“What shall we do?” he said then, and our life changed.
Jericó changed it as he himself, his physical attitude, his appearance changed in the next moment, when he let fly the issues he wanted to communicate after his prologue on the stage of touristic minimization and mental abandon.
What shall we do? he repeated. There are many possibilities for success. Which are yours and mine? Or rather, Josué, which success is worthy of you and me?
I wasn’t going to answer with the reasons I’ve just given you, which can be summarized in the word “experience,” for only on that basis did my expectations, though still vague, begin to take shape. I knew Jericó would not share much in the recounting of his European experiences, which (I was beginning to realize) he would never reveal beyond the brief tour he had just offered. His years of absence were going to be a mystery, and Jericó didn’t even challenge me to penetrate it. There was in this attitude I’ve called Byronic a wager: The past has died and the future begins today. Make whatever guesses you like.
As a consequence, I changed my attitude. Instead of asking about his past, I proposed sharing our future.
“What do we want?” he repeated, and added: “What are we afraid of?”
He continued saying that he and I knew—or ought to know—what we could be or do. He recalled an earlier conversation about “not ever going to a quinceañera, a thé dansant, a baptism, the opening of restaurants, flower shops, supermarkets, bank branches, the celebration of university classes, beauty contests, or meetings at the Zócalo.” Never being interested in the rock-and-roller Tarcisia who married the Russian millionaire Ulyanov, both of them barefoot, with Hawaiian leis around their necks and guests who welcomed the dawn dancing hip-hop on the sand at seven in the morning.
“Now, Jericó, how did they serve the stew to honor the father of the bride—”
“Who is a native of Sonora. Did you turn down the invitation?”
“No, Jericó, not at all, I’m not interested in being—”
“Not even if it’s your own wedding?”
I smiled, or tried to. I remembered how I had admired Jericó’s capacity for taking life very seriously.
I said I felt I had gone past those tests, didn’t he? I refrained for the moment from mentioning Lucha Zapata, Miguel Aparecido, the children in the sinister pool at San Juan de Aragón. Perhaps Jericó responded indirectly, saying it wasn’t enough not doing what we didn’t do. Now we ought to decide what we were actually going to do. He stood and grasped my shoulders. He looked at me with his Delftware eyes. We didn’t have, that was apparent, a talent for music, literature, tennis, water- or downhill skiing, racing cars, or directing films, we didn’t have the soul of actuaries, accountants, real estate agents, porters, and all the sad people who accept their small destinies … he said.
“What do we have left?”
I told him to tell me. I didn’t know.
“Politics, Josué. It’s self-evident, brother. When you’re no good as a street sweeper or a composer, when you can’t write a book or direct a movie or open a door or sell socks, then you devote yourself to politics. It’ll go like clockwork.”
“That’s what we’re going to do?” I said, with false astonishment.
Jericó laughed and let go of my shoulders.
“Politics is the last resort of intelligence.”
He winked. In Europe he had learned, he said, that the mission of the intellectual was to torment power with words.
“Then what do you want to do?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet. Something huge. Give me time.”
I thought without saying so that freedom is uncertainty. That is something I had learned.
He didn’t read my thoughts:
“There can be many attempts at success. Which is worthy of you and me?”
I didn’t know what to say. I was held back by another feeling. Above and beyond the words and attitudes, that morning of our reunion in the garret on Calle de Praga remains in my mind, especially now that I’ve died, as a moment of terror. Could we resume our intimacy, the common respiration that had joined us when we were young? Could we feel again the primary emotion of youth? Was everything we had lived only a prologue, a preparation for a goal we didn’t really know yet how to define? Was our friendship the sole, poor shelter of our future?
Jericó embraced me and said in English, as if responding to all my questions, Let’s hug it out, bitch.
