Destiny and Desire Read Online Free PDF

into laughter.
    He told us his father had been a carpenter, first in one of the poorest districts in the city. Then he began to make furniture. Soon he was selling beds, chairs, and tables to several hotels. Then he established a furniture store downtown, near the Avenida 20 de Noviembre. With so much furniture on his hands, the only thing he could do was put up a hotel, and then another, and yet another, and since the guests wanted entertainment close by—television was still in diapers, that is, black-and-white—he took an old movie house in San Juan de Letrán and turned it into a live-performance theater, decorated in the style of a Chinese pagoda just like the one in Los Angeles, and since man does not live by art alone, he opened a furniture store and then another and another and yet another until he had a chain of hotels and that’s what we live on.
    Errol sighed while Jericó and I—and certainly all of you who can hear me—put on a polite face and listened without blinking to this lightning account of a career that culminated in this shambles of a house in the Pedregal de San Angel with a boy who refused to get into the Cadillac driven by a uniformed chauffeur and delighted in humiliating a defenseless mother and attacking an absent father.
    “He hired gangs of bums to put mice inside rival movie houses, break his enemies, and take over their theaters.”
    “How nice,” I dared to say, but Errol, enveloped in the cloud of his own rhetoric, didn’t hear me.
    “He sent salesmen to distract employees in the businesses of his rivals.”
    “Very smart,” Jericó said with a smile.
    “He sent evangelists to convert them to Protestantism.”
    “The religion of capitalism, Errol,” I said for the sake of saying something.
    “Have you read
Protestantism and the Modern World
by Ernst Troeltsch?” Jericó commented, increasing the aberrations of the conversation. “Without Protestantism there is no capitalism. In the opinion of Saint Thomas, capitalists went to hell. Consequently, all capitalists are Protestants.”
    I swear it hurt me to see Errol’s bewilderment when right after that Jericó and I looked at each other, thanked him, and left the walled house through a garden with no trees where workers were raising something like a statue onto a pedestal.
    “Let the chauffeur drive you home.”
    We agreed and left. Relieved, but without saying a word and exchanging a complicit glance that said: He’s our friend. We won’t stop talking to him.
    Were we talking to ourselves, Jericó? Didn’t we leave the Esparza house secretly thinking that all this horror, this inanity, this dissatisfaction, this grief, takes place
en famille
, it occurs because
a family
exists—like a tray of rotten fruit, a cup of poison, a sewer capable of receiving it all, digesting it, purifying it, bringing it back to life from a near-death final injury?
    You and I avoided looking at each other, Jericó, when we left the residence in Pedregal. Neither of us had a family. We were what we are because we were, are, will be orphans. What is orphanhood? No doubt not the mere absence of father or mother or family but inclemency, the ruination of the sheltering roof for reasons that sometimes are clearly attributable to abandonment, to death, to simple indifference. Except that you and I did not know any of these reasons. Perhaps you do, but you’ve kept them to yourself. And my situation was equivocal, as I’ll recount later.
    He’s our friend. We won’t stop talking to him.
    Although perhaps, privately, we envied Errol his family situation no matter how violent or pathetic it was.
    “He didn’t need to say what he said,” was the secret message Jericó sent me when I got out at Calle de Berlín.
    “That’s true. He didn’t,” I remarked, more to confirm our friendship than for any other reason.
    ON THE OTHER hand, months later, when we graduated from secondary to preparatory, we found not a pretext but an opportunity to speak