Destiny and Desire

disguising her origin as a provincial wife dominated by an unhappy macho, and I knew she was victorious, in possession of the plot. Subject to Max’s design but independent of him: Asunta had made Jerico believe she was my lover, that in this building the only Utopia was the erotic satisfaction she and I gave each other and I, beyond the nurse Elvira Rios and the abandoned Lucha Zapata, had fulfilled my sexual life in nights of ecstasy with Asunta Jordan. Fuck me!

Asunta told this to Jerico. In this way Jerico’s treason was avenged, even though Monroy had been the author of his salvation, which still needed to be demonstrated.

None of it mattered.

My world collapsed with Jerico’s murderous look. I didn’t want to believe that behind our long and proven fraternal friendship, disdain was the mask of the hatred that was the real face of our relationship. Because concentrated hatred is what gleamed around the maw of a Jerico animalized by defeat, by Asunta’s erotic disdain, by Monroy’s probable deception, by the political triumph of President Carrera, by the humiliation of knowing that if not for Asunta’s appearance in the apartment on Calle de Praga, he, Jerico, would have been a victim of the fugitive law, shot in the back as he tried to escape, or locked up in San Juan de Aragon with his miserable conspirators. Exposed to the implacable vengeance of Miguel Aparecido.

I feared for him.

I should have feared for myself.

SO YOU’RE GOING to write your thesis on me, Josue? What do you plan to say? Are you going to repeat the same cliches? Niccolo Machiavelli, calculating, hypocritical, the icy manipulator of the power he never wielded, only advised? Are you going to talk about my mainstays, necessity, virtue, fortune? Are you going to write that necessity is the stimulus for political action though in its name there is also betrayal and ambition? Are you going to repeat that virtue is a manifestation of free will though it can also be the mask of the hypocrite? And, finally, are you going to say that I compare fortune to feminine inconsistency, capricious and inconstant, concluding that the man who depends on it least endures longest?

Machiavelli the misogynist! Didn’t I marry Marietta Corsini to obtain, in a single hymen, both virginity and fortune? Ah, Josue, don’t repeat the tired phrases that pursue me from century to century. Be bolder. Have the audacity, my young friend, to penetrate my true biography, not the one by “serious” historians, no, but the one about my real, vulgar, crude, lustful existence: Niccolo Machiavelli says it aloud so everyone can hear: “I don’t know anything that gives more happiness, doing it, thinking about it, than fornication. A man can philosophize all he wants, but this is the truth.” That’s what I wrote, and now I repeat it to you. Everybody understands it. Few say it. You can quote me. It irritates me that people are ignorant of my taste for women and sex. Let them be ignorant! What difference does it make! But if you’re going to write truthfully about me, you’ll repeat with me: Sweet, trifling, or weighty, sex creates a network of feelings without which, it seems to me, I could not be happy.

Look at them: One is named Gianna, another Lucrecia, still another La Tafani. I’ll tell you something beyond their names: Desire responds only to nature, not morality. La Riccia was a prostitute well known all around Florence? That does not diminish in the least the pleasure she gave me. She was my lover for ten years. It didn’t matter to her when my fortunes changed. She didn’t change. Friends changed. She did not. And La Tafani? Charming, refined, noble, I can never praise her as she deserves. Love entangled me in her web. They were nets woven by Venus, my young friend, soft and sensitive… Until the day the nets harden and imprison you and you can’t undo the knots and don’t care about the punishment. Don’t forget, Josue, all love is pardoned and pardonable if it gives you pleasure. I had relations with women and also with men. It was another time. Homosexuality was common in Florence.

In general, all my love had sweetness, because loved flesh gave me delight and because when I loved I forgot my troubles, so much so that I preferred the prison of love to having freedom, yes freedom, ay! granted to me.

