Christopher Unborn

1. My circumstance consists of certainties and uncertainties

My circumstance consists of certainties and uncertainties. One certainty: the boy has been conceived under the sign of Aquarius. One uncertainty: his chances of becoming a Mexican fetus are one in one hundred and eighty-three trillion six hundred and seventy-five billion nine hundred million four hundred thousand fifty-three hundred and forty-eight, according to my father’s calculations, which he made as he waded into the Pacific Ocean with my mom to wash away the shit that rained on them from the sky that midday of my cuntception. First day of the c(o)untdown they called it. I call it my first swing in the cemetery, as I moved toward the ovarian reading lesson, because even though they remember now what happened that day, I knew it absolutely and totally from the moment in which my dad’s microserpent knocked over my mom’s corona radiata (no, not a corona corona, Dad’s was an exploding cigar, a MIRV, come to think of it) as if it were made of rose petals, while the survivors I’ve already mentioned of the great battle of Hairy Gulch invaded the gelatinous membrane, de profundis clamavimus — but nobody was home: which of us will have the honor to fertilize Doña Angeles (no last name), wife of Don Angel Palomar y Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca, descendant of the most exclusive families of Puebla, Veracruz, Guadalajara, and Mexico City?; one in a million, the lucky little guy, the fortunate hunchback. All madly trying to penetrate, break the barrier, perforate the shell, and overcome the fidelity of this Penelope who will not invite just any old dick to dinner, only one, the champ, the Ulyssex returned from the wars, the greatest, the Muhammad Ali of the chromosomes, número uno:

YOU MEAN LITTLE OLD ME?

I, admirable and full of portents, I allowed in, bombarded by voices and memories, oh dear me, places and times, names and songs, dinners and fucks, speeches and stutterings, rememberings and forgettings, this unique I CHRISTOPHER and what they call genes.

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

“Of course,” agreed Uncle Homero Fagoaga, “Hegels are to blame for everything.”

Why did two men who hated each other, who were so unalike in everything, my Uncles Fernando and Homero, have to be together, colliding, interrupting each other? What impels us to do what we don’t want to do, to self-destruction? Is it that we prefer an insult, a humiliation, even a crime — murder — to being alone?

My father and mother, for example, are no longer alone: they live together and they have just conceived me — ME. I will listen to them throughout this story and I shall learn, little by little, that their union, their true love, does not exclude a constant struggle between what they are and what they would like to be, between what they have and what they would like to have. I state here and now that what I have just said without breaking any rules of narrative (know it well, your mercies benz) because the difference between my father and my mother is that you’ll know all there is to know about Angel at the beginning, while about Angeles you’ll know a little at the end. There are people like that, and I don’t lose anything by stating it outright at the start. It’s more important to note the opposing forces within them: what I am and what I want to be; what I have and what I want to have. I, so solitary in the solar center of my narrative, I understand well what I’m telling you, Gentile Readers. Since I am so alone, I have to wonder incessantly: what is it I need in order not to be alone; who is the other I need most in order to be myself, the one and only Christopher Unborn?

My answer is clear and forthright: I need you, Reader.

2. At any hour of the day

At any hour of the day, in any social class, in any of the infernal circles of this selva selvaggia, there are two problems: how to be alone or, alternatively, how to be in good company. But in Makesicko City, the city where my father grew up, the problem is saving oneself from pests (Angel told Angeles).

They tell me that in other countries a person with manners would never dare interrupt someone’s morning work time or his well-earned leisure time without setting up a date in advance and then showing up at the exact time; they send blue pneumatiques (or used to until pneumatiques died prematurely in 1984) or at the least call. Not in Mexico. The D.F. is a village with village manners disguised as a megalopolis. “Hey, man, get over here right now.” “Listen, I’m coming right over, okay?” Complete with kings, tombs, tribes, and leeches.

The most virulent form of this social disease known as the leech is the “parachutist,” who “drops in” at any hour of the day or night without calling, interrupting a dinner (if it’s the gate-crasher variety, it wants to be invited to join in), interrupting sex (if it’s a refined voyeur and sniffs out the hours when others take their pleasure), interrupting reading (if it happens to suffer acute agraphia and feels annoyed if someone settles down to cohabitate with words).

Which language will the child speak? asks my mother insistently, and my father answers that our language is dying on us, and only because they know that will they (Mom and Dad) pardon the existence of my Uncle Homero. We just saw all that.

But for the parachuting or interrupting pest no pardon is possible: its language is pure chatter, yakitiyak, gossip, tongue-wagging, and championship bouts of chin-wagging, although these creatures often invent dramatic pretexts to justify their undesired intrusion to the victim: during his adolescence, my father Angel (he tells us) attracted these creatures (of both sexes), especially those wandering around loose in Colonia Juárez or Colonia Cuauhtémoc.

In this city, then, populated by perpetually invading hordes (si j’ai bien compris) that arrive from anywhere at any hour of the day or night without being called or desired, who knock at the door (bambambam, Anybody home? knockknockknock, It’s the devil! Nobody home? Am I interrupting? Could you lend me your maracas? Don’t you have a little tepache in the fridge? For whatever reason, says my father Angel: in this city, he believes that when he was a young man he was sought out more than any of his friends or acquaintances because they all still lived at home or because of inflation they all went back to live with their parents or had to rent rooms in uncomfortable, promiscuous boardinghouses, fearful of ending up in old neighborhoods or the new, lost neighborhoods, and by contrast, Angel was an orphan, but an orphan with a nice place; and all of them were suffering under revived nineteenth-century discipline (or earlier: the interregnum of disorder in Mexico was born with the Rolling Stones and ended with the austerity of Rollover Debts: on the crumbling corners, the saddest song was once again the one about there being only four thousand pesos left from all the oil that was mine ay ayayayay; the happiest song, the one about the death of the petropeso, the death of conceit, you want a tiger in your tank?/ well money talks and bullshit walks): someone knocked on the door of his grandparents’ house, a beggar dressed as a monk, asking for alms:

“Please contribute to my grandmother’s funeral.”

Angel’s grandma, Doña Susana Rentería, pulled off her wedding ring and, trembling, handed it to the monk. Then she shut the door, embraced Angel, and begged: “Please don’t tell my Rigo what I just did.”

Okay, the pest rarely sets up a date and when it does it invariably arrives late; on the other hand, if it comes without warning, it always arrives (by definition) right on time: such was the case of the myriad parachutists who dropped in on my father when he was living — more freely than anyone in his generation as far as coming and going were concerned — in the coach house annexed to the house of his grandparents, Don Rigoberto Palomar (ninety-one years old) and Doña Susana Rentería de Palomar (sixty-seven years old) on Calle Génova. Having emancipated himself from the tyranny of Don Homero Fagoaga and his sisters Capitolina and Farnesia, my father enjoyed a unique reputation: if he lived alone — so the story went — it was because he was more respectable, more mature, more trustworthy than any other boy or girl in his public school: HEROES OF 1982. The school, originally private, was founded by Don Mamelín Mártir de Madrazo (better known in financial circles as Jolly Roger), who created it as proof of his public-spiritedness. Of course, Don Mártir, the most expropriated banker in Mexico before he was kidnapped and murdered, never imagined that this last bulwark of his civic prestige would also be expropriated. They never even bothered to change the school’s name, since HEROES OF 1982 by definition could apply just as well to the expropriators as to those expropriated — all the better, in fact, since those who expropriated the school would one day leave government for private industry, where they would in their turn be expropriated by the next government, revolutionarily ad infinitum. The net result was that at school Angel Palomar y Fagoaga paid dearly for his fame because pests dropped in at all hours to tell him their troubles, using metaphysical or physical anguish as a pretext: I’ll commit suicide if I don’t talk to someone, which actually meant: If I don’t commit suicide I’ll talk to someone, and by the way do you have anything in the fridge (an ocean), what are you reading (The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, gent.), how tired I am (go to bed, baby), aren’t you? (sure I am and here I come), what record should I put on (the last one put out by my favorite group, Immanuel Can’t), well, Kan’t you sing me something?

The life of the turkey vulture

is a wretched sort of life

All the year he flies and flies

his head as bald as a knife

insult me: slut! will you pull off my peplum, my chlamys, my fibula, strip me bare and help me with the homework? I’ve got such a pain right here, what could it be? I thought you might be sad — with nothing to do — screwing around as usual — as alienated as I am — jerking off, pig — on your way out, eating, sleeping, don’t you like me to visit you? — is it true that they told you that you told them to tell me? — I came over so you could tell me what you mean — got any dope? — could you introduce me into your sister? — I need bread, man — lend me a few rubbers — do you guys know of anyone who might need a fireworks expert for November 2? a paid insultant? — money, man? unless you have influence they won’t lend you any money at the bank, know any bank directors, Angelito? — lend me your comb — lend me your cock — wasn’t it you who had the recipe for those tamales wrapped in banana leaves? — lend me — lend me — could you call up — couldn’t you have an Equanil sent up from the pharmacy on the corner? — looks like the revolution starts tomorrow — the fascist coup — the military coup — the Communist coup — lay in lots of canned goods, Angel, let’s get to the state of siege right away — nail polish at the perfume counter, right? — where are those cold beers, bartender? what? are you turning cheapskate on us, what happened? — could you store my mint collection of Playboy for me: they just don’t understand at my place, ya know? — my collection of stuffed toys, Angelote, at my place, if my mom sees them, you know — could I leave my Toyota Super XXX here in your patio, Angel, at my place my dad is so strict, that stuff about moral renovation — capisc’—let me leave my valise here in case I take a trip — my collection of Almazán posters? — my Avelina Landín records? — my book of López Portillo’s favorite metaphors? — my collection of tops?

Between his sixteenth and his twentieth year the pests pestered him and the parachutists rained on him, as if the independence of his generation (which grew progressively more disciplined under paternal tutelage) depended on Angel in his house, from which it was possible to see the Angel of Independence on Paseo de la Reforma. It was as if that were the price of the unsettled, excited twenty years of death, repression, opening, reform, triumph, collapse, and austerity in which Angel and his friends had the good fortune to be born and grow up: they saw their own coming-of-age postponed again when they were between eighteen and twenty-two and the effective control of their parents extended and strengthened to a degree worthy of the most severe household of the prerevolutionary Porfirio Díaz era — until, thought my father Angel, privileged spectator that he was, the time for the inevitable reaction came, the helplessness, solitude, escape, and nomadism that began after the Disaster of 1990.

But one might also say that the very illusion of liberty depended on Angel’s isle of autonomy, on that and something else: as if the eventual resurrection (oh, vain illusion!) of the moribund city, where by now all the worst prophecies about it come true, without anyone’s ever having raised a finger to stop them, depended on the wobbly survival of Colonia Juárez, the only urban oasis that still maintained a certain veneer of civilization. In the ears of Angel, in the ears of his genes, and in the ears of his descendants in limbo, there rumbles the sound of filthy water, pumped in and out, pestilential, a gigantic parallel to the beats and vulnerabilities of his own heart.

In the coach house on Calle Génova, my father found himself alone with a mountain of garbage and the conviction that nothing — really nothing — of all that was piled up there was worthy of being saved: the magic of the marketplace, as President Ronald Ranger liked to say, at the outset of the odious eighties, saved nothing: it destroyed everything, while making people believe that the garbage deserved to remain. And the worst thing is that Angel could not or would not get rid of the mountain of detritus that threatened to bury him in his own cave. He wouldn’t deprive himself of that most eloquent testimony to the era he was honored to live through: the monument of scrap, vinyl, and old hair. Hitler’s evil genius consisted in offering to the times in which we lived its most truthful prognostication — the mountains of enslaved objects from Auschwitz. Who didn’t have his innocent Auschwitz in an attic, a coach house, a medicine chest, a trunk, or in his own back yard?

Thus it was that my father Angel, when he reached his twentieth birthday, one before by law what he had inherited from his deceased parents, the inventors, should be handed over to him, he came to the full realization that having grown up in a world that was proudly conservative in its economics, both in its principles and in their application, in reality he had grown up in a world of junk and economic anarchy. The truth had been a lie, and realizing it offended him greatly.

This afternoon of my creation, my genes and chromosomes begin to talk as if my life depended on language more than on the fortuitous meeting of semen and egg: listening to my father and mother speak immersed in the sea which is the cradle of life, the unique refrigerator in the burning world that incinerated all forms of life in the universe except those that took refuge and developed underwater and left, I tell you with perfect certainty, the primitive ocean inside every one of us, floating eternally in a certain sense in saltwater, because the problem, your mercy the reader should know, is not to dry out. Never, under no circumstance: if you dry out you die, like a fish without scales, a bird without feathers, or a pup without fur: pity the person who tends not the savage ocean he bears within him because it’s the only thing left to him from two overlapping creations: that of the world and that of the child. I say this because I feel that my parents are speaking one afternoon from within the Pacific Ocean, about another ocean of dust: a city they will, I suppose, bring me to someday, since they talk so much about it, think about it so much, predict so many things about it, and fear it so much. For example: “Look, Angelito,” his (mine, mighty, mymighty?) Grandpa General Rigoberto Palomar said to him, “the Drainage Sewer was built by Don Porfirio Díaz in around 1900 at a level lower than the city’s at that time. But now the city has sunken in its swampy bed and the sewer is higher than our shit. Now it costs millions to pump day in day out so that the shit rises to the level of the sewer and flows away. If they stopped pumping for two minutes, Mexico City would be flooded with poop.”

3. Angel put up with everything

Angel put up with everything until the day when a pest of a different nature joined the crowd. A tall, robust, dark, mustachioed young man with the eyes of one of the guerrilleros photographed by Casasola drinking chocolate in Sanborn’s in the Year of Our Lord 1915. I see him now: I’d seen him in the halls of alma mater, HEROES OF 1982, walking as if he’d spent his life pushing the cannon in the Zacatecas campaign, with his gorilla-like shoulders: invisible cartridge belts crossed his chest, an invisible, blackened straw hat covered his big head: anyone who did not avert his eyes ran the risk of meeting him in person and getting demolished. His name was Matamoros Moreno.

