“Do you smooch?”
I looked at Errol. He didn’t return my look. The dark boy kissed me on the mouth and then asked if I had a vocation for suffering.
I tried to answer. “I don’t know. I’m not like you.”
“Don’t stigmatize me,” answered the boy.
“What did he mean?” I asked Errol.
That I shouldn’t distinguish between reason and sentiment. They viewed me as a thinking type who controlled his feelings, Errol said, that’s how they view every outsider. They wanted you to free your emotions. My emotions-wasn’t I going over them again and again on my walk through the Zona Rosa? What other extreme, what externalization of my emotions could I add to the internalization I’ve narrated here? A generational abyss opened before me. At that instant, on Insurgentes, with Errol, surrounded by the tribe of emos, perhaps I stopped being young, the eternally young Josué, the apprentice to life, graduated and moved a step away from retirement by this Bedouin tribe of adolescents determined to separate from me, from us, from the nation I have described, analyzed, and constantly evoked here, with Jericó and Sanginés, with Filopáter and Miguel Aparecido. A secession.
Now, on the Glorieta de Insurgentes, at dusk on this Wednesday of my life, I felt the country no longer belonged to me, it had been appropriated by children between fifteen and twenty years old, millions of young Mexicans who didn’t share my history and even denied my geography, creating a separate republic in this minimal utopia on a plaza in Mexico City, another in Guadalajara, another in Querétaro: the other nation, the threatening and threatened nation, the rejected and rejecting country. It was no longer mine.
Did Errol read my gaze that afternoon as we strolled around the sunken plaza of Insurgentes?
“They’re only trying to substitute one pain for another. That’s why they cut their arms. That’s why they pierce their ears.”
Substitute one pain for another? I would have liked to tell my friend I too had a tribal esthetic, had nonconformity, had depressions, couldn’t stop falling in love (Lucha Zapata, Asunta Jordán) and suffering. Was it only my esthetic that was distant, not my sentiments? This sudden need to identify with the young people on the square was doomed, I knew, to failure. It had value on its own, I thought, it had value as an effort at identification, even though physically I could never be part of the new, ultimately romantic nation of darkness longing to die in time, to save itself from maturity… from corruption…
They were romantics, I said to myself, and to Errol I said: “They’re romantics.”
I sensed the personal excitement, the desire to leave the great shadow of poverty and mediocrity and become visible, free the emotions forbidden by the family, religion, politics…
“Don’t stigmatize me.”
“What are they called?”
Darketos. Metaleros. Skatos. Raztecos. Dixies. They form groups, crews. They help each other. They defend themselves. They’re grateful. They’re emos.
Suddenly, the peace-passivity-of the emo world was shattered with a violence Errol himself didn’t expect, and he took me by the shoulders to lead me off the Glorieta. The Génova, Puebla, and Oaxaca entrances were closed by the invasion of young men shouting assholes, fuckers, get them, throwing stones while the emos covered their faces and said-they didn’t shout-equality, tolerance, respect, and offered their arms to be wounded by the aggression until the skateboarders took the initiative and chased the aggressors with their boards and a kind of peace returned followed by a slow nocturnal migration to other corners of a restless city that both was and was not mine.
“I want to kill Maxi Batalla and Sara P.,” Errol said when we sat down to drink beers at a café on the Glorieta. “They killed my mother.”
“Somebody got there first,” I told him.
“Who? Who did?” There was slaver on my friend’s lips.
“My brother Miguel Aparecido.”
“Where? Who?”
“In the San Juan de Aragón Prison.”
“What? He killed them?”
I didn’t know how to answer him. I knew only that the Mariachi Maxi and the whore with the bee on her buttock were “in a safe place,” and with that, perhaps, the history of my time closed and a new history opened, the history of the kids on the plaza who one day, I reminded Errol, would grow up and be clerks, businessmen, bureaucrats, fathers as rebellious as their own fathers had been, pachucos and tarzans, hippies and rebels without a cause, gangs and the unemployed, generation after generation of insurgents eventually tamed by society…
“Do you understand, Errol, why, if there are five tigers in a cage, four get together to kill just one?”
“No, old buddy, plain and simple, no.”
We agreed to see each other again.
“YOU NEED A vacation,” Asunta Jordán told me when I returned to the office on Santa Fe. “You look a wreck. It’s time for a rest.”
For the sake of my mental health, I rejected the idea of a conspiracy. Why did everyone want to send me on vacation? I looked in the mirror. “A wreck”: vitiated, damaged. Ruined by evil companions? Their distribution in my life flashed through my mind: María Egipciaca, Elvira Ríos, Lucha Zapata, Filopáter, Max Monroy, Asunta herself, Jericó… Evil or good companions? Responsible for my being a “wreck”? I had enough honor left to say that I alone-and no one else-was responsible for the “damage.”
I looked in the mirror. I seemed healthy. More or less. Why this insistence on sending me away for a rest?
“To Acapulco.”
“Ah.”
“Max Monroy has a nice house there. On the way to La Quebrada. Here are the keys.”
She tossed them, with a contemptuous gesture though with a friendly smile, on the table.
It was a house on the way to La Quebrada, Asunta explained. It dated from the late 1930s, when Acapulco was a fishing village and there were only two hotels: La Marina, in the middle of town, and Hotel de La Quebrada, which came down from the hills and settled on a terrace where one could admire intrepid divers who waited for the right waves and then threw themselves into the narrow inlet of water between steep, craggy cliffs.
Now Acapulco had grown until it had millions of inhabitants, hundreds of hotels, restaurants, and condominiums, beaches polluted by the uncontrolled discharge from the aforementioned hotels, restaurants, and condominiums, and increasing sprawl to the south of the city, from Puerto Marqués to Revolcadero and even as far as Barra Vieja, in search of what Acapulco used to offer like a baptismal certificate: limpid water, tended beaches, paradise lost…
I arrived at Max Monroy’s house at La Quebrada on a solitary Monday with one suitcase and the books I wanted to reread to see if one day I would present my lawyer’s thesis, Machiavelli and the Modern State. Erskine Muir, who explains the Florentine by means of his time, the Italian city-states, Savonarola, the Borgias; or Jacques Heers, who sees a not very rigorous but passionate historian, poet, and author of courtly plays and carnival songs whose literary imagination was applied to reasons of state, making generations believe that carnival is serious and curiosity the law. Maurizio Piral, who questions the famous smile of Niccolò as the female author of the book Niccolò did not write: the book about life, its paradox, its uncertainty. A misinterpreted man, insists Michael White: his mental lucidity forgotten, his duplicity and ambition codified. Sebastián da Grazia sends Niccolò to the hell made up, of course, of his contemporaries. Franco Fido studies the paradox of an author who writes “The bible of his own enemies,” from the transformation of Niccolò by Elizabethan dramatists into “Old Nick,” the Devil in person, to his vulgar rhetorical invocation by Il Duce Mussolini. The Jesuits, the ignorant, Fichte: Who has not been concerned with the “most famous Italian in Europe,” especially the Italians themselves, who reduced him to municipal, confessional, and academic boundaries?