According to Asunta, there is not just one secret but rather a kind of constellation of truths. He was not the first, she tells me, to put the modern telephone within reach of everyone. He was the first to foresee a possible clogging of lines because of short supply and excess demand, opening the possibility of buy now pay later but on condition you sign up with us, the companies of Max Monroy.
“Why? Not only because Max Monroy offered in one package telephone, computer, Vodafone, O2, the entire package, Josué, but without deceptive contracts or onerous clauses. Max didn’t care about hiding costs, he didn’t want to exploit or add clauses in illegible print. Everything in big letters, understand? Instead of high prices and high utilities, he proposed low prices and constant utilities with a gesture of freedom, understand? Max Monroy is who he is because he respects the consumer’s freedom, that’s the difference. When Max asked the consumer to abandon networks established earlier, his offer was freedom. Max told each consumer: Choose your own basic monthly package. I’ll give it to you at a fixed price. I’ll permit you to use whatever you want from our network, films, telephone, information, whatever you like and the way you like it. Max addressed specific groups offering them a fixed price in exchange for a constellation of services, assuming the operating costs and subsidizing operations when necessary.”
Asunta adjusted the navy blue pinstripe jacket that was her uniform, which must have moved her to say that Max Monroy was a great tailor.
I laughed.
She didn’t: “A great tailor. Listen carefully. Max Monroy never offered the same communication service to everybody. He promised each client: ‘This is for you alone. This is yours. It’s your suit.’ And he kept his promise. We offer each client individual tailoring.”
I think she looked with critical coolness at my classic attire of gray suit and tie. She looked at me as one looks at a mouse. Her eyes requested, without saying anything, “More contrast, Josué, a red or yellow tie, a thinner belt or some striking suspenders, look handsome, Josué, when you take off your jacket to work or make love, don’t dress like a bureaucrat at the Ministry of Finance when you come to the office, how do you usually dress at home? Look for a modern mix of elegance and comfort. Go on.”
“Sans façon,” she said very quietly. “Charm-casual.”
“Excuse me?” I said, guessing at the mimetic talent of Asunta Jordán.
“Nothing. Max Monroy invented individual tailoring for each consumer and each consumer felt special and privileged when he used our services.”
“Our?” I permitted myself a raised eyebrow.
“We’re a big family,” she had to say, disappointing me with the cliché and returning me, for an instant, to my old nostalgia for our philosophical talks with Father Filopáter.
“Other companies put on pressure. Competition is intense. Until now we’ve beaten the others because all our activity is always directed to as many sectors as we can manage, as many consumers as we can imagine. Our strategy is multisegmentary. Growth with utility. Just imagine. What do you think?”
Asunta’s discourse kept fading until it turned into a distant echo. She continued speaking about Monroy, his enterprises, our companies. I became more and more lost in contemplation of her. Words were lost. Life as well. I don’t know why at that moment, before this woman, for the first time, I had the sensation that until then childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood were like a long, slow river flowing with absolute certainty to the sea.
Now, looking at her as I embarked on this new occupation dictated by the lawyer Sanginés-and I didn’t know then whether to thank or reproach him for his attentions and painstaking care toward me and Jericó-I felt that, far from rowing peacefully to the sea, I was moving upstream, against nature, in a cascade of short, abrupt movements, violating the laws that had so far ruled my existence in order to escape into a vital-or was it fatal?-velocity that moved backward but in reality flowed toward an unfortunate tomorrow, toward a growing brevity that, as it approached its origin physically and violently, was, in reality, announcing to me the brevity of my days as of today. We all come to know this. I learned it now.
Was Asunta the person who would, when she touched me, at least give sense and tranquillity to the “great event,” Henry James’s “important” thing: death? I don’t know why I thought these things as I sat across from Asunta this morning in an office in Santa Fe. Did the feeling of fatality authorize another, apparently opposite one, the desire I began to feel in front of her?
Had my conversation with Miguel Aparecido the night before been prolonged into this morning of leaden sun? Against my will my mood darkened because of the mission the prisoner had charged me with: avenging the mother of our buddy Bald Errol Esparza.
I was silent. One does not speak of these things here, under pain of being irrelevant to Max Monroy’s great entrepreneurial machine, because if I intuited anything with certainty it was that the entrepreneurial world into which Licenciado Sanginés had thrust me, taking me out of a childish, studentish, irksome, brothel-going, crepuscular semiseclusion in a middle class that had abandoned its values to let itself be carried along by the current-I was thinking of Lucha-this “new world” excluded everything that was not self-referentiaclass="underline" the enterprise as origin and purpose of all things.
And Antigua Concepción? I asked myself then. Was she a madwoman or a super-magnate? Or both?
Asunta, as I have said, was sitting so I could not avoid an occasional, discreet glance at her legs. I began to believe it was on the basis of those extremely beautiful, long, depilated extremities, encased in flesh-colored stockings, silky to mortal eyes, that my feeling of passion was born.
I say passion. Not affection, or love, or gratitude, or responsibility, but passion, the freest, least bound of obligations, the most gratuitous. A feeling that flowed from Asunta’s legs to my falsely distracted, deceptively discreet gaze…
The world is transformed by desire. While she continued to enumerate the companies of Max Monroy for which I would begin to work starting now, all the times of my life-past, present, future, along with the prestigious names of the emotion: memory and desire, recollection and premonition-engaged with one another now and in the person of this woman.
I thought that life goes by rapidly. I never had thought that before. Now I did, and associated fugacity with fear and fear with attraction. Never, I admitted, had a female attracted me as much as Asunta Jordán did at that moment. And the dangerous thing was that passion and the woman who provoked it were, without my permission, beginning to transform my own desire, which in some way was no longer mine but was not yet-would it ever be?-hers.
From now on-I already knew it-my entire future would reside in that question. Asunta was turning me, without wanting to, into an inflamed man. Careful, careful! I told myself, to no avail. I felt conquered by the attraction of this woman and at the same time, without wanting to, without realizing it, I knew my life with the helpless Lucha Zapata was coming to an end.
The attraction of Asunta Jordán was inexplicable. It was instantaneous. Mea culpa? Because while she seemed desirable to me, she also seemed tiresome.
WAS LUCHA ZAPATA a fortune-teller? I didn’t say anything to her when I returned that night to Cerrada de Chimalpopoca. I found her dressed as an aviator again. I noticed her resemblance to the celebrated Amelia Earhart, the valiant Gringa lost forever in a flight without a compass over the South Pacific. I hadn’t realized it. They were alike in something. Amelia Earhart was freckled and smiling, like those North American fields of wheat that laugh at the sun. She wore her hair very short, I suppose in order to fly better and set the aviator’s helmet firmly on her head. She wore pants and a leather jacket.