to the tranquillity that, to be honest, she and I wanted to achieve and share without knowing exactly how to do it.
All of this occurred in the middle of her effort to stop using drugs and replace them with alcohol until I realized that tequila didn’t give the same high as amphetamines, then she’d go back to drugs and discover,
I knew very well that any person with Lucha Zapata would be “to blame” for a situation for which she was responsible. Asking her to take responsibility was like asking pears of an elm tree, as the unvanquished and sententious Maria Egipciaca would say. Lucha Zapata needed someone else to blame. Me, someone else, it didn’t matter. But never herself. Herself, never. And I made note of her accusations and acts of violence for the simple reason that I’ve already indicated: I wanted to be responsible for a person.
Until the day she couldn’t take any more.
But first she sang: “I’d like to be a fine pearl in your shiny earrings and nibble at your ear and kiss your cheeks.”
I’LL SAY THAT Jerico never showed curiosity about my prolonged absences from the apartment we shared on Calle de Praga. It didn’t surprise me and I didn’t thank him for it. I didn’t meddle in his life either.
I had my doubts.
How had Jerico traveled? What kind of passport did he have? Where was his passport? What was his name, after all?
Jerico what? I realized that deep-rooted gratitude for the protection the schoolyard champion gave the defenseless big-nosed kid kept me from seeing my friend in any light other than what is called in Roman law
One of the great temptations when two people live together is rummaging through the affairs of the other. The temptation to open drawers, read personal diaries and correspondence, pry into closets, move like a cockroach under beds to see what the other has hidden under the mattress, in jacket pockets…
I don’t need to tell you, you who are reading me and are all, without exception, decent people, that your author with the good memory Josue Nadal-I-never stooped to being a snoop. This did not stop me from cultivating certain doubts, all of them so unverifiable that they died before birth.
What was Jerico’s last name?
Had he really spent four years in Europe, with Paris as his base?
Was his evocation of Europe a farce, theatrical and elementary? Kneeling on the Place de la Concorde, sure, not even Gene Kelly did that accompanied by George Gershwin’s music, and if Jean Gabin or Jean-Paul Belmondo passed by, they didn’t even blink.
Why didn’t Jerico ever use those common expressions in ordinary French speech I knew only from old movies of the
Why, on the other hand, did North American sayings slip out?
And above all, unfamiliar allusions to youthful musicians-Justin Timberlake-or local television programs-
I say I didn’t inquire, but I suspected with no proof and no desire either to break the commitment to discretion, though I did consult the Entertainment section of
Other much more important concerns were set forth by Jerico with his customary mental speed and a certain childish audacity, firing them at me at times when I returned with no explanations from a night with Lucha Zapata: Who are we, Josue? How are we? Why are we? To what end are we? without obtaining more from me than an undulating smile and the urgent need to bathe, shave, make myself presentable after an exhausting session of guard duty at Cerrada de Chimalpopoca. I suspected that Jerico welcomed me with this salvo of abstract questions in order not to ask more concrete ones: Where are you coming from? Where did you spend the night? Why do you smell so strange?
The questions remained unresolved because of a new development.
It seems our garret, so bare at the beginning, was filling up with gadgets that came to our door in delivery trucks and then were carried up to our nest by dark men with strong backs and sparse mustaches.
Who sent us a laser fax machine, a television set with a 46 (or 52 or 70) inch screen? Who replaced our useless old black telephone with a white one from an Italian movie and then presented us with a couple of Sony Walkman portables and then-Creative Zen, Samsung YP-T9-others even more modern, with music, movies, calendars, and addresses? The last particularly interested me. What addresses did I have except for mine and Lucha Zapata’s? It didn’t take long for the light to go on. Or rather, the Sony Walkman with the name on the little screen of Maestro Antonio Sangines and the phone numbers of his residence, his house in Coyoacan, and his offices on the Paseo de la Reforma.
Right there the message appeared that said:
I EXPECT YOU BOTH AT MY HOME ON JULY 2 AT 6:00 PM.
LIC. ANTONIO SANGINES.
I expect you both. Not I expect
Now I waited for Jerico. He came in with his head high, laughing.
So then, once again, the two of us.
The maestro received us in his big old house in Coyoacan, surrounded as always by his noisy progeny, little children racing on tricycles, flying with arms spread, making engine noises, and eventually climbing on the professor’s wingback chair, lying peacefully on his lap, or threatening a catastrophe from the top of the chair.
“Outside, boys,” said Sangines, laughing, and looked at Jerico and me when, in the same breath, he said:
“Come in, boys.”
He wanted to position us immediately in what Roman law calls
More than enough for me. I was his student in the law faculty, he was my adviser in reading and my professional mentor. He sent me to do the famous “forensic practice” in the prison of San Juan de Aragon. He was directing my professional thesis. But Jerico? What relationship could he have with Sangines? I tried to determine this in the form of greeting, always so revelatory in a country of embraces, pats, diminutives and augmentatives, remote suspicions, dissimulated gloating: Iberian America is also Italic America, a land of elegant appearances, the cult of the
The fact is that Sangines said only “Come in, boys,” with an implicit “take a seat” in two leather chairs facing our host’s wingback. We were simply two students subject to a certificate of proficiency examination.
The children left. The students sat down. I’ll cut the message short: Sangines believed we had completed an apprenticeship. With which I felt I was on the rungs of a medieval guild asking myself if this relationship was not, in fact, a transcription, though within the university, of the medievalism that is the watchword and perhaps the pride of Latin America, a continent that, unlike the United States of America, a nation with no antecedent more powerful than itself, did have a Middle Ages and as a consequence has-we have-from Mexico to Peru, mental categories that exclude a will not arbitrated by the Church or state. The Gringos are Pelagians without knowing it, descendants of the heretic who postulated individual freedom without the need for institutional filters, as opposed to his conqueror Augustine of Hippo, for whom grace was not individually achievable without the intervention of the Church. The North Americans, who don’t have Pelagius or the Middle Ages, do have Luther, the Reformation, Puritanism, Calvinism, and all the heresy (I repeat:
