There were, no doubt, other excesses that broke the gray neutrality of our classes. The headmaster, an irascible Frenchman with unpronounceable Breton family names, whom we called “Don Vercingetorix,” regularly opened the school year by standing on a dais with a gladiolus in his hand. After perusing the assembled student body with a severe look worthy of Torquemada, he would proclaim, “This is a young Christian before he goes to a dance and kisses a girl.” Immediately afterward he would throw the flower on the floor and stamp on it in a kind of holy can-can until he had pulverized the innocent flower, which he would then pick up from the floor and show us the vegetable tatters in his hands, concluding: “And this is a Catholic boy after he goes to a dance and kisses a girl.” Of the moribund gladiolus, all that survived, with a symbolism surely not desired by the enraged Vercingetorix, was the erect stem. A pregnant silence and a final warning: “Think. Confess your sins. Break ranks.” All that was missing was for him to warn, “And don’t break into laughter,” though the formal severity of the school lent itself not to jokes but to a kind of Christian resignation when we got ready in the locker room to play basketball, knowing that at the opportune moment Professor Soler would come in, saying “Let’s see, let’s see, everybody ready?” as a pretext to look at us before we pulled on our shorts and approach, “let’s see, let’s see,” to adjust the jockstraps needed to protect our sex from blows on the court, to heft with touching reverence, on his knees or bending over, the testicles of each student to check that we were well protected as we went out to athletic encounters and, if we were lucky, sexual combat.
We students forgave this innocent pleasure of Father Soler, whose red face was the product not of any shame but of an inheritance that can give to the product of the mixing of Indians and blonds a sanguine appearance very apt for disguising the blushes of embarrassing emotion. In other words: Collectively the students forgave the life both of the ostentatious Vercingetorix and the silent Soler, considering that they did not have many opportunities to express themselves in public, subject as they were to long hours of prayers and rosaries, early suppers, fleeting breakfasts… They would have put out the sun with the smoke of incense.
Everything changed when the new philosophy instructor came on the scene.
Father Filopáter (that’s how he was announced and how he introduced himself) was a small, agile man. He moved with a combination of juvenile athleticism and spiritual animation, as if in order to demonstrate one you had to celebrate the other. He walked with varying rhythms. Very quickly when he went from one task to another. Very slowly when he strolled around the yard accompanied by one or two students to whom he listened with intense concentration, offering the paradoxical idea of a short man who grew as he thought, as if his ideas-for he seemed to think more than to talk-were flying over him, creating an unusual halo, not round but long, though always shining.
It goes without saying, you who are still alive and can contradict me with no risk or confirm everything I say out of curiosity, that Jericó and I immediately fixed on the new arrival and imagined how we could approach him and determine who he was-in addition to being a philosophy instructor-by what he thought and said. He was ahead of us.
Always together, he said, approaching with his quickest step, like Castor and Pollux.
The mythological allusion did not escape us, and both Jericó and I instantly looked at each other, knowing he spoke of the twins born of the same egg, for their father was a god disguised as a swan. Always together, the twins took part in great expeditions, like the exploits of the Argonauts under the command of Jason, searching for the as yet undiscovered soul they called the Golden Fleece.
Filopáter read in our glances that we already knew the legend, though neither he nor we had the courage, on that sunlit October afternoon, to conclude the story of the young twins. A legend can end badly, but the conclusion should not be anticipated at the beginning of life (Jericó and Josué) or what soon would become a friendship (with Father Filopáter). And yet how could it not illuminate for me, no matter how tacitly, the suspicion of an ending that was, if not desired, ultimately fatal? Perhaps the affinity born immediately between the instructor and ourselves was due to a kind of shared respect thanks to which we knew the outcomes but held them off with friendship, ideas, in short, life, since for friendship the outcome always was ideas, life, and the death of the real dialogists. If Socrates survives thanks to Plato, Saint Augustine, and Rousseau because they confessed, and Dr. Johnson because he had Boswell as his secretary and clerk, what opportunity for survival did we three-Father Filopáter, Jericó, and I-have beyond a luminous October afternoon in the Valley of Mexico? Would we be capable, like poets and novelists, of surviving thanks to works that, though they are ours, escape us and become the property of everyone, especially the reader not yet born? This was the challenge that began to filter, like a pure breeze separating us from the overwhelming pollution of the traffic, the smog, the movement in the street of desolate bodies, the mere proximity, here in the schoolyard, of noisy students at recess. No, the breeze was not pure. It was an illusion of our affinity.
Jericó and I were not (I must inform you) beings separate from the school community. On the contrary, knowing ourselves (as we knew ourselves) superior to the gregarious collectivity of the institution, fortuitous companions in earlier readings perhaps well thought out and digested, our meeting owed a great deal to chance, which is accidental, but also to destiny, which is disguised will. In cafés and classes, on long walks through the Bosque de Chapultepec or the Viveros de Coyoacán, we two had compared ideas, evoked readings, each one filling in the lapses of the other, recalling a book, condemning an author, but in the end assuming an inheritance that eventually we shared with the unrepeatable joy of intellectual awakening that is a fact in every society, but especially in ours, in which true creativity is rewarded less and less while economic success, celebrity, television appearances, sex scandals, and political clownishness are valued more and more.
The difference between us, I admit right now, was one of exigency and rigor. I also admit, for the eternal record, that in our relationship I was more indolent or passive, while Jericó was more alert and demanding.
“Demand more of yourself, Josué. Until now we’ve moved forward together. Don’t lag behind me.”
“Don’t you lag either,” I replied, smiling.
“It’s hard,” he responded.
After gym, which was required, we all showered in the long, cold, solitary bathrooms in the school. Unlike the nuns’ schools, where girls have to wash dressed in gowns that turn them into cardboard statues, in schools for boys, showering naked was normal and attracted no one’s attention. An unwritten law dictated that in the shower we men would keep our eyes at face level and no one, under penalty of suspicion of unhealthy curiosity or simple vulgarity, would look at a classmate’s sex. Naturally, this rule was overseen by the one who observed it least: timid, impertinent Father Soler, who would walk up and down the bathroom with the mixed gaze of an eagle and a serpent-very appropriate to our nation-and in his hand a threatening, symbolic rod that he never, as far as we knew, used on the boys’ wet backs and lustrous buttocks.
Those who are still alive and reading me will agree that I am telling them something as unusual for them as it was for us. Jericó decided that the temptation of our looking at each other naked existed, but the way to overcome it was not by physical effort but by expressing ourselves intellectually. For that, he said, let’s choose two thoughts that are opposite and therefore complementary and invoke them in the shower-which was icy, those who still enjoy their senses should know, for that was demanded by our mentors’ code of physical rigor and aspirations to sanctity.