Christopher Unborn

1. Later my father and mother emerge from the sea

Later my father and mother emerge from the sea and put their ears to the sand as if to listen for something far off, to listen through walls, depths, to listen for the earthquakes that are coming, to listen for the growth of the grass and the creaking of the graveyards, the noise El Niño makes moving over the sea and the trot of the coyotes coming down the mountains.

I’ve been hearing noises since the beginning — they resound. I dream that: wherever I am I shall be covered, masked, but still resounding, hearing, dreaming, perhaps one day I shall be listened to, but for now I only listen, listening to them through my prenatal filters, like this:

“This is my second question: what will the boy’s name be?”

“Christopher.”

“Don’t be a jerk. I already know that: What else? Which last names!

“Palomar.”

“What else?”

“I don’t know what your other names are. I named you Angeles. Angel and Angeles sound good.”

“Describe me today.”

A green flame I would have wanted to touch when she was a girl, before and before and before, a green flame is what she looks like now, liquid emerald, daughter of the dawn (well, of this dawn: the one we managed to get): well, you’re better than nothing. Tall and slender, fair but trying hard to get a tan. Black hair, cut short, shaved at the neck, raven wing and kissmequick over one eye: very twenties. Both of us dress very twenties. Hippie style’s out of fashion. Today to be a rebel in fashion means to be seriously retro: I wear dark suits, gaiters, hats, scarf pins, ties, starched collars. She wears black bandeaux, gray silk stockings, shoes for dancing the Charleston. Now I’ve made her dress Tehuana-style to fool Uncle Homero: she in Tehuana clothes, me hippie-style; folklore and revolution, things that don’t shock our relative or anyone else.

Angeles: your expression is so hard sometimes, while your flesh is so smooth and soft. I love your perfumed nape, your acid axillas, your naked feet. Angeles, my Angeles: give me things to think about at night. My Engelschen with long legs and breasts that seem immobile they’re so small and so well fixed. Pale, limp, and white (now tanning under the January sun of Acapulco). She commemorated her lack of a past as well as her arrival in Mexico City by going alone one afternoon to the Monument of the Revolution to make wee-wee on the eternal flame and by declaring later in the police station when they arrested her for disrespect:

“That flame doesn’t cost the government a dime. That’s why I put it out.”

Later she confessed to Angel that she only did it to get even, to show that a woman not only can urinate standing up if she so chooses but can even put out the sacred flame of the Mexican Revolution that way. Uncle Fernando Benítez took Angeles in when the girl turned up on his doorstep out of the blue one day in the year ’91, after the national disasters in ’90 that left us bereft of half the territory remaining to us, and many people from the provinces decided to flee from Chitacam, the Yucatán, Mexamerica, from the coast north of Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo, in order to go on being Mexicans. Angeles appeared before Benítez with no suitcase, without even a change of clothes, which Don Fernando liked because he didn’t want to know any more about her; he said he liked to decide things once and for all right on the spot, decide about love or friendship or justice without proof or explanation. She said she’d seen him from a distance in the plaza of her hometown and she liked the way he came right up to people, he spoke to people to whom no one else ever spoke: she liked that and that’s why she’d come. And she’d read his books.

He told the authorities she was his niece and defended her with all the sophistry of a good Mexican lawyer — even if he had no degree, Fernando Benítez, like all literate Mexicans, had a jurist locked in his bosom, just dying to get out into the world. While Angeles was being held, Don Fernando Benítez sent his agile young ally, the Orphan Huerta, to reignite the flame; by the time Angeles appeared before the magistrate, it was impossible to prove that the flame had ever been extinguished, and Benítez could declare the following: Are you saying, your honor, that the flame of the Mexican Revolution can be put out just like that — as declared by these two exemplars of the best police force money can buy, even if they were in all probability a bit tipsy at the time and for all practical purposes merely concupiscent, the miserable nobodies! The truth of the matter is that my niece did feel an urge, that’s so, was seen and chased by these fleet-footed minions of justice, which heightened her nervousness and its effects on her bladder, so she eliminated where she could — but to put out the flame of our permanent revolution? With a mere squirt of wee-wee? Who could do it? Not her, not me, not even you, your honor!

And Angel? Will you describe him, Mom?

Also green, very much a gypsy. Tall, a boy from this new generation of skinny, tall Mexicans. Both of us are dark and green, me with black eyes and he with lime-green eyes. We looked at each other: he’s shortsighted, knows how to whistle all of Don Giovanni, and says that I would have been a perfect courtesan in an opera if I’d been born a hundred years ago, and if I hadn’t begun reading the complete works of Plato. The set with green covers. Vasconcelos. The National Autonomous University of Mexico. God, it’s the only thing that lets me look at myself in the mirror and say to myself: There you are. Your name is Angeles. You love Angel. You are going to have a baby. What makes you think I won’t read the whole Cratylus, which is a book about names: Angel, Angeles, Christopher: Are they the names that really belong to us (my love, my man, my name, my son)? Or are the names ourselves, are we the names? Do we name or are we named? Are our names a pure convention? Did the gods give us our names, but by saying them (our own and the others) do we wear them out and pervert them? When we name ourselves, do we burn ourselves? None of this matters to me: I intuit that if I have a name and I name you (Angel/Angeles) it’s so I can discover little by little your nature and my own. Isn’t that what’s most important? What does it matter then that I have no past or that I don’t remember it, which is the same thing. Take me as I am, Angel, and don’t ask me any more questions. This is our pact. Name me. Discover me. I am going to have a son and I’m going to read Plato. What makes you think I won’t, despite all the accidents that in Mexico make intellectual endeavor impossible, all the distractions, the pleasant climate, the deteriorating environment, let’s take a walk, the coffee klatches, the gossip, the parties, there isn’t a real summer, the winter is invisible, politics are taken care of for us every six years, nothing works but everything survives, you was born, you dies, you don’ reads, you don’ write nothin’. What makes you think I won’t? Do you understand why I’m memorizing Plato? Those books are those men, Angel, the others, the people, the ones who did something, read, spoke, listened: Angel, I have no other connection with the others, not even with a past, not even with a family or anyone else. I have no past, Angel my love, that’s why everything that falls on me sticks to me, all causes, all ideas, feminism, the left, third world, ecology, ban-the-bomb, Karl and Sigi, liberation theology, even traditional Catholicism as long as it goes against conformity, everything sticks to me and whatever sticks to me has to be good, my love, because the only thing that doesn’t stick to me is respect for authority, faith in the chief, superior races, the murder or oppression of anyone in the name of an idea, history, the nation, or the leader, none of the above. I am a good receptacle, Angel, a white wall without memories or my own past, my love, but a place where only pretty things can be written and ugliness has no place. Now I leave it to you to write there with me, but don’t force me into anything, my love; I need you, but don’t chain me up; I follow you, but don’t order me to follow you; let me make the life I never had or don’t remember with you, Angel, and one day we can remember together, but I’ll have no memory of anything but my life with you: please, let’s share everything. Pardon my habitual silence. I’m not absent. I observe and absorb, my love. This is our pact.

Your father Angel says I feel superior to him because since I have no past I’ve had to enter today’s universality in a flash, the universality of violence, haste, cruelty, and death. But his parents died comically, eating tacos.

What did Grandpa and Grandma do, Dad?

Your grandparents, Diego and Isabella Palomar, were inventors, Chris: in the tabloids of the period they were called the Curies of Tlalpan. I’m telling you this so you know right from the start that in this country anything you do will be pardoned as long as it serves in one way or another to justify and legitimize the status quo. Your uncles, Homero and Fernando, who detest each other, have at least that in common. Don Homero’s illegal trafficking is pardoned because he does his job as Defender of the Castilian Tongue. Don Fernando’s critical gibes are forgiven because he is the Defender of the Indians. My grandpa General Rigoberto Palomar’s eccentricities are forgiven because he is the only person who believes body and soul that the Mexican Revolution triumphed. And my parents were given official protection for their inventions because they were the Curies of Tlalpan: two inventive and daring scientists during the period, my boy, when Mexico thought it could be technologically independent. One illusion less! For thirty years we were buying obsolete technology at high prices; every five or six years we had to turn our decrepit machinery in for new obsolete machinery, and so on and so on and so on … And thus the techniques for robotics and cryogenics, biomedicine, fiber optics, interactive computers, and the entire aerospace industry passed us by. One day, when you’ve grown up, I’ll take you to see the ruins of the investments in the oil boom, son, when we spent forty billion dollars to buy junk. I’ll take you to see the ruins of the nuclear plant in Palo Verde, next to which Chichén-Itzá looks like a brand-new Coca-Cola and hot-dog stand. I’ll take you, my dear son, to see expensive, rusting machinery sitting in the useless industrial Gulf ports. And if you want to take a ride on an ultramodern Japanese bullet train, well, maybe it would be better for you to take a ride on the kiddy train in Chapultepec Park instead of trying the paralyzed inter-ocean train that according to its Mexican designers was going to knock the crap out of the Panama Canal. Seek in vain, my boy, the rapid shipment of barrels of oil from Coatzacoalcos to Salina Cruz, the shortest route from Abu Dhabi to San Francisco and Yokohama: seek it, sonny, and all you’ll see are the cold rails and the hot illusions of insane Mexican oil-grandeur: no immortal spring, only these, Fabio, oh grief: the blasted heath between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. Mountains of sand and the cadaver of a spider monkey. Long live the Opepsicoatl Generation!

But, Daddy, when did they make you?

* * *

(His parents conceived my father the night of October 2, 1968, as a response against death. At times they’d thought of not having children, of dedicating themselves totally to science. But the night of the student massacre at the Plaza de Tlateloco, they said that if at that instant they didn’t affirm the right to life so brutally trampled on by an arrogant, maddened, and blind power, there would never be any science in our country: they had seen the troops destroy entire laboratories in University City, steal typewriters, dismantle the work of four generations of scholars. As my grandparents made love they could not shut out the noise of sirens, ambulances, machine guns, and fires.

My father was born on July 14, 1969. Thus, his intrauterine life took place between two symbolic dates. In that fact he sees a good omen for my own conception: between Twelfth Night and Columbus Day. But my mother balances this abundance of symbols: she doesn’t even know when she was born, much less when she was conceived.)

But my grandparents, Dad, tell me about my grandparents.

I don’t know if what my parents, Diego and Isabella, invented in the basement of their house in Tlalpan (where I was born) was useful or not. In any case, whatever it was, it hurt no one, except, as it turned out, themselves. They believed in science with all the love of novelty and all the fury of liberal, emancipated Mexicans and rejected both inquisitorial shadows and the sanctimoniousness of the past. So their first invention was a device to expel superstition. Conceived on a domestic scale and as easy to use as a vacuum cleaner, this manual, photostatic device made it possible to transform a black cat into a white cat the instant the feline crossed your path.