“What can I do for you, bro’?” asked Angel, opening the door, his ability to be surprised having early on been eradicated. An ear of green corn in mole rolled from the inside of the house toward the street.

“Remember me?”

“Who could forget you?”

“Do you mean that?” He bared tremendous teeth as he gazed with unfeigned lust at the pile of deflated condoms and dried-out Kotex behind Angel. “Bet you can’t remember what my name is.”

“Petero Palots,” said my dad with insouciance, not so much out of irreverence but simply because he was unconscious of the danger.

“Whadya mean?” grunted Matamoros Moreno.

“Listen, man,” answered my pop, “it’s not good manners to knock on someone’s door and then ask the guy who answers if he remembers your name ten years after having been in the same class with you and two hundred other assholes, staring at the map of the country while the son of a bitch of a teacher spent most of the class calling the roll. The only thing I remember is that he took sixty minutes to get from Aguilar to Zapata by way of your humble serviette Palomar y…”

“Moreno,” grunted the visitor, while my father, after a mnemo-technical shove like that, saw once again the map of the Republic before its current shrinkage (the country abbreviated during the disaster of 1990!), and the light bulb went on in his head.

“Tabasco Moreno.”

“Too far south.”

“Jalisco Moreno,” suggested my father timidly.

“Farther north,” said Moreno melancholically.

“Sonora Moreno.”

“O, it ends in o,” he said, this time almost begging for recognition. “Even by name I’m macho, Palomar.” He looked toward some false eyelashes someone had stuck on a mannequin head and forgotten there.

“Of course,” exclaimed my young father, “of course, who could forget that name: Matamoros Moreno. You just caught me off-guard. Now, what can I do…?”

Before he could finish the sentence, Matamoros managed to put one foot between the door and the jamb. “He won’t jamb me,” my father said to himself. “Enough is enough.” But this orangutan was scaring him.

“Don’t get all bent out of shape, Palomar,” said the big guy, now blinking one of his tiger eyes through the partially open door and speaking in a voice that was so sweet my father felt ashamed of himself.

“Don’t get upset, coward. Don’t try to evaporate on me,” he added quickly with a ferocity that convinced my father that his decision to make it difficult for Matamoros to get in was sound.

“Don’t get upset, chum,” Matamoros said after a bit, in a voice that shook my dad’s soul and confirmed his worst fears.

Later he said to himself that he had always feared the day someone would ask him for an opinion about a literary text. He was well known as a reader in HEROES OF 1982. He could recite Quevedo. He quoted Montaigne. He was a fan of López Velarde. He had access to the vast library that belonged to his scientist parents. His Quevedian motto was: Nothing surprises me. The world has bewitched me. But that it should turn out to be Matamoros Moreno who would turn over his first literary efforts to him, who would ask for his sincere opinion, who would assure him that he had admired him from a distance in HEROES OF 1982 as the most highly cultured boy in their class, the most avid of readers … My father sat down among his empty bottles, his bicycle wheels, his squashed cardboard boxes, and his collections of alien porn, to read the literary efforts of his fellow student Matamoros Moreno.

The reader is cordially invited to fill the virgin page following with his own version of Matamoros Moreno’s text, read by my father that afternoon when he was twenty years old. The only hints about it are some statistics: Matamoros says “heart” twenty times; “tumescent flesh” and “maculate flesh” appear eighteen times each; fifteen times he exclaims “Holy Mother,” attributing to this fertile lady eleven times the expression “white hair” and only ten “little mop of cotton”; there are fourteen “blazing shines,” thirteen lives scattered among rosebushes, and twelve mad passions; only four coral lips appear in this census.

Angel’s first reaction was to laugh. But three things stopped him.

The first was that in Chapter 2, as if to arouse obligatory applause, Matamoros said only:

THERE’S NO COUNTRY LIKE MEXICO, DON’T YOU AGREE?

This attempt at demagoguery was strengthened by Chapter 3, which proclaimed in lapidary tones:

SHE DID IT FOR NO OTHER NATION

The proclamation of the Virgin of Guadalupe added religious terrorism to patriotic terrorism, my dad had objected. The great thing about Matamoros was that his zenith was also his nadir, his alpha was also his omega: his peak was down below; there was no fall, just as there was no ascent; his sentences were the high point of a gorge, never the low point of a ridge.

But the third, the real problem was telling him all this.

Or letting him know indirectly.

Matamoros, of course, had given him no address: he said he’d be back next week. The mail didn’t work anymore, who didn’t know that? My father calculated that a week for Moreno would be exactly one week, and when the seventh day after the Matamoorish visit came around, he hung the manuscript in a manila envelope on the outside doorknob, along with a “Very interesting” note.

He heard Matamoros Moreno’s unmistakable footsteps at three o’clock in the afternoon, the precise hour at which the seventh day came to an end. He pressed his ear to the door without breathing. He heard the rustle of papers. Then the long, jailhouse footfalls going into the distance. He opened the door to see if the coast was clear. Not a trace of Matamoros, but the manuscript was still hanging from the doorknob. Matamoros had appended a note to my father’s note: “What’s very interesting? I’ll be back tomorrow at the same time. Do a better job. And don’t try to jerk me around.”

My father spent a restless night. To mock Matamoros would be to put himself in physical danger. So my father Angel spent his morning between fear and mockery, mockery and fear: Matamoros Moreno was laughable; he was also to be feared. What was to be done with this supreme invader of the impossible private life of Angel Palomar y Fagoaga?

He was on the verge of asking his Grandfather Rigoberto Palomar for advice. But he did that only on the most important occasions, when there was clearly no way out. His grandfather would expect more agility from him, a more fertile imagination. It was an unwritten agreement between them. Besides, what was Angel going to do at three that his grandfather would or would not do at two or four?

At exactly three, Matamoros materialized. “Well, what did you think of my work?”

“It provokes digressive flights.”

“Whadya mean?”

“I mean that the metaphysical transposition, taking control of the signifying practices, ultimately modifies all the prosodic and morphologic instances, eventually hastening the triumph of the linguistic eros, itself related to the fungous and fusive homophony of the homologous.”

Matamoros Moreno stared severely at my father. “Cantinflas couldn’t have put it better, bro’.”

He looked with paleolithic irony toward the interior of the coach house, as if he could read the stacks of love letters written by other people and take the rust off the abandoned motorcycles. “Tomorrow I’ll be back for a serious opinion, Palomar. Remember, three strikes and you’re out.”

Off he went, dragging his chain, pushing his cannon. My father leaned back, cursing all classmates, from the beginning of time. Because of fear and laughter he could not sleep: his nightmares about Matamoorish violence were interrupted by attacks of insane laughter as he remembered the most singular sentences penned by his classmate. Three strikes and you’re out, warned his old school chum (may God protect us from them!), so here we go. But if he didn’t have the guts to laugh right in his face and tell him, look, Matamoros, your prose is an exercise in involuntary humor; or the courage to say, look, Matamoros, your prose is shit, then at least he’d have the valor to confront this unforeseen nemesis a third and possibly last time. Neither scorn nor fear. Let’s see what happened.

Matamoros Moreno was right on time when Angel Palomar opened the front door for him. My father could imagine Matamoros from head to toe, but he didn’t imagine him with anyone else: no, Matamoros didn’t need protection; he was his own bodyguard, clearly. Nor did Angel imagine he’d be with a woman, even if the woman provided another kind of protection or blackmail — how could Matamoros do that to him! No, not that. But yes, yes that. Except that the woman was an eleven-year-old girl. Dark, plump, dressed in pink, with tresses, bangs, dimpled cheeks, and black little eyes — Shirley Temple translated into Mexican.

“My daughter. Illegitimate, of course. I couldn’t leave her alone. Thursdays the day care is closed. Sorry. Her name is Colasa. Short for Nicolasa. I don’t like Nicolasita. So it’s Colasa. Kiss the nice man, honey.”

Moist, sticky, chocolatey, bubble-gummy, aromatic kiss. My father confesses he collapses — yesterday, today, and tomorrow — in the presence of girls between three and thirteen years of age. Defenseless. Victimized. Against Colasa Moreno he was nothing.

“Colasa Sánchez, sorry, after her mother. I’m not sexist. Why should she have to carry around a man’s name all her life, first her father’s and then her husband’s? Let her have her own name, her mother’s name, right?”

Angel my father was about to say that a woman always has a man’s name, whether it’s her mother’s maiden name (a father’s name, after all) or her father’s name, so that the name of Colasa’s mother was her grandfather’s name, but …

“So what’s the story with my stuff, buddy?”

Vanquished, my father was obliged to say that it was an unusual example of poetic prose: the pitfalls of sentimentality had been avoided with skill and intelligence; it was difficult to communicate more beautifully a feeling of so much filial goodness. Wasn’t it Dostoevsky who said when he outlined the theme of The Idiot, WHAT?; no, that’s the title of a Russian novel, okay? OKAY, get on with it man, I like what you’re telling me, like it a lot, Colasa likes it too, doncha honey: yes Daddy, the nice man really is nice and very intelligent, right Daddy?: groan of agony from Angel Palomar: “It wouldn’t be unworthy of an anthology of this kind of writing.”

“Well, see about getting it done.”

“Getting what done, Matamoros?”

“Getting it published, man. I’ll be back tomorrow at the same time. Come on now, Colasa. Say thank you to the nice man. Thanks to his help, we’re going to get rich and famous, kid. And something better: we’re going to be happy. You’re a good guy, Palomar.”

As if her father were a prompter, Colasa Sánchez started to sing:

My heart’s delight’s this little ranch

Where I live content

Hidden among the mountains blue

With rainbows heaven sent.

It was difficult to get him out without actually shoving him through the door, without seeming impolite, assuring him that tomorrow was another day, they’d see for sure, of course, the famous anthology, yes, ha ha ha, the girl singing happy ranch, my little nest, with honeysuckle scent …

He didn’t flee from Matamoros Moreno and his daughter Colasa Sánchez out of physical fear of such fearsome characters or because of any moral fear of telling them the truth or out of psychic fear of his desire to laugh at them: my father took the bus to Oaxaca that afternoon of his twentieth year in the month of November out of the purest compassion: so they wouldn’t suffer. How could he have imagined that that damned Matamoros had left his daughter Nicolasita (it was an annoying nickname!) standing guard on the corner near his grandparents’ house?

Night and day, obviously, since the snot-nose was sitting on her haunches in front of a country-style ministore, as if she were on strike, with a lantern for night work, a black and red flag, and a pot of smoking beans. The simple child was hugging an ancient, moth-eaten doll of the charro Mamerto, a character my father recognized from a collection of comics someone had left in his coach house.

No sooner did she see my father than Colasa let out a shout, threw the charro with his huge black mustaches aside, and pointed her finger at my dad:

“Stop him! Stop him! The shameless rascal is fleeing! The scoundrel is going back on his word! Stop him! In the name of heaven and justice, I implore you not to abandon a poor girl! Stop him! The coward is fleeing, stop the knave!”

Horrified, my father ran like the devil toward Paseo de la Reforma, not even stopping to greet the statue of Don Valentín Gómez Farias, as was his custom, not even blowing a kiss to the Angel of Independence. He boarded a taxi and left poor Colasa behind, weeping, her tresses standing on end. When he reached Oaxaca thirty hours later, my father was so nervous that he walked into the Church of San Felipe Neri to take Communion for the first time since he abandoned the house of the Fagoagas. He looked with the sweetest serenity at the church made — my genes swear it to me — of golden smoke. Of course, how was he to know that, expelled by the language of Matamoros Moreno, he would find in Oaxaca his own language, as a kind of faith, as a quasi-madness, and above all as an act of conscience.

He realized in that moment of peace that never in his life had he left the boundaries of the Federal District: his horizon had always been that of the valley trapped among mountains, among the steepest slopes of the tropics, and under a sheet of cold air: the least intelligent, least provident city, the most masochistic, and suicidal, most stupidly stupid city in the history of the world. He left it thinking about the insult of the pests and its mountains of garbage.

Now a pure and unforeseen thundershower in November, the sky washed clean, the earth resurrected: he was in Oaxaca.

4. Your Breath the Blue of Incense

“Then I fled to Oaxaca,” my father told my mother, “far from Matamoorish fury. For the first time in my life, I was leaving the D.F. Searching through my knapsack for some gum, I found a letter from my Grandma Susana telling me that when I got to Oaxaca I should look up a Mrs. Elpidia, who, although she did not advertise, took in recommended guests and made food fit for a king. Also: her house was located a short distance from the plaza.

My grandmother had also included an envelope with two hundred thousand pesos in it — to cover expenses — and the complete works of López Velarde in one volume. How she knew that I was leaving when I hadn’t said a word about it is something I jealously guarded in my unmentionable hoard of family witchcraft, where she held the place of honor.

I’ll get bored here, I thought, but I was mistaken because the patio of Doña Elpidia’s house was shaded by cool trees and contained a cage with a joking parrot in it. The old lady gave me a room with a view of the mountains and served me the best yellow mole in the world. I acquired a relaxed rhythm, that of my own body, my own heart: I realized that I had been living inside a Mixmaster my entire life; I learned again how to walk, stop, rest, look, and smell.

I began to live with light, not against light; with my digestion, not in doubtful combat with my own guts; sleeping and waking up at the proper times. It happened little by little: a dawn sculpting itself; an abrupt afternoon; a city of greens and blacks and golds. There was time for me to sit in the plaza and listen to the band play overtures to Italian operas. There was time for me to eat prickly-pear ice in the atrium of Santa Rita. Time to walk into churches alone. Oaxaca gave me only itself. It was something new: I was in the world and not a refugee from the world. This was Oaxaca’s first gift.

