Free Destiny and Desire by Carlos Fuentes Page B

señor,” that mysterious patron to whom the doctor had referred with unqualified severity and categorical words.
    I should confess that the allusion to “the señor,” which I heard for the first time on that occasion, produced a conflicted feeling in me. I realized that María Egipciaca was not the source of my material existence or physical comfort but simply followed the orders of a person who had never been mentioned before in this house. Was the physician’s indiscretion really an indiscretion? Or had the good doctor intentionally put María Egipciaca in her place, revealing that far from being the lady of the house, she too, like the weekly maid, was an employee? I wanted to gauge the effects of this revelation on my guardian’s attitude. She was careful not to vary in the slightest the behavior I already knew. If I was sick and sentenced to rest, she would heighten, without modifying in its essentials, her irreproachable conduct as a señora charged with lodging me, feeding me, dressing me, and sending me to school.
    But since at the same time the doctor had announced that the nurse would come to take care of me on the instructions of the señor who “pays for everything, pays well, and pays on time,” María Egipciaca had on the horizon of her suspicions a new and weaker propitiatory victim. The nurse and I. I and the nurse. The order of factors etcetera. The outcome foreseen by María Egipciaca was a relationship that excluded her from her good governance of the house and care of my person. How to reaffirm one and prolong the other? Sometimes the questions that pierce our spirits escape through our eyes, just as my encephalic mass spills out of my skull today, when I woke up dead on a Pacific beach.
    Fourteen years ago Elvira, if she did not prevent my death, did renew my life. My routine as an early adolescent in secondary school promised, in my young but limited imagination, to repeat itself into infinity. It is curious that at a time of such great physical changes, the mind insists on prolonging childhood, since the belief that adolescence itself will be eternal is only the mirror of the tacit conviction (and convention) of childhood: I’ll always be a little girl, a little boy, even though I know I won’t. But I’ll be an adolescentwith the mentality of a little boy, that is, of a survivor. In the end, what age belongs to us more than childhood, when we truly depend on others? Everything is longer when we are children. Vacations seem deliciously eternal. And class schedules too. Though subject to school and especially the family, at that time of life we have more freedom with regard to what binds us than at any other period. It seems to me this is because in childhood freedom is identical to imagination, and since here everything is possible, the freedom to be something more than the family and something more than school flies higher and allows us to live more separately than at the age when we must conform in order to survive, adjust to the rhythms of professional life, submit to rules inherited and accepted by a kind of general conformity. We were, as children, singular magicians. As adults, we will be herd animals.
    Can’t we rebel against the gray sadness of this fatality? I evoke this feeling because I believe it is what joined Jericó and me as brothers. And I’m also of this opinion because it was the nurse Elvira Ríos who came before anyone else to break the habitual formations enclosing me in the house on Calle de Berlín under the tutelage of María Egipciaca. It isn’t that the nurse had proposed to “free me” or anything like that. It was simply a question of a presence different from everything I had known until then. María Egipciaca constantly praised the Caucasian race, the “whiteys,” almost assigning to them the destiny of the world or, at least, the monopoly on intelligence, beauty, and strength. She suffered from an unfortunate mental confusion that led her to say things