The apparatus’s other accomplishments were, my boy, as follows: it reconstituted broken mirrors instantaneously by magnetizing the pieces. They used it to leap Friday the 13th gracefully and to close automatically the portable ladders under which it was possible to walk the streets (a supplemental movement deflected the paint cans that might, for that very reason, fall on one’s head). It even caused hats carelessly tossed on beds to float indefinitely in the air.

They even invented the salt-jumper, which, when someone spilled salt, caused it immediately to bounce over the left shoulder of the person who made the mess. But their most beautiful invention, without a doubt, was the one that created a delightful space in the sky and clouds above any umbrella opened inside a house. And the most controversial was the one that permitted any hostess to summon instantaneously a fourteenth guest when at the last moment she found herself with thirteen at table. My own parents never understood if that saving guest was a mere specter created by lasers or if the invention actually created a new guest of flesh and blood whose only vital function was to eat that one meal and disappear forever without leaving a trace, or if there existed an unfathomable complicity between the device and certain living — and hungry — persons who, on finding out about the dilemma of protocol and superstition, turned up to get a free meal, convoked by some message between computer and consumer which escaped the control or intention of my diligent parents.

The invention of the Fourteenth Guest led in its turn to two more inventions, one metaphysical, the other, alas! all too physical. My mother Isabella, no matter how modern and scientific she might be, especially because she was rebelling against her family, the Fagoagas, could never manage to free herself from an ancient female terror: whenever she saw a mouse, she would scream and jump up on a chair. Unhappily, she caused several accidents by jumping up on rickety stools and improvised platforms, breaking test tubes and occasionally ruining ongoing experiments. By the same token, there was no way to reconcile this attitude of hers with my parents’ declared purpose; namely, to transform superstition into science. The fact is that the basement of their house in Tlalpan was full of rodents; but so was the rest of the city, my father, Diego Palomar, pointed out, and if Diego and Isabella had enough money to invest in pieces, even slices of cheese to put in their mousetraps, what could the garbageman or the ragpicker put in theirs?

Moved by this scientific and humanitarian concern, which distanced them so greatly from my mother Isabella’s family, they proceeded to invent a mousetrap for the poor in which the owner would put, instead of a piece of real cheese, the photograph of a piece of cheese. The photograph was an integral part of the invention, which would be sold (or distributed) with the color photo of a magnificent piece of Roquefort cheese standing upright in the trap. Excited, your grandparents set about testing the device at home, as they always did. They left the trap in the basement one night and eagerly returned in the morning to see the results.

The trap had worked. The photograph of the cheese had disappeared. But in its place my grandparents found the photo of a mouse.

They didn’t know whether to treat this result as a success or a failure. In any case, they did not lose hope; instead, they derived the following corollary: if the representation of matter, its reproduction, is complemented by an opposite term, it must be possible to isolate this relationship within matter itself, seeking within each object in the universe the principle of antimatter, the potential twin of the object. To make the antimatter materialize at the instant matter disappears became the concentrated, obsessive avenue of your grandparents’ genius, Christopher.

They began by taking simple, organic objects — a bean, a piece of celery, a lettuce leaf, a jalapeño pepper — and submitting them to a kind of infinite race between Achilles and the turtle. By keeping each one of those objects connected to its vital source — the root that supplies nutrition — my parents tried to accelerate the process by which the bean, the lettuce, the pepper, and the celery were ingested, while at the same time they were replaced by the accelerated reproduction of other identical objects. From integrating the process of growth with the process of consumption there was only one revolutionary step: to introduce within each pepper, lettuce, bean, or celery a principle of reproduction that would be inherent in but separate from the object in question: the Achilles of consumption would be caught every time and more and more by the turtle of reproduction acting as an active principle of antimatter.

All that remained to my parents, Isabella and Diego, to do was to apply this discovery to the natural envelope of those ingredients: the tortilla, our national and supernatural food, and announce the discovery of the Inconsumable Taco: a taco that, the more it is eaten, the more it grows back: the solution to Mexico’s nutrition problems! the greatest national idea — Uncle Homero Fagoaga laughed when he learned about it — since mole was invented in Puebla de los Angeles by a dyspeptic nun!

They all laughed, Angeles, Uncle Homero, and his horrid sisters Capitolina and Farnesia (ages unconfessable), as they made a detailed inventory of the house that belonged to my parents and me in the neighborhood of the Church of St. Peter the Apostle in Tlalpan: a house painted in bright colors — yellows, blues, and greens — with no windows on the street but plenty of interior patios, located between a hospital from the Porfirio Díaz era and a water-pumping station: making an inventory of what one day, according to my parents’ express intention, was to be mine, along with an inheritance of forty million gold pesos. It was to have been mine when I turned twenty-one.

“I can stay right here and live alone,” I said, stubborn and full of the sufficiency of my eleven years.

“No, no, by Jesus, a thousand times no!” exclaimed Farnesia. “In this horror?”

“Quite horrible, little sister, but property values here are going up because of how near the paper factory is, and the diners, and the entrance to the Cuernavaca highway,” Don Homero said, calculating rapidly. He may have been very academic in regard to the language, but he was also very academic in business.

“In any case, the boy should live with us so he’ll be educated: he has our name, so we should sacrifice ourselves,” opined Capitolina. “Poor little orphan.”

“Ay, little sister,” agreed Farnesia, “talking about sacrifices, how this ungrateful tot is going to pay for making me leave my house to bury his parents and come here to bring him home — you know that for me it is a sin to leave the house!”

“And you can see he doesn’t believe in God.”

“Proof of his bad upbringing, Capitolina.”

I understand you, Angel, when you tell me that when you were still very young the first thing your Aunts Capitolina and Farnesia told you when they took you in, poor little orphan, was that you were never to mention the reason why you were an orphan, it was too ridiculous, everyone would laugh at you. What will they say if they say that they said that you are the taco orphan or something else like that? What would be left of the family honor? The merest vestiges, Capitolina answered. No, no, dear Jesus, a thousand times no!

You went to your parents’ tomb doing violence to your own memory, imagining all the time that they had died of something else, of anything else, tuberculosis or cancer, a duel at dawn, drowned in a storm on the high seas, smashed up on a bad curve, romantic suicide pact, simultaneous cirrhosis of the liver, but not of indigestion after eating tacos.

Since you had to imagine death as a lie, you felt that everything around you was also a lie. If you couldn’t remember your parents’ death, how were you going to remember the promise of the resurrection of the flesh? How were you going to believe in the existence of a soul? Buried in a lie, they will never truly be resurrected. Cause and effect were missing. Death by Taco: Immortal Soul: Resurrection of the Flesh. Death by Zero: Zero Soul: Zero Flesh. Nothing comes of nothing!

You communicated your doubts to your aunts, and there was a family meeting with your tutor, Uncle Homero. Heretical child, your Aunt Capitolina berated you, even though you don’t believe in God, as your words suggest, at least say that you believe or what will become of you? You will go to hell. Worse, interrupted Farnesia, no one will invite you to their parties or give you their daughter’s hand in matrimony, heretic and remiss child, and in the second place … Go to church, added Capitolina, even if you don’t believe, so that everyone sees you there, and when you get older, Farnesia sensibly observed, go to the university or no one will know what to call you if you aren’t Dr. So-and-so: there has never been a Fagoaga who’s just been plain Mister, God forbid! And when you get older, Uncle Homero concluded politically, go to Party assemblies even if you fall asleep listening to the speeches, just so people see you there. Asleep, Uncle Homero? Bah, just look at the photos of the deputies fast asleep during the presidential report: then your sacrifice will warrant their compassion, respect, and a rising career in national politics, why not? An alert and contentious deputy would be a bad thing, like that bearded tribune Don Aurelio Manrique, who, from his Potosí seat, shouted “Fraud!” at the Maximum Hero of the Revolution, General Don Plutarco Elías Calles, who was perorating in sonorous Sonoran tones from the august rostrum of Doncelles; but a sleeping deputy can quickly become a wide-awake minister, just look at the dazzling rise of that dynamic public man from Guerrero, Don Ulises López, nephew, Don Homero Fagoaga went on, oblivious of Angel’s internal torments, don’t doubt it for a minute and learn, little nephew: how are you going to make a career for yourself, my innocent little Angel?

“Three centuries of Mexican Fagoagas and we’ve all made careers in arms and letters, in the Church and the government, always adapting ourselves to the conditions of the times: one day with the Viceroy, the next with Independence; in bed with Santa Anna and the conservatives, wide awake with Comonfort and the liberals; united with the Empire, lawyers for Lerdo; with Porfirio Díaz for nonreelection, with Porfirio Díaz for reelection; momentarily with Madero, unconditionally with Huerta, at the orders of Carranza, followers of Calles, enemies of Cárdenas, that’s right, we’d have nothing to do with him, even our oh so tall and noble glass of family water can overflow, we have our limits; and disciplined and enthusiastic supporters of the Revolution after Avila Camacho, when the President, revolutionary general that he was, declared himself a believer and a friend to capitalism and thus resolved all our contradictions: Learn, my boy.

My father says to my mother.

My infantile eyes, Angeles, looked at that round, redundant presence — my Uncle Homero Fagoaga — with whom I had to coexist during the years of my childhood and adolescence, as did Juan Goytisolo with the caudillo, Francisco Franco: to inconceivable limits, to the point that I could not imagine life without my oppressor, without his pronouncements, orders, concessions, and rules. Uncle Homero got fatter and fatter, as if he were eating for two. It was impossible to imagine him as a child. He must have had an old man’s face when he was born. He knows everything. He’s obsequious to everyone. The active dialectical organization of all opposites is immediately perceptible between his two cerebral hemispheres, as vast, conceivable, as all the other paired fleshy parts of the abominable anatomy of my Uncle Homero Fagoaga.

