Then she would embrace me without defenses, like an old pillow, like a defeated ghost that knows it is divorced forever from a visible body, and say, “They threw me out because I use drugs, I’m an addict, if I had cancer they wouldn’t throw me out, they’d take care of me, isn’t that right, Savior?” She’d look at me with eyes so forsaken I simply held her even tighter, as if I feared that at those moments of extreme tenderness she’d leave me forever, freeing herself from life with a sigh that at the next moment would turn into a flare-up that burned my neck. I moved her away. She looked at me with intense hatred, accused me of keeping her locked up here, I’d open the door to the courtyard and invite her to go out, she called me horrible, an authoritarian type made in the image of power, a persecutor, an enemy and not a savior as she had believed.
“All of you, let me live my life!” she shouted in despair, tearing at her short hair and scratching her cheeks.
I stopped her by force, grasping her fists, bringing them up to my own face.
“Go on, Lucha, if you want to scratch, scratch me, go on …”
Then she would say Savior, don’t be so bossy, and she would caress my cheeks and sing the usual song, “I’m a poor little deer that lives in the mountains and since I’m not very tame I don’t come down to the water by day, by night little by little and in your arms, my darling.”
I already knew that this song about the “poor little deer” was the code for love. In this way, Lucha would invite me to culminate the day’s action, whatever it may have been, with an erotic moment that could be the quiet after a squall or the announcement of a coming storm, the gentle slope of peace recovered for a moment or a prelude to the tranquillity that, to be honest, she and I wanted to achieve and share without knowing exactly how to do it.
All of this occurred in the middle of her effort to stop using drugs and replace them with alcohol until I realized that tequila didn’t give the same high as amphetamines, then she’d go back to drugs and discover, ay, ay, ay, that her hidden drugs were being consumed and tobacco and alcohol were no substitute and I was to blame for everything.
I knew very well that any person with Lucha Zapata would be “to blame” for a situation for which she was responsible. Asking her to take responsibility was like asking pears of an elm tree, as the unvanquished and sententious María Egipciaca would say. Lucha Zapata needed someone else to blame. Me, someone else, it didn’t matter. But never herself. Herself, never. And I made note of her accusations and acts of violence for the simple reason that I’ve already indicated: I wanted to be responsible for a person.
Until the day she couldn’t take any more.
But first she sang: “I’d like to be a fine pearl in your shiny earrings and nibble at your ear and kiss your cheeks.”
—
I’LL SAY THAT Jericó never showed curiosity about my prolonged absences from the apartment we shared on Calle de Praga. It didn’t surprise me and I didn’t thank him for it. I didn’t meddle in his life either.
I had my doubts.
How had Jericó traveled? What kind of passport did he have? Where was his passport? What was his name, after all?
Jericó what? I realized that deep-rooted gratitude for the protection the schoolyard champion gave the defenseless big-nosed kid kept me from seeing my friend in any light other than what is called in Roman law amicus curiae.
One of the great temptations when two people live together is rummaging through the affairs of the other. The temptation to open drawers, read personal diaries and correspondence, pry into closets, move like a cockroach under beds to see what the other has hidden under the mattress, in jacket pockets …
I don’t need to tell you, you who are reading me and are all, without exception, decent people, that your author with the good memory Josué Nadal—I—never stooped to being a snoop. This did not stop me from cultivating certain doubts, all of them so unverifiable that they died before birth.
What was Jericó’s last name?
Had he really spent four years in Europe, with Paris as his base?
Was his evocation of Europe a farce, theatrical and elementary? Kneeling on the Place de la Concorde, sure, not even Gene Kelly did that accompanied by George Gershwin’s music, and if Jean Gabin or Jean-Paul Belmondo passed by, they didn’t even blink.
Why didn’t Jericó ever use those common expressions in ordinary French speech I knew only from old movies of the nouvelle vague? Ça alors. A merveille. Quand même. Raison d’être. Savoir-faire. Laissez-faire. Franglais.
Why, on the other hand, did North American sayings slip out? Shove it. Amazing. Let’s hug it out, bitch.
