gleams opaquely. An alliance for the rest of our lives, a plan for life to keep us together forever. But on that occasion, hadn’t he proposed obligations all imposed by him? Do this, don’t do the other, turn down frivolous social invitations. And you’ll also despise “the herd of oxen.” But let’s also make a “selective, rigorous” plan for reading, for intellectual self-improvement.
That’s how it was, and now I’m grateful for the discipline he and I imposed on ourselves and deplore the docility with which I followed him in other matters. Though I congratulate myself because, when we lived out our destinies, he and I respected our secrets, as if part of the complicity of friendship included discretion about one’s private life. He didn’t find out about Lucha Zapata and Miguel Aparecido, or I knew nothing about Jerico’s life during his-how many were they?-years somewhere else. Europe, North America, the Border? Today I couldn’t say. Today I’ll never know if Jerico told me the truth. Today I know nothing about Jerico’s identity except the blinding truth of my fraternal relationship with him. I couldn’t blame him for anything. I had hidden as much about myself as he did. The terrible thing was to think that, “put in a safe place,” Jerico would never be able to tell me what he didn’t know about himself, what, perhaps, he would dare tell me if he knew, as I did, that we were brothers.
Understanding this filled me with rancor but also with sorrow. Once, when he had returned to Mexico, I wondered if we could take up again the intimacy, the shared respiration joining us when we were young. Was all we had lived merely an unrepeatable prologue? I insisted on thinking our friendship was the only shelter for our future.
It was hard and painful for me to think our entire life had resolved into terms of betrayal.
And too, as if to soften the pain, the moments returned of a strange attraction that did not lead to the encounter of bodies because a tacit, equally strange prohibition stopped us at the brink of desire in the shower at school, in the whore’s bed, in our cohabitation in the garret on Praga…
Had friendship stopped at the border of a physical relationship subject to all the accidents of passion, jealousy, misunderstanding, and attribution of unproven intentions that torment yet attract lovers? In mysterious ways, the desire felt under the shower or in the brothel was subject to this mysterious prohibition, as strong as the desire itself. A desire that, seen from a distance, is the first passion, the passion for cohabitation and contiguity, while the incestuous desire is confused with these virtues and therefore prohibited with a strength that can deny fraternity itself…
What could we do then, he and I, except feel like forbidden gods? We had the permanent possibility of violating the commandment regarding a prohibition only the gods can transgress against without sin. Who prevented us? How easy it would be for me today, after everything that has happened, to imagine it was the “call of the blood” holding us back. The feeling in the deepest part of ourselves that we were brothers without ever knowing it… Or perhaps he and I had no reason to turn to incest, since incest between siblings is a rebellion against the parents (says Sigmund from the couch) and we did not have father or mother.
The truth, I tell myself now, is that time and circumstances moved us away from all temptation: When Jerico returned from his absence (Europe? the United States? the Border?), facts themselves gradually divided us, doubts began to appear, perhaps Jerico’s Naples wasn’t Naples, Italy, but Naples, Florida, and his Paris was in Texas… Elective affinities emerged first with cordiality, then with growing antagonism in our workplaces, in my slow apprenticeship in the Utopia tower while he ascended rapidly in the Palace of La Topia. I was an open book. Jerico was a message in code. Perhaps this was what I wanted. Wasn’t my life a secret to everyone except me, and if it no longer was it’s because now I’m telling and writing it. Perhaps Jerico, like me, is the author of a secret book like mine, the book I knew nothing about as he knew nothing of mine. The sum of secrets, however, did not abolish the remainder of evidence. Jerico had wielded a real influence on presidential power. He had felt authorized to go beyond the power granted him to the power he wanted to grant himself. He made a mistake. He thought he would deceive power but power deceived him. And when he found out about it, my poor friend, cornered by the reality his illusions disdained, the only recourse he found to save his personality was to fall in love with Asunta… He wanted to defeat me in the final territory of triumph, which is love. And even there, Asunta handed me the victory. She defeated Jerico by telling him she was my lover.
