the octopus isn’t concerned with looking. It wants embraces. It has tentacles.
As if searching for respite, I walked through the crowd confirming that Mexico D.F. has twenty-two million inhabitants, more than all of Central America, more than the Republic of Chile, along whose street I walked now toward the temple of Santo Domingo, protected by the Dominican priest Father Julian Pablo from postponable disasters and sometimes from ones that couldn’t be postponed. I saved myself from the fake bullfighters who zigzagged with merchandise in their hands like assault weapons, and in Santo Domingo I encountered the resurrected profession of “evangelists,” men and women sitting on low wooden chairs in front of old Remington typewriters, listening to the dictation of illiterate men and women who wanted to send to a distant village, to families in the countryside, the mountains, the provinces, their regrets, their words of love and sometimes of hate, which these clerks set down on paper and charge for; double if, as safety advises, the “evangelists” themselves are the ones who address the envelope and buy the stamp, promising to drop the letter in the mail.
“Sometimes, Josue, they give us the wrong address, or one that doesn’t exist, the letter never arrives, and then things as sad as forgetting can happen, or as violent as wreaking vegeance on the scribe responsible for the letter’s not reaching its destination-even if it didn’t really have any destination at all.
“And what is destination, or destiny?” continued the voice I tried to locate, to recognize, in the row of people’s scribes sitting in front of the old building of the Inquisition. “It isn’t fate. It is simply disguised will. The final desire.”
Then I was able to unite voice and eyes. A small man, bald but in a borrowed hairdo, his bones brittle and his hands energetic, white-skinned though tending to a yellowish pallor, for a couple of Band-Aids covered tiny cuts on one cheek and his neck, dressed in an old black suit with gray stripes, a shirt with a too-large collar unbuttoned at his throat and adorned by a wide, out-of-fashion tie that actually looked more like the covering for a defeated, emaciated chest, mortified by blows of contrition. Borrowed apparel. Secondhand clothes.
Our eyes met and I recognized old Father Filopater, the guide of generous meticulousness during the early youth of Castor and Pollux, Josue and Jerico. I held back my tears, took Filopater’s hands, and was about to kiss them. I don’t know what held me back. Shyness or distrust of his nails that in spite of being cut short showed signs of grime at the corners. Though this, perhaps, was due only to his work on an old typewriter and an apparently rebellious two-color ribbon, for when Filopater pressed a key thoughtlessly, the entire ribbon unrolled into something resembling infinity.
“Maestro,” I murmured.
“The maestro is you,” he replied, smiling.
He accepted my invitation. We sat down in a cafe on Calle de Brasil, Filopater with his heavy typewriter (as big as his head) under his arm and eventually occupying a chair at our table, mute now but invited.
He looked at the typewriter. “Do you know? Each word you write strikes a blow against the Devil.”
I wanted to laugh, amiably. He extended his hand and stopped me.
“As always, I listen to you with respect, Maestro.”
I shouldn’t call him that, he replied with a moment of annoyance. He was only a scribe and that, he said, was enough (he wanted to hurry on to two things) to explain his history. When we were served our coffee, he evoked Saint Peter, “If you cannot be pure, be careful,” and concluded with the words of Saint Thomas, “Only virginity can make a man equal to an angel.”
“What do you want to tell me, Father?”
He resigned himself to my calling him that as long as I forgot about “Maestro.” He was about to sigh. He looked at me like someone picking up an old conversation. As if no calendars had intervened between today’s and yesterday’s words.
“I would like to have been a Trappist,” he said with a smile. “The brothers of La Trappe can communicate only with feet or hands, gestures and whistles. On the other hand, look at me. If not a Trappist then trapped in the trammels of the word…”
“You taught us not to be afraid of words,” I recalled with good intentions.
“But there are those who do fear the word, Josue, and I say this intentionally. Jesus said ‘I am the Word’ and he meant several things-”
“He meant that he was part of the Trinity,” I recalled and repeated with a kind of red-faced enthusiasm, as if not only my youth depended on this memory but my farewell to it: The reencounter with our teacher indicated to me that a cycle was ending but the next one was slow in showing itself.
“I mean that the Trinity is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit… and the Word is an attribute of the Spirit but is shared in by the Father, the Son…”
I wanted to see admiration in Filopater’s eyes. I found only compassion. Because he knew what I meant, he was going to say the same thing, and we felt sorry for each other for knowing and saying it, as if we could be not only pre-Christians but true pagans, absent from faith in Christ because we were ignorant of it, but condemned to being absent even if we did know about it.
“The Trinity is a mystery,” he began to speak again. “It cannot be known by reason. It is a revealed truth. It puts faith to the test. Either you believe, Josue, or you don’t believe.”
I wasn’t going to tell him I had stopped believing because he knew I had never believed. That’s why he immediately said: “The surprising thing is that, at the same time, the Trinity, the Word, transcends reason but is not at war with reason.”
“The dogma of the Trinity is not incompatible with reason?” I asked, because I wanted to push Filopater’s words to a proposition that wasn’t a conclusion but a confrontation. His current state told me clearly that something serious had occurred to make him abandon teaching, which had been his vocation since his youth, when he taught the Pizarro Leongomez brothers at the Javeriana in Bogota and then, when the rough tides of Colombian politics washed him up in Mexico, he landed in our secondary school.
“No,” he said with renewed energy. “It isn’t. But that is the truth clerical intolerance can employ against a person if he attempts to reconcile the truth of faith and the reason of truth. It is not only easier”-did I detect an unusual disdain in the priest’s voice?-“it is more cowardly. For as long as we maintain that faith is true though it may not be factual, you will be protected by a dogma that is a paradox we owe to Tertullian: ‘It is certain because it is impossible.’ A definition of faith…”
The coffee was bad, with milk it was worse. Filopater sipped it almost as a sacrifice. He was Colombian.
“If you wager, on the other hand, on the rationality of faith, you expose yourself to the censure of those who prefer to deny reason to religion only because they wouldn’t know how to explain their faith rationally, and therefore opt for a blind faith, an ignorant faith.”
Filopater became excited.
“No.” He banged on the table and knocked over the glass bowl of sugar, spilling it. “One must sustain the mystery with reason and fortify reason with mystery. Faith does not exclude reason and reason does not destroy faith. Saying this exposes the dogmatic man, the passive man, the man who wants to impose a truth like the Inquisitors beneath whose walls you found me sitting this morning, or hides behind the wall denying the work of God-”
“What is it?” I asked with a certain impertinence. “The work of God, what is it?”
“The redemption of the world by means of the wearisome affirmation of human reason.”
The glass sugar bowl had rolled off the table onto the floor, where it shattered, granulating the floor like a snowstorm that has lost its way in the tropics.
The owner of the cafe hurried over, alarmed, annoyed, a woman submissive to patrons.
“
MOVE LIKE TIGERS. Study the sites. They walk through public offices. They find out. Where are the telephone and telegraph installations? Which seem the places of least resistance? The Zocalo? The Paseo de la Reforma? The distant shantytowns, Los Remedios, Tulyehualco, San Miguel Tehuizco? The government ministries of state, post offices, private businesses, apartment houses? Study them all. Tell me which ones you like. Recruit in the penitentiaries. I, Jerico, will see to it that by my order Maxi Batalla, Sara Perez, Siboney Peralta, Brillantinas, Gomas, and Ventanas are released, an order from the office of the president, signed by me, is enough, and the president will never know. Let the criminals join up with the laborers who can’t get across the border; promise them good jobs in California; promise the unemployed in Mexico City, the unsatisfied workers, that they’ll be rich and won’t have to work; promise: promise the migrant workers thrown out of the United States, their families who
