“Then take a look at Hetara at dawn, without the night’s makeup. What will you see? What will it taste of? A roll dipped in perfume. And what will you find if you tear off the veil? A revolting face.”
He indicated the woman’s backside. She had a queen bee tattooed on her left buttock. He didn’t know I had seen it, which is why he pointed it out to me.
“Everything’s varnish, my dear Josue. Lose your illusions and say an affectionate goodbye to the veiled woman.”
Only later did I remember that when I made love to her I closed my eyes, knowing that he, Jerico my friend, made love with his eyes open and came without making noise. Even though he came. She did not.
“Like clockwork.”
WHEN WE GRADUATED from prep school, we would matriculate in the Faculty of Law. We took that for granted.
Our earlier philosophical meanderings-the reading of Saint Augustine and Nietzsche, the discussions with Father Filopater, the magnet of Spinoza-convinced us that the framework of ideas was like the skeleton in a body that now required the flesh of experience. And without having read Spinoza, experience could be had by a bus driver or a cook. We-Jerico and I-ran the risk of believing that ideas were enough in themselves: splendid, eloquent, astral, and sterile. To give reality to our thoughts, we decided to study law as the option closest to our shared intellectual vocation.
Because we could share a woman or an apartment. This was almost child’s play compared to the brotherhood of thoughts-Castor and Pollux, children of the swan, the Dioscuri born of the same ovary, causing flowers and grasses to burst forth in the world, attending the birth of love and conflict, power and intelligence. Because they were so united, they decided our next step: to be lawyers in order to give reality to our ideas.
I was certain about our shared purpose. Still, I noticed in my friend, during the months of vacation between our leaving prep and matriculating at the university, a growing disquiet manifested in isolated phrases when we ate, showered, walked through the neighborhood, went into one of the increasingly rare bookstores in the city, and invaded (or allowed ourselves to invade) spaces devoted to popular music, videos, and gadgetry. There was no lack of street life on the way to our old prep school. Vast, swarming, moving like an undisciplined army of ants, the street gave an accounting of increasingly greater differences of class. There was an abyss between the motorized world and the world on foot or even between those in cars and those on a bus. The Mexican contrast, far from ebbing, increased, as if the country’s “progress” were an optical illusion, calculated on the number of inhabitants but not the sum total of their welfare.
The working-class city increased its numbers. The privileged city isolated itself like a pearl in the urban oyster (cloister). Jerico and I went to a cineclub and saw Fritz Lang’s
In our city, the young who were neither poor nor rich rubbed elbows with the wealthy in discotheques and wandered solitary and joyless through the commercial centers, the large groupings of stores, movie houses, and cafes under the common roof of provisional protection. Outside, an option was waiting for the young in stylish clothes: Move up, move down, or stay where you are forever.
For all these reasons, Jerico and the one who is narrating this story to you, gentle survivors, felt privileged. I had lived in protected comfort in the house on Berlin. Now, I shared the apartment on Praga with my friend. I hadn’t known the source of Jerico’s income. Now I had a suspicion that I didn’t have the courage to share with him. On the fifteenth of every month an envelope appeared in the mailbox with a check made out to me. I confess I cashed it in secret and didn’t tell Jerico. But I imagined that periodically he received similar assistance and even went so far as to think, with no proof at all, that the source of our controlled income might be the same. The truth is that the amount I had at my disposal was enough for my immediate needs and nothing more.
Since my friend and I led twin lives, I supposed his income was not very different from mine. What we did share was the mystery.
I was saying that during the months of vacation, Jerico began to let slip phrases without precedent or consequence. They seemed directed at me, though at times I considered them mere expressions in viva voce of my friend’s thoughts and concerns.
In the shower: “What do we fear, Josue?”
At breakfast: “Never leave yourself open to an ambush.”
Having lunch at three o’clock: “Don’t let anyone impose opinions on you. Be independent.”
Walking together through the neighborhood: “Don’t feel superior or inferior to anybody. Feel equal.”
Back in the apartment: “We have to make ourselves equal to everything around us.”
“No,” I replied. “We have to make ourselves better. What makes us better also challenges us.”
Then we fell into a frequent debate, our elbows leaning on the table, my hands supporting my head, his open in front of me, at times he and I in the same posture, both joined by a fraternity that, for me, was our strength… as we drank beer.
“What undermines a man? Fame, money, sex, power?”
“Or, on the contrary, failure, anonymity, poverty, impotence?” I hurried to say between sips of brew.
He said we ought to avoid extremes, though in case of necessity-and he smiled cynically-the first was preferable to the second.
“Even at the cost of corruption, dishonesty, lies? I give up!”
“That’s the challenge, dude.”
I took his hand affectionately.
“Why did we become friends? What did you see in me? What did I see in you?” I asked, returning with a certain dreamy melancholy to our first meeting, when we were both almost children, in the school officially named Jalisco and in reality Presbytery.
Jerico didn’t answer. He remained silent for several days, almost as if speaking to me were a form of treason.
“How to avoid it?” he murmured at times. “I give up!”
I smiled as I said, so the conversation would not be sidetracked in the usual way: Either you learn a trade or you end up a highway robber.
He didn’t smile. He said with punctual indifference (that’s how he was) that at least the criminal had an exceptional destiny. The terrible thing, perhaps, was to give in to the fatality of the evasive, the conformity of the common and ordinary.
He said the vast
“I believe that youth consists of daring, don’t you agree? Maturity, on the other hand, consists of dissimulating.”
“Would you dare, for example, to kill? To kill, Jerico?”
I pretended terror and smiled. He went on with a somber air. He said he feared necessity, because hunting for the necessary meant gradually sacrificing the extraordinary. I said that all of life, for the mere fact of being, was already extraordinary and deserving of respect. He looked at me, for the first time, with a wounding contempt, lowering me to the condition of the commonplace and lack of imagination.
“Do you know what I admire, Josue? Above all things I admire the man who murders what he loves, the thief who steals what he likes. This is not necessity. This is art. It is will that is free, supposedly free. It is the opposite of the herd of complaining, stupid, bovine, directionless people, the ones you pass every day in the street. The filthy herd of oxen, the blind herd of moles, the thick cloud of green flies, capeesh?”
“Are you telling me it’s better to have the extraordinary destiny of a criminal than the common destiny of an ordinary citizen?” I said without too much emphasis.
“No,” he replied, “what I’m praising is the capacity for deceit, disguise, dissimulation of the citizen who murders in secret and turns his victims into strawberry marmalade!”
