Swift as Desire Page 3

  Though things had started to change a bit lately. That is not to say that the time between amorous interludes had grown longer, or that his wife’s pregnancy had interfered with their sex life. Yet Júbilo felt there was an interference that disturbed the exchange of energies between them. He didn’t know how to explain it, but he sensed that Lucha was hiding something from him. It was a thought she didn’t dare to express and that Júbilo was unable to read, but he could feel it in his veins. This is best explained if one takes into account that a thought is an electric current, and water is one of the best conductors of electricity. Since there is an abundance of this element pumping through our bloodstream, it wasn’t at all difficult for Júbilo to “feel” his wife’s thoughts during the exchange of energies produced by their sexual intercourse. His wife’s womb was his energy receptacle, as well as his power company, and lately he had suffered a change in voltage. It made Júbilo despondent, but when he questioned Lucha about it, she denied anything was wrong. Since he didn’t have a device like a telegraph machine at hand to capture her hidden thoughts, he was forced to speculate about them. Of course, instead of guessing, he would have loved to be able to convert those electrical impulses into words. If only he could find a way to do that! If he could somehow invent a thought decoder. To his way of thinking, thoughts were entities that existed from the moment they originated in the mind; they consisted of waves of energy that traveled silently and invisibly through space until they were captured by some sort of receiving apparatus and converted into sounds, written words, or even images. Júbilo was convinced that some day an apparatus would be invented that would be able to convert the thoughts of others into images. There was nothing to prevent it. Meanwhile, he would have to keep using the only reliable receiving system he had at hand, which was himself. Maybe he only needed to fine-tune his perception a bit to capture the more subtle wavelengths, allowing him to expand his ability to communicate with the world around him.

  Júbilo firmly believed that everything in the universe had a soul, that every single thing had feelings, thoughts—from the tiniest flower to the farthest galaxy. Everything had a particular way of vibrating and of saying, “Here I am.” So it could be said that the stars talked, that they were capable of sending signals to indicate their most intimate thoughts. The ancient Mayans believed the stars were linked to the mind of the sun, and that if one managed to establish contact with the king of the stars, it was possible to perceive not only the sun’s thoughts, but also its desires. And Júbilo, as a worthy descendant of that wonderful race, liked to open his consciousness and widen his sensibilities to embrace the sun, the stars, and a galaxy or two, trying to find a signal, a message, a meaning, a pulsing vibration that would speak to him.

  How sad it would be if no one received those impulses! If no one understood them! If the emitted signals wandered aimlessly through the darkness of time. There was no thought that could disturb Júbilo more than a message that finds no receiver. Being such a wonderful listener, and having been born with the ability to interpret any kind of communication, he would feel depressed when a message languished without a response, floating there in space, unnoticed. Like a caress that never touches skin, or a freshly fallen fig which is ignored, uneaten, and ends up rotting on the ground. There was nothing worse, thought Júbilo, than the idea of countless messages that never knocked on a door and just languished in space, disoriented, wandering, unclaimed. How many of these pulsating, invisible, inaudible presences were spinning around a person, a planet, or the sun? This simple thought filled Júbilo with guilt. It made him miserable, as if it were his responsibility to receive messages for all those who couldn’t. He would have loved to tell everyone that he was able to perceive their signals, that he valued them and, most important, that they were not sent in vain. Over the years he found the best way to acknowledge the signals of others was by fulfilling their most intimate desires, by doing them an honest act of service.

  Perhaps this sentiment was born one distant day when his grandmother took him into the jungle, to a secret place, a hidden Mayan stela still undiscovered by archaeologists. To the eyes of a small boy, it seemed like a colossal monument, difficult to take in at first. Just as great was its power of attraction. The hieroglyphics carved into the stone instilled a tremendous fascination in all those who gazed upon it. Doña Itzel and Júbilo studied it for a long time while the old woman smoked a cigarette. It was one she had fashioned herself, the tobacco wrapped in a corn husk. We’re talking about a whole leaf of the husk, so it was quite a cigarette and took doña Itzel a long time to finish. During this time, Júbilo concentrated on the hieroglyphics.

