Destiny and Desire

was offered freedom, enigmatic when he decided to be a prisoner.

This was my idea of the man. I looked at what I saw before me when I entered the cell.

The earlier Miguel was not the present one and I could no longer wager on the truth. Was Miguel the severe, fatalistic man of yesterday? Or was he the destructive, beaten animal of today?

It is strange how, when a human being is set loose from acquired habits and customary masks are removed, barbaric feelings spring up, not in the usual sense of savagery or atrocity, but in the fuller meaning of existing earlier than convention, limits, and above all, the idea of the person. That was this Miguel Aparecido, a man earlier than himself, as if everything the world (and I) knew about him was a great deception, pure appearance, the skin of a phantom whose concealed body and soul belonged to someone else. This man.

Looking at him with great intensity, I thought of his decisive words. He counted on the loyalty of the other prisoners. Brillantinas and Gomas. Ventanas. Siboney Peralta. El Negro Espana and La Perfida Albion. Then he had told me, boy, nothing happens here that I don’t know about, and nothing I don’t want to or can’t control.

“Know this: even unexpected riots are the work of my will.”

He had told me earlier he could smell the air and when the atmosphere in the prison became very heavy, a great internal fight was needed to clear the air. There were serious riots here when necessary, and then peace returned. Because peace, he said, was a necessity in prison.

“Many innocents come through here. They have to be respected.”

I had seen the children in the swimming pool. They shouldn’t be in prison forever.

“But if chaos did exist here, that would be because I am powerless to assure the order indispensable for the San Juan de Aragon Prison not to be heaven or hell but, and it’s saying a lot, a goddamn purgatory.”

On that occasion he had taken me by the shoulders, looking at me as if he were a tiger.

“When something happens here that slips through my fingers, it makes me furious.”

Furious. The riot of broken chairs banging against the walls. The tables in the dining room smashed to pieces. Injured, dying, dead police. Padlocks first filed, then opened. Filed clean away.

Maximiliano Batalla. The Mariachi’s Band. Brillantinas and Gomas. Ventanas. Siboney Peralta, who strangles and sings. Even La Perfida Albion and El Negro Espana. Above all Sara P., the widow of Nazario Esparza and killer, along with Maxi Batalla, of Dona Estrella de Esparza, Errol’s mama…

All of them. All of them. They escaped San Juan de Aragon. This time Miguel Aparecido did not provoke or control the riot. Maxi and Sara learned the lesson, they unleashed the barely contained fury of the criminal population, got the prisoners together, organized the riot, wreaked destruction, escaped.

“Who?” I asked, enraged by him, like him, Miguel Aparecido.

He looked at me like a dead man who has not lost the hope of resurrection.

“You, Josue.”

No, I shook my head, astonished, not me.

“You, Josue, you have to find out what happened. How Maxi Batalla and Sara the whore were able to organize the escape. Why my allies abandoned me. Who organized them, who helped them, who opened the doors for them?”

He looked at me in an enlightened, perverse way, passing on to me the obligation that he, from prison, could not carry out, granting him a kind of vengeful halo with the desire to deceive me, make me believe that if I discovered the truth outside these walls it would also reveal the truth that remained here, confined, not so much inside the walls of the prison as inside the walls of Miguel Aparecido’s head.

I could not see the weakness of the tiger that looked at me with the dissatisfaction of not having eaten because it had not killed. I could not see that the real menace of Miguel Aparecido consisted in telling the truth.

I understood only that it was not the flight of Sara P. and the Mariachi, or even-and this was worse-of Brillantinas and Gomas, Siboney and Ventanas, Albion and Espana that drove me mad, but the collapse of my illusion: Miguel was not, as he believed, the overseer of the penitentiary, the top dog, the sheikh. That is what infuriated him: the collapse of his jailhouse authority. The loss of the kingdom created by the sacrifice of his freedom. Being the head of the interior empire of the prison.

“I’m here because I want to be.

“I’m the head.

“When something happens here that slips through my fingers, I become furious.

“Fu-ri-ous.”

Part Three. Max Monroy

A year went by following the events I have narrated so far. Perhaps things occurred in all the chapters of my life. I didn’t return to Antigua Concepcion in the nameless burial ground. I never heard from my increasingly sentimentalized Lucha Zapata, who flew away with the fugacity of a bird with a damaged wing. I had completely forgotten about my sinister jailer Maria Egipciaca. I knew that Elvira Rios, my nurse, was barely a decisive though fleeting traffic accident. Dona Estrellita de Esparza lay buried, her despicable husband Don Nazario had been roasted alive in his own courtyard by the very incarnation of immorality, the vile and ridiculous Sara P., the Lady Macbeth of Mariachiland imprisoned after a macabre, imbecilic confession in the San Juan de Aragon Prison together with her partenaire in mischief, the immortal Mariachi Maxi, who escaped with this same Sarape and an entire gang of criminals, to the rage and despair of the presumptive capo of the penitentiary, my friend Miguel Aparecido, mocked by a band of thugs and thrown into a physical and moral anguish whose dimensions (I guessed) I would never know, no matter how, from his eyes of a caged tiger, a secret would peer out, veiled with difficulty by his bluish eyelids. Licenciado Antonio Sangines, source of so much news and guidance in my life, had absented himself (for the moment) and the truth is that none of what I’ve just said mattered to me very much for a simple reason.

I was in love.

I could fail in sincerity with you, patient readers, both absent and present (present if you are kind enough to read me, absent if you do not and at times even when you do), and tell you whatever I feel like. In the course of a year, twelve months, three hundred sixty-five days, eight thousand seven hundred sixty hours, five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes, thirty-one million five hundred thirty-six thousand seconds, what can’t an individual do, especially if he is author and protagonist of a novel dictated from and for death? What action is forbidden to him in my tale? What lie does not overcome my memory? What recollection of the past, what desire for the future? Don’t you see: I persist, to my own despair (and, with luck, to yours), I am here, writing away, desiring the past at the same time I remember the future.

Desiring the past.

Remembering the future.

This, I assure you, is the paradox of death. Except that you have to die to know it.

What I want to say now is that for an entire year, dedicated to working in the offices of Max Monroy in the noble (but resurrected) region of Santa Fe, ancient seat of the Renaissance utopia of Fray Vasco de Quiroga in New Spain, I too was reborn. Reborn to love. I fell madly in love with Asunta Jordan. And from this fact my story hangs.

I have already recounted the experience of my training to be worth something in the business empire of Max Monroy. At first, desiring to show my energy and goodwill, I ran (two steps at a time) from floor to floor. Gradually I learned the lessons of the business, its phrasing, its designations: verbs, adjectives, and especially adverbs, not only endless but without end: The suffix “-ly,” I realized very quickly, was not used in these offices. One said “recent” but not “recently”; “patient” without “-ly” and “original,” “definitive,” “occasional,” or “formal” with no lymology at all. But don’t think the elimination of the ending was the death of adverbial agency-rather, it was its elevation to the level of the implicit. By eliminating the adverb, all its protagonistic quality was given to the verb: to define, occasion, form, patient, and if not “to recent,” then at least to bring everything to a today pregnant with tomorrow and sterilized and free of useless, nostalgic yesterdays, mere commemorations.