Look at him as he imperiously saunters through salons and antechambers, offices and auditoriums, churches and fashionable discotheques: the archaizing thesis runs from the totemic soles of his flat feet properly protected from the slightest contact with Mexican filth by white Gucci leather to the top of his head, involuntarily tonsured by time and Pantene massages; the modernizing thesis runs from the greasy, well-oiled strands on his cranium (that head which is the top of Don Homero’s corporeal pyramid): there, in the gaze of this eminent personage (he’s arrived! he’s here! let him pass through! stand at attention, everyone! Don Homero Fagoaga has entered!) the illiterate masses would find that the entire Age of Reason, from the spirit of law to the cultivation of our own garden, parades through the bright belvedere of his eyes, now — we must admit it — often covered over by lashes ever shorter and more sticky, the Weariness ever thicker, his brows ever longer, his eyelids ever droopier, wrinkled, thinned out, and other disasters of the autumn of life; but the Spanish Counter-Reformation, with all its inquisitions, expulsions, prohibitions, and certificates of purity, remains in the same way Don Homero’s calluses last and scratch in the same way Don Homero’s uncut, mandarin toenails remain: Torquemada inhabits one of his demonstrably functioning testicles (this in spite of our liberal Uncle Don Fernando’s slanderous rumormongering), and Rousseau the other: born free, his second ball knows no other chain than that of a coquettish pair of Pierre Cardin briefs; under one armpit rests the nun, the mother, the holy betrothed saint of mine; under the other, the rumba dancer, the whore, the holy whore. There is, therefore, no admirer more devout or impassioned of the singular synthesis obtained in Mamadoc; Don Homero’s got gunpowder in one nostril and incense in the other; with one ear he hears the Blessed be He and with the other he hears that old revolutionary song, the corrida about the ballad of the Revolution, girl Valentina; with one buttock he sits at the table of reaction, with the other on the benches of the Revolution; and only in the holes and uneven centers, in the singularities of his body, which is so vast it is dual, white and flabby twice over, fundamentous and quivering in every binomial, fervent and odorous in every cotyledon of his gardenia, ambitious twice over, hypocritical twice over, a fool twice over, intuitive twice over, malicious twice over, innocent twice over, gluttonous twice over, arrogant twice over, provincial twice over, resentful twice over, improvised twice over, everything twice over, nothing twice over, Mexican to the depths of his soul, no nation was ever blessed with so much nothing and nothing of so much except the baroque mirage of a gilt altar for an unshod Virgin (thinks Don Homero Fagoaga, pinning a carnation to his lapel before the mirror and dreaming of seducing Mamadoc). Only in the holes and unmatched centers, says my father Angel, can the vital distance of so much paradox be conjugated: like a deep vein that says scratch away at me and you’ll find silver; his anus a whirl of thick golden ingots that says wait and you will receive gold, don’t be deceived by appearances (our Uncle Fernando Benítez closes his eyes as he flies over the precipices of the Sierra Madre toward the last Lacandon and smells the nearness of a mountain of blind gold): the inexhaustible verbal fuel in his tongue.

Because he owes his renown, above all, to his dominion over language, to an exquisite use of the forms of courtesy (“I do not offend through those with which I sit down, Marquise, if I say that your ladyship’s next flatulence will figure on my bill; you just go on eating this sublime dish from our national cuisine, refried beans, slices of onion, Manchego cheese, and peas, who could want more?”) and to his marvelous use of the subjunctive (“If I were to like or were not to like, I might not doubt, exquisite friend, to proceed perhaps if to do so you would have or might not have some problem alluding to your female progenitor, but only if to do it, there were incontrovertible proofs of your being bastards”), without forgetting his incomparable use of the national political language (“After the proclamation of Independence by Father Hidalgo and the expropriation of oil by General Cárdenas, the inauguration of the Road Dividers of Chilpancingo is the most transcendent act of National History, Mr. Governor”) and even of international political language (“From the cosmic balcony of Tepeyac may be heard, vicars, Holy Father, the hallelujahs of the deaf genius of Bonn!”). To any word Don Homero Fagoaga ascribes some twelve syllables even if it only happens to have three: gold on his lips is transmuted into go-oo-aah-ll-dd and Góngora comes out sounding like gonorrhea.

“Learn, my boy, the Fagoagas never lose, and what they do lose they yank right back!”

Pillars of the Government, of the Church, and of Commerce, lost in the immensity of His-panic time:

Who defeated the Moor in Granada?

Fagoaga!

Who defended the cross in Castile?

Fagoaga!

From those faggots, Fagoagas.

From those powers, Homers!

exactly as it is written on the family coat of arms. Angel stared at the final product of that line — his Uncle Homero — and said no.

“If I squeeze, as if they were lemons, all the Fagoagas who have existed over thirteen centuries, Angeles, I swear I wouldn’t get more than a bubble of bitter bile and another of flatulence, to use his term. Sorry, baby; I except my dead mom the inventor who showed her intelligence by marrying a blundering scientist who was a man of few words, like my dad.”

2. My father bade farewell to the house of his childhood

My father bade farewell to the house of his childhood — the house of the bright colors — by silently walking through the gallery of pearlescent light, as if there were two different kinds of light in that one space, the light of the new world and the light of the other, which if not old world, grew further and further away for the Americas of the nineties, where the carefully framed portraits of my grandparents’ heroes were hanging.

There was Ernest Rutherford, looking rather like a sea lion, tall and with a shaggy mustache, gray, as if he had just come from the depths of his cave, dazzled as he left the darkness behind, seeing in the heavens a duplication of the world of the atom.

There was Max Planck, with his high forehead right out of a Flemish painting and his narrow shoulders and drooping mustache, and Niels Bohr, with thick, protuberant lips, looking like the good-natured captain of a whaling ship, forever pacing the deck of a universe on the verge of rioting and throwing the savant into the open sea in a rowboat without oars, and Wolfgang Pauli looking like the perfect Viennese bourgeois, stuffed with pastry and the music of violins.

Perhaps Wolfgang Pauli, in his constant coming and going on the Copenhagen ferries, revived the dialogue between men and forgotten words. Like Rimbaud, said my father (as my genes tell me), like Pound, like Paz: resurrection of language.

“What language will my son speak?”

“In what world will my son live?”

“Which world is this?”

“Who is the Mother and Doctor of All Mexicans?”

“Why did they first run off and then kill the inhabitants of the mountains around Acapulco?”

“What’s Hipi Toltec doing surrounded by friendly coyotes in the middle of a dried-out palm grove?”

Nevertheless, the eyes of my child-father, educated by my scientific grandparents in the brightly colored house in Tlalpan, reserved their greatest interest, their greatest affection for the photograph of a young, blond, smiling savant on the verge of launching himself down the toughest slopes of the grand slalom of science. My father always thought that if someone had an answer for all the riddles of the day of my conception, it was this boy: his name, inscribed on a tiny copper plaque at the bottom of the photo, was Werner Heisenberg, and nothing affected my father’s young imagination so much as the certainty of his uncertainty: the logic of the symbol does not express the experiment; it is the experiment. Language is the phenomenon, and the observation of the phenomenon changes its nature.

Thanks, Dad, for understanding that, for assimilating it into your genes that come from my grandparents and that you transmitted to me. A kind of cloud of warm rain bathes me and covers me from the unruly mop of hair, mustaches, and calf’s eyes of Albert Einstein, and I’ve been living with him from before my conception, swimming in the river of when and the three wheres of my current and eternal dimension; but when I emerge from the interminable river to see a time and a place (which are my own), the one who accompanies me is the young mountain climber: thanks, Werner, and because of you and for you my very personal Heisenberg Society formed in the uterus of my mother Angeles, the first club I ever belonged to and from whose fluffy (enjoyable!) armchairs I already observe the world that nurtures me and which I nurture by observing it.

Thanks to them, I understand that whatever is is provisional because the time and space that precede me and whatever I know about them I know only fleetingly, as I pass, purely by chance, through this hour and this place. The important thing is that the syntheses never finish, that no one save himself, ever, from the contradiction of being in one precise place and one precise time and nevertheless thinking about a time and place that are infinite, denying the end of experience, maintaining open the infinite possibilities for observing the infinite events in the unfinished world and transforming them as I observe them: turning them into history, narrative, language, experience, infinite reading …

My poor father: he grew up in this world, he lost it, and would take years to return to it by the most labyrinthine paths: his Sweet Fatherland, mutilated and corrupt, had to return to the universal promise of the physical wisdom characteristic of the men whose portraits hung in the pearlescent gallery of the house in Tlalpan and to the reason in the dream of heroic Mexicans, capable of being biologists, chemists, physicists, creative men and women, producers, productive, not only consumers, barnacles, drones, in a society that only rewarded rogues. The reason in the dream and not only the dream of reason: men and women devoured and devouring, chronophagous, heliophagous, cannibals eating their own fatherland. This is what Isabella and Diego, my grandparents, wanted to overcome. But now their son, my father, had lost the house of intelligence.

How long it would take us to return to the portraits in this gallery!

It’s time I revealed myself before you, Reader, and tell you I have already returned by way of my genes, which know all, remember all, and if, a bit later, I, like you, forget everything when I’m born and have to learn it all over again before I die, who would deny that in this instant of my gestation I know everything because I am here inside and you, Reader, are you out there?

3. And so, when his parents died

And so, when his parents died, my father was brought to live with his Aunts Capitolina and Farnesia Fagoaga, sisters of his mother (and my deceased grandmother) Isabella Fagoaga de Palomar and that powerful survivor, my avuncular Don Homero Fagoaga (oh, horror). Although Don Homero did not live with his little sisters, he did visit them every day, took most of his meals with them, and in their house on Avenida Durango he honed his moralizing rhetoric and gave his punctilious lessons in proper Christian conduct. My father, between the ages of eleven and fifteen, was the principal object of this evangelizing.

It is not possible (my genes inform me) to give the precise ages of Capitolina and Farnesia. In the first place, my aunts have fixed themselves in an environment that denies them contemporaneity and that facilitates their seeing themselves as younger than all that surrounds them. While other ladies of their generation, less astutely perhaps, have sold off all the furniture, bibelots, pictures, and other decorations that at a given moment go out of fashion, Capitolina and Farnesia have never consented to deacquisition what they inherited and, moreover, to use and inhabit their inheritance. Wrapped in antiques, they always seem younger than they are.

The house on Avenida Durango is the last remnant of the architecture that flourished during the Mexican Revolution, precisely during the years of civil war, between 1911 and 1921: in the transition between the French hotels of the Porfirio Díaz era (1877–1910) and the indigenist, colonialist horrors of the reign of Plutarco Elías Calles, Maximum Hero of the Revolution (1924–35). Don Porfirio and his gang crowned their native versions of the Faubourg St.-Honoré with mansards; Obregón, Calles, and their disciples first built public buildings in the shape of Aztec temples and then lived in domestic versions of churrigueresque churches that had been passed through the filter of the Hollywood stars. The guerrilla fighters ended up living like Mary Pickford and Rudolph Valentino. Those who remained in Mexico City during the armed struggle, with gold under their mattresses and infinite ability when it came to hoarding food and attending property auctions — the Fagoagas, for example — built these mansions out of stone, generally one story high, surrounded by gardens with tamped-down dirt paths, fountains and palm trees, their façades ornamented with urns, vines, and impassive masks, their roofs crowned with balustrades and balconies with high French doors painted white. Inside, they stuffed their villas with all the furniture and paintings they’d inherited from the turn-of-the-century, the national Belle Epoque with its landscapes of the Valley of Mexico, its society portraits in the style of Whistler and Sargent, with display cases full of minutiae, medals, miniature cups; their pedestals with Sèvres vases and white busts of Dante and Beatrice. Heavy plush sofas, carved mahogany tables, red curtains with lots of tassels, much stained glass in the bathroom, stairs with red carpeting and gilt rug stays, parquet and canopied beds; washstands in every room, gigantic armoires, gigantic mirrors, chamber pots and cuspidors in strategic locations; the suffocation of porcelain, dust, varnish, lacquer, terror of fragile, tiny things; a house of look — but-don’t-touch. In their house the little Fagoaga sisters preserved a style of life, of speech, of whispering secrets, and excitation, all of it totally alien to the city outside.

