“What do you know-”
“I’ve heard you.”
“Have you seen us?”
“It was very dark. Don’t fuck around.”
“Black. It was black, you spying bastard!”
“Go on, don’t play dumb, answer me.”
“Don’t be a busybody, I’m telling you. What a meddler you are!”
This reproof, which seemed to come from Asunta, in fact was directed at me by Antigua Concepción: I felt the outrage of her wrinkled hand weighed down with heavy rings, almost in the posture, rather than attacking me, of defending her son Max, who advanced like a ghost, white as chalk, surrounded by the tolling of deep bells, disconcerted, with eyes that said,
“I feel like sleeping…”
Max Monroy came toward me, expecting to be interrupted, wanting it, anticipating it.
The bell rang with a muffled sonority.
Max said to me: “What, who is it tolling for?”
I had the courage to respond: “Who stopped destiny?”
“Your stopping mine or my stopping yours?” he said in a voice desperate with unwanted concern before the entire dream vanished…
THOSE WHO HAVE accompanied me throughout this… What to call it? Agony? Mental anguish, aching passion? Those who accompany me (you, semblance, brother, hypocrite, etcetera) know my internal chats all strive to be dialogues with Your Graces, efforts of desperate appearance and agonizing reality to escape the site of my epidermis and tell you what I tell myself, without the certainty of truth, with the insecurity of doubt.
How was the person of Jericó, put “in a safe place,” not going to return constantly to my soul as I walk slowly from the apartment on Praga to an uncertain destination? A pedestrian of the air, because while my feet trod the sidewalks of Varsovia, Estocolmo, and Amberes, my head had no compass. Or rather: North was Jericó, in more than one sense. The cardinal point of my life, the wind that cools it, pole star, guide, direction, and above all frontier, the limit of something more than territories, a frontier of exiles, distances, separations that the life of Jericó made irremediable…
Did our life end before our youth?
At what moment?
I loved and admired this man, my brother. Now I summarized my life with him in a question: Everything that happened to us, did it happen to us freely? Or, in the end, were we only a sum of fatalities? Did we rebel against particular destinies-masculine sex, orphans, aspirants to intelligence, I’ll say! translators of intellectual talent to practical life-We won’t be doctors or mechanics, Josué, we’ll be political men, we’ll influence the life of the city… the city he described to me from the terrace of the Hotel Majestic, lengthening it with a gesture of his arm, denying we were puppets of fatality, only to arrive, exhausted, at our destiny chosen as a compromise, as our personal will, to discover at the end of the road that all destiny is fatal, gets away from us, closes life like an iron door and says to us: This was your life, you have no other, and it wasn’t what you wanted or imagined. How long will it take us to learn that no matter how much will we have, destiny cannot be foreseen, and insecurity is the real climate of life?
And in spite of everything, Jericó, wasn’t there a certain equilibrium, an ultimate harmony, an involuntary measure in all you and I did and said? Necessity on one side, chance on the other, they go beyond us and place us, eventually, on the crest of a wave, at the brink of death, conscious that if we don’t know our destinies, at least we’re conscious of having one…
How was our shared destiny revealed to the extent it was not shared but chosen by each of us on his own, knowing we were inseparable: Castor and Pollux, even before we knew we were brothers: Cain and Abel? And I don’t know whether as boys we fought not against each other but against the necessity that seemed to impose itself on us. How did we lose our way? Judge me if you wish. I don’t judge you. I merely confirm that gradually, in the apartment on Praga, seeing the Zócalo from the Hotel Majestic, gradually your face gave way to your mask only to reveal that your mask was your true face… We spoke of the tiger in the zoo devoured by the other four caged tigers. Why that tiger and not one of those that attacked it?
“Use force as if it were an animal you release so it can do harm and then return to its domestic enclosure.”
You released it, Jericó. You couldn’t control it. The tiger didn’t return to the zoo. You turned yourself into the animal, my brother. You believed that from power you would defeat power and turn yourself into power. You told me: Be violent, be arrogant, they’ll respect you in the end and even come to adore you. You believed it was enough to assign a destiny to the mass of people to have them follow you with no motive of their own, only because you were you and no one could resist you. And when you failed, you accused them of treason: the masses who ignored you, Max Monroy because he didn’t consult with you, Valentín Pedro Carrera because he got ahead of you, Antonio Sanginés because he read you in time, Asunta because she preferred me.
I stopped on Calle de Génova, at the entrance to the tunnel that leads to the Glorieta de Insurgentes. The darkness of the urban cave gave me a sense of agony, that word in which accountability and death are associated as they laugh at us and mock our challenges, inspirations, powers…
What was the sin, Jericó? I go onto the plaza filled with young Mexicans disguised as what they are not in order to stop being what they are, and it comes to me like a revelation: your lack of interest in others, your inability to penetrate another’s mind, your pride, Jericó, your rejection of those who are unwanted in the world, which is the immense majority of people. The mobocracy, you said once, the massocracy, the demodumbocracy, la raza, that raza incarnated now, when I penetrate the darkness of the tunnel, in a scuffle, a shove that joins my lips to other lips, a fortuitous kiss, unexpected, dry, unknown, accompanied by a smell I try to recognize, a stink, a sweat, something sticky, an incense of marijuana and bait, the urban smell of tortilla and gasoline…
Rapid, fleeting, the kiss that joins us separates us, the tunnel brightens with its own light and we see each other’s faces, Errol Esparza and I, Josué once Nadal from Nada, now Monroy of a kingdom…
I EMBRACED ERROL, Baldy Esparza, as if he were my past, my adolescence, my precocious thought, everything I was with Jericó and that Errol returned to me now, in a diminished though nostalgic version, thanks to a fortuitous encounter on the Glorieta de Insurgentes.
What did he say to me? What did he show me? Where did he take me? He couldn’t take me to the emo clubs because only young guys went there and not uptight ones like me, dressed to go to an office (a funeral, a wedding, a quinceañera dance, a baptism, everything forbidden by Jericó?), and on the plaza, congregating in silent groups, adolescent girls and boys with no gaze because they covered their eyes with bangs, wore extensions at the back of the neck, dressed in black, with self-inflicted wounds on their arms, drawings tattooed on their hands, very skinny, more dark than dark-skinned, sitting on the flower boxes, silent, abruptly moved to kiss, decorated with stars, perforated from head to foot, I felt impelled to look and avoid their gaze, suspicious of the danger and drawn by an unhealthy curiosity until Errol, my guide through this small parainferno or infereden, placed like a navel in the center of the city, said to me,
“They like it if you look at them.”
A tribe of skinny dark bodies, stars, skulls, perforations, how could I not compare them to the tribes on the Zócalo that Jericó trusted to attack power and where Filopáter earned his living typing at Santo Domingo? Never, with Jericó, had I approached this universe where I was walking now guided by Errol, who had become the Virgil of the new Mexican tribe that he, in spite of his age-which was mine-seemed to know, perhaps because, skinny and long-haired, dressed in black, he didn’t seem to be his age and had penetrated this group to the degree that he approached a girl and kissed her deeply and then her companion, who asked me: