“Power wearies men, though in different ways. Carrera becomes exasperated at times and then I see his weariness. He has unacceptable outbursts. He says inconsequentially violent things. For example, when he passes the Diego Rivera frescoes in the Palace, ‘You don’t paint a mural with lukewarm water, Sanginés,’ and when I sit down to work: ‘We’ll open a credit column for Our Lord Jesus Christ, because I’m going to fill out the debit column right now.’ He tries to avoid violence but can be disparaging and even vulgar when he refers to ‘the street pox.’ He prefers the government to function in peace. But it’s difficult for him to admit change. He prefers doing what he did: inventing popular festivals to entertain and distract people. Then he transformed the Zócalo into an ice skating rink. And then he opened children’s pools in areas with no water. People were hurt in the rinks. They drowned in the pools. It didn’t matter: Circuses without bread.”
“Have a good time, kids,” I added without too much sense, suspecting that by talking about the president, Sanginés avoided talking about Max Monroy.
Sanginés nodded. “When I tell him all this doesn’t solve problems, Carrera replies: ‘The country is very complex. Don’t try to understand it.’ In the face of that, Josué, I am left speechless. Injustice, intolerance, resignation? With these facts our leader makes his bed and night after night lies down with these paradigmatic words: ‘Making decisions is boring.’ ”
“Does it console him to know that some day he’ll be seen naked?”
“Naked? His skin is his gala outfit.”
“I mean without memory.”
Sanginés ordered an espresso and looked at me attentively.
Certainly it attracted his attention that I equated “nakedness” and “memory.” I do realize that in my imagination memory is like a seal in which wax retains the image without any need to pour it. My conversation with Sanginés placed before me the dilemma of memory. Immediate memory: ordering an espresso and not remembering it. Intermediate memory: When all was said and done, would I keep it?
“A man without memory has only action as a weapon,” said Sanginés.
“Did the president’s patience come to an end?” I insisted.
“Your friend Jericó ended it for him.”
He wasn’t going to let me talk. And I didn’t want to talk.
“Jericó tricked the president. He offered loyalty and gave him betrayal. This is what Carrera didn’t forgive. Everything else I’ve told you this afternoon was left behind, it collapsed, and the president was left alone with only the black tongue of ingratitude, and of solitude, which is even more bitter.”
The coffee tasted less bitter than his account. I felt that interrupting him was something worse than foolishness: it was lack of respect.
“He’s clever. He realized that to crush Jericó the forces of law and order were not enough, though I can tell you he used them. Jericó gave the president the opportunity to demonstrate his social power, his ability to represent the nation. And for that he needed Max Monroy.”
“Monroy doesn’t like Carrera. I know, Maestro, I saw it myself. Monroy humiliated Carrera.”
“What serious politician hasn’t eaten shit, Josué? It’s part of the profession! You eat toads and don’t make faces. Bah! Carrera needed Monroy to demonstrate unity in the face of an attempted rebellion. Monroy needed Carrera to give the impression that without Monroy the republic can’t be saved.”
“A pact between thieves.” I tried to be ironic.
Sanginés ignored me. He said I should understand Max Monroy. I said I had never underestimated him (including his sex life, which I had learned about and never would reveal out of respect for myself).
“It’s difficult not to admire a man who never allows himself to be flattered. He knows the best men lose their way in flattery …”
He looked at me with something resembling sincerity: “In Mexico we have a word that is categorical, juicy, and insuperable: lameculos. The person who flatters to obtain favors. In my day we talked about the UFA. United Front of Asskissers. Today it would be the UFT, United Front of Traitors.”
“And Monroy?” I said in order not to reveal I didn’t know what he was talking about. The UFA! The Stone Age!
“Monroy.”
“He can’t bear a flatterer. It’s his great strength in the midst of the national milieu of political, professional, and entrepreneurial asskissers.”
“But …” I interrupted and didn’t dare continue. The name and figure of Miguel Aparecido were on the tip of my tongue. Instead, I came up with a question: “And Jericó?”