  “What does it say, abuela?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, child. Apparently, some very important dates are written on this stela, but no one has been able to interpret them.”

  Young Júbilo was horrified. If the Mayans had bothered to spend so much time carving this stone to leave the dates inscribed on it, it was because they considered them to be truly important. How was it possible that they had been forgotten? He just couldn’t believe it.

  “But tell me, abuela, isn’t there anyone who knows the numbers?”

  “That’s not the problem, Che’ehunche’eh Wich. We can read the numbers, what we don’t know is the corresponding dates on our calendar, because the Mayan calendar was different, and we’re missing the key that would allow us to interpret them.”

  “And who has it?”

  “No one, it was lost during the conquista. As I have told you, the Spaniards burned many, many codices, so there are many things we will never know about our ancestors.”

  As doña Itzel took a long puff of her cigarette, a tear ran down young Júbilo’s cheek. He refused to believe that so much had been lost. It couldn’t be true. This stone slab spoke to him, and although he was unable to understand it, he was sure he could decipher its mystery, or at least he was going to try.

  He spent days learning the Mayan number system, which is based on the number twenty and employs dots and lines for its written expression. Curiously, this training helped him, years later, when it came to learning Morse code. But at the time, he had no idea he was going to be a telegraph operator and his only concern was to find the hidden key that would allow him to decipher the Mayan dates. Nothing could have made doña Itzel happier. To see her grandson so completely absorbed in the culture of the ancient Mayans filled her with pride and satisfaction. And more important, I think that was what allowed her to die in peace, since she realized that her legacy on earth was assured in a member of the family. She was now certain that Júbilo would not forget his Mayan roots. She died peacefully, smiling. And while Júbilo was saddened by her death, he could find some comfort in it too. His grandmother died at the right time, before modern development could scandalously overtake Progreso, her quiet pueblo. It was indeed ironic that his grandmother had lived in a town named Progreso, because although she was an active woman with liberal ideas, she in no way shared the urge for progress that was so common at the time. She accepted that women could smoke and fight for their rights, she even supported the 1916 movement to regulate abortion in the Yucatán. But she was adamantly opposed to the advent of the telegraph, the telephone, the train, and all other modern technological advances, which in her mind only caused people’s heads to fill with noise, made them live more frenetically, and distracted them from their true interests.

  In some way, his grandmother saw all these advances as crude successors of the positivist thought that defined the Científicos, a group of misguided characters who had kept President Porfirio Díaz in power for many years. It was during Díaz’s dictatorship, in 1901, that the book Mexico: Its Social Evolution was published. Written by the positivist doctor Porfirio Parra, the book was a clear testimony of what the day’s most respected and refined authorities really thought about Mexicans. In a single stroke, this book disowned Mexico’s Indian heritage, leaving it out of the story completely. Parra claimed that before the arrival
of the Spaniards, the Indians only knew how to count up to twenty, and that their mathematical knowledge only extended to life’s bare necessities and was never used for scientific investigation. According to Parra, the origins of Mexican science lay in the facts imported by the conquistadores, not in any native knowledge. It was a history charged with racist undertones, not to mention ignorance, and it justified doña Itzel’s fear that all these recent technological advances would obscure the fight to break away from Cientificismo’s legacy and to return to true Mexican, Indian, values being mounted by great Mexicans, like José Vasconcelos, Antonio Caso, Diego Rivera, Martín Luis Guzmán, and Alfonso Reyes.

  For doña Itzel, it was clear that the real question surrounding the issue of the train lay not in whether one would be able to reach his destination more quickly, but in why he would want to. The danger she saw was that technological advances served no purpose if they were not accompanied by an equivalent spiritual development. Even though they had gone through a revolution, Mexicans had not acquired any greater consciousness of who they were. And now, living even faster than before, how were they to connect with their past? When were they going to stop wanting to be what they weren’t?

