distinguished by his snub nose or thin lips. A shaved skull. Brilliant eyes, the same but different, guardians of both a youthful past and a mature future.
He embraced me and I smelled the remembered sweat.
Jerico had come back.
“You look like a poor fool in an asylum,” I told him.
“Punched in,” he said in English, and immediately afterward, as if recalling and correcting: “It’ll go like clockwork.”
I CONFESS THAT the return of Jerico produced contrary feelings in me. After his absence, we were both entering our mid-twenties with a separation that put our youthful friendship to the test. In principle this impinged on any other consideration, though he and I-I imagined-were not strangers to the usury of time. The second consideration, however, had to do with my closeness to Lucha Zapata and the daily, vital question of knowing where I would brush my teeth, in the apartment on Praga, with him, or the little house in Chimalpopoca, with her.
At first I didn’t permit the choice between them to be a problem that would interfere with my joy. Seeing Jerico again not only renewed my own youth but, in particular, rescued and prolonged it, though with a bittersweet anticipation that I would also begin to lose it. Until the moment of his departure, my friend was what you already know because you read it here: the independent, audacious boy who gave me my place in secondary school, saving me from being the scapegoat of the gang of bastards who were going to feed on me and my prominent nose as they would have taken advantage of somebody who was cross-eyed or crippled. Jerico stood firm “in the middle of the arena,” obliged the “good-for-nothings,” as Dona Maria Egipciaca would have called them, to respect me. We initiated the comradeship that now, after our separation, his return would put to the test.
I admit as well that a series of ambivalent impressions followed one another in my mind on the day I found my friend back in the apartment on Praga. His physical appearance was different. I don’t know if it was better. Yes, he had lost some of the persistent baby fat on his face. He looked more angular, more tense, more reserved. I don’t know if his shaved head suited him or not. I could lean toward the side of fashion and accept it as one of the many ways of making a statement with one’s hair at the time: long manes, shaved heads, multicolored locks, afros, Mohawks, Roman consuls, rebel dreadlocks, except that the combination of his shaved head and slender face emphasized the strangeness of his naked gaze. His eyes, blue, round, fixed, immeasurably enlarged by the nakedness of his entire head, created a contradictory impression in me. I saw in those unprotected eyes an unusual innocence transformed with a mere blink into a cynical, threatening, and wise gaze. I confess I marveled at that instantaneous transition of a psychological profile, not only the next one but its opposite.
The strange thing (or is it reasonable?) is that his words when he returned to Mexico also blinked, passing from an ingenuousness that seemed out of place in the cynical, daring man I had known, to a gravity it took me a while to identify with the actual name of ambition. Could we reestablish our intimacy?
He recounted naive things to me, for example that when he arrived at the Place de la Concorde he kneeled and kissed the ground. I laughed: As an act of freedom? Not only that, he replied: As an act of fidelity to the best in the Old World (I hid a nervous twitch of disapproval: Who would ever call Europe “the Old World”?) and above all, he continued, to France and the French ability to appropriate everything by redeeming the crime in culture.
“There’s a Napoleon brandy. Can you imagine a Hitler brandy?”
I wasn’t going to discuss the enormous difference between the “good” Bonapartist tyrant and the “bad” Nazi tyrant because in his tirade Jerico was already immersed in an amusing comparison of national European profiles and the cliches that went with them (the French have a sex life, the English have hot water bottles), leading to feverish amazement at having heard “all the languages we see at the movies” and the enumeration of Rue Lepique, Abbey Road, Via Frattina, Puerta del Sol, and above all the streets, the squares of Naples where, he said, he identified with the possibility of being corrupt, immoral, a killer, a thief, and a poet without consequences, as part of custom and perhaps the landscape of a liberty so habitual it leaves no trace of mortality, surviving, he said, in tradition.
“Why can’t we be Neapolitans?” he exclaimed with a certain grandiloquence, appropriate to the friend who faced me with the arrogance of a Byron that I viewed as an antipoetic pose and, what is worse, as simple-minded, naive, unworthy. Why are we, in Europe, nothing but Comanches, mariachis, or bullfighters?
He laughed, redeeming himself. “We ought to guard against being part of the national folklore.”
This was Jerico, my old companion, passed through the sieve of an experience that he wanted, as I understood it, to share with me at a level of exaltation and camaraderie that would lead him to tear off his shirt, gesticulate, and assume the caricature of a bedazzlement that ought to end-I knew Jerico-with an excessive, ironic action, one that in a certain sense flagellated his own ego.
“On my knees in the Concorde,” he repeated, kneeling in the middle of the living room with his arms stretched wide in an act at once grotesque and tender, and which I understood without understanding it, like a farewell to youth, a stripping away of the vestments of a tourist, the rustic skin that covers the traveler in transit, the soul of the “Argentine we all carry inside us”: the superego.
Knowing Jerico, this display as part of his weaknesses did not fail to surprise me. Perhaps he wanted to indicate that beneath the appearance of return was a companion who had never left. Or, on the contrary, knowing it was impossible, he was asking for help in getting rid of distance and his experiences and returning to the point at which we had separated. We were the same but different. I had experienced studying at UNAM, the tutelage of Sangines, the visit to San Juan de Aragon, the mysterious encounter with Miguel Aparecido, the strange, committed relationship with Lucha Zapata. What did Jerico have to offer, aside from the postcard he had just given me?
“Freedom,” he said, as if he had read my thoughts.
“Freedom is kneeling down to give thanks in the Place de la Concorde?” I said, not very pleasantly.
He nodded, his eyes lowered.
“What shall we do?” he said then, and our life changed.
Jerico changed it as he himself, his physical attitude, his appearance changed in the next moment, when he let fly the issues he wanted to communicate after his prologue on the stage of touristic minimization and mental abandon.
What shall we do? he repeated. There are many possibilities for success. Which are yours and mine? Or rather, Josue, which success is worthy of you and me?
I wasn’t going to answer with the reasons I’ve just given you, which can be summarized in the word “experience,” for only on that basis did my expectations, though still vague, begin to take shape. I knew Jerico would not share much in the recounting of his European experiences, which (I was beginning to realize) he would never reveal beyond the brief tour he had just offered. His years of absence were going to be a mystery, and Jerico didn’t even challenge me to penetrate it. There was in this attitude I’ve called Byronic a wager: The past has died and the future begins today. Make whatever guesses you like.
As a consequence, I changed my attitude. Instead of asking about his past, I proposed sharing our future.
“What do we want?” he repeated, and added: “What are we afraid of?”
He continued saying that he and I knew-or ought to know-what we could be or do. He recalled an earlier conversation about “not ever going to a
“Now, Jerico, how did they serve the stew to honor the father of the bride-”
“Who is a native of Sonora. Did you turn down the invitation?”
“No, Jerico, not at all, I’m not interested in being-”
“Not even if it’s your own wedding?”
I smiled, or tried to. I remembered how I had admired Jerico’s capacity for taking life very seriously.
I said I felt I had gone past those tests, didn’t he? I refrained for the moment from mentioning Lucha Zapata, Miguel Aparecido, the children in the sinister pool at San Juan de Aragon. Perhaps Jerico responded indirectly, saying it wasn’t enough not doing what we didn’t do. Now we ought to decide what we were actually going to do.
