Destiny and Desire Read Online Free Page A

did not live in the basement of bad faith. Errol behaved honorably. In any case, Jericó and I were the ones walking twisted paths.
    “Errol Esparza.”
    “Josué Nadal.”
    “Jericó.”
    You who survive me can imagine that when I became Jericó’s friend, I asked him what his last name was and he replied Just Jericó, no last name. I wasn’t satisfied, I felt curious, I went to the admissions secretary at the school and asked outright,
    “What’s Jericó’s last name?”
    The secretary was a young, attractive man who seemed out of place in the small records office, behind a corrugated glass panel near the school entrance, where half his face and an entire hand would appear, upon request, to attend to the public. He hastily withdrew hand and face and his voice acquired a neutral but forced tone.
    “That’s Jericó’s name: Jericó.”
    Although it was during office hours, the secretary closed the small window. Soon afterward I sensed both an offensive and defensive attitude in my friend Jericó. I attributed it to the secretary’s indiscretion, though I had no proof. The fact is that Jericó, letting a few days pass through the sieve of an unaccustomed seriousness in our dealings with each other, which I attributed to my own indiscretion as well as the secretary’s (a position normally filled by embittered women in their forties with no hope of finding a husband), asked me to go with him to the café on the corner, and once we were seated in front of two tepid, tasteless, decaffeinated concoctions, he gave me an intense look and said that during the past semester he and I had naturally cemented a friendship that he wanted to know was solid and lasting.
    “Do you agree, Josué?”
    With a good amount of enthusiasm, I told him I did. Nothing in my past—my very brief past, I said with a laugh—promised a friendship as close as the one Jericó and I had created in the past few months. His concern seemed to me unnecessary, though welcome. We were sealing a pact between comrades. I wished that instead of Nescafé we each had a glass of champagne. I felt the warmth of satisfaction that as adolescents we discover in the friendship of a kindred spirit who rescues us from the solitude reserved, without pity, for the incomprehensible boy who stops being a child overnight and no longer fits into the careful world his parents prepared for him under the illusion that a child so indulged would never grow up.
    That wasn’t my case. Then Jericó said that between the ages of seventeen, which we already had reached, and twenty-one, which was yet to come, he and I ought to establish a project for life and study that would make us close forever. Perhaps there would be separations, trips, women, for example. The important thing was to seal, right here, an alliance for the rest of our lives. Knowing that he would always come to my aid, and I would come to his. Knowing which values we shared. What things we rejected.
    “It’s important to make a list of obligations …”
    “Sacred ones?”
    Jericó agreed energetically. “For us, yes.”
    Where would we begin?
    First, with a shared decision to reject frivolity. My friend took a gossip magazine out of his backpack and leafed through it with displeasure and disgust.
    “Look at this succession of idiocies in full color on glossy paper. Are you interested in knowing that the rock-and-roller Tarcisia married the Russian millionaire Ulyanov, both of them barefoot, with Hawaiian leis around their necks, on the Playa del Carmen, and that the guests began the day dancing to hip-hop on the sand at seven in the morning, when they gorged on a savory tripe stew in honor of the bride’s father, who is a native of Sonora? Would you have liked to be a guest? Would you have accepted an invitation? Answer me.”
    I said no, Jericó, not at all, I’m not interested in being—
    He interrupted me. “Not even if it was your own wedding?”
    No, now I smiled, I thought that taking the matter