“Until a hunter shoots you, and you fall and become supper. Sure…”
“Risks,” Jericó said with a laugh, “and the air can be disturbed by a cyclone, the rain can be stormy, the sea rough, and the bird, with luck, unconquered and flying toward freedom.”
“An old bird, you mean,” I said to harmonize with the jubilation of my old companion. I even sang: “Wounded bird of the dawn…”
“In other words, Josué, do you believe you and I have a special mission, since love, home, marriage are forbidden to us?”
“Friendship would be enough,” I murmured with no desire to offend or even inquire.
He slammed one fist with the other. It was a gesture of action, of virtue, of energy, of a voluntary desire to lead. To lead me to him and himself to me as well.
He said the country was not advancing. Why? The president is weak. He hasn’t governed with energy. We did everything halfway. You and I? No. Those who governed us. Everything halfway, everything mediocre. We though we were king of the world because we had oil. We sold it for a lot of money. With the profits, we bought nothing but trinkets. A luxury six-year term. We behaved like nouveaux riches. There was no “tomorrow.” The price went down. Debts remained. A new horizon. Commerce. A quick treaty, to deck out another six-year term. Things are free to move about. Not people. Currency, stocks, objects move. Workers remain stationary, though they’re needed in the USA. Come because we need you. But if you come, we’ll kill you. Okay? Fair enough? Since then we simply fill in one hole before the next one opens. We’re like the little Dutch boy in the story, his finger stuck in the hole in the dike to avoid the inevitable flood. But we only put our finger deep in our asshole. And it smells bad.
Theatrically, my friend Jericó pulled aside the curtain in the room to reveal, from our high perch, the omnipresent urban chaos of Mexico City, the great deep pyramid of Cementos Tolteca and Seguros América and Avenidas Cuauhtémoc, the fragmented pyramid sunk in primeval mud and asphyxiated in secondary air, the clogged traffic, the overflowing buses, the streets numerous but uncountable: the lines of workers at five in the morning waiting to go to their job and return at seven at night in order to return at five… Six hours for working. Eight for commuting. Life.
“Do you realize?” Jericó exploded and I saw him this way, now, in shirtsleeves, his shirt open to his navel, his hairless chest demanding the heroism of bronze, the childish cheeks, subtly stripped of baby fat, of a face consumed by the heroic gesture and the intense brilliance of his pale eyes.
Did I realize? he asked rhetorically, pointing down and into the distance, a country of more than a hundred million inhabitants that cannot provide work, food, or schooling to half the population, a country that does not know how to employ the millions of workers it needs to build highways, dams, schools, housing, hospitals, to preserve forests, enrich fields, construct factories, a country where hunger, ignorance, and unemployment lead to crime, a criminality that invades everything, the police are criminal, order disintegrates, Josué, the politicians are corrupt, the canoe has sprung a leak, we live in a Xochimilco with no Dolores del Río or Pedro Armendáriz or pigs to save us: The canals are filled with garbage, they were choked by filth, abandonment, thorns, the corpses of piglets, chicken bones, the remains of flowers…
He came up to me but didn’t touch me.
“Josué. This year I’ve traveled the country from one end to the other. The president gave me the job of forming groups for celebrating fiestas. I betrayed him, Josué. I’ve gone from village to village to form combat groups, organizing immigrants who find no way out, campesinos ruined by the Free Trade Agreement, discontented workers, inciting all of them, my brother, to slowdowns, to boycotts, to stealing parts, to self-inflicted accidents, to arson and murder…”
I listened to him with a mixture of fascination and horror, and if one impelled me to distance him, the other led me to an embrace, a mixture that was idiotic but explicable of what in me refused and what in me desired. From village to village, he repeated, recruiting at funerals, churches, dances, barbecues…
“Following the orders of El Señor Presidente, you understand? preparing the festivities that matter to him so much in order to distract, deceive, put blinders on the mule, Josué, without realizing that here we have a gigantic force for action, a force of people who are fed up, forsaken, desperate, ready for anything…”
I asked without saying a word: Anything?
“For submission and abandonment, because that has been the rule for centuries,” he continued, reading the question in my gaze. “For the festive deceit, which is what the president wants.”
“And you?” I managed, finally, to squeeze in a word.
I didn’t have to say what I was going to say.
And you?
“If you don’t want to hear the answer, don’t ask the question,” said Jericó.
“DON’T TOUCH MY face.” “Don’t open your mouth.” “Don’t say anything.” All these prohibitions from Asunta excited my imagination and I reproached myself, wondering if I could be so boorish that I was not satisfied with her sex but demanded of her a chatter that was, barely, a complement to my own “lyric poetry”: the words that in my sentimental fictions corresponded to physical love. I felt in me a fountain of poetic chivalry that I wanted to accompany the more bestiarium, the animal custom that sex is, with a verbal reduction something like the musical accompaniment to a bolero, or the background music in a film… in any case, more angelicarum.
And Asunta asked for silence. She cut off my words and left me perplexed. I didn’t know if the demand for silence was the condition of a promise: Be quiet and you’ll see me again. Or a condemnation: Be quiet because you won’t have me again. Was this the sublime coquetry of the woman, the doubt that left me hanging and allowed me to guess at the worst and the best, repeated delight or exile from pleasure, heaven with Asunta and hell without her?
I wanted to believe I was a ludic subject of the enchantress, that I would return to her bed, her graces, her blessing, on a night when I least expected it. That, in a sense, she would put me to the test. That my virility had seduced her forever. That in secret she would tell herself, I want more, Josué, I want more, though her coquetry (or her discretion) moved her to circumspection in order to transform the wait into pleasure not only renewed but multiplied… It was enough for me to believe this in order to arm myself with patience and, with patience, to obtain many favors. The first, the gift of virtue. I deserved her love because I was faithful and knew, like an ancient knight, how to wait and not despair, stand vigil over the weapons of sex, respond calmly to the call of my lady. This idea of chaste love hampered my imagination for a few days. I launched into the reading and rereading of Don Quixote, above all reading aloud the passages of love and honor dedicated to Dulcinea.
I’ll tell you, this mania did not last very long, because my flesh was impatient and my heart less strong than I had thought, so Asunta stopped being Dulcinea-Iseult-Heloise and became a base fetish, to the extent that her photograph at the head of my bed occupied a quasivirginal spot, and I say “quasi” because on a few nights I did not resist the temptation to masturbate looking at her face (upside down, it’s true, given that my jerking off occurred while I was lying in bed and Asunta’s image hung vertically, held up by a tack) and surrendering, in the end, to solitary pleasure, forgetting Asunta, reproaching myself for my weakness though repeating that line about “Things are known to Onan unknown to Don Juan.”