Destiny and Desire

by Carlos Fuentes

  Who knows what she imagined in my gaze that obliged her to say: “Don’t worry. All the servants have gone. We’re alone. All, all alone.”

  She caressed my cheek. I didn’t move.

  She said not everything was ready.

  “Look. The pool is empty and full of leaves and trash. There’s an air of abandon in spite of all my efforts. The grass is uncut. The palm trees are gray. And Max always said things like ‘I want to be buried here.’ How curious, don’t you think? To be buried in a place he never visited …”

  “Nobody looks forward to the cemetery,” I dared to say.

  “How true!” the voice declared. “Didn’t I always tell you? You’re smart, you asshole Josué, you’re really smart, good and smart.”

  And she threw the contents of the whiskey glass at my chest.

  “Just don’t get too smart.”

  I maintained my calm. I didn’t even raise my hand to my chest. I looked, distracted, at the setting sun. She resumed the air of a tropical hostess.

  “I don’t want neighbors,” Max had said.

  She made a panoramic gesture.

  “And he did it, Josué. There’s nobody here. Only a high mountain and the open sea.”

  “And a beach down there,” I added, not to leave anything out, and I sensed Asunta becoming uncomfortable.

  “Don’t expect anyone to stop there,” she said in a rude tone.

  I tried to be frivolous. “Your company’s enough for me, Asunta. That’s all I ask.”

  The shirt stuck to my chest.

  “You can have champagne for breakfast,” she said in a tone between diversion and menace. “In any case,” she sighed and turned her back on the sea, “enjoy the luxury. And think of just one thing. Luxury is acquiring what you don’t need. On the other hand, you need your life … Right?”

  She laughed. Her soul was being laid bare, little by little. Not all at once, because I had been observing her since I first met her, disdainful and absent, walking through cocktail parties with her cellphone glued to her ear, imposing silence, not entering into conversation with anyone. I had to understand her as she was and for what she was. An attentive woman and for that reason dangerous. Because extreme attention can unleash violent, unexpected reactions: It’s the price of being aware, of being overly aware.

  If, like an adolescent, I fell in love one day with this woman and her visible attributes, if she ever had them, she had been losing them gradually until she played the sinister game of presenting herself as my lover to Jericó and driving my brother mad with the first great passion of his strange life of austerity without purpose, lust without enthusiasm, a lover without love. I knew Asunta’s malice exceeded both my capacity for loving and Jericó’s icy ambition. We were, in some way, pawns in a vast chess game that led to the solution, apparently ritualized, of “putting in a safe place.”

  “And Jericó?” I insisted. “In a safe place as well?”

  “We don’t speak of that.”

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

  “I can show you.”

  “What? Not in …?”

  “What it is to be put in a safe place? Wait just a little …”

  “And what it is to go to bed with Max, like you?”

  “What do you know—”

  “I heard you.”

  “Did you see us?”

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

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

  “Go on, don’t play around, answer me.”

  “Don’t be a snoop, I’m telling you. Big nose!”

  “All that not to go back to the hellhole in the desert, Asunta, the town in the north where you were nobody and put up with a macho, presumptuous, hateful husband? All that out of gratitude to the man who took you away from there and put you on your little peak of business and influence …?”

  “I would have left there with or without him,” Asunta said, her face extremely tense.

  “I don’t doubt it. You have a lot of guts.”

  “I have smarts. I have a very clever brain. But Max was a stroke of luck that came to me. There would have been other opportunities.”

  “How can you trust in chance?”

  “Necessity, not luck. I would have found the means to escape.”

  Mistress of the game? Even of the great Max Monroy? These questions teemed in my mind during this twilight facing the Mexican Pacific.

  As if she had read my thoughts, she exclaimed: “Nobody blessed me. Nobody chose me. I made myself on my own. I think—”

  “You’re the creation of Max Monroy,” I said, taking her by surprise.

  “Nobody blessed me. I made myself on my own!” She grew angry.

