I believe Sangines read my thoughts, because he immediately decided my destiny. I would finish the course of study (I needed only a year and a couple of classes I could pass in a proficiency exam) and conclude forensic practice in the prison of San Juan de Aragon.
“Begin to prepare your thesis. The subject is Machiavelli and the creation of the state,” he pronounced, adding: “It is necessary for you to conclude your interview with Miguel Aparecido,” before turning to Jerico and saying: “You have refused to follow a career. You believe experience is the best university. I am going to test you. Tomorrow go to the offices of the Presidency of the Republic in Los Pinos. They are expecting you.”
And returning to me.
“And they are expecting you, Josue, in the office of Don Max Monroy in the building in Colonia-I should say the new city-of Santa Fe.”
He sighed, as if longing for a modest city that could not exist again, rose to his feet, and brought the interview to an abrupt end, leaving me with a certain bad taste in my mouth; I didn’t know whether to attribute it to an attitude unlike the normally amiable behavior of Professor Sangines, or, more seriously, to a melancholy very similar to the sadness of goodbyes, as if a period in my life had just ended.
Jerico and I walked, looking for a taxi, toward Avenida Universidad, and were distracted as we crossed the Viveros de Coyoacan Park, breathing deeply, with no set purpose, because we were in one of the few lungs of an asphyxiated metropolis.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“Well,” I shrugged. “I’ll be doing the same things.”
“No, the one who’ll change is you. Max Monroy is a very powerful man.”
“Bah. I may never even get to meet him.”
Then I added: “Knowing you, Jerico, I think you’ll not only get to meet the president-”
He interrupted: “He’ll know me even if he doesn’t see me,” and added: “Look, hurry up and finish your degree. We’re twenty-five years old. We can’t go on waiting. We need a position. We can’t give as an occupation ‘I think’ or ‘I am.’ We have to be and do.”
I smiled in return. “One can always turn into a perpetually young old man, like Jelly Roll Morton, Compay Segundo, or Mick Jagger.”
The reader will note that I wanted to test the connection I had suspected in Jerico with North American pop culture instead of a pretended French affiliation that, as I’ve already told you, seemed suspect to me. The problem is, if you talk about jazz and rock, of necessity you land in Anglo-American territory. France loves jazz but doesn’t give it anything but love.
Jerico paid no attention to me. Who are we? What do we have? Name, occupation, status? Are we a vacant lot?
“
Jerico was unfazed. “A garbage dump of what could have been? A catalogue of debits and losses? Even the bottom of the barrel? So what’s going on? I like it!”
“A hoarse-voiced basket where things accumulate?” I added, quoting Neruda but thinking of tasks I still had to do, not only the course of study in law, not only the mysterious prisoner Miguel Aparecido, but in particular my unspeakable commitment to a woman who required protection, whom I could not leave alone, at large, helpless…
“Lucha Zapata” was the name on the tip of my tongue like a bird in an open cage who doesn’t really know whether his well-being depends on flying away or remaining locked up and at the mercy of birdseed.
Jerico didn’t go any further. There was in him, when we left the large Jardin de los Coyotes, a new, atypical reserve that undoubtedly had to do with the position Sangines had just offered him and that now occupied our minds. Though in retrospect, I wondered if the maestro’s unusual coldness was due to the unpublished presence of Jerico, which had skewed his behavior and evoked in my heart a dual feeling of nostalgia for the attention my teacher had previously paid me and reproach for his current manner.
Without saying goodbye, Jerico jumped on a moving bus with dangerous agility and I hailed a taxi to return to Lucha Zapata’s house, undecided now as to my home and real address.
Unless, I smiled, it was the penitentiary where Miguel Aparecido-who knows to what end-was waiting for me.
“It’s going like clockwork,” Jerico shouted from the bus. “
I NOTICED THAT Lucha Zapata was nervous, strange, different, and distant when I returned that night to the house on Cerrada Chimalpopoca next to the noisy Metro de los Doctores. She was involved in the ecstatic movements of preparing lunch, not looking at me as she cut the avocados in two, heated the tortillas, smeared them with the green flesh of a buttery fruit that relieves the acidity of Mexican corn. She knew I admired-and marveled at-this homemaking “professionalism” in my friend. She possessed a kind of domestic discipline contrary to the disorder of her life as an alcoholic and drug addict. She was an excellent cook and I arranged to have her cupboard always stocked with all the pleasures of the market that transform Mexican food into a gift of the gods for a country of beggars.
My mouth waters: jalapeno chile, habanero chile, saffron, jitomate, huitlacoche fungus, epazote tea, machaca dried beef, cochinita pork, chotes, chicharron cracklings, oregano. I bought them at La Merced very early in the morning, assisted by a lively old woman with a straw-colored braid, Dona Medea Batalla. She appeared before me with her black cherry eyes and said: “Let me help you, Licenciado.” “How do you know?” I said with a look. She touched one eye. “I know you all, Licenciado. You can spot a licenciado a mile away… just the way I can smell out villains.”
I confined myself to placing produce in the basket. Lucha would transform it into blind mason’s sauce, soup of corn ears and roasted chiles, uchepos or Michoacan corn tamales, Morelian enchiladas, enchiladas de plaza, and stuffed chayotes. I admired her concentration and skill, which contrasted so strongly with her life’s disorder, wondering if asking her where she had learned to cook was the pretext for controverting the forgetfulness on which she insisted.
She defended herself. Her memory was locked away and her cuisine, she gave me to understand, was part of an atavistic, popular wisdom that wasn’t taught. One is born, in Mexico, knowing how to cook. That was why I took pains to bring her the best produce, with the implicit hope that one day, eating well, she would remember something and live better.
It was a thin hope, not to mention a vain one.
“Did you bring beer?” she asked, standing, tottering.
“I forgot,” I said, having just come from the interview with Sangines and Jerico.
“Poor devil,” she smiled with twisted lips. She laughed. “Beer makes you cold inside,” she added for no reason.
I asked her to be calm, to lie down, what did she want? knowing that asking a person like her for “calm” was the same as telling her: You’re crazy.
She said with sudden sweetness that she had a weakness for avocados. I told her I’d go out and buy a good supply right away. I regretted it. Lucha needed me there. She was helpless, a step away from death…
“What do you want from me?” she spoke from inside an internal cave.
I said nothing.
“My past. You’re hungry for my past. You’re a snoop,” she said, reproaching me for what I wasn’t, as my life with Jerico demonstrates. “A snoop. A meddler. You stick your big nose in.”
She attacked my nose violently. It wasn’t difficult for me to push her hand away. She fell onto the mat. She looked at me with immense sorrow and even greater resentment, not free of that great pretext for Mexican failure: feeling defeated, always being the loser, and obtaining salvation, perhaps, thanks to the blessing of defeat. We don’t celebrate success except as a passing announcement of eventual defeat in everything.
“You see,” she murmured. “You’re the powerful one, the arbitrary one. You push me. You throw me to the floor. Do you see why I live the way I live? Because power is arbitrary, arbitrary, arbitrary…”
“Capricious,” I said in a stupid eagerness to find synonyms for defeat.
“A caprice?” Lucha Zapata twisted what I said. “Do you think that living and dying is just a caprice?”
“I didn’t say that.” Clumsily I tried to apologize, standing while she knelt on the mat, looking up at me from the floor.
“Then what?” she asked in a voice at once defeated and victorious, ardent and dry.