STUNNED BY AERIAL excursions on the wings of the prophet Ezekiel and landings in the deep earth where Doña Antigua Concepción lies, exhausted by so much sky and so much history, disheartened by great promises, I walked very slowly toward Colonia Juárez and the apartment on Calle de Praga without knowing where I was coming from or the location of the secret grave that soon dissipated in the noise of engines, exhaust fumes, the ring-ring of bicycles, and thunder in the clouded sky, trying to leave behind the experience I had gained and concentrate on particular accidents, the personal inadequacies and small vices and virtues of men and women with their own names though lacking a historic surname.
Drunk on the chronological history of Antigua Concepción and inebriated by the undated apocalypse of the prophet Ezekiel, with infinite patience and humility I climbed the stairs of the house on Praga, prepared to focus my humanity again on Jericó’s friendship and my care of Lucha. These were my priorities, soon dissolved by Jericó’s urgent expression when he greeted me.
“Let’s go to Pedregal. Errol’s mother has died.”
Years had gone by without our returning to the ultramodern mansion turned into a neobaroque mess by the dictatorial bad taste of Don Nazario Esparza. “Act as if you haven’t seen anything” was Errol’s recommendation to us, referring either to the arguments of his parents or the Transylvanian horror of his house. I remembered the lack of any initiative on our friend’s part once he had provoked an altercation between his parents. Or perhaps I was misremembering. It had been six, seven years since I had seen my old classmate or visited his house.
Now, from the entrance door, black crepe announced the family’s mourning. I thought the house had always been in mourning, locked with padlocks of avarice, lack of compassion, suspicion, meager love, scant serenity. Except that as I approached the coffin of Doña Estrellita de Esparza, with Jericó ahead of me, I felt that compassion and serenity, at least, had in fact inhabited this lugubrious mansion but were virtues that lived waiting for the death, and only in the submissive, preoccupied presence, of Doña Estrellita.
I looked at her corpse. Her waxen face had been blurred even more by the cold hand of Death, the Ashen-Faced, and caricatured by the rouge and lipstick the funeral director (or damned Don Nazario) had smeared on the grayish features. Doña Estrellita wore a hairdo that looked false, very 1940s, very Joan Crawford, high and full. Her ghostly hands rested on her chest. With a start, I realized the Señora had on her housewife’s, maid’s, and cook’s apron, and this, I wanted to say to Jericó, this definitely was a final mockery by the sinister Don Nazario, prepared to send off his wife as maid to Eternity and celestial housewife. Don Nazario received without emotion or even the blink of an eye the condolences of his previously mentioned clientele, who expressed their sympathy and then dissolved again behind a veil of murmurs, inaudible conversations, and the passing of canapés, with the collective obsequiousness of a relative and the singularity of dissimilar manners and fashions, for those who had known him since his humble beginnings and those who acknowledged him at his present heights ranged from the owners of transient hotels to managers of hotel chains.
I looked at Doña Estrellita in order not to look at the crowd.
In spite of everything, the body continued to display a simulation of beatitude and the perpetual smile of someone going to a wedding of people she doesn’t care about but who deserve courtesy. In death, Doña Estrella was confident in her boredom, and if she had lost the habit of crying, the fault was not hers. There was only one dissonant detail, because the
apron was like a uniform. The Señora had a bright scarf tied around her neck.
Ruddy, tall, florid, Don Nazario received the customary condolences. I would have liked to avoid it. I couldn’t escape the line of mourners. Jericó was ahead of me, his face composure itself though with a sarcastic line along his upper lip. Don Nazario extended his hand without glancing at me. I gave him mine without glancing at him. I looked for Errol.
“He isn’t here,” Jericó murmured.
“What do you think of that?” I asked.
“Were you expecting him to come?”
“To tell you the truth, yes,” said my feelings and not me. “She was his mother …”
“Not me,” Jericó declared over and above my opinion.
