Destiny and Desire Read Online Free PDF Page A

of the original framework there erupted like malignant chancres fake Colonial, Breton, Provençal, Scotch, and Tudor residences, not to mention the inconceivable California ranch and the nonexistent tropical “adobe hacienda.”
    Still, the Esparza family had not brought to Pedregal the architecture of their previous districts. They had accepted the severity of the original monastic design. At least on the outside, Barragán triumphed. Because once Jericó and I walked into the home of our new friend, Errol Esparza, what we found was a baroque disorder inside a neobaroque chaos inside a post-baroque clutter. In other words, one horror did not suffice in Esparza’s house. The bareness of the walls was a summons that could not be denied to cover them with calendar art, mostly still lifes, picture after picture, not merely contiguous but incestuous, as if leaving a centimeter of empty wall were proof of barefaced miserliness or the crude rejection of an invitation. Articles of furniture also fought for the prize of space. Massive sofas from cheap furniture stores designed to fill large empty spaces: six griffin claws, three cushions of embossed velvet for the back, tables with dragon feet and surfaces covered with ashtrays taken from various hotels and restaurants, rugs with Persian intentions and the appearance of straw sleeping mats contrasted with salonsof a Versaillesque nature, Louis XV chairs with brocade backs and deer feet, glass cabinets with untouchable
souvenirs
of Esparzan visits to Versailles and Gobelin tapestries of recent manufacture. Everything indicated that the first room, with its gigantic television screen, was where the Esparzas lived and the “French” room where, in the evenings, they
received
.
    “Make yourselves comfortable,” the good Errol said without a hint of irony. “I’ll let my mother know we’re here.”
    We were looking at the shaggy purple rug whose obvious intention was to grow like an interior, crepuscular lawn, when Errol reappeared leading a “simple” woman who announced her simplicity with her old-fashioned hairdo—I think it was called a “permanent”—down to her low-heeled shoes with black buckles and moving—now upward—to her cotton stockings, one-piece flowered dress, short apron on which the lady listlessly rubbed her red hands, as if drying them after a domestic flood, to pale, barely made up features. Her face was the blank canvas of an artist undecided whether to conclude it or leave it, with impatient relief, unfinished.
    The lady looked at us with a mixture of candor and suspicion, still drying her hands like a domestic Pontius Pilate, and said in a dull voice, Estrella Rosales de Esparza, at your service …
    “Tell them, mother,” Errol said brusquely.
    “Tell them what?” Doña Estrellita asked with no pretense of surprise.
    “How we got rich.”
    “Rich?” the lady said with authentic confusion.
    “Yes, mother,” the bald kid continued. “My friends must be amazed at so much luxury. Where did it all come from, this … junk?”
    “Oh, son.” The lady lowered her head. “Your father has always been very hardworking.”
    “What do you think about papa’s fortune?”
    “I think it’s fine.”
    “No, its origins.”
    “Oh, son, how can you be—”
    “Be what?”
    “Ungrateful. We owe everything to your father’s efforts.”
    “Efforts? Is that what we call crime now?”
    His mother looked at him defiantly.
    “What crime? What are you talking about?”
    “Being a thief.”
    Instead of becoming angry, Doña Estrellita maintained an admirable composure. She looked at Jericó and me with patience.
    “I haven’t welcomed you. My son is a very impetuous boy.”
    We thanked her. She smiled and looked at her son.
    “He insults me because I’m not Marlene Dietrich. As if that were my fault! He isn’t Errol Flynn either.”
    She turned her back, bending her head, and went back to the mysterious place she had come from.
    Errol burst