Destiny and Desire

the devoured tiger attacked, why that tiger and not any of the four attackers? What united the aggressors against an animal of their own kind? Was it pure chance, the bad luck of the fifth tiger? Could the victim have been the killer of another tiger?

The image of a caged Jerico produced in me the memory of an invisible figure, mobile in the extreme, my friend, who came and went in the city and the world without explanation, without identity papers, without even a second name: just Jerico, the perfect symbiosis of desire and destiny, free as the wind, without family ties, without known loves. Almost, if he weren’t so tangible in our familiarity, a phantom: my spectral brother, half of Castor and Pollux, the fraternal duality inconceivable in separation… Who had imprisoned the wind? Who had the free spirit under lock and key?

I knew the answer. Max Monroy. And the answer was added to the legion of questions I was asking myself at this time. What interest did Max Monroy have in rescuing Jerico and bringing him here, to the bosom of the large family, enterprise and home of Utopia? I imagined for a second it was all a ruse of Monroy’s to defy the president, demonstrating where real power was to be found. Did Monroy plant Jerico in the offices at Los Pinos only so my friend would deceive the president, making him believe in a false loyalty and using the springboard of power to stage an unsuccessful, ridiculous coup, failed beforehand, as Monroy expected, proving to the president that he, Monroy, possessed the information leading to the crisis, and by possessing the information he possessed real power: calibrating the threat, letting ambushes pass when they had no future, suffocating rebellions in the cradle, and cutting off their heads if they arose? Had it all been Monroy’s great masquerade for Carrera, a demonstration of where real power was to be found?

Or had Jerico’s actions been independent of Monroy? Had my friend acted, unsuccessfully, on his own, caught up in a dead illusion of revolt, impossible in the modern world of information and power, omnipresent under all circumstances, Orwell’s 1984 staged every day, without drama, without unnecessary symbols, without totalitarian cruelties, but disguised in the most absolute normality and accustomed to the technique of white-gloved castration?

Asunta Jordan did not look at me. Her complete attention was dedicated to reading the digital print, skipping the password, depending on two gigabytes of memory, connecting with the wireless net, showing me without even looking at me that the ideological world inhabited by poor Jerico was an illusion of the past, something as ancient as the pyramids.

“Older than a forest,” Max Monroy said about himself.

But if Jerico was an agent removed from both Carrera’s presidential and Monroy’s entrepreneurial power, whom did he represent? Himself, only that? You are aware of the mutual respect my friend and I had for each other. He did not inquire into my personal life and I did not try to find out about his. The question that remained shrouded was, of course, Jerico’s life during the obscure years of his absence. I acted in good faith. I loved my friend. I loved our old friendship. If he said he had been in France during that time, I believed him, no matter how false his French culture seemed to me and how conclusive his pop cultural references to the North American world. Did Jerico let slip Gringo exclamations intentionally-Let’s hug it out, bitch-and never French ones? Did he want me to know I was deceived, did his old habit of playing with reality get the better of him, deceiving to amuse, masking to reveal? Did he want to seduce me, put me in the position of asking about him, transform him into my own mystery, transfer to Jerico the questions I did not ask myself? Did he know perhaps that my mysteries were nonexistent? Did he know what I’ve recounted here, everything you know: my affair with Lucha Zapata, my relationship with Miguel Aparecido, my employment in Max Monroy’s enterprise, the recent revelation of Miguel Aparecido’s relationship to Monroy, my secret talks with Monroy’s mother, Dona Antigua Concepcion, and finally my infatuation with Asunta Jordan, the pleasure of the night and the humiliation of the next morning, the fugacity of my pleasure with her, and Asunta’s brazen, frightening giving of herself in her relationship of gratitude with the ancient tribal chief: Max Monroy?

Perhaps, with these questions, I disguised my own mystery, my origins prior to my life with Maria Egipciaca in the mansion on Berlin.