Nevertheless, though they shared a style, they were quite dissimilar: Farnesia was tall, thin, dark, and languid, while Capitolina was short, pudgy, fair, flat-nosed, and febrile. Capitolina spoke in tones that brooked no rejoinders; Farnesia left all her sentences hanging in midair. Capitolina spoke in the first person singular; her sister in a vague but imperial “we.” But both practiced piety at all hours, suddenly falling to their knees before crucifixes and spreading their arms at the least appropriate times and places. They were obsessed with death and spent endless nights in nightgowns, with their hair braided, recalling how Mr. So-and-so or Miss What’s-her-name died. They only read the newspaper for the obituary notices, which they read with consternated glee. But if for Capitolina this activity was translated into the satisfaction of knowing about a misfortune so she could feel well, for Farnesia it was reduced to the conviction that sanctity consisted in doing more evil to oneself than to anyone else, and that this would open the doors of heaven to the inseparable sisters. Because Farnesia was absolutely convinced that the two of them would die at the same time; Capitolina did not share (or desire) such a calamity, but she would not argue with her high-strung little sister.

To go out or not to go out: that was their question. The house on Avenida Durango was for the sisters a convent proportioned to their needs. To abandon it was a sin, and only the most terrible events — like the death of a relative or bringing one home to live with them — could push them out of their home. But there were voyages out they believed — with pain in their souls — could not be postponed. Capitolina and Farnesia, it seems, had a passion: to find out what unbelievers were about to die so they could try to convert them on their deathbeds, for which purpose they dragged along with them the priest from the neighboring Church of the Holy Family.

No heretical will, no atheistic indifference, no lay prejudice, could stand between their crusading and the deathbed. They would clear paths by swinging their umbrellas, Capitolina snorting, Farnesia fainting, both advancing with their priest toward the bed where, more often than not, the Misses Fagoaga were accepted with a sigh of resignation or with saving praise by the dying person, who thus found in them a pretext to admit he was a closet Catholic and so to arrange his affairs — just in case — with the Other World.

This crusade by the Fagoaga sisters to save souls was put to the test by the staunchest agnostic among their relatives (by marriage), General Don Rigoberto Palomar, father of the deceased inventor Diego Palomar, husband of Isabella Fagoaga and my father Angel’s grandfather. General Palomar, whose life ran neck and neck with that of the century, had been a bugle boy in Don Venustiano Carranza’s Constitutionalist Army, and at the age of eighteen became the youngest general in the Mexican Revolution. His merit consisted in retrieving the arm of General Alvaro Obregón when the future President lost it in an artillery barrage during the battle of Celaya against Pancho Villa. Some say, maliciously, that the severed member of the valiant and canny division leader from Sonora was recovered when General Obregón himself tossed a centennial gold coin up in the air and the lost arm tremulously rose up from among the cadavers and, with immutable greed, snatched at the money.

The modest truth is that the bugle boy, Rigoberto Palomar, accompanied by his faithful mascot, a retriever named Moses, found the arm, which the dog sniffed and took up in his jaws. Rigo kept the dog from gnawing the bone. Alvaro Obregón’s white flesh and blond hair made the famous arm stand out; the bugle boy delivered it personally to Obregón; he was instantly promoted to general. Out of gratitude, the brand-new boy brigadier shot Moses dead so no witnesses would remain — not even a mute one — to the fact that a dog was about to dine on the limb, which, as everyone knows, was preserved in a bottle of formaldehyde and buried along with the general, who, on July 28, 1928, a few days after his election, was treacherously murdered by a religious fanatic during a banquet held in a restaurant called the Lightbulb. Only General Palomar kept the secret of the President-elect’s last words: Obregón, as he died, dragged his one remaining hand over the tablecloth, his blue eyes fading and his voice imploring, “More corn muffins, more corn muffins,” before his inert body collapsed. Today, a monument to his memory stands on Avenida de los Insurgentes, in the very place where he died. Sweethearts meet there by day and marijuana smokers by night.

The guardian of all these scenes, both public and secret, General Rigoberto Palomar, was a national treasure: the last survivor of the Revolution in a political system excessively eager for legitimacy. All of which contributed to making Don Rigo — who was sane on all other matters — insane on the subject of the Mexican Revolution. He simultaneously held two contradictory beliefs: (1) The Revolution was not over; and (2) the Revolution had triumphed and carried out all its promises.

Steadfast between these pillars, Don Rigo, who grew up in the anticlerical cyclone of the Agua Prieta government, fiercely upheld secularism. Let no priest come near him: then Don Rigo showed that the Revolution was indeed on the march by committing some undescribable atrocity or other, from stripping a priest, mounting him on a burro, and leading him through town, to summoning a firing squad to the patio of his house on Calle Génova and pretending to go through a formal execution.

On afternoons, accompanied by his wife Doña Susana Rentería, Grandfather Palomar would climb up to the crest of a ridge with a stone in his hand. He would then toss the stone down the ravine and say to his wife: “Look at that stone, the way it goes on and on.”

This madness of General Palomar made him part of the national patrimony: the government named him Eponymous Hero of the Republic and the PRI gave orders that he never be touched or bothered in any way, an indispensable requirement in a regime where unwritten law, as always, was the personal whim of the man in power. The fact is that my great-grandfather lived a quiet life: he dedicated himself to administering wisely the goods and chattels he’d acquired honestly and lived out his life in perfect sanity, except as regards this matter of his revolutionary madness and his strange love for Doña Susana, who was left to him in the will of a landowner from Jalisco who had supported the Cristero revolt. His name was Páramo and he’d been arrested and murdered by General Palomar’s troops. His last wish was that Don Rigo take his daughter Susana Rentería under his protection, that he symbolically marry her, that he bring her up, and that he consummate their marriage when the girl turned sixteen. The girl, Susana Rentería, was only five years old when her landowning Cristero father was killed, but Don Rigo respected the idea of a last wish, above all that of an enemy, and accepted Pedro Páramo’s inheritance.

He brought Susy (as he came to call her) to his house in Mexico City, where he took care of her, dressing her as if she were a doll, in old-fashioned shifts and velvet slippers. When she was sixteen, he married her. There was a twenty-year difference in age between them, so that when Susy married Rigo, he was about thirty-six years old, and Cárdenas had just forced the Maximum Chief Plutarco Elías Calles out of Mexico.

None of the people who knew them had ever met a couple more in love, more considerate of each other, or more tender. Susy learned very quickly that her husband was an extraordinarily reasonable man in all matters except the Revolution, and she learned over the years to humor him and to say yes, Rigo, you’re right, there isn’t a single priest left alive in Mexico, not a single piece of land that hasn’t been returned to the peasants, not a single parcel of communal land that isn’t a success, not a single archbishop who doesn’t walk about dressed in mufti, not a single nun wearing a habit, not a single gringo company that hasn’t been nationalized, not a single worker who hasn’t been unionized. Elections are free, the Congress calls the President to account, the press is independent and responsible, democracy blazes forth, the national wealth is justly distributed, but there is corruption, Rigo, there is corruption, and it is a revolutionary obligation to wipe it out. The general turned the artillery of his revolution, simultaneously triumphant and permanent, against corruption, Rome, and Washington. Imagine, my tumultuous and elective genes, my Great-grandfather Rigoberto’s dismay when no one could hide from him the fact that the Holy Father, the Vicar of Christ, the Pope himself (and Polish into the bargain!) was in Mexico, dressed as a pontiff and not as an office worker, walking with all due pomp through the streets, welcomed by millions and millions of citizens of the Republic, celebrating Mass and giving blessings right out in public. Don Rigoberto collapsed, took to his bed, howling against the betrayal. He preferred to die rather than admit that Article 3 of the Constitution had been violated: why had all those men died fighting the Cristeros? Why did you have to die on us, General Obregón? Where are you when we need you most, General Calles? You may fire when ready, General Cruz!

Susy called the doctors and advised the family — including Capitolina and Farnesia, who saw a golden opportunity: charity begins at home. They dragged along with them the priest from the Holy Family and my poor twelve-year-old father, so he would experience the hard reality of life. They walked in scattering incense and holy water, calling for the salvation of wayward General Palomar’s soul and warning my young dad not to be surprised that, if Rigoberto did not repent of his sins, horns popped out of his head right then and there and Satan in person might appear to drag him by the heels to hell.

General Rigoberto Palomar, sunk in his soft but rumpled bed, was taking his last breaths when the Fagoaga sisters walked in with the priest and the boy. His wild, bloodshot eyes, his emaciated, tremulous nose, his palpitating throat, his half-open mouth, his entire face as purple as an aubergine, were not softened by his liberty cap with its tricolor (green, white, and red) cockade that he wore as a nightcap to cover his shaved head.

All the general had to do was see the sisters, the priest waving the sacrament on high, and the boy tossing the censer around like a ball-and-cup toy and he instantly recovered from his attack. He jumped up on the bed, cocked his cap coquettishly over one eye, raised his nightshirt to his waist, and waved a nicely stiffened phallus at the Misses Fagoaga, the boy, and the priest.

“This is the sacrament I’m going to give you if you come one step closer!”

Stunned, Farnesia walked toward Grandfather’s bed, murmuring vague phrases and holding her hands in front of her, as if she were expecting a ripe fruit to fall into them or a sacrament administered to her.

“Besides … In the first place … After all … In the second place … We…”

But her domineering sister stretched out her parasol and with the hooked handle caught her straying sister at the same time she declared: “To hell, that’s where you’re going, Rigoberto Palomar, but before that you shall suffer the torments of death. I’m telling you here and now! Now cover yourself, you’ve got nothing to brag about!”

The old man looked at the boy, winked, and said to him: “Learn, kid. What this pair of witches needs is to feel the whole rigor of the penis. I know who you are. When you can’t put up with these old bags, you have a place to live right here.”

“You are going to die, you scoundrel!” shouted Capitolina.

“And in the third place,” Farnesia managed to say.

General Rigoberto Palomar never had another sick day. Balancing out the shock of John Paul II’s visit, he renewed his vows in the permanent revolution — there was so much more to be done!