We made our way through the crowd of mourners. You could see it in their faces: No one loved this family. Not Don Nazario and not Doña Estrella. Much less Errol, the dispensable rock-and-roller fag. They were all there out of obligation and necessity. They all owed something to Nazario Esparza. Don Nazario controlled them all. There was no love. No grief. No hope. What did we expect? my eyes asked Jericó as we walked through the crowd, all of them surrounded by the forest of funeral wreaths that turn Mexican funerals into a boon for florists. Become a florist and make your fortune: We are all passing through.
In the middle of the funeral forest I bumped into a woman and offered my excuses. Out of place, she was carrying a cigarette in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other. She bumped into me, the ash fell onto my lapel and a downpour of La Veuve onto my tie. The woman stopped and smiled. I made a useless effort to recognize her or to ask myself, Where have I seen her before? never addressing her directly, “Where have we seen each other?” because of a kind of tacit precept I couldn’t explain to myself and that did not correspond to the amiability of the beautiful woman who approached like a panther, a predatory animal. A fake blonde, light tan touched with sun in her hair, and artificially moist lips.
“Listen,” she ordered a waiter, “bring a drink for the Señor.”
“Excuse me. This isn’t the time,” I said.
“A drink,” she gave the order again, and the waiter inquired as if he hadn’t heard her clearly:
“Pardon me, Señora?”
“A drink, I said. Go on.”
The waiter didn’t answer. He looked at me and Jericó, who was behind me now, understanding less than I did about the new scenario in the Esparza mansion.
The waiter said: “Welcome, Don Jericó, Don Josué. You’re always welcome here.”
And he went for the drinks ordered by the Señora, who already had champagne in her hand, a cigarette in her mouth, and the Chanel uniform of a black dress. She looked at us with a mix of charm and irony.
“Are you looking for Errol?” said this cunning woman.
We nodded.
“Look for him in a cheap cabaret on the streets of Santísima. He plays the piano there. It’s your ass, Barrabás!”
She aimed an artificial laugh at us and, turning her back, hummed as she moved through the mourners, who instinctively made way for her, as if they already knew her and, what is more, respected her, and what is worse, feared her …
My friend and I looked at each other with unspoken questions. At a distance, Don Nazario was receiving condolences with his bottle-bottom eyes. From a distance, he smelled of vomit. From a distance, one could hear the jangle of his key ring.
We passed the wall of bodyguards protecting entrances and exits, recalling Doña Estrella thanks to a tacit memory: No one, except her son and the waiter, perhaps, remembered her for the many details that now, in her honor (and ours) we evoked as if we were sharing them with our pal Errol, the bald kid from secondary school.
She never laughed at jokes because she didn’t understand them.
She believed everyone forgave her for her life.
Her husband had said once that as a young woman she was stupid but charming.
She guarded this phrase as if it were a treasure.
For the rest of it she always felt she was out of place.
She didn’t understand the word “superfluous.”
She didn’t even know how to mistrust the maids (the opposite was obvious to us).
When she was reprimanded, she sang as if she were involved in something else.
“What do you think of papa’s fortune?” “Very nice.” “No, its origins.” “Oh, son, don’t be that way.” “What way?” “Ungrateful. It’s why we eat.” “Shit.” “Don’t be vulgar. We owe everything to your father’s efforts.” “Efforts? Is that what they call crime now?” “What crime, son?” “Papa is a pimp, a lenón.” “A león, a lion?” “No, a musician, John Lennon.” “I don’t understand.” “Or a revolutionary, Lenin.” “Son, you’re making my head spin.”
When we were on the street, cold and empty that night, Jericó asked:
“Listen, what does that red scarf mean that they put around her neck?”
I didn’t know, and on Calle del Pedregal there were only long lines of luxury cars and bored chauffeurs.
WHEN JERICÓ RETURNED I didn’t know whether to reveal to him my relationship with Lucha Zapata or keep it a secret. I opted for discretion. Ever since school, my friend and I had shared everything, ideas as well as whores, focusing on a fairly ascetic life of intensive studies and still unformed goals we didn’t dare call ambitions. Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri, sons of a god and a bird, two mortals worshiped as divinities, though they were not. Famous for their valor and skill. Exiled by Zeus to live alternate days in heaven and in hell.
