Now I listened, thought, saw, and felt a profound sadness, as if Jerico’s defeat were mine. As if the two of us had lived a great intellectual dream that, in order to exist, did not tolerate the test of reality. In the final analysis, were my friend and I barely hangers-on of anarchy, never makers of revolution? Did ideas we had read, heard, assimilated lose all value if we put them into practice? Was our confusion of ideas and life so great? Didn’t those ideas resist the breath of life, collapsing like statues made of dust as soon as reality touched them? Were we becoming illusions?
The gang of the Mariachi and Sara P., Siboney Peralta, Brillantinas, Gomas, and Ventanas returned to the San Juan de Aragon Prison. Miguel Aparecido was waiting for them there.
The president withdrew first from the Castle, muttering to himself (Asunta heard him), “In the old days the hangman sold the boiled flesh of his victims,” and Max, who followed seconds later, remarked to Asunta: “It’s one thing to be based in reality. It’s another to create reality.”
And right after that: “Let’s go, the sun’s very strong and in the light of day one makes many mistakes.”
The president simply sighed: “Making decisions is very boring. I swear…”
He was on his way out.
“MISERABLE OLD FOOL. Useless old bastard. Damn mummy.”
Miguel Aparecido punched the wall of his cell, speaking in a wounded, vengeful tone of voice, sonorous and stifled, as if rather than words coming out of his mouth there were animals: insects, rodents, turkeys, grebes, bustards, and mandrakes, so intimate to his mind was the word and so desperate was it to find ways out, similes, survivals.
“Lock up a man whose hands are tied with a cat, then ask him to defend himself.”
He looked at me with ferocity.
“He’ll defend himself with his teeth. There’s no other way.”
What had disturbed him so much? He had won. The criminals released through Jerico’s influence were back behind bars and I wouldn’t guarantee their future. Jerico’s transient power-his whim-had done something more than free a gang of bandits. It had violated the will of Miguel Aparecido, the master of the prison, the top dog, the big fucker inside these walls. Miguel felt mocked.
Still, there was something in his rage that went beyond Jerico, the flight from and return to prison of the criminals, the mockery of the very will of the man with the olive skin and yellow eyes and self-willed muscles, kept hard and flexible thanks to the discipline of imprisonment, as if the days and months and years of prison counted in a rogue’s exercises, his knee flexions, air punches, arms extended in extremely hard flexion against prison walls, imaginary jump ropes, like a boxer who prepares for the big fight, overcoming through an act of will the noise of the city that filters through the corridors and catacombs of the prison.
He grabbed the newspaper. “Look,” he said, poking at the image of Max Monroy and, in passing, that of the president. “Look.”
I looked.
“Do you know he’s never allowed his picture to be taken?”
“The president? He’s always in the papers, on television, in displays… All that’s left for him is to announce the lottery.”
“Monroy,” said Miguel, as if all the bitterness in the world were concentrated in that name. A yellowish saliva ran along the prisoner’s lips. The tiger devoured by other bloodthirsty beasts in the Chapultepec zoo appeared, duplicated, in his eyes. “Monroy… motherfucker, at least he used to be discreet enough not to be photographed, the decency not to let himself be seen, the old bastard son of a bitch mother…”
I confess my discretion. Or my cowardice. I didn’t jump to the defense of my old friend from the graveyard, the “bitch mother” of Max Monroy, Antigua Concepcion.
“And worse, even worse,” Miguel said syllable by syllable, “even worse is that son of the great bitch whore, Max Monroy’s son.”
“Who is he?” I said, innocent (but uneasy?).
This is the story Miguel Aparecido told me that afternoon in a cell in the San Juan de Aragon Prison, after going on a while longer in his diatribe, the asked-for explanation and the unasked-for one as well. I felt a strange emotion: Miguel Aparecido seemed like an hourglass anxious to empty the contents of one hour into another, though anguished by the fatal flight of time. The flight of time was the evasion in his narrative and if I was his privileged listener, at that moment I still did not know to what degree, so intense, so personal, Miguel’s narration concerned me.
I thought at first he vacillated between emptiness and incoherence. I wanted to believe that at the end of the story both of us, he who was talking and I who was listening to him without saying a word, could find in ourselves something resembling compassion and from there pass on to comprehension. Now this was merely a desire (even an intention) of mine. Miguel Aparecido’s discourse took another direction.
He said he was imprisoned by order of Max Monroy. He quickly cut me off: Of course judicial requirements had been met. Of course he had a trial. Of course testimony was heard and a sentence was announced. “Of course I was condemned to thirty years in prison for a crime I didn’t commit… three decades of confinement starting at the age of twenty,” he remembered, but in the voice of someone who, when recalling, also commemorates.
He looked at me with a defiant air. “I behaved well, Josue. I swear I made an effort. I intended to be the best inmate in the pen. Punctual, hardworking, obliging. All of it contrary to my own character: cleaning toilets, removing excrement, mopping up vomit… All of it to get out of here. Get out for only one purpose.”
He was about to lower his eyes.
He didn’t.
“To kill. I wanted to get out to murder Max Monroy. For having accused me falsely. Of attempted murder. Now I wanted to deserve the accusation. I got out. I prepared for the act, and now I was serious. I haunted the Utopia building. I imagined a thousand ways to eliminate the son of a bitch. Suddenly he intuited it, he didn’t find out, he just smelled that something was going on because he knew I was free. He had to have thought: What do I do to lock up this bastard again? Because he had to have realized that in this second round, either he’d kill me or I’d kill him…”
Miguel Aparecido was making a great effort to keep his gaze fixed on me, eyes wide open, as yellow as those of a canid race, Miguel-wolf with the jaw as strong as a padlock, arms and legs imprisoned but longing to get out and race toward his prey, but sad, afflicted by the confinement he had imposed on himself, he reveals to me now, he stopped prowling around the offices of Max Monroy, returned to prison, asked for the help of Antonio Sangines, I want to go back to the pen, Licenciado, please have them take me back into jail, I beg you for your mother’s sake, please, save me from the crime, I don’t want to kill my father, if you really love Max Monroy return me to the pen, Lic, you can do it, you have influence, do me this favor, save me from sin by locking me up right away, accuse me of whatever you like, get me out of freedom, take away my desire to kill, save me from myself, put the chains of my freedom on me…
“I returned to prison, Josue. Sangines invented some crime for me. I don’t know which. I don’t remember anymore. I think he revived the earlier sentence for reasons that escape me. Sangines is a shyster. He knows all the tricks. He can resurrect the dead. He can get water from a stone. But he can’t erase the memory you drag behind you whether you’re free or in prison…”
SIBILA SARMIENTO WAS twelve years old when they decided she should be married. They all agreed that matrimony was very desirable but it would be better to wait for the girl to grow. For her first menstruation. For hair to grow under her arms. All of that. Sibila still played with dolls and sang children’s songs. Matrimony was desired. It was also premature, said the girl’s family.
The mother of the presumptive groom became enraged. An offer of marriage in the name of her son was not something you turned down. Marriage was not a question of hair or periods. It was an act of convenience. Sibila Sarmiento’s family knew perfectly well that only the wedding of their children, right now, without delay, would join the names and properties of the Sarmientos and the Monroys and the great unity and productivity of their lands- Michoacan, Jalisco, Zacatecas-would triumph in hard cold liquidity before the law of the market and succession divided them into parcels, or an act of reiterated demagoguery gave them to the campesinos, transformed them into communal lands, and threw us all into poverty.
“Do you know the song? ‘Just four