After this experience, my father Angel was never the same. He began to realize things, some of them quite small. For example, when he kissed Aunt Capitolina’s hand every morning, he discovered that she always had flour and jalapeño pepper on the tips of her fingers and under her nails, while Aunt Farnesia’s hand smelled strongly of fish. The Misses Fagoaga ordered their domestic life according to purposes my father did not understand very well. He began to notice their manias. Their household staff changed constantly and for reasons Angel could not fathom. But they always called the maids by the same name: Servilia; Servilia do this, Servilia do that, Servilia on your knees svp, Servilia I want my corn-flour soup at 3 a.m., Servilia don’t use rags to clean out my chamber pot, which is very delicate and might break, use your smooth Indian hands. They were more particular in this than their brother Don Homero, although they all shared that creole vice. They needed someone to humiliate every day. The sisters sometimes accomplished this by organizing intimate suppers in which they did their utmost to confuse, annoy, or insult their guests. It wouldn’t have mattered to them if their guests ever returned, but the fact was, they observed, that the majority were delighted to return for more, eager for more punishment.

Miss Capitolina would fire off her irrefutable arguments:

“So you doubted the probity of Viceroy Revillagigedo? Ingrate!”

These arguments were received with stupefaction by the guests, who had never said a word about the viceroy, but Capitolina was once again on the attack:

“They make jam in Celaya and sugar candy in Puebla. Are you going to deny it! I dare you!”

The shock of the guests was not assuaged by Farnesia, who interrupted her sister’s conversation with verbal inconsequentialities of all sorts:

“It doesn’t matter. We shall never accept an invitation from you, sir, but we will give you the pleasure of receiving you in our salon. We are not cruel.”

“Now that you mention tacos,” Capitolina pronounced, “I can’t talk about tacos without thinking of tortillas.”

“But I…” the guest would say.

“Never mind, never mind, you are a Jew and a Bulgarian, judging by your appearance, don’t try to deny it,” Capitolina would assert, one of her manias being to attribute to others whatever religion and nationality came into her head.

“No, the truth is that…”

“Ah!” Farnesia sighed, on the verge of fainting on the shoulder of the man sitting next to her. “We understand the pleasure it must give you just to have met us.”

“Who is that ugly old dumb woman you brought, sir?” Capitolina went on.

“Miss Fagoaga! She’s my wife.”

“Damn the parvenu. Who invited her to my house?”

“You did, miss.”

“A strumpet, I tell you, and I’ll say it to her face, strumpet, gatecrasher, vulgarian, how could you ever marry her!”

“Ah, Mauricio, take me home…”

“Incidentally,” Farnesia commented, “and in the third place, we never…”

“Miss: your attitude is highly rude.”

“Isn’t it, though?” Doña Capitolina would say, opening her tremendous eyes.

“Mauricio, I’m going to faint…”

“And you just can’t imagine what happened yesterday,” Farnesia would immediately say, one of her other specialties being to accumulate inconsequential information and breathlessly communicate it. “It was just six o’clock in the afternoon and we naturally were getting ready to take care of our obligations because you should never leave for today what you can do tomorrow, the doorbell was ringing so insistently and we remembered the open window and we went running upstairs to find out if from the roof we could see what was going on and our cat walked right in front of us and from the kitchen came a smell of cabbage that, my God, you know we’re getting too old for these surprises and after all either you drink in manners with your mother’s milk or your mother learns manners, we never know and we’re about to go mad!”

These suppers were discussed by the sisters with great satisfaction. One of their ideas was that only people of their social class should live in Mexico. They cherished the idea that the poor should be run out of the country and the rest of the lower orders be thrown into jail.

“Oh, Farnecita, je veux un Mexique plus cossu,” Capitolina would say in the French she reserved for grand moments.

“Cozy, cozy, a cozy little country,” her sister complemented her in English, and when they said these little things, the two of them felt comforted, warm, sure of themselves, just like their quilted tea cozy.

These enjoyable intermezzi, nevertheless, gave way more and more to tensions my father discovered as he advanced into adolescence: the aunts looked at him in a different way, whispered to each other, and instead of kneeling alone, grabbed him, each one taking an arm at the most unexpected moments, forcing him to kneel with them and strike his chest.

One night, some horrifying shouts woke him up, and my father ran around in confusion, looking for the source of the noise. He tripped over innumerable bibelots and display cases, knocking them down and breaking things, and then he stopped at the locked door of Capitolina’s room. He tried to look through the keyhole but it was blocked by a handkerchief redolent of cloves. All he could hear were the terrible shouts of the two sisters:

“Christ, belovèd body!”

“Brides of the Lord, Farnesia, we are the brides of the Lord!”

“Husband!”

“You are a virgin, but I am not!”

“Isabella our sister was happy to give birth!”

“Surrounded by respect!”

“We give birth in secret!”

“Filled with shame!”

“How old is the boy today?”

“The same age as he is!”

“Oh, my Lord! My holy bridegroom!”

My father walked away in shock and could not sleep, either that night or any subsequent night he spent under the Fagoaga sisters’ roof. At the age of fourteen, he felt urgent sexual desires, which he satisfied standing before a print of the Virgin offering her breast to the Infant Jesus. He repeated these exercises twice a week and was surprised to see that whenever he did it a sudden ray of light would illuminate his room, as if the Virgin were sending him flashes of gratitude for his sacrifice.

“A few months later, Uncle Homero walked into the Calle Durango house with all his insolent overbearing, called Servilia an ‘obscene trollop,’ and stood me next to her in the grand salon of the sisters’ house, with both of them present, and accused me and the maid of making love in secret. Servilia wept and swore it wasn’t so, while Capitolina and Farnesia shouted out their denunciations of the two of us and Don Homero accused me of lowering myself with the servants, and the three of them accused the maid of thinking she was their equal, now she’s gone beyond her station, the maids always hate us, they always would like to be and to have what we are and it’s a miracle they don’t murder us in our beds.

“Servilia was fired, Uncle H. made me take down my trousers, and after caressing my buttocks he spanked me with one of Aunt Capitolina’s shoes, informing me that he would discount from my allowance the broken glass and other damage I’d caused.

“All this seemed tolerable and even amusing since it put my Christian faith to the test and forced me to think: how can I go on being Catholic after living with the Fagoagas? I have to have faith!”

“What an incorrigible romantic you are! You have to have faith!”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you rationalize everything.”

“To the contrary, I am merely repeating the oldest article of faith. It’s true because it’s absurd.

“But I was dying of curiosity. Every night I spied through my aunts’ keyhole, hoping that just once they would forget to block it up.”

“And what happened?”

“They shouted, as I told you, we give birth in secret, the lost child, the same age as Angelito, the lost child. One night they forgot the handkerchief.”

The keyhole was like the eye of God. A pyramid of air carved in the door. A triangle anxious to tell a story. Just the way it is in one of those unexpected openings in old-fashioned fairy tales: the kitchen opens onto the sea, onto the mountain, onto the bedroom. It smelled strongly of cloves. He imagined the bleeding, embroidered handkerchief with silver borders.

“Did they purposely not put it in, or did they really forget?”

My father wished he hadn’t seen what he saw that night through the keyhole in the room illuminated only by candlelight.

“What happened, for God’s sake! Don’t turn this into a suspense story!”

He wished he hadn’t seen what he saw, but he couldn’t tell it to anyone.

“Not even me?”

“Not to you or anyone else.”

“You say you were consumed by curiosity.”

“Just imagine.”

Inebriated by the smell of cloves, blinded by the fantastic theology of the candles burning down, saying I am afraid of myself, he ran out of the house on Avenida Durango and went to live with his grandparents Rigoberto Palomar and Susana Rentería in the house on Calle Génova, but he never told them what he’d seen. He swore it: he would die without saying a word, it was the proof that he was now a man; he closed his eyes and left his mouth open: a fly landed on the tip of his tongue; he spit, he sneezed.

4. “Don’t go yet, Mommy

“Don’t go yet, Mommy, I want to know how you and Daddy met, that way I’ll know everything about the holy family.”

“Sorry, sweetie, but we’re only in January and all that happened in April; you’ll have to wait until the right month rolls around.”

“The cruellest month.”

“Who said that?”

“T. S. Shandy, native of San Luis.”

“San Luis Potosí?”

“No, San Luis Misurí: T. S. Elote. Fix your genetic information circuits, son, or we’re never going to understand each other. Which leads me directly to the finish of the tale of the wellspring of all confusion in this story and in the world: your uncle, Homero Fagoaga, who baptized you from the air at the instant you were conceived.”

“Shit!”

The intrigues against Uncle Homero began one October day more than six years ago, and he didn’t know it, said my father, and he, the most interested party, was completely unaware and told that to my mother when they both walked into the Pacific Ocean to wash off the shit which had rained down on them that midday of my conception, when I had just been admitted into the supreme hostel, bombarded by voices and memories, places and times, names and songs, foods and fucks, memory and oblivion, I who had just abandoned my metaphysical condition, being El Niño Child, to acquire my name, I CHRISTOPHER, but in any case, even though I had my own name, I had to begin as El Niño, look ye well your mercies, if I was going to win the Contest of the Quincentennial of the Discovery of America on the next 12th of October 1992. They said, if it’s a girl we’re dead ducks, so we ditch her straightaway because we’re not entered in the Contest for Coatlicue or Malinche or Guadalupe or Sor Juana or Adelita, who are our national heroines, whose virtues are now for the glory and benefit of the nation incarnate in Our Lady Mamadoc. No way, we’re in the Christopher Contest.

COLON CRISTOBAL

CRISTOFORO

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

COLOMBO

COLOMB CHRISTOPHE

the same in all languages, see, baby? Christ-bearer and Dove, which is to say, the two persons missing from the Trinity, the Son and the Holy Spirit, our Discoverer, the saint who got his footsies wet crossing the seas and the dove that arrived with a little branch in his beak to announce the nearness of the New Land and the one who broke an egg to invent us, but all this history and all this nomenclature depend, as you all can see, on something over which neither Angel nor Angeles, my parents, has any control, that is, that the data in my father’s spermatozoid and my mother’s reproductive cells divide, separate, give up half of themselves, accept this fatal sacrifice all in order to form a new unity made of two retained halves (but also of the two lost halves) in which I will never be identical to my father or my mother even though all my genes come from them, but for me, only for me, for no one else but me, they have combined in an unrepeatable fashion which shall determine my sex: this unique I Christopher and what they call GENES:

“Hey, the genes are to blame for everything,” said Uncle Fernando Benítez.

“Right,” agreed Uncle Homero Fagoaga, “the genius is to blame for everything. Hegel is to blame.”