  “I can see you now, abandoned in Torreón without Max Monroy, damn dissatisfied provincial …”

  I don’t know if this defense of my father came from some corner of my soul, though I realized Asunta would come at me and scratch my eyes out … I restrained her. I lowered her arms. I obliged her to leave them hanging by her hips. I kissed her with some passion, some disdain; in any case, an uncontrollable mixture of my own feelings, which may not have been very different from the emotion any man can feel if he is embracing a beautiful woman, no matter how much of an enemy she may be, no matter how …

  For a moment I suspended my reason and liberated my senses. We all have a heart that doesn’t reason, and I didn’t care that Asunta didn’t respond to my omnivorous kisses, that her arms didn’t embrace me, that I forgot myself before repenting of my actions, before thinking she was responsible and that in this entire situation—I felt this as I was chewing the lipstick on her lips—we had all been concealing the most secret secret of our souls …

  Because a personal emotion let loose like an animal, even though it isn’t returned, can abolish for an instant the customary hierarchies of love, power, and beauty. Why did Asunta let herself be kissed and groped without responding but allowing me to continue?

  I moved her away, imagining she would say something. She said it.

  “I have the bad habit of being admired,” she informed me with a cynical, even happy air of self-sufficiency. “It’s useful …”

  “Sure. The bad thing is your appearance doesn’t manage to disguise your real desires. I believe—”

  “What are they?” She stopped me. “What are they? my desires?”

  “Serving Max Monroy and being independent of Max Monroy. Impossible.” I affirmed my own intelligence in the matter, I defended it as if it had been cornered.

  “Max protects me from myself,” was her reply. “He saves me from bad luck. From my bad luck, you’re right, the misfortune of my previous life …”

  “There are people who are like screens for other people. You’re Max’s screen. You don’t exist.” I spat the words at her with a kind of frivolous rage, as if wanting to bring the scene to an end, get away, conclude the farce, pick up my suitcase and my books and get away forever from the spider’s web woven by Asunta around a man, Max Monroy, who had been revealed as my father and, I told myself confusedly, whom I ought to honor, know and honor, get close to instead of Machiavelli, damn it, what was I thinking of? I thanked her, Asunta Jordán, for shaking me, taking me out of the vast juvenile illusion that I could go on with my life as if nothing had happened, write my thesis, graduate … And then, and then?

  I got out of this illusion by telling myself duty is independent of desire. Bad luck. But that’s the way it is.

  Who knows what Asunta read in my gaze. I saw her with a background of sudden madness.

  “You’re too intelligent to be loved,” I told her as a logical consequence of my own thoughts. “What does Max Monroy think of that?”

  She began to speak with unusual nervousness, as if the answers to my question were, all at the same time, an invocation to the sun to disappear immediately and leave us in the most profound darkness, yes, though they were also disconnected phrases, disguised word
s I had forgotten because eventually Asunta returned to her implacable, affirmative logic.

  The madwoman Sarmiento was locked away forever in the asylum, she said, and the end of the day resonated in her voice.

  Your brother Jericó has been put in a safe place, she said, and an armada of dark clouds announced the coming night.

  Your brother Miguel Aparecido languishes in an Aragón cell and won’t come out because he’s afraid of killing his father Max Monroy.

  “And Max Monroy, what about him?”

  “I’ve already told you there are things Max Monroy doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want to know he’s going to die. Sanginés has prepared a will for him in which the heirs are Sibila Sarmiento, Miguel Aparecido, Jericó Monroy Sarmiento, and Josué Monroy Sarmiento …”

  “And you, Asunta?” I asked without too much premeditation.

  “I’m at the tail end,” said the poor girl from the north, the provincial I saw now disguised as an important executive, without her palazzo pajamas, her omnipresent cellphone, the glass in her hand: I saw her in a little percale dress, flat shoes, permanent-waved hair, rouged face, porcelain earrings, and a gold tooth.

  That’s how I saw her and she knows I saw her that way.

  My imagination had stripped her and returned her to the desert.

  “And you, Asunta?”

  “Don’t you dare mock me,” she said with icy fury. “I’m always at the tail end. I inherit only a handout.”

  “And do you want to inherit it all?”

  “Because I deserve it all. Because no one has done as much as I have for Max Monroy.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I want to inherit it all.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “You know.”

