damn it.”
Monroy shook his head, sunk deep into his shoulders.
“Nobody has his way anymore,” he declared. “Everything’s on file. There’s no subversive movement that isn’t known. If I was late in informing you, it’s because most of these revolutions abort right away. They last as long as Indian summer. Why add to your worries, Mr. President? You have enough with preparations for your popular festivals.”
The president did not respond to the blow. He owed Monroy too much. Monroy felt just a little embarrassed, as if he had abused his own power.
“When it’s a question of serious matters, I’m at your disposal, Mr. President.”
“I know, Don Max, I know and I appreciate it. Believe me.”
Hadn’t Jerico, dressed in shadows, known what I knew in Monroy’s office thanks to Asunta’s information?
“Were we in the wrong age?” I asked with no irony.
He went on as if he hadn’t heard me. “Were we born in time or out of time?”
He said it was important for him to know that.
He evoked our childhood and early youth, both of us brought up without a family, without knowing our parents, without even knowing if we had parents, never knowing who supported us, paid for our schools, clothes, food…
“Because somebody supported us, Josue, and if we didn’t find out who for the sake of convenience pure and simple, because it was totally awesome to receive everything and owe nothing, we didn’t ask and nobody asked us either, our table was set, and did we deserve it, champ? Didn’t the moment come to rebel against a destiny others had made for you and go out and create your own destiny?”
I didn’t know what to say to him, except that his presence at that moment was for me like a tribute to the past he and I had shared. It was a way of telling him I had doubts about our friendship in the future. This was, after all, a moment of melancholy.
Jerico wasn’t a fool. He grasped my words at once and adapted them to his own situation, he was here and was the friend I avoided in order not to harm him and he, now, was seizing his neck as the rebellious poet seized the swan “with deceitful plumage.” Jerico wanted to twist his own neck, that was his dramatic vocation.
“Do you remember our first meeting, Josue? Remember it and then add on the facts of our relationship. Do you agree I was always the one who pushed you to act? Against school authority, against conventions of thought, against good manners, do you agree I always pushed you toward the path my life was opening for us?”
“It’s possible,” I replied, testing the shifting ground that spread before me.
“No,” he said fiercely. “Not possible. True. That’s how it was. I always went first, of course I did.”
“To a point.” I wanted to play along because I didn’t want the stormy confrontation Jerico’s gaze was sending out to me from the darkness.
“Believe it even if you don’t believe it.”
He laughed. I don’t know if he laughed at the situation, at me, or at himself.
“You stopped, Josue. You didn’t follow me to the end of the road.”
“The fact is there was a cliff at the end of the road,” I said with no desire to condemn him.
He took it differently. “You didn’t have the courage to walk with me to the end of the road. You didn’t cross the frontier with me, Josue. You didn’t have the courage to explore the evil in yourself. Because both of us always knew that just as we did good, we could do evil. Even more: the ‘better’ we were, the less complete we would be. Each action in our lives means roads to the edge of the abyss. One precipice is good. The other is evil. Don’t be confused, brother. You and I did not fall into good or evil. We simply walked along the street of ambiguity, both yes and no… A decision had to be made. There’s a moment that demands definition from us. Does it depend on where we are, whom we’re with, what influences us? Sure, I found myself at the center of political power. And from there, Jerico, my only option to be myself, to not turn into a puppet of power, was to oppose power with power, power of another kind, Jerico, the power of evil, because look, the power of good, where has it brought us? To a democracy that resembles a wheel with a mouse inside that runs and runs and doesn’t get anywhere. And did I opt for a different action? And did that action lead to the stigma of evil? Reclaim it for me, if you like. Go on.
He breathed like a tiger. “Yes. That’s what I did. Explored the evil in myself. I descended to the depths of my own evil and discovered that evil is the only valid enemy for a brave man. Evil as valor, do you understand? Evil as proof of your manhood.”
I reacted with modest annoyance.
“I don’t want the killing to go on, that’s all. I don’t want to smell more blood after the century we were born into, Jerico, the time of evil carried to the extreme of knowing itself as evil and celebrating evil as the great good of desire and destiny… It makes me sick, what about you, you bastard?”
(Before my open eyes passed the corpses in the trenches of the Marne and the camps of Auschwitz, in the blood-filled river of Stalingrad and the blood-filled jungle of Vietnam, the juvenile corpses of Tlatelolco and the victims in Chile and Argentina, the tortures of Abu Ghraib and the justifications, also corpselike, of Nazis and Communists, brutal soldiers and terrified presidents, Gringos maddened by the incomprehensible difference of not being like everyone else and French rationalists applying “the question” in Algeria: Now I told myself the probable summary of history is that we could analyze in detail and clarify the cultural modalities of the time but did not know how to avoid its evil. In the life of Jerico and Josue, how much was it worth to exalt the knowledge of good as a barricade against the preference for evil? Was our “culture” the dike against the Devil’s flood? Without us, would we all have drowned in the sea of evil? Or, with or without us, would the evil of the time have been manifest in measures that did not matter in the light of just one little girl screaming naked, burned forever, on a path in the jungle of Indochina? Of one little Jewish boy forced out of the Warsaw ghetto with his hands raised, the star on his coat and his destiny in his eyes?)
“I don’t want the killing to go on,” I said then in a way that may seem irrelevant. Just then it was the only response dictated to me by the situation. “I want us to go on being Castor and Pollux, the brothers who were friends.”
“Shall we be Cain and Abel, the brothers who were enemies?”
“That depends on you.”
“You didn’t have the courage. You didn’t go with me,” he insisted in a way that seemed desolate and lugubrious.
“I think you were wrong, Jerico. You misread the situation and acted accordingly. You acted badly.”
“Badly? Something had to be done,” he said in a tone of sudden modesty, fairly unexpected and chimerical in him.
“You can do something. You can’t do everything,” I responded with growing humility and blamed myself for treating a friend in a condescending way without meaning to. This was insulting. I was sure he didn’t realize it. Was I wrong?
There was no time to reply. We clearly heard footsteps on the stairs. It was midnight, and in this building, aside from our apartment, there were only offices that closed at seven. For an instant I thought Jerico was going to hide in the closet. He moved. He stopped. He listened. I listened. We listened. The footsteps were ascending. They belonged to a woman. The click of high heels revealed that. Both of us, separated by a couple of meters, waited. There was nothing to do except, for an instant, separate as if only one would have to die, alone.
The door opened. Asunta Jordan looked at us as if the two meters of separation did not exist. She looked at us as if we were one, Castor and Pollux, fraternal twins, not Cain and Abel, the brothers who were enemies.
She turned off the flashlight in her hand. It wasn’t necessary. The lights were on now. The purloined letter was in plain sight for everyone to see.
Outside, the Gothic statues of the Church of the Santo Nino de Praga did not give us their white smiles.
“I DIDN’T FINISH telling you,” said Lucha Zapata in the letter she dictated to Filopater that the priest handed to me now.
She didn’t finish? She didn’t even begin. And I never asked her: Tell me about your past. Not out of negligence. Out of love. Lucha Zapata gave me and asked for an affection in which memories were superfluous. This was how our relationship was established, without recollections but not amnesiac, because the absence of the past was a radical way of taking root in the present, love as the root of instant passion that remembers nothing and foresees nothing because it is self-sufficient.