And above all, unfamiliar allusions to youthful musicians—Justin Timberlake—or local television programs—Entourage. Let’s hug it out, bitch.
I say I didn’t inquire, but I suspected with no proof and no desire either to break the commitment to discretion, though I did consult the Entertainment section of Reforma to find out about Justin Timberlake and what Entourage was.
Other much more important concerns were set forth by Jericó with his customary mental speed and a certain childish audacity, firing them at me at times when I returned with no explanations from a night with Lucha Zapata: Who are we, Josué? How are we? Why are we? To what end are we? without obtaining more from me than an undulating smile and the urgent need to bathe, shave, make myself presentable after an exhausting session of guard duty at Cerrada de Chimalpopoca. I suspected that Jericó welcomed me with this salvo of abstract questions in order not to ask more concrete ones: Where are you coming from? Where did you spend the night? Why do you smell so strange?
The questions remained unresolved because of a new development.
It seems our garret, so bare at the beginning, was filling up with gadgets that came to our door in delivery trucks and then were carried up to our nest by dark men with strong backs and sparse mustaches.
Who sent us a laser fax machine, a television set with a 46 (or 52 or 70) inch screen? Who replaced our useless old black telephone with a white one from an Italian movie and then presented us with a couple of Sony Walkman portables and then—Creative Zen, Samsung YP-T9—others even more modern, with music, movies, calendars, and addresses? The last particularly interested me. What addresses did I have except for mine and Lucha Zapata’s? It didn’t take long for the light to go on. Or rather, the Sony Walkman with the name on the little screen of Maestro Antonio Sanginés and the phone numbers of his residence, his house in Coyoacán, and his offices on the Paseo de la Reforma.
Right there the message appeared that said:
I EXPECT YOU BOTH AT MY HOME ON JULY 2 AT 6:00 PM.
LIC. ANTONIO SANGINES.
I expect you both. Not I expect you. You both. Plural.
Now I waited for Jericó. He came in with his head high, laughing.
So then, once again, the two of us.
The maestro received us in his big old house in Coyoacán, surrounded as always by his noisy progeny, little children racing on tricycles, flying with arms spread, making engine noises, and eventually climbing on the professor’s wingback chair, lying peacefully on his lap, or threatening a catastrophe from the top of the chair.
“Outside, boys,” said Sanginés, laughing, and looked at Jericó and me when, in the same breath, he said:
“Come in, boys.”
He wanted to position us immediately in what Roman law calls capitis diminutio, a kind of diminution of personality, due to the loss—Rudolph Sohm dixit—of the legal rule of freedom, of citizenship, or because of the minimal alteration of being expelled from the family.
More than enough for me. I was his student in the law faculty, he was my adviser in reading and my professional mentor. He sent me to do the famous “forensic practice” in the prison of San Juan de Aragón. He was directing my professional thesis. But Jericó? What relationship could he have with Sanginés? I tried to determine this in the form of greeting, always so revelatory in a country of embraces, pats, diminutive
s and augmentatives, remote suspicions, dissimulated gloating: Iberian America is also Italic America, a land of elegant appearances, the cult of the bella figura, and the memory of serial Machiavellianisms modulated to remember debts or forget grievances.
The fact is that Sanginés said only “Come in, boys,” with an implicit “take a seat” in two leather chairs facing our host’s wingback. We were simply two students subject to a certificate of proficiency examination.
The children left. The students sat down. I’ll cut the message short: Sanginés believed we had completed an apprenticeship. With which I felt I was on the rungs of a medieval guild asking myself if this relationship was not, in fact, a transcription, though within the university, of the medievalism that is the watchword and perhaps the pride of Latin America, a continent that, unlike the United States of America, a nation with no antecedent more powerful than itself, did have a Middle Ages and as a consequence has—we have—from Mexico to Peru, mental categories that exclude a will not arbitrated by the Church or state. The Gringos are Pelagians without knowing it, descendants of the heretic who postulated individual freedom without the need for institutional filters, as opposed to his conqueror Augustine of Hippo, for whom grace was not individually achievable without the intervention of the Church. The North Americans, who don’t have Pelagius or the Middle Ages, do have Luther, the Reformation, Puritanism, Calvinism, and all the heresy (I repeat: choos-ing) necessary to dictate with a very wide margin rules of conduct at the edge of institutions. We do not. Though the reader will note the constant benefit of Father Filopáter’s lessons in preparatory school.
