Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

“Somebody got there first,” I told him.

“Who? Who did?” There was slaver on my friend’s lips.

“My brother Miguel Aparecido.”

“Where? Who?”

“In the San Juan de Aragón Prison.”

“What? He killed them?”

I didn’t know how to answer him. I knew only that the Mariachi Maxi and the whore with the bee on her buttock were “in a safe place,” and with that, perhaps, the history of my time closed and a new history opened, the history of the kids on the plaza who one day, I reminded Errol, would grow up and be clerks, businessmen, bureaucrats, fathers as rebellious as their own fathers had been, pachucos and tarzans, hippies and rebels without a cause, gangs and the unemployed, generation after generation of insurgents eventually tamed by society…

“Do you understand, Errol, why, if there are five tigers in a cage, four get together to kill just one?”

“No, old buddy, plain and simple, no.”

We agreed to see each other again.

“YOU NEED A vacation,” Asunta Jordán told me when I returned to the office on Santa Fe. “You look a wreck. It’s time for a rest.”

For the sake of my mental health, I rejected the idea of a conspiracy. Why did everyone want to send me on vacation? I looked in the mirror. “A wreck”: vitiated, damaged. Ruined by evil companions? Their distribution in my life flashed through my mind: María Egipciaca, Elvira Ríos, Lucha Zapata, Filopáter, Max Monroy, Asunta herself, Jericó… Evil or good companions? Responsible for my being a “wreck”? I had enough honor left to say that I alone-and no one else-was responsible for the “damage.”

I looked in the mirror. I seemed healthy. More or less. Why this insistence on sending me away for a rest?

“To Acapulco.”

“Ah.”

“Max Monroy has a nice house there. On the way to La Quebrada. Here are the keys.”

She tossed them, with a contemptuous gesture though with a friendly smile, on the table.

It was a house on the way to La Quebrada, Asunta explained. It dated from the late 1930s, when Acapulco was a fishing village and there were only two hotels: La Marina, in the middle of town, and Hotel de La Quebrada, which came down from the hills and settled on a terrace where one could admire intrepid divers who waited for the right waves and then threw themselves into the narrow inlet of water between steep, craggy cliffs.

Now Acapulco had grown until it had millions of inhabitants, hundreds of hotels, restaurants, and condominiums, beaches polluted by the uncontrolled discharge from the aforementioned hotels, restaurants, and condominiums, and increasing sprawl to the south of the city, from Puerto Marqués to Revolcadero and even as far as Barra Vieja, in search of what Acapulco used to offer like a baptismal certificate: limpid water, tended beaches, paradise lost…

I arrived at Max Monroy’s house at La Quebrada on a solitary Monday with one suitcase and the books I wanted to reread to see if one day I would present my lawyer’s thesis, Machiavelli and the Modern State . Erskine Muir, who explains the Florentine by means of his time, the Italian city-states, Savonarola, the Borgias; or Jacques Heers, who sees a not very rigorous but passionate historian, poet, and author of courtly plays and carnival songs whose literary imagination was applied to reasons of state, making generations believe that carnival is serious and curiosity the law. Maurizio Piral, who questions the famous smile of Niccolò as the female author of the book Niccolò did not write: the book about life, its paradox, its uncertainty. A misinterpreted man, insists Michael White: his mental lucidity forgotten, his duplicity and ambition codified. Sebastián da Grazia sends Niccolò to the hell made up, of course, of his contemporaries. Franco Fido studies the paradox of an author who writes “The bible of his own enemies,” from the transformation of Niccolò by Elizabethan dramatists into “Old Nick,” the Devil in person, to his vulgar rhetorical invocation by Il Duce Mussolini. The Jesuits, the ignorant, Fichte: Who has not been concerned with the “most famous Italian in Europe,” especially the Italians themselves, who reduced him to municipal, confessional, and academic boundaries?

All this was in my knapsack. The indispensable commentaries. Above all, those of the statesman speaking to Machiavelli power to power: Napoleon Bonaparte feels he is the Machiavellian incarnation of the New Prince as opposed to the Hereditary one, but is anxious to endure in power: to be succeeded, as the New Prince, by his descendants, who will be the Heirs…

I say all the preceding so the reader can know my good-magnificent-intentions when I withdrew to Acapulco loaded down with Machiavellian literature and with a touch of melancholy, an inevitable residue of my recent personal history, not imagining that the true Machiavellianism wasn’t in my knapsack but waiting for me in the house at La Quebrada, which you reached by ascending the mountainous curves over the bay until you reached a rocky height and entered a mansion that rushed, with no distinction of style beyond a vague “Californian” from the 1930s, past the kitchens, bedrooms, and sitting rooms to the reward of a huge terrace overlooking the Pacific Ocean and, farther down, the narrow private beach. In its entirety, it was like one of those white porcelain dinner pails my guardian María Egipciaca prepared for me with five little stacked plates, from wet soup to dry soup to chicken to vegetables to dessert… the works.

“Max Monroy built it for Sibila Sarmiento,” Asunta Jordán told me surprisingly when I reached the terrace and she came toward me, highball in hand, barefoot, dressed in palazzo pajamas I knew from rooting through her closet. Loose blouse. Wide pants. Black with gold trim and edges.

She offered me the drink. I feigned casualness. She didn’t tell me too much. It wasn’t the first surprise this woman had given me. She looked at the ocean.

“But Sibila Sarmiento never got to live in it. Well, in fact, she didn’t even get to see it…”

She saw me. She didn’t look at me. She saw me there: like a thing. A necessary but awkward thing.

Asunta laughed in her fashion: “Max had illusions that one day he’d be able to bring the mother of his three sons here, to Acapulco, and offer her a quiet life by the ocean. Well. What a hope!”

Her gaze became cynical.

One more of Max’s illusions. He imagined that one day Doña Concha would free him from the maternal dictatorship to which she kept him subjected.

“A man at once complicated and simple,” she went on, “it’s difficult for Max Monroy to digest. Everything takes him time. He never belches, you know? There are things he doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want… And another thing. Between utility and revenge, he always chooses the useful.”

She raised her glass. She almost winked at me.

“I’m just the opposite…”

She laughed. “Then he strikes like a bolt of lightning.”

She indicated that I should sit in a wicker chair. I remained standing. At least in this I could rebel against what I felt was the implicit dictatorship of Asunta Jordán. She didn’t care.

“Max Monroy!” she exclaimed as if she were invoking the sunset. “A civilized man, right? A reasonable man, don’t you think? He always asks for suggestions. He’s open to suggestions. Ah, but not to criticism. Suggesting is one thing. Criticizing is another. Criticizing him means thinking he can’t think for himself, that he requires orientation, another’s opinion… False. The suggestions should stop halfway between two hateful extremes, Josué, my good Josué: flattery and criticism.”

She told me she would criticize, for example, this useless, uninhabited house… a mansion for a ghost, for a madwoman. Or for a ghostly madwoman.