He closed his eyes blissfully. I already knew that.
“And do you know why they trust me?”
I didn’t want to answer with some offensive joke.
“No.”
“Because they know I possess all the information and don’t trouble anyone with what I know.”
“And what’s that?” I wasn’t pretending innocence: I was innocent.
He said in Mexico, in each Latin American country, rebellions are being forged day and night, in the hope of marking an until here and a from now on as, let’s say, Bolívar or Castro did. He said he wouldn’t go into the reasons why it was difficult for revolutions “like the ones in the old days” to occur again. Present-day power is more sophisticated, better informed, societies have higher expectations, the left is familiar with electoral routes, but the right will have to have its innate voraciousness limited from time to time by a little fear.
“It seemed to me, Josué, that Jericó’s little adventure, so secondary, so minimal, so directed toward failure, ultimately so lacking in danger, offered me the opportunity to alert power without undue cost and give the right a shock. And in passing, to deflate the grotesque vision the extremely ambitious Jericó had acquired of himself.”
Sanginés’s smile was very offensive.
“He read Malaparte and Lenin. He felt like a little local Mussolini. Poor kid!”
“But in reality there was no danger,” I insisted, moved, in spite of myself, by a feeling for Jericó that went beyond fraternity and simply called itself friendship.
Sanginés knew how to disguise his smiles. “Exactly. Because there wasn’t, we could pretend there was.”
“I don’t understand, damn it.”
Sanginés didn’t celebrate his small logical triumph. “The greatest threats are fought in secret. The lesser ones should be denounced as a warning to the greater ones that we know what they want and control what they do. And to let the public know they are, at the same time, both threatened and safe.”
I looked at Sanginés with unaccustomed fury.
“He’s my brother, Maestro, he’s worthy of a little respect-some compassion-a-”
Sanginés continued as if he had heard nothing.
“Carrera and Monroy may be rivals, but they won’t be each other’s victims. Stopping Jericó is effective proof of this. At the moment of danger, the two powers unite.”
“He’s my brother,” I insisted.
And he was Monroy’s son.
Sanginés looked at me with burning coldness.
“He was Cain.”
Was Cain our brother? I wanted to ask Miguel Aparecido in the cell in Aragón and didn’t dare. There was a prohibition in his blue-black gaze. If Jericó was Cain, he and I were not Abel.
“Was he Cain?” I insisted to Sanginés.
“He was your brother,” the lawyer Sanginés agreed with salutary cruelty, telling me there was no better example than this to teach a probative lesson regarding the futility of rebellion and the cowardice of a response without balls. The winners were the Statesman and the Entrepreneur, like that, capitalized.
Cain and Abel.
I read this with vast, indescribable clarity in the gaze of my brother Miguel. We were not Abel. We hadn’t saved ourselves skillfully from either the curse or the good fortune. We had assumed, without fully realizing it, the responsibility of caring for our brother. Wasn’t Jericó our brother?
“He was Cain,” said Miguel Aparecido.
I didn’t have to ask for explanations. I remembered the curse Jericó had hurled at me from Asunta’s bed, with a murderous look and a disdain revealed by the mask of hatred. Jericó naked on all fours, a captured animal, threatening me-I’m going to kill you, fucking cocksucker-slavering, frustrated. The concentrated hatred of my brother Cain. And my painful doubt: Had the hatred he showed me the last time always been inside Jericó? Did he “patronize” me when we were young, look down on me, despise my independence and my supposed sexual triumph with Asunta?
Was this the end of the story? No. I didn’t know what had happened to Jericó. The question ate through my entire body like a restless acid concentrating in my heart only to flee my soul and remind me, my soul, that it was captive in a body.
I knew Miguel Aparecido’s response before he gave it. It seemed to be the answer agreed on by all of them, by Sanginés, by Asunta, by Miguel.
“Where is Jericó? What has happened to Jericó?”
“He’s been put in a safe place,” Miguel Aparecido replied.
In spite of this definitive statement, I knew the story would never end.
I wanted to assuage my own fears by saying: Just like Sara and the Mariachi and Gomas and Siboney? Put in a safe place? All of them imprisoned? All of them at peace?
Then Miguel Aparecido looked at me with a strange mixture of contempt and compassion.
IN SPITE OF this categorical statement, I knew the story never ended.
“The worst one of all is walking around free,” said Miguel Aparecido, and I didn’t want to put a name to anyone I knew, because my spirit could not tolerate more guilt, more shame, more capitulation.
“Who?” I said in haste. “Everything’s in-”
He cut me off with a forgotten name: Jenaro Ruvalcaba.
With an effort the scoundrel I met once during my first visits to the San Juan de Aragón Prison returned to my memory. Licenciado Jenaro Ruvalcaba was a criminal lawyer of scant renown. He received me courteously in his cell. He was agile and blond, about forty years old. He told me the prison population consisted of complaining, stupid people who didn’t know what to do with freedom.
“And how do you manage?”
“I accept what prison gives me.” He shrugged and proceeded to a reasonable analysis of how to behave in prison: Don’t accept visitors who came out of obligation, doubt the fidelity of the conjugal visit…
“Both will betray you,” he shouted suddenly.
“Who?”
“Your wife and her lover.” He stood and put his hands to his head. “Traitors!”
He closed his eyes, pulled at his ears, and attacked me with his fists before the guard hit him with his club on the back of the neck and Ruvalcaba fell, weeping, on the cot.
“He’s free?” I said to Miguel without hiding my terror, for this attorney was a proven menace.
“He’ll never be free,” remarked Miguel Aparecido. “He’s the prisoner of himself.”
Then he told me the following story.
Ruvalcaba did not lack talent. He was shaped by misfortune. A criminal gang kidnapped his father, his mother. They killed his father. They let her go, so she would suffer. The mother was a brave woman, and instead of sitting down to cry, she decided to educate her son Jenaro and give him a career as a criminal attorney so he would defend society against criminals like those who killed his father. Jenaro studied law and became a penologist. Except as he was preparing to defend the law he wanted to be a martyr to the law. He felt equal admiration and revulsion for both his father and those who killed him.
“The old prick, how could he let himself be kidnapped and murdered by that gang…? Fuck me…
“My father was a brave man who let himself be killed so my mother could go free… Fuck me…”
And so between admiration and contempt the divided, schizoid character of Jenaro Ruvalcaba was formed, at once defender and violater of the law: a poisoned fruit constantly fragmenting into inimical pieces.
Miguel said to make a long story short, a division was created in Ruvalcaba’s mind between the forbidden and the permitted, which eventually resolved into a situation worthy of farce. Ruvalcaba sublimated his psychological schism by molesting women. His vice consisted in boarding public transport-the Metro, buses, collective taxis-and harassing women. Don’t ask me why he found in this activity the reconcilation of his contrary tendencies. The fact is his maniacal pleasure was to take the Metro or the bus and first look at women with an intensity that was troubling because more than anything else, it was intrusive. He leaned against the female passengers. He recriminated them if they gave him dirty looks. He put his hands on their hips. He pawed their buttocks. He went straight to the nipple with his fingers. At times it was furtive, at times aggressive. If they reproached him or complained about him, Ruvalcaba would say: “She’s an old flirt. She led me on. I’m a criminal lawyer. I know about these things. Old women in heat! Frustrated old women! Let’s see if anybody will do them a favor!”