  “You won’t dare. I know what you want. I’ll speak to Max. I’ll …”

  No, she shook her head, agitated, her gaze cold, nobody will say anything to Max, nobody, because there won’t be anybody, nobody but me, she kept saying with a maddened desire and a gaze of the most terrible evil, radical egotism, the certainty that the world is there to serve us along with the frightful uncertainty that the world might leave us out in the cold, a handful of dust in a chalky desert instead of the leafy paradise that was and had been the face of Asunta, two gardens in one or a single fierce wasteland of her youthful imagination … The face of Asunta Jordán. I don’t know if the dying light of day gave her the almost mythological air of a great avenger: a Medea maddened not by sexual jealousy but by monetary jealousy, the yearning to be the heir to the vast amount, not knowing that money belongs to no one, it circulates, is consumed, and will end up in the immense ocean of trash. Perhaps because she knew this, she elevated herself from a jealous Medea to an enveloping Gorgon of power, queen of an empire that would slip from her hands if she did not endow herself with bloody eyes, a terrifying face, and hair made of serpents, crowned by this sunset and this ocean. Loved by Poseidon, possessed by our father Monroy, did she have to be killed so that from her blood would be born a gold dagger that would kill her before she killed me, Miguel Aparecido, Sibila Sarmiento, and Max Monroy himself, as she had perhaps already killed Jericó? In the flashing darkness of Asunta Jordán’s eyes I saw the simplicity of destiny and the complexity of ambition. Or would Asunta Jordán have time to look at me and turn me into stone? And wasn’t it true that …?

  “Even if you kill me, I’ll go on looking at you,” she said with a whiskey and lipstick breath when I moved away from her, called by the sound of footsteps on branches that increased behind me, giving way to the face of Jenaro Ruvalcaba, agile and blond, followed by a confused gang of sweating dark people, all armed with machetes, and Ruvalcaba himself swung his machete at the back of my neck, sending me with a bleeding head into the well of the empty pool surrounded by empty bottles and the grass that grew in a jumble from cracks in the cement …

  Epilogue

  ASCENT TO HEAVEN

  Here is my decapitated head, lost like a coconut at the edge of the Pacific Ocean on the Mexican coast of Guerrero.

  My head not only misses my body. I don’t know where I ended up from the neck down. Perhaps my headless corpse has also been put “in a safe place.” Perhaps, however, the sacrifice of the body has been the condition for my soul to be liberated from a purely vegetative existence and assume a new life of connection. A life of connection: Isn’t this the life typical of the animal? Is it wishful thinking to believe that now that my body is lost, my spirit will ascend to a region inhabited only by anima? And, to begin with, isn’t anima animal?

  Anima. How curious, how unexpected, the way the mind, if it does not return to, at least approaches knowledge acquired years before, the youthful readings I have mentioned so often in this my manuscript of salt and foam! Matter and form. Potentiality and act. Only death confirms for me that now I am no more than a potential act, matter in pursuit of its own form. Now I feel my soul as the promise of a restored sense, but without content now and therefore ready to receive all contents. I am something possible, I tell myself in this extremity of my existence. I do not yet exist. Even if I am, perhaps, immortal because of the paradox of having died, only for that reason …

  Soul anima animal: My head lies on the beach, bathed by the tepid waves of the Southern Sea. I no longer know if I’m confused, if I speak of my anima and speak at the same time of my animal. But if I have once again become anima of animal, that means I have returned to the embryo, to the formation of animal and man, to the instant of similarity between species: their brotherhood.

  I will stop there because the idea is enough to accelerate my mind and send me to an evolutionary aftermath I don’t desire because I feel it moves me away from an obscurely recovered fraternity with the world, yes, but with my brothers as well. What were their names? How many were we? Two, three …? The great ocean transforms my decapitated head into a seashell and repeats ancient stories to me that the sea alone preserves and the waves murmur … Two brothers … Their faces return, their bodies return, their names return in each beat of the benevolent, brutal surf that impels forward and drives back the entire movement of the universe …

  An insane idea crosses my mind. Castor and Pollux. My brother Jericó and I enjoyed immortality only on alternate days. I feel terror. Can I keep immortality more than one day and consequently deny it to my brother? Can he do the same and leave me abandoned forever, adrift without one more day of life? I express this horrible thought looking at a mad rush of horses galloping over the waves shouting for water, water, though water surrounds them, you will not drink this water, you will gallop rapidly the length of this water, you will cut through the sea and protect the sailor with the fire of your memory setting the top of the mast ablaze, we, you and your brother, will give each other the emotion of life, love, combat, power, glory, the abduction of women, we will grasp the mast of fire and the steeds of the sea will drag us to a destiny I can see on the same beach I came to, already being there …

  A pelican totters near the coast.

  Its voice reaches me.

  “The worm is an error,” it says.

  And these words are enough to return me to the site where I find myself and the terrible loss of life, the endless holocaust of the inexplicable death of us all, of human beings … And then not alternative immorality, or the horses of the sea, or the mast of fire, or the fear of killing or being killed when I am no longer immortal, none of that is present, only this lying here, a head cut off by a machete, and the thing that is not here, a lost body, a trunk of hollow cavities divided by the diaphragm, the mortal depository of the heart, lungs, pleura, antechamber of the stomach, liver, bladder, intestines, kidneys, what’s left?

