Monroy. I know he returned to prison in order not to do it, to distance himself from the temptation of parricide… I understand him, Don Antonio, I understand Miguel, I swear I do.”
“Instead”-I don’t know if Sangines smiled or if the play of lights turned on suddenly along the avenue feigned the smile-“let the boys stand on their own feet. Let them know difficulties. Let them achieve happiness and power on their own. But don’t let the destiny of Miguel Aparecido be repeated, the abandonment and crime determined by my powerful, invincible mother, Dona Concepcion.
“Do not let it be repeated,” Sangines said two or three times. “Let my sons be formed alone but not forsaken. Let them count on everything, house, servants, monthly allowances, but not with the deadly cushioning of a rich father, not with lassitude, abandon, frivolity, the unfortunate security of not having to do anything in order to have everything. Let them have something in order to have something. I’ll put them to the test. You send them the money each month, Licenciado. Let them lack for nothing. But not have too much of anything. I want their own life for my sons, without guilt or hatred…”
Clearly Sangines, for the first time, confronted his emotion, abandoned the upright gravity of a discreet lawyer and prudent adviser, freed himself for a kind of catharsis that moved more quickly than the car when it left the traffic circle at Insurgentes to take Florencia to the Paseo de la Reforma.
I looked at him with amazement. He wanted to abandon discretion, gravity, not simply rein them in.
“He left them free, without the intolerable pressures and distorted affections of a mother,” Sangines said in his new emotional tessitura.
“He left them? Who?” I tried unsuccessfully to clarify. “Them…? Who…?”
“He left them free so they could be themselves and not a projection of Max Monroy…”
“Free? Who, Maestro? Who is it you’re talking about?” I insisted, calmly.
“Let my sons not repeat my life…”
“My sons? Who, please? Who?”
“Let them create their life and not be content with inheriting it. Let them never believe there is nothing left to do…”
The Mercedes stopped in front of the apartment building on Calle de Praga. A feeling of malaise, of uneasiness, together with a humiliating sensation of having been used, impelled me out of the car.
“Goodbye, Maestro…”
Sangines got out too. I took out the key and opened the door. Sangines followed me, disturbed and nervous. I began to climb the stairs up to the top floor. Sangines followed warily, impatiently, with something resembling pain. I didn’t recognize him. I imagined his actions were driven by a duty perhaps not his own. Actions driven by someone else. Such was the nervous preoccupation of his behavior.
The stairway was dark. On my floor the light was not turned on. Everything was shadows and reflections of shadows, as if total darkness did not exist and our eyes, don’t they eventually become accustomed to the blackness, in the end denying its dominion?
“He didn’t want to leave them adrift in crime, like Miguel Aparecido,” Sangines said urgently.
I didn’t reply. I began to walk up. He came behind me, like an unexpected ghost in need of the attention I denied him, perhaps because I feared what he was telling me now and could reveal to me later. But there was no later, the lawyer wanted to talk now, he pursued me from step to step, he didn’t leave me alone, he wanted to snatch away my peace…
“They let Max Monroy into the asylum.”
“The asylum?” I managed to say without stopping, compelled to reach the sanctuary of my garret, astonished by the lack of logical continuity in a man who taught the theory of the state with the precision of a Kelsen.
“He maintained the asylum, he gave them money.”
“I understand.” In spite of everything, I wanted to be courteous.
“They let him in. They left him alone with the woman.”
“Who? With whom?”
“Sibila Sarmiento. Max Monroy.”
I was going to stop. The name halted my movements but hurried my thoughts. Sibila Sarmiento, Max Monroy’s young bride, locked away in the madhouse by the wickedness of Antigua Concepcion.
“Miguel Aparecido’s mother…” I murmured.
Sangines took my arm. I wanted to pull away. He didn’t let me.
“The mother of Jerico Monroy Sarmiento one year and of Josue Monroy Sarmiento the next.”
“HE’S IN A safe place.” The phrase repeated by Sangines and Asunta regarding Jerico’s destiny tormented me now. It referred to my brother. It brought up huge questions associated with memories of our first meeting at the Jalisco School, El Presbiterio… Was that encounter prepared beforehand too, wasn’t it simple chance that brought my brother and me together? To what extent had Max Monroy’s desire directed our lives? Beyond the monthly allowances each of us received without ever finding out where they came from. Who argues with good luck? Beyond the coincidences we didn’t want to question because we took them as a natural part of friendship. Through my memory passed all the acts of a fraternity that, I knew now, were spontaneous in us but watched over and sponsored by third parties. And this was a violation of our freedom. We had been used by Max Monroy’s feelings of guilt.
“Believe me, Josue, Max felt responsible for the destiny of Miguel Aparecido, Miguel threatened him with death, Max knew the fault lay with Dona Concepcion, he didn’t want to blame her, he wanted to make himself responsible, and the way to take on the obligation was to take charge of you and Jerico, making certain you wouldn’t lack necessities but that extravagance wouldn’t make you slack, this was his moral intuition: You should be free, make your own lives, not feel grateful to him…”
Sangines said this to me in the stairwell.
“Did he intend to reveal the truth to us one day?” I became confused and was angry with Sangines. “Or was he going to die without telling us anything?”
I regretted my words. When I said them I understood I had associated fraternally with Jerico, and I knew if Sangines revealed Max’s secrets it was because Max had already exiled Jerico, as if he had tested us all our lives and only now Jerico’s gigantic, crucial mistake gave me primogeniture. Jerico-it was the sentence without reason or absolution-had been put in a safe place… What did it mean? My uneasiness, at that moment, was physical.
There was an anxious pulse similar to a heartbeat in Sangines’s words. “Max allowed desire and luck to play freely in order to form destiny-”
“And necessity, Maestro? And damned necessity? Can there be desire or destiny without necessity?” I looked at him again without really making him out in the gloom, believing my words were now my only light.
“You didn’t lack for anything…”
“Don’t tell me that, please. I’m speaking of the necessity to know you are loved, needed, carnal, warm. Do you understand? Or don’t you understand anything anymore? God damn!”
“You didn’t lack for anything,” Sangines insisted as if he would continue, to the last moment, fulfilling his administrative function, denying the emotions revealed by his avid, nervous, anxious figure, I don’t know, distant from what he was but also revealing what he was.
“And Jerico?” I stopped, photographed in front of myself like a being of lights and fugitive shadows.
“He’s in a safe place,” Sangines repeated.
The phrase did not calm the vivid but painful memory of my fraternity with Jerico, the intense moments we had together, reading and discussing, assuming philosophical positions at the request of Father Filopater. Jerico as Saint Augustine, I as Nietzsche, both led by the priest to the intelligence of Spinoza, transforming the will of God into the necessity of man. Were we, in the end, loyal to necessity in the name of will? Was this what my brother and I desired as a goal when we loved each other fraternally? Did our great rapport consist of this, associating necessity with will?
One scene after another passed through my mind. The two of us united at school. The two of us convinced not having a family was better than having a family like the Esparzas. We had signed a pact of comradeship. We felt the warm teenage satisfaction of discovering in friendship the best part of solitude. Together we made a plan for life that would bring us together forever.
“Maybe there will be, you know, separations, travel, broads. The important thing is to sign right now an alliance for the rest of our lives. Don’t say no…”
For the rest of our lives. I remember those afternoons in the cafe after school and the other side of the coin
