Christopher Unborn

1. I Don’t Want to Serve Anymore

Angel and Angeles arrived at Ada Ching’s floating disco at approximately 10 p.m., singing the John Donne One by Mao Tsar. The breeze was rattling the inflatable rubber Byzantine cupolas, and He — Don Homero Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca — insolently posed on the deck as if the sea, the moon, the distant shore, and the great globe itself owed their existence to Him alone. He was once again in public, performing, exhibited for the delight of the unfortunate masses, perpetually fanned by Tomasito: Io non voglio più servir!

But then, with terrifying ill-will blazing in his eyes, with a gesture of permanent hatred, he looked at the three boys who helped him up from the launch while Angel and Angeles pushed his buttocks up from below. He stared at the lads with rancor; first he saw the three pairs of legs, let’s see which ones he liked, and four of the six feet were in one way or another deformed, eddyfeet, yes Eddy Alien Toes says my pundit pop, feet deformed by that protective layer of human rubber that has been appearing on the feet of city kids: some feet shredding as if charred (Uncle Homero averts his eyes in disgust), others white and milky like those of Uncle H. himself (disgusting, disgusting!), still others svelte, golden brown, firm, well shaped, eddypolinean, in that case, and on those lawyer Fagoaga fixes his hungry gaze, raising it slowly without seeing all he wants. To calm the Filipino, my parents hummed the aria Io non voglio più servir sung by the servant of Don Joe Vanni, the capo of the Sevillian mafia, and the lawyer Fagoaga absorbed the detestable though desired presence of those cabaret waiters dressed in extraordinary bikinis stamped with the lamented effigies of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. The waiters wore huaraches, the one with the nice legs was strangely familiar: his face was fighting to get out of Uncle’s drawer of deliberately forgotten things, where the boy was wearing a brimless, bottle-cap-encrusted borsalino on his filthy black head of stiff hair; Uncle H. felt as if he’d seen him, fleetingly, before, where, where, David Campo de Cobre? Lost Boy? Olivo Torcido? If you twist the olive branch in fields of copper, you will only create a pip of a problem.

He looked homerically at the face of the Orphan Huerta with a confused feeling of desire and hatred he simply could not repress. He did not even see the faces that corresponded to the other two pairs of legs, the chubby ones and the tattered ones, nor did he hear what one said to the other, listen, bro’, where’s the girl, and the other answered that he hadn’t seen her and the bottle-capped one don’t worry, Baby Ba will turn up when she feels like it, all that matters is that she does her flute accompaniment for us.

Homero was both inconsolable and uncontrollable, almost attacking the Orphan Huerta bodily; the three boys scattered and only two pairs of hands were left clutching Uncle Homero’s equally tiny hands. Angeles thought they were even smaller in proportion to the fagoagean hulk that weighed in at three hundred and ten pounds; my Uncle Homero’s Vienna sausage-pink hands blended with the yellow lemon-colored hands of the little man whose smile was as tenacious as his grip and who refused to let go of our uncle and kept him from pursuing his object of desire with passion and hatred.

“I’m the psychialtlic pianist, Deng Chopin. I takey velly good care patients by coming down hatch next to galley storage cupboard. I telly you maybe you need selvices.”

“Well, as the Procurator Pontius P. once asked on a memorable occasion — where can I wash my hands around here? Oh yes, please decamp instantly, oh Mongolian minihorde,” said Don Homero, not deigning to look at the little man.

But Deng Chopin (short hands, indefinite age, long fingers, shaved head, dark eye shadows, redolent of opium) refused to release him and forced our relative to bend over until his cheeks brushed his Sino-Polish lips.

“Only fool or drunkard no see water when in ocean,” said Deng. “Set me free. I do not understand your argot,” said Don H., but he could not break that iron grip.

“Oh”—Deng Chopin smiled—“must go on deck, hear noise of lain or voice of God. Rust mean tears, and preasure is seed of pain because pain is seed of preasure.”