I believe Sanginés read my thoughts, because he immediately decided my destiny. I would finish the course of study (I needed only a year and a couple of classes I could pass in a proficiency exam) and conclude forensic practice in the prison of San Juan de Aragón.
“Begin to prepare your thesis. The subject is Machiavelli and the creation of the state,” he pronounced, adding: “It is necessary for you to conclude your interview with Miguel Aparecido,” before turning to Jericó and saying: “You have refused to follow a career. You believe experience is the best university. I am going to test you. Tomorrow go to the offices of the Presidency of the Republic in Los Pinos. They are expecting you.”
And returning to me.
“And they are expecting you, Josué, in the office of Don Max Monroy in the building in Colonia—I should say the new city—of Santa Fe.”
He sighed, as if longing for a modest city that could not exist again, rose to his feet, and brought the interview to an abrupt end, leaving me with a certain bad taste in my mouth; I didn’t know whether to attribute it to an attitude unlike the normally amiable behavior of Professor Sanginés, or, more seriously, to a melancholy very similar to the sadness of goodbyes, as if a period in my life had just ended.
Jericó and I walked, looking for a taxi, toward Avenida Universidad, and were distracted as we crossed the Viveros de Coyoacán Park, breathing deeply, with no set purpose, because we were in one of the few lungs of an asphyxiated metropolis.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“Well,” I shrugged. “I’ll be doing the same things.”
“No, the one who’ll change is you. Max Monroy is a very powerful man.”
“Bah. I may never even get to meet him.”
Then I added: “Knowing you, Jericó, I think you’ll not only get to meet the president—”
He interrupted: “He’ll know me even if he doesn’t see me,” and added: “Look, hurry up and finish your degree. We’re twenty-five years old. We can’t go on waiting. We need a position. We can’t give as an occupation ‘I think’ or ‘I am.’ We have to be and do.”
I smiled in return. “One can always turn into a perpetually young old man, like Jelly Roll Morton, Compay Segundo, or Mick Jagger.”
The reader will note that I wanted to test the connection I had suspected in Jericó with North American pop culture instead of a pretended French affiliation that, as I’ve already told you, seemed suspect to me. The problem is, if you talk about jazz and rock, of necessity you land in Anglo-American territory. France loves jazz but doesn’t give it anything but love.
Jericó paid no attention to me. Who are we? What do we have? Name, occupation, status? Are we a vacant lot?
“Terrain vague,” I said with my comic suspicions.
Jericó was unfazed. “A garbage dump of what could have been? A catalogue of debits and losses? Even the bottom of the barrel? So what’s going on? I like it!”
“A hoarse-voiced basket where things accumulate?” I added, quoting Neruda but thinking of tasks I still had to do, not only the course of study in law, not only the mysterious prisoner Miguel Aparecido, but in particular my unspeakable commitment to a woman who required protection, whom I could not leave alone, at large, helpless …
“Lucha Zapata” was the name on the tip of my tongue like a bird in an open cage who doesn’t really know whether his well-being depends on flying away or remaining locked up and at the mercy of birdseed.
Jericó didn’t go any further. There was in him, when we left the large Jardín de los Coyotes, a new, atypical reserve that undoubtedly had to do with the position Sanginés had just offered him and that now occupied our minds. Though in retrospect, I wondered if the maestro’s unusual coldness was due to the unpublished presence of Jericó, which had skewed his behavior and evoked in my heart a dual feeling of nostalgia for the attention my teacher had previously paid me and reproach for his current manner.
Without saying goodbye, Jericó jumped on a moving bus with dangerous agility and I hailed a taxi to return to Lucha Zapata’s house, undecided now as to my home and real address.