I remember and savor all this because The Prince, the work you’re studying on the instructions of your Professor Sangines, was received in 1513 as the work of the Devil (Niccolo Machiavelli, Old Nick, the Demon, the double of Beelzebub, Belial, Azazel, Mephistopheles, Asmodeus, Satan, the Deva, the Cacodemon, the Evil One, the Tempter, and more familiarly, not only Old Nick but also Old Harry, Old Ned, the Dickens, Old Scratch, the Prince of Darkness), all because I brought light to the business of politics, deceived no one, told them this is the way things are, like it or not, it isn’t a moral judgment of mine, these are our political realities, read me seriously, I am inspired not by darkness but by light, learn that a good government is in accord only with the nature of the time and a bad government is opposed to the spirit of the time, learn that old governments are secure and manageable and new governments dangerous because they displace the authorities of previous governments and leave their own followers dissatisfied because they thought with power they would obtain everything that can be given only with an eyedropper in the tension between the legitimacy of its origin, which in no way assures the legitimacy of its exercise…

Why go on? Politics is simply the public relationship among human beings. Freedom is the regularization of power. Men are mad and want to see the origin of power in sacred revelation, in nature, in race, in a social contract, in revolution, and in law. To them I say no. Power is simply the exercise of necessity, the mask of virtue, and the chance of fortune. Unbearable. Do you know, to restore my spirits, sometimes I return to the countryside and change clothes. I put on togas and medallions, gold sandals and laurel wreaths, and then, alone, I converse with the ancients, with the Greeks and Romans, my peers…

It is a great lie: a fiction. The truth is I need the city. I love the city, its works, its plazas, its stones, its markets, its bodies. The sweetness of a face allows me to forget my sorrows. The heat of sex invites me to leave my family, making them think I have died. Madness!

And still, here I am back in office, serving the Prince, remembering perhaps that love is mischievous and escapes from the liver, the eyes, the heart. Only the administration of the city-politics, the polis-saves me, Josue, from the suicidal ardor of sex and the onerous imagination of the historical past as I wait for my trip to hell, a much more amusing place than heaven.

Understand, then, my smile. Understand the portrait of me by Santi di Tito in the Palazzo Vecchio. Do you see now why I smile? Do you realize there are only two comparable smiles, the Giaconda’s and mine? She was the Mona Lisa. Will I be the Mono Liso, Smooth Monkey? There is no risk. If you like, call me, in Mexican, Machiavelli, Chango Resbaloso, Slippery Monkey.

“JERICO’S MISTAKE,” SANGINES remarked during this new lunch, now in the Danubio on the Calles de Uruguay, “consisted in believing a dissatisfied mass would follow a revolutionary vanguard. He didn’t see two essential things: First, that the revolutionary masses are an invention of the revolutionary vanguard. Second, that when the masses have moved it’s because they have reached the end of their patience. That doesn’t happen here-or hasn’t happened yet. Most people believe they can achieve a better situation. People make promises to themselves. People, if you like, deceive themselves. Go away. Fine. The worker goes as a migrant to California, Oregon, the Carolinas. Fine. But people see the ads and what they want is to be like that, like the ad. Have a car, their own house, go on vacation, whatever, fuck the ‘Classy Blonde.’ Have you seen, Josue, the faces of people when they come out of a movie, imitating-unconsciously, no doubt-the star they’ve just seen?”

“Nicole Kidman,” I intervened just to say something, when I should have paid attention to the platter of shellfish the Danubio waiter had placed in front of me. “Errol Flynn,” I added, unusual for me, in memory of Baldy, our friend, but also with a certain mockery, as if Sangines were teaching me what I already knew and I, out of respect, was pretending I was still learning, as I did when I was his student at the law school.

“We have created a society,” Sangines continued while, as was his custom, he made little balls out of bread crumbs, “which for the most part wants to move up, have things, cars, women, clothes, sun, and if you press me, an education for the children, life insurance, social security, hospital and television insurance.”

“Bread isn’t enough,” I tried to interject like a French monarch. “They want cake.”

Sangines smoothed the tablecloth as if to rid it of wrinkles or crumbs-and to avoid paying attention to me.

“There are also desperate ways out,” he argued so as not to withdraw. “Go as a migrant worker to the United States, defy the guards’ bullets, the barbed wire, the walls, the truck in which the coyotes can abandon you or leave you to suffocate…”

Did the restaurant tablecloth, white and bare, resemble a desert along the border? Were the salt and pepper shakers beacons that would guide the position of our dishes, already ordered, on their way, bean soup, ceviche,