He stood and grasped my shoulders. He looked at me with his Delftware eyes. We didn’t have, that was apparent, a talent for music, literature, tennis, water- or downhill skiing, racing cars, or directing films, we didn’t have the soul of actuaries, accountants, real estate agents, porters, and all the sad people who accept their small destinies… he said.
“What do we have left?”
I told him to tell me. I didn’t know.
“Politics, Josue. It’s self-evident, brother. When you’re no good as a street sweeper or a composer, when you can’t write a book or direct a movie or open a door or sell socks, then you devote yourself to politics. It’ll go like clockwork.”
“That’s what we’re going to do?” I said, with false astonishment.
Jerico laughed and let go of my shoulders.
“Politics is the last resort of intelligence.”
He winked. In Europe he had learned, he said, that the mission of the intellectual was to torment power with words.
“Then what do you want to do?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet. Something huge. Give me time.”
I thought without saying so that freedom is uncertainty. That is something I had learned.
He didn’t read my thoughts:
“There can be many attempts at success. Which is worthy of you and me?”
I didn’t know what to say. I was held back by another feeling. Above and beyond the words and attitudes, that morning of our reunion in the garret on Calle de Praga remains in my mind, especially now that I’ve died, as a moment of terror. Could we resume our intimacy, the common respiration that had joined us when we were young? Could we feel again the primary emotion of youth? Was everything we had lived only a prologue, a preparation for a goal we didn’t really know yet how to define? Was our friendship the sole, poor shelter of our future?
Jerico embraced me and said in English, as if responding to all my questions, Let’s hug it out, bitch.
STUNNED BY AERIAL excursions on the wings of the prophet Ezekiel and landings in the deep earth where Dona Antigua Concepcion lies, exhausted by so much sky and so much history, disheartened by great promises, I walked very slowly toward Colonia Juarez and the apartment on Calle de Praga without knowing where I was coming from or the location of the secret grave that soon dissipated in the noise of engines, exhaust fumes, the ring-ring of bicycles, and thunder in the clouded sky, trying to leave behind the experience I had gained and concentrate on particular accidents, the personal inadequacies and small vices and virtues of men and women with their own names though lacking a historic surname.
Drunk on the chronological history of Antigua Concepcion and inebriated by the undated apocalypse of the prophet Ezekiel, with infinite patience and humility I climbed the stairs of the house on Praga, prepared to focus my humanity again on Jerico’s friendship and my care of Lucha. These were my priorities, soon dissolved by Jerico’s urgent expression when he greeted me.
“Let’s go to Pedregal. Errol’s mother has died.”
Years had gone by without our returning to the ultramodern mansion turned into a neobaroque mess by the dictatorial bad taste of Don Nazario Esparza. “Act as if you haven’t seen anything” was Errol’s recommendation to us, referring either to the arguments of his parents or the Transylvanian horror of his house. I remembered the lack of any initiative on our friend’s part once he had provoked an altercation between his parents. Or perhaps I was misremembering. It had been six, seven years since I had seen my old classmate or visited his house.
Now, from the entrance door, black crepe announced the family’s mourning. I thought the house had always been in mourning, locked with padlocks of avarice, lack of compassion, suspicion, meager love, scant serenity. Except that as I approached the coffin of Dona Estrellita de Esparza, with Jerico ahead of me, I felt that compassion and serenity, at least, had in fact inhabited this lugubrious mansion but were virtues that lived waiting for the death, and only in the submissive, preoccupied presence, of Dona Estrellita.
I looked at her corpse. Her waxen face had been blurred even more by the cold hand of Death, the Ashen- Faced, and caricatured by the rouge and lipstick the funeral director (or damned Don Nazario) had smeared on the grayish features. Dona Estrellita wore a hairdo that looked false, very 1940s, very Joan Crawford, high and full. Her ghostly hands rested on her chest. With a start, I realized the Senora had on her housewife’s, maid’s, and cook’s apron, and this, I wanted to say to Jerico, this definitely was a final mockery by the sinister Don Nazario, prepared to send off his wife as maid to Eternity and celestial housewife. Don Nazario received without emotion or even the blink of an eye the condolences of his previously mentioned clientele, who expressed their sympathy and then dissolved again behind a veil of murmurs, inaudible conversations, and the passing of canapes, with the collective obsequiousness of a relative and the singularity of dissimilar manners and fashions, for those who had known him since his humble beginnings and those who acknowledged him at his present heights ranged from the owners of transient hotels to managers of hotel chains.
I looked at Dona Estrellita in order not to look at the crowd.
In spite of everything, the body continued to display a simulation of beatitude and the perpetual smile of someone going to a wedding of people she doesn’t care about but who deserve courtesy. In death, Dona Estrella was confident in her boredom, and if she had lost the habit of crying, the fault was not hers. There was only one dissonant detail, because the apron was like a uniform. The Senora had a bright scarf tied around her neck.
Ruddy, tall, florid, Don Nazario received the customary condolences. I would have liked to avoid it. I couldn’t escape the line of mourners. Jerico was ahead of me, his face composure itself though with a sarcastic line along his upper lip. Don Nazario extended his hand without glancing at me. I gave him mine without glancing at him. I looked for Errol.
“He isn’t here,” Jerico murmured.
“What do you think of that?” I asked.
“Were you expecting him to come?”
“To tell you the truth, yes,” said my feelings and not me. “She was his mother…”
“Not me,” Jerico declared over and above my opinion.
We made our way through the crowd of mourners. You could see it in their faces: No one loved this family. Not Don Nazario and not Dona Estrella. Much less Errol, the dispensable rock-and-roller fag. They were all there out of obligation and necessity. They all owed something to Nazario Esparza. Don Nazario controlled them all. There was no love. No grief. No hope. What did we expect? my eyes asked Jerico as we walked through the crowd, all of them surrounded by the forest of funeral wreaths that turn Mexican funerals into a boon for florists. Become a florist and make your fortune: We are all passing through.
In the middle of the funeral forest I bumped into a woman and offered my excuses. Out of place, she was carrying a cigarette in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other. She bumped into me, the ash fell onto my lapel and a downpour of La Veuve onto my tie. The woman stopped and smiled. I made a useless effort to recognize her or to ask myself, Where have I seen her before? never addressing her directly, “Where have we seen each other?” because of a kind of tacit precept I couldn’t explain to myself and that did not correspond to the amiability of the beautiful woman who approached like a panther, a predatory animal. A fake blonde, light tan touched with sun in her hair, and artificially moist lips.
“Listen,” she ordered a waiter, “bring a drink for the Senor.”
“Excuse me. This isn’t the time,” I said.
“A drink,” she gave the order again, and the waiter inquired as if he hadn’t heard her clearly:
“Pardon me, Senora?”
“A drink, I said. Go on.”
The waiter didn’t answer. He looked at me and Jerico, who was behind me now, understanding less than I did about the new scenario in the Esparza mansion.
The waiter said: “Welcome, Don Jerico, Don Josue. You’re always welcome here.”
And he went for the drinks ordered by the Senora, who already had champagne in her hand, a cigarette in her mouth, and the Chanel uniform of a black dress. She looked at us with a mix of charm and irony.
“Are you looking for Errol?” said this cunning woman.
We nodded.
“Look for him in a cheap cabaret on the streets of Santisima. He plays the piano there. It’s your ass,
