couples captured in an aquarium by dancing they obviously deemed charming, gallant, sophisticated, sensual, liberated, and libertine: heads gyrating, eyes closed dreamily or open in false amazement, hands shaking as if to throw or catch invisible balls, shoulders in grotesque calisthenics, legs freed of all control, halfway between prayer and defecation. And the feet, cockroaches in shoes to avoid death by Flit, two-toned men’s shoes, cowboy boots, pointy-toed stiletto heels for the women, an occasional tennis shoe, all given over to the silent dance, the grotesque ritual of bodies deceiving themselves, feigning elegance, sensuality, good humor, which, stripped of accompanying sounds, reduced the dancers to a macabre imitation of an anticipated dance of death.
I thought that friendship was something fundamentally indecipherable. Pride, generosity, tenderness, accepted inadequacies, quiet reserves, the courage memory keeps acquiring-or the bitter absolution of its loss: everything united as in a chorus at once present and very distant, more eloquent in memory than in actuality, though with each gleam it brings the announcement of a future as unpredictable as a pistol going off at a piano concert.
“Let’s be independent,” Jerico fired at me. “Let’s not have opinions imposed on us.”
If the words surprised me, it was because they contained a tacit truth in our relationship. We had always been independent, I replied to my friend. He said I hadn’t: I had lived in a mansion like the prisoner of a tyrannical nanny and saved myself by coming to live with him.
“And you?” I asked. “Have you always been independent?”
Jerico looked at me with a kind of compassionate tenderness.
“Don’t ask me a question you could answer or be quiet about yourself, old pal. We’re independent? First ask yourself: Who has supported us for as long as we can remember?”
I interrupted him. “Lawyers. Licenciado Sangines, the-”
He interrupted me: “Were they sent? All of them, servants, sent by someone else?”
“Physically or morally?” I attempted to lighten the unusual conversation; we hadn’t seen each other for more than a year, and this meeting in our old den on Calle de Praga was taking place on his initiative.
He ignored me. “We’ve assumed we have no past, that we live in the present, that the lawyers will provide and if we ask indiscreet questions, we’ll break the spell and wake up no longer princes in the bedroom but frogs in the ditch… and with no way out.”
I told him he was right. We had never inquired beyond the immediate situation. We received a monthly check. At times Sangines led us to the doors of a mystery, but he never opened them. It was as if the two of us-Jerico, Josue-feared knowing more than we already knew: nothing. I suggested, before the ironic gaze of my friend, that perhaps our negligence had been our salvation. What or who would have answered our questions: Who are we, where do we come from, who are our parents, who supports us?
“Who supports us, Jerico?” I looked at him as if he were a mirror. “Are we innocent pimps? Are we better than La Hetara on Durango or the whore with the bee on her buttock?”
He remained silent, refusing to be surprised by my brusque remarks.
“Do you remember Father Filopater when we were at school?”
I nodded. Of course.
Jerico said, after looking at the floor, that we had never understood-he spoke for the two of us-whether Filopater pretended to be a false heretic to make faith palatable, like the false unbeliever who takes us down the path that leads to belief.
“Because Filopater did two things, Josue. On one hand, he made us see the mindlessness of religion in the light of reason. But he also revealed the foolishness of reason in the light of faith.”
“Reason compromises faith and faith compromises reason,” I added without thinking too much about it, almost as a fatal, exact conclusion, that is, as dogma.
“Dogma.” Jerico read my mind. We were Castor and Pollux again, the mystic twins, the Dioscuri. The inseparable pair.
“Listen, who decides that a dogma is a dogma?” I asked, stepping back from the abyss of fraternity.
“Authority.”
“Force?”
“If you think so.”
I didn’t know where or by what route he wanted to take me. I said force isn’t enough. Force requires authority to be forceful.
“And authority without force?” Jerico asked.
“Is morality,” I took a risk with my words.
“And morality?”
“I won’t tell you it’s certainty, because then morality and faith would be the same.”
“Then, morality can be uncertain.”
“Yes. I believe the only certainty is uncertainty.”
“Why?”
“If you agree, Jerico, I’ll only ask you not to feel superior or inferior. Feel equal.”
“Do you remember when we were young we’d ask ourselves: What invalidates a man, what strips him of value?”
I nodded.
“Answer me now,” he said with a certain pugnacity.
“You and I are each embarked on his attempt at success. I sincerely think we haven’t defined ourselves yet. We’re always someone else because we’re always in the process of becoming.”
“I have.” Jerico intensified the conflict another degree.
“I haven’t.” I shrugged. “I don’t believe you, bro.”
“Do you want me to prove it to you?”
I looked at him with as much spirit (adverse, perverse, diverse?) as he showed looking at me.
“Sure, of course. I’ll envy you because I’m not as sure as you are. It’ll do me good.”
I waited for him to speak. We understood each other too well. He hesitated for an instant. Then he observed, smiling this time, that to be coherent, he would respond with actions, not words. I returned the smile and folded my arms. It was a spontaneous gesture but it indicated a certain permanence on my part at this time and in this place we had shared since we were nineteen years old.
“Don’t stop when you’re halfway there,” he said suddenly.
“You make the path as you walk, says the song.”
“You understand me.”
“Because I’m sitting here and you’re over there. All we have to do is change places and all the truth we’ve just said collapses, goes all to hell, becomes doubt.
“And also memory,” I insisted. “Let’s remember where we were before.”
“Though we don’t know where we’ll be afterward.”
“We can predict.”
“And if we’re struck by lightning?”
“We live or we die,” I said with a smile.
“We survive.” He looked at me with eyes half closed and then opened wide as if by orders of an internal sergeant.
“Alive or dead?” I hesitated.
“Alive or dead, we’re only survivors. Always.”
I shook my head.
“We have no father,” said Jerico.
“And?”
“If we did, we’d grow up to honor him so he’d be proud of us.”
“And since we don’t…”
“We can exist for ourselves.”
“On condition we honor ourselves?” I smiled.
“Don’t get lost when you’re halfway there.”
I detected a certain internal disturbance in my friend when he repeated: “Halfway there. There’s more. Something more than you and me. Our country. Our nation.”
I laughed out loud. I told him he didn’t have to justify his job, his position at Los Pinos. I wanted to liven and
