place us, eventually, on the crest of a wave, at the brink of death, conscious that if we don’t know our destinies, at least we’re conscious of having one…

How was our shared destiny revealed to the extent it was not shared but chosen by each of us on his own, knowing we were inseparable: Castor and Pollux, even before we knew we were brothers: Cain and Abel? And I don’t know whether as boys we fought not against each other but against the necessity that seemed to impose itself on us. How did we lose our way? Judge me if you wish. I don’t judge you. I merely confirm that gradually, in the apartment on Praga, seeing the Zócalo from the Hotel Majestic, gradually your face gave way to your mask only to reveal that your mask was your true face… We spoke of the tiger in the zoo devoured by the other four caged tigers. Why that tiger and not one of those that attacked it?