wanted to turn her into a completely useless, completely supported girl, what could I be? Can you see me trapped in a family governed by three unbearable rules? ‘We don’t talk about that. Errors are not corrected. We don’t regret anything, child.’ Not anything? Where did my parents come up with the idea that everything they did was allowed, knowing they didn’t do anything worth disallowing? The north, the desert, the emptiness, the highways going nowhere, the mountains in the distance, the desert close at hand, the ocean a pious lie, the weather always undecided between suffocation and dawn. A desert husband. Quick, we don’t want the girl left behind with us. Is he the best? No. Is he the worst? Not that either. Who is he? He sells cars. Buses. Trucks. Is he in love? Is he calculating? Do we have more than he does? Does he have more than we do? Where did Tomas Gonzalez come from? Where did Asunta Lopez Jordan come from? Who’s better, the Gonzalezes or the Lopezes? Who presumes what, just tell me that? Who boasts of their cactus, their desert, their rock, their paving stone or tortilla, just tell us that? Why does he presume so much, what is the presumptuous man presumptuous about? Why on your wedding night does he show you his penis and say, Baby, let me introduce you to King Kong, from now on he’s going to sleep with us? Why is he presumptuous about everything except you? Why does he talk about you, Asunta Lopez Jordan, as his ball and chain? Why does he presume with his friends that you take care of the house but he is a macho who needs broads livelier and sexier than you, Ernestina and Amapola and Cross-eyed Malva and Sweetass, all the whores of the north plus some from Arizona and Texas when he goes, as they say, to buy spare parts, sure, damn it, is that what they call it now? Why do you begin to pester him too, Asunta Lopez de Gonzalez, why do you tell him shave, you scratch when you make love to me, use deodorant, play golf, do something, stick King Kong in his cage?
“The gorilla’s cage,” Asunta Jordan said to me with no other commentary, “and I a pneumatic doll… pneumatic, but thanks to my neura attentive, alert, and for that reason dangerous: attentive, alert thanks to the horror of my husband and my family, convinced that these virtues of mine, in provincial society, were defects, I was dangerous, but perhaps in another society being violent and unpredictable was a virtue. In my town I unleashed negative reactions. When Max Monroy came fifteen years ago for the opening of the automotive factory, and I went to the reception afterward with my husband, Max Monroy looked out and saw a flock of contented women and a herd of presumptuous men and saw one woman who was discontented, that was me, and humiliated, that was me, and proud, that was me, and different, that was me, and that same night I left with him and here I am.”
“You were saying that a woman is a luxury.”
“No. A trophy.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s inconvenient. Where do you put an Oscar? He takes me away. For saying the wrong thing. For not wanting to make a good impression.”
“Max Monroy saw that in you?”
“That’s why he’s Max Monroy.”
(She stopped, alone in the middle of the dance floor. Her husband, Tomas, had gone off without saying goodbye. Couples danced. Families sat on three sides of the floor. The orchestra animated the entire nation from the fourth side. Couples danced. She stopped alone in the center of the floor. She didn’t look at anyone. She didn’t know if anyone was looking at her. She didn’t care anymore. Then Max Monroy approached and took her by the waist and hand without saying a word.)
MY AGREEABLE (though disturbing) work in the Santa Fe office was interrupted (and it wouldn’t be the last time) by Licenciado Antonio Sangines. I wondered if my debt to the professor would be eternal. The heretics cited by another professor, Filopater, said that the final proof of God’s mercy would be forgiving all the damned and emptying out hell in one stroke. Not that my debt to Sangines was hellish. On the contrary. I’m a grateful man. I was (and am) very conscious of everything I owed the maestro. Still, I couldn’t help asking myself: How long will I be paying my debts-studies, thesis direction, meals at Coyoacan, admittance to the Prison of San Juan de Aragon, interviews with the prisoner Miguel Aparecido, even news about the destiny of my friend Jerico in the offices of the presidency-to Professor and Licenciado Don Antonio Sangines?