About a week later I began to get nervous. I was at the peak of my sexual powers and I must confess that, in exchange for psychiatric care and furniture warehousing, I enjoyed the favors of all the broads who passed through my cave on Calle Génova. (Of this, more later. I always associate sex with December, when the chicks in the Distrito Federal do more screwing in a month than they do in the rest of the year. Before they make their New Year’s resolutions, which should be “Start screwing in January.”) In Oaxaca I was afraid of losing what I’d already won, out of pure sexual distress. I strolled around the plaza, in the opposite direction from the way the local girls would walk each Saturday and Sunday. It was useless. They seemed to look away from me on purpose. I started to get bored with ices, the overture to William Tell, leafy laurels, and clean, trim mountains.

Even Doña Elpidia’s mole started to annoy me … The only thing I could do was talk to the parrot, which I did with determination one boring, calm Sunday morning, trying to teach him some bawdy verses by Quevedo:

He who trusts whores is a gelding.

But Doña Elpidia’s parrot, indifferent to my classical instruction, went on repeating the same stuff — like a parrot:

He who eats a locust will never leave this place …

And Doña Elpidia, who was about to celebrate her ninety-ninth birthday behind the door of her kitchen, was chanting, as if I didn’t understand the parrot, “He who eats locust never more shall leave this place…”

“Does he need some locusts, Doña Elpidia?” I said ever so obligingly — and besides, I know how to take a hint.

“Yes, he does, son, and the market isn’t even four blocks away…” she said, showing me her vacant gums.

I walked down the cobblestone street from Elpidia’s house, and in the Sunday market I found lots of stands selling red crickets powdered with chili powder, and in one place I found a girl who looked like Colasa Sánchez, Matamoros Moreno’s illegitimate daughter — was it the same girl? was it her sister? — who flashed an irresistible smile at me (let me remind you, Christa Balilla, that I cannot resist any girl between three and thirteen years of age). She offered me a little plastic bag filled with locusts. But when I went to take them, the girl refused to give them to me, hugged them to her breast, and wiggled her finger at me to follow her.

She led me to a tiny church that looked more like a passageway, with windows open onto the street, and only there did she hand me the bag of locusts. Then she ran off, covering her mouth with her hand.

I ate those delicious insects that crackle between your teeth before releasing into your palate the airy burn of dawn (Matamoros dixit). Then I walked into the Church of San Cosme and San Damián, perhaps the simplest I’d seen in this city of baroque frills.

It was crowded.

But there was only one Agueda.

How could I not recognize her? Normally I wouldn’t have noticed a woman there praying before the Christ of the Way of Calvary, but in this Sunday crowd I believed anything and everything when I saw her there kneeling in contradictorily prestigious starched skirts and fearsome full mourning.

Of course I bit my tongue as I recognized I was quoting the poem by López Velarde I’d read the night before in my solitary bed, resisting the temptation to masturbate, imagining Cousin Agueda’s fingers weaving “gently and perseveringly in the sonorous corridor.” How could I not recognize her this morning if just last night, sadly, I ended up offering up to her that small, jumping, nervous sacrifice, I myself a cricket with chili on it, imagining her as I saw her now, dressed in mourning, but resonant with starch, with her coppery eyes, and her ruddy cheeks, and I wishing she would caress me as she was caressing the beads on her rosary with her fine, agile fingers.

Oh my chaste and pure soul! Agueda turned her head covered with veils of black lace just at the moment when I decided to give in to the seductions of the language appropriate to the woman and the place: to stop resisting and become that language. She turned her head and looked at me — just for an instant (telling makes it seem longer, but it all happened in an instant) — with her unusual copper sulphate eyes.

“I had, inland, an impoverished sweetheart”: in those eyes that rhymed with each other I detected an infinitely modest happiness, oh my unborn son, and all my sour tedium drained from me. In Agueda’s eyes I discovered not conformity but peace.

She looked at me for an instant and again wrapped her mourning in her shawl the color of ivory and mother-of-pearl. I followed her to the exit. She didn’t try to avoid me. She didn’t stop to say, “Do not compromise me further, sir.”

To the contrary. She turned to look at me from time to time; and I stopped each time she turned, telling her that I would follow wherever she led: Agueda. Well, she went from the flagstone floor of San Cosme and San Damián to the golden glory of Santo Domingo, and from there to the temple of Our Lord of Health, which smelled intensely of flowers and the bakeries next door, and finally to the art-nouveau Church of San Felipe Neri, where she settled down for a long stay. It was now five in the afternoon and she wasn’t moving, surrounded by those fleurons that seemed invented by Gaudí in Barcelona but which in fact were the work of Zapotec craftsmen from Oaxaca in the seventeenth century. I began to think of the gaze of the Holy Child of Atocha dressed in brocade and red feathers more as that of a rival than as a gaze of reproach.

“Young man, we are closing now,” a bald sacristan dressed in a filthy brown suit informed me I don’t know how much later.

On the other hand, he said nothing to Agueda, who was still wrapped in her radiant mourning.

Since I saw she wasn’t about to move, it occurred to me to hide in one of the confessionals, on the priest’s side. The doors were locked and the lights were extinguished, but when I left my hiding place, I saw Agueda still kneeling there, Christopher my boy, and I didn’t want to watch her become an old maid.

I approached her; I touched her shoulder; she turned toward me. All her symbols depended on her eyes: the apostolic spider, the nocturnal hieroglyphic, the enigmatic Edens of her hair, the cruel scorpions of sex; the vacuous intrigue of erotic chess.

She, too, remained silent; she left everything to my immediate memory of López Velarde’s verses, names and musicality, a poet dead at the age of thirty-three, my unborn Christopher, all because he strayed from the old park of his heart in Jerez de Zacatecas to go to die in the noisy thoroughfare of the decadent, rouged, and lipsticked capital; in 1921, on a June morning, the poet Ramón died with his pockets full of papers without adjectives.

Oh, my retrograde heart: Agueda looked at me and I feared she would think all this about me: this dark, tall, green-eyed boy with the brand-new mustache is my sweetheart, my cousin, my poet Ramón López Velarde. But it didn’t happen that way — that was only my imagination seeking to explain the sudden solitude of the Church of San Felipe on a Sunday night in November in 1990, when the poet from Jerez had enjoyed barely sixty-nine years of immortality.

She said nothing; but she did raise her veil over the comb she wore in her hair, thus revealing the rustic novelty of her perfumed nape. The nape was both annunciation and invitation. I had no idea that a nape, the beginning of her hair and the nakedness of her neck, could be as exciting as the meeting ground between pubic hair and belly skin. I kissed her as her clothes slid off her back and she abandoned the starched mourning shawl on her shoulders.

She knew me (or rather knew the poet): she bared only her back, shoulders, and nape; she invited me to monopolize with my kisses the incomparable smoothness of her body, she gave me the ecstasy of the chaste, acid fragrance of her armpits; of her shoulders, perfect for a copious and liquid cry; of the wingèd virtue of her soft breast; in the sleepy quintessence of her soft back: I breathing it all in, I forever in love with the smoothness and softness of provincial women, fair-skinned and light on their feet, pretty faces that never miss a Mass, young ladies with apple-shaped faces, prisoners of the glacial abandon of their beds, who so quickly turn from being intact virgins to Matres dolorosas: I would like to fall asleep in your beatific arms, Agueda, as if on the breasts of a saint.

The perfumed partiality of Agueda’s body in the church infected me with the absolute. Clenching my teeth, I told her I could not desire her and only desire her, that she should give me what she had even if it were on the threshold of the cemetery, “like perfume,” I whispered in her ear, “and bread and poison and cauterization.”

The statue of the Virgin in the church, dressed in mourning like Agueda, was also a somber triangle presiding over the lucid mist: Mexican Virgins have feminine sex and shape, and then Agueda, who felt me kissing her back and shoulders and nape but who felt me within as well as near her underskirts, raised her feet and offered them, sliding on the pew, to my insatiable curiosity.

I took off her shoes, I kissed her feet, and I remembered verses about feet that fascinated me enormously. It is not I who return but my enslaved feet, said Alfonso Reyes the exile among us. I love your feet because they walked on the earth until they found me, said Pablo Neruda the immortal lover. Luis Buñuel in enraged tenderness washed the feet of the poor and of some young Mexican ladies in the most exciting scene of Christian eroticism on a certain Good Friday. Now Agueda’s feet seek my sex, which is opportunely free of its prison of shorts and zippers, and Agueda kisses me only with her feet, Agueda makes me tremble and I imagine her in the role of Veronica, granting me the gift of her patience while her now tranquil, thaumaturgic eyes watch my pleasure: for you, Christopher my son, not yet: that time it was for her and for me because unless the father experiences pleasure the son never will.

She gave me water to drink from her cupped hands.

She was no longer there when I woke up in the morning when the first of the faithful entered the church.

I searched for her in the market, in the plaza, in old Elpidia’s patio, in the churches through which I’d followed her that November Sunday. I asked Doña Elpidia, the girl who sold me the crickets and led me to San Cosme and San Damián. I even asked the parrot, who only said: “He who eats a locust will never leave this place…”

I tried to answer him again with Quevedo, almost bringing myself down to the damn parrot’s level:

Fowl of the wasteland, who, all alone,

Leads a carefree life …

The parrot was never going to learn that poem, and I was never going to find Agueda.

I realized it that night as I strolled around the plaza:

Now the Oaxaca girls did look at me, flirt with me. As if they knew I was their own; that I belonged to them; that I shared a perfumed and black secret with them. As if before they hadn’t looked at me so as to force me to look for Agueda.

And the parrot’s verse? And the looks and notes and instructions of Doña Elpidia? And the girl who sold locusts in the market? Wasn’t it perhaps a perfect and logical chain that had led me to Agueda in the shadowy Church of San Cosme and San Damián? I stared intensely into the eyes of one of the girls in the plaza: she stopped, proud and fearful, as if I had insulted her; she hid her face in her hands and left the circle of love, accompanied by another girl, who looked at me reproachfully.

Dried out, crazy, or dead: that’s what I told them without speaking; the only thing I thought as I looked at them.

They fled as if condemned by my words to the clean injury of virginity: a resignation full of thorns.

The enchantment was broken.

5. Fatherland: Always Remain the Same, Faithful to Your Own Reflection

Renewed, happy, and retrograde, my heart spent many more weeks in Oaxaca. I let Oaxaca penetrate and possess me, just as I had wanted to penetrate and possess the vanished Agueda. Slowly but surely, I purged myself of the need to hurry. I wisely reconquered the softness of Agueda’s back, sitting alone on a bench in an anonymous park. I won it all little by little, my boy: the willowy bodies of the girls, their sugar lips, their loving provincial modesty, my nostalgia for the feet of my beloved, the clear Sundays, the cruel sky and the red earth, the chronic sadness, the miraculous illusions, the wells and the windows, the dinners and the sheets, the prolonged funeral rites, the prophecy of the turtle …

I made everything mine. Even the source of Matamoros Moreno’s prose: I recognized it, I shared it; we were brothers, doubles, barely separated by the lines on an open hand: courtesy and camp. Brothers, doubles, because López Velarde transformed the commonplaces of our small-town kitsch into poetry and mystery, and that’s something Matamoros knew better than I.

In Oaxaca, I even acquired the insanely heroic habit of talking to myself.

I returned to Mexico City when I thought the danger of Matamoros and Colasa had succumbed to my prolonged absence, by which time they would have avidly sought new, more promising opinions, backing, and recommendations for Matamoros’s efforts.

I returned by bus, alone, repeating, repeating to myself the verses of López Velarde’s Sweet Fatherland

surface: maize

oil wells: devil

clay: silver

tolling bells: pennies

smell: bakery

fowl: language

breathing: incense

happiness: mirror

I looked for Agueda and I did not find her

I looked for the Sweet Fatherland and didn’t find it

Three months later, I found your mother.

I searched for a nation identical to itself. I searched for a nation built to last. My heart filled with an intimate, reactionary joy: as intimate as the joy felt by millions of Mexicans who wanted to conserve at least the borders of their poor country: conservatives. I said I learned to love true conservatives. Bishop Vasco de Quiroga, who constructed a utopia in Michoacán in 1535 so that the Indians could conserve their lives and traditions and not die of despair. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, the Franciscan scribe who saved the memory of the Indian past. The Indian and Spanish builders whose structures were meant to last. Resistant stone, faithful countries: was only Mexico’s past serious? asked my father Angel after his return from Oaxaca, his loss of Agueda, his meeting my mother. Does Mexico’s future have to be like its present: a vast comedy of graft and mediocrity perpetrated in the name of Revolution and Progress? Thus, I want the Sweet Fatherland, my father Angel ordered us to say, ordered, that is, my mother, whom he had still not met, and me, still in the most perfect of limbos: a country identical to itself: hardworking, modest, productive, concerned in the first instance with feeding its people, a country opposed to gigantism and madness: I refuse to do anything, plant anything, say anything, erect anything that will not last five centuries, Christopher, my son, created to celebrate the five centuries: beloved Angeles.

This was his resolution, mulled over in the few instants of solitude he enjoyed in his coach-house merry-go-round over in Colonia Juárez. But putting the resolution into practice presented him with a mass of contradictions. He would understand these contradictions later in February when he met his friend the fat little guy, the projectionist and lyricist for rockaztec, who explained to him that the tragedy of his life and the source of his artistic inspiration was his father, a living (when he was alive) contradiction. When he married, his father was given a horrible gift, nothing less than a vast, hideous bronze sculpture, dominating and inexorable, that contained images of Father Hidalgo, Don Benito Juárez, and Pancho Villa, together raising the national flag (executed in tricolor silk) above the Basilica of Guadalupe, on whose portals (executed in polychromed wood) hung the tricolor shields of the PRI. This gift was sent to the fat guy’s father, who was an engineer specializing in public works, by his principal client, the head man at the Secretariat of Public Works, and even though our buddy’s dad detested the sculpture and huffed and puffed about it the whole day, and even though its presence in the entryway of the family house in Colonia Nápoles almost caused his divorce and was certainly the source of a conjugal irritation that lasted throughout his parents’ life, our buddy would tell us all that his dad would never take it away from there: suppose the Director General of the Secretariat comes around and doesn’t see his present? Suppose people think that in our house we don’t respect the symbols of the nation? Our national heroes? The flag? The Virgin? I’ll tell you what could happen: bye-bye contracts, bye-bye three squares per diem!