In his uncomfortable and undignified pose — he looked like an elephant kneeling to hear the advice of a mouse — Homero, his eyes ablaze with the sparkle of awakened desire, inquired, “Preasure? Pleasure?” he asked, confirmed, and desired. “Pain? Is that what you said?”

“Ah, I see you understand. Mouth is door of disaster. No speak more.” Deng scurried away with the rapid steps of a Mademoiselle Butterfly (maid in Japan), summoning, with a mandarinesque wave of the hand, our panting, polecat-scented Uncle Homero, who once again saw the Orphan Huerta pass by, this time with an electric balalaika in his hands:

“Careful,” murmured Deng. “Even Devil handsome when only fifteen. Better you come me, Homelo. Lemember, good deeds stay at home; evil deeds travel around world.”

Homero followed Deng through a hatch. Angel and Angeles glowed, phosphorescent in the tropical night, looking from the deck of the floating disco at the nocturnal world of Dockapulco, itself dominated by this ominous symbol: a gigantic pleasure raft with four Byzantine onion cupolas made of rubber and inflated with gas, all floating over a sea of oil (don’t put your hands in the water, Mom and Dad; all of Neptune’s waters could not wash your oil-blackened hands clean) (WELCOME TO BLACAPULCO GOLD) itself floating on the liquified shit of an Imaginary Fatherland: Oil of Olé! Welcome! It is here where all the oil pipes, the wells, the refineries, the motor of progress, the circulation of our wealth, the end of mortmain disgorge: an Acapulco discotheque! Welcome! WE HAVE ENERGY TO BURN and the sewage from one hundred hotels, shit, piss, bottles, orange peels, rotten papaya skins, chicken bones, Kotex, condoms, tubes from various kinds of cream, the creams themselves, the bubbles from bubble bath, used gargles, the liquid, oily equivalent of what Angel had in his garage on Calle Génova was bobbing around on the black waves.

“Welcome!” shouted the owner, Ada Ching (fifty-five years old), “and merci, merci,” Ada thanked Angel and Angeles for having sent her the Four Fuckups, “a success,” gestured Ada, as she cheered on the arrival of the New Year’s celebrants, the launches, the fashionable gondolas, and the humble rowboats bobbing around the disco. She was dressed in a slate-blue tunic and elephant trousers, which hid her imaginably tiny feet. “Most esteemed guests,” Ada Ching said breathlessly to Angel and Angeles, gently pushing them toward another hatch on the ever more crowded raft, “great keeds, these minettes, thanks for envoying them to me,” she said: Ada Ching, the last remaining supporter of the Sino-Soviet alliance, armed with a portentous French accent which enabled her to communicate with reporters from Le Monde, the only people interested in her case, as personal as it was peculiar, and “come along, my infants,” she said to my parents, “did you know that your ongle, your oncle sent his valet to find out if there was a sadomaso cabaret here in Aca? Since we’re here to serve our customers because the customer has always reason, well, just regard, sacred blue! Enter please the cathedral of S & M! Formal attire required: Rubber, Leather, or Skin!”

The dark cabin Ada Ching led them to was fitted with a two-way mirror through which they saw Uncle Homero, on his knees, entering through a narrow little door, a comfortable enough passageway for his Sino-Polish host, but not so for this fattest of sausages, sweating away on his knees. Uncle Homero stands up, brushing the sawdust from his knees; Deng Chopin’s sadomasochistic cabaret looks like a stable — it’s filled with cows. Homero pinches his long, thin nose between two of his fingers as he stands there amid the slaughterhouse gear, looks at his knees smeared with manure, then sits down at a table. Deng, with a napkin over his arm, takes his order, what you rike, Mr. Homero? I would like lobster, says Don H., In that case, you’ll have a steak, asshole, says Deng, delivering our astounded uncle a smart slap in the face, and from behind the tail of a cow leaps a blue dwarf wearing an orange-and-black banner from Princeton University, who sits down on the aforementioned fat knees of Our Relative. And what does this mean? asks Homero, seeing that the painted dwarf is staining his white safari jacket blue. It to piss you off, asshole, answers Deng, and next to my folks in the penumbra of the mirrors, Ada Ching repeats, biting her nails in excitement: “Pour t’embêter, pauvre con,” as she admires the performance of her lover, the psychiatrist/pianist.

