Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire: A Novel

Destiny and Desire is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

English translation copyright 2011 by Edith Grossman

All rights reserved.

Jacket design: Flamur Tonuzi

Jacket illustration: Thomas Woodruff

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in Spanish as La voluntad y la fortuna by Alfaguara, Mexico City, Mexico, in 2008, copyright 2008 by Carlos Fuentes.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fuentes, Carlos.

[Voluntad y la fortuna. English]
Destiny and desire : a novel / Carlos Fuentes ; translated by Edith Grossman.
p. cm.
Originally published in Spanish as La voluntad y la fortuna by Alfaguara, Mexico City, in 2008.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60445-7
1. Grossman, Edith, 1936 II. Title.
PQ7297.F793V6413 2011
863.64dc22 2010015078

Title-page image copyright iStockphoto.com / Jhason Abuan
Jacket design: Flamur Tonuzi
Jacket illustration: Thomas Woodruff

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v3.1

ALSO BY CARLOS FUENTES

Aura
The Buried Mirror
Burnt Water
The Campaign
A Change of Skin
Christopher Unborn
Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins
The Crystal Frontier
The Death of Artemio Cruz
Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone
Distant Relations
The Eagles Throne
The Good Conscience
Happy Families
The Hydra Head
Inez
Myself with Others
A New Time for Mexico
The Old Gringo
The Orange Tree
Terra Nostra
This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life
Where the Air Is Clear
The Years with Laura Diaz

For my children
Cecilia
Natacha
Carlos

Contents

Prelude

A t night the sea and the sky are one and even the earth becomes confused with the dark immensity that envelops everything. There are no chinks. No breaks. No breaches. Night is the best representation of the infinitude of the universe. It makes us believe that nothing has a beginning and nothing has an end. Especially if (as is the case tonight) there are no stars.

The first lights appear and the separation begins. The ocean withdraws to its own geography, a veil of water that conceals deep-sea mountains, valleys, ravines. The ocean bottom is a chamber whose echoes never reach us, least of all me, during the small hours.

I know that day will destroy the illusion. And if dawn never breaks again, then what? Then Ill think the ocean has stolen my form.

The Pacific really is a tranquil ocean now, as white as a large basin of milk. The waves have warned it that earth is approaching. I try to measure the distance between two waves. Or is it time that separates them, not distance? Answering this question would solve my own mystery. The ocean is undrinkable, but it drinks us. Its softness is a thousand times greater than earths. But we hear only the echo, not the voice of the sea. If the sea were to shout, we would all be deaf. And if the sea were to stop, we would all be dead. There is no unmoving sea. Its perpetual motion gives oxygen to the world. If the sea doesnt move, we all suffocate. Not death by water but by asphyxiation.

Dawn breaks and daylight determines the seas color. The blue of the water is merely a dispersion of light. The color blue means that the solar sphere has conquered the clarity of the water, providing it with a covering that doesnt belong to it, that isnt its skin, if in fact the ocean also has skin What will the new day illuminate? Id like to give a very fast answer because Im losing the words to tell you, the survivors, this tale.

If the newborn sun and the dying night dont speak for me, Ill have no history. The history I want to tell all of you who still live. I believe the sea lives and that each wave that washes over my head feels the earth, touches my flesh, looks for my gaze and finds it, stupefied. Or rather bewildered. Incredulous.

I look without looking. Im afraid of being seen. Im not what you would call a pleasant sight. Im the thousandth severed head so far this year in Mexico. Im one of fifty decapitated heads this week, the seventh today, and the only one in the past three and a quarter hours.

The rising sun is reflected in my open eyes. My head has stopped bleeding. A thick liquid runs from the encephalic mass into the sand. My lids will never close again, as if my thoughts will continue to dampen the earth.

Here is my severed head, lost like a coconut on the shores of the Pacific Ocean along the Mexican coast of Guerrero.

My head torn away like the head of a dead fetus that has to lose it so the headless body can be born in spite of everything, quiver for a few moments, and die as well, drowned in blood, allowing the mother to be saved and to cry. After all, the efficacy of the guillotine was tested first by severing the heads of corpses, not kings.

My head was cut off by machete blows. My neck is a cloth that unravels into shreds. My eyes are two open beacons of astonishment until the next tide carries them out and the fish swim into my head through the sacrificial orifice and the gray matter spills in one piece onto the sand, like an overturned bowl of soup, lost in the earth, forever invisible unless a fee is paid by national and foreign tourists. Were in the tropics, damn it! Dont you know that, you people who are still alive or who believe you are living?

My brain stopped controlling the movements of a body it can no longer find. My head abandoned my body. Without a body, what good does it do to breathe, circulate, sleep? Even if these are the oldest areas inside my head, do new zones await me in the part of my brain I didnt use in life? I no longer have to control balance, posture, respiration, the rhythm of my heart. Am I entering an unknown reality, the one the unused portion of my brain will soon reveal to me?

Those who have been guillotined dont lose their head right away. They have a few secondsperhaps minutesto move their bulging eyes, ask themselves what happened, where am I, whats waiting for me, with a tongue that, separated from the body, does not stop moving, loquacious, idiotic, about to lose itself forever in the mystery of finding out what happened to my trunk instead of focusing urgently on the greatest duty of a severed head, which is to recreate the body in its mind and say: This is the head of Josu, the son of unknown parents, who is searching for his living body, the one he had in life, the one he felt night and day, the one that woke every morning with a lifes plan negated, of course it was! by the image in the first mirror of the day. I, Josu, whose only concern at this moment is not biting my tongue. Because although my head is severed, my tongue attempts to speak, freed at last, and succeeds only in biting itself, biting itself as one bites a sausage or a hamburger. Flesh we are and to flesh we return. Is that how it goes? Is that the prayer? My eyes without sockets look for the world.