But this same man, his father, as our buddy again remembers, mocked authority all day. He said he would take nothing from no one, let’s see someone try to give him an order, he was a serious professional, independent, an engineer, to be more precise: he’d like to see someone try: he refused to do his military service or to pay income tax (which, according to him, ended up in the Swiss accounts of government officials); he refused to join with the neighbors to create a neighborhood patrol; he refused to get on line for movies or bread (lines? me? I’d like to see the guy …); he never stopped for a red light; and he never ever (it redounds to his honor) paid off any cop or meter maid: he hated all uniforms, even those of street sweepers or ushers: he would urge them to be individuals, to dress as they pleased, they weren’t nuts and bolts in a machine, they were individuals, damn it, INDIVIDUALS! not rags, not doormats; he never signed petitions of any kind, never bought a lottery ticket, never lent candles to the neighbors when the power went out, never depended on anyone so that no one would depend on him, never helped anyone, never asked for help; but he never got rid of that hideous sculpture down in the entryway: he would say, what if the boss comes?; then bye-bye three squares per diem; but more than that, he never dared to touch the symbols: his individualism became abjection in the face of those domineering symbols; just as he always refused to go to a political meeting or obey a traffic light, he refused to act against any abstract abuse by the powers that be, even an abuse that condemned him and his family to walk in front of that sculptural monstrosity every day of their lives: individualist to the end, but abject to the end as well: my poor old man, our pudgy little pal would sigh, anarchist and synarchist, and that’s the way we are in these parts: rebels in our private lives and slaves in our civic lives.

This is the dilemma my father Angel expressly tried to avoid. It was easy to distinguish and decide, but very difficult to do things. No sooner would he act than he would fear falling into total disorder and ending up not in a bower of bliss but in the slough of despond. He denied that being conservative meant being an “hidalgo,” because hidalgos only try to prove themselves in love and war and end up with no roof over their heads and no brains left, and what turns out to be the ultimate test of hidalgos is doing absolutely nothing. And what my young father began to fear was that if he didn’t watch out, he too would disappear, chewed up by the jaws of Mexico and her Institutions: he tried to imagine himself in a trashy Iwo Jima, a mock Laocoön, which the father of his future pal Egg installed in the vestibule over in Colonia Nápoles. In any case, the Canaima Option, the grand Latin American solution, was best: remain immobile in a jungle landscape, with no more company than an araguato monkey and slowly but surely let the vines cover you up. The jungle swallowed him up!

Neither was he going to carry on like a creole aristocrat with old-fashioned expatriate nostalgia for Spain, because he knew that in Mexico there have traditionally been two ways of being Spanish: being the gachupín with the grocery store, the frugal Don Venancio who sleeps on the counter and keeps an exact inventory of how many cans of sardines have been sold every day, or being the anti-Don Venancio, the creole gachupín who, in order to get a taste of what it’s like not to run a grocery store, keeps blissfully chaotic account books, goes into debt up to his sideburns, and in doing so puts the nation into debt: all to show he’s no shopkeeper, but an hidalgo: not Don Venancio the Sober but the spendthrift conquistador, the Very Magnificent Don Nuño de Guzmán, to bankruptcy and collapse, full speed ahead. My father had read Emilio Prados, Luis Cernuda, and León Felipe, the Spaniards who were exiled by Franco and who came to live in Mexico in 1939. These were the real Spaniards: not Venancio or Nuño, neither a Spaniard returned with his pockets full of New World gold nor a conquistador. He never wanted a Creole Camelot.

How would he be? He romantically reinvented himself as a rebellious conservative, in the same way that he would be an assassin if he could get away with it: but he was much more concerned that no one dare judge him, banking on his dishonesty, as was normal in Mexico, but banking instead on his virtue. He believed that in order to achieve his goal he would always have to do not the “right” thing but whatever he wanted to do and that would be the “right” thing. He tossed a veil over his personal failing: sensuality.

“Now tell me, buddy, what finally happened with that statue or monstrosity or whatever it was?”

“Well, what happened was that one night some thieves broke into our house — because, of course, my father refused to join the neighborhood patrol. Dad and Mom went downstairs in their pajamas, and the thieves threatened them with a knife. I saw it all from the stairs.”

“Who threatened them?”

“A great big guy wearing a mask. He seemed to be dragging a ball and chain and had what looked like a dwarf with him who was also wearing a mask. My mother saw her chance, Angelito, the heavens opened up to her. She ran to where the sculpture was so she could hand it over to the thief. But the truth is that she hugged the thing as if it were her dearest possession. At least that’s how the crook saw it, ’cause he apparently couldn’t stand for whatyacallit in psychology, a resistance, and right then and there he cut my mom’s throat … Christ! shouts my old man, forgetting everything he’d ever said about the Director General over at Public Works, and then screams at the thief: ‘Asshole! What she wanted was for you to take the thing! She wanted to get rid of…!’ He never got a chance to finish. Who knows what the crook was thinking, because he cut my old man’s throat, too. Then he took the damn statue, helped by the dwarf. He must’ve thought it was made of gold or had secret drawers stuffed with dollars, God knows…”

One February day, my father Angel attended a session of the Academy of the Language presided over by my Uncle Homero Fagoaga. He was dressed up like Francisco de Quevedo (it was the first time he wore the disguise in public). He listened politely to Don Homero’s speech in honor of the newest member of the Academy, the gongorhythmic poet J. Mambo de Alba, listened to Mr. Mambo’s sublime nonsense — he praised the crisis because it enclosed Mexico within itself and kept out foreign books, movies, art, and ideas. Now we were to scratch ourselves with our own nails! To read Proust is to proustitute oneself! To read Joyce is to make a poor choice! Reading Gide is doing a bad deed! Valéry is the valley of the shadow of evil! Mallarmé is marmalade! E. E. Cummings — well! He should be condomed! Let’s hear it for Tlaquepaque, coffee with cinnamon, serapes from Saltillo, Michoacán pottery, let’s head structuralism off at the pass, forget nouvelle cuisine and postpunkrock, let’s be like Ramón López Velarde, who, nourishing himself exclusively on the Revolution, with no foreign readings or fashions, found the essence of the Sweet Fatherland. It was the reference to López Velarde that aroused my father Angel’s rage. He’d always imagined his favorite poet wearing out his eyes looking for and finding and reading Baudelaire and Laforgue, while the colorless (but not odorless) poet and academician celebrated the dearth of imported books, the closing of the cultural borders, all so we could scratch ourselves with our own nails! Impetuously, Angel leapt up from his seat, went to the podium, and grabbed both his uncle and the poet by their noses. While he twisted one nose with each hand, he declared to the stupefied audience the things he’d just said here:

I SEEK A NATION IDENTICAL TO ITSELF

I SEEK A NATION MADE TO LAST

NOTHING THAT DOESN’T LAST FIVE CENTURIES

FATHERLAND, ALWAYS REMAIN THE SAME

FAITHFUL TO YOUR OWN REFLECTION:

LONG LIVE ALFONSO REYES! MEXICAN LITERATURE WILL BE GREAT

BECAUSE IT’S LITERATURE NOT BECAUSE IT’S MEXICAN!

and my father forced everyone there, beginning with the uncle and the poet, to breathe onto a mirror:

“I knew it. You’re all dead. I will not bestow the conservative tradition on a gaggle of exquisite corpses.”

He was very young. He mixed his metaphors. He was sincere. He didn’t know if his anarchic whims, outlandish jokes, and premeditated disorder would give him the key to happiness: Sweet Fatherland!

6. In these annals of a wonderful life prior to my conception

In these annals of a wonderful life prior to my conception (which makes me wonder if I’ll be lucky enough to find something amusing in my intrauterine life and — and even this I don’t dare hope for — later on), my father returned in February 1991 from Oaxaca, transformed, even though he still didn’t know it.

He went on leading his bachelor’s life, protected by his Grandparents Rigoberto and Susana. He still hadn’t found my mother and took up again with an old girlfriend named Brunilda, a great big sexy girl, lively and sentimental, with eyes like limpid pools and the mouth of a clown.

He was not faithful to her, nor she to him. And they both knew it. But he had never asked her to have a drink in the Royal Road Hotel bar along with one of his other girlfriends. She, on the other hand, enjoyed those collisions between rivals, allowing the two gallants to stare each other down like two polite basilisks while she chewed on the fringe of her ash-blond hair and observed them from the depths of her twin pools.

“So you think you’re terribly liberated, eh?” she would say, making catty faces from time to time. “So you think you’re terribly civilized, eh? A pair of little English gentlemen, is that it?”

Photos and letters from the rival accidentally left on Angel’s bed.

Now they were all together in the VIPS in San Angel, the afternoon of Thursday, February 28, 1991, neutral territory where they could explain all these things. Angel yawned. He shouldn’t have done it: life in Mexico City contains more surprises than any yawn imaginable deserves.

In the ecumenical and inexhaustible taxonomy of Mexican pests, Angel gave a high place to professional wives: these women feel it’s their job to promote their husbands twenty-four hours a day, to see to it that they are invited to elegant dinners, to castigate verbally any misguided critics of their divine consorts, and to imagine cataclysmic snubs provoked by the envy of others. But above all, the professional wife feels authorized to cash checks, an activity without which anything else she did would be meaningless.

Among the members of this subspecies for whom Angel felt special revulsion was Luminosa Larios, wife of the millionaire magazine impresario Pedrarias Larios, and it was not without a tremor of fatal anticipation that he saw her sit down at two in the afternoon on that same day at one of the tables in the VIPS.

No sooner did Luminosa Larios lay eyes on my father Angel than she obliterated any imaginable possibility for the couple sitting there to air out their problems. Luminosa always acted as if there were two people in the world: she, the quasi-ecclesiastical representative of her Genial Husband, and the person privileged to hear her revelations. She now began to enumerate these glories, stretching her hand with its voracious green nails toward Angel’s shoulder: her husband Pedrarias had just opened — simultaneously — twenty-four gas stations in the Nations of North America, The New York Times had published an article by Tom Wicker in which he compared Pedrarias with early Hearst or late Luce or murky Murdoch, she didn’t remember quite the way it went now (she scratched the air with her green claws so that the gold charms on her bracelets would tinkle more musically). Pedrarias had a cameo in the new Pia Zadora film, Pedrarias was received by President Donald Danger, Pedrarias may have earned seven hundred million pesos last year, but he still has a social conscience, and emblazoned across the cover of his magazine Lumière: SOLIDARITY WITH THE SUBJUGATED PEOPLES OF THE FOURTH WORLD VICTIMS OF THE OIL IMPERIALISM OF THE THIRD WORLD.

“What a whirlwind! What publicity!” exclaimed Luminosa in satisfied tones. “But even my husband has his limits: even though they’ve asked him repeatedly, he would never do the ads for those Cuban heels made by Rising Star Shoes. I mean, really! Where do they get off, making up stuff like that? It came out in some two-bit paper published in Mexamerica that nobody reads; here’s the article and some other interesting clippings. Next year my husband’s book comes out, an exciting, stupendous confession entitled Epic of a Paranoid Hick in Paris. We deny completely that we’ve been evicted from seven different apartments for not paying the rent, the telephone bill, or for fixing the broken furniture. And it was our enemies who made up that lie about our using towels to wipe our asses. Nothing but lies!” shouted Luminosa, bright red and cross-eyed.

With growing excitement, the lady began to pass around catalogues, posters, press clippings, photocopies of checks, magazine covers on which she appeared wearing a bikini, as if the fame and merits of her husband depended now and forever on them. The printed matter flew over Brunilda’s head, messing her hair and annoying her, as her cat-like eyes showed. Then the words settled in the tortilla soup the couple were eating. And amid this avalanche of luminous publicity, Luminosa took the opportunity to mention, as if in passing, this bit of news, which changed my father’s life:

“Oh yes, Angelito, I just found out that your Uncle Don Homero has disinherited you or something like that.”

My father Angel did not know what to take care of first: Tom Wicker’s article floating in his tortilla soup, Brunilda’s horribly fulminating and disappointed stare, or Doña Luminosa Larios’s infinitely hypocritical smile, fixed on her face as she cocked her little head to one side as an invitation to middle-class approval. Her Gorgon eyes were bulging because no quantity of scalpels doing any quantity of plastic surgery could erase those crow’s-feet that looked like quotation marks between which she eternally recited her husband’s deeds. She dripped joy at the sight of someone suffering.

The lady resolved my father’s dilemmas by sensually stretching her arm, wrapped in an atrocious blouse of violet crepe, and resting her sympathetic face on one of her wrists ablaze with jewels. “Don’t forget to come over at the usual time, now,” she said, withdrawing her hand just before Angel could touch it, and then proceeding to play peekaboo with her napkin.

Brunilda gave my father a look of double warning that he could read easily because she said everything with looks: “You’re not only ruined financially, but you publicly two-time me with this parrot who seems to have escaped from the Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

Angel got up with his bowl of soup in his hands and emptied all of it — checks, clippings, and catalogues — over Doña Luminosa Larios’s head. Brunilda got up impetuously, her mouth wide open.

“It’s a frame-up! This lady is making up a romance!”

