Destiny and Desire

“Wakes earlier.”

“Gets up crazy.”

“No flies come in.”

“Shuffling.”

Elvira completed the interrupted proverbs of Maria Egipciaca, who listened to them hiding behind the door, betrayed by a moth-eaten sigh. She was defeated.

A week went by. Ten days went by. The period of my convalescence was growing short, and one night, when the famous peace of the graveyard reigned, Elvira said to me:

“Young man, you need only one thing to settle your nerves.”

And immediately she undressed in front of me and I could bear witness to my own imagination. What one thinks can be superior or inferior to reality. I feared, when Elvira unfastened her shirt, that her breasts would not be as I had imagined them. That her belly, her pubis, her buttocks, would contradict my fantasy. This was not the case. Reality surpassed fiction. Elvira’s silence during our fifteen minutes of love was barely broken by an earthly little sigh from her and a prolonged ay! from me, which she stifled, with delight, by covering my mouth with her hand.

Better than my pleasure was the feeling that I had given it to her. No matter how Elvira picked up again not only her clothes but her nurse’s attitudes, I knew from then on that I could give pleasure to a woman and believed at that moment it was the greatest wisdom in life and everything I learned from then on would not be better or wiser than this, although this, I also found out, would never be repeated exactly the same way. There would be in my life loves that were longer, shorter, more or less important, but none would replace my sexual dawning in the arms of Nurse Elvira, healer of my youth and quadrant of my maturity.

And so it happened that on the same day I got up from bed and Elvira very seriously said goodbye, I went into the bedroom of my almost forgotten jailer Dona Maria Egipciaca and found an unmade bed and an abandoned mattress.

FATHER FILOPATER HONORED us with his friendship. Of all the assholes running loose in the schoolyard, he selected Jerico and me to talk, discuss, and think with him. We knew it was a privilege. We didn’t, however, want to be seen as something exceptional, enviable, or, by the same token, laughable or open to ridicule by the mass of students more interested in dozing or kicking a ball than in demonstrating that man is a being who thinks when he walks. Because our conversations with Filopater were all peripatetic. With absolutely no desire to evoke Aristotle, Filopater made it clear that in the act of walking, one establishes an active friendship without the hierarchies implied when we sit at a table or receive the lesson from the altar-civil or religious-of the teacher-priest (or as Filopater would say, not without a touch of pedantry, the magister-sacerdos).

I suppose that speaking while walking was the intuitive way in which the teacher put himself on our level and invited us to speak without his looking down at us from on high. Sometimes we stayed after class in the yard. Other times we walked the streets of Colonia Roma. Rarely did we reach the Bosque de Chapultepec. The truth is that in the act of holding a dialogue, the city tended to disappear, changing into a kind of agora or academy shared through the word. And the word, what was it? Reason or intuition? Conviction or faith? Provable faith? Rational intuition?

The first thing Father Filopater set forth for us was what he considered a danger. He knew about our readings and intellectual enthusiasms. From the very first, he warned us:

“Be careful of extremes.”

The invitation to debate was formulated from the moment the priest proposed that we talk to him. We respected him enough-and I suppose we respected ourselves enough-not to question his right to think, ours to refute him, and his to respond. Moreover, I confess that Jerico and I wanted and needed this, I at the age of eighteen and he at nineteen, and both of us fertile ground for receiving another’s seed in the mental fields we had been cultivating at least since sixteen and seventeen with impassioned readings, debates between ourselves, and a feeling of enormous emptiness: Why did we think, for whom did we think, who would dispute our proud youthful knowledge, who would put it to the test?

Because nothing inspires pride comparable to that of a young person’s intellectual awakening. The darkness dissipates. Day dawns. Night is left behind. Not because the earth moves around the sun, but because we are the sun, the earth is ours. We knew it.

“Drinking from the same fountain, you and I can be left dry, Josue, we can turn into intolerant individuals without someone to put us up against the wall and make us doubt ourselves…”

I am transcribing and fixing these words of Jerico’s because I will have occasion to invoke them very often in the future.

Now, as if he had read our thoughts and deciphered our disquiet, Filopater approached us in the schoolyard, tacitly asked us to join him in his slow walk among the arches of the building, without attracting attention, with pensive references to the weather, the changing light in the city, the quality of the day, the ability to hear and take pleasure in urban music, and thought.

“I’m not mistaken if I say you’re very involved in two authors.”

He saw our books, hidden sometimes in our book bags, sometimes displayed defiantly on our desks or read with youthful ostentation at recess, when the presence of my friend Jerico defended me against the old assaults on my innocent nose and we were both consigned to a kind of student limbo. We were “strange” and didn’t know how to get a ball into a hoop.

The two authors were Saint Augustine and Friedrich Nietzsche. In an intuitive and reasoned way, Jerico and I, like iron unattached to a magnet, had headed for opposing thinkers. We wanted, more accurately, to learn to think on the basis of extremes. Our purpose was transparent to someone like Father Filopater and his rapid attraction to an unoccupied center: for us and, in contrast to what we could imagine, for himself.

“It matters a great deal to you to think as you choose, doesn’t it?”

“And also to express freely what we think, Father.”

“Authority has no right to intervene?”

“Of course not.”

“Of course not when it’s a question of a religious institution? Or never?”

“We want it never to interfere if it’s a question of a secular state.”

“Why?”

“Because the state is secular in order to dispense justice, and justice is not a question of faith.”

“And charity?”

“It begins at home,” I allowed myself to joke, and Filopater laughed along with me.

He began by situating our extremes. He clarified that Jerico and I chose two authors who would teach us to think, not two filiations who would oblige us to believe and defend what we believed. In this we agreed with him. It was the basis of our dialogues. We weren’t wedded to our philosophers except insofar as we read and discussed them. Was Filopater tied to the dogmas of his Church? Thinking this was our initial advantage. We were mistaken. In any event, our thinking was opposed to faith and wagered on the clash of ideas. Our decision was that these ideas were diametrically opposed, and Filopater situated them in a pellucid manner.

We read Saint Augustine: God creates all things and He alone sustains them. Evil is only the absence of a good we could have. When it fell, humanity lost its original values. Recovering them requires divine grace. Grace is inaccessible to human beings, fallen and in disgrace, on their own. The Church is the intermediary of grace. Without the Church, we remain joined to the dis-grace of the human mass, which is massa peccati.

Saint Augustine defended these ideas and fought without respite the heretic Pelagius, for whom salvation was possible without the Church: You can be saved by yourself.

At the other extreme of these youthful ideas, Nietzsche proposed freeing us from all metaphysical belief, abandoning any acquired truth, and accepting with bitterness a nihilism that rejects a Christian culture impoverished by the need for renunciation and yet masked by false values that consecrate appearances and hinder the impulse toward truth.

“What truth?”

“The recognition of the absence of any truth.”

Father Filopater was not lacking in astuteness and I don’t believe he suspected, beyond a couple of peripeteias, that his religious investiture would lead him to instruct us in the virtues of