forests and deserts, valleys and volcanoes that with a blow of his fist Cortes the Conquistador described to Carlos the Emperor: A wrinkled parchment, that’s what Mexico is. How to smooth it out?
“He was animated, Josue, by the dream and desire to found a collective kingdom together with a private empire. Is it possible?”
The capricious hail returned, like a purely nominal reality, to the Salto del Agua Fountain beside the Chapel of the Inmaculada Concepcion, and I imagined a country filled with thirst as a condition of purity. A parchment country.
“I don’t know, Maestro…”
He ignored me.
“A collective kingdom. A private empire. Ah! Impossible, my dear Josue, without the necessary final submission to political power. Except Max guessed what the change in Mexico would consist of: from a bourgeoisie dependent on the state to a state dependent on the bourgeoisie.”
“Without realizing,” I dared to interject, “that private empires are built on quicksand?”
I saw Sangines smile. “You had to count on incalculable factors…”
“And fame? How did Monroy administer his fame?”
Now Sangines burst into laughter. “A great reputation is worse than a bad one, which is better than no reputation at all. You must realize that Max Monroy opted for divine imitation. Like God, he is everywhere, and no one can see him.”
I caught the double meaning of the phrase. I abstained from commenting. I fought against the comfort of the Mercedes whose springs were putting me to sleep. I had said enough when I suggested Max didn’t know that the foundations of all power are pure illusion. The emperor has no clothes. We are the ones who dress him. And then, when we demand that he return them, the monarch becomes angry: The clothes belong to him.
“Max Monroy,” continued Sangines, “realized something. His peers, adversaries, accomplices, subjects, did not read and were not thoroughly informed, they navigated by trusting in pure instinct. Max transformed Unamuno into a kind of personal Bible that gave him, like an aureole of the spirit, the tragic sense of life. From this repeated reading he drew certain conclusions that differentiate and guide him, Josue. The worst vices are purity and presumption. Sharing sorrows is no consolation. And the question is this: How can we master our passions without sacrificing them?”
Behind the blurred windows of the car, the equally blurred forbidden images returned of Max Monroy and Asunta Jordan joined in the darkness of sex, blacker than the darkness in the bedroom, and when I once again expelled this vision from my mind, Sangines was commenting, as if he had read my indecent thoughts, that Max Monroy does not permit ambition and lust to impose on his reason.
“They can impose on his virtue. Not his reason.”
I remarked with audacity that our desires are one thing and our loyalties something else entirely, evoking the figures of Asunta Jordan and Lucha Zapata side by side.
“He doesn’t attempt to correct the errors of others,” Sangines said with a smile, “and he rejects well-known pleasures. Do you know something? Monroy has never gone to Aspen, where our wealthy feel they’re from the first world because there’s snow and they go skiing. He has never gone to Las Vegas, where our politicians return to chance what they seize from necessity.”
“What makes him happy, then?” I said as if I didn’t know, and emboldened, for no reason other than the severity of the words, by the name of Arcos de Belen that redeemed me from the anonymity of the nearby Plaza of Capitan Rodriguez M. beside the Registry Office. This enigma shifted my thoughts languorously: Who was Captain Rodriguez M., who could he have been to deserve his own plaza?
I don’t believe Sangines left his own question unanswered. He guessed it in my ignorance, and knowing it gave me a strange, quieter emotion. The lawyer went off on a tangent. He told me the penthouse occupied by Monroy in the Utopia building was the entrepreneur’s own utopia, as far as possible from what he called “the damn streets,” these same arteries along which Sangines and I were now driving, the “damn” streets Monroy saw from above with those eyes of broken glass.
“ ‘I forget the names of the streets,’ is what Max Monroy says from his vantage point. And it’s true.”
Sangines took my hand and immediately let it go.
“He’s beginning to be distracted. At times, I confess, he becomes incoherent…”
His words shocked me. “Why are you telling me this?”
“He says he no longer drinks because alcohol causes mental lapses and he doesn’t want to neglect his life and legacy. Things like that.”
“Asunta is his heir?” I asked, impertinent.
“He says old age is like a smuggler who puts ideas that aren’t yours into your head. He says his organs get ahead of his death.”
“Asunta is his heir?” I insisted.
I didn’t want to see Sangines’s twisted smile.
“At times he’s delirious. He says he’s walking alone and naked and crazy through a large empty plaza. That’s when Asunta protects him from himself.”
“You haven’t answered-”
“I heard him say to Asunta, ‘Will you live without me?’ ”
“What did she say?” I asked avidly, as if, when Max died, Asunta would really be bequeathed to me.
“She says, ‘Yes, but I won’t be able to love again without you.’ ”
The car braked at a green light because the opposite light was also green and cars screeched to a halt, blowing impotent horns.
“The end of life is sudden and inexplicable,” Sangines managed to say over the noise.
“Of power or of force?” I said in a voice so quiet he perhaps didn’t hear me, because he continued unperturbed.
“Believe me that one lives a final moment in which one’s life slips away in taking more and more pills, not for relief, not even to survive, Josue, but just to urinate. Like a-”
“An animal,” I interrupted brutally.
“The thing is… The thing…” murmured Sangines as if he doubted what he would say next. “The thing is…”
He didn’t look at me. He didn’t want to look at me. I obstructed his gaze.
“Miguel Aparecido isn’t an animal. He isn’t a thing. He’s the son of Max Monroy. Why don’t you talk to me about that, Maestro? That abandonment, that irresponsibility, just tell me this: Doesn’t that abandonment condemn Max Monroy’s entire life, doesn’t it disqualify him as a man and as a father?”
The noise of maddened car horns, police whistles, furious voices did not mitigate my own inflamed voice, as if, in the name of my friend Miguel Aparecido, I had acquired a recriminatory tone stronger than all the city’s cacophony, the din that penetrated in dissipated form all the way to Miguel Aparecido’s cell, as if Mexico D.F. would not grant peace even to prisoners-or the dead.
He decided to look at me. I wish I had avoided that. Because in Antonio Sangines’s gaze, when he and I were enclosed in a car stopped at the intersection of Chapultepec and Bucareli, I saw my own postponed truth, my own destiny deflected and eventually recovered, the lost origin of a child who lived on Calle de Berlin in the care of a tyrannical governess…
Sangines said calmly: “An entire life looking for one’s own place, one’s personal position. That’s what Max says. And he adds: I don’t want to give anything to anybody. Let them struggle. Let them stand on their own feet.”
“Who?”
“His sons,” said Sangines with a certain repentant brutality.
“His son, Miguel Aparecido,” I corrected him spontaneously.
“The hope that the courage and will demonstrated by him are repeated in his sons. That’s what you mean.”
“His son,” I repeated. “That’s what I mean-”
“Otherwise, the silver platter is the same as the silver bridge your enemy runs away on,” he insisted.
“I’ve visited Miguel Aparecido. You know that, Maestro. You allowed me to enter the Aragon prison. I know Miguel’s story. I know his father treated him with contempt and cruelty. I know Miguel left prison prepared to kill