“Don’t you dare follow me,” she said to Angel. “I’ve got lots of options. This one just died.”

For two weeks he didn’t see her. Of course, he was not deprived of female companionship, since there were lots of girls eager for pleasure, especially the pleasure of escaping from the plague of their families.

“I’ll tell you what’s goin’ on with this ’flation,” one of these bonbons summarized. “There’s no jobs and no megabucks, so we all gotta stay home, Angel baby, the power elite is takin’ it out on us women, man, ya’oughtta see, they’ve got us back in their Tyrone Power.”

“Who’s got the power?” asked my dad at the door, as always inventing useless passwords to protect his chaste and pure dwelling, knowing full well that pirating music and videotapes was the hottest business in town, especially because the city lacked both entertainment and contact with the outside world. Seeing old movies on videocassettes was the supreme form of entertainment in the Mexico of the nineties.

“Who’s got the power?”

“Mischa Auer,” answered a cinephilic teenybopper’s voice. There was nothing left to do but open the door and fall into the Felliniesque arms of María de Lourdes, María Cristina, Rosa María, María Concepción, Maricarmen, or María Engracia.”

“Who’s got the air?”

“Fred Astaire, baby.”

“Who’s got the marbles?”

“Greta Garbles.”

“Who set the table?”

“Esther Fernández.”

He didn’t open the door.

Brunilda didn’t know this new set of passwords, so she never got Behind the Green Door to Deep Trope. She telephoned, but the mythomaniacal yet astute Grandmother Susana happily sent Angel on a hypothetical one-way trip to Chile. Next came letters, some love letters, some despair letters, but all unanswered letters. Brunilda was torn apart by the anxieties of sex and vanity, emotions both linked and compulsive, to say nothing of her horrible suspicion about a future devoid of inheritance.

Because one fine morning Grandfather Rigoberto Palomar appeared in my father Angel’s coach house with a ream of documents, turned a blind eye to the naked piece of ass who squealed as she went to get dressed (later she complained to Angel that Grandpa had caressed her ass), and confirmed to him that Uncle Homero Fagoaga, as the documents stated it, had brought suit against his nephew Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, accusing him of being a spendthrift, irresponsible, and incapable of administering the estate of forty million gold pesos which, according to the last will and testament of his deceased parents, he was to have inherited on his twenty-second birthday — the new age for adulthood, according to the law, which Angel would reach on July 14, 1991.

Angel understood the shrug and the challenging expression on his grandfather’s face: one meant fatalism, the other meant freedom, a mixture appropriate to an old man as wise as this one, who was always saying to his grandson that even though he could help him — although now there was little he could do, true enough — Angel ought to use his imagination and his own resources.

“But you know so much, Grandfather.”

“No matter how much I know, I am not your age and I can’t sniff out everything you can. Your intuition is definitely better than my knowledge.”

Freedom is everything, everything, Angelillo, said the old man, handing him the documents. Even fatalism, he said, is a way of being free. Sometimes our will is not enough, see? if we don’t know that things can go wrong for no good reason. Then we aren’t free. We’re deluded. You can count on my support, but manage your affairs freely, with imagination, and without fear, Angelillo.

Angel had been going out with Brunilda for quite a while and preferred ending a relationship which had no more to it than a pleasure which, if solid, was always the same. The additives Brunilda used to try to diversify normal sexuality — unilateral jealousy, inopportune encounters with other occasional lovers, letters from one boyfriend left for no good reason in the bed of another — wore Angel out: a romantic relationship was nothing if it wasn’t a means whereby one man could be set aside from all the rest. Brunilda imbued all her relationships with analogies in order to avoid the harmony of tedium; her diversions frustrated Angel’s romantic intentions.

Three weeks after the break with Brunilda, my father, on a whim, decided to go out on the town in disguise. He put on a toga and a Quevedesque mustache and walked unnoticed by anyone from Calle Génova to Río Mississippi, where traffic was heavier. There a boy of unusual whiteness (accentuated by his shiny pitch-black hair) was putting on a spectacular performance of bullfighting with cars and trucks; his agility momentarily disguised his thick, soft body and the fact that he resembled nothing so much as a pear.

Angel, for his part, watched with openmouthed admiration as the boy executed a twirl around a bloody-minded taxi, a left feint in front of an irate heavy truck driven by an albino in black glasses, a rapid-fire series of veronicas in the face of a ferocious squad of motorcyclists. But when the fat young man posed on his knees in the path of a Shogun limousine without license plates but with darkened windows — which accelerated down the wide street as soon as it saw the boy on his knees — Angel leapt to rescue the erstwhile torero and dragged him to safety.

“You nuts, man?” asked Angel.

“What about you, goin’ around dressed like the Masked Avenger!?” panted the pudgy lad.

“If it bothers you, I’ll take it off.”

“Who said you should take off?”

“No, not me, it. My disguise, I’ll take it off.”

My father pulled the cape off his shoulders and the huge glasses off his nose.

“Actually, I did all that to get your attention,” panted the fatty. “Brunilda told me to tell you that if you don’t call her this afternoon, tonight she’ll kill herself. Swear to God.”

They walked along Paseo de la Reforma to the flower market at the entrance to Chapultepec Park. Fatso explained that he was a composer; perhaps Angel knew his last hit, “Come Back, Captain Blood”?; well, he wrote that number along with the new group he was putting together, because the group he’d belonged to before, Immanuel Can’t, did not respect the individual personality of its artists, required everything to be group experience, collective expression; that was their categorical imperative, laughed the overweight conversationalist as he raised the dust on the Reforma sidewalks with his big feet. He was not in agreement, he said, with that philosophy, which was too sixties; he wanted to be conservative, romantic post-punk conservative, and his motto was REWARD YOURSELF!

“Reward yourself, that’s what I say. You never know what tomorrow may bring.”

They reached the flower market. As Angel placed an order, Fatty recited a few stanzas of his rockaztec hit:

Wontcha come back, Captain Blood?

You’re a great big iron stud,

And we all need what you’ve got

Adventure, honor: HOT!

You gave it to our dads:

Now what about the lads?

They liked each other and agreed to meet the next day for coffee. Fatty then told him that the funeral wreaths had begun to arrive at Brunilda’s apartment in Polanco at four in the afternoon, one after another, purple and white, violets and tuberoses, some shaped like horseshoes, others plain wreaths, still others artistic diaphragms; suffocating, perfumed, permutated, indefatigable dead man’s flowers to celebrate her announced suicide, truckloads of flowers that invaded the apartment of the girl with immense eyes and clown mouth: she wept. She tore apart her sky-blue satin robe, she threw herself on the bed, she tried to keep any more wreaths from entering the house, she dramatically fainted off the bed and onto the floor, revealing one exuberant breast, all of which only convinced the messengers they should bring her more flowers than those Angel had ordered, so they tossed a whole cartload of flowers on her, only looking for a glimpse of that trembling antenna of Brunilda’s pleasures.

“When I left her, she was crying with rage. She said she’d get even by marrying your rival tomorrow. They’ll be on their honeymoon starting tomorrow night in the Hotel Party Palace and they’ll drink to your death.”

Now my dad Angel ordered a piñata delivered the next night to the bridal suite at the Party Palace. He added a note addressed to Brunilda’s brand-new husband: “At least you’ll have one thing to break, asshole.”

Along with the fat boy, Angel set about making the preparations for the coming-of-age party his grandparents had insisted on throwing for him in the very room where his deceased parents had been married, the traditional Clair-de-Lune Salon on Avenida Insurgentes, where thousands and thousands of sweet-sixteen-party piñatas had done service ever since the forties. The grandparents say that aside from the sentimental value of the place, Uncle Homero will be looking for evidence of Angel’s spendthrift ways (for example: his recent flower purchases at Chapultepec, his numerous girlfriends, his dinners in posh restaurants, his cassette business, or the rumors of his shacking up, according to Aunts Capitolina and Farnesia, in boardinghouses, and, Holy Mother! even in Oaxaca churches after hours), but the whole idea of celebrating his coming-of-age in the Clair-de-Lune is such a cheap idea, so I-wish-I-could-afford-better that it will give you a humble air, Grandson. No, you can’t hold it here in the house because anything private has to be exclusive, luxurious, and criminal.

7. Angel and his new buddy the fat boy

Angel and his new buddy the fat boy (whose original name no one remembered or chose to remember) spent a nervous week preparing the July 14 party. Angel convinced him not to rejoin the snobs in the Immanuel Can’t group while at the same time admonishing him not to fall into the horrible vulgarity of those plebes the Babosos Boys. Instead, the two of them should use their imagination to create a new group that would synthesize those two extremes. Fatty said no problem, that he knew a fabulous guitarist/singer, a protégé of the eminent polymath Don Fernando Benítez, a guy named Orphan Huerta. In his urban rambles, he’d also come upon a grotesque named Hipi Toltec, who walked the broad avenues of the city, his long, greasy locks hanging down, his face thin and long-nosed, like a plumed coyote, wearing rags and a luxurious snakeskin belt that announced in French: “La serpent-à-plumes, c’est moi.”

“He thinks he’s always right in the middle of the conquest of Mexico, that he’s come back and that no one recognizes him; he’s a harmless nut, until he screws up the signifiers.”

“Well then, fat boy, we’ve got to keep his signifiers straight for him.”

“It’s worth the trouble. He’s the best drummer around. But you’ve got to convince him the drums are tom-toms. He sort of disintegrates as he plays. He drives the girls crazy.”

“What do you do, pudgy?”

He played the piano, the maracas, and the piccolo, and — he blushed — he had to include in the group a ten-year-old girl who played the flute, any problem with that?

“It’s your band,” said my dad Angel with a no-problem wave, imagining the girl in that privileged age, between three and thirteen.

“We’re all set, then,” said Fatty. “The four of us are friends and we even have a name, the Four Fuckups. All we needed was someone to get us moving, to provide moral support. Thanks, Angel.”

“You’re welcome. If you like, I could even be your business manager.”

On the afternoon of the birthday party, the fat boy arrived first at the Clair-de-Lune, so he could set things up, arrange the tables, put flowers in vases, clear a space for the musicians, and check out the marvelous metal egg put there by the constantly recharged imagination of the salon’s directors as a spectacular device for introducing the guest of honor: they raised the egg to the ceiling, which was decked out with Styrofoam stars and half-moons, and then, once all the guests were present, lowered the egg with a trumpet fanfare to announce the arrival of the new citizen, the sweet-sixteener, or the daring society debutante.

Fatty’s intention was to make sure things would go well and that my father Angel would be comfortable during the hour or so he’d have to spend in the ovoid prison where he’d wait for all the guests until the moment—11 p.m. — when the signal would be given, the egg would descend, and my dad would pop out of it in the bloom of health.

My dad’s pal was deeply involved in poking a needle through the ventilation holes to make sure nothing was blocking them (not an easy task in the half light of afternoon) when suddenly two hands, not powerful but having the advantage of surprise, pushed him into the improvised sarcophagus, locked him in, and sent him up to the ceiling. It didn’t take Fatty long to understand his situation: no one would get him out of there before eleven. But even that hope faded when through the ventilation holes he heard a pomaded voice say:

“Do not concern yourselves with this ovoid artifact, workers of the manual sort. My nephew has decided not to use such a worn-out symbol. I have convinced him to abandon this ceremony in exchange for a tasty and much to be preferred gift of a million pesos. To you, for acceding to my desires and withdrawing from this locale tonight, I grant a similar sum. Besides, as the Admiral of the Ocean Sea might have said to his mutinous crew: Why should I worry about one ovoid ball, when I need two?”

Then, when the workers left, dividing up those devalued pesos, the same voice shouted to Fatty, locked within the metal egg: “May you rot in there, you irresponsible spendthrift! A Fagoaga never loses, and what he does lose, he snatches back!”

This was followed by the kind of laugh a mad monk makes in his catacomb. Afterwards, hours and hours of silence in which Angel’s chum, feeling rather like one of Dickens’s poor heroes taking the place of his friend at the guillotine, decided to while away his time writing a novel in his head. He said to himself that the principal problem in such a project is knowing how to begin, so, since he’d thought of Dickens first, he began his mental novel with the words “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…” But he shook his head. He felt something was superfluous there and tossed those pages written in the ovoid darkness into the trash heap of his mind before taking up his imaginary pen and making a fresh start. “For a long time I used to go to bed late. Sometimes, my candle still burning, my eyes so firmly open that I had no time, not even for counting burros and cursing my insomnia…” No, no. He began again: “In a place in La Mancha which I remember perfectly, and which is located barely twelve miles to the east of Ciudad Real, in the foothills of the Valdeña Mountains and right on the bank of the Jubalón River…”

No, that wasn’t right either. He tried another beginning: “All unfortunate families resemble each other; happy families are such each in its own manner.” Bah! He thought about the stupid death of his own family or that of his buddy Angel Palomar and wondered if with that story he could at least start a novel. But he left it for another day, because the hours were going by and he was in total darkness. Happy families: “When his father brought him to see ice, Aureliano Buendía thought that one day he would be shot.” Unhappy families: “When he woke up that morning after a restless night, the insect found he’d been transformed into Franz Kafka.”