Now Deng takes up a yoke, hangs it around Don H.’s fat neck, and orders Homero, “Down on all fours, fatso,” and hangs water bags over his back, slips a girth around him — he’s agile, that mandarin, remarks my dad — puts the bridle over Our Relative’s sweaty nose, encloses his double chin with a halter, and then attaches a crupper. Delighted with the President of the Royal, who can still use his tongue and whines with pleasure, Deng Chopin ties a cowbell around the neck of Don Homero Fagoaga, President of the etc., and orders him to moo, and mooooo he does, moooooo, moooooooo, longer and longer. The Chinese whips his buttocks and then, nude, as if in an all-too-tangible dream, the Orphan Huerta appears, no longer dark-skinned but golden, covered with golden dust, his buttocks golden, likewise his erect phallus, which Homero, on his knees, spattered with cow shit, yoked, stretches his arms out to touch, and he moos, moos as the naked Orphan sings in his usual voice: The ox shits, the cow shits, the girl with the biggest tits shits, and he drops a little golden nugget, round as a lump of Klondike gold right in front of Uncle Homero’s bridled face. He stretches out his hands, invincible Uncle H. Take the excremental gold of your obscure object of desire, Angel and Angeles urge him on from the immobility of the mirror, try to eat it, you coprophagic old man, rub it into your muzzle while the Orphan passes and disappears like a dragonfly, and with each movement of his impossible and humiliated desire Uncle makes the cowbell ring and moos and his voice, tremulous from longed-for humiliations and defeats rises whining, through clangs of the bell, through hatches, and between planks, to the deck, where it blends in with the voices of the musicians, moooo, moooooosica. The pretty girls dance to the sound of the bells, For Whom the Belles Toil, moooo, moooooostery, moooouerte, the rockaztec on deck in counterpoint to a distant subterranean bellow made by the humiliated, beaten Relative, trembling from unfulfilled pleasure, kissing the feet of the diminutive psychoanalyst, and on deck, the Orphan Huerta, now on the bandstand with his electric balalaika, Hipi Toltec with his tom-toms and teponaztlis, Egg at the synthesizer, and a wind section consisting of a flute. Pop and Mom, now that you are fixed in your decision not to confuse humiliation with death, don’t give humiliation prerogatives. Angel, don’t confuse humiliation with non-existence, don’t let yourself be seduced, my love, by the cruelty that makes the victim know who his executioner is and thus satisfies executioner and victim: Uncle Homero deserves only death, the most radical disappearance, although he does not know who gives it to him. Angel and Angeles come up on deck and join the dancers on the floating discotheque and the flute solo accompanied by the singing of the Four Fuckups:

Serpents are better

When feathered

— See their eggs fly!

And after they shed

Their skins

You can bake them

In a pie

Baby, baby, in a pie

Reptiles in the sky!

No no no listen to me, please, don’t just change the subject, tell me if you can hear that little refrain, the only melody in this cacophony they call rockaztec, tell me even before I’m conceived if there isn’t a cute little girl with chestnut hair pulled back and parted down the middle, wearing a white percale dress, who’s playing a flute in the Four Fuckups band, but my parents’ invisible, hasty glances do not see what I can see before being born. They do not listen to the flute I listen to from my perfect limbo.

they hear the rockaztec of the plumed serpent,

they see Egg, his face growing paler by the minute, our belovèd buddy is losing his face, he has no more face, it’s not his fault, let’s restore his face to our great buddy Egg, to whom we owe so much, merely our lives, says my father, all our lives, I would say, because if my father had suffocated inside that metal egg because of Homero, he would neither have met my mother nor created me,

they see Hipi Toltec falling to pieces, sprinkling tiny shards of skin about as he dances on the bandstand, his snakeskin belt and his conchshell at his lips, a combination Tezcatlipoca and Mick Jagger,

they see the Orphan Huerta leading the band, a rearview mirror tied to his head so he can see what’s going on behind him, see himself from behind, see the world in a 360-degree pan, ah my BARROCANROLL, ah my rockaztec, how they shout when the Orphan sings