“He’s in a safe place,” Sanginés answered without looking at me. He said it in a categorical, almost disagreeable way.
We left.
Outside the Danubio it was raining. Lottery sellers pursued us. Sanginés’s driver got out of the Mercedes, offered us an umbrella, and opened the door.
“Where can I drop you, Josué?”
I didn’t know how to answer.
Where did I live?
I got into the Mercedes like an automaton, removed from the intense activity of Mexico City. I lived in the Zona Rosa, transformed once more into the bohemian district, an oasis from the surrounding violence of the city and, in any case, from the latent menace that was more the rule than the exception. I tried to comfort myself with that idea …
What Sanginés and I talked about in the car is too important and I’ll leave it for another time.
ASUNTA JORDÁN RECEIVED me again in her office and didn’t raise her head. She reviewed papers. She signed letters. She initialed documents. She told me Jericó was “in a safe place.” What does that mean? That he won’t bother anyone anymore. Is he dead? I asked, getting right to the point. He’s in a safe place. Did she mean he wouldn’t cause any more trouble?
I tried to control conflicting impulses. In a safe place? What did the formula signify? I remembered it from my studies of law. Especially Roman law. The verb recaudar means to collect money. It also means to watch over or guard. And finally, to achieve what you want through entreaties. The scholarly tome says all this. To be in safety. Miguel Aparecido is, voluntarily, in his cell in San Juan de Aragón. Maxi Batalla and the shameless Sara P. are, against their will, in the same prison. Where is Jericó? A fraternal impulse that refused to die disturbed my breast. My friend Jericó. My brother Jericó. Castor and Pollux yesterday. Cain and Abel today. And the woman who knew everything didn’t tell me anything. She reviewed papers, not as a way to disguise her feelings or distance herself from the situation but as part of the daily work of an office that had to function. The Utopia office on the Plaza Vasco de Quiroga in the extensive district of Santa Fe in an interminable Mexico City.
Asunta Jordán.
“Why did you make Jericó believe you and I were lovers?”
“Aren’t we?” she said without raising her head from the papers.
“Only once.” I tried to hide my bad feelings.
“But intense, wasn’t it? Don’t say it was a quickie, all right?”
She meant resign yourself: only once, but enough for a lifetime. Is that what she wanted to tell me? I don’t know. She didn’t want to say what she was thinking. Asunta told Jericó she was my lover because in that way …
“I told him I was yours alone and couldn’t be his.”
“In other words, you used me.”
“If that’s what you think.”
“Whom do you love?” I asked insolently.
She looked at me at last and in her eyes I saw something like triumph in defeat, a victorious failure. Passing through Asunta’s eyes were her provincial childhood, her marriage to the odious and despicable owner of King Kong, her fortuitous meeting with Max Monroy, and the simple, available nakedness of Asunta, the innocence with which she stood in the middle of the dance floor and waited for the inevitable, yes, but also for the evitable, what could be and what could not be. Waited for Max Monroy to approach, take her by the waist, and never let her go again.
I believe that in the most profound depths of Asunta’s inner life, that instant defined everything. Max took her by the waist and the past became just that, a stony preterit, something that never happened. Max took her by the waist and she gave herself completely, without reservation, to what she desired most at that moment: a strong man, a protector who would shelter her from the miserable mediocrity of her destiny. But the woman I knew (and ay! knew only once, biblically) owed everything to Max Monroy, which humiliated her in a certain sense, made her inferior to herself, placed her in a situation of obligatory gratitude with Max but of obligatory dissatisfaction with herself, with her desire for independence.
At that moment I understood Monroy’s intelligence. The man who saved her did not demand banal gratitude from her. It was he who demonstrated total confidence in Asunta. He didn’t need to stress his age. He didn’t need to ask Asunta to give him what he needed from her. Constant professional rigor and sporadic erotic rigor. I was witness to both. Was there something else? Of course. Max gave Asunta power and sex. He also gave her independence. He let her love whomever she liked, on two conditions. He was not to find out anything about it. She could love another man knowing she could count on Max Monroy’s acceptance.