In the darkness, he saw in his mind a black whiplash and thought that in reality it was the dark ghost of a perfect spermatozoon like the one that might give life to his own son or that of his friend Angel Palomar, or those of his buddies the Orphan Huerta, Hipi Toltec, and the Baby Ba, and directly below the Reader would be able to wonder, wherever he might be reading a book apocryphally entitled

Christopher Unborn

by

CARLOS FUENTES

years after the events narrated there took place, that is, as it always happens, the most rejected books end up being the most accepted books (mentally wrote the pudgy rock-and-roller), the most obscure books become the clearest, the most rebellious become the most docile, and that’s the way it goes, Reader. The most likely thing is that You are a poor adolescent girl in the Sacred Heart Secondary School busily copying down in your crabbed hand some classic passage from this novel which you have stuck between your missal and a joint and that perhaps you have opened to the page where in this instant you find Yourself and I find Myself and deprived of any other guide you begin to write My Novel as if it were Your Novel, copying not the one you are reading here, that is, a new novel that begins with these words:

Prologue: I Am Created

I am a person no one knows. In other words: I have just been created. She doesn’t know it. Neither does he. They still haven’t named me. No one knows my face. What will my sex be? I am a new being surrounded by a hundred million spermatozoa like this one:

imagination engendered me first, first language: it created the black, chromosomic, heraldic snake of ink and words that conceives everything, unique delectable repetition, unique riveting that never fatigues: I’ve known it for centuries, it’s always the same and always new, the serpent of spiral sperm, the commodius vicus of history, narrow gate of vicogenesis, vicarious civilization that God envies us: phallus and semen, conduct and product, my parents and I, serpent and egg

rather a novel in which the possibilities of all the participants are comparable: the possibilities of the Author (who obviously has already finished the novel the Reader has in his hands) and those of the Reader (who obviously still doesn’t know the totality of this novel, barely its first months), as well as those of the Author-Reader, that is You when you finish reading the novel, possessor of a knowledge the potential Reader as yet does not have, the Reader who may one day read the novel or perhaps never read it, or who may know of it and intend to read it — just to distinguish the potential Reader from the kind who know it exists but who refuse to read it because they disdain the Author, are bored by him, and turn down his invitation to a ludic read, and also to distinguish the potential Reader from those completely ignorant of the existence of this book and who will never have this knowledge, those, possibly, who are already dead or as yet unborn, those who, should they be born, will never find out about, or find out about but not want to, or want to but be unable to read it; or, simply, the sinister novel, its earthly function accomplished, may forever be out of print, out of circulation or excluded from libraries because of its obscenity, its offenses against reigning good taste, or because of its political impossibility: in any case, Fatty, big feet and all, hanging in his unwanted aviary, consoles himself, the limit to what a person can read is not the same as the limit to what that person can say, nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last possibility is the possibility of literature, our pudgy friend smiled without witnesses, his superiority over the accidents and contingencies of life or over the strict propositions, so demanding of being tested, of science and philosophy: infinite possibility, common possibility of the Reader and the Reader, common possibility of Life and Death, Past and Present, of a Man and his unborn Son: to recognize themselves in the same book, symbolized by a spurt of black sperm, a spark of sinuous ink: life and opinions, peau de chagrin that consume themselves in desire and thus articulate the certainty that we all have to die our lives and live our deaths.

Thanks to this symbol our big-footed, shiny-maned Fatty could imagine everything, a son for his new friend Angel Palomar, the child’s mother a beautiful, slender, dark girl who walks through a park, hidden sometimes by a tree, at other times by a balloon, come closer in the flutter of her skirts and the rhythm of her waist: a girl with … with a halo!: Angel and Angeles, parents of a child yet to be born, what shall we name the child? what language will the child speak in Makesicko Dee Eff, what air will the child breathe here where the air is queer? will the child find his little chromosomatic brothers and with them reconstruct their X’s and Z’s, probing to the very root of their chain of genetic information? well, wrote Pudgy, in the same way, a novel seeks out its novels, the ascent and descent of its spermatozoon of black ink: like the child, the novel is no orphan, it did not spring from nothingness, it needs a tradition just as the child needs a family tree: no one exists without something, there is no creation without tradition, no descendence without ascendence. CHRISTOPHER UNBORN philadelphically seeks its novelistic brothers and sisters: it extends its paper arms to convoke and receive them, just as the recently conceived child misses its lost brothers and sisters (he even misses the girl he might have been, which I give him straightaway: the girl named Baby Ba) and convokes them all blindly with a movement of his hands. This is his genealogy:

Erasmus: Appearances are deceptive

Don Quijote: Windmills are giants

Tristram Shandy: Digressions are the sunshine of reading

Jacques Le Fataliste: Let’s talk about something else

Christopher Unborn: Okay, while the captive fat boy decided without thinking to triumph over boredom by means of these concerns, rewarding himself despite the situation, but resigned to writing an overly pessimistic novel whose only repetitive element would be “It was the worst of times. It was the worst of times. It was the worst of,” the salon was filling up with waiters, bartenders, guests, the guest of honor — my father because he was Angel Palomar y Fagoaga happily twenty-one years of age, and his grandparents (my greats in that case) Don Rigoberto Palomar and Doña Susana Rentería, the members of the new band, still incomplete but which, nevertheless (the prisoner in the iron egg felt almost as a posthumous homage), played and sang the hit song he’d composed: “Come Back, Captain Blood”

From the masthead you wave to us

Sailing toward the sunset

Fatso listened, half suffocated, already with a taste in his mouth that said: Baby, you’re turning blue: half crazy inside the metal egg, now smelling himself, now smelling the exudates from the silver-plated copper: on the verge of shouting Help! Au Secours? Help! Aiuto! I Need Somebody! but, in the first place, no one would have heard him with all the noise of the party and, second, he was no crybaby; he was a tough little man who neither gave nor accepted explanations, just like his hero from the pirate movies:

Bye-bye, Captain Blood,

I’ll never see you again …

He closed his eyes, making his last effort at a first line for a novel: “Call me Christopher.” Then, as if he had spoken a magic word (down sesame!), he heard the creak of the pulleys, the movement of the cables, and the abrupt descent of the egg from the star-studded ceiling of the Clair-de-Lunatic to its dance floor.

Trumpets sounded and the band played the march from Aida. People laughed, their voices grew louder, they exclaimed. Angel laughed and said it was a mistake, what’s going on? he was already there, he laughed nervously, what is all this? he was already at the party and was certainly not going to pop out of any egg, he feared the unforeseen, a fantastic surprise: a girl was going to step out of the egg! A woman he didn’t know but loved, whom he had wanted to introduce to family and friends, as a surprise, as if the girl were his gift to them and they would introduce her to him, not knowing that he already knew her! not knowing that the two of them (he and she) had met in a park but had promised to get to know each other little by little, between April and August, one meeting per month, first the voice, then contact between their (respective) feet (May), then their fingertips only (June), they would clasp each other’s hands (yummy-yummy) (July), and only in August, as the grand prize, would they finally see each other’s face.

The lights went on in his head: Don Fernando Benítez!

And there he was on the other side of the hall, arm in arm with his wife, the two of them drinking his health.

Benítez had a gift for bringing young people together, for protecting them, taking them under his wing. Had he put a girl inside this egg for him, for Angel? Was this his supreme gift for coming of age? A dream! The idea shocked him because of its excessive pleasure and he wanted to stop the whole thing, but the workers said no way, it’s in our contract that we lower the egg at eleven o’clock, without finding out about anything else and a bit drunk from the beers they’d bought with Uncle Homero’s bribe, and Grandfather Rigo: get on with it, boys, do your job, let them, Angelillo, don’t get into trouble with a union on top of the problems you already have with Uncle Homero’s lawsuit, and the workers, in low voices: fat old asshole! today we get paid twice, whaddaya think: hatred blinds you, no doubt about it!

When they opened the doors of the ovoid sarcophagus, they found the nice boy with no air, blue in the face, disoriented and totally bald. His quondam black and shiny hair had all fallen out.

The fat boy was pulled out of the egg and brought back to consciousness by Angel, the Orphan Huerta, and Hipi Toltec, who put a hand mirror in front of Pudgy’s face to see if he was still breathing. Then he put his coyote-like muzzle to the pink lips of the fat boy to resuscitate him, breathing like an animal, like a bellows. The boy came out of his faint and saw his bald reflection.

“Call me Egg,” he managed to gasp.

“Our dear buddy, the Egg,” said my father Angel, publicly baptizing him.

“Where is Baby Ba?” Egg asked as he came out of his stupor, and he didn’t know if with that question he should begin another novel: “Would I find the Baby…?”

After the guests departed, Don Rigoberto and Doña Susana listened to each one of the boys — their grandson, Angel, the recently baptized Egg, and the new friends of the rockaztec band, the Orphan Huerta and Hipi Toltec — give the hitherto unknown reasons that united them in their hatred for Homero Fagoaga.

They were highly amused to learn that each faction on its own, the Four Fuckups and Angel with Uncle Fernando as a providential intermediary, had already perpetrated myriad parallel tricks on the pesky, pernicious, and pestiferous (each group had its adjective) Don Homero Fagoaga: now they would join forces and nothing would stop them!

Fat, disgusting, an’ a motherfucker, said Orphan Huerta, smiling, remembering and reaffirming at the same time.

The stolen communal lands in Acapulco, said Hipi Toltec truculently. Les terres communales dépouillés à Acapulco.

My parents’ legacy, said Angel, while secretly repeating to himself: why Mexico City and not Acapulco, when the epicenter was on the coast? His eyes grew misty as he remembered that terrible and heroic day when he was sixteen: the earthquake of September 19. I wanted to shout from the unborn center of my pregnant mother: and what about the children of Acapulco? Would it have mattered to you that they died if you could have saved those who died in D. F.? This certainly says a lot about my father’s moral sense, but for the moment I can’t argue the matter with him face to face. I’m dying of rage! I’m getting carried away! How impatient I can get to be born, damn!

It isn’t a person, it’s a symbol, said Egg: Acapulco.

Therefore, the revolutionary grandfather Rigo Palomar concluded with perfect logic, what you should do is destroy Homero by destroying Acapulco. Perfect syllogism.

No, exclaimed Angel. Not Homero. Not Acapulco. The Sweet Fatherland.

That expression was going to hang over my father Angel like a dream he could half remember when awake, but in the meantime, things started happening very quickly: in August, my father saw my mother’s face, and only when he’d seen it did he have the desire to put into effect his symbolic plan for the destruction of Acapulco which in reality turned out to be the splendid fancy of saving the Sweet Fatherland, the Good Fatherland: but this took, know it your mercies benz, something like half a year, during which time our buddy Egg wondered why he had given that purely symbolic reason, “Acapulco,” instead of revealing that it was none other than Don Homero Fagoaga who had pushed him into the birthday egg. Who else could it have been? But he didn’t tell on the uncle, nor did the others ask him: How did you get inside that egg, Egg? It had to have been that malignant Uncle Homero who … This was a mystery, and on nights of moral ecstasy Egg asked himself, Why did Jesus allow himself to be crucified knowing beforehand what was going to happen and above all having singled out Judas at the Last Supper (Would I find the Baby Ba…?)? He also knew that one day, once things got moving, he would not be able to resist the temptation. He would expose Uncle Homero. Egg was not Jesus, nor did he wish to be. Besides, Acapulco was calling for them.

8. But before we get to the New Year’s party

But before we get to the New Year’s party, won’t you tell me how you and Daddy met, Mom?

“What a stickler for details you are! It was during April. Come on now, it’s nothing to bite your nails about.”

“I don’t bite much of anything, Mom.”

“Right. Okay, but if I tell you what you want to know now, I can only tell you as if we had met in December.”

“Just the facts, ma’am.”

“Okay, I met him by whispering into the ear of the statue of Benito Juárez in the Alameda Hemicycle. We climbed all the way up. No, I don’t know what Angel said to the Great Hero, but what he told me — he speaking into one of Juárez’s ears while I listened at the other — was: ‘Listen, baby, if we manage to hear each other through the marble ears of the Great Zapotec, we’ll really have made it.’”

I think I mumbled back something like, “Let’s never hurt each other. We’re all here together.”

A fat child wearing a summer hat and holding a helium balloon came toward us out of the Alameda Park, holding the hand of a woman who looked like a skeleton dressed in a ball gown from the beginning of the century. The child, who resembled a wise, contented frog, stared up at us as we clung to Juárez’s head, and then went off, still clutching Death by the hand. Actually, I don’t know if we saw that or if Angel told me about it later. The next month we came back to the same place on the same day of the week even though we had not laid eyes on each other. Something else: we came back without having seen each other the first time, as if from the first moment we had promised not to look at each other until later; we spoke through the heroic marble of the Indian of Guelatao — let’s not ask for more than is given us.

Q. What is a miracle?

A. Something that takes place very rarely.

Because, by the time the day came when he let himself be seen by me, we’d already spoken through the ears of Benito Juárez and gone on doing it for more than four months, meeting again and again without fixing a time or day, without even saying “See you here next month, baby”; of course, it happened that one would get there before the other, but we’d wait: how could I not wait when I didn’t sleep a wink the night after I met him because I was so happy? And that was without seeing him!

My father Angel, is he a poet?

He would be if he were ugly. The day he finally let me see him he turned up disguised as Quevedo, his glasses as curlicued as his mustachios and goatee, wearing a ruff, and limping. But he forgot one thing: he didn’t change his voice: “My voice was not that of the poet Quevedo, who died in September of 1645 in Villanueva de los Infantes because he couldn’t stand the idea of one more winter sitting next to the fireplace where each chill convinced him that he was only living to see himself dead. Quevedo died from the cold and the humidity that came from the river that flowed directly behind his bed, denounced to the Inquisition, a courtier who remained independent, humorous and funereal, imperialist and libertarian, medievalizing and progressive, moralist and cynic — like Love “who is in all things contrary to itself.” That’s the disguise your father turned up in the first time he let me see him.

As contradictory as our famous Uncle Homero?

Yes, but able to use language like a great poet. I think your father did that intentionally. It was his first attempt to overwhelm Uncle Homero and his world, and the way he did it was by refusing to concede Homero a monopoly on language, by using Quevedo — no less — to taunt Homero, Quevedo, who was just as opportunistic as Homero but who was saved by his poetic genius. Of course, your father’s voice was not Quevedo’s.

