And why, silenced and confused, did I try to replace the forbidden word with an amatory and affectionate gesture? (The two things are not the same: The amatory is passion, affection is concession.) Or with good manners, gratitude, and why not, the brief prologue to seduction…
We know we have spent many hours together, at the office, at times in a café as a distraction from our obligations, often at working lunches, rarely at social dinners, more often at cocktail parties where she made her appearance as part of Max Monroy’s power, the visible, tangible, desirable power of a man as famous as he is mysterious: A year in the office in Santa Fe and I still hadn’t seen, not even glimpsed, the top dog, the chief, the bossman, the qaid.
Knowing she had constant access to him and all I knew about him I knew through her (and, in secret, through the informed, interred voice of Antigua Concepción, but this I could not repeat)… At the office, no one on the ten lower floors and the two top ones had met the chief executive, Max Monroy. I began to imagine he was a fiction created and maintained to make people believe in an untouchable power and to uphold the authority of the enterprise. I would have believed this if, from time to time, Asunta had not descended to the world of mortals to share with me something said or done by Monroy-his work a constant reference; his words a frequent one; his current life never mentioned.
My relationship with Asunta, therefore, had been purely professional. With the exception of my adventure in her boudoir, guessing at, touching, and smelling her underclothes, something only I and the maid who caught me in the act knew about. Had the servant told Asunta or was she so discreet-or fearful-that she kept quiet? I couldn’t know and couldn’t ask. If Asunta knew, she behaved as if she didn’t, and in either case my sexual excitement increased: If she knew, how exciting it was to share that fact as a secret. If she didn’t know, it was even more moving to have a sensation that made me solitary master of her underthings when they were not covering her body. And in any event-emotion, enthusiasm-what delight was produced in me by the memory of those bras, panties, garters, stockings, arranged like a small army of the libido in their ordered bureau drawers.
How could I approach her beyond our daily working relationship? By imagining her reality or realizing her imagination?
I tried to approach her by approaching those who worked in the Vasco de Quiroga building, as if the undesired origin of the desired woman would come alive in the origin of Monroy’s employees in the Utopia building. As if on knowing them, I would see a lessened Asunta, still without power. As if, in my mean-spirited rancor, I desired to see her expelled from Olympus and returned to the minihell of anonymous work.
I WAS RESTING, my arms crossed above me and my hands forming a kind of pillow, when I heard footsteps on the stairs and identified them with Jericó. They were phantom steps that sent back to me an echo of my best friend and, perhaps, my best years. Everything was thrown into turmoil (for nostalgia should not last too long) by the sensation that Jericó not only had reached the apartment on Calle de Praga we once shared but was opening the door with the key we also had shared.
I felt a certain uneasiness: I was the one who lived here now, and this was the place I left to go to work at the San Juan de Aragón Prison or the Santa Fe offices. For the first time, I was the master of the house. Jericó’s key going into the lock on the door was like a physical and spiritual violation. He came in and made himself right at home. He had told me, from the beginning, that the place needed his noise even though he shared it with me, the newcomer, the stone guest, the Tancredo of bullfighting.
“Wake up, Josué,” he said from the door, raising his hand to his forehead in a kind of pseudomilitary salute.
“I am awake,” I said reluctantly, looking at the advancing shadow out of the corner of my eye.
“Did you eat yet?” he persisted and didn’t allow me to answer. “Because I ask you, pal, who digests better: the man who sleeps after a banquet or the one who goes out to hunt?”
I shrugged. Jericó was interrupting a daydream dedicated to Asunta, what she was like, how I could have her, would she love me again, or was our encounter only a passing quickie, informal, without consequences?
I was recalling and consecrating it, Asunta’s body, and now Jericó proceeded with anatomical brutality: “Are you going out to hunt, are you coming home to sleep? How do you know?”
He poked my navel and drew a line between my ribs.
“By opening up your belly.”
He laughed.
“There’s the proof.”
I emerged from my lethargy. I sat on the edge of the bed. Jericó prepared coffee. He had taken possession of something that, I told myself, offended, he had never left. I was the intruder. I was practically the vagrant.
“What do you want?” I said, longing to annoy him.
His expression didn’t change: “I want you.” He offered me a steaming cup of instant coffee.
“Why?”
He launched into a discourse that seemed interminable. Who were we? Two people shipwrecked from paternal authority. That’s what makes us brothers. We lack a family. We didn’t have an old man. We were abandoned, liberated, set adrift.
“Whatever you like.”
“And?”
“That obliges us to know our internal limits. You realize that the majority of human beings never seriously ask themselves: Who am I? What are my limits? Why? Because family and society have marked out the path and boundaries for them. Here, kid, don’t step off the path, look as far ahead as you like, but don’t look right or left. Eyes fixed on the horizon we presented to you because we think about you, son, and want the best for you, don’t think about anything, everything’s been thought about in advance, my boy, it’s for your own good, don’t stray, don’t venture anything, don’t turn away from a destiny you don’t deserve to know independently, why would you, boy, if we’ve already prepared it for you? We prepared the future for you the way you make a bed, here are the pillows, here are the covers, get in and sleep, baby, don’t disturb the bed, after all, it took a lot for us to arrange it for you and have it ready so you can sleep peacefully, sleep and sleep and sleep, youngster, kid, baby, boy, son, and not worry about a thing.”
He made a nasty face and then burst into laughter.
“Wake up, Josué, arise and walk!”
I told him I was listening. He didn’t expect any words from me. He had brought his own speech and my job was to listen to him and not make a sound.
“I continue: You and I weren’t born for domesticity. Consider your sexual life. From pillar to post, here a vagabond, there a whore, here a nurse, there a secretary…”
“I do better than you, a really solitary plainsman,” I grumbled, angry that he knew what I thought he was unaware of.
“We have no friends,” he said, somewhat disconcerted.
“Do you think we’re part of a vanished civilization?”
“We’re always obliged to correct the errors in our destiny, whatever it may have been, Josué. So it’s more than the truth…”
“A different destiny? How?”
“By getting together with people. Organizing the people. Taking a bath with the masses, like the showers you and I used to take together, but now with millions of human beings who want to be redeemed.”
“Won’t they be redeemed better on their own?”
“No,” Jericó almost shouted. “What’s needed is the head, the leader!”
“The Duce, the Fuehrer,” I said with a skeptical smile.
“The country is ripe,” Jericó asserted, corrected his course, and returned to him and me.
“Yes, I swear to you, God’s truth, only you, and only I, we weren’t born to be husbands or fathers or even faithful lovers. You and I, Josué, were born for freedom, without ties, the road cleared to be and act without reporting to anyone, do you understand? We are free, old friend, free as the air, the rain, the sea, the birds!”