Jericó was one of many. But she knew Jericó had to be destroyed. And his destruction consisted in not only denying him sex but telling him her sex belonged to me, his brother Josué. In this way her obligation to Max and her personal freedom were satisfied, I understood it, but at the price of Jericó’s mortal enmity toward me. Castor became Cain.
She knew he would hate me. Jericó said it, on all fours and naked like an animal, there on the bed: He had always given me everything, he preceded me in everything, ever since we met, first him, then me. With Asunta he was second, not first. How would his infinite vanity tolerate that? A vanity, I knew, identical to blindness. The moral, political, human blindness of Jericó … I saw it only now. I swear I never suspected it before. How many things does the most intimate friendship conceal?
“But that isn’t true,” I said with brutality. “You belong to Max Monroy.”
She didn’t look up. “I belong to myself. I belong only to Asunta Jordán. Ta-dum. Curtain.”
It debilitated me, disconcerted me, infuriated me that she would say these things without looking at me, signing papers again, reviewing memos, marking dates on her calendar …
“And Monroy?” I asked with the blind vision of the coarse and bestial, compassionate and senile, artificial and devout love between Asunta and Max, buried in my obligatory silence, in my ridiculous sense of discretion …
That did oblige her to look at me again for an instant before returning to her papers. The look told me: “I belong to Monroy. I owe him everything. Besides, I’m like him. I’m also Max Monroy because Max Monroy made me what I am. I’m Asunta Jordán because this is what Max Monroy decided and wanted. Max Monroy took me out of the provinces and raised me to where I am now. You may think an administrative job, no matter how privileged, in Max’s huge organization, is minor in the general scheme of things, but learning to talk, to dress, to conduct myself with intelligence, coldness, and the necessary disdain … that’s something you can never pay for.”
She said it with a show of sincerity, though with a poorly disguised arrogance. She looked down. For her, being where she sat now was utopia, yes, the place of imaginary happiness, a satisfaction in the end comparative with respect to something earlier, which one left behind and to which one does not wish to return. Looking at her sitting there, immersed in her work, almost pretending I was not standing in front of her, made it difficult for me to separate Asunta’s person from Asunta’s function, and between the two, with the slim edge of a razor, I introduced the idea of happiness. Because when all was said and done, why did she work, why did this woman dress, style her hair, act, and lie except to maintain a position, yes, a position that assured her the minimum of happiness to which she had a right, above all comparatively. I thought of her history. The wife subjected to the vulgar, noisy machismo, hereditary and without direction, of a poor, unaware, difficult devil, her husband. Her destiny in the middle class of the arid society of the northern deserts. Mexico along the border, so smug about being the most prosperous part of the country, the industrial north, without Indians, without the extreme poverty of Chiapas or Oaxaca, bourgeois Mexico, self-satisfied in contrast to the outstretched hand of the beggar south. Mexico energetic and proud of it in contrast to the great devouring capital city, fat, dissipated, heavily made up, the urban gorilla of D.F. squashing the rest of the nation with its shameless buttocks …
But the same north from which Asunta came was south of the border with Yankee prosperity, it was “south of the border, down Mexico way,” the wealth of the Mexican north was the poverty of the North American border. The passage of clandestine workers through Arizona and Texas. The barbed wire fence. The coyote’s truck. The border guard’s bullet. The maquila in Ciudad Juárez. The drug dealer from Tijuana to Laredo. Gangrene. Pus. What Sanginés always recalled when we got together.
And from all this, she extracted a semblance of happiness. And what was happiness? I asked myself this morning, standing in front of Asunta’s desk, her own border facing the subordinate employee or the occasional lover. Was happiness an internal fact, a satisfaction, or was it an external fact, a possession? I didn’t see in Asunta a semblance of bliss if by bliss one understands happiness. Was happiness synonymous with destiny? Perhaps. To a certain extent. But in Asunta Jordán I saw a destiny too dependent on things that weren’t hers. For example, Max Monroy’s desire, origin of Asunta Jordán’s “happiness” in the sense of power, well-being. And inheritance? What would Max’s will say about Asunta’s destiny? And while we’re on the subject, would Max remember his son Miguel Aparecido, the voluntary prisoner in San Juan de Aragón? Would he remember?