Thus did Uncle Fernando, tired of his in-law’s feigning deafness when it suited him and always confusing him in order to wriggle out of the moral definitions proposed by the robust liberalism of the elder uncle, decide to stop speaking to Homero and instead organize the band of Four Fuckups, who at that time, says my father, must have been between fifteen and eighteen years old. All this in order to screw Uncle Homero, dog him day and night, never give him a moment’s peace, follow him through the streets of Makesicko City from dawn till dusk, from door to door, from his penthouse on Mel O’Field Road to his office on Frank Wood Avenue, as if they were hunting him down, don’t cut any corners, boys, my abused lads, set traps and snares for him, hunt him down.

Don Homero Fagoaga insisted on living in this uncomfortable building on Mel O’Field Road for a very simple reason: all the buildings around his had collapsed during the consecutive earthquakes of 1985, so that Uncle H.’s condo was surrounded by “fields of solitude, dejected downs”: flattened lots, ranches wiped out by the city’s acid rain, but his building was standing, saying to the world that where Homero lived, earthquakes were sparrow farts. This sublime and sublimated lesson did not go unnoticed, he was informed by his public-relations experts, for whom he acquired at astronomical prices the properties in the center of town that the government wanted to transform into gardens but which Ulises López sold through his front man, Dr. Fagoaga.

“I am twenty years older than you,” Uncle Fernando said to him, “but I’m still on the make.”

“Did you say quake? Again?” asked Uncle Homero, running to take his place in the nearest doorframe.

“Twenty years older than you, but harder in the phallus,” Uncle Fernando said.

“You like Niki de St. Phalle’s art? Terrific!”

“I still like to screw…”

“Stew? Only when the weather’s cool…”

“No, Jimmy Stewart, you old fool,” Uncle Fern exclaimed in despair. And he ordered his boys: “Chase him as if it were hunting season and he were big game, you’ve got to be hard-nosed and hard-assed with this old rhino! Keep an eye on him, my little Fuckups, make a fool of him. Drive the miserable old fart nuts.”

It all began when the shortest (but the oldest) of the Four Fuckups, the so-called Orphan Huerta, set up his stand of overripe fruit right at the well-guarded door of Uncle Homero’s condo on O’Field, singing out day and night in his soprano twang. Day and night in the shrill voice of a kid from the slums.

“Oranges, pears, an’ figs,” chanted Orphan Huerta in his intolerable voice whenever Uncle Homero walked through the building’s revolving door, a miraculous fact in itself, according to my dad, because Uncle Homero’s mass should not by rights have been able to pass through any door, revolving or stationary, open or closed, screened or screenless:

“Condomed door.”

“Cuntdemned door, did you say?”

“Like the Doors without Jim Morrison, sans issue.”

“I see, I see.”

“You see nothing, you old fart, so stop pretending.”

The fact is, they don’t make them (doors, that is) that huge anymore. Uncle Homero can only get through a revolving door the way jelly gets into a jar — adapting himself to the circumstances, in a word.

“I do so love belly dancers,” said Uncle Fernando.

“You love jelly doughnuts, at your age?” observed Uncle Homero incredulously.

“No, you fat slob, hegelly doughnuts,” retorted Uncle Fernando, getting up and knocking his chair over backwards.

Or perhaps Uncle Homero is rehearsing to get into heaven through the eye of a needle every time he enters or leaves his house, says my mom, floating in the sea just as I float inside her in the fetal sea.

“Through the needle of an eye?” Don Homero feigned surprise.

The Orphan Huerta never allowed himself to be intimidated by the contrast between the narrowness of the door and the generous dimensions of Don Homero Fagoaga, LL.D. As soon as he saw him, he burst into his hideous chant, which sounded like a rusty knife being dragged across a plate.

“Oranges, pears, an’ figs; oranges, pears, an’ figs.”

Uncle Homero begins to shake (like a bowlful of jelly) and offers the poor Orphan a five-cent coin from the times of Ruiz Cortines, at the same time that he corrects him:

“Oranges, pears, and figs, my boy.”

He was offering him something more than five cents from the fifties, inestimable era in which the Mexican Revolution was going to celebrate its Golden Anniversary and when the peso was devalued to twelve-fifty, and even so they went on loving each other for a little while longer (the Revolution and the peso). Uncle Homero is offering the poor Orphan something more than five cents, he is awarding him a verbal mother and father, he is offering him education, without which (Don Homero says to the Huerta boy) there is neither progress nor happiness but only stagnation, barbarism, and disgrace.

“Oranges, pears, and figs, my boy.”

Proper speech, that’s what he offers him, the Castilian tongue in all its pristine, puritan purity, the Gothic Virgin and her pudgy acolyte: the Castilian Tongue and Homero Fagoaga LL.D.: the Ideal Couple: Don Homero nothing more than a servant of the Spanish Language, Hispaniae Lingua. He hones it, he fixes it, he gives it splendor, and he offers to the future, to the potential, to the possible Don Orphan Huerta LL.D. the possibility of being, finally, in the following order, Mother’s Day Poet, Orator of National Holidays, Declaimer of the Sexagesimal Campaign, at worst a Congressman, people’s tribune and at the same time elitist Demosthenes, owner of the Language: Uncle Homero licks his lips imagining the destiny of the Orphan Huerta if the boy would only give his tongue to the old man, if he’d allow him to educate it, sentence it, diphthong it, vocalize it, hyperbatonize it.

Uncle drops the Classic Tongue like a golden pill on the savage tongue of the Orphan Huerta, who stood there astonished with his mouth as open as a mailbox, filthy, the poor devil, his face darker from the grime than from his infamous genes, the scum and the dust and the mud of the no-man’s-land from which the kid emanated with his head crowned with a helmet of gray felt, the ruin of a quondam borsalino, emblazoned with beer or soda bottle caps. The Orphan Huerta.

“Oranges, pears, an’ figs.”

Uncle Homero adjusted his balloon trousers, which were held up by yellow suspenders (one side bearing the image of the Holy Father repeated along its full length, thus holding in place the whitish softness of the lawyer’s right bosom; the other side bearing the image of Emiliano Zapata, alternately wearing expressions of shock and heart failure, on his left bosom); he buttoned the only button on his Barros Jarpas (as our Chilean lady friend enigmatically refers to these striped trousers) and dropped the coin of verbal gold on the bottle-capped head of the Orphan Huerta.

“Oranges, pears, and figs, son.”

He said it in the same voice God said let there be light, in the same voice His Son (oh Godoh!) said verily I say unto you suffer the children to come unto me. The Orphan Huerta regarded him with a suspicious eye.

But in that instant Uncle Homero was the pedagogue and not the pedophile. “Or, as the dazzling light of Spanish grammar that spoke incarnate in the voice of the illustrious Venezuelan, Don Andrés Bello, said on a great day, the tendency to drop the final d in the copulative and before a monosyllabic word beginning with a consonant is to be resisted at all costs.”

The Orphan Huerta ceased to be suspicious. Uncle Homero’s grammar lesson culminated in a gaze appropriate to a hanged donkey. That’s how tender were the eyes of this fatted calf. That’s how stretched his baggies were by his pedophilia.

“Resisted at all costs, son,” said Homero tenderly, caressing the bottle-capped head of the boy, and the Orphan Huerta tells even today how he extracted from the depths of his filthy soul all the revenge sunken into the bottom of Lake Texcoconut that each and every Makesickan carries in the mudbank of his guts, next to the treasures of Whatamock, father of the fatherland, which is to say toasted tootsies for the toast of the nation, said my daddy-o, the vacillating hero, washing off the shit, while I, pleased as punch, floated around in the ocean within my mother where I am not touched (oh, still not) by the shit of this world.

Resisted at all costs, son: Uncle Homero’s skin could not resist the razor-sharp edges of the bottle caps on the boy’s cap. He raised his wounded finger to his tongue (his tongue, the protagonist, the star of his prodigious body, now full of his own acrid blood spilt by a grimy gamin from Atlampa) and he looked deliberately at the Orphan, but finding no reaction to this dialectic of grammar and bottle caps and finger and blood and tongue, he ended up repeating:

“Oranges, pears, and figs.”

And the Orphan answered:

“Fat old fart an’ motherfucker.”

That was only the beginning. The Orphan stuck out his tongue horribly at Uncle Homero and then fled. The supremely agile grammarian, who resembled nothing so much as a dancing hippopotamus, a balloon on a string, a sentimental elephant and the other fantasies of Waltdysneykov, that is, the Grimm Brother of our infancies, said my father while he washed the excrement from his hair, tried to chase him, but the Orphan dashed across a vacant lot next to Uncle H.’s condo and joined some other boys — his brothers, his doubles? — who also could run with blazing feet over the stones that had been burned by industrial detritus.

Lawyer Fagoaga knew that this was their style; the Cuauhtémoc cadets he called them, ancient children, unique heroes at the moment of their birth, he called them, secretly enraging my lopezvelardean father; they had blown their noses into the huge black handkerchief commemorative of Anahuac’s ecocide. They were born wearing huaraches, in the words of Don Lucas Lizaur, the founder of the prestigious shoe emporium the Buskin (located at the corner formerly known as Bolívar and Carranza, today Bully Bar and Car Answer, where the drunks would call for cabs as they emerged from the bar-discotheque-boîte of our Chilean lady friend, as the reader will soon see): they were born with a layer of hide on their soles, making them able to walk the hot streets of the capital, conquered this time by her own sons, the industrial, commercial, official conquistadors.

“Oh, Mexico, favorite daughter of the Apocalypse!” Uncle Homero sighed as he watched the Orphan disappear in the burning mist of the vacant lot and join his pals. City dogs get bloody noses from sniffing the pavement, my mother says, and their paws are like shoe leather.

“What will my baby breathe when he’s born?”

5. What Will My Baby Breathe When He’s Born?

The pulverized shit of three million human beings who have no latrines.

The pulverized excrement of ten million animals that defecate wherever they happen to be.

Eleven thousand tons per day of chemical waste.

The mortal breath of three million motors endlessly vomiting puffs of pure poison, black halitosis, buses, taxis, trucks, and private cars, all contributing their flatulence to the extinction of trees, lungs, throats, and eyes.

“Pollution control?” Minister Robles Chacón exclaimed disdainfully. “Sure, when we’re a great metropolis with centuries of experience. Right now we’re growing, so we can’t stop, this is only our debut as a great city. We’ll regulate in the future.”

(WILL THERE BE A FUTURE? wonders the placard my proud father parades along Paseo de la Reforma)

(WE HAVE BEEN A GREAT METROPOLIS SINCE 1325, says the second placard he proudly exhibits on the streets of the posh Zona Rosa)

“Anti-pollution devices on cars and trucks?” indignantly exclaims Minister-for-Life Ulises López. “And who’s going to pay for it? The government? We’d go broke. The private sector? What would we have left to invest? Or would you prefer that the gringo investors pay for that, too? They’d be better off investing in Singapore or Colombia!”

