“I have.” Jericó intensified the conflict another degree.
“I haven’t.” I shrugged. “I don’t believe you, bro.”
“Do you want me to prove it to you?”
I looked at him with as much spirit (adverse, perverse, diverse?) as he showed looking at me.
“Sure, of course. I’ll envy you because I’m not as sure as you are. It’ll do me good.”
I waited for him to speak. We understood each other too well. He hesitated for an instant. Then he observed, smiling this time, that to be coherent, he would respond with actions, not words. I returned the smile and folded my arms. It was a spontaneous gesture but it indicated a certain permanence on my part at this time and in this place we had shared since we were nineteen years old.
“Don’t stop when you’re halfway there,” he said suddenly.
“You make the path as you walk, says the song.”
“You understand me.”
“Because I’m sitting here and you’re over there. All we have to do is change places and all the truth we’ve just said collapses, goes all to hell, becomes doubt.
“And also memory,” I insisted. “Let’s remember where we were before.”
“Though we don’t know where we’ll be afterward.”
“We can predict.”
“And if we’re struck by lightning?”
“We live or we die,” I said with a smile.
“We survive.” He looked at me with eyes half closed and then opened wide as if by orders of an internal sergeant.
“Alive or dead?” I hesitated.
“Alive or dead, we’re only survivors. Always.”
I shook my head.
“We have no father,” said Jericó.
“And?”
“If we did, we’d grow up to honor him so he’d be proud of us.”
“And since we don’t…”
“We can exist for ourselves.”
“On condition we honor ourselves?” I smiled.
“Don’t get lost when you’re halfway there.”
I detected a certain internal disturbance in my friend when he repeated: “Halfway there. There’s more. Something more than you and me. Our country. Our nation.”
I laughed out loud. I told him he didn’t have to justify his job, his position at Los Pinos. I wanted to liven and lighten the situation.
“It all depends,” I said. “What’s the objective?”
“To be superior to all those who challenge us.” He took another breath.
“Wouldn’t it be enough just to be equal?”
“You’re joking. I don’t want them to say about us: They’re like everybody else, they’re the usual ones, the customary ones, the ones in the crowd. Agreed?”
I said probably, if my friend’s words indicated that self-improvement was necessary, of course… Agreed…
“Are we different, you and I?” I said after Jericó’s obstinate silence.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you and I didn’t have to survive. We always had food on the table.”
“Like everybody else? Do you think I did?”
I took a step I hadn’t wanted to take: “I suspect you did.”
In that suspicion were summarized the doubts you already know about regarding the character called just “Jericó,” with no last name, not even the past afforded me by the house on Berlín, the care of María Egipciaca, and the nurse Elvira Ríos, before my destiny and Jericó’s converged like two rivers of fire, Castor and Pollux. I was Josué Nadal.
Jericó, without family names, who traveled without a name on his passport, who perhaps traveled without a passport, who perhaps-everything my affection for him had hidden was now suddenly revealed-had not been in France or the United States or anywhere except the hiding place of his soul… And wasn’t it enough, I exclaimed to myself, to have a soul where you could take refuge? Wasn’t that sufficient?
“Alive or dead… Survivors.”
At this moment, when I heard these words, I felt that a stage in our lives (and consequently in our friendship) had closed forever. I understood that from now on he and I would have to be responsible for our own lives, breaking the fraternal pact that until then not only had united us but allowed us to live without asking ourselves questions about the past, as if, being friends, it was enough for us say and do things together to complement the absences of our earlier life.
It was as if life had begun when he and I became friends in the schoolyard. It was as if, when we stopped being friends, a barefoot death had begun to approach us.
“MAX MONROY,” Asunta Jordán tells me tonight, “has two rules of conduct. The first is never to respond to an attack. Because there are so many, you know? You can’t be as prominent as he is without being attacked, above all in a country where it’s difficult to forgive success. Lift your head, Josué, and they immediately assault you and, if they can, decapitate you.”
“Rancors in this country are very old and very deep,” I remarked, and added Socratically, because I didn’t want to disagree with her: “Mexico is a country where everything turns out badly. There’s a reason we celebrate the defeated and despise the victorious.”
“Even though we stay with our idols. If you become an idol, an idol of the ranchera, the bolero, the soap opera, sports, your life is pardoned,” Asunta said with her style of popular humor.
“Idolatry here is very old.” I smiled, continuing my adulatory tactic. “We believe in God but we worship idols.”
Asunta shook off this ideological confetti with an elegant movement of her head. “But the fact of not responding to an attack is a terrible weapon. You don’t give the attacker a moment of untroubled sleep. Why doesn’t Max respond? When does Max respond? How does Max respond-if he does respond? What weapons will Max use to respond?
“In this way,” Asunta continued, “Max doesn’t need to do anything to answer those who assault him. The fact of not doing anything provokes terror and in the end defeats the attacker, who doesn’t understand why he isn’t answered, then doubts the efficacy or ferocity of the attack, immediately feels completely worthless because he doesn’t deserve a response, and in the end aggression and aggressor are forgotten and Max Monroy goes on, as cheerful…”
“As Johnnie Walker.” I laughed then.
She wasn’t too happy with this joke. Asunta was already embarking on the second example she wanted to give to complete the picture of Max Monroy’s conduct. A rancorous cloud passed over her gaze, evoking, without looking at me, those who tried to become famous by attacking the fame of Max Monroy. Lesson learned: They succeeded only in increasing it. They were forgotten.
“And the second case?”
Asunta came back as if from a dream.
“Max Monroy is a cautious man.” She smiled with a certain bitter nostalgia that did not escape my attention. The second example was that Max, who naturally is a cautious man, becomes even more cautious when he receives an improper or unexpected favor.
“Improper?”
If Asunta hesitated it was only for a second. Then she said: As improper as having imprisoned a dangerous man only as a favor to the great Max Monroy.
I searched in vain for a rictus of laughter, an ironic intention, an angry emphasis in Asunta’s voice, her gaze, her posture. She had spoken as a statue would speak-if a statue could speak.
“Favors are paid for, I think,” I continued so our talk would not die, as it could have died, right there, since I was trying to tie up loose ends and bring together what I knew with what I didn’t know…
“Favors have a price, and then we realize the mistake it is to grant them and go mad trying to find an action to wipe out the obligation we have acquired to the person who did us the favor,” she went on. “Do you see?”
“Death?” I asked with the innocent face I have practiced most in front of the mirror.
“Death?” she replied with an incredulous affirmation on the point of becoming a question.