There were noble façades of tezontle and marble, large street doors of carved wood, jalousied windows, courtyards filled with flowers: I could see nothing. Sidewalk commerce hid street after street, twenty thousand vendors offered me radios, clothing, costume jewelry, even a television set was suddenly placed in front of my nose so I could see myself reflected in its silvery-gray surface: I thought, seeing my face both surprised and distant, that what the twenty thousand peddlers were selling here, the merchants guided by the long nose of the god that precedes them with a sheaf of staves and dollars, were all versions of my own life, of the faces I could have had, of the bodies that might have been mine, of the odors that might have emanated from my mouth, my armpits, my buttocks, my feet, and now were confused, were part of and emanations from the crowd that pushed me, offered me things, brushed me with charm, touched me with vulgarity, pushed and pulled me where? what was I looking for? the gang evoked by Jericó? could my less and less old friend-more and more my new nemesis-really believe he could mobilize this entire Hugoesque world of mischievous crime, survival by a wink, fierce independence when faced with the powers mocked here, subjected here to the simple law of survival? Could Jericó transform them into an army formulated to take power? Could Sanginés be right? Was I wandering here to confirm the truth? To find out whether Jericó was right or not, whether he believed he could control this hissing serpent slipping from street to street, market to market, favor to favor?
The thousand-headed hydra of Mexico City. In any event, if not a hydra an octopus, and Jericó believed the octopus had only one eye. It’s enough to see it, knowing it isn’t Medusa and can’t petrify us with a glance, because the octopus isn’t concerned with looking. It wants embraces. It has tentacles.
As if searching for respite, I walked through the crowd confirming that México D.F. has twenty-two million inhabitants, more than all of Central America, more than the Republic of Chile, along whose street I walked now toward the temple of Santo Domingo, protected by the Dominican priest Father Julián Pablo from postponable disasters and sometimes from ones that couldn’t be postponed. I saved myself from the fake bullfighters who zigzagged with merchandise in their hands like assault weapons, and in Santo Domingo I encountered the resurrected profession of “evangelists,” men and women sitting on low wooden chairs in front of old Remington typewriters, listening to the dictation of illiterate men and women who wanted to send to a distant village, to families in the countryside, the mountains, the provinces, their regrets, their words of love and sometimes of hate, which these clerks set down on paper and charge for; double if, as safety advises, the “evangelists” themselves are the ones who address the envelope and buy the stamp, promising to drop the letter in the mail.
“Sometimes, Josué, they give us the wrong address, or one that doesn’t exist, the letter never arrives, and then things as sad as forgetting can happen, or as violent as wreaking vegeance on the scribe responsible for the letter’s not reaching its destination-even if it didn’t really have any destination at all.
“And what is destination, or destiny?” continued the voice I tried to locate, to recognize, in the row of people’s scribes sitting in front of the old building of the Inquisition. “It isn’t fate. It is simply disguised will. The final desire.”
Then I was able to unite voice and eyes. A small man, bald but in a borrowed hairdo, his bones brittle and his hands energetic, white-skinned though tending to a yellowish pallor, for a couple of Band-Aids covered tiny cuts on one cheek and his neck, dressed in an old black suit with gray stripes, a shirt with a too-large collar unbuttoned at his throat and adorned by a wide, out-of-fashion tie that actually looked more like the covering for a defeated, emaciated chest, mortified by blows of contrition. Borrowed apparel. Secondhand clothes.
Our eyes met and I recognized old Father Filopáter, the guide of generous meticulousness during the early youth of Castor and Pollux, Josué and Jericó. I held back my tears, took Filopáter’s hands, and was about to kiss them. I don’t know what held me back. Shyness or distrust of his nails that in spite of being cut short showed signs of grime at the corners. Though this, perhaps, was due only to his work on an old typewriter and an apparently rebellious two-color ribbon, for when Filopáter pressed a key thoughtlessly, the entire ribbon unrolled into something resembling infinity.
“Maestro,” I murmured.
“The maestro is you,” he replied, smiling.
He accepted my invitation. We sat down in a café on Calle de Brasil, Filopáter with his heavy typewriter (as big as his head) under his arm and eventually occupying a chair at our table, mute now but invited.
He looked at the typewriter. “Do you know? Each word you write strikes a blow against the Devil.”
I wanted to laugh, amiably. He extended his hand and stopped me.
“As always, I listen to you with respect, Maestro.”
I shouldn’t call him that, he replied with a moment of annoyance. He was only a scribe and that, he said, was enough (he wanted to hurry on to two things) to explain his history. When we were served our coffee, he evoked Saint Peter, “If you cannot be pure, be careful,” and concluded with the words of Saint Thomas, “Only virginity can make a man equal to an angel.”
“What do you want to tell me, Father?”
He resigned himself to my calling him that as long as I forgot about “Maestro.” He was about to sigh. He looked at me like someone picking up an old conversation. As if no calendars had intervened between today’s and yesterday’s words.
“I would like to have been a Trappist,” he said with a smile. “The brothers of La Trappe can communicate only with feet or hands, gestures and whistles. On the other hand, look at me. If not a Trappist then trapped in the trammels of the word…”
“You taught us not to be afraid of words,” I recalled with good intentions.
“But there are those who do fear the word, Josué, and I say this intentionally. Jesus said ‘I am the Word’ and he meant several things-”
“He meant that he was part of the Trinity,” I recalled and repeated with a kind of red-faced enthusiasm, as if not only my youth depended on this memory but my farewell to it: The reencounter with our teacher indicated to me that a cycle was ending but the next one was slow in showing itself.
“I mean that the Trinity is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit… and the Word is an attribute of the Spirit but is shared in by the Father, the Son…”
I wanted to see admiration in Filopáter’s eyes. I found only compassion. Because he knew what I meant, he was going to say the same thing, and we felt sorry for each other for knowing and saying it, as if we could be not only pre-Christians but true pagans, absent from faith in Christ because we were ignorant of it, but condemned to being absent even if we did know about it.
“The Trinity is a mystery,” he began to speak again. “It cannot be known by reason. It is a revealed truth. It puts faith to the test. Either you believe, Josué, or you don’t believe.”
I wasn’t going to tell him I had stopped believing because he knew I had never believed. That’s why he immediately said: “The surprising thing is that, at the same time, the Trinity, the Word, transcends reason but is not at war with reason.”