(INVEST IN SEOUL, SUFFOCATE REVEREND MOON, says my tenacious father’s eleventh placard as he pickets the Korean Embassy this time)

“What will my son breathe?”

Mashed shit.

Carbonic gas.

Metallic dust.

And all of it at an altitude of about one and a half miles, crushed under a layer of frozen air, and surrounded by a jail of circular mountains: garbage imprisoned.

Madam, your son’s eyes may also contemplate another circle of garbage surrounding the city: all it would take would be a match tossed carelessly onto the circular mass of hair, cardboard, plastic, rags, paper, chicken feet, and hog guts, to create a chain reaction, a generalized combustion that would surround the city with the flames of sacrifice, setting loose the feathered Valkyries named jade and moon, who would, in a few minutes, consume all the available oxygen.

Vomited by the city, blind, dazzled by sudden light, by the accumulated goo on his eyes, by the threat of visual herpes, fed by the garbage, swollen by the sewage, his hairy head crowned by a brimless felt hat decorated with bottle caps, his skin discolored from disease, the Orphan Huerta. Like a badly digested turd, he flew out of the Insurgentes subway stop and headed for Calle Génova in the Zona Rosa, where my father, calm and sure of himself, was parading around with his WILL THERE BE A FUTURE? placard. The Orphan ran blindly, like a fetus thrown prematurely into the world, the uterus in his case a stairway, pint-sized and stoned, the umbilical cord in his case the INSURGENTES metro line, until he slammed into the back of a short man elegantly dressed in gray shantung, standing in the entrance to the El Estoril restaurant. The blind but instinctively predatory snotnose (literally dripping) stretched out his hand toward the pants pocket and then the stomach of the bald, shortsighted, and bearded character who shouted Miserable punk! grabbed the kid by the wrist, made him scream (Well done, Uncle Fernando!), and quickly twisted his thieving arm around his back.

Don Fernando Benítez wore a money belt to keep his money safe, as everyone who walks around Makesicko City does, but he never stopped showing off the watch and chain that hung from the middle of his vest. It had been a gift from his oldest to his youngest lover, who had bequeathed it to Benítez when she died, like all the others, before him, thereby subverting the rule of feminine survival. He considered the watch a legitimate part of his lifetime, lifelong harvest: at the age of eighty, the eminent creole journalist and historian believed that sex was art and history. His blue, penetrating eyes wanted to penetrate the veil of grime and suffocation that covered the face of this infant Cacus, or infant caca, and read there something, anything that would not condemn him without giving him beforehand the right to a reading. In the eyes of the boy, he read: “Love me, I want to be loved.”

That was all he needed to bring the lad to his house in Coyoacán, change his clothes (the Orphan Huerta clung to his bottle-capped borsalino, as if to remember where he came from and who he was), and no shoe could fit over his feet turned to stone by industrial detritus, his feet whose soles were made of natural rubber: foot toasties, Cuauhtémoc cadets!

“You actually look handsome, son of a bitch,” Benítez told the boy once he’d bathed him.

He knew his name. “I was always called Orphan Huerta.”

Where did he come from?

He shook his head. The lost cities of Mexico were anonymous cities: larger than Paris or Rome, six, seven, eight million inhabitants, but no name. The Orphan Huerta, he at least had a name, but about the nameless city he came from (in the Cratylus my mother reads, names are either intrinsic or conventional, or does an onomastic legislator give them out?), nothing was known.

Benítez understood that a language was hiding itself so as to be understood only by those initiated into a cabal, a social group, or a criminal caste, but it hid entire cities without even burying them, without hiding them in the liquid oblivion of a sewer — this could only happen in a city without a sewage system!

“We’ve got to give this kid an origin, he can’t wander the face of the earth without a place of origin,” said Benítez’s wife, in a display of good sense. So the two of them covered their eyes and pointed to a spot on the map of the city they had hanging in the kitchen: Atlampa. From that moment on, they said that Orphan Huerta was from Atlampa, that was his neighborhood, Atlampa this and Atlampa that. But one day Don Fernando took the Orphan for a walk through Lomas: first the boy became excited, then he became sad. Benítez asked him what was wrong, and the boy said, “I would have preferred to be from here.”

From here: he stared dreamily at the green lawns, the shutters, and the high walls, the trees and the flowers, but above all the walls, the protection. The sign of security and power in Mexico: a wall around the house.

This boy had a brother — Benítez managed to understand that after deciphering the Orphan’s pidgin — but he’d gone away a year ago. When he left, he asked where the man who had done most damage to Mexico was. General Negro Durazo, chief of the police in charge of order and justice in the times of López Portillo, or Caro Quintero, himself an immoral thug who was a great success in drug trafficking, in seducing women, and who killed people with the same callous indifference as the chief of police. The difference between them was that the drug lord fooled no one, always worked outside the law, and didn’t hide behind the law. The drug lord, concluded the Orphan’s brother, did not do the nation the same kind of damage the police chief did by corrupting the justice system and discouraging the people. He said all that one afternoon after vomiting up that day’s meager, rotten food: “I’m cutting out, bro’, and I’m gonna see if I’m like Caro Quintero, who was a guy who’d try anything, who did himself a lot of good without fucking up the country in the process. Later on, I’ll come back for you, little brother. I swear by this.”

He kissed the cross he made with his thumb and index finger. But the day of his return never came (the Orphan measures time in terms of diarrhea attacks, senseless beatings, blindside attacks, who beat you up, orphan boy? Neither the sun nor the night is any good as a way to tell time: the Orphan can only count on the orphaned hours of the day) and the brother who stayed referred to the absent brother as “the lost child” and what was he? One day he slipped like a rat into the recently opened metro — before, he could use only packed minibuses or go on foot, and then one day it became possible to get on a train redolent of clean, new things, enter through the dust of the anonymous city and pop out like a cork into the boutiques and restaurants and hotels of the Zona Rosa:

No, Benítez said to him, I don’t want you to be a young corpse: one more in this land of sad men and happy children. You’ve got lots of energy, orphan boy, I mean, you feel strong, right? Yessir, Mr. Benítez. Then let me show you how to survive by using jokes, humor is better than crime, right? You (we) have the right to laugh, orphan boy, all of you have at least that right, the right to a giggle, even if your laughter is mortal: wear out your power in the joke and perhaps you will find your vocation there; I’m not going to force you, who knows what kind of mind all the kids like you develop in the hells of this world?

The boy asked if someday he would find his lost brother, and Benítez took off his brimless borsalino, patted his bristling head, and told him of course, don’t worry about it, lost children always turn up sooner or later, of course.

Uncle Fern was a wise man: he showed him the way with humor, without Teutonic tyranny, waiting to see what this boy was made of who’d been spit into his hands by the subway, which had transformed the Zona Rosa from an elitist oasis into a lumpen court of miracles. With whom did he hang around, to what ends were his talents put? Bring your friends home, Uncle Fernando told him, I want them to feel welcome here, and so one day there appeared with the Orphan a fat white boy with flat feet and slicked-down black hair. He said he was an orphan, too, like the Orphan, a projectionist in a theater that specialized in classics, where they showed old films. He’d met the Orphan at the entrance to the Hotel Aristos, should I tell your godfather what you were doing, Orph’? The boy with the bristling hair nodded assent and the chubby lad said, “He was beating out a rhythm with the bottle caps on his hat, he beat out a tune on the caps, just imagine what kind of talent he has, sir.”

“And what about you?” asked Benítez.

“Well, I joined up with him, sir. Uh, I’m a little ashamed. I mean, I don’t know if you … Darn, this long hair … I still wear mine that way, even though it’s out of fashion, but I … Well, the fact is that I use pins to keep it in place, see? My black curls, ha ha, well, I could pick out a tune with a hairpin, and I joined up with your godson here…”

They gave a demonstration and agreed to see each other a lot and meet to practice their music in Don Fernando’s house. The fat boy, who never mentioned his name and who evaded answering all questions about his family, expressed himself with difficulty, but now he said goodbye to Don Fernando with his brows worried and in a voice of mundane fatigue and extreme precision:

“Don Fernando, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

He put on his dirty trench coat and went out hugging the Orphan. Two days later, they both returned with a third friend: a dark boy who was peeling and disheveled, barefoot, with a snakeskin belt wrapped around his waist. He was falling to pieces. The Orphan and the fat boy introduced him as Hipi Toltec, but the boy only said in (bad) French: “La serpent-à-plumes, c’est moi.”

His instrument was a matchbox, and soon they began to rehearse together, dedicating themselves to their music. Don Fernando would walk by and look at them with satisfaction, but suddenly two things occurred to him: with each session, the musical harmony of the three boys became stronger and more refined. And he, Benítez, about to turn eighty, still had not exhausted his vital plan, his struggle in favor of the Indians, democracy, and justice, but his physical strength was indeed waning. Perhaps these boys … perhaps they would be his phalanx, his advance guard, his accomplices … They would help him bring his revolutionary plan to fruition.

One Saturday, he gave them three instruments: a set of Indian drums for Hipi Toltec, an electric guitar for the Orphan, and a piano for the long-haired fat boy. There was no need to sign a contract. They all understood they owed each other something.

“A man is nothing without his partner,” the little fat boy enunciated clearly, pulling his gray fedora down over his brows.

But he immediately reverted to his normal personality, saying to Uncle Fernando, “Well … it’s that we need … I mean, we aren’t just three…” Benítez expressed his astonishment: he even counted on his fingers.

“No … it’s that … well … umm … the girl’s missing.”

“The girl?”

“Yes, yes, the girl Ba … She, I mean, plays the piccolo,” the fat boy suddenly declared solemnly, and then he sighed.

Benítez preferred not to ask for explanations and, humoring them, honored their tacit agreement. He bought the little flute and handed it over to the fat boy. That night, in his room, he listened to them practice and could identify all the instruments perfectly: the piano, the guitar, the drums, and the flute.

They baptized themselves the Four Fuckups.

Benítez could find out nothing about the origins of Hipi Toltec; he accepted the invisible existence of Baby Ba and he paid attention to every word the fat boy said, so tongue-tied in ordinary conversation but so sure of himself when he applied dialogues he’d learned in the theater to everyday life.

But our uncle, a journalist after all, never let up in his investigation of Orphan Huerta — where did he come from? did he escape from his lost city only because the new subway line had opened? how much was this kid going to reveal about himself?

With a kind of fortunate parallelism — Don Fernando commented — the detestable Homero Fagoaga also had a young boy, Philippine in origin, named Tomasito, only where Benítez gave the Orphan and his buddies the courage and freedom to be independent, Fagoaga incorporated the Filipino into his service as his valet and chauffeur.

