Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

“Use force as if it were an animal you release so it can do harm and then return to its domestic enclosure.”

You released it, Jericó. You couldn’t control it. The tiger didn’t return to the zoo. You turned yourself into the animal, my brother. You believed that from power you would defeat power and turn yourself into power. You told me: Be violent, be arrogant, they’ll respect you in the end and even come to adore you. You believed it was enough to assign a destiny to the mass of people to have them follow you with no motive of their own, only because you were you and no one could resist you. And when you failed, you accused them of treason: the masses who ignored you, Max Monroy because he didn’t consult with you, Valentín Pedro Carrera because he got ahead of you, Antonio Sanginés because he read you in time, Asunta because she preferred me.

I stopped on Calle de Génova, at the entrance to the tunnel that leads to the Glorieta de Insurgentes. The darkness of the urban cave gave me a sense of agony, that word in which accountability and death are associated as they laugh at us and mock our challenges, inspirations, powers…

What was the sin, Jericó? I go onto the plaza filled with young Mexicans disguised as what they are not in order to stop being what they are, and it comes to me like a revelation: your lack of interest in others, your inability to penetrate another’s mind, your pride, Jericó, your rejection of those who are unwanted in the world, which is the immense majority of people. The mobocracy, you said once, the massocracy, the demodumbocracy, la raza , that raza incarnated now, when I penetrate the darkness of the tunnel, in a scuffle, a shove that joins my lips to other lips, a fortuitous kiss, unexpected, dry, unknown, accompanied by a smell I try to recognize, a stink, a sweat, something sticky, an incense of marijuana and bait, the urban smell of tortilla and gasoline…

Rapid, fleeting, the kiss that joins us separates us, the tunnel brightens with its own light and we see each other’s faces, Errol Esparza and I, Josué once Nadal from Nada, now Monroy of a kingdom…

I EMBRACED ERROL, Baldy Esparza, as if he were my past, my adolescence, my precocious thought, everything I was with Jericó and that Errol returned to me now, in a diminished though nostalgic version, thanks to a fortuitous encounter on the Glorieta de Insurgentes.

What did he say to me? What did he show me? Where did he take me? He couldn’t take me to the emo clubs because only young guys went there and not uptight ones like me, dressed to go to an office (a funeral, a wedding, a quinceañera dance, a baptism, everything forbidden by Jericó?), and on the plaza, congregating in silent groups, adolescent girls and boys with no gaze because they covered their eyes with bangs, wore extensions at the back of the neck, dressed in black, with self-inflicted wounds on their arms, drawings tattooed on their hands, very skinny, more dark than dark-skinned, sitting on the flower boxes, silent, abruptly moved to kiss, decorated with stars, perforated from head to foot, I felt impelled to look and avoid their gaze, suspicious of the danger and drawn by an unhealthy curiosity until Errol, my guide through this small parainferno or infereden, placed like a navel in the center of the city, said to me,

“They like it if you look at them.”

A tribe of skinny dark bodies, stars, skulls, perforations, how could I not compare them to the tribes on the Zócalo that Jericó trusted to attack power and where Filopáter earned his living typing at Santo Domingo? Never, with Jericó, had I approached this universe where I was walking now guided by Errol, who had become the Virgil of the new Mexican tribe that he, in spite of his age-which was mine-seemed to know, perhaps because, skinny and long-haired, dressed in black, he didn’t seem to be his age and had penetrated this group to the degree that he approached a girl and kissed her deeply and then her companion, who asked me:

“Do you smooch?”

I looked at Errol. He didn’t return my look. The dark boy kissed me on the mouth and then asked if I had a vocation for suffering.

I tried to answer. “I don’t know. I’m not like you.”

“Don’t stigmatize me,” answered the boy.

“What did he mean?” I asked Errol.

That I shouldn’t distinguish between reason and sentiment. They viewed me as a thinking type who controlled his feelings, Errol said, that’s how they view every outsider. They wanted you to free your emotions. My emotions-wasn’t I going over them again and again on my walk through the Zona Rosa? What other extreme, what externalization of my emotions could I add to the internalization I’ve narrated here? A generational abyss opened before me. At that instant, on Insurgentes, with Errol, surrounded by the tribe of emos, perhaps I stopped being young, the eternally young Josué, the apprentice to life, graduated and moved a step away from retirement by this Bedouin tribe of adolescents determined to separate from me, from us, from the nation I have described, analyzed, and constantly evoked here, with Jericó and Sanginés, with Filopáter and Miguel Aparecido. A secession.

Now, on the Glorieta de Insurgentes, at dusk on this Wednesday of my life, I felt the country no longer belonged to me, it had been appropriated by children between fifteen and twenty years old, millions of young Mexicans who didn’t share my history and even denied my geography, creating a separate republic in this minimal utopia on a plaza in Mexico City, another in Guadalajara, another in Querétaro: the other nation, the threatening and threatened nation, the rejected and rejecting country. It was no longer mine.

Did Errol read my gaze that afternoon as we strolled around the sunken plaza of Insurgentes?

“They’re only trying to substitute one pain for another. That’s why they cut their arms. That’s why they pierce their ears.”

Substitute one pain for another? I would have liked to tell my friend I too had a tribal esthetic, had nonconformity, had depressions, couldn’t stop falling in love (Lucha Zapata, Asunta Jordán) and suffering. Was it only my esthetic that was distant, not my sentiments? This sudden need to identify with the young people on the square was doomed, I knew, to failure. It had value on its own, I thought, it had value as an effort at identification, even though physically I could never be part of the new, ultimately romantic nation of darkness longing to die in time, to save itself from maturity… from corruption…

They were romantics, I said to myself, and to Errol I said: “They’re romantics.”

I sensed the personal excitement, the desire to leave the great shadow of poverty and mediocrity and become visible, free the emotions forbidden by the family, religion, politics…

“Don’t stigmatize me.”

“What are they called?”

Darketos. Metaleros. Skatos. Raztecos. Dixies. They form groups, crews. They help each other. They defend themselves. They’re grateful. They’re emos.

Suddenly, the peace-passivity-of the emo world was shattered with a violence Errol himself didn’t expect, and he took me by the shoulders to lead me off the Glorieta. The Génova, Puebla, and Oaxaca entrances were closed by the invasion of young men shouting assholes, fuckers, get them, throwing stones while the emos covered their faces and said-they didn’t shout-equality, tolerance, respect, and offered their arms to be wounded by the aggression until the skateboarders took the initiative and chased the aggressors with their boards and a kind of peace returned followed by a slow nocturnal migration to other corners of a restless city that both was and was not mine.

“I want to kill Maxi Batalla and Sara P.,” Errol said when we sat down to drink beers at a café on the Glorieta. “They killed my mother.”