No, it was the voice of the world remembering Quevedo, and Quevedo remembering himself, immortalized and self-immortalizing a hundred, two hundred, a thousand years after his death. It was Ramón Gómez de la Serna calling him the great Spaniard, the most absolutely Spanish Spaniard, the immortal bestower of tone — he who gave tone to the soul of our race, it was César Vallejo calling him Quevedo, that instantaneous grandfather of all dynamiters, and it was Quevedo himself requesting a place in an academy of laughter and disorder, and calling himself the child of his works and stepfather of other people’s works, as short of sight as he was of luck, given to the devil, on loan to the world, and recommended to the flesh: with slit eyes and a slit conscience, black hair and black luck, long in the forehead and rather long-winded as well!: the portrait of the poet Quevedo was identical to that of my father Angel disguised as Quevedo, when he finally revealed himself to my mother, but my father already had an answer, a suggestion, before she could say a word:

I looked at him for the first time, and he looked at me.

“You’ve got a halo, baby,” he said, touching my cheek.

“No, I never had a halo before.”

“I think you were born that way but that you never really saw yourself.”

“Maybe no one ever saw me that way before.”

Then a guy carrying a glass tower on his back bumped into us; then two playful kids came along. I didn’t know if his disguise was in fact Quevedo’s ghost. In the ugly bustle of Mexico City, who would know about such things. And yet they exist. Even though you’ve got to be a poet to know about them. Know about them? To see them even, because, as everybody knows, that’s the beautiful thing about your father, Christopher. So of course I didn’t sleep all that night, out of pure happiness. The devil took me away from Plato. Or maybe he put me more deeply into Plato. “We say it was or it is or it shall be, when in truth all we can say about things is that they are.”

The first thing I thought when I saw Angel disguised: he’s Quevedo, if Quevedo had been handsome. Then I said to myself: Quevedo is handsome.

His name is Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, he lives with his grandparents, but now he has met me, and I am a woman who can’t sleep because she’s so happy she met him. But that night we went to the Café de Tacuba to eat pambazos and chalupas, as if we wanted to sink our roots deep in the earth because we were both flying like kites we were so excited at having seen our faces, saying to ourselves in secret: This is how he looks; this is how she looks; this is he; this is she.

We left the café and in the freshly poured cement in front of the old Chamber of Deputies on Donceles Street, next to the house where the ancient widow of General Llorente and her niece Aura lived such a long time ago, we wrote out these words with our fingers. At the time, I had no idea they were your father’s answer to the Fagoaga coat of arms, how the Fagoagas attack Goths and Moors, how Fagoagas never lose. Quevedo hovers over us. He’s our poet.

It is burning ice, frozen fire,

a wound that pains but is not felt,

a dream of good, an evil right at hand,

a brief but tiring rest

.….

an imprisoned freedom

Then we heard the shouting, the whistles, the ratatatat, and the bombs, the boots running over the oldest cobblestones in Mexico, along that street now called Virgin Knights to the infinite confusion of Uncle H., who never did for the Castilian tongue what my Angel and I did to celebrate our meeting, leaving the signature of our love which cannot go beyond imprisoned freedom, and why bother deluding ourselves: we ran far away from the noise of the police, who could have been chasing us for having written a poem in the wet cement on Donceles, or perhaps they were chasing someone else for some other reason, but if they’d found us they would have grabbed us along with the rest (the rest? who are the rest in the Mexico of ’92?), spreading their persecution without asking questions.

The supreme law was once again Shoot first, ask questions later.

How could I forget the first thing Angeles told me over our Benito Juárez telephone circuit?

“Let’s never hurt each other. We’re all here together.”

“We’re invincible, baby.”

“I couldn’t say anything more spontaneous or truthful. I could only tell you because I don’t intend to be hurt by you. The others don’t matter to me.”

We ran fleeing from a threat that was all too real and yet absent at the same time, the worst kind, the threat that can both be and not be, strike or not strike, ask questions or not: we certainly did not have to be born, she and I, in the sixties to know that in Mexico the law remains, nunc et semper, the whim of whoever happens to be holding power. We ran to Fat St. Mary, far from the solitude of Virgin Knights, where we were saved by homeless squatters, by kids asleep on top of the hot grilles covering the subway vents next to the brotherly pelts of dogs with bloody noses. So, who told you, Ixcuintli, to go around sniffing the pavement? Around here the stones burn, but you and I, Angeles, left a sonnet by Quevedo written on the hot palm of the cement, and repression, immutable, stopped at the frontier of darkness and silence.

“Tell me, what language will the child speak?

9. Things didn’t just happen all by themselves

Things didn’t just happen all by themselves: they met several times, they talked about why they were going to do what they were going to do, was it was only to try to fuck up Uncle Homero, who had sued Angel, confiscated his house and fortune, and had in all likelihood tried to suffocate Egg in his namesake in a botched attempt to suffocate his nephew? My mother Angeles asked all this when she met the group in order to find out what she was getting herself into. Then she added: “Would you be doing this if you didn’t know Uncle Homero, if you didn’t hate him?” Yes! And that was Angeles’s first impression of the Four Fuckups:

She thought Hipi Toltec was disturbed, his eyes weepy because he had so much trouble falling asleep, which he did by counting Aztec gods instead of sheep, and because he lived within himself and his historical confusion: “La serpent-à-plumes, c’est moi,” but he had a strange notion of justice, clear and swift. At first she feared him, but eventually felt a tenderness for his mystery. She saw the Orphan Huerta pass from an unfocused resentment to a sensual enjoyment of the things that success brought when the Four Fs got famous for their renditions of Egg’s ballads. The first thing she heard him say was: “I don’t remember anything. I never knew my father or my mother.” The second thing she heard him say was: “We’ve only seen milk and meat in newspaper photos.” But after the success of “Come Back, Captain Blood,” the single was later reissued with the songs in the album Take Control and another single “That Was the Year,” and Orphan Huerta began to buy himself (wholesale) china-doll shoes, Guess jackets, and Fiorucci sweaters, calling them my china dolls, my Guess jackets … Angeles noted that Egg was observing his two comrades with compassion and understanding, although he reserved his glances of real tenderness for the invisible Baby Ba, to whom he dedicated his most loving expressions: precious girl, chubby girl, my lollipop with curls, how’s my little birthday cake today? and other cute expressions Angeles caught him making up in flagrante. Embarrassed, Egg would say things to her such as: “Children should be sin but not hurt.” Or, blushing furiously: “I’m not crazy, miss; every once in a while my mind wanders, see?” But she began to realize that he was looking at her more and more as he made his cute remarks to the absent Baby Ba, that the more he looked, the more quickly he would avert his eyes or look in another direction if my mother caught him in the act. Or he’d start talking to Angel, the Orphan, and Hipi in English:

“Where you going?”

“I’ll go in a while to the River Nile…”

“Have some fun…”

“Where’s fun in Makesicko ’91?”

“Madness is in the mind of the beholder”

“Madness is only a state of mind”

“Don’t let your feelings show”

“Reward yourself!”

The band’s first great hits emerged from this daily banter, and they went on to put together the thirty-million-copy-selling album That Was the Year in the same way. The Four Fuckups intended to debut the songs in that album at New Year’s in Acapulco, where, to lay the groundwork for their apocalyptic disorder plans, they had allowed themselves to be hired by the famous French Marxist chanteuse Ada Ching for her floating discotheque, Divan the Terrible. My mother noticed that things gestate in the same way I’m going to gestate: art or a child, drop by drop, the only hair on opportunity’s head is that long forelock we’re supposed to grab, and to think that this hit song began when Uncle Homero F. (?) locked the fat boy in the egg, and then it gestated to the rhythm of these conversations and the band’s comings and goings through the deteriorated city where only Angel had his own place but never invited his pals over so he wouldn’t make them feel bad about it or so that he wouldn’t bother his grandparents, who were by now quite old. The buddies had no place to live and no relatives, but Uncle Fernando lent them the living room in his house in Coyoacán and that’s why they ended up involving him in their intrigue against Uncle Homero (Don Fernando didn’t have to be begged, even though his mind was on the Indians up in the mountains and not on the tourists on the beaches) and with Benítez they planned their escape from Aca when … and with the Four Fs all the details of the destruction of the Babylon of Garbage. Angeles said nothing, Angeles only looked and tried to understand without compromising her language in the underground, carnivalized, cannibalized noise buzzing around her feminine mystery: like the Orphan, she had no past; like Hipi, she imagined herself unknown; like the Baby Ba, she thought she was invisible; like Egg, she feared she was mad; like Uncle Fernando, she aspired to be an instrument of justice, and, in her indignation at what she saw in Mexico, she felt like a composite of all of them, her comrades and friends (did she have others before? she didn’t remember). At the same time, she felt strangely alienated from the man she came to love and with whom she slept in a sexual uproar; my mother tried to guess the reasons behind the terrible act they were preparing to commit at year’s end in Aca. She listened to my father talk about the Sweet Fatherland, about the need for an exemplary act of cleansing, complete with biblical fury: Bye-bye Babylon, So long Sodom, Go, go Gomorrah, only a ninny could like Nineveh, So ciao to Baby, So, go, Ninny:

Babylon? You mean Baby Loan, since we’ve mortgaged our children’s future. Of Babylon nothing remains: she looked at Angel and understood that the entire situation prior to her arrival, the crisis, the impotence, the rage, the corruption, the past, the youth — all of it was forcing Angel (explicitly), Egg (a bit less), Hipi and the Orphan (intuitively), to exorcise the demons, to upset the order, to humiliate the king, sweep out the garbage, find (Angel!) the Sweet Fatherland: Angel the postpunk, romantic, conservative who went from disorder to anarchy to the sadism of underdevelopment in order to find the utopia of the spotless fatherland: she would see him plunge into horror in order to destroy it; or would they be destroyed, he, she, all of them, by the horror which was indifferent to them?

These thoughts transformed my mother during the Acapulco ape-pick (simian and marine) into the most cautious and taciturn woman in the world; at times she thought she was going to win the Johnny Belinda deaf-mute contest, and, frankly, she could not foresee that her participation in the extraordinary events of the month of January would prove to be so tranquil. She would participate from now on in a silent dialogue in the hope that all of them (the band of buddies) would be able to speak together afterwards, and that triangular dialogue would go something like this:

ANGEL: I WANT ORDER

(FULLY KNOWING THAT NO ORDER WILL EVER BE SUFFICIENT)

EGG: I WANT FREEDOM

(FULLY KNOWING THAT I SHALL FAIL)

ANGELES: I WANT LOVE

(FULLY KNOWING THAT LOVE IS ONLY THE SEARCH FOR LOVE)

and that’s why Angel marched toward disorder, Egg sought the commitment of the invisible by singing songs to the world, overcoming his inability to express himself fluently, and my mother Angeles kept silent in order not to reveal that perhaps she hated what she was doing.

“Besides,” my dad said to her, “if we succeed in fooling Uncle H., we might get the house of bright colors back. That’s where I spent my childhood. I love the place. I’m sick of having to see you just now and again in your Uncle Fernando’s house or in my coach house. I have to live with you all the time.”

He dressed her as Annie Hall (tweed jacket, man’s tie, blue jeans), while he wore faded chinos, a Hopi shirt, and love beads. Both put on wigs of long, thick hair for their visit to Don Homero Fagoaga’s penthouse on Mel O’Field Road. They were going to ask him if they could make peace and spend New Year’s together in Acapulco.

My father had no real reason to be there, and Uncle Homero smelled a rat: he did, however, receive them. Just looking at them, he could see they were harmless. But just looking at my mother was all he had to do to suffer a shock: Don Homero Fagoaga’s sexual fantasies were infinite, and my mother put him into such a state of erotic excitement that he became a stuttering teenager:

“Well … indeed … so we have a little couple here, huh? I mean, are you thinking of getting married…? Excuse me, I didn’t mean to imply … Well!”

Angeles realized that the success of the expedition depended on her, so she coquettishly lowered her eyes and touched the hand of the invincible Don Homero.

“Ah,” groaned Don Homero, wagging his sausage-like finger, “aaaah, my innocent niece, I may call you niece, may I not? thank you: out of pure honesty, sacred temple, as the bard from Córdoba, Don Luis de Góngora y Argote, wrote on an amorous occasion…”

He carefully looked Angeles over, adding pure alabaster, small door of precious coral …

“Uncle,” my mother interrupted him sweetly but decisively, “in the first place, don’t change the subject on me: may we come to your house in Acapulco? In the second place, don’t let that lemonade go to your head, and in the third, if you go on in that way, comparing my body to hard alabaster and my cunt to a small coral door, my husband here, your nephew, is liable to take matters into his own hands. Isn’t that right, Angel?”

“Angeles! Good gracious! You’ve mistaken me, niece! That Gongoristic metaphor refers to your mouth, not to your, your…”

Don Homero dropped the spoon he used to stir his martinis: “Tomasito, fan me.”

“Yes, master.”

“My wife is right. Don’t get out of line, Uncle Homero.”

“How dreadful! For God’s sake, I hope you accept my invitation to spend New Year’s with me in Acapulco. You did receive my invitation, didn’t you? No? How awful the mails are these days, as our invincible sovereign Philip II said when he received the news about the Armada! The rest of Europe was right to say: ‘I hope my death comes by way of Spain so it gets to me late!’”

