Back at Santo Domingo and in conversation with Filopáter, I expected what he offered as we walked from the plaza to Calle de Donceles along República de Brasil, a continuation of our earlier talk, though part of my attention was devoted to crossing the crowded streets, keeping the good father from being run down by trucks, cars, bicycles, or peddlers’ carts.
“I don’t want you going around in circles about the reasons for my exclusion,” he said then, and I understood that the miracle of his existence was not to die by being run down. “My crime was to maintain that Jesus is not a proxy for the Father. Jesus is God because he is incarnate and the Father does not tolerate that. Anathema, anathema!” Filopáter struck his emaciated chest, making the ancient tie fly up while I helped him cross the street. “And my conclusion, Josué. If what I say is true, God appears only to the most unworthy of men.”
“The most unbelieving?” I said, impelled by Filopáter’s words.
“I don’t believe in a totalitarian God. I believe in the self-contradictory God incarnated in Jesus. Thou hast had my soul even unto death, said Jesus the man in Gethsemane. And if he said Father, why hast thou forsaken me, what wouldn’t he say to all of us? Men, why have you forsaken me? Don’t you see I am only a helpless man, condemned, fatal, with no providence at all, just like you? Why don’t you recognize yourselves in me? Why do you invent a Father and a Holy Spirit for me? Don’t you see that in the Trinity I, the man, Jesus the Christ, disappear when made divine?”
When we finally walked through the large street door of number 815, Calle de Donceles, to a covered alleyway smelling of moss and rotting roots, Filopáter led me to a room at the rear of the crowded courtyard, avoiding with a glance I imagined as fearful the stairway that led to the residential floor, as if a ghost lived there.
Filopáter’s room was in reality a workshop with tables prepared for precise work: grinding lenses. A table, two chairs, a cot, bare walls unadorned except for the crucifix over the bed. Since I looked longer than I should have at the bed, Filopáter took me by the arm and smiled.
“A woman doesn’t fit in my bed. Imagine. Celibacy has been obligatory for priests since the Lateran Council of 1139, except that Henri, bishop of Liège in the thirteenth century, had sixty-one children. Fourteen in twenty-two months.”
“A woman,” I said just to say something, not imagining the consequences.
“Your woman,” Filopáter said to my enormous surprise.
He saw the astonishment followed by incomprehension on my face; before my eyes passed the gaze of Asunta Jordán, in my ears the voice of the nurse Elvira Ríos, in my nose the smell of Señora Hetara’s whores, but my sealed mouth did not pronounce the name Filopáter made himself responsible for saying:
“Lucha Zapata.”
And then he murmured: “Perhaps the voice of Satan said to Jesus on Calvary: ‘If thou be God, save thyself and come down from the cross.’ ”
I WAS AFRAID as I walked up to the apartment on Calle de Praga. On each stair a false step threatened me. In each corner an enemy lurked. I went up slowly, accompanied by a legion of demons unleashed by the visit to Filopáter’s hiding place in the center of the immense city. In the shadows, succubi adopted the intangible forms of women to seduce and condemn me. Worse were the incubi who offered themselves to me as satanic male lovers. And the horror of my ascent was that the incubi were men with the face of Asunta and the succubi women with Jericó’s features, as if I wanted to erase from my vision Lucha Zapata’s face, evoked by my visit with Filopáter on Calle de Donceles. Then I knew it was all a premonition.
I opened the door to the apartment nervously, hurriedly. I put the keys in my pocket and before I turned on the lights Jericó’s voice asked me-ordered me-from the darkness: “No light. Don’t turn on the light. Let’s talk in the dark.”
I accepted the invitation. Little by little, as usual, my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and Jericó’s shadow was outlined with greater clarity.
But not much. The man, my friend, set aside an area of his own darkness that protected him from a world turned hostile. As if I didn’t know. The arrest order had come from the office of the president with the fury reserved for a traitor.
From then on “Judas” would be the presidential term used to refer to Jericó, “Judas.”
Now Jericó Iscariot was hiding in the most obvious and therefore most concealed place: our apartment on Calle de Praga.
“Do you remember Poe? We read him together. The purloined letter is in sight of everyone and therefore nobody sees it.”
“You’re taking a risk,” I said with a reverberation of affection from my heart but not daring to say: Run away. I didn’t want him, a fugitive, to feel expelled as well. What would I do except respect Jericó’s desire, even knowing I might seem like his accomplice, his harborer?
“Get away. Don’t compromise me.”
I didn’t dare say that.
He said it for me.
He saved me the grief.
“You know, old pal. We wanted so much in life, we read, studied, discussed so much, and ended up only being worth what you pay an informer.”
I became angry. “I’m no Judas.”
He became angry. “That’s what they call me in the president’s office.”
“I had nothing to do…” I stammered. “I’m not a traitor. I don’t work in the government.”
“Then are you my accomplice?”
“I’m your friend. Not a traitor and not an accomplice.”
I asked him without words to understand me. I didn’t want to ask him to leave. Where would he go? He knew I wouldn’t turn him in. He took advantage of our friendship. Did he sacrifice it? I rejected this idea, seeing Jericó cornered by shadows, failed in his illusory takeover of power, the act of an inopportune fascist fascination impossible in our time, the product of an imagination, as I now understood it, exalted by itself, by the past, by a feverish, perversely idealistic intelligence. My friend Jericó with no last name. Like kings. Like sultans. Like Asian dictators.
“Thanks, Monroy. Your monitoring has allowed us to keep an eye on all of Judas’s preparations.”
Max Monroy didn’t tell the president that having access to all the strands of information was useful for something.
Valentín Pedro Carrera couldn’t help making a joke.
“You kept the information till pretty late, Don Max. This Judas almost had his way and turned us into Christ, damn it.”
Monroy shook his head, sunk deep into his shoulders.
“Nobody has his way anymore,” he declared. “Everything’s on file. There’s no subversive movement that isn’t known. If I was late in informing you, it’s because most of these revolutions abort right away. They last as long as Indian summer. Why add to your worries, Mr. President? You have enough with preparations for your popular festivals.”
The president did not respond to the blow. He owed Monroy too much. Monroy felt just a little embarrassed, as if he had abused his own power.
“When it’s a question of serious matters, I’m at your disposal, Mr. President.”
“I know, Don Max, I know and I appreciate it. Believe me.”
Hadn’t Jericó, dressed in shadows, known what I knew in Monroy’s office thanks to Asunta’s information?