Unless, I smiled, it was the penitentiary where Miguel Aparecido—who knows to what end—was waiting for me.
“It’s going like clockwork,” Jericó shouted from the bus. “Hug it out!”
I NOTICED THAT Lucha Zapata was nervous, strange, different, and distant when I returned that night to the house on Cerrada Chimalpopoca next to the noisy Metro de los Doctores. She was involved in the ecstatic movements of preparing lunch, not looking at me as she cut the avocados in two, heated the tortillas, smeared them with the green flesh of a buttery fruit that relieves the acidity of Mexican corn. She knew I admired—and marveled at—this homemaking “professionalism” in my friend. She possessed a kind of domestic discipline contrary to the disorder of her life as an alcoholic and drug addict. She was an excellent cook and I arranged to have her cupboard always stocked with all the pleasures of the market that transform Mexican food into a gift of the gods for a country of beggars.
My mouth waters: jalapeño chile, habanero chile, saffron, jitomate, huitlacoche fungus, epazote tea, machaca dried beef, cochinita pork, chotes, chicharrón cracklings, oregano. I bought them at La Merced very early in the morning, assisted by a lively old woman with a straw-colored braid, Doña Medea Batalla. She appeared before me with her black cherry eyes and said: “Let me help you, Licenciado.” “How do you know?” I said with a look. She touched one eye. “I know you all, Licenciado. You can spot a licenciado a mile away … just the way I can smell out villains.”
I confined myself to placing produce in the basket. Lucha would transform it into blind mason’s sauce, soup of corn ears and roasted chiles, uchepos or Michoacán corn tamales, Morelian enchiladas, enchiladas de plaza, and stuffed chayotes. I admired her concentration and skill, which contrasted so strongly with her life’s disorder, wondering if asking her where she had learned to cook was the pretext for controverting the forgetfulness on which she insisted.
She defended herself. Her memory was locked away and her cuisine, she gave me to understand, was part of an atavistic, popular wisdom that wasn’t taught. One is born, in Mexico, knowing how to cook. That was why I took pains to bring her the best produce, with the implicit hope that one day, eating well, she would remember something and live better.
It was a thin hope,
not to mention a vain one.
“Did you bring beer?” she asked, standing, tottering.
“I forgot,” I said, having just come from the interview with Sanginés and Jericó.
“Poor devil,” she smiled with twisted lips. She laughed. “Beer makes you cold inside,” she added for no reason.
I asked her to be calm, to lie down, what did she want? knowing that asking a person like her for “calm” was the same as telling her: You’re crazy.
She said with sudden sweetness that she had a weakness for avocados. I told her I’d go out and buy a good supply right away. I regretted it. Lucha needed me there. She was helpless, a step away from death …
“What do you want from me?” she spoke from inside an internal cave.
I said nothing.
“My past. You’re hungry for my past. You’re a snoop,” she said, reproaching me for what I wasn’t, as my life with Jericó demonstrates. “A snoop. A meddler. You stick your big nose in.”
She attacked my nose violently. It wasn’t difficult for me to push her hand away. She fell onto the mat. She looked at me with immense sorrow and even greater resentment, not free of that great pretext for Mexican failure: feeling defeated, always being the loser, and obtaining salvation, perhaps, thanks to the blessing of defeat. We don’t celebrate success except as a passing announcement of eventual defeat in everything.
“You see,” she murmured. “You’re the powerful one, the arbitrary one. You push me. You throw me to the floor. Do you see why I live the way I live? Because power is arbitrary, arbitrary, arbitrary …”
“Capricious,” I said in a stupid eagerness to find synonyms for defeat.
“A caprice?” Lucha Zapata twisted what I said. “Do you think that living and dying is just a caprice?”
“I didn’t say that.” Clumsily I tried to apologize, standing while she knelt on the mat, looking up at me from the floor.
“Then what?” she asked in a voice at once defeated and victorious, ardent and dry.
I didn’t say anything and she embraced my knees murmuring Love me Savior, I have only you, don’t leave me, what do you need to love me more? what do you need to know I need you?