Read Online Destiny and Desire by Carlos Fuentes - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Carlos Fuentes
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Muslims, Christians, rebels, libertines, those who, heretics all, choose:
eso theiros
, I choose: heresy, freedom …
What is everything, in the end, but an optical effect? Baruch (Benoît, Benito, Benedetto) asks himself as he bends over his lenses, convinced a man is a philosopher only if, like him, he gives himself up to asceticism, humility, poverty, and chastity.
But isn’t this the greatest sin of all? Isn’t the rebellion of Lucifer in its high degree of humility the most awful of crimes: being better than God?
Baruch Spinoza shrugs. The spider devours the fly. Death is no more than an unfortunate encounter.
Thus spake Filopáter.
A SHORT WHILE after that terrible family scene in the mansion in Pedregal, Errol left home. We found out because he left school in the first year of preparatory at the same time, and we decided to callat his house, as curious as we were concerned about a boy whose destiny seemed so different from ours that, in the end, it represented what Jericó and I could have been.
That afternoon the house in Pedregal seemed dismal, as if its extreme bareness of austere lines had become overloaded with the internal accumulation of things I’ve already described. As if the simple contrast of sun and shadow—a taurine architecture, after all, an essential reduction of the ritual—had ceded light to a somber sunset so that the interior of the house infected the exterior despite its resistance.
We didn’t have time for the front door to be opened for us. It opened and on the doorstep a young, robust woman appeared accompanied by the weak-looking, dark-skinned waiter we had met at the reception. Each carried a suitcase, though the woman also had, pressed to her bosom, a small porcelain statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. They were not alone. Behind her appeared Errol’s mother, Señora Estrellita, drying her hands on her apron, looking at the servants with a passionate intensity we did not recognize and enduring the downpour of insults from her husband Don Nazario, dressed for the beach in shorts and leather sneakers.
It was like a cataract of hatreds and recriminations on feedback; turbid waters, contaminated with urgencies and excrescences that had their muddy source in the words of the father, were calmed in those of the mother and eventually found a strange backwater of silence in those who should have been angriest, the two servants dismissed by Señora Estrella to shouts of good-for-nothings, scoundrels, you’ve abused my confidence, get out, I don’t need you, I can run the house and prepare the meals better than you, lazy Indian beggars, go back to the mountains, and unaware of our presence, she hurled a misguided domestic fury at the pair of servants but it turned back on Jericó and me, the invisible spectators, and her husband, Don Nazario, a kind of distant but omnipotent Jupiter dressed to go jogging who, in fact, was running around his wife as he stepped on the toes of his employees, whose obstinate silence, stony glances, and immobile postures bore witness to their passive resistance and announced an accumulated rage that, without the mitigationof daily release, would spill over in one of those collective explosions that the Esparzas perhaps could not imagine or perhaps believed they had warded off for long periods of time with the rules of obedience and submission to the master, or it may be they desired it as one desires an emotional purge that sweeps away indecisiveness, secret guilt, the omissions and faults of those who hold power over the weak.
Doña Estrella shoved the dismissed employees. Don Nazario insulted Doña Estrella. The servants, instead of picking up their suitcases and walking away—she praising the Virgin—remained stoic, as if they deserved the storm of insults raining down on them or enjoyed without smiling those the master directed at the mistress in a kind of chain of recriminations that most resembled eternity as a prison sentence.
“Where was the
eso theiros
, I choose: heresy, freedom …
What is everything, in the end, but an optical effect? Baruch (Benoît, Benito, Benedetto) asks himself as he bends over his lenses, convinced a man is a philosopher only if, like him, he gives himself up to asceticism, humility, poverty, and chastity.
But isn’t this the greatest sin of all? Isn’t the rebellion of Lucifer in its high degree of humility the most awful of crimes: being better than God?
Baruch Spinoza shrugs. The spider devours the fly. Death is no more than an unfortunate encounter.
Thus spake Filopáter.
A SHORT WHILE after that terrible family scene in the mansion in Pedregal, Errol left home. We found out because he left school in the first year of preparatory at the same time, and we decided to callat his house, as curious as we were concerned about a boy whose destiny seemed so different from ours that, in the end, it represented what Jericó and I could have been.
That afternoon the house in Pedregal seemed dismal, as if its extreme bareness of austere lines had become overloaded with the internal accumulation of things I’ve already described. As if the simple contrast of sun and shadow—a taurine architecture, after all, an essential reduction of the ritual—had ceded light to a somber sunset so that the interior of the house infected the exterior despite its resistance.
We didn’t have time for the front door to be opened for us. It opened and on the doorstep a young, robust woman appeared accompanied by the weak-looking, dark-skinned waiter we had met at the reception. Each carried a suitcase, though the woman also had, pressed to her bosom, a small porcelain statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. They were not alone. Behind her appeared Errol’s mother, Señora Estrellita, drying her hands on her apron, looking at the servants with a passionate intensity we did not recognize and enduring the downpour of insults from her husband Don Nazario, dressed for the beach in shorts and leather sneakers.
It was like a cataract of hatreds and recriminations on feedback; turbid waters, contaminated with urgencies and excrescences that had their muddy source in the words of the father, were calmed in those of the mother and eventually found a strange backwater of silence in those who should have been angriest, the two servants dismissed by Señora Estrella to shouts of good-for-nothings, scoundrels, you’ve abused my confidence, get out, I don’t need you, I can run the house and prepare the meals better than you, lazy Indian beggars, go back to the mountains, and unaware of our presence, she hurled a misguided domestic fury at the pair of servants but it turned back on Jericó and me, the invisible spectators, and her husband, Don Nazario, a kind of distant but omnipotent Jupiter dressed to go jogging who, in fact, was running around his wife as he stepped on the toes of his employees, whose obstinate silence, stony glances, and immobile postures bore witness to their passive resistance and announced an accumulated rage that, without the mitigationof daily release, would spill over in one of those collective explosions that the Esparzas perhaps could not imagine or perhaps believed they had warded off for long periods of time with the rules of obedience and submission to the master, or it may be they desired it as one desires an emotional purge that sweeps away indecisiveness, secret guilt, the omissions and faults of those who hold power over the weak.
Doña Estrella shoved the dismissed employees. Don Nazario insulted Doña Estrella. The servants, instead of picking up their suitcases and walking away—she praising the Virgin—remained stoic, as if they deserved the storm of insults raining down on them or enjoyed without smiling those the master directed at the mistress in a kind of chain of recriminations that most resembled eternity as a prison sentence.
“Where was the
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