Destiny and Desire by Carlos Fuentes — Read

DEAR SURVIVORS: I would be lying if I told you that the departure of my friend Jericó condemned me to irremediable solitude. I've mentioned that his absence coincided with the years of my university studies, culminating in the guardianship of Don Antonio Sanginés and my ghastly visit to the juvenile pit at San Juan de Aragón in the name of "forensic practice."

I haven't lied. I've omitted. I should remedy the fault. In my spirit, I tried to associate the absence of Jericó with a willed, ideal solitude, which reality took care of proving false as soon as I said goodbye to my friend in the airport. I can deceive the living. Who among all of (or the few of) you can disprove what I'm recounting here? Everything I've said may be pure invention on my part. You, Señor, Señora, Señorita who read me, there is no proof I'm telling you the truth. There isn't even proof I exist outside of these pages. You can believe me if I declare that my sex life, without the usual company of Jericó, was a desert without salt or even sand: an emptiness comparable to the children's pit, so deep, desolate, and cruel, a Sahara of cement. Imagine, if you wish, that I looked for and found the nurse Elvira Ríos, that I became her lover even though she was married, that I didn't become her lover because she was married, that she turned me down because she had sex only with the sick to console them, and I seemed as healthy as socialist realism in a poster from the Stalinist era whose pop art was on display, at the time, in the Palacio de Bellas Artes. You can deny it if I tell you I went back to the brothel on Avenida Durango a few more times to fuck the whore with the veiled face and the bee on her buttock. The truth? A lie? I didn't know her name. She was gone, she had left, "retired," according to the chaste expression of the madam and whoremistress Doña Evarista Almonte, alias La Hetara.