  His grandmother died without finding the answer to these questions, and Júbilo, though visibly affected by her death for quite some time, never stopped trying to decipher the enigma of the hieroglyphics. His mathematical studies finally led him to the key to the Mayan calendar. All the wisdom achieved by the amazing Mayan astronomers was locked within thirteen numbers and twenty symbols. The Mayans were acutely aware of the skies that surrounded them and the movement of the planets. Not only could they predict eclipses with great precision, but they could also calculate Earth’s orbit around the sun with an accuracy to within a thousandth of a decimal point of the calculations of modern science. How could this be explained in a civilization that didn’t have modern instruments of measurement? That hadn’t even reached the point of discovering the use of the wheel as a means of transportation?

  Júbilo arrived at the conclusion that it was because the Mayans were able to establish an intimate connection with the universe that surrounded them. They used the term Kuxán Suum to define the way we are connected with the galaxy. Kuxán Suum translates as “The Way to the Sky That Leads to the Universe’s Umbilical Cord”—a line that extends from the solar plexus of each man and passes through the sun until it reaches the Hunab-Kú, which translates as “The Beginning of Life Beyond the Sun.” For the Mayans, the universe was not separated or atomized. They believed that a subtle web of fibers maintained a constant connection between certain bodies. In other words, that the galaxy was integrated in a resonating matrix, within which the transmission of information occurred instantaneously. And that any individual who had the necessary sensitivity to perceive the resonance of specific objects could connect with them and enjoy immediate access to all cosmic knowledge. He could perceive the resonance of objects. Of course, when the Kuxán Suum became obscured we could not connect with anything, since our own resonance was diminished, and although the sun could be right in front of us, it wouldn’t say anything to us.

  It was very interesting to imagine the galaxy as a resonating box. To resonate means to echo. And to echo means to vibrate. The whole universe pulses, vibrates, echoes. Where? In objects equipped to receive energy waves. Júbilo discovered that pointed objects were more efficient for receiving energy than rounded objects. So the construction of pyramids by his ancestors, as well as the raising of telegraph posts by his contemporaries, seemed completely logical to him.

  His understanding of this phenomenon provided him with an explanation for his having been born with a pointed skull, which acted as a powerful antenna and served marvelously for connecting with the cosmos. And for his erect member, which connected him with the deepest and most sonorous matrix in the world: his wife’s. This was the basis of Júbilo’s ability to establish a strong connection with people, even across distances. More surprisingly, he could connect with objects too, and even with something as abstract as numbers. A possible explanation for this lay in that Júbilo, being a high-frequency antenna, not only intercepted subtle vibrations from all things but also was in complete harmony with them. In other words, he not only perceived the vibrating waves but became one with them, vibrating at the same rate and frequency. Like the sound of a guitar cord being strummed and then echoed by another cord tuned to the same note. The second cord, even though it hasn’t been touched, will vibrate at the same time as the first. For Júbilo, echoing was the best way to respond to a vibration that said, “Here I am.” It was his way of saying, “Here I am too, and I am vibrating right along with you.”

  And so it wasn’t so strange that Júbilo could communicate with numbers. In his extensive study of Mayan numerology, he had discovered that writing the number five wasn’t the same as writing the number four. And not just because they represented a different accumulation of elements, but because each number had its own distinct way of resonating, just like a musical note. So, just as he could clearly recognize the difference between do and re, Júbilo could also determine with great precision the number of a playing card lying facedown on a table. This made him an exceptional card player, but, curiously, he rarely played, and never with his friends, because it seemed dishonest to him to take advantage of his ability to connect with numbers. The only time he made an exception was in Huichapan, a tiny, peaceful pueblo in the Sierra de Puebla, when he was standing in for the local telegraph operator who was on vacation.

