This was the very mark of my relationship with Lucha Zapata, and if she was writing to me now she did so, I’m certain, in the name of chance and freedom. She did not betray herself. She was tossing a bottle into the sea. Would I read these pages? It would not depend so much on my desire as on my destiny. If I had not walked the streets of the Historic Center in search of clues to what Jerico was preparing (and wasn’t this, no matter how I disguised it as official duty, a sickly form of disloyalty to a friend?) I would not have run into Father Filopater on the Plaza de Santo Domingo. He could have rejected my approaching him. Out of a sense of decency. Because his new life was a break from his former one. Because I had no right to resurrect the past.
It didn’t happen that way. He received me, recognized me, remembered me, led me to his poor lodgings at the rear of a poisonous garden on Calle de Donceles where Filopater imitated the life of Spinoza, grinding lenses.
This matter could have ended there. If I hadn’t seen my old teacher for eleven years, why wouldn’t I have left him forever following our brief, accidental meeting? This is the question and no one is shielded from it. We met. We didn’t meet. If we didn’t meet, what things would not have happened? What opportunities would have been lost? What dangers avoided? But if we did meet, what things would happen? What opportunities would present themselves? What dangers would be realized?
Jerico was right: Perhaps we’re always at a great crossroads, a circular plaza with avenues radiating from it, each one leading in turn to other plazas from which other avenues radiate. Six, thirty-six, two hundred sixteen, infinite plazas, infinite avenues for a finite life guaranteed a direction only by what we make with our hands, our ideas, our words, forms, colors, sounds, not what we do with sex, social relationships, family life: These evaporate and no one remembers anyone after the third or fourth generation. Who was your great-grandfather, what was the name of your great-great-grandfather, what face did your most remote ancestor have, the one who lived before photography, the one who wasn’t lucky enough to be painted by Rubens or Velazquez? We are part of the distribution of the great collective forgetting, a telephone book with no numbers, a dictionary of blank pages where not even the fingerprints of those who turned them remain…
Why, then, did Lucha Zapata leave me this letter-confession in which she detailed her criminal life with individuals I came to know through the brothel life of my early youth, my visits to the Esparza house and the San Juan de Aragon Prison? Why did Lucha break the silence, the music of our love affair, with a criminal tale? Here Lucha Zapata appeared training in crime, first as one of the gangs of beggars, false blind men, cripples, the destitute, the incurable, whatever they desire, whatever destiny grants us. Lucha eating the bread of affliction on busy corners, from Avenida Masaryk to the road to the airport, her hand outstretched, reciting prayers, doggerel, God bless you, whatever Your Grace can spare, praise God, simulating bloody sores at the entrance to churches, hernias at the entrance to hospitals, fevers at the entrance to restaurants, allying herself in an ascending scale with thieves, thugs, pimps, houseboys who specialize in robbing houses, the pious who steal in churches, apostles who know how to use picklocks and open doors, bullfighters who steal from pedestrians in the light of day; hoodlums, paid killers, experts in knife fights, panderers, boys who work in brothels, aimless young people and old criminals as well who have no recourse but crime, old soldiers, ruined pensioners, those hounded by bankruptcy, late payments, overdue mortgages, devaluated currency, evaporated savings, discontinued jobs, nonexistent insurance, you see, Josue, how intertwined are virtue and destiny, chance and necessity, innocence and guilt in the legion of those who rob out of necessity because others, you know? need to steal or steal without need, as others kill for pleasure and others unnecessarily and others because they need to kill, are you charitable, do you understand, do you have enough charity to forgive if you know, Josue, or can you love only if you don’t know? Can you love Lucha Zapata only if you know nothing about Lucha Zapata?
Yes, she was a vision, an aviator expelled from the airfield for attempting to steal a twin-engine plane from a hangar, a specter in a cap and goggles and leather jacket who fell by chance into my arms when I said goodbye to Jerico who was flying off to study in France and I saw Sara P. pass by preceded by a false porter who turned out to be the bandit and mariachi Maxi Batalla. Was this the truth? Everything else fiction? The mariachi wasn’t beaten and mute as his poor mother thought but alive and well? Sara P. was part of the criminal gang organized by Jerico to attack power with violence because legality seemed useless to him and he confused revolutionary action with a police problem, which is what he received in return: disaster, flight, prison?
