lighten the situation.
“It all depends,” I said. “What’s the objective?”
“To be superior to all those who challenge us.” He took another breath.
“Wouldn’t it be enough just to be equal?”
“You’re joking. I don’t want them to say about us: They’re like everybody else, they’re the usual ones, the customary ones, the ones in the crowd. Agreed?”
I said probably, if my friend’s words indicated that self-improvement was necessary, of course… Agreed…
“Are we different, you and I?” I said after Jerico’s obstinate silence.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you and I didn’t have to survive. We always had food on the table.”
“Like everybody else? Do you think I did?”
I took a step I hadn’t wanted to take: “I suspect you did.”
In that suspicion were summarized the doubts you already know about regarding the character called just “Jerico,” with no last name, not even the past afforded me by the house on Berlin, the care of Maria Egipciaca, and the nurse Elvira Rios, before my destiny and Jerico’s converged like two rivers of fire, Castor and Pollux. I was Josue Nadal.
Jerico, without family names, who traveled without a name on his passport, who perhaps traveled without a passport, who perhaps-everything my affection for him had hidden was now suddenly revealed-had not been in France or the United States or anywhere except the hiding place of his soul… And wasn’t it enough, I exclaimed to myself, to have a soul where you could take refuge? Wasn’t that sufficient?
“Alive or dead… Survivors.”
At this moment, when I heard these words, I felt that a stage in our lives (and consequently in our friendship) had closed forever. I understood that from now on he and I would have to be responsible for our own lives, breaking the fraternal pact that until then not only had united us but allowed us to live without asking ourselves questions about the past, as if, being friends, it was enough for us say and do things together to complement the absences of our earlier life.
It was as if life had begun when he and I became friends in the schoolyard. It was as if, when we stopped being friends, a barefoot death had begun to approach us.
“MAX MONROY,” Asunta Jordan tells me tonight, “has two rules of conduct. The first is never to respond to an attack. Because there are so many, you know? You can’t be as prominent as he is without being attacked, above all in a country where it’s difficult to forgive success. Lift your head, Josue, and they immediately assault you and, if they can, decapitate you.”
“Rancors in this country are very old and very deep,” I remarked, and added Socratically, because I didn’t want to disagree with her: “Mexico is a country where everything turns out badly. There’s a reason we celebrate the defeated and despise the victorious.”
“Even though we stay with our idols. If you become an idol, an idol of the ranchera, the bolero, the soap opera, sports, your life is pardoned,” Asunta said with her style of popular humor.
“Idolatry here is very old.” I smiled, continuing my adulatory tactic. “We believe in God but we worship idols.”
Asunta shook off this ideological confetti with an elegant movement of her head. “But the fact of not responding to an attack is a terrible weapon. You don’t give the attacker a moment of untroubled sleep. Why doesn’t Max respond? When does Max respond? How does Max respond-if he does respond? What weapons will Max use to respond?
“In this way,” Asunta continued, “Max doesn’t need to do anything to answer those who assault him. The fact of not doing anything provokes terror and in the end defeats the attacker, who doesn’t understand why he isn’t answered, then doubts the efficacy or ferocity of the attack, immediately feels completely worthless because he doesn’t deserve a response, and in the end aggression and aggressor are forgotten and Max Monroy goes on, as cheerful…”
“As Johnnie Walker.” I laughed then.
She wasn’t too happy with this joke. Asunta was already embarking on the second example she wanted to give to complete the picture of Max Monroy’s conduct. A rancorous cloud passed over her gaze, evoking, without looking at me, those who tried to become famous by attacking the fame of Max Monroy. Lesson learned: They succeeded only in increasing it. They were forgotten.
“And the second case?”
Asunta came back as if from a dream.
“Max Monroy is a cautious man.” She smiled with a certain bitter nostalgia that did not escape my attention. The second example was that Max, who naturally is a cautious man, becomes even more cautious when he receives an improper or unexpected favor.
“Improper?”
If Asunta hesitated it was only for a second. Then she said: As improper as having imprisoned a dangerous man only as a favor to the great Max Monroy.
I searched in vain for a rictus of laughter, an ironic intention, an angry emphasis in Asunta’s voice, her gaze, her posture. She had spoken as a statue would speak-if a statue could speak.
“Favors are paid for, I think,” I continued so our talk would not die, as it could have died, right there, since I was trying to tie up loose ends and bring together what I knew with what I didn’t know…
“Favors have a price, and then we realize the mistake it is to grant them and go mad trying to find an action to wipe out the obligation we have acquired to the person who did us the favor,” she went on. “Do you see?”
“Death?” I asked with the innocent face I have practiced most in front of the mirror.
“Death?” she replied with an incredulous affirmation on the point of becoming a question.
“Death,” she continued calmly, though with a certain pleading tone.
“Whose?” I didn’t let her go.
Perhaps she hesitated for a moment. Then she said: “The death of the one who did us the favor.”
“Improper?”
Or unexpected. Unexpected?
“The one who did the favor died.”
“The advantages of being old,” I said with an erotic calculation doomed, I knew beforehand, to fail. She did not appear to understand. On the contrary, she stressed that Max Monroy was a self-made man, but only in part. He inherited a great deal (I remained silent about my relationship, valid only if secret, with Max’s mother, Antigua Concepcion.)
If she spoke like his mother Dona Conchita (with reason she changed her name, refusing the diminutive in exchange for voluntary antiquity) she would say: Agrarian reform benefited him as much as it did his mother. It was the end of the old haciendas as big as all of Benelux. It took two days by train to travel the lands of William Randolph Hearst in Chihuahua and Sonora. “Citizen Kane,” I interjected, and she continued, not understanding the allusion. She repeated the lesson: “Thirty-five percent of Mexico’s territory in the hands of Gringos. The hacienda was broken, the system of communal lands was created-all for all, sure-agrarian law was violated, now small properties were accumulated and campesino lands stolen to construct hotels on the beaches, the campesinos didn’t receive a thank you, or a whiskey, or a swim in the kidney-shaped pools, but most fled to the cities, above all ‘dissipated and painted’ Mexico City and the new industrial sectors created by the expropriation of the petroleum industry. Max’s good fortune: first, agrarian repartition; second, the system of communal lands; third, small farmsteads; fourth, communal landowners without credit or machinery, subject to the law of the market, without protection or even a five-centavo piece, and fifth-lucky five-the campesino flight to industry, creation of a domestic market, saturation in demand, inequality, unemployment, the flight of labor to the United States, money returned by workers to their old communities, the explosion of cheap consumerism.”
“And Monroy taking advantage of it all?”
“He isn’t a thief.” Asunta looked at me without affection. “He has today’s money just as he had yesterday’s. He has built a fortune on the earlier one, his mother’s. He has multiplied Dona Conchita’s goods” (please: Antigua Concepcion, more respect for the dead!), “imposed very severe rules of discipline, justice, independence, knows the gulf that separates reputation from personality, protects the second, scorns the first, is implacable in getting
