ate it, and placed the horns over the fireplace in the dining room. As if none of it really mattered.”
Asunta said this with a kind of administrative sincerity that irritated me a good deal. As if her admiration for another man, even though he was her boss and she “owed him everything,” took away from me the position, perhaps a small one, that I wanted to obtain.
“Doesn’t Max Monroy ever make mistakes?” I asked, very stupidly.
“I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you the truth. It isn’t that he makes or doesn’t make mistakes. Max Monroy knows how to escape the demands of the moment and see farther than other people.”
“He’s perfect,” I remarked, marinating my own attraction to Asunta in more and more stupidities.
She didn’t take offense. She didn’t even doubt my intentions, irritating me even further. Did this woman consider me incapable of an insult?
“He escapes the exigencies of the moment. He moves forward. You understand that, don’t you?” she asked, and I realized that with her question she was telling me she knew what I was attempting and, incidentally, didn’t care. Max Monroy anticipates.
Asunta looked at me seriously.
“He moves ahead of the times.”
“And what happens if you change over time?”
“You’re defeated, Josue. Time defeats you.”
“ ‘Think, Asunta, of the speed of things. Just in my lifetime Mexico has moved from being an agricultural country to an industrialized one. Once the cycles were very slow. A cycle of centuries (Max likes alliterations, Josue) for the agricultural country. A dozen decades for the industrialized one. And now, Asunta, now…’ ”
An exceptional gesture: Max Monroy slams his fist into the open palm of his other hand.
“ ‘And now, Asunta, a time of speed, a global race without borders, without flags, without nations, to the world of technology and information. China, Japan, even India, even Russia…’-he didn’t mention the United States, it would have been redundant-‘The global world is a techno-informational world, and whoever doesn’t get on the train in time will have to walk barefoot and arrive at his destination late.’ ”
“Or not travel,” I commented.
“Or at least buy a pair of huaraches,” she said with a smile.
“ ‘Asunta, there are things I don’t say but that you know. Understand them and we’ll get along very well. Let’s work together. In Mexico, in all of Latin America, we mistake rhetoric for reality. Progress, democracy, justice. It’s enough for us to say them to believe they’re true. That’s why we go from failure to failure. We indicate a goal for Mexico, Brazil, Argentina… We convince ourselves that with words, favorable laws, the ribbon cut, and immediate forgetfulness we’ve achieved what we said we wanted… We say words that mock reality. In the end, reality mocks our words.’ ”
“Max Monroy wins out over reality?”
“No, he anticipates reality. He admits no pretexts.”
“Only texts,” I stated clearly.
“What he doesn’t admit is the madness of the simulations our governments and some entrepreneurs are so fond of.”
Asunta was telling me that Max Monroy was everything Max Monroy distanced himself from, and what he distanced himself from was the illusion and daily practice of Latin American politics.
“He moves ahead of his times,” the woman I desired said with irritating admiration.
“His times never defeat him?”
“How?” she said with feigned surprise. “Just watch my lips. Let’s see, with what? Please, just tell me that.”
With old age, I said, with death, I said, with rage, more magnetized by the desire to love Asunta than by the respect I owed Antigua Concepcion, my radical interlocutor, that is, the root of my possible wisdom, my fortune, my destiny.
And in your mind, boy, do you think you can visit my grave with impunity?
“No, Senora, I don’t think that, forgive me.”
Then respect my son and don’t rush things, asshole.
Was I the secret emissary of Antigua Concepcion in the world her son Max inherited and strengthened? I asked myself about my part in this soap opera, and what disturbed me most was my carnal desire for a woman who bored me: Asunta Jordan.
I’M GOING TO let Sara Perez speak, Sara P., Nazario Esparza’s second wife. I confess her vocabulary offends me, though less than the facts the words ostentatiously display. Ostentatious: Sara P. takes pride in her virtues: The ones that stand out are vulgarity, cynicism, ignorance, perhaps black humor, possibly a hidden desire for seduction, I don’t know…
First of all, I’ll correct my previous affirmation. Jerico begged off accompanying us to the Esparzas’ house. “I don’t have time” was the message he sent to Sangines and me. “The president’s office is very demanding. Besides, I don’t know what I can contribute… Sorry.”
We couldn’t find Errol. Sangines sent a real expeditionary force to all the old nightclubs in the city and to the new ones in outlying neighborhoods, the tony ones and the dives: Our friend couldn’t be found anywhere, he had vanished, the city was very large, the country larger still, the borders porous. Errol could have been in any city in the United States or Guatemala. You’d have to be a new Cabeza de Vaca to go out and find him. And in our century there was no El Dorado as there had been in the sixteenth, except for the name of some casino in Las Vegas.
In short: Only Sangines and I showed up, escorted by the police and the court secretaries to hear Sara Perez de Esparza’s statement. She was seated on a kind of throne placed in the center of the reception room that I remembered in another time, presided over by the timid chastity of Esparza’s first wife, Errol’s mother, and now by the female I could not help associating, in retrospect, with an act of coarse sexuality in the closet of a men’s room in the Benito Juarez International Airport; with a hurried walk, preceded by a porter and dressed like Judith on her way to Bethulia, “for a chat,” along the immense, crowded corridors of that airport; with a sorrowful day in memory of her predecessor Dona Estrellita; with another walk through the airport on the day I ran into Lucha Zapata for the first time; and finally, with the night on which Jerico and I fucked this same woman in La Hetara’s brothel.
But back then she wore a veil and I could identify her only by the bee tattooed on her buttock, which I saw again during the absurd scene in the airport bathroom.
Now, Sara Perez de Esparza was seated on her semi-Gothic and pseudo-Versaillesque throne, appropriate to her strange mixture of omnivorous tastes, for I was beginning to think everything could be found in this woman, the worst and the best, the most vulgar and the most refined, the most desirable and the most repugnant, without passing through any nuance of common sense. Seated on her throne, scratching at her forearms with silvered nails as long as scimitars, dressed like a star in
