Free Destiny and Desire by Carlos Fuentes

personal insurrection is not a sign of esthetic imagination. And he immediately referred to his father.
    “What can you think of a man who travels abroad with a money belt filled with silver pesos around his waist to make certain no one steals them? A man who travels with a special case filled with chiles to season insipid French cooking?”
    He was silent for a moment. He didn’t invite us to comment. It was clear his diatribe had not yet ended.
    “Do you remember when I told you how my father made his way? The man of action, the faithful husband, the strong head of the family? First a carpenter, in a poor district of the city. A furniture maker. Selling chairs, beds, and tables to various hotels. Furniture stores, hotels, movie houses. Remember? The modern Saint Joseph, except that his Virgin Mary didn’t give birth to a savior but to an informer. I didn’t tell you everything that time. I skipped over the link that joins the chain of my revered father, like the key ring in his pocket that he rattles with so much authority. Between the furniture store and the hotels are the brothels. The first chain of my fortune is made of whorehouses. That’s where the mattresses went, that’swhere the beds were used, that’s where the Catholic, bourgeois, and respectable fortune of a couple who insult their servants and ignore their son was founded. In a brothel.”
    What could we say? He didn’t expect anything. His confession didn’t affect us. It was his business. For him, obviously, it had been transformed into an open wound, and that was when we knew that because of our disinterest in this matter, the value Jericó and I shared with regard to the geographies of families or the supposed “crimes” of individuals, it did not concern us. Right then Jericó and I confirmed something we already knew, the necessary product of our readings assimilated to the philosophical and moral leap that the instructive friendship of Father Filopáter signified. A lesson for us, for him the recognition of losses and gains in the ancestral game between parents and children, forebears and descendants. About whom could I speak except women who weren’t related to me, María Egipciaca, my nemesis, and Elvira Ríos, my nurse? And Jericó, who remained silent about family antecedents about which he may have been completely ignorant? And about whom except ourselves could we speak, he and I, Jericó and Josué, regarding the familial relationship that in our lives was ultimately identical to the relationship between friends? This apparent solitude was the condition of our absolute solidarity. The small saga of Errol and his family confirmed in Jericó and me the fraternity that was a sure sign of the orientation of our lives. Brothers not in blood but in intelligence, and knowing this, we realized (at least I did), joined us early on but perhaps put us to the test for the rest of our lives. Would we always be the intimate friends we were now? What would the twelve strokes of noon leave us? And what the prayer murmured at the end of the day?
    Perhaps it was unfair to call us what Filopáter named us—Castor and Pollux—simply in contrast to the real orphanhood of our friend Errol Esparza, voluntarily estranged from his parents though perhaps more devoted than we were to the eternal struggle between talent and solitude.
    Then he came out of the bathroom, naked, his head wet, the young man who greeted us and sat in front of the drum set whileErrol picked up the guitar and the two of them began their rock version of “Las Golondrinas.”
    A few mariachis to the wise.
    I ALWAYS KNEW she would spy on us. The presence of Elvira Ríos was offensive to María Egipciaca, even before the nurse set foot in the house adrift on Calle de Berlín. In the mind of my caretaker, this enormous residence had room for only two people, her and me, in the chastely promiscuous relationship I have already told you about. It was as if two enemy animals occupied, with no