Destiny and Desire

“What crime? What are you talking about?”

“Being a thief.”

Instead of becoming angry, Dona Estrellita maintained an admirable composure. She looked at Jerico and me with patience.

“I haven’t welcomed you. My son is a very impetuous boy.”

We thanked her. She smiled and looked at her son.

“He insults me because I’m not Marlene Dietrich. As if that were my fault! He isn’t Errol Flynn either.”

She turned her back, bending her head, and went back to the mysterious place she had come from.

Errol burst into laughter.

He told us his father had been a carpenter, first in one of the poorest districts in the city. Then he began to make furniture. Soon he was selling beds, chairs, and tables to several hotels. Then he established a furniture store downtown, near the Avenida 20 de Noviembre. With so much furniture on his hands, the only thing he could do was put up a hotel, and then another, and yet another, and since the guests wanted entertainment close by- television was still in diapers, that is, black-and-white-he took an old movie house in San Juan de Letran and turned it into a live-performance theater, decorated in the style of a Chinese pagoda just like the one in Los Angeles, and since man does not live by art alone, he opened a furniture store and then another and another and yet another until he had a chain of hotels and that’s what we live on.

Errol sighed while Jerico and I-and certainly all of you who can hear me-put on a polite face and listened without blinking to this lightning account of a career that culminated in this shambles of a house in the Pedregal de San Angel with a boy who refused to get into the Cadillac driven by a uniformed chauffeur and delighted in humiliating a defenseless mother and attacking an absent father.

“He hired gangs of bums to put mice inside rival movie houses, break his enemies, and take over their theaters.”

“How nice,” I dared to say, but Errol, enveloped in the cloud of his own rhetoric, didn’t hear me.

“He sent salesmen to distract employees in the businesses of his rivals.”

“Very smart,” Jerico said with a smile.

“He sent evangelists to convert them to Protestantism.”

“The religion of capitalism, Errol,” I said for the sake of saying something.

“Have you read Protestantism and the Modern World by Ernst Troeltsch?” Jerico commented, increasing the aberrations of the conversation. “Without Protestantism there is no capitalism. In the opinion of Saint Thomas, capitalists went to hell. Consequently, all capitalists are Protestants.”

I swear it hurt me to see Errol’s bewilderment when right after that Jerico and I looked at each other, thanked him, and left the walled house through a garden with no trees where workers were raising something like a statue onto a pedestal.

“Let the chauffeur drive you home.”

We agreed and left. Relieved, but without saying a word and exchanging a complicit glance that said: He’s our friend. We won’t stop talking to him.

Were we talking to ourselves, Jerico? Didn’t we leave the Esparza house secretly thinking that all this horror, this inanity, this dissatisfaction, this grief, takes place en famille, it occurs because a family exists-like a tray of rotten fruit, a cup of poison, a sewer capable of receiving it all, digesting it, purifying it, bringing it back to life from a near-death final injury?

You and I avoided looking at each other, Jerico, when we left the residence in Pedregal. Neither of us had a family. We were what we are because we were, are, will be orphans. What is orphanhood? No doubt not the mere absence of father or mother or family but inclemency, the ruination of the sheltering roof for reasons that sometimes are clearly attributable to abandonment, to death, to simple indifference. Except that you and I did not know any of these reasons. Perhaps you do, but you’ve kept them to yourself. And my situation was equivocal, as I’ll recount later.

He’s our friend. We won’t stop talking to him.

Although perhaps, privately, we envied Errol his family situation no matter how violent or pathetic it was.

“He didn’t need to say what he said,” was the secret message Jerico sent me when I got out at Calle de Berlin.

“That’s true. He didn’t,” I remarked, more to confirm our friendship than for any other reason.

ON THE OTHER hand, months later, when we graduated from secondary to preparatory, we found not a pretext but an opportunity to speak for hours on end with a new instructor who had just joined the faculty. Until then we had not felt admiration or scorn for the group of teachers who, with far too much discretion for our demanding spirits, taught not very imaginative classes based on acts of serial (like a crime) memorization of history, geography, and natural sciences. The biology instructor was amusing because of the subterfuges he summoned and the rough terrain he walked in order to sublimate the facts of nature by means of an explicit final reference, the crown of his reiterated discourse, to the act of divine creation, the origin and destiny of our physical realities and transcendent mortality.

There were, no doubt, other excesses that broke the gray neutrality of our classes. The headmaster, an irascible Frenchman with unpronounceable Breton family names, whom we called “Don Vercingetorix,” regularly opened the school year by standing on a dais with a gladiolus in his hand. After perusing the assembled student body with a severe look worthy of Torquemada, he would proclaim, “This is a young Christian before he goes to a dance and kisses a girl.” Immediately afterward he would throw the flower on the floor and stamp on it in a kind of holy can-can until he had pulverized the innocent flower, which he would then pick up from the floor and show us the vegetable tatters in his hands, concluding: “And this is a Catholic boy after he goes to a dance and kisses a girl.” Of the moribund gladiolus, all that survived, with a symbolism surely not desired by the enraged Vercingetorix, was the erect stem. A pregnant silence and a final warning: “Think. Confess your sins. Break ranks.” All that was missing was for him to warn, “And don’t break into laughter,” though the formal severity of the school lent itself not to jokes but to a kind of Christian resignation when we got ready in the locker room to play basketball, knowing that at the opportune moment Professor Soler would come in, saying “Let’s see, let’s see, everybody ready?” as a pretext to look at us before we pulled on our shorts and approach, “let’s see, let’s see,” to adjust the jockstraps needed to protect our sex from blows on the court, to heft with touching reverence, on his knees or bending over, the testicles of each student to check that we were well protected as we went out to athletic encounters and, if we were lucky, sexual combat.

We students forgave this innocent pleasure of Father Soler, whose red face was the product not of any shame but of an inheritance that can give to the product of the mixing of Indians and blonds a sanguine appearance very apt for disguising the blushes of embarrassing emotion. In other words: Collectively the students forgave the life both of the ostentatious Vercingetorix and the silent Soler, considering that they did not have many opportunities to express themselves in public, subject as they were to long hours of prayers and rosaries, early suppers, fleeting breakfasts… They would have put out the sun with the smoke of incense.

Everything changed when the new philosophy instructor came on the scene.

Father Filopater (that’s how he was announced and how he introduced himself) was a small, agile man. He moved with a combination of juvenile athleticism and spiritual animation, as if in order to demonstrate one you had to celebrate the other. He walked with varying rhythms. Very quickly when he went from one task to another. Very slowly when he strolled around the yard accompanied by one or two students to whom he listened with intense concentration, offering the paradoxical idea of a short man who grew as he thought, as if his ideas-for he seemed to think more than to talk-were flying over him, creating an unusual halo, not round but long, though always shining.

It goes without saying, you who are still alive and can contradict me with no risk or confirm everything I say out of curiosity, that Jerico and I immediately fixed on the new arrival and imagined how we could approach him and determine who he was-in addition to being a philosophy instructor-by what he thought and said. He was ahead of us.

Always together, he said, approaching with his quickest step, like Castor and Pollux.

The mythological allusion did not escape us, and both Jerico and I instantly looked at each other, knowing he spoke of the twins born of the same egg, for their father was a god disguised as a swan. Always together, the twins took part in great expeditions, like the exploits of the Argonauts under the command of Jason, searching for the as yet undiscovered soul they called the Golden Fleece.