Everything eventually tied in a bundle that gathered up the threads of the plot in this chance encounter with Filopater and the reading, even more fortuitous, of a letter Lucha Zapata wrote to me without losing hope I would read it one day? “You don’t remember me” was the refrain of the letter. And again: “You gave me the pulse of happiness,” and once again: “I had to suffer to love you.”
A letter dictated to Filopater by Lucha.
Why? What did she know?
Couldn’t she write without needing an amanuensis?
Did Filopater have to be the scribe of our destiny?
Or was this a way to confess what she never would have told me in person, since our dealings with each other, you remember, went beyond all reference to the past? But the element of chance prevailed over Lucha’s desire. Perhaps I would never have walked through the Plaza de Santo Domingo. Perhaps I would never have seen Filopater again. This was the point at which our desire-Lucha’s and mine-and chance coincided. Dictating a letter to a public scribe in the hope I would find him and he would give me the letter to read. Like now, fulfilling a prophecy more than engaging in a coincidence, I did it, I read the letter.
At the beginning of everything, was there a kindergarten? Was there a hostile mother, embittered because youth is a seduction that doesn’t last, because her daughter felt sad and solitary and wanted to expel the shadows and the mother told her Don’t show your breasts and she told her mother I hate how you dress and they said things to each other like love is when things turn out well so the mother would return to her responsibility, didn’t I tell you, didn’t I say you could only live at your mother’s side? And Lucha wanted to preserve a moment, just one, precisely the one when mother and daughter were admired together, at the same time, what a nice pair, they look like sisters, expelling the shadows, the threat, the deception, Didn’t I tell you you could only live with your mother? before throwing herself out on the street, into voluntary beggary, crime, the company of Maxi Batalla and Sara P. and Siboney Peralta, Brillantinas and Gomas, the roguish and violent licenciado Jenaro Ruvalcaba of sad memory in this my course in criminality subject to the prison control of Miguel Aparecido but free, outside prison, free as a pack of hungry beasts, fangs sharpened, mouths slavering, eyes reddened by unwanted wakefulness, by Jerico’s political ambition.
I was part of all this history. I knew the distribution of desire and also of destiny. I had loved this woman who saved herself from crime and punishment thanks to her chance encounter with me in the airport and thanks to our life together, uneven, a real roller coaster of emotions, alcohol and drugs, good food and better sex: What did I have to complain about if I knew how to avoid the vices and enjoy the virtues? What?
ASUNTA JORDAN CAME into the apartment on Calle de Praga with all the authority of her bold gestures, imperiously clicking high heels, uniform of a high-level employee, ill-tempered face, eyes that managed to see my friend and me at the same time. She was peremptory and there was nothing to say. An armored car was waiting downstairs escorted by two more cars carrying armed people. I resigned myself. Jerico had a nervous reflex like that of a trapped animal. She played for a moment with my resignation and his fatal rebelliousness.
It wasn’t what we feared. Jerico was protected by Max Monroy from the presidential decision to annihilate him. Judas. Jerico was driven to Max’s building on Plaza Vasco de Quiroga, in the direction of Santa Fe. Asunta was in charge of the operation. Jerico, until he heard otherwise, would be hidden in an apartment in the Utopia building next to the one occupied by Asunta. I, with a bitter taste in my mouth, decided to remove myself, go to Filopater’s house, spend a week in that corner at the rear of the covered garden on Calle de Donceles and then return, perhaps purified, to the Santa Fe building. I read Lucha Zapata’s letter.
On my return I entered a rarefied atmosphere.
Asunta received me in her office without looking up from the computer that distracted her.
“He’s in the apartment on the thirteenth floor, next to mine. Take the keys.”
She tossed me a key ring and I picked it up, trying to guess her intention. I didn’t need keys. Max Monroy had a yen to live with open doors: “I have nothing to hide.”
It was his best disguise, I had understood that. The fact that the probable presence of Jerico required keys and locked doors alarmed me as we may be alarmed by the presence in our house of a ferocious animal we feed so it will survive but that we keep locked up so it doesn’t kill us.
I recalled the news item from the zoo. A tiger killed by the bites of other hungry tigers. Five tigers. Why was
