He read the serious questioning in my face.
“I’m here because of a great injustice,” he said.
“But you’re still here because you want to be,” I added unemphatically.
He shook his head a little. “No. Because of my will.”
“I don’t understand.”
He took a few steps in a circle. “First it makes you angry. You’re suffocating.”
He was timing his words to his turns around the cell, and these movements frightened me more than his words. He squared his jaw. His straight nose quivered.
“Then you’re stunned at being here and surviving the initial horror and your permanent impotence, asshole… I mean, Licenciado.” He smiled, looking at me. “Right after that you feel defeated, absolutely fallen into misfortune.”
He stopped and gave me a very ugly look.
“Finally you go back to anger, but this time in order to take your revenge.”
“On which people?” I said, about to fall into the trap of the Count of Monte Cristo.
“On which
I looked at him expectantly. We both knew there were no premature answers and this would be the code of “honor” between us: Nothing before its time.
As I had thought of Edmond Dantes earlier, now I tended toward Doctor Mabuse, the prisoner who directs his crimes from a Berlin cell. Is there anything new in these prison stories? Looking at Miguel Aparecido, I told myself there was. The plots resemble one another because they are part of the same destiny: lost freedom. In prison, more than anywhere else, we realize there is no freedom because we live day by day, because our goals are futile, fragile, and in the end unattainable, because death takes responsibility for canceling our contract and when we’re dead we’re not aware of what has survived us, what has perished with us, and, at times, before us. It’s enough to walk down a busy street and attempt, in vain, to give transcendence to the lives passing by on their way to death, anticipating it, trying to deny it, all subject to disappearing into a vast, collective anonymity. Except the musician, the writer, the artist, the philosopher, the architect? Even them, how long will they endure? Who, recognized today, will be unknown tomorrow? Who, ignored today, will be discovered tomorrow? Few political and military figures survive. Who was Elizabeth I’s chamberlain when Shakespeare was writing, who the North American secretary of state at the time of the obscure sailor and scrivener Herman Melville, who the secretary general of the National Peasant Union when Juan Rulfo wrote
Then why did this man refuse to be free, perpetuate his prison, and almost boast of being a prisoner? It was enough for me to look at him to understand that Miguel Aparecido did not deliver his truths just like that. It was enough to see how he looked at me to know I needed to respond with patience to his mystery, and this pawned a portion of my future and my own freedom to the life of this strange individual who finally, once the time periods imposed by life imprisonment were understood, told me something concrete and asked me for something explicit.
“You leave here for only three reasons. Because you die. Because you complete your sentence. Or because you escape.”
If I looked at him in a questioning way, it was unintentional.
“And again, you escape only if you don’t die, or because you’re a badass for running away, or because you have powerful connections,” he continued. “Yesterday a convict left here only because of his connections. And that makes me very angry.”
I believe that if the Devil exists, at that moment Miguel Aparecido appeared to me as Lucifer, Satan, Mephistopheles, the Prince of Darkness enveloped in the shadows of an immense history of accumulated vengeances, violent desires, delayed wishes, arbitrary destinies, and nights without light.
“The man and the woman who freed him unjustly must be punished.”
I still don’t know how I survived that morning in the diabolical presence of Miguel Aparecido.
“Find your friend Errol Esparza. Tell him he ought to take his revenge.”
The order resounded for me in the vast hollowness of prison silences.
“He ought to take his revenge.”
“On whom?”
“The man is Nazario Esparza. The woman is Sara Perez, Sarape, she used to be a whore in La Hetara’s house.”
THE VENDETTA ORDERED by Miguel Aparecido was postponed because of other pressing matters. Sangines sent Jerico to Los Pinos as a young aide in the presidential office. And me he directed to collaborate in the management of the powerful Max Monroy’s enterprises, out toward Santa Fe, in a new border area of a troglodytic Mexico City.
The distances between remote neighborhoods of the capital can involve as much as two hours of travel. The distance from the apartment on Praga to Cerrada de Chimalpopoca and now to my unexpected destination of Santa Fe was the same as the distance from Rotterdam to The Hague and from The Hague to Amsterdam, without taking into account my visits to San Juan de Aragon prison.
What could I do? My bewilderment suggested a way out: another visit to the senora buried in the nameless grave, whose location I did not know, to ask her for advice. The dead don’t have schedules. Unless eternity is the clock without hands where time melts.
I said these words to myself as I walked along Paseo de la Reforma, hesitant about my destination or destinations, when the sky darkened, the angel flew down from the top of the Columna de la Independencia, grasped me by the collar, rose up with a howl or sob or sigh-all at the same time-and taunted me as he asked, breaking my concentration:
“Do you know the sex of angels?”
I wanted to reply they have none, that’s why they can be angels, except that the creature carrying me through the air silenced my words and spoke to me in a man’s voice, and I recognized that voice, it belonged to my old friend Ezekiel, the prophet enveloped in a turbulent wind that flew me over castles and skyscrapers, magnificent slopes and bare hills, neighborhoods of mud and gardens of roses, stating his recommendations as we flew: be on your guard, don’t fear them, speak to them even though they don’t listen, fast, inform them a prophet will come among them, tell them to listen to the voices of the multitude, and I heard a great laugh when the prophet Ezekiel, who was also, in his free time and when he had a yen for transvestism, the Angel of Independence, let me go, and I saw that one of his feet gleamed but it was a calf’s foot.
The storm steered my fall. A sudden ground blocked it. Green foliage softened it.
I fell on my face.
In front of me, once again the grave of
ANTIGUA CONCEPCION
And the familiar voice:
Walk around my grave three times, Josue. Thank you for coming alone. We live in a guarded world. Nobody moves without a bodyguard. They say it’s for security. Pure potatoes. It’s pure fear. We live in fear. We tighten our asshole, to put it politely.
Her sigh made the earth tremble.
Not you, she continued. You’re not afraid. That’s why you come to see me alone. I’m grateful. Alone with your soul. Because even though you don’t believe it, you have a soul, my boy. Take care of it. Don’t trade it for a plate of lentils or bean soup.
“Senora,” I said, “I’m going to work in the office of Max Monroy. Your son, Senora…”
I know that.
