Is it true, or is it poetry?
Where was he buried? asked Sangines, on whose face a displeasure appeared that contrasted, I must admit, with my own fascination: the rocambolesque, surreal, indescribable tale of this woman stripped of any moral notion, enamored of her mere presence on earth, possessed of incalculable vanity, enveloped in an idiotic glory, with no more reality than that of her actions with no connection to one another, which only form a chain of servitudes that escape the individual’s consciousness, all of it, in that instant, closed a stage of my youth that began in the brothel on Calle de Durango when together with Jerico we enjoyed the female with the bee tattooed on her buttock, and ended now, with the female seated on a prop throne, sex painted on her face so she would have a mouth and speak.
I THOUGHT, OVER the next few days, that my relationships with women never really concluded, they ended abruptly and lacked something that at my age was beginning to intrude as a necessity. Duration. A lasting relationship.
In preparatory school Jerico and I had read Bergson and because of that reading, the subject of duration reappeared at times in our conversations. Bergson makes a very clear distinction between duration we can measure and another kind that can’t be captured with dates because it corresponds to the intimate flow of existence. What we have lived is indivisible. It contains the past as memory and announces the future as desire. But it is not past or future separate from the moment. Consequently each moment is new though each moment is the past of memory and longing for the future.
(One understands why Bergson’s philosophy was the weapon of intellectuals at the Ateneo de la Juventud-Jose Vasconcelos, Alfonso Reyes, Antonio Caso-against the Comtean Positivism that had been transformed into the ideological mask of the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship: Everything is justified if in the end there is progress. At the Palace of Mining in Mexico City, a modern goddess, with the brilliance and opacity of leaded windows, is proclaimed a divinity of industry and commerce. She was the courtesan of the dictatorship.)
What does this movement of the moment contain that embraces what we were and what we will be? On the one hand, instinct. On the other, intelligence. People confronted by the creative act, confronted by Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Beethoven or Bach, Shakespeare or Cervantes, speak of inspiration. Wilde said that creation is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. In other words, creating supposes work, and both Jerico and I believe the production of frustrated talents in Latin America is as great as the production of bananas because our geniuses are waiting for
Intention and intelligence. I believe my friend and I, in a long relationship begun in the schoolyard of a religious academy, did not need to pronounce those words to comprehend and live them. They weren’t the only basis of our understanding, affirmed the day I went to live with him on Calle de Praga. Today, however, two or three days after hearing the damned (or was she blessed in her compassion?) Sara Perez de Esparza, Jerico came into our shared apartment and said point-blank that the time had come for us to live apart.
I didn’t change my expression. “I’ll leave today.”
Jerico had the grace to lower his head. “No. I’m the one who’s leaving. You stay here. It’s just”-he looked up-“I’ll be traveling a lot around the country.”
“And?”
“And I’ll be receiving all kinds of visitors.”
“You have an office.”
“You understand what I’m saying.”
I didn’t want to linger over the obvious and think that Jerico needed to move to have greater erotic freedom. Perhaps he’d already had it while I was devoted to Lucha Zapata and now, without her, the promise of my constant presence had cost him a couple of “romances.”
I realized there was something more when Jerico said abruptly, “Nothing obliges me to live against myself.”
“Of course not,” I agreed with gravity.
“Against my own nature.”
It didn’t even occur to me that my friend was going to reveal homosexual inclinations. Images return to my memory of the shared shower at school and, more provocatively, our eroticism with the woman who had the posterior bee. I also recalled what he said when he returned from his years of study in Europe, a trip planned with as much mystery as his return, a mystery deepened by a certain falsity I intuited-I didn’t know, I only intuited-in the Parisian references of a young man who didn’t know French argot but did use American slang, as he did now:
“Look, as Justin Timberlake sings: ‘Daddy’s on a mission to please.’ Don’t be offended.”
“Of course not, Jerico. You and I have had the intelligence never to contradict each other, knowing that each of us has his own ideas.”
“And his own life,” my friend said exultantly.
I said that was true and looked at him without any expression, asking him rhetorically: “His own nature?”
I didn’t say it trying to trap him, or with ill will, or deceitfully, but really wanting him to explain to me what “his own nature” was.
“We’re not the same,” he said in response to my tacit question. “The world changes and we change along with it. Do you remember what I said, right here, when I came back to Mexico? I asked you then, What do we have? A name, an occupation, status? Or are we a wasteland? A garbage dump of what might have been? A canceled register of debits and credits? Not even the bottom of the stewpot?”
I stopped him with a movement of my hand. “Take a breath, please.”
“We need a position, Josue. We can’t give as our occupation ‘I think’ or ‘I am.’ ”
“We can turn into young old men, like some musicians, Compay Segundo or the Rolling Stones, why not? didn’t I warn you?”
“Don’t joke around. I’m serious. The time has come for us to apply ourselves to action. We have to act.”
“Even though we betray our ideas?” I said with no mean-spirited intention.
He didn’t take it badly. “Adapting ourselves to reality. Reality is going to demand things in line with our talents though opposed to our ideals.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to do, I’m going to act in accordance with necessity and try, as far as possible, to maintain my ideals. What do you think?”
“And if your ideals are bad ones?”
“I’ll be a politician, Josue. I’ll try to make them less bad.”
I smiled and told my friend we really were faithful to our Catholic education and the morality of the lesser evil when it’s necessary to choose between two demons. Were we
“And besides, the Jesuit goes where the Pope orders him to, without protest, without delay.”
“But that order was to save souls,” I said with the irony his words provoked in me.
“And souls aren’t saved passively,” he replied with conviction. “You must have absolute faith in what you’re doing. Your ends must be clear. Your actions, overpowering. A country isn’t built without implacable acts. In Mexico we’ve lived too long on compromise. Compromise only delays action. Compromise is wishy-washy.”
He was agitated, and I looked at him with distress, almost out of the corner of my eye.
He said that in every society there are the dominant and the dominated. The unbearable thing is not this but when the dominant don’t know how to dominate, abandoning the dominated to a fatal or vegetative existence.
“One must dominate to improve everyone, Josue. Everyone. Do you agree?”
Smiling, I accused him of elitism. He answered that elites were indispensable. But it was necessary to unite them with the masses.
“A more mass-oriented elite,” Jerico declared, moving like a caged animal around a place, ours until then, that he apparently was transforming now into a prison ready to be abandoned. “Do you think you’re immortal?” he asked.