She told me once: “I have alert sleep. I also have dreamy wakefulness. You should know that. God’s truth. Do you understand?”
“And what else?” I insisted so as not to give her the last word by giving it to her.
“Before I break my chains myself, Max frees me from them. But he gives me the keys so I have hope.”
I looked at Asunta. Had she succeeded in uprooting desire and fear? Was this true happiness, not to desire, not to fear? Was this serenity? Or was it simply the disguise of a passivity that counts happiness as the absence of fear and the absence of desire? If ataraxia signified serenity, perhaps the price was passivity. Asunta’s calm, I knew, I learned, was the result of a forced and forceful desire. It was a satisfaction that rewarded her for having overcome the mediocrity of her matrimonial past. It was also a dissatisfaction that in the name of gratitude to Max distanced itself from the free enjoyment of love chosen by her.
Did she love me?
She read my mind. “I hope you don’t have any hopes, my poor Josué.”
I said I didn’t, lying.
“If I went to bed with you,” she didn’t look up, “it was because Max allowed me to. Max allows me sexual pleasure with young men. He knows the limitations of his, well, his third age. He lets me have pleasure. The pact with him is permanent. With the others, it’s temporary.”
It occurred to me there was certainty in her mind: Max knew about her loves, he permitted them, he respected them. Perhaps he even enjoyed them, as long as they didn’t interfere with her professional relationship. Perhaps the proof of her love for Max consisted in being unfaithful to him, certain that for him this was part of love. I believe I understood, thinking about Max and Asunta, that loving each other a great deal and getting along well can lead to indifference and hatred. Max Monroy must tolerate Asunta’s “betrayals” because he wants and needs them.
“Solamente una vez,” I managed to sing: “Only once,” as if the words to a bolero could sublimate all our emotions.
“Exactly. Like in the song.”
“And Jericó?”
“What about Jericó?”<
br />
Why did Asunta present herself to him as my lover, unleashing a mortal hatred that was, in the end, more than my lack of solidarity with his political project, the thing that ended our longstanding friendship?
“Why?”
She refused to look at me. This time I understood the reason. Before, she didn’t look at me because she was haughty and powerful. Now her absent gaze was shameful and shamefaced. Then she had the courage to raise her head and look straight at me.
“I belong to Max Monroy. I owe him everything. It’s shit to owe everything to one person. It’s shit.”
When I heard her say this, I knew Asunta was both happy and unhappy. Her passion disturbed me more than her indifference. With me, she made love with her eyes open.
That’s why she didn’t need to explain anything else to me. I understood Asunta lied to Jericó when she told him I was her lover, and to me when she told me only one night was mine to win, my God, I understood, it hurt me, it stripped my life bare to understand it, to gain a position of freedom before Max without harming Max but irreparably harming the ancient fraternity of Josué and Jericó, Castor and Pollux.
Cain and Abel.
Did Asunta realize what she had unleashed? Perhaps her egotism became confused with her true satisfaction, the cliff’s edge of happiness to which she believed she had a right, even at the cost of a fratricidal war that in her eyes was, perhaps, barely a genteel war, one of those waged as if it were a game, with no real risk … And the abyss?
She didn’t realize. I felt a kind of compassion for Asunta Jordán and a destiny she valued, perhaps, only by comparison. It was in reality a destiny, I thought then, that was despicable, deceptively liberated, in fact alienated.
“Who was your friend Jericó with before all this?”
“Who was he with?”
“Women.”
“Whores. Only whores.”
“The imbecile fell in love with me.”
I didn’t believe it and didn’t interrupt her.
“He told me he was falling in love with a woman for the first time.”
Destiny and Desire Page 38
