“Us?”
He looked with contemptuous eyes at the empty rooms in the house on Berlin.
“You’ll go crazy here. It’ll be like clockwork.”
JERICO LIVED ON the top floor of a crumbling building on Calle de Praga. The green tide of the Paseo de la Reforma could be heard in perpetual conflict with the gray traffic of Avenida Chapultepec. In any event, living on the seventh floor of an apartment building with no elevator had something about it that isolated us from the city, and since on the other floors there were only offices, after seven in the evening the building was ours, as if to compensate for the cramped arrangement of a living room integrated with the kitchen-stove, refrigerator, pantry- separated only by the high counter we used as a table, integrated in turn by two high stools that resembled the racks where they placed heretics, to the derision of the people, and the punished, to the mockery of their masters.
What else? Two bedrooms-one smaller than the other-and a bathroom. Jerico offered me the larger room. I refused to displace him. He suggested changing beds every seven days. I accepted, not understanding the reasoning behind the offer.
We also shared the closet, though I brought from Berlin to Praga (from Doblin to Kafka, one might say) more clothing than the very few items my friend had.
And we shared women. I should say, a single woman in a single house on Calle de Durango, the brothel of La Hetara, a name of ancient lineage, according to my friend, for at the dawn of Mexican time two women fought for control of whoredom in the city: La Bandida, a famous madam celebrated in boleros and corridos and, much more discreet, La Hetara, to whose house Jerico took me one night.
“You’re like a lamb going to slaughter, and I know why. You fell in love with the nurse Elvira Rios. You didn’t realize that the nurse, the doctor, the entire house on Berlin, and of course your jailer Dona Maria Egipciaca were all passing illusions, phantoms of your childhood and early youth, destined to disappear as soon as you reached the ‘age of reason.’ ”
“How do you know that?” I asked without too much surprise, since to me the speed of my friend’s associations and conundrums was already proverbial.
“Aaaah. The fact is your case is mine… I believe…”
With growing perplexity I asked him to explain. I had grown up in a mansion in the care of a strict tyrant and he, apparently, had been freer than the wind, giving the impression-underscored by his apartment, his vital ease in speaking, living, going to see whores, walking between the Zona Rosa and Colonia Roma as if there were no (were there any?) urban frontiers-that he had appeared in the world totally prepared, with no need for family, antecedents… or a last name.
All the entrance bells at the building on Praga had the names of individuals, companies, legal offices. The top floor said only PH-Penthouse. Ever since school, and above all after the incident with the young administrator whom I asked about Jerico’s last name, I did not have the courage to investigate any further. It cost the administrator his job. After my question we didn’t see him again, not even hidden behind his officious little window. I deduced that just as the school secretary had vanished, I could disappear too if I inquired about the last name and therefore the origins of my straightforward though mysterious friend Jerico.
And yet, here we were together in the garret (penthouse) on Calle de Praga between Reforma and Chapultepec, sharing roof, bathroom, meals, readings, and, finally, women. Or rather, woman. Just one.
Jerico pushed aside the beaded curtain and moved easily among the twenty or so girls gathered in the parlor of La Hetara. He told me-noticing my glances-to close my eyes. Why? Because we were going directly to the room where our friend was waiting for us. Friend? Our? Our whore, Josue. Our? Mine is yours. I forbid you to choose. I already chose for you, he went on, opening the door of a bedroom that had a thick, mixed aroma (perfume, sweat, starch) slathered on the walls, which no one and nothing, except the collapse of the house, could eliminate.
It was a room overloaded with heavy curtains on the walls, an effort at the kind of Oriental luxury I would later appreciate in the paintings of Delacroix crowded with silks, draperies, carpets, incense burners, fans, odalisques, and eunuchs… except in this room everything was sensually olfactory and barely visible, so great was the pileup of pillows, carpets, poufs, mirrors with no reflection, and the smell of cat piss and fast food, as if, when the act was over, the prostitute’s solitude was compensated for only by an appetite contrary to the insatiable hunger that is the rule for the modern woman, molded by models who look like broomsticks and lead the daughters of Eve to bounce back and forth between bulimia and anorexia.
What awaited us? Was she fat or thin? Because in the darkness of the room, which was not even half-lit, it was difficult to find the dependable object of Jerico’s desire transformed, with fraternal tyranny, into my own.
I allowed myself to be led. I recognized my position as student with barely one flower in my buttonhole, the deflowered and lamented Elvira, while Jerico strolled through this brothel like a sheikh in his harem with an unpleasant self-assurance that owed a good deal to his nineteen years. He was the sultan, the
With a dramatic gesture, Jerico took a heavy silk bedspread and pulled it aside, revealing the woman protecting herself beneath and behind this large scenic device.
How much was revealed to me? Very little. The woman was still covered from the waist down, only her bare back gleamed, in the dusky light, like a forgotten moon, and her face was covered by a veil that concealed her from nose to shoulder. The only things visible were the eyes of a winged beast, black, large, cruel, mindless, and indifferent, as mysterious as the hidden half of her face, almost as if from the nose down this woman had an appearance that denied the great unknown of her gaze with a vulgarity, simplicity, or stupidity unworthy of her enigmatic eyes.
I didn’t see much more, as I say, because as soon as we were undressed, the woman disappeared amid Jerico’s kisses and my timid caresses, the two of us naked without any previous order or decision, naturally stripped of everything except our skin, avid to kiss the woman, touch her, in the end possess her.
And never speak to her. The veil that covered her mouth also sealed it. She did not allow a sigh, a moan, a reply to escape. She was the object-woman, something volunteered, made for the pleasure-that first night-only of Jerico and Josue, Castor and Pollux, here and now again the children of Leda, whore to the swan, born in this instant of the same egg, the Dioscuri in the act of being born, crushing the flowers and grass, shattering the eggs of the swan so that from her would be born love and conflict, power and intelligence, the tremor in the thighs, the fire on the roofs, the blood in the air.
We followed each other in love.
Only later did I try to reconstruct in memory what existed outside my body, as if in the act itself any impression other than pleasure would extinguish it. The woman behind the veil was inanimate though endowed with a labored indolence. She adopted mechanical poses that left the initiative to the two of us. Even so, my love was abrupt, spasmodic, obliging me to imagine Elvira’s lack of haste.
“Can you say something to her that will make her tremble?” Jerico whispered in my ear, he and I facing each other with the woman between us, the two friends head to head, panting, trying in vain to smile, naked in our carnal blindness, our hands resting on the woman’s waist, fingers touching, I looking out of the corner of my eye at the bee tattooed on one of the whore’s buttocks, our mouths joined by respiration that was shared, yearning, suspicious, shy, ardent.
“Can you imagine all the men who’ve had her? Doesn’t it excite you to know the road of her body has been traveled by thousands of cocks? Does it bother you, interest you, repel you? Only you and I become emotional? Are we going to find our pleasure separately or at the same time?”
I would like to believe, at a distance, that those nights at La Hetara on Calle Durango sealed forever the fraternal complicity (that had already existed since school, since our readings, since our conversations with Filopater) between Jerico and me.
Still, there was something else. Not only the postcoital sadness I didn’t feel with Elvira and did now, but an ugliness, a vulgarity that Jerico himself took care to point out to me.
“Do you want to believe?” He coughed with a caricatured, pompous cough while the woman lay facedown in the bed. “Do you want to believe that sex is like a great baroque poem whose exterior is the insidious ornamentation on limpid profundity?”
He made a disagreeable face so I would laugh.