That’s why all of them except for Angeles and the Baby Ba are there stretched out on the Countess Beach listening to three chicks chatter relentlessly about if it wasn’t a bit much that each one went with two hunks to the Divan last night or if the vibes were good but right then they started in, ya know: Ya can take the boy outta Brooklyn but ya can’t take Brooklyn outta the boy; they got all hot and bothered and tried to start necking. But the girls said enough was too much now that they’d showed what grotty chauvinist pigs they really were. Situations like that were sticky, ’cause when these nouveaus get going they don’t ever wanna stop, and they chanted:

I don’t want to live forever

But I’m afraid to die

and when they saw my dad, Egg, the Orphan, and Hipi stretched out there sunning themselves in their bulging bikinis, the three chicks said, oh sorry about that, we’re not letting you rest with all our gossiping, and my father the provocateur said no, I didn’t hear you, I was thinking, and they, hmm, he didn’t even hear us, we seem so uninteresting to these nouveaus, and Egg, just to be nice, said yes, yes we did hear you, how could we not, everything you said was instructive, while the girls were putting on sun cream, ah, so these nosy nouveaus are real pests, always sticking in their noses where they shouldn’t, to which the boys: a one and a two and a three, they began to throw sand at the bonbons, who at first laughed, then enough already, then they coughed, then they screamed; finally they were buried in the sand, and Hipi danced the deer dance over them to flatten them out and make sure they were good and dead and in complete privacy, and the most curious thing is that no one turned around to look at the scene, much less to interrupt them. A lesson that did not escape the attention of Pappy & Company.

Out of all these elements, as usually happens in artistic affairs, was born the great hit broadcast by the Four Fuckups for the New Year’s parties: and with what pleasure do I transcribe them for you, from their Dickensian inspiration (a tail of two cities; hysteria of two cities; the color of Aca and Defé) up until the time they released it officially in the discotheque run by Ada Ching and her lover Deng Chopin: Here it is, all together now:

It was the worst of times

It was the worst of times

The year was the jeer

The day was the die

The hour was the whore

The month was the mouse

The week was the weak

It doesn’t get better than this!

and my folks make love in the bridal suite Uncle Homero reserved for them, and she feels opulent, sensual, rich, new things, delicious things, she’s afraid to feel things she’s never felt before, she feels more modern than ever when luxury surrounds her and she doesn’t understand why she’s never been in a place like this, air-conditioned, piped-in music, unknown smells that expel the usual olfactory experiences (markets? churches? damp patios? leafy jungles? carved stones? quince, mango, laurel and silk-cotton trees?: now what is not there begins to come back to her): she is afraid to remember everything that happened before, now that she’s in something that could never happen there, in a there she says to my father after having an orgasm, where I see myself moving, light, suddenly I saw myself a minute ago, moving and light in the past. What does that mean?

Neither one could answer. For the first time, she was terrified of her openness, her willingness to be everything that fell upon her and stuck to her in her newness or innocence. She’d never seen towels marked His and Hers, or sheets with Mickey and Minnie Mouse, or personal hair dryers, or peach-flavored vaginal ointments. She missed her history, and said to my father:

“Of what interest could these sordid provincial tales be to you: bastard children, runaway father, new lover for mother, exile with relatives who live far away? Of what possible interest could my past be?”

10. Let’s see now

Let’s see now: six years after Uncle Homero’s green Jell-O bath, the Four Fuckups are playing rockaztec in the floating disco moored off Califurnace Beach down old Acapulkey way, and my parents take advantage of the circuntstance (as you might say) to ask Uncle Homero to bury the hatchet and invite them to spend New Year’s of 1991–92 in his castellated house on Peachy Tongue Beach, where their fat relative has constructed a kind of Foreign Legion fort right out of Beau Geste to protect himself from whatever might happen. He gave his niece and nephew the complete guided tour this end-of-December morning, marching them past towers and battlements that shot up out of the sand, blockhouses and casemates, parapets and escarpments, and even fearsome concertina rolls of razor wire, ranks of poised, pointy lances — excellent defense against cavalry charges!

In the center of his fortress, Uncle Homero built a pool in the shape of a tongue, with a secret tunnel disguised as a drain which would allow him to escape in a minisub (How would he fit? Like a pig in a sausage, said my father; like a rabbit in a pâté, like Christ in the host, host! said my mother) into the sea, shot out like a cork, in case of emergency.

“I’m making you a gift of some beach property,” Uncle Homero said one day in a tone of magnificent condescension to Uncle Fernando, some twenty or so years earlier, after the Tlateloco riots. He compounded this felonious friendliness by clapping Uncle Fernando, a small, high-strung, but sturdy little gent, on the back. “You can build a house there for your declining years.” To which Don Fernando said no thanks, how would I ever defend it against the guerrilleros who’ll be coming along in twenty years?

Tomasito the waiter served my mother a pineapple filled with whipped cream and then slipped directly into a reverie, staring obliquely and nostalgically toward the Pacific route of the Spanish galleons. Acapulco, key to the Orient, warehouse for the silks of Cipango, the ivory of Cathay, the scents of the Moluccas: good old Acapulkey!

My mother follows his eyes and stares at the sea as the sun goes to the Philippines. None of this distracts Uncle Homero from his task of presiding over the al-fresco dinner in the patio illuminated by the torches that Tomasito lights so that the flames and the glow of the setting sun can clash on the grand cheeks of the grand personage, as if they were fighting over the round color of the soft, saliva-drenched, cushioned tongue that slithers over lips, molars: Don Homero sighs and looks at my parents, who had felt obliged to dress in folkloric costumes. He then raises his glass of piña colada and gives instructions to Tomasito, which the Filipino does not manage to understand completely: when Uncle Homero says “More drinks,” Tomasito answers, “More stinks? No, master, smell fine.” Don Homero wilts and proffers his glass as if he were a blind man selling pencils. He sighs: There you see it all: four centuries a Spanish colony and all they have to show for it is pidgin English. Pigeon, master? Pigeon make too much shit on head. Shit on head, eh? Well, as the patient Filipino public servant, Don Manuel Quezón, said on a memorable occasion, you must have fallen out of your crib and landed on your head!

To which Tomasito immediately responds by feigning a yawn, checking his watch, and saying good night, as he serves Uncle H. a slice of Gorgonzola, following the ancient Mexican custom of serving cheese before dinner.

No! I said head, not bed. My God, this is the end of language as communication: no one understands me. With that he drank down his piña colada in one gulp and instantly felt, as our friend Ada Ching (whom the reader will meet shortly) would have said, “soulaged.” He was admiring my parents’ outfits: my mother dressed Tehuanastyle, with a sleeveless blouse and skirt made of virtually transparent cloth, and my father decked out in railroad-worker blues, complete with red neckerchief: who knows what images of sin and revolution, Demetrio Vallejo and Frida Kahlo, folly and finality, passed through the carefully combed, plastered-down, parted-down-the-middle mind of Our Relative; his manner, from the moment he opened his door to them, had been, come to me, you innocent doves.

He said this was just not his day as far as servants, local or imported, were concerned. Nothing, decidedly nothing, had gone well for him from the moment one of these somber servants crossed his path, he sighed. Nothing at all had gone well, belovèd niece and nephew, but he felt better, like Perón safe-at-home, as Don Eduardo Mallea had so wittily written. Mallea, who maintained the proud purity of our language with Argentine passion from his bay of silence. He (Uncle H.) was happy to have his niece and nephew here with him on vacation, all useless rancor dissipated, no bad memories, once again one big happy family as Tolstoy or Tolstuá (his name can and should be pronounced both ways) might have said; ah Federico, Federico, you were the last poet to say Understand me for I understand you, now, as you can plainly see, no one understands anyone and this is my challenge, my mission: as Antonio de Nebrija the grammarian said to Queen Isabella the Catholic, Language is always the companion of Empire and Empire (he pointed to himself with a butter knife) is one Monarch and one Sword: Tomasito, pour out the nectar.

Instantly, the Filipino snatched off his own bow tie and tried to fasten it onto our stupefied uncle, whose imperial discourse died, along with his fallen glass, on the cement of the tiny island. You said pull off necktie, masssster. Moron, monkey from Manila, let go of me, get that thing off my neck. He sneezed, swallowed, gagged, his round red eyes darting toward Angel and Angeles, and he saw what he did not want to see: no one got up to pat him on the back, to fill his glass, or to attempt the Heimlich maneuver on him. Angeles = dark eyes, those of a child who has never been treated tenderly, Angel = green, serene eyes, like a lake, green how I love you green, the black night spread its mantle, the mist rose, the light died: dark eyes and green eyes full of what Don Homero did not expect to find there in response to his call for aiuto! help! au secours! auxilio!

“Ah,” coughed our uncle, “ah, hatred persists, as the enlightened Venezuelan despot Don Juan Vicente Gómez said once in a jocular mood — when he publicly announced his death in order to arrest and then punish those who dared to celebrate it, ah yes, so this is the way…?”

He pounded his delicate fist into his open palm.

“I have right on my side, nephew. If I sued you for being a spendthrift when you turned twenty-one, it was not, as God is my witness, to increase my own personal fortune, but to save yours, that is, what remains of it after your father, my poor brother-in-law, embarked on that mad enterprise, the Inconsumable Taco.”

“Leave my old man out of this, Uncle H. He’s dead and never hurt a fly.”

“Ah, my little sister Isabella Fagoaga is also dead. And a dark day it was when she linked her destiny, as the superb Chilean bard Pablo de Rokha said, in a rare metaphor, to that of an enemy of the national economy like your father, Diego Palomar. An inconsumable taco! A taco that grows as you eat it! The solution to the problems of national nutrition! The greatest idea since the invention of mole in Puebla de los Angeles by a dyspeptic nun!”

Tomasito tried once again — at the worst possible moment — to serve our uncle a Cointreau on the rocks with Pepsi-Cola (“Your Merry Blizzard, massster!), but Don Homero went on, carried away by the inertia of his eloquence, evoking beaches piled high with fish, first nervous, then dead, then rotten, what does it matter, millions and millions of lost proteins on the exuberant coast of our shrinking (ay!) national territory, while this deluded Don Diego Palomar was fabricating an eternal taco, because his genes carried him away, just as Ganymede was carried aloft by the eagle …

“No speak evil, master!” interjected a shocked Tomasito.

“What, you Rabelaisian monkey?”

“Rabble east?” queried the perplexed Filipino. “No, master, no rabble here, east or west! Only very fine people, yes?”

Don Homero regained his composure: “Now, where was I? Yes, your progenitor, Don Angel Palomar, perpetrated a frontal attack on the entire concept of supply and demand, on national progress itself, a taco with a mortgage is what I call it, but it was mortal for the only two people who ever dared ingest such a poisonous dish, your father and mother, may they rest in peace.”

He breathed deeply, he swelled up, his eyes seemed to pop out of their sockets, and he instantly closed them, fearing some new Filipino gaffe, may he rest in peace, as he recovered the beauty of the artificial oasis (was there ever a natural oasis? Homero thinks not; creation was born subverted) constructed by him at Port Marquee Bay in Paramount style — shady islets surrounded by crystalline brooks that babbled among coconut and date palms, and a band of araguato monkeys trained to throw coconuts from the high branches of these not so tristes tropiques: Aaaaaah! Someone’s going to interrupt him, the Filipino, Angel, or Angeles, may they rest in peace, one of them is going to say something, but no, they are strangely quiet for people their age, for people so famous as jokers and (above all) rebels, why are they so quiet? why are they letting him speak so badly of that pair of obtuse illuminati, Diego and Isabella Palomar?

And so, in the silence of niece and nephew, Homero Fagoaga savored a triumph which he knew was Pyrrhic. He was defeated in victory, ay Tomasito, you would have to take out of the white pocket of your fine Filipino shirt a black-fringed photograph of Elpidio Quirino, the deceased Father of the Islands. Just what Uncle H. had feared. He did not have to open his eyes to say:

“I, as your testamentary tutor, had and still have the obligation to bring your excesses to heel, to put order in your life, to force you to think about your wife, and also, perhaps, if God so ordains it, your child, your children!”

“Tartuffe,” murmured Angeles, almost biting her champagne glass out of rage, “may God not so ordain children because they all get a share in the inheritance, and then what will you get, you old hypocritamus? Tartuffe! Tartuffe!” She began to raise her voice, but she fell silent because Tomasito entered just then with the dessert of the same name, and Uncle Homero did not become enraged with him because he had not caught Mom’s allusion to Molière. He simply exclaimed:

“Both of you must learn, please allow me to say so, the virtues of our national dialectic, which, once we’ve assimilated it, makes us the Mexicans we are because we are progressive because we are revolutionary because we are reactionary because we are liberal because we are reformists because we are positivists because we are insurgents because we follow the Virgin of Guadalupe because we are Catholic because we are conservatives because we are Spaniards because we are Indians because we are mestizos.”

“And are you a member of PRI, Uncle Homero?” asked my mother without looking at him, looking instead at the sea, looking Homero, looksee, lacksee, lackadaisical. Oh mère, oh merde, Homère.

“At your service,” the avuncular personage says automatically, but Angel and Angeles fall silent because Tomasito enters a second time to serve the Tartuffe (or to serve the Tartuffe the Tartuffe), and Uncle Homero declares, as he looks up at the black sky as if to show he knew how to be a good loser and to celebrate such a happy reconciliation worthy of other embraces in the state of Guerrero, Acatempan, he invited them to spend this New Year’s Eve in the floating discotheque Divan the Terrible unless

they would prefer to stay here and fight the night away over the legal problems related to the suit for being a spendthrift

they would prefer to let Tomasito babble, since he was quite capable of filling an entire night with vaudeville at the slightest semantic provocation

they would prefer to return in indignation to Mexico City because Uncle H. had spoken ill of Angel’s father

they would prefer to spank Uncle Homero for being naughty

they would prefer to drown him in the pool of his tropical fortress

the dessert had been poisoned by Uncle Homero

the dessert had been poisoned by Angel and Angeles

Tomasito got drunk in the kitchen on Merry Blizzard and forgot to serve dessert

Angeles memorized Plato’s Cratylus, which she’d studied in the classic university edition with green binding published by

Homero had drugged Angel’s drink and, naked, would chase his delectable niece along the beach

Homero had only drugged Angeles and ordered Tomasito to tie Angel up so he could watch his wife being raped by his satyr uncle

the Three Wise Men entered Don Homero’s coastal compound mounted on camels

it rained unexpectedly in January

all of them just went to sleep.