“Do you know where the señora is buried?” I asked with an air of innocence.
“Nobody knows,” the voice of voices continued. “Not even Max. He handed the body of Señora Concepción to a group of criminals he got out of prison with the promise to free them and told them to bury Concepción’s corpse wherever they liked, but never to tell him about it… or anyone else. It goes without saying.”
“What trust in-”
“None at all. Instead of freeing them, he abducted them. Nobody knows where they ended up. They were never heard from again. Just imagine.”
“But Miguel’s there, he’s in prison…”
“Miguel Aparecido is the only person Max Monroy couldn’t handle. Miguel Aparecido chose to remain locked in a cell in San Juan de Aragón as a precaution against his own desire to get out and murder his father, and his father accepted his release, or his imprisonment, as a compromise between two certainties: his and Miguel’s. Max didn’t liquidate Miguel and Miguel didn’t annihilate Max. But Max served an infinite sentence, worse than death itself, and Miguel lived his life creating an empire inside prison.”
“He didn’t control the sadists who killed the children…”
“It was part of the compromise.”
“What compromise?”
“Between Miguel and the authorities. I’ll give you this in exchange for that. A swap.”
“Are you telling me the jailers have the right to kill a few kids and Miguel has the right to save them?”
“He’s the big boss.”
“How do they choose?” I said with no horror in my oneiric voice, losing the order of the acts, the words attributable to Asunta, to Miguel, to Antigua Concepción, I don’t know…
“They choose at random. Eagle or sun. Heads or tails. This one stays in prison. That one drowns in the pool. The ones who don’t cross themselves are really lucky!”
“And the ones who know how to swim?” I said without much relevance.
“They’re saved too.”
The voice in my dream went on: “The worst criminals get away, led by the Mariachi Maxi and the whore with the bee, the damned Sara P… Not everything turns out the way we want, isn’t that right?”
“They’ve been put in a safe place,” the chorus repeated the sacramental phrase.
“In a safe place?”
“They belong to Miguel. I don’t guarantee their well-being.”
“Just like my brother? Just like Jericó?”
“We don’t talk about that.”
“In a safe place? What? How? Isn’t anybody going to-?”
“I can show you.”
“What? Not in…?”
The voices dissipated. They dissipated. Dissipated. They were insignificant voices that bring dreams to distract us from what wants to summon us and we can scarcely guess at.
On the other hand, the figure of Max Monroy advances toward me, shoulders high, head sunk into his body, defiant, as if wanting to tell me that insults, physical abuse, praise and blame did not even graze a man of action who was also a solitary man: Action and solitude, solitude and action, joined, are never used up, said Monroy’s voice in the dream, the record of a man’s motives is huge, there is avarice, desire, rancor, rarely complete satisfaction, Josué, if you fulfill a desire the desire engenders another desire and so on until sorrows flourish because the sun did not come out and we cannot understand that our desires are one thing and our loyalties something very different and in order to obtain what is desired you must separate it from all loyalty immediately, my son, without harming anyone. That is what those who detest, envy, or accuse me do not understand: I did not have to harm anyone to be who I am…
He advances toward me preceded by that strange odor of an animal recently emerged from a cave that Asunta evoked one day.
“Being old does not mean having impunity,” said the shade of Monroy. “Or immunity.”
In the logic of the dream, he launched into a list of his ailments and the medicines he took to alleviate them. I’m old, he said, the old feel threatened by the young. I’m ossifying. Go on, touch my bones. Go on. Ándale.
I didn’t dare. Or I experienced the illogical transitions in the dream. Max Monroy was saying things separated by the oneiric instincts that dissolve the concretion of things, new enterprises disturb the old order, the old resist them, I create them, I am my own opposition…
“I admit that advanced age develops greater doses of cynicism, a measure of skepticism, a degree of pessimism. Why?”
I said I didn’t know.
“You have to know how to say no.”
“Ah.”
“Being old does not mean having impunity. Or immunity,” he repeated. “You have to know how to look deep into my eyes to know who I am. Who I was.”
The voice resonated as if it were traveling the length of a gallery of mirrors.
He said his joints ached.
He said: “There are things I don’t want to know.”
I asked Asunta Jordán: “Why do you appear almost naked at parties and with me only in the dark?”
“Why is your penis so long?” I believe she asked him.
“To cool off my semen,” responded Monroy.
“What does it mean to be put in a safe place? Wait just a minute…”
“And what does it mean to go to bed with Max, like you do, Asunta?”