that this man, father of her three children, desired her with fury, stripped her without asking permission, gave in to the passion she inspired in him and that both of them, Max and Sibila, shared, she because even though in the fleeting moments of Max’s visits, she felt loved and needed, free to see herself naked with pleasure, overcome by the passion of the man who tore at her hair and kissed her mouth and excited her nipples and caressed her pubis, clitoris, and buttocks with an irresistible force that freed her from this prison to which her own lover had condemned her, because Sibila Sarmiento was pleasure when captive and danger when free. And Max Monroy loving Sibila physically, freely, and not by order of his tyrannical mother, had no other way to take his revenge-with no filial unease-on damned Concepcion.
Miguel Aparecido’s tiger-eyes told me he understood. He asked me to accept that Sibila our mother won the love of Max our father. This was enough compensation for her imprisonment in the hospital. She could receive Max’s love and be satisfied, almost grateful because she had the love of the world without its pitfalls. Eventually, receiving Max and making love to him was the same as being free without the dangers of life, the city, the world, which surrounded her like a gigantic threat dissipated only by the man’s visits and then by successive months of waiting: the birth of a son, and much later another, and soon after that a third, and all at the same time.
Miguel Aparecido. Jerico. Josue.
The Immaculate Conception descended on Sibila Sarmiento’s womb intermittently, unpredictably. For her-I imagine now-the instant was eternal, everything happened at the same time, there was no real time between the visits of the man who deflowered her at the age of twelve and the man who impregnated her after that, then again, and then a third time: I believe for her everything happened at the same moment, the act of love was always the same, the pregnancy a single one, the child the only one, not Miguel, not Jerico, not Josue, a single child being born forever, prepared to leave the enclosure, the prison, the asylum, the womb, in the name of Sibila Sarmiento. Born in a cell, and therefore worthy of freedom. Born in misery and therefore destined for good fortune. Engendered in impotence and therefore heirs to power.
My brother Miguel gave me his arm in the Roman fashion and did not have to say anything. The fraternal pact was sealed. Pain was another name for memory. We looked at each other with depth in our eyes. What we had to say about the past had been said. It was time for us to speak about the future. The syntony, in this regard, was total.
There were a few minutes of silence.
We looked in each other’s eyes.
Discord did not take long to break out.
He said he felt content that Brillantinas and Gomas, Siboney Peralta, and the whole damn troop who accompanied Sara P. and the Mariachi Maximiliano Batalla in their catastrophic attempt at rebellion were back in prison.
I told him I had seen them in passing, behind bars, as I came to see him now.
“Well, take a good look at them, my brother, because you won’t be seeing them again.”
He looked at me in a way that meant I couldn’t avoid the cold at my back. At that moment I knew the gang of Sara P. and the Mariachi wouldn’t leave jail except feetfirst.
“And Jerico?” I dared to say, abruptly.
“They were his people,” replied Miguel Aparecido. “He got them out of prison from the office of the presidency. He organized them. They were his people.”
He looked at me with those blue-black eyes I’ve mentioned, and the yellow flecks acquired their own life of never-satisfied intelligence.
“He didn’t calculate. He didn’t realize. He had a half-baked idea that if a vanguard acts, the masses will follow. He was wrong. He believed that by penetrating as he did the offices of power, he himself could rise to power. Very smart, sure… It’s your ass, Barrabas!”
I said it was an old sickness to believe power is contagious… He didn’t realize that power doesn’t commit hara-kiri. Power protects itself.
“Understand what the public meeting of President Carrera and the magnate Monroy in Chapultepec meant,” Sangines had said to me. “Neither went to see the other for pleasure. They’re rivals. But each understands that the other has his own dynamite factory, and dynamite factories have to be placed at a distance so they don’t blow one another up. Each part-Carrera, Monroy, power, business-has a kind of veto over the other. They join together when they feel threatened by a third exogenous force, a stranger to the inbreeding of power. Power originates in power, not outside it, just as a cell forms inside another. This is what Jerico didn’t understand. He believed he could head a popular force that would carry him to the top. He didn’t understand that the movement of the people, when it occurs, is necessary, not artificial, not a product of a messianic desire.”
“Revolutions also create elites,” I noted.
“Or elites head them.”
“Though they also erupt from the people.”
“Yes,” Sangines acknowledged. “The ruling classes have to be renewed in order not to be annihilated. They can do it peacefully, as has occurred in Mexico. They can do it violently, as has also occurred in Mexico. The revolutionary knows when he can and when he cannot. His political talent consists in that: when to and when not to.”
“If all of you knew that, I mean, Carrera as well as Monroy, why didn’t you let Jerico fade away all by himself with no followers except this gang of hoodlums imprisoned here? Why?”
Sangines replied with the wisest of his smiles, the one I remembered from his classes at the law school, far from the awful grimace that deformed his spirit when he followed me in the darkness up the staircase on Praga. The smile I admired.
“I have confidence in both houses, the house of political power and that of entrepreneurial power,” he continued.
He closed his eyes blissfully. I already knew that.
“And do you know why they trust me?”
I didn’t want to answer with some offensive joke.
“No.”
“Because they know I possess all the information and don’t trouble anyone with what I know.”
“And what’s that?” I wasn’t pretending innocence: I was innocent.
He said in Mexico, in each Latin American country, rebellions are being forged day and night, in the hope of marking an
“It seemed to me, Josue, that Jerico’s little adventure, so secondary, so minimal, so directed toward failure, ultimately so lacking in danger, offered me the opportunity to alert power without undue cost and give the right a shock. And in passing, to deflate the grotesque vision the extremely ambitious Jerico had acquired of himself.”
Sangines’s smile was very offensive.
“He read Malaparte and Lenin. He felt like a little local Mussolini. Poor kid!”
“But in reality there was no danger,” I insisted, moved, in spite of myself, by a feeling for Jerico that went beyond fraternity and simply called itself friendship.
Sangines knew how to disguise his smiles. “Exactly. Because there wasn’t, we could pretend there was.”
“I don’t understand, damn it.”
Sangines didn’t celebrate his small logical triumph. “The greatest threats are fought in secret. The lesser ones should be denounced as a warning to the greater ones that we know what they want and control what they do. And to let the public know they are, at the same time, both threatened and safe.”
I looked at Sangines with unaccustomed fury.
“He’s my brother, Maestro, he’s worthy of a little respect-some compassion-a-”
Sangines continued as if he had heard nothing.
“Carrera and Monroy may be rivals, but they won’t be each other’s victims. Stopping Jerico is effective proof of this. At the moment of danger, the two powers unite.”