The reader knows to what degree the fraternal union of Castor and Pollux, of Josué and Jericó, excluded many relationships common in boys our age. No family, no girlfriends, no friend except Errol and the shared teachings of Filopáter. Now, however, we were separated by years in which I acted without him and so could let myself be guided by Antonio Sanginés, penetrate the prison of San Juan de Aragón, interview the convicts, allow myself to be impressed by Miguel Aparecido’s diabolical personality and, above all, take responsibility for Lucha Zapata.
I decided to keep to myself the existence of the red-haired woman who lived beside the Metro.
Telling Jericó about it would have put me at the disadvantage of letting him know my business without the reciprocity of learning almost anything about his. Because the superficial humor with which my friend recounted his European experience did not suit his conflictive, penetrating, bold, and ironic personality. I came to think that Jericó was lying to me, that perhaps he hadn’t spent years in Europe, that someone else had sent the postcards in his name … How strange. All this came to mind because when he returned, as you remember, Jericó said a sentence in English that sounded strange to me,
Let’s hug it out, bitch,
a sentence I didn’t understand and couldn’t translate, but that didn’t fit into either European or Latin American culture. By elimination—I deduced, thinking like Filopáter—it could only be North American.
I didn’t attribute too much importance to this, even though the matter remained suspended in my mind waiting for a clarification that would or would not come, because what Quixote says to Sancho about miracles—they rarely happen—can be transferred to mysteries—when they are revealed, they cease to exist—and I confess here and now that I wanted Jericó to have a truth hidden from me, since I had one hidden from him, and her name was Lucha Zapata.
I’m not ignoring the fact that Zapata’s character put me to the test, at times making me want to leave her or at least share the burden and with whom but Jericó. I’m saying I kept the secret because not only my own dignity before my friend but the very essence of my relationship with her demanded it. This is another way of saying that in recent months, Lucha Zapata had come to depend more and more on me, and that had never happened to me before. Once I had depended on others. Now, a helpless woman, constricted into herself and emerging from that constriction only because of my presence (I thought then), depended on
me for salvation.
I urged her to stop using drugs. She continued consuming narcotics until her hidden stash was used up. Then she drank more than usual. Except that alcohol did not completely replace the essential amphetamines. I felt she was approaching a critical point and decided to become strong for her and endure everything—her shouts, insults, depressions, collapses—in the name of her eventual health. In short: I took charge. And if I now summarize the things she said during this time, it is, perhaps, to announce the things she did. Except that these, in the end, refuse to remain under the rug (the mat, in the case of Lucha Zapata) and dominate the words, reducing them to the ashes of mere prattle.
“I want happiness for myself and for everybody,” she would say in her moments of exaltation, as if she were stealing a plane again from a hangar in the international airport and was prepared to drop flyers on the city from the air, condemning all of us to joy.
“I can’t tolerate poverty,” she exclaimed immediately afterward. “It offends me that half my people are destitute, begging, stealing, without hope, exploited by the powerful, deceived by politicians, abandoned to the fatality of having always been and why not, tell me Josué, why not go on being destitute forever, tell me or I’ll die right here …”
It was with this passion that Lucha Zapata evoked a past—that of our people, always oppressed—that she rarely applied to herself. Sometimes I set traps for her so she would talk about her life before our meeting. I never got her past—or almost never, actually—the evocation of our moment in the airport and her aerial view of a collective misfortune that, for her, was eternal, beyond time: Mexico had always been oppressed and would be so forever, inevitably …
“I want happiness for myself and for everybody. I can’t tolerate poverty. What can I do, Savior?”
Sometimes she became violent and banged her head against the walls, as if she wanted to expel from her skull a brain that had been, she said, abducted. Why, by whom? I asked without receiving an answer other than a deep moan that was like hearing the protest of her lungs blackened by tobacco and drugs.
Destiny and Desire Page 15