  Aaaaah! I am satisfied. I am master of my head, no matter how decapitated it may be. Splenius, trapezius, trachea. The hyoid bone continues to hold up my tongue. My face has a mouth. My skull contains the encephalon. My brain, my brain lying here still has a cortex of gray matter that escapes through
my nostrils, no longer encloses the white matter that comes out through my eyes. What happened to the cerebellum that controlled the movement of what I have lost: my body? What posture, no balance at all?

  To breathe. Circulate. Sleep. What sorrow to have lost everything. What an illusion to believe new areas of my head can be lost only to give active life to the older ones … Skin. Orifices. Head. Trunk. Extremities. They were me. At first I saw myself in my bathroom mirror. I am twenty-seven years old. I caress my cheeks. I shave my chin and upper lip. I remember I must rescue my appearance before it is too late. I close my eyes. I imagine my face. An Indian thatch of black hair. Dark eyes sunk into the sockets of an almost transparent facial skeleton. Invisible eyebrows. A pleasant mouth. Thin. Smiling. Ears neither large nor small. A skinny face. Skin stuck to the bone. Hair sprouting like nocturnal thickets that grow at the bottom of the sea with the small amount of light that penetrates to the depths.

  The great Sargasso of anticipated death.

  The sea that ascends in brief surges, obliging me to swallow before it reaches the orifices of my large nose, big-nose, beak, snout, schnozz …

  THEN THE IMMENSE black seaweed emerged at the same time from the sea and the sky and the miracle occurred: In the air, my unattached head and body reunited and the voice I already knew and recognized told me heaven is opening, the time of exile is over, the tempestuous winds carry us away, do you remember me? I am Ezekiel, the prophet who joins the wings of the world and saves man from the fire and the waves, returning you, Josué, to the air that belongs to you and where you will have new companions: What a mistake, what a huge mistake to believe souls go to heaven or to hell, to new cloisters of cloud or flame! Souls do not fit into heaven or hell, which are enclosed spaces. Souls inhabit infinite space. Listen to the sound of my wings, listen to the voices of all that has existed. I will speak to you but you will see, Josué. You will see hard faces and unyielding hearts. You will see your rebel house. Your father. Your brothers. The whore of Babylon. They do not know there is a prophetess who watches them and protects you. They are seated on scorpions. They eat paper and believe it is ambrosia. They do not listen to you because they do not want to. Speak to them even though they do not listen to you. You are the great rumor, you are the great warning. The city is dying, you warn them, Josué, on the wings of the prophet Ezekiel who I am, the city will place obstacles before you, the city will be on guard because the spirit has entered you and therefore you disobeyed, you did not submit to the house of order, ambition, promotion, advantage, compromise, Josué, you did not lock yourself in your house, you did not cleave your tongue to your palate, you fasted, you saw the sanctuary defiled by plague and war, ruin and ignominy, crime, the desolation of the temples, the living corpses prostrate before idols, look, Josué, look from the air at the dolorous city, malodorous city, do you believe you have abandoned it forever? Do you believe you have left your house without finishing its construction? Ah, Josué, only death allows us to see the future; if we lived forever we would be the future and not know, if we continued on earth we would continue to believe in our individuality and not see the truth that accompanies us: the truth is another person, perhaps other persons, but undoubtedly there is one person, delegated by Providence, designated by the gods, made by Nature, the person who watches over you, not like an angel but like a good demon, the presence that accompanies you, the little devil you saw and did not see, knew and did not know, embraced and abandoned, the woman who gave herself completely to you, tested and proved you as a man and left you when it was necessary for you to draw near alone, as we all draw near, above all prophets like me, to the angels, to our destiny … She left. She lied to you so you would not miss her. She always guessed your necessity, Josué, your reason for waging war in the lands of Judea from the mountains of Nero and Pisgah to the edge of the sea, your personal war, Josué, the war of your unrepeatable but not solitary individuality, you have had a companion, Josué, the close assistance of the only person you really loved and who really loved you, with surrender, with rebelliousness, perhaps with vexation, always with passion and it was this, the passion that is a passage through life, suffering, enduring reversals, suffering disease, moving the soul to pleasure and to pain, desiring, becoming passionate, who was the demon of your passion?