Why did she lie? What caused her to give the coup de grace to the large animal, the living, palpitating thing beyond all logic, the carnal and cruel, aflame and affectionate thing that is friendship between two men? Two men who are brothers though they don’t know it and move into fierce enmity perversely incited by Asunta Jordan: For the first time, my brother Jerico desired a woman and that woman, in order to humiliate and paralyze Jerico, declared she was my lover, awarding me a sexual laurel I did not deserve. Asunta presented to her Jehovah, Max Monroy, Abel-Josue’s harvest and Cain-Jerico’s, and since the terrestrial God preferred mine to his, Jerico the fratricide was prepared to kill me. I believe now the failure of his political insurrection, the way in which he deceived himself about the desire and the number of his followers, was identical to his blindness: Jerico could not distinguish between the reality of reality and the fiction of reality. Now I understand, finally, that this, the fiction, was imposed on reality because it came closest to my brother’s fratricidal desire: His war perhaps was not against the world but against me. A latent war that had gone on forever, put off perhaps because Jerico’s personality was stronger than mine, his triumphs more apparent, his capacity for intrigue greater, his alliance with the secret more covert: personality, success, imagination, mystery.
These were my brother’s weapons, except he couldn’t use them against me because… Why? Now as I enter San Juan de Aragon Prison thanks, once more, to the good offices of Licenciado Antonio Sangines, now as I pass the cells from which they look at me like caged animals: the Cuban mulatto Siboney Peralta, the thieves Gomas and Brillantinas, the Mariachi, and Sara P., all of them behind bars, I look down, toward the swimming pool of imprisoned children, deficient Merlin with the shaved head, and Albertina who was a boy who was a girl, and the eloquent Ceferino guilty of being abandoned, and Chuchita looking at her tears in the mirror, and the girl Isaura dreaming about a volcano, and Felix the very sad happy boy, and right there Jerico and Josue passed like phantoms, and now I ask myself why, if we were so fraternal, so protected after all, so far from the ruined destinies of these children of Aragon, why weren’t we Felix and Ceferino and Merlin, abandoned children, helpless like our brother Miguel Aparecido? In this strange prison counterpoint, the figure of Asunta Jordan abruptly appears in my head like a sudden revelation. Asunta, Asunta, she prevented the repetition of the biblical verdict and at the same time guaranteed it. Jerico, once Castor, did not kill me, his brother Pollux, because this time Cain did not kill Abel, I found out now, just today, thanks to her, thanks to the woman, thanks to Asunta Jordan who deflected the destiny of the deadly, ancient story: Jerico did not destroy Josue, Cain did not kill Abel thanks to the woman, the seer, the priestess, the enchantress emerged from a desert on the border between life and death, rescued from mediocre obscurity by a man who recognized in her, by simply taking her by the waist during a provincial dance, an earthly strength, the power that he, subject to the voracious whims of his mother, did not have: Would she, the woman desired, admired, feared, censured by me, be the author of my salvation? She condemned my enemy brother. She, on the pretext of saving him from Carrera’s revenge, took him to the mansion of Utopia and exhibited him there to me, degraded him in my presence, in my presence put him naked on all fours and took away from him the fratricidal destiny of killing me on the pretext of jealousy…
Pre-text. Ah, then what will be the text?
IF I SEND you someone, Miguel Aparecido, tell, talk, don’t leave him unfed. Remember.
He was the same. But different. The blue-black eyes flecked with yellow. A violent gaze tempered by melancholy. A sadness that rejected compassion. Very heavy eyebrows. A dark scowl and eyes flashing light. A virile face, square-jawed, carefully shaved. Light olive skin. An inquisitive nose, straight and thin. Graying hair, combed forward, curly in the back.
He was the same. But he was my brother.
Did he know? For how long? Did he not know? Why?
He shook hands in the Roman style, clasping my forearm and showing me once again a naked power that ran from his hand to his shoulder.
“Twenty years.”
“Why?”
“Ask him.”
How could I demand a reply to something that went beyond us and defined us? Children of the same father and mother. I saw Miguel Aparecido’s face, immobile and defiant. I was troubled by the image of our father Max Monroy and his abominable droit de seigneur in the asylum. I imagined him at night, or by day, what difference did it make, going to the asylum to visit our mother Sibila Sarmiento. She was locked away. I don’t know if she looked forward to Monroy’s arrival as a possible salvation or as a confirmation of her sentence. Perhaps she knew only
