Destiny and Desire

“Sacred ones?”

Jerico agreed energetically. “For us, yes.”

Where would we begin?

First, with a shared decision to reject frivolity. My friend took a gossip magazine out of his backpack and leafed through it with displeasure and disgust.

“Look at this succession of idiocies in full color on glossy paper. Are you interested in knowing that the rock- and-roller Tarcisia married the Russian millionaire Ulyanov, both of them barefoot, with Hawaiian leis around their necks, on the Playa del Carmen, and that the guests began the day dancing to hip-hop on the sand at seven in the morning, when they gorged on a savory tripe stew in honor of the bride’s father, who is a native of Sonora? Would you have liked to be a guest? Would you have accepted an invitation? Answer me.”

I said no, Jerico, not at all, I’m not interested in being-

He interrupted me. “Not even if it was your own wedding?”

No, now I smiled, I thought that taking the matter as a joke was the best thing and I admired Jerico’s intense ability to take life very, very seriously.

“Do you swear never to go to a quinceanera, a the dansant, a baptism, or grand openings of restaurants, flower shops, supermarkets, bank branches, the celebration of university alumni, beauty contests, or meetings at the Zocalo? Do you promise to despise a couple who have their picture taken in color and published in the paper when she is eight months pregnant and wearing a bikini with the proud husband caressing her belly and announcing the imminent arrival, baptism, and sanctification of Raulito in the midst of a storm of flashbulbs (which is why they were announcing the emotional event now)?”

I made the mistake of laughing. Jerico slammed his fist down on the table. The coffee cups rattled. The waitress came over to see what was going on. The hostility in my friend’s eyes frightened her away. The cafe began to fill up with patrons thrown up after a day of work that perhaps differed for each one but still imposed an identical fatigue on all of them. Public or private offices, businesses large or small, the merciless traffic of Mexico City, the nonexistent hope of finding happiness when they reached home, the weight of what was not. All that began to come into the cafe. It was seven in the evening. We had begun talking at five-thirty, when the place was empty.

And together we had agreed on a plan for a shared life. Did we speak only of avoiding the stupidities of social and political festivities and celebrations? Not at all. Before what Jerico contemptuously called “the herd of oxen” came in.

“Oxen,” Jerico repeated. “Never say ‘oxes.’ ”

“Oxen?”

“No. Oxes. Never say oxen are oxes.”

“Why?”

“So as not to give in to the vulgarity, stupidity, and camouflaging of mental poverty by means of deadly buffoonery.”

We settled on a plan of readings, of selective and rigorous intellectual self-improvement, which, survivors, you will not find out about today because at that moment Errol Esparza walked into the cafe and reminded us, boys, today’s the day you visit my house. Let’s go.

“Like clockwork,” Jerico said, as usual.

THE ESPARZA FAMILY lived in the Pedregal de San Angel, an ancient volcanic bed, a remnant of the eruptions of Xitle, on whose dark, bulky foundations the architect Luis Barragan attempted to create a modern residential district based on strict rules. First, that volcanic rock be used to build the houses. Second, that they would assume the monastic forms of the Barragan style. Unadorned straight lines, clean walls, with no variant other than the colors, evocative of folklore, associated with Mexico: indigo blue, sour-cherry red, and sun yellow. Flat roofs. No visible water tanks as in the rest of a chaotic city where so many styles cohabitate that in the end there is no style unless it is the triumphal repetition of squat houses, one-story businesses, paint shops, auto repair shops, tire shops, garages, parking lots, and miscellaneous candy stores, taverns, and retailers of all the daily necessities of this strange society of ours, always controlled from the top by very few and always capable of organizing itself from the bottom, with the majority living independently.

I have said all of this because the pure order desired by the architect did not last as long as a snowball in hell. Barragan had closed the Pedregal with symbolic sentry boxes and gates, as if to dictate a public anathema: Vade retro, Partagas, you will not pass.

Impure disorder in the name of the false freedom of residents and their accommodating architects-all of them subject to another tyranny, the tyranny of bad taste and assimilation of the worst in the name of a robot’s autonomy-finished off the fleeting effort to give at least one metropolitan residential district the unity and beauty of a district in Paris, London, or Rome. So that in the midst of the naked beauty of the original framework there erupted like malignant chancres fake Colonial, Breton, Provencal, Scotch, and Tudor residences, not to mention the inconceivable California ranch and the nonexistent tropical “adobe hacienda.”

Still, the Esparza family had not brought to Pedregal the architecture of their previous districts. They had accepted the severity of the original monastic design. At least on the outside, Barragan triumphed. Because once Jerico and I walked into the home of our new friend, Errol Esparza, what we found was a baroque disorder inside a neobaroque chaos inside a post-baroque clutter. In other words, one horror did not suffice in Esparza’s house. The bareness of the walls was a summons that could not be denied to cover them with calendar art, mostly still lifes, picture after picture, not merely contiguous but incestuous, as if leaving a centimeter of empty wall were proof of barefaced miserliness or the crude rejection of an invitation. Articles of furniture also fought for the prize of space. Massive sofas from cheap furniture stores designed to fill large empty spaces: six griffin claws, three cushions of embossed velvet for the back, tables with dragon feet and surfaces covered with ashtrays taken from various hotels and restaurants, rugs with Persian intentions and the appearance of straw sleeping mats contrasted with salons of a Versaillesque nature, Louis XV chairs with brocade backs and deer feet, glass cabinets with untouchable souvenirs of Esparzan visits to Versailles and Gobelin tapestries of recent manufacture. Everything indicated that the first room, with its gigantic television screen, was where the Esparzas lived and the “French” room where, in the evenings, they received.

“Make yourselves comfortable,” the good Errol said without a hint of irony. “I’ll let my mother know we’re here.”

We were looking at the shaggy purple rug whose obvious intention was to grow like an interior, crepuscular lawn, when Errol reappeared leading a “simple” woman who announced her simplicity with her old-fashioned hairdo-I think it was called a “permanent”-down to her low-heeled shoes with black buckles and moving-now upward-to her cotton stockings, one-piece flowered dress, short apron on which the lady listlessly rubbed her red hands, as if drying them after a domestic flood, to pale, barely made up features. Her face was the blank canvas of an artist undecided whether to conclude it or leave it, with impatient relief, unfinished.

The lady looked at us with a mixture of candor and suspicion, still drying her hands like a domestic Pontius Pilate, and said in a dull voice, Estrella Rosales de Esparza, at your service…

“Tell them, mother,” Errol said brusquely.

“Tell them what?” Dona Estrellita asked with no pretense of surprise.

“How we got rich.”

“Rich?” the lady said with authentic confusion.

“Yes, mother,” the bald kid continued. “My friends must be amazed at so much luxury. Where did it all come from, this… junk?”

“Oh, son.” The lady lowered her head. “Your father has always been very hardworking.”

“What do you think about papa’s fortune?”

“I think it’s fine.”

“No, its origins.”

“Oh, son, how can you be-”

“Be what?”

“Ungrateful. We owe everything to your father’s efforts.”

“Efforts? Is that what we call crime now?”

His mother looked at him defiantly.