Destiny and Desire

“Who told you?”

The earth trembles. It’s her way of speaking. I receive messages each time it trembles.

“Ah!”

I suppressed my own astonishment and quickly added:

“What kinds of messages, Senora?”

That you’re going to enter a new world, silly. Before, in the world I knew, it was the president of the republic who dispensed justice, listened to complaints, and received petitions, the old king! Once I came with my complaints and petitions to President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, the last president. He didn’t even look at me. All he said was: Don’t bother me. Then, I answered, don’t be president. He looked up and in his eyes drunk with the sun I saw what power was: a tiger’s gaze that made you lower your eyes and feel fear and shame.

I believe at that moment the earth where the senora was buried was the enormous eye of a hurricane.

She must have read my mind.

Don’t be an asshole, she said with the arrogant vulgarity I was already familiar with. If you’re going to work with my son, be careful. Max Monroy is my heir. He’s another breed of creature. Mine. Earlier millionaires are beggars beside Max Monroy. Look, I knew them all. They became rich thanks to the revolution, which raised them up from nothing, opening opportunities for them that had once been denied to those at the bottom. Federico Robles fought in Celaya with Obregon against Villa, and from then on One-arm pampered him, directing him into politics, and when politics became dangerous or stopped producing, he guided him into business, which was then virgin territory, or as Robles himself said-a strong but sentimental man who decided to build on desolate battlefields, and even to stain his conscience-one had to sacrifice ideals to build a country, to feel that one had a right to everything for having made the revolution, established the foundations of capitalism, created a stable middle class, and invented true Mexican power, which “consists,” Federico Robles would say, “of nothing but grabbing the country by the back of the neck” and being “one big badass,” and that same man, she declares, was capable of portraying a woman he loved, respecting her, loving her without raising her up or sinking her, offering her a sweet brutality, the strength that a woman-she, Hortensia Chacon-needed in order to love and deserve her life. This I know. Or the case of Artemio Cruz, another millionaire who came from nothing, from a miserable hovel, and made a fortune changing sides, moving at just the right time from one faction to another, betraying thousands to take over a newspaper and dedicate himself to making a fortune by serving the powerful man on duty at the time… who was, when all was said and done, himself, Artemio Cruz and no one else…

Another seismic sigh.

Ay! And yet he was a man, had loves, lost them, Artemio Cruz had a wound, kid, do you have any? I don’t see scars on your body…

“Then what do you see, Senora?”

Ay, I see ignorance about yourself. You don’t know who you are. You still don’t know. Artemio Cruz had an open love wound and spent his life trying to close it. He failed. And it was his own fault he failed. That’s all. He had a brave son. He lost him. On the other hand, that caliph of the northern border, Leonardo Barroso, that one has no excuse. He was a thug who never had a day of compassion, not even for his own impaired son, he took his wife away and prostituted her, are you listening to me? one Michelina Laborde, one of those little society whores sold to the highest bidder with no shame at all because in order to feel shame you have to have some smarts, just a little bit of brain, that’s all, and these little society ninnies move their necks and you hear a marble rolling around though their eyes blink like calculators. Leonardo Barroso was a miserable asskisser to the Gringos, father of another cruel, misogynistic son, son and grandson of incest with the aforementioned Michelina but grandfather to a brave, astute, and perverse woman, Maria del Rosario Galvan, whom you will suddenly meet in your new life. Generation after generation, degeneration!

I questioned in silence. She read the silence.

You know, my boy? Sometimes I feel… well, nostalgia for times gone by. Except we no longer have gold coins, like in the old days, to memorialize what we have lived. We have photos, we have movies, we have TV. That was our memory: photographable, filmable, archivable. Now everything has changed, and here comes the story of my son Max Monroy. The fruit doesn’t fall far, etcetera. Except Max is no fruit. He’s a trunk. He’s like the Tree of Tule in Oaxaca, a gigantic cedar forty meters high and forty-two meters around and two thousand years old. And though Max Monroy is only in his eighties, it’s as if he incarnated two millennia because he’s so sharp and such a bad fucker though he’s my son and that’s the way he is because fortunately he inherited nothing from his father except the vague memory of a country destroyed by its own epic, kid, you can’t live on that forever, I mean on an epic, and in Mexico the epic of the revolution justified everything, progress and backwardness, construction and corruption, peace and politics. Everything in the name of the revolution. Until the Tlatelolco Square massacre left the revolution stripped bare. Stripped bare but shitting blood, of course.

“How do you compete with an epic?”

The senora’s voice trembled, and in it she did not hide a certain satisfaction with herself, about herself.

By moving ahead-she affirmed from the grave-as I did. I’ve already told you about that. I moved ahead of everything and that’s why I could leave my son Max Monroy an independent fortune not subject to presidential favor or political changes. That exhausted my miserable husband. The general lived in a world of torments, tormented by insults, physical challenges, excessive praise, toadies, eventual guilt-when they were alone, do you think all the sons of bitches we’ve had in Mexico never felt guilty, do you think that?

Max Monroy, his invisible but indefatigable mother exclaimed from the grave, Max Monroy!

And then in a very low voice and jumbling together eras, dead dry fields, lost harvests, orphaned children, everyone to the mountains, always fleeing, children, women, cows, to the mountains, the mountains, the mountains… One day we had to be still, resigned, obedient… The nation was worn out. Or it was worn out by the marriage of indigence and injustice. Who knows?

The voice was fading.

The senora was lost in memories of what she wanted to forget.

It was all unpredictable…

“It still is, Senora,” I dared to contribute.

Death, harvests, descendants…

“Do you want me to tell your son anything? A message?”

The sepulchral silence was followed by vast laughter.

Our souls hover like vampires…

When they cross the river, the dogs stay behind the soldiers…

The soldiers skinning goats, roasting pigs, it’s over!

My tits swelled for a whole year.

To nurse my son.

Go on, three times around my grave.

-

I WOKE ON the mat in Lucha Zapata’s house and looked, bewildered, at the light of dawn. My immediate memory did not hold the cemetery or the address or zip code of where I came from but only a nonexistent river on this desolate, dry, and stifled mesa. A river like a truncated finger pointing the way to the sea.

You, who already know my end, may think I’m inventing a posteriori the events of the past. I swear to you I’m not. And the reason is this: At dawn there was a recurrence of astonishing continuities between my hours at Antigua Concepcion’s grave and my waking in Lucha Zapata’s house.

As if the voice of Max Monroy’s dead mother continued in the voice of the living lover of Josue Nadal, who is myself, the narrator of this tale, Lucha Zapata, in a white nightgown, walked barefoot from the mat to the kitchen and back to the mat describing, evoking, as dazed as a sleepwalker, an encounter on an old forgotten street, sordid and dissolute. Lucha finds in a corner of the night (that’s what she said, now these are her words, not mine) a man in rags and covered by newspapers. It is very dark. The man’s eyes are very black and shining. Everything about him is exhausted except his gaze.

They look at each other. He gives his hand to Lucha. He stands without saying a word and leads her along the streets of the night. They stop in front of a lighted window. Inside people are holding a party. It is probably a family occasion. A girl of about eight or nine entertains the others by prancing about, telling jokes, and singing