“What’s Jericó’s last name?”
The secretary was a young, attractive man who seemed out of place in the small records office, behind a corrugated glass panel near the school entrance, where half his face and an entire hand would appear, upon request, to attend to the public. He hastily withdrew hand and face and his voice acquired a neutral but forced tone.
“That’s Jericó’s name: Jericó.”
Although it was during office hours, the secretary closed the small window. Soon afterward I sensed both an offensive and defensive attitude in my friend Jericó. I attributed it to the secretary’s indiscretion, though I had no proof. The fact is that Jericó, letting a few days pass through the sieve of an unaccustomed seriousness in our dealings with each other, which I attributed to my own indiscretion as well as the secretary’s (a position normally filled by embittered women in their forties with no hope of finding a husband), asked me to go with him to the café on the corner, and once we were seated in front of two tepid, tasteless, decaffeinated concoctions, he gave me an intense look and said that during the past semester he and I had naturally cemented a friendship that he wanted to know was solid and lasting.
“Do you agree, Josué?”
With a good amount of enthusiasm, I told him I did. Nothing in my past-my very brief past, I said with a laugh-promised a friendship as close as the one Jericó and I had created in the past few months. His concern seemed to me unnecessary, though welcome. We were sealing a pact between comrades. I wished that instead of Nescafé we each had a glass of champagne. I felt the warmth of satisfaction that as adolescents we discover in the friendship of a kindred spirit who rescues us from the solitude reserved, without pity, for the incomprehensible boy who stops being a child overnight and no longer fits into the careful world his parents prepared for him under the illusion that a child so indulged would never grow up.
That wasn’t my case. Then Jericó said that between the ages of seventeen, which we already had reached, and twenty-one, which was yet to come, he and I ought to establish a project for life and study that would make us close forever. Perhaps there would be separations, trips, women, for example. The important thing was to seal, right here, an alliance for the rest of our lives. Knowing that he would always come to my aid, and I would come to his. Knowing which values we shared. What things we rejected.
“It’s important to make a list of obligations…”
“Sacred ones?”
Jericó agreed energetically. “For us, yes.”
Where would we begin?
First, with a shared decision to reject frivolity. My friend took a gossip magazine out of his backpack and leafed through it with displeasure and disgust.
“Look at this succession of idiocies in full color on glossy paper. Are you interested in knowing that the rock-and-roller Tarcisia married the Russian millionaire Ulyanov, both of them barefoot, with Hawaiian leis around their necks, on the Playa del Carmen, and that the guests began the day dancing to hip-hop on the sand at seven in the morning, when they gorged on a savory tripe stew in honor of the bride’s father, who is a native of Sonora? Would you have liked to be a guest? Would you have accepted an invitation? Answer me.”
I said no, Jericó, not at all, I’m not interested in being-
He interrupted me. “Not even if it was your own wedding?”
No, now I smiled, I thought that taking the matter as a joke was the best thing and I admired Jericó’s intense ability to take life very, very seriously.
“Do you swear never to go to a quinceañera, a thé dansant, a baptism, or grand openings of restaurants, flower shops, supermarkets, bank branches, the celebration of university alumni, beauty contests, or meetings at the Zócalo? Do you promise to despise a couple who have their picture taken in color and published in the paper when she is eight months pregnant and wearing a bikini with the proud husband caressing her belly and announcing the imminent arrival, baptism, and sanctification of Raulito in the midst of a storm of flashbulbs (which is why they were announcing the emotional event now)?”
I made the mistake of laughing. Jericó slammed his fist down on the table. The coffee cups rattled. The waitress came over to see what was going on. The hostility in my friend’s eyes frightened her away. The café began to fill up with patrons thrown up after a day of work that perhaps differed for each one but still imposed an identical fatigue on all of them. Public or private offices, businesses large or small, the merciless traffic of Mexico City, the nonexistent hope of finding happiness when they reached home, the weight of what was not. All that began to come into the café. It was seven in the evening. We had begun talking at five-thirty, when the place was empty.
And together we had agreed on a plan for a shared life. Did we speak only of avoiding the stupidities of social and political festivities and celebrations? Not at all. Before what Jericó contemptuously called “the herd of oxen” came in.
“Oxen,” Jericó repeated. “Never say ‘oxes.’ ”
“Oxen?”
“No. Oxes. Never say oxen are oxes.”
“Why?”
“So as not to give in to the vulgarity, stupidity, and camouflaging of mental poverty by means of deadly buffoonery.”
We settled on a plan of readings, of selective and rigorous intellectual self-improvement, which, survivors, you will not find out about today because at that moment Errol Esparza walked into the café and reminded us, boys, today’s the day you visit my house. Let’s go.
“Like clockwork,” Jericó said, as usual.
THE ESPARZA FAMILY lived in the Pedregal de San Angel, an ancient volcanic bed, a remnant of the eruptions of Xitle, on whose dark, bulky foundations the architect Luis Barragán attempted to create a modern residential district based on strict rules. First, that volcanic rock be used to build the houses. Second, that they would assume the monastic forms of the Barragán style. Unadorned straight lines, clean walls, with no variant other than the colors, evocative of folklore, associated with Mexico: indigo blue, sour-cherry red, and sun yellow. Flat roofs. No visible water tanks as in the rest of a chaotic city where so many styles cohabitate that in the end there is no style unless it is the triumphal repetition of squat houses, one-story businesses, paint shops, auto repair shops, tire shops, garages, parking lots, and miscellaneous candy stores, taverns, and retailers of all the daily necessities of this strange society of ours, always controlled from the top by very few and always capable of organizing itself from the bottom, with the majority living independently.
I have said all of this because the pure order desired by the architect did not last as long as a snowball in hell. Barragán had closed the Pedregal with symbolic sentry boxes and gates, as if to dictate a public anathema: Vade retro, Partagás, you will not pass.
Impure disorder in the name of the false freedom of residents and their accommodating architects-all of them subject to another tyranny, the tyranny of bad taste and assimilation of the worst in the name of a robot’s autonomy-finished off the fleeting effort to give at least one metropolitan residential district the unity and beauty of a district in Paris, London, or Rome. So that in the midst of the naked beauty of the original framework there erupted like malignant chancres fake Colonial, Breton, Provençal, Scotch, and Tudor residences, not to mention the inconceivable California ranch and the nonexistent tropical “adobe hacienda.”
Still, the Esparza family had not brought to Pedregal the architecture of their previous districts. They had accepted the severity of the original monastic design. At least on the outside, Barragán triumphed. Because once Jericó and I walked into the home of our new friend, Errol Esparza, what we found was a baroque disorder inside a neobaroque chaos inside a post-baroque clutter. In other words, one horror did not suffice in Esparza’s house. The bareness of the walls was a summons that could not be denied to cover them with calendar art, mostly still lifes, picture after picture, not merely contiguous but incestuous, as if leaving a centimeter of empty wall were proof of barefaced miserliness or the crude rejection of an invitation. Articles of furniture also fought for the prize of space. Massive sofas from cheap furniture stores designed to fill large empty spaces: six griffin claws, three cushions of embossed velvet for the back, tables with dragon feet and surfaces covered with ashtrays taken from various hotels and restaurants, rugs with Persian intentions and the appearance of straw sleeping mats contrasted with salons of a Versaillesque nature, Louis XV chairs with brocade backs and deer feet, glass cabinets with untouchable souvenirs of Esparzan visits to Versailles and Gobelin tapestries of recent manufacture. Everything indicated that the first room, with its gigantic television screen, was where the Esparzas lived and the “French” room where, in the evenings, they received.