That did oblige her to look at me again for an instant before returning to her papers. The look told me: “I belong to Monroy. I owe him everything. Besides, I’m like him. I’m also Max Monroy because Max Monroy made me what I am. I’m Asunta Jordán because this is what Max Monroy decided and wanted. Max Monroy took me out of the provinces and raised me to where I am now. You may think an administrative job, no matter how privileged, in Max’s huge organization, is minor in the general scheme of things, but learning to talk, to dress, to conduct myself with intelligence, coldness, and the necessary disdain… that’s something you can never pay for.”
She said it with a show of sincerity, though with a poorly disguised arrogance. She looked down. For her, being where she sat now was utopia, yes, the place of imaginary happiness, a satisfaction in the end comparative with respect to something earlier, which one left behind and to which one does not wish to return. Looking at her sitting there, immersed in her work, almost pretending I was not standing in front of her, made it difficult for me to separate Asunta’s person from Asunta’s function, and between the two, with the slim edge of a razor, I introduced the idea of happiness. Because when all was said and done, why did she work, why did this woman dress, style her hair, act, and lie except to maintain a position, yes, a position that assured her the minimum of happiness to which she had a right, above all comparatively. I thought of her history. The wife subjected to the vulgar, noisy machismo, hereditary and without direction, of a poor, unaware, difficult devil, her husband. Her destiny in the middle class of the arid society of the northern deserts. Mexico along the border, so smug about being the most prosperous part of the country, the industrial north, without Indians, without the extreme poverty of Chiapas or Oaxaca, bourgeois Mexico, self-satisfied in contrast to the outstretched hand of the beggar south. Mexico energetic and proud of it in contrast to the great devouring capital city, fat, dissipated, heavily made up, the urban gorilla of D.F. squashing the rest of the nation with its shameless buttocks…
But the same north from which Asunta came was south of the border with Yankee prosperity, it was “south of the border, down Mexico way,” the wealth of the Mexican north was the poverty of the North American border. The passage of clandestine workers through Arizona and Texas. The barbed wire fence. The coyote’s truck. The border guard’s bullet. The maquila in Ciudad Juárez. The drug dealer from Tijuana to Laredo. Gangrene. Pus. What Sanginés always recalled when we got together.
And from all this, she extracted a semblance of happiness. And what was happiness? I asked myself this morning, standing in front of Asunta’s desk, her own border facing the subordinate employee or the occasional lover. Was happiness an internal fact, a satisfaction, or was it an external fact, a possession? I didn’t see in Asunta a semblance of bliss if by bliss one understands happiness. Was happiness synonymous with destiny? Perhaps. To a certain extent. But in Asunta Jordán I saw a destiny too dependent on things that weren’t hers. For example, Max Monroy’s desire, origin of Asunta Jordán’s “happiness” in the sense of power, well-being. And inheritance? What would Max’s will say about Asunta’s destiny? And while we’re on the subject, would Max remember his son Miguel Aparecido, the voluntary prisoner in San Juan de Aragón? Would he remember?
She told me once: “I have alert sleep. I also have dreamy wakefulness. You should know that. God’s truth. Do you understand?”
“And what else?” I insisted so as not to give her the last word by giving it to her.
“Before I break my chains myself, Max frees me from them. But he gives me the keys so I have hope.”
I looked at Asunta. Had she succeeded in uprooting desire and fear? Was this true happiness, not to desire, not to fear? Was this serenity? Or was it simply the disguise of a passivity that counts happiness as the absence of fear and the absence of desire? If ataraxia signified serenity, perhaps the price was passivity. Asunta’s calm, I knew, I learned, was the result of a forced and forceful desire. It was a satisfaction that rewarded her for having overcome the mediocrity of her matrimonial past. It was also a dissatisfaction that in the name of gratitude to Max distanced itself from the free enjoyment of love chosen by her.
Did she love me?
She read my mind. “I hope you don’t have any hopes, my poor Josué.”
I said I didn’t, lying.
“If I went to bed with you,” she didn’t look up, “it was because Max allowed me to. Max allows me sexual pleasure with young men. He knows the limitations of his, well, his third age. He lets me have pleasure. The pact with him is permanent. With the others, it’s temporary.”
It occurred to me there was certainty in her mind: Max knew about her loves, he permitted them, he respected them. Perhaps he even enjoyed them, as long as they didn’t interfere with her professional relationship. Perhaps the proof of her love for Max consisted in being unfaithful to him, certain that for him this was part of love. I believe I understood, thinking about Max and Asunta, that loving each other a great deal and getting along well can lead to indifference and hatred. Max Monroy must tolerate Asunta’s “betrayals” because he wants and needs them.
“Solamente una vez,” I managed to sing: “Only once,” as if the words to a bolero could sublimate all our emotions.
“Exactly. Like in the song.”
“And Jericó?”
“What about Jericó?”
Why did Asunta present herself to him as my lover, unleashing a mortal hatred that was, in the end, more than my lack of solidarity with his political project, the thing that ended our longstanding friendship?
“Why?”
She refused to look at me. This time I understood the reason. Before, she didn’t look at me because she was haughty and powerful. Now her absent gaze was shameful and shamefaced. Then she had the courage to raise her head and look straight at me.
“I belong to Max Monroy. I owe him everything. It’s shit to owe everything to one person. It’s shit.”
When I heard her say this, I knew Asunta was both happy and unhappy. Her passion disturbed me more than her indifference. With me, she made love with her eyes open.
That’s why she didn’t need to explain anything else to me. I understood Asunta lied to Jericó when she told him I was her lover, and to me when she told me only one night was mine to win, my God, I understood, it hurt me, it stripped my life bare to understand it, to gain a position of freedom before Max without harming Max but irreparably harming the ancient fraternity of Josué and Jericó, Castor and Pollux.
Cain and Abel.
Did Asunta realize what she had unleashed? Perhaps her egotism became confused with her true satisfaction, the cliff’s edge of happiness to which she believed she had a right, even at the cost of a fratricidal war that in her eyes was, perhaps, barely a genteel war, one of those waged as if it were a game, with no real risk… And the abyss?
She didn’t realize. I felt a kind of compassion for Asunta Jordán and a destiny she valued, perhaps, only by comparison. It was in reality a destiny, I thought then, that was despicable, deceptively liberated, in fact alienated.
“Who was your friend Jericó with before all this?”
“Who was he with?”
“Women.”
“Whores. Only whores.”
“The imbecile fell in love with me.”
I didn’t believe it and didn’t interrupt her.
“He told me he was falling in love with a woman for the first time.”
“What did you say to him?”
“You already know. That I belonged to you, Josué.”
And immersed again in her papers, she added:
“You have nothing to worry about. We have him in a safe place.”
I DON’T KNOW if memory is a form of incarnation. In any case, it must be a stimulus for the spirit that by means of recollection manages to revive. Though perhaps memory consists only in holding on to an instant and immediately returning movement to the moment. Is memory barely a scar? Is it the past I myself don’t recognize? Though if I don’t know it, how can I remember it? Is memory a mere simulation of recalling what we have already forgotten or, what’s worse, have never lived?