Destiny and Desire

second stupidity; favors can be renewed but gratitude is lost if it doesn’t turn into something else: love that is a highflying bird or friendship that is not (Byron) a bird “without his wings” but a fowl less fleeting than love, with its high passionate flight and its low carnal passion. Maria Egipciaca was part of my childhood landscape. She fed me and had the peculiarity of offering me the spoon accompanied by incomplete proverbs, as if she were waiting for the Holy Spirit of Homilies to descend and illuminate my childish brain:

“No matter how early you wake up…”

“If you eat and sing…”

“Let it rain, let it rain…”

“A closed mouth…”

“An old woman died…”

I believe that whatever the real identity of Maria Egipciaca, for her, mine was that of perpetual infancy. As a little boy I didn’t dare ask her Who are you? since I had adjusted, in the gloomy solitude of this greenish house, to where I was though I didn’t know who I was. The fact is she never called me “son,” and if she said it by accident, it was in the way someone says “listen,” “boy,” or “kid.” I was an asterisk in the daily vocabulary of the woman who took care of me without ever explaining or clarifying her relationship to me. I didn’t feel worried, I was used to it, I nullified any question about Maria Egipciaca’s status and was sent to the public school on Calzada de la Piedad, where I made some friends-not many-whom I never invited to my house, and I was never invited to theirs. I suppose I had a forbidding aura, I was “strange,” what others intuitively know about-a family, a home-did not stand behind me. I was, in fact, the orphan who, like the mailman, comes and goes punctually, without provoking a response to what would later, in secondary school, be my watchword: my large nose, or as Jerico, the friend who came to fill all the loneliness of my childhood, would say, “You don’t have a big nose. Your nose is long and thin, not big. Don’t let that bunch of bastards get to you.”

Since the nose is the advance guard of the face and goes before the body, announcing the other features, I began to smell that something was changing in my relationship to Maria Egipciaca when, fatally, she discovered my shorts stiff with semen in the hamper. My alarming first ejaculation was involuntary, as I was glancing casually at an American magazine at the stand on the corner, which I acquired with embarrassment and leafed through with excitement. I thought I was sick (until on subsequent occasions alarm was transformed into pleasure) and didn’t know what to do with my dirty underwear except toss it in the hamper as naturally as I tossed in shirts and socks, and with the certainty that the laundress who came to the house once a week was not very concerned about finding signs of one kind of filth or another in underwear: that’s why it was “under.”

What I didn’t know is that before handing it over to the laundress, Maria Egipciaca carefully went over each item. She didn’t have to say anything to me. Her attitude changed and I couldn’t attribute the change to anything but my stained shorts. I imagined that a mother, without any need to refer to the fact, would have come to me affectionately and said something like “My little boy is a man now” or some similar foolishness, would never have referred to the concrete fact, much less with a desire to punish. That’s how I knew Maria Egipciaca was not my mother.

“Pig. Dirty pig,” she said with her most sour face. “You make me ashamed.”

From that moment on, my jailer, for I could no longer view her any other way, did not stop attacking me, isolating me, cornering me, and eventually arming me with total indifference in the face of the expert fire of her censure.

“What are you going to do with your life?”

“What are you preparing for?”

“What goals do you have in mind?”

“If only you were more practical.”

“Do you think I’m going to take care of you forever?”

“What do you want all those books for?”

This culminated in a nervous ailment that in fact signified the collapse of my corporeal defenses before a reality that held me under siege without offering a way out, a great wall of enigmas about my person, my goals, my sexuality, my family origins, who my father and mother were, what good it did to read all the books shown me by the secondhand book dealers with whom I was friendly for a while, and knew later, thanks to Professor Filopater.

The doctor diagnosed a crisis of nerves associated with puberty and said I had to rest for two weeks under the care of a nurse.

“I know how to take care of him,” Maria Egipciaca interjected with so much bitterness that the doctor cut her off abruptly and said that starting tomorrow a nurse would come to care for me.

“All right,” Maria Egipciaca said with resignation. “If the senor pays…”

“You know the senor pays for everything, he pays well and he pays on time,” the doctor said with severity.

That was how Elvira Rios came into my life, the young, brown-skinned, short, affectionate nurse who immediately became the object of the concentrated hatred of Dona Maria Egipciaca del Rio, for reasons not far removed from the similarity of their fluvial last names and in spite of the fact that my caretaker was singular and my nurse a true delta.

“Look at her, so dark and dressed all in white. She looks like a fly in a glass of milk.”

“Ay, there’s no lack of idiots!” the little nurse responded with inconsequential speed.

But now, to be more grateful than ungrateful, I should return to Father Filopater and his teachings.

FILOPATER DIXIT:

The philosopher Baruch (Benoit, Benito, Benedetto) Spinoza (Amsterdam 1632-The Hague 1677) attentively observes the spiderweb spread like an invasive veil over a corner of the wall. A single spider dominates the space of the web that, if Spinoza remembers correctly, did not exist a few months ago, has existed for only a very short time, going unnoticed, and now demanding attention as a principal element in a monastic room, bare and perhaps barren for someone, like Spinoza, who does not have a vocation for superior detachment.

There is nothing but a cot, a writing table with papers, pens, and ink, a washbasin, and a chair. There is no mirror, not for lack of means or an absence of vanity. Or perhaps for both reasons. Books thrown on the floor. A window opens on a stone courtyard. And the spiderweb ruled by the patient, slow, persevering insect that creates its universe without help from anyone, in an almost astral solitude that the philosopher decides to break.

He brings in from the street a spider (they abound in Holland) identical to the one in the bedroom. Identical, but an enemy. It is enough for Spinoza to place the street spider delicately on the web of the domestic spider for it to declare war on the intruder, for the stranger to let it be known that its presence is not peaceable either, and for a battle between the spiders to begin that the philosopher observes, engrossed, not really knowing which one will triumph in the war for living space and prolonged survival: The life of an arachnid is as fragile as the silk its spittle produces when it makes contact with the air, and as long as its probable patience. But the introduction of an identical insect into its territory is enough to transform the intruder into the Nemesis of the original spider and unleash the war that will end in a victory that interests no one after a war that concerns no one.

But in fact, not lacking in imagination (whoever says he is?), the philosopher adds strife to strife by tossing a fly onto the spiderweb. Immediately the spiders stop fighting each other and walk with a patient, dangerous step to the place where the immobilized fly lies captive in unfamiliar territory that imprisons its wings and lights up its greenish eyes (green like the walls of the house on Berlin), as if it wanted to send an SOS to all the flies in the world so they would save it from an inexorable end: to be devoured by the spiders that, once they satisfy their hunger to kill the intruder by their poisonous endeavors, will devour each other. That is death: an unfortunate encounter. That is a spider: an insectivore useful to man the gardener.

Spinoza laughs and returns to the work that feeds him. Polishing lenses. Cutting glass for spectacles and for the magic of the microscope invented a short time earlier by the Dutchman Zacharias Jaussen, master of the brilliant idea of joining two convergent lenses, one for seeing the real image of the object, the other for the augmented image. In this way we consider the immediate image of things and at the same time the deformed image, augmented or simply imagined, of itself. The philosopher thinks that just as there is a world immediately accessible to the senses, there is another, imaginary world that possesses all the rights of fantasy only if it does not confuse the real with the imaginary. And what is God?

Spinoza is very conscious of the period in which he lives. He knows that Uriel de Aste was condemned by the ecclesiastical authorities in 1647. His crime: denying the immortality of the soul and the revelation of the world,