Destiny and Desire by Carlos Fuentes Page A

of an unaccustomed situation that disconcerted me more than anything else. The attempt to mollify me by assuring me everything would be the same did not resolve the mysteries I found troubling. Who was María Egipciaca? Where was she? Had she died? Had she been dismissed? Would I see Nurse Elvira again? Who was I? Who was supporting me? Who was the owner of the house I lived in? How did those proverbs end?
    “…  does dawn come earlier.”
    “…  wakes up crazed.”
    “…  the old woman’s in the cave.”
    “…  lets in no flies.”
    “…  shuffling the deck.”
    Jericó completed the proverbs María Egipciaca had left dangling and gave me an order:
    “Come live in my apartment.”
    “But the lawyer—”
    “Pay no attention to him. I’ll arrange it.”
    “And if you can’t?”
    “That can’t happen. You have to learn to rebel.”
    “And be left without—”
    “You won’t lack for anything. You’ll see.”
    “You’re pretty rash, Jericó.”
    “Sometimes you have to take a risk and ask yourself: Who needs whom? Do they need me or do I need them?”
    “Us?”
    He looked with contemptuous eyes at the empty rooms in the house on Berlín.
    “You’ll go crazy here. It’ll be like clockwork.”
    JERICÓ LIVED ON the top floor of a crumbling building on Calle de Praga. The green tide of the Paseo de la Reforma could be heard in perpetual conflict with the gray traffic of Avenida Chapultepec. In any event, living on the seventh floor of an apartment building with no elevator had something about it that isolated us from the city, and since on the other floors there were only offices, after seven in the evening the building was ours, as if to compensate for the cramped arrangement of a living room integrated with the kitchen—stove, refrigerator, pantry—separated only by the high counter we used as a table, integrated in turn by two high stools that resembled the racks where they placed heretics, to the derision of the people, and the punished, to the mockery of their masters.
    What else? Two bedrooms—one smaller than the other—and a bathroom. Jericó offered me the larger room. I refused to displace him. He suggested changing beds every seven days. I accepted, not understanding the reasoning behind the offer.
    We also shared the closet, though I brought from Berlín to Praga (from Döblin to Kafka, one might say) more clothing than the very few items my friend had.
    And we shared women. I should say, a single woman in a single house on Calle de Durango, the brothel of La Hetara, a name of ancient lineage, according to my friend, for at the dawn of Mexican time two women fought for control of whoredom in the city: La Bandida, a famous madam celebrated in boleros and corridos and, much more discreet, La Hetara, to whose house Jericó took me one night.
    “You’re like a lamb going to slaughter, and I know why. You fell in love with the nurse Elvira Ríos. You didn’t realize that the nurse, the doctor, the entire house on Berlín, and of course your jailer Doña María Egipciaca were all passing illusions, phantoms of your childhood and early youth, destined to disappear as soon as you reached the ‘age of reason.’ ”
    “How do you know that?” I asked without too much surprise, since to me the speed of my friend’s associations and conundrums was already proverbial.
    “Aaaah. The fact is your case is mine … I believe …”
    With growing perplexity I asked him to explain. I had grown up in a mansion in the care of a strict tyrant and he, apparently, had been freer than the wind, giving the impression—underscored by his apartment, his vital ease in speaking, living, going to see whores, walking between the Zona Rosa and Colonia Roma as if there were no (were there any?) urban frontiers—that he had appeared in the world totally prepared, with no need for family, antecedents … or a last name.
    All the entrance bells at the building on Praga had the names of individuals,