At that time, a story was going around, and one night Benítez repeated it to my father and mother, so they would see that he was man enough to give the devil his due. Homero had saved the young Tomasito from a farewell slaughter ordered by the Philippine dictators, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, before they fell. Homero left him, so it seems, at the mercy of a U.S. officer in the Subic Bay naval base, and now he brought him to serve as his houseboy in Mexico City.

“But don’t go soft on Homero,” warned Benítez insistently, waving a severe finger. “You should all know that Homero owes his relationship with the Philippines to the fact that he acts as Ulises López’s front man there, exporting wheat which cannot be sold in the U.S. because it’s been poisoned with a chemical agent. It’s exported to Mexico, where Ulises López stores it and then, through Homero, exports it to the Philippines. There it’s received, hoarded up, and distributed by a monopoly that belongs to Marcos’s buddies, who still can’t be dislodged. It sounds very complicated, but given Ulises López’s global economic thinking, it’s not.”

When he heard that name, the Orphan Huerta jumped up from behind a green velvet chair where he’d been hiding and with an audacious fury he repeated: López, López, Ulises López, Lucha López, as if they were the names of the devil himself and his henchman. They burned our houses, they said the land was theirs, they murdered my folks. Because of them, my lost brother and I fled!

My mother instinctively embraced the Orphan, and my father recited one of his favorite verses by López Velarde — the Christ Child left you a stable — and Benítez agreed that the city’s image is its destiny, but Ulises López did not, there was no destiny, there was will and action, nothing more, he would repeat to his wife Lucha Plancarte de López: wherever a band of squatters would set up on their lands, they would get them out with blood and fire, showing no mercy. After all, they only lived in miserable cardboard shacks, like animals in stables.

6. Fatherland, Your Surface Is Pure Corn

Uncle Fernando’s second revenge was to order the Four Fuckups to stand in front of lawyer Fagoaga’s Shogun limousine at the moment he was to leave for dinner.

Don Homero had spent an extremely active morning at his office, which provided him a perfect front for his activities: old-fashioned, supremely modest, on a fourth floor on Frank Wood Avenue, with old, fat-assed, half-blind secretaries who’d heard their last compliment during the presidency of López Mateos, folio upon folio of dusty legal documents, and hidden behind them a notary from Oaxaca wearing a green visor and sleeve garters. Don Homero had spoken on the telephone with his gringo partner Mr. Kirkpatrick, agreeing (Homero) to import from his partner (Kirkpatrick) all the pesticides prohibited by law in North America, to send them from Mexico to the Philippines as a Mexican export (our exports are highly applauded because they bring in revenue, ha ha), even though I pay you more than any Filipino could pay me, ha ha, don’t be a joker, Mr. Kirkpatrick, I’ll never eat a tortilla made from a kernel of corn sprayed with your pesticide. I have my baguettes flown in by Air France from that chic bakery on Rue du Cherche-Midi. Luckily there are no consumer protection laws here! It’s better to have investments and a job, even if they bring cancer and emphysema!

Now our esteemed LL.D. descended from his traditional offices on Frank Wood Avenue, putting on his kidskin gloves and his dove-colored fedora and making his way through the masses that at three in the afternoon were filing along this central street, which in other eras had been known as San Francisco, then as Plateros, and lately Francisco Madero, got into his wide-bodied car through the door obsequiously opened by his Filipino chauffeur Tomasito. At the time, Tomasito was very young but sinister-looking because of his Oriental features. As Don Homero was making himself comfortable on the soft seats, he saw that the street mob had gathered around his car, their eyes popping out of their heads, staring at him, Don Homero Fagoaga, lawyer and linguist, as if he were a two-headed calf or a millionaire who followed the President’s orders and brought back the dollars he’d exported in 1982.

Uncle Homero ordered the Filipino chauffeur to go on, to get out of here now, but Tomasito said in English No can do, master, and the multitude grew, rubbing its collective nose on the windows of Mr. Fagoaga’s Japanese limo, sullying the windshield, the windows, and the doors with their saliva, snot, fingerprints, and blinding breath. Such was the massive and to him incomprehensible curiosity Counselor Fagoaga provoked. He sat, fearful and besieged, in all his obesity within this Turkish bath which his automobile had become with its windows closed to fend off a death which the illustrious member of the Academy of the Language didn’t know whether to ascribe to excessive hatred, like the deaths of Moctezuma or Mussolini, or to excessive love, like that of any rockaztec idol of our times, stripped and dismembered by his groupies.

“Open the windows, my Manila-bred charioteer!” shouted Uncle H. to his chauffeur.

“Is danger master, me no likey lookey!” (En Anglais dans le texte.)

“Well, you’re starting to annoy me, you bastard son of Quezón,” exclaimed Uncle H., who valiantly opened his window onto the excited mob, in order, as it were, to pick out the kid with the bottle-capped head, shouting orbi et urbi, gather round, free show, the kid with the vulcanized feet held aloft by his disciples, a fat guy with limp black hair and a skinny kid who had a coyote’s snout and tangled hair, shouting look at this car, the windows are magnifying lenses, hoisted right off the ground by the horrible skinned kid with the huge snout and that soft fatty with long hair who could have been, ay! Homero himself at sweet sixteen, shouting look at the Japanese car, latest model with magnifying windows, and look at the fat man inside magnified, now or never, ladies and gentlemen.

“Take off, yellow peril!” said Uncle Homero furiously to Tomasito, who was rapidly closing the window. “Take off, don’t worry, run them over if you have to, I’ve told you already, you know the official opinion of the Federal District police force: If You Run Over a Pedestrian, Do Not Stop. Get moving, Tomasito, they’re using inquest reports as wallpaper in all the law offices and courts, get moving, even if you run them over and kill them. It’s legal, because it costs more to stop traffic, make police reports, and sue people. Kill these downtrodden masses, Tomasito, for the good of the City and the Republic. Kill them, Homero said, but in his crazed eyes desire trembled. He loved them and he hated them, he saw them running across vacant lots, barefoot, unarmed, but by now used to the wounds caused by dioxides, phosphates, and monoxides; he peeked out the closed, dripping window of the Nipponese limo, and stared angrily at them, as they ran along Frank Wood behind him; in front of the curious crowd: the bottle caps, the skinned one, and the pudgy little one; he observed their three pairs of legs, let’s see which ones he liked best, and their six feet which ran behind his automobile were deformed in some way, eddypusses, or Eddy Poes, says my dad now, punster supreme, feet deformed by that protective layer of human rubber which has been forming on the feet of the city kids and which is sure evidence that they spent their un-fancies in the streets, lots, in this place we call Mexico, DOA: eddypusses of lost children, running behind Uncle Homero Fagoaga’s limo: the Lost Boys, Orphan Huerta, Orphan Annie, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit, the gaseous exhalations of Mexico, DOA:

“Charge, O Horde of Gold!” Uncle Homero closed his eyes as his faithful Filipino obeyed and cut a swath through the curious bystanders — the spectacle looked like a Posadas engraving of Death on Horseback massacring the innocent. More than one nosy body was summarily dumped on his backside (“Fools!” exulted Don Homero), but in fact our uncle only had eyes for that boy with the ferociously grimy mien, the one wearing the bottle caps on his chapeau and running with his two companions … Nevertheless, as it usually turns out with even the obsessions truly worthy of the name, he eventually stopped thinking about them and the crowd scene he’d just endured. He was exhausted. When he got home, he went up to his apartment and asked to have a bath drawn. Tomasito ran to carry out the order and then returned, delight written all over his face: “Ready, master.”

Homero tweaked his cheek. “Just for that, I forgive you all your sins, because when you’re efficient, you’re a wizard, my little Fu Manchu.” He undressed in his black marble bathroom, coquettishly imagining in the mirrors another form for his body, one that while being the same would drive the obscure objects of his desire mad, he, Homero, a Ronald Colman with a Paramount mustache. He sighed, thankful for the liquid verdancy of the water in his Poppaeaish tub fit for a Roman empress. Deliberately, but fleetingly, he thought that in Mexico, D.F. (aka DOA), only private comfort — not only exclusive but actually secret — existed because anything shared with others had become ugly — streets, parks, buildings, public transportation, stores, movies — everything, but inside, in the corners left to wealth, it was possible to live luxuriously, secretly, because it did not involve a violation of national solidarity — like having to give back hard but illegally earned bucks, or giving up $5 million co-ops on Park Avenue, or selling off condos in Vail at bargain rates, it did not involve offending those less fortunate than he who … He gazed with a sense of marvel at the intense green color, at the same time liquidly transparent and beautifully solid (like marble, one might say), of the water in his bath and gave himself up to it completely.

He let himself drop, with a jolly, carefree plop, into the tub, but instead of being enveloped by the delightful and warm fluidity of the green water, he was embraced by a cold, sticky squid: a thousand tentacles seized his buttocks, his back, his knees, his elbows, his privates, his neck: Lawyer Fagoaga sank into something worse than quicksand, mud, or a tank full of sharks: unable to move a finger, a leg, his head bobbing like that of a marionette, Homero was sucked in by a tub full of green gelatine, a sweet pool of viscous lime Jell-O in which Uncle H. looked like a gigantic strawberry.

“What have we here, a barrister in aspic?” guffawed Uncle Don Fernando Benítez from the door, wearing a starched butterfly collar, bow tie, and a light, double-breasted shantung suit.

“Tomasito!” Homero Fagoaga managed to scream, seconds before sinking into horror, surprise, and rage, which were even stickier than the gallons of gelatine put there by the Fuckups: “Tomasito! Au secours! Au secours!”

“Does your boss really know French, or is he just a disgusting snob?” asked Uncle Fernando, taking the stick and hat that Tomasito, the perfect though perplexed servant, handed him before he went to help his master, who was shouting, “Benítez, you Russophile! You café Marxist! You salon Commie!” His extravagant list went on, my mother noted, and every item pointed to the exact moment in which his political education had taken place and dated him.

Tomasito, after saving his master with vacuum cleaners, massage, and even corkscrews, withdrew to pray to a potted palm he carried around with him. He begged the gods of his country that he never again confuse his master with the relatives, confidants, or friends of his master, that he never again allow them to enter the domicile of his master, or that he ever serve more than one master at any one time.

Then, sobbing, he went back to Don Homero Fagoaga, prostrate in his canopied bed, to squeeze him out a bit more and beg his forgiveness.

“I think there’s still some gelatine in his ears and nose,” said my father Angel, but my mother merely repeated these words:

“What will my son breathe when he is born?”

“Perhaps I’d better answer your question about which language the boy will speak first. Didn’t you ask about that, too?”

“Okay. Which language will he speak? That was my third question.”