I felt I had voluntarily erased all memory before the age of seven, though I also think before that age we have no memory at all except what our parents tell us. I had no parents. Jerico, apparently, didn’t either. I’ve already recounted how he and I would congratulate ourselves on not having a family if the family was like that of our friend Baldy Errol. This was one more disguise, perhaps the most sophistic of all. The fact is Jerico had no second name because he had renounced it. His example led me to mention only very occasionally the one I had in school, at the university, at work. Josue Nadal. Perhaps I rejected it to emulate Jerico. Perhaps a last name with no known ancestry made me uncomfortable. Perhaps he and I preferred to be Castor and Pollux, legendary brothers, without last names.

In this gigantic puzzle, where was Jerico? Who was Jerico? I had the anguished feeling, located in the pit of my stomach, that I absolutely did not know the person I thought I knew better than anyone: my brother Jerico, protector of the fraternity of Castor and Pollux, Argonauts destined for the same adventure. Retrieving the Golden Fleece…

The naked man, the animal that received me in the secret apartment in Utopia, was on all fours on a rumpled bed.

I remembered him in the same posture, defiant but smiling, sure of himself, master of a future as mysterious as it was certain, in La Hetara’s whorehouse: Who knows what would happen, but it would happen for him, for Jerico, thanks to his desire and his destiny. And necessity? Could my friend exclude the necessary from the desired and the destined? I thought of him now as he was earlier, the day he announced his departure, moving like a caged animal around the space we shared, which had changed into a prison he was going to leave-without even imagining he would end up here, once more on all fours but this time really caged, shut in, a prisoner now as perhaps he always had been, of himself: Jerico under guard, mapping the prison of his bed.

His whitish body ended in a furious, disheveled head with bloodshot eyes, enraged lips, and murderous teeth, as if he had just devoured the tiger at the zoo. His body looked grotesque, elongated, in distorted perspective behind the blond head that encapsulated Jerico’s entire person then, as if everything pulsating in him, guts and testicles, heart and skeleton, were concentrated in a monstrous, aggressive head that was intestines, balls, claws, and blood of the animal walking on the bed on all fours, fixed on me, taking pride in his verbal ferocity, his feverish dialect, there are men loved by many women, Josue you bastard, there are men no woman loves, but I love just one, you’ve had them all, I love only one, let me have her, damn it, let me have her or I swear I’ll have you killed! Do you think you have a right to everything I didn’t have? You’re wrong, motherfucker! I’ll give you everything, like always, but let me have this woman, just one woman, why do you fuck with me, Josue you bastard, why don’t you let me have the only woman I desire, the only woman who’s made me feel like a man, the woman who captured me and mastered me and tore away from me mystery and the power to question, the woman who refuses to be mine because she says she’s yours and Asunta rejects me saying she belongs to you, she can’t be anybody else’s, you bastard motherfucker, free her you son of a bitch, let her go for my balls, aren’t we like brothers? Don’t we share whores? Why do you want Asunta all to yourself, damn miser, stop stabbing yourself, fucking pig, fix yourself up, Okay, that’s enough…

And he let out a savage shout:

“I’m going to kill you, you fucking pig, either you let me have that broad or I swear you’ll be pushing up daisies!”

He said this in so horrible a way, on all fours, naked on the bed, his testicles bouncing between his legs, his face that of a ferocious animal, as if everything truly Jerico had come out to be depicted on the threatening face that no longer belonged to the valiant companion Pollux but to the murderous brother Cain.

A naked Jerico slavered, in a bestial posture and concentrating on me, I realized, the frustrations so contrary to a life that took place on the stages of success, from school until today. Jerico the bold, the sharp, the triumphant, the protector, the mysterious, the one who didn’t show his cards and won the game with a poker face, was showing his cards now and he had nothing: not even a miserable pair of fives, not even when the lower numbers had been eliminated. It was this naked feeling-physically, morally naked-that concentrated the hatred of my brother Cain against me, and when Asunta appeared behind Jerico’s bed and I looked at her, I understood her perverse game. Whatever the motives of Max Monroy in saving Jerico from the president’s vengeance and bringing him to the shelter of Utopia, Asunta’s game, no matter how tangential to Monroy’s intentions, was what had mortally wounded Jerico.

I looked at Asunta at the rear of the bedroom, her arms crossed over her chest, the executive figure