I was recalling and consecrating it, Asunta’s body, and now Jerico proceeded with anatomical brutality: “Are you going out to hunt, are you coming home to sleep? How do you know?”
He poked my navel and drew a line between my ribs.
“By opening up your belly.”
He laughed.
“There’s the proof.”
I emerged from my lethargy. I sat on the edge of the bed. Jerico prepared coffee. He had taken possession of something that, I told myself, offended, he had never left. I was the intruder. I was practically the vagrant.
“What do you want?” I said, longing to annoy him.
His expression didn’t change: “I want you.” He offered me a steaming cup of instant coffee.
“Why?”
He launched into a discourse that seemed interminable. Who were we? Two people shipwrecked from paternal authority. That’s what makes us brothers. We lack a family. We didn’t have an old man. We were abandoned, liberated, set adrift.
“Whatever you like.”
“And?”
“That obliges us to know our internal limits. You realize that the majority of human beings never seriously ask themselves: Who am I? What are my limits? Why? Because family and society have marked out the path and boundaries for them. Here, kid, don’t step off the path, look as far ahead as you like, but don’t look right or left. Eyes fixed on the horizon we presented to you because we think about you, son, and want the best for you, don’t think about anything, everything’s been thought about in advance, my boy, it’s for your own good, don’t stray, don’t venture anything, don’t turn away from a destiny you don’t deserve to know independently, why would you, boy, if we’ve already prepared it for you? We prepared the future for you the way you make a bed, here are the pillows, here are the covers, get in and sleep, baby, don’t disturb the bed, after all, it took a lot for us to arrange it for you and have it ready so you can sleep peacefully, sleep and sleep and sleep, youngster, kid, baby, boy, son, and not worry about a thing.”
He made a nasty face and then burst into laughter.
“Wake up, Josue, arise and walk!”
I told him I was listening. He didn’t expect any words from me. He had brought his own speech and my job was to listen to him and not make a sound.
“I continue: You and I weren’t born for domesticity. Consider your sexual life. From pillar to post, here a vagabond, there a whore, here a nurse, there a secretary…”
“I do better than you, a really solitary plainsman,” I grumbled, angry that he knew what I thought he was unaware of.
“We have no friends,” he said, somewhat disconcerted.
“Do you think we’re part of a vanished civilization?”
“We’re always obliged to correct the errors in our destiny, whatever it may have been, Josue. So it’s more than the truth…”
“A different destiny? How?”
“By getting together with people. Organizing the people. Taking a bath with the masses, like the showers you and I used to take together, but now with millions of human beings who want to be redeemed.”
“Won’t they be redeemed better on their own?”
“No,” Jerico almost shouted. “What’s needed is the head, the leader!”
“The Duce, the Fuehrer,” I said with a skeptical smile.
“The country is ripe,” Jerico asserted, corrected his course, and returned to him and me.
“Yes, I swear to you, God’s truth, only you, and only I, we weren’t born to be husbands or fathers or even faithful lovers. You and I, Josue, were born for freedom, without ties, the road cleared to be and act without reporting to anyone, do you understand? We are free, old friend, free as the air, the rain, the sea, the birds!”
“Until a hunter shoots you, and you fall and become supper. Sure…”
“Risks,” Jerico said with a laugh, “and the air can be disturbed by a cyclone, the rain can be stormy, the sea rough, and the bird, with luck, unconquered and flying toward freedom.”
“An old bird, you mean,” I said to harmonize with the jubilation of my old companion. I even sang: “Wounded bird of the dawn…”
“In other words, Josue, do you believe you and I have a special mission, since love, home, marriage are forbidden to us?”
“Friendship would be enough,” I murmured with no desire to offend or even inquire.
He slammed one fist with the other. It was a gesture of action, of virtue, of energy, of a voluntary desire to lead. To lead me to him and himself to me as well.
He said the country was not advancing. Why? The president is weak. He hasn’t governed with energy. We did everything halfway. You and I? No. Those who governed us. Everything halfway, everything mediocre. We though we were king of the world because we had oil. We sold it for a lot of money. With the profits, we bought nothing but trinkets. A luxury six-year term. We behaved like nouveaux riches. There was no “tomorrow.” The price went down. Debts remained. A new horizon. Commerce. A quick treaty, to deck out another six-year term. Things are free to move about. Not people. Currency, stocks, objects move. Workers remain stationary, though they’re needed in the USA. Come because we need you. But if you come, we’ll kill you. Okay? Fair enough? Since then we simply fill in one hole before the next one opens. We’re like the little Dutch boy in the story, his finger stuck in the hole in the dike to avoid the inevitable flood. But we only put our finger deep in our asshole. And it smells bad.
Theatrically, my friend Jerico pulled aside the curtain in the room to reveal, from our high perch, the omnipresent urban chaos of Mexico City, the great deep pyramid of Cementos Tolteca and Seguros America and Avenidas Cuauhtemoc, the fragmented pyramid sunk in primeval mud and asphyxiated in secondary air, the clogged traffic, the overflowing buses, the streets numerous but uncountable: the lines of workers at five in the morning waiting to go to their job and return at seven at night in order to return at five… Six hours for working. Eight for commuting. Life.
“Do you realize?” Jerico exploded and I saw him this way, now, in shirtsleeves, his shirt open to his navel, his hairless chest demanding the heroism of bronze, the childish cheeks, subtly stripped of baby fat, of a face consumed by the heroic gesture and the intense brilliance of his pale eyes.
Did I realize? he asked rhetorically, pointing down and into the distance, a country of more than a hundred million inhabitants that cannot provide work, food, or schooling to half the population, a country that does not know how to employ the millions of workers it needs to build highways, dams, schools, housing, hospitals, to preserve forests, enrich fields, construct factories, a country where hunger, ignorance, and unemployment lead to crime, a criminality that invades everything, the police are criminal, order disintegrates, Josue, the politicians are corrupt, the canoe has sprung a leak, we live in a Xochimilco with no Dolores del Rio or Pedro Armendariz or pigs to save us: The canals are filled with garbage, they were choked by filth, abandonment, thorns, the corpses of piglets, chicken bones, the remains of flowers…
He came up to me but didn’t touch me.
“Josue. This year I’ve traveled the country from one end to the other. The president gave me the job of forming groups for celebrating fiestas. I betrayed him, Josue. I’ve gone from village to village to form combat groups, organizing immigrants who find no way out, campesinos ruined by the Free Trade Agreement, discontented workers, inciting all of them, my brother, to slowdowns, to boycotts, to stealing parts, to self-inflicted accidents, to arson and murder…”
I listened to him with a mixture of fascination and horror, and if one impelled me to distance him, the other led me to an embrace, a mixture that was idiotic but explicable of what in me refused and what in me desired. From village to village, he repeated, recruiting at funerals, churches, dances, barbecues…
“Following the orders of El Senor Presidente, you understand? preparing the festivities that matter to him so much in order to distract, deceive, put blinders on the mule, Josue, without realizing that here we have a gigantic force for action, a force of people who are fed up, forsaken, desperate, ready for anything…”
I asked without saying a word: Anything?
“For submission and abandonment, because that has been the rule for centuries,” he continued, reading the
