“He’s clever. He realized that to crush Jericó the forces of law and order were not enough, though I can tell you he used them. Jericó gave the president the opportunity to demonstrate his social power, his ability to represent the nation. And for that he needed Max Monroy.”
“Monroy doesn’t like Carrera. I know, Maestro, I saw it myself. Monroy humiliated Carrera.”
“What serious politician hasn’t eaten shit, Josué? It’s part of the profession! You eat toads and don’t make faces. Bah! Carrera needed Monroy to demonstrate unity in the face of an attempted rebellion. Monroy needed Carrera to give the impression that without Monroy the republic can’t be saved.”
“A pact between thieves.” I tried to be ironic.
Sanginés ignored me. He said I should understand Max Monroy. I said I had never underestimated him (including his sex life, which I had learned about and never would reveal out of respect for myself).
“It’s difficult not to admire a man who never allows himself to be flattered. He knows the best men lose their way in flattery…”
He looked at me with something resembling sincerity: “In Mexico we have a word that is categorical, juicy, and insuperable: lameculos. The person who flatters to obtain favors. In my day we talked about the UFA. United Front of Asskissers. Today it would be the UFT, United Front of Traitors.”
“And Monroy?” I said in order not to reveal I didn’t know what he was talking about. The UFA! The Stone Age!
“Monroy.”
“He can’t bear a flatterer. It’s his great strength in the midst of the national milieu of political, professional, and entrepreneurial asskissers.”
“But…” I interrupted and didn’t dare continue. The name and figure of Miguel Aparecido were on the tip of my tongue. Instead, I came up with a question: “And Jericó?”
“He’s in a safe place,” Sanginés answered without looking at me. He said it in a categorical, almost disagreeable way.
We left.
Outside the Danubio it was raining. Lottery sellers pursued us. Sanginés’s driver got out of the Mercedes, offered us an umbrella, and opened the door.
“Where can I drop you, Josué?”
I didn’t know how to answer.
Where did I live?
I got into the Mercedes like an automaton, removed from the intense activity of Mexico City. I lived in the Zona Rosa, transformed once more into the bohemian district, an oasis from the surrounding violence of the city and, in any case, from the latent menace that was more the rule than the exception. I tried to comfort myself with that idea…
What Sanginés and I talked about in the car is too important and I’ll leave it for another time.
ASUNTA JORDÁN RECEIVED me again in her office and didn’t raise her head. She reviewed papers. She signed letters. She initialed documents. She told me Jericó was “in a safe place.” What does that mean? That he won’t bother anyone anymore. Is he dead? I asked, getting right to the point. He’s in a safe place. Did she mean he wouldn’t cause any more trouble?
I tried to control conflicting impulses. In a safe place? What did the formula signify? I remembered it from my studies of law. Especially Roman law. The verb recaudar means to collect money. It also means to watch over or guard. And finally, to achieve what you want through entreaties. The scholarly tome says all this. To be in safety. Miguel Aparecido is, voluntarily, in his cell in San Juan de Aragón. Maxi Batalla and the shameless Sara P. are, against their will, in the same prison. Where is Jericó? A fraternal impulse that refused to die disturbed my breast. My friend Jericó. My brother Jericó. Castor and Pollux yesterday. Cain and Abel today. And the woman who knew everything didn’t tell me anything. She reviewed papers, not as a way to disguise her feelings or distance herself from the situation but as part of the daily work of an office that had to function. The Utopia office on the Plaza Vasco de Quiroga in the extensive district of Santa Fe in an interminable Mexico City.
Asunta Jordán.
“Why did you make Jericó believe you and I were lovers?”
“Aren’t we?” she said without raising her head from the papers.
“Only once.” I tried to hide my bad feelings.
“But intense, wasn’t it? Don’t say it was a quickie, all right?”
She meant resign yourself: only once, but enough for a lifetime. Is that what she wanted to tell me? I don’t know. She didn’t want to say what she was thinking. Asunta told Jericó she was my lover because in that way…
“I told him I was yours alone and couldn’t be his.”
“In other words, you used me.”
“If that’s what you think.”
“Whom do you love?” I asked insolently.
She looked at me at last and in her eyes I saw something like triumph in defeat, a victorious failure. Passing through Asunta’s eyes were her provincial childhood, her marriage to the odious and despicable owner of King Kong, her fortuitous meeting with Max Monroy, and the simple, available nakedness of Asunta, the innocence with which she stood in the middle of the dance floor and waited for the inevitable, yes, but also for the evitable, what could be and what could not be. Waited for Max Monroy to approach, take her by the waist, and never let her go again.
I believe that in the most profound depths of Asunta’s inner life, that instant defined everything. Max took her by the waist and the past became just that, a stony preterit, something that never happened. Max took her by the waist and she gave herself completely, without reservation, to what she desired most at that moment: a strong man, a protector who would shelter her from the miserable mediocrity of her destiny. But the woman I knew (and ay! knew only once, biblically) owed everything to Max Monroy, which humiliated her in a certain sense, made her inferior to herself, placed her in a situation of obligatory gratitude with Max but of obligatory dissatisfaction with herself, with her desire for independence.
At that moment I understood Monroy’s intelligence. The man who saved her did not demand banal gratitude from her. It was he who demonstrated total confidence in Asunta. He didn’t need to stress his age. He didn’t need to ask Asunta to give him what he needed from her. Constant professional rigor and sporadic erotic rigor. I was witness to both. Was there something else? Of course. Max gave Asunta power and sex. He also gave her independence. He let her love whomever she liked, on two conditions. He was not to find out anything about it. She could love another man knowing she could count on Max Monroy’s acceptance.
Jericó was one of many. But she knew Jericó had to be destroyed. And his destruction consisted in not only denying him sex but telling him her sex belonged to me, his brother Josué. In this way her obligation to Max and her personal freedom were satisfied, I understood it, but at the price of Jericó’s mortal enmity toward me. Castor became Cain.
She knew he would hate me. Jericó said it, on all fours and naked like an animal, there on the bed: He had always given me everything, he preceded me in everything, ever since we met, first him, then me. With Asunta he was second, not first. How would his infinite vanity tolerate that? A vanity, I knew, identical to blindness. The moral, political, human blindness of Jericó… I saw it only now. I swear I never suspected it before. How many things does the most intimate friendship conceal?
“But that isn’t true,” I said with brutality. “You belong to Max Monroy.”
She didn’t look up. “I belong to myself. I belong only to Asunta Jordán. Ta-dum. Curtain.”
It debilitated me, disconcerted me, infuriated me that she would say these things without looking at me, signing papers again, reviewing memos, marking dates on her calendar…
“And Monroy?” I asked with the blind vision of the coarse and bestial, compassionate and senile, artificial and devout love between Asunta and Max, buried in my obligatory silence, in my ridiculous sense of discretion…