Destiny and Desire

I laughed. “Not at all.”

He waved his finger in my face. “Don’t lie. When we’re young we all think we’re immortal. That’s why we do what we do. We don’t judge. We invent. We don’t give or take advice. We do two things: We don’t accept what’s already been done. We renovate.”

I laughed in spite of myself.

Me too-I said to myself-I think I’m going to live forever, I feel it in my soul though my head tells me otherwise.

“Do you think it’s legitimate for the old to control everything, power, money, obedience? Do you?”

“Ask me that on the day I become old.” I tried to be amiable with a friend whose belligerent face, so impassioned it changed color, distanced him from me by the minute.

Jerico realized I was looking at him and judging him. He tried to calm down. He made a sacrilegious joke.

“If you believe in the Immaculate Conception, why not believe in the Maculate Conception?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, a little shocked in spite of myself.

“Nothing, pal. Only that life offers us a million possibilities on every corner. Or rather, on every plaza.”

His eyes were shining. He said to imagine a circular plaza-

“A rond-point?” I asked deliberately.

“Yes, a circle out of which, say, four or six avenues emerge-”

“Like the Place de l’Etoile in Paris.”

“Ecole,” he said enthusiastically. “The point is, which of the six avenues are you going to take? Because when you choose one, it’s as if you’ve sacrificed the other five. And how do you know you’ve made the right choice?”

“You don’t know,” I murmured. “Except at the end of the avenue.”

“And the bad thing is you can’t go back to the starting point.”

“To the original plaza. La Concorde,” I said with a smile and, unintentionally, with irony.

He kept looking at me. With affection. With defiance. With an unspoken plea: Understand me. Love me. And if you love and understand me, don’t try to find out any more.

There was a silence. Then Jerico began to pack his things and the conversation resumed its usual colloquial tone. I helped him pack. He told me to keep his records. And his books? Those too. But then he looked at me in a strange way I didn’t understand. The books were mine. And him, what was he going to read from now on?

“Let’s be baroque,” he said with a laugh, shrugging his shoulders, as if that definition would transform the history of Mexico and the Mexicans into chicken soup.

“Or let’s be daring,” I said. “Why not?”

“Why not?” he repeated with a light laugh. “Life is getting away from us.”

“And to hell with the consequences.” I considered the unpleasant scene to be over. I touched my friend’s shoulder.

I offered to help him carry down the two suitcases.

He refused.

I PROPOSED SHOWING indifference to beauty, health, and fortune. I wanted to transform my indifference into something distant from vice and virtue. I was afraid to fall into solitude, suicide, or the law. I wanted, in short, to avoid the passions, considering them a sickness of the soul.

The deafening failure of these, my new intentions (my doubt), had to do with the mere presence of Asunta Jordan. From nine to two, from six to nine, from the afternoon to midnight, I was never far from her during my period of initiation in the offices of the Vasco de Quiroga building in the Santa Fe district. The building itself consisted of twelve floors for work and another two for the residence of the president of the enterprise, Max Monroy, in addition to a flat roof for the helicopter.

“And you?” I asked Asunta with a mixture of boldness and stupidity. “What floor do you live on?”

She looked at me with her eyes of an overcast sea.

“Repeat what you just said,” she ordered.

“Why?” I said, more fool me.

“So you’ll realize your stupidity.”

I admitted it. This woman, with whom I had fallen in love, was educating me. She led me through the twelve permitted floors, from the entrance on the Plaza Vasco de Quiroga, greeting the guards, the concierge, the elevator operators, and from there to the second, third, and fourth floors, where female secretaries had abandoned typing and stenography for the tape recorder and the computer, where male secretaries signed or initialed correspondence with a flourish and also dictated it, where file clerks transferred the old, dusty correspondence of a company founded by Max Monroy’s mother (my secret interlocutor in a nameless graveyard) almost ninety years ago onto tapes, diskettes, and now iPods, blogs, memory sticks, USB drives, external disks, and from there to the fifth floor, where an army of accountants was at work, to the sixth, offices of the lawyers in the service of the enterprise, to the seventh, from which Max Monroy’s cultural concerns-opera, ballet, art editions-radiated outward, to the eighth, a space dedicated to invention, to the ninth and tenth, the floors where practical ideas were devised for modern technologies.

On the eleventh floor I worked with Asunta Jordan and an entire executive army, one floor below the thirteenth and fourteenth floors inhabited, as far as my imagination could tell, by Bluebeard and his disposable women.

Was Asunta one of them?

“You’re not a seminarian or a tutor,” she said as if she could sense in me a hero of a nineteenth-century novel as embodied by Gerard Philipe. “You’re not an ordinary run-of-the-mill employee because you were sent here by Licenciado Sangines, whom Max Monroy loves and respects. And you’re not socially inferior, though you’re not actually socially superior either.”

She looked me over from head to toe.

“You have to dress better. And something else, Josue. It’s better not to have been born than to be ill bred, do you understand? Society rewards good manners. Appearances. Speaking well. Good form. Form is part of our power, even if we’re surrounded by fools or perhaps for that very reason.”

She elaborated-from floor to floor-speaking about the Mexican cultivation of form.

“We’re the Italians of America, more than the Argentines,” she said in the elevator, “because we were a viceroyalty and above all because we descended from the Aztecs, not from boats.”

“An old joke,” I dared to say. Asunta seemed to be repeating something she had learned.

She laughed, as if in approval. “Since you’re none of that, it’s right for you to learn to be what you’re going to be.”

“And what I want to be?”

“From now on, that’s no longer different from what you’re going to be.”

To that effect-I suppose-Asunta took me to social functions she considered obligatory, in other offices and hotels, with powerful and sometimes pretentious people with a yearning for elegance, a subject that awakened in Asunta’s gaze and facial expression a series of reflections that she communicated to me in a very quiet voice, both of us surrounded by the rapid sound of the social hive, as she tasted the glass of champagne in which she only wet her lips without ever drinking from it: When she set down the glass, the level of the drink was always the same.

“What is luxury?” she would ask me on those occasions.

Surrounded by clothes, aromas, poses, strategies, Hispanic canapes and Indian servers, I didn’t know how to answer.

“Luxury is having what you don’t need,” she declared, her eyes hidden behind her raised glass. “Luxury is poetry: saying what you feel and think, without paying attention to the consequences. But luxury is also change. Styles change. Tastes change. Luxury tries to move ahead or at least catch up with style, creating and inviting it…”

She spoke of luxury not as if she had invented it but because she was inaugurating it.

“ ‘Luxury does not know that style and death are sisters,’ ” I said, citing Leopardi and testing her.

“It’s possible.” Asunta’s expression did not change, and I recalled old conversations with Jerico and Filopater.