  A persistent rain had fallen all day. The houses had wide eaves so people could walk along the narrow streets without getting wet. The climate induced a sort of melancholy that clung to the bones of the pueblo’s inhabitants and was much worse than the constant dampness. In the two weeks that Júbilo and Lucha had been in the town, Júbilo hadn’t felt the slightest urge to explore this popular tourist destination. He preferred spending his free time frolicking in bed with his wife. But one afternoon, one of his most frequent telegraph clients, a young local named Jesús, had come to send his regular telegraph to Lupita, his girlfriend, who lived in the city of Puebla. Lupita and Jesús were getting married in two weeks. The preparations for the wedding were already well along and Júbilo had been sending a flurry of telegrams to the bride-to-be informing her of the details of the religious ceremony, how many flowers and candles would adorn the church, the number of chickens that would be sacrificed for the banquet, in short, Júbilo even knew how many kisses Jesús was planning to give her and, most important, where. Of course, this last bit of information had not been divulged by the groom-to-be. But it had been present in his mind and Júbilo, without wanting to, had simply received the confidential message while he was watching Jesús write his telegrams, which made him an unwitting accomplice to Jesús’s love affair.

  But that morning, as soon as he saw Jesús walk in the door of the telegraph office, Júbilo knew something serious had happened. Jesús entered with his head hanging, sad and distressed. Because his sombrero was tilted, rainwater ran off it, soaking the papers on the desk without Jesús even noticing. It seemed that he had even forgotten his good manners, because he didn’t bother to remove the sombrero from his head. Timidly, Júbilo rescued a few forms from disaster and moved them out of harm’s way while Jesús made several attempts to write a telegram that invariably ended up in the trash can. It was clear to Júbilo that whatever Jesús had to tell Lupita, it was certainly not pleasant. Wanting to help him, Júbilo spoke to the lovesick youth, little by little winning his confidence, until he finally got Jesús to confess his problem.

  It turned out that Jesús was a hardened poker player and usually played at the cantina on Friday nights. But the previous week he had made a fatal decision. He had changed the day of his game from Friday to Saturday, to make the most of his last days as a bachelor, with disastrous results. He had lost everything. Everything! The rancho where he planned to live with Lupita, the money for the church, the banquet
, the bride’s dress, even the honeymoon trip that he had dreamed about for so long! It was obvious that the man was completely destroyed. Worst of all, he had lost his fortune at the hands of don Pedro, the local cacique, a landowning tyrant, a man who besides being rude, coarse, and evil-looking was abusive, exploitative, and a thief, among other charming traits.

  Júbilo couldn’t understand how it was possible that, knowing this about don Pedro, Jesús had still chosen to play with him—he simply couldn’t believe it. Jesús tried to excuse himself by arguing that it had been impossible to avoid, that don Pedro had arrived at their poker table out of nowhere and asked if he could join the group, and none of them had been able to refuse. That was understandable. But what was still unclear was why Jesús had risked everything he had. Júbilo felt there must have been a very good reason. And while he listened to Jesús’s long tale of woe, during which he blamed everything that had happened on an excess of alcohol, Júbilo focused on entering into harmony with Jesús’s suffering to try to find the real answer. He discovered that what his friend was hiding behind his sad and glassy gaze was the flimsy hope of defeating, for once in his life, the man who had taken all of his family’s possessions from them. This revelation certainly explained Jesús’s irrational behavior. The feeling of injustice was so deeply buried within his soul that it made him feel totally powerless, the impotence of several generations of campesinos who had suffered terrible abuse at the hands of the large landowners. Júbilo was so in tune with Jesús’s pain that he felt in his own body the offense, the humiliation, the impotence. And in that instant, he knew he had to avenge this poor man who didn’t know how to tell his fiancée, just two weeks beforehand, that they had to suspend the preparations for their eagerly anticipated wedding. Especially since in just a few days’ time Lupita was to leave Puebla, together with her family, to come to Huichapan, where Jesús’s entire family was anxiously awaiting her.