A question without an immediate response, which still obliged me, no doubt because I did not have an answer, to suspend my work in the Vasco de Quiroga office and at the side of my platonic love Asunta Jordan and ask myself: Where was Sangines’s strategy leading with respect to the San Juan de Aragon Prison and the prisoner Miguel Aparecido? What, in essence, did Sangines want when he opened the cell blocks of the penitentiary to me with a master key? Because I went into the prison and was made to feel right at home, with all kinds of facilities and even special considerations like this: Leaving me alone in the cell with Miguel Aparecido, a strong man focused on a personal resolve whose origin and fate I did not know: to remain imprisoned even though he completed his sentence; and if he ever was released, to commit a new crime that would keep him in prison.
A new crime. What was the first crime, the original crime, the offense Miguel Aparecido wanted to pay for eternally, since the ultimate solution of this enigma was to die in prison? Still, was this conclusion of mine, so easy and melodramatic, correct? Did a final point exist that would conclude Miguel’s punishment in Miguel’s mind, allowing him finally to leave his cell? Knowing this meant knowing everything. From the beginning. The origin of the story. The resolution of the mysteries I’ve been stitching together here and the conversion of mystery into destiny. Truths the prisoner did not seem disposed to reveal.
Least of all today. I went into the cell. His back was turned. The high, distant barred light drew lines on his body that were not part of his gray uniform: It was as if only the sun wore the striped uniform of the old prisons.
I went in and Miguel did not turn to look at me. It would have been better for me if he had. Because when he did, he revealed the face of a terrifying beast. His hair was wild, his cheeks scratched, his eyes as red as an ominous sunset, his nose wounded, his lips and teeth bloody.
“For God’s sake, Miguel…”
I walked forward to embrace him, with a natural instinct to provide relief. He did not want help. He repulsed me brutally. I looked away, knowing he looked at me without affection.
Then something inside me said, “Don’t look away. Look directly at him. Look at him as if you’ve seen him before. Like a vulnerable, bewildered human being in pain who rejects your affection only because he needs it, because he has no other support but you, just you, my poor Josue, double of himself.”
I thought this and felt what we all know but never say aloud, because it is both a mystery and self-evident. I looked at Miguel Aparecido and saw myself reflected in him not as in a mirror but only in a question: We are body, we are soul, and we will never know how flesh and spirit are joined.
I looked at the unaffectionate eyes of Miguel Aparecido, feverish with the terror of the day, and for an instant I saw myself in them… I saw that both of us, I a free man, he a prisoner, were concerned with the same dilemma: Did we all deserve to be punished for the crime of a single man? Could the soul be saved if the body wasn’t saved too? Could our body commit offenses without punishing the soul? Could the soul sin and the body remain free of transgression?
When I say I saw all this in Miguel Aparecido’s gaze, I mean I was seeing it in the reflection that returned to my eyes from his. I recalled Filopater and his reading of Saint Augustine: Sooner or later, human misery always requires the solace, the relief, the consolation religion offers through the promise of the resurrection of the flesh and the world with the promise of freedom in this life. Looking again (I don’t know if for the first time) at Miguel Aparecido this afternoon, I thought religion and freedom resemble each other inasmuch as they believe in the unbelievable: the resurrection of the flesh or the autonomy of the individual. Perhaps the second is the greater mystery. Because we cannot know if we are going to be resurrected, we accept the secret of faith. But knowing we can be free, the absence of freedom opens before us an entire hand of anguished possibilities: to struggle for freedom or to renounce it; to act or abstain; to dirty one’s hands or use gloves… If we choose one card, we sacrifice the rest. In life there is no change in cards. If you get four aces, you fucking win. If you get a weak hand, you’re fucked. Though at times you win the game and save your life with a pair of fives. You play the hand you’re dealt, and if you think you can ask for a different one, you’re mistaken. Whoever deals the cards does it only once. We have to play the weak or winning hand destiny gave us.
Did I see in this man wounded both externally and internally the fatality of an existence I really had not known until now? Miguel Aparecido appeared (so to speak) to me like a strange but always serene being, master of a secret and comfortable with his own mystery, jealous of what he kept hidden in his bosom, intolerant when he
