Destiny and Desire by Carlos Fuentes — Read

A year went by following the events I have narrated so far. Perhaps things occurred in all the chapters of my life. I didn't return to Antigua Concepción in the nameless burial ground. I never heard from my increasingly sentimentalized Lucha Zapata, who flew away with the fugacity of a bird with a damaged wing. I had completely forgotten about my sinister jailer María Egipciaca. I knew that Elvira Ríos, my nurse, was barely a decisive though fleeting traffic accident. Doña Estrellita de Esparza lay buried, her despicable husband Don Nazario had been roasted alive in his own courtyard by the very incarnation of immorality, the vile and ridiculous Sara P., the Lady Macbeth of Mariachiland imprisoned after a macabre, imbecilic confession in the San Juan de Aragón Prison together with her partenaire in mischief, the immortal Mariachi Maxi, who escaped with this same Sarape and an entire gang of criminals, to the rage and despair of the presumptive capo of the penitentiary, my friend Miguel Aparecido, mocked by a band of thugs and thrown into a physical and moral anguish whose dimensions (I guessed) I would never know, no matter how, from his eyes of a caged tiger, a secret would peer out, veiled with difficulty by his bluish eyelids. Licenciado Antonio Sanginés, source of so much news and guidance in my life, had absented himself (for the moment) and the truth is that none of what I've just said mattered to me very much for a simple reason.

I was in love.