Reptiles in the sky! with his shrill but erotic voice and Hipi with his low, phantom-like voice, and Egg without a face, much less a voice

(and Baby Ba’s flute: Only I hear it)

Serpents are better

When feathered

the grand dionysian delirium out of doors in Acapulco, under the luminescent, sick sky. Angel and Angeles make their way through the throng and pick out the faces that dominate the color sections of the ever more numerous newspapers and the ever more sporadic gossip spots on TV, Mariano Martínez Mercado, the handsomest, most marriageable (excuse me, I meant marketable) young man in the National Organization of Commercial Kingpins (NOCOKS), creole with violet eyes and an aura of beige elegance: wearing, of all things, a mess jacket, can you beat that? to come to the Acapulco Raj from the sulphurous metropolis, the D.F., starched shirt-front, wing collar, black tie, black trousers with red stripe, and now barefoot in order to greet the well-bred, dark-skinned little girl dressed as a Carmelite nun, who seems to have been dipped in tea, how else could she have touched the infinitely brittle skin, so thin a sigh would tear it, of Mariano M. M., the most etc., but she doesn’t even look at him, the upstart, he might be turning cartwheels, but she doesn’t look at him, she merely allows her bare foot to touch the naked foot of Mariano, dazzled by the light and by this naked contact between his white foot and the unshod nudity of her lost girl’s foot:

anonymous and naturally barefoot — she is dressed as a Discalced Carmelite, she looks at you, Dad, looks behind Mariano and looks at you, beyond the very tall, very thin, very blond, and very snooty gringo that you, Mom, recognize as D. C. Buckley, of all the species of carnivorous hymenoptera, the best-acclimated Wasp in our country, the favorite emissary in Mexico of the Liberal and Independent Republic of New England and Adjacent Islands, the autonomous entity that in the early nineties united libertarian tendencies, protests against abuses of human rights, gay rights, lesbian rights, without gagged, controlled, or disinformed press, New York and its islands, Long, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, where abortion is a right but where no rights are aborted: the last refuge in the world of habeas corpus and due legal process represented here by the last Lector of Lawrence and Lowry who believes in Mexican sensuality here not in the incestuous drunken brawls of the Four Islands (Manhattan and), D. C. Buckley is dancing touching toes with a street girl who usually hawks corn candy and other sweets on the Acapulco docks, as the owner of the disco, Ada Ching, tells my folks, that’s what he asked for, a daughter of nature to be his escort for the night, pure, a tabula rasa, a room without furniture, untouched by the oracles of sibylization, a nobel sauvage, understand, mon Ange? someone who could scrape the grime of Chicago off him even if it meant a case of Chilpancingo crabs

and now she makes her entrance, this then! the blue foot! fools, get those spots on her, the queen of the jeunesse dorée of the capital, look at her, Angel, the golden girl, she abandoned the sun just to console the stars down here, what an honor, what a privilege, drenched in sequins, sweet sixteen, it’s Penny López, the daughter of the minister Don Ulises You Know Who, author of the key slogan of Mexican industrialization, the one you see written on every mountain, every wall, in the sky itself, dragged by blimps and engraved in skywriting on the clouds:

MEXICANS: INDUSTRIALIZE:

YOU WON’T LIVE LONGER, BUT YOU WILL LIVE BETTER

and she passes by right next to you, accompanied by her governess, Miss Ponderosa, her two bouncy bodyguards, and her usual companion, the young Brazilian diplomat, Decio Tudela, dressed like Tyrone Power (of short memory) in The Rains Came, oo-la-la! I danced with Tyrone Power in La Perla cabaret, How long ago was that, mon Ange? where are the snows of yesteryear, and oo-la-la Decio Tudela’s wearing exactly the same outfit as Mariano Martínez Mercado, except that Decio has a red turban, like a maharadish, and one of two things is going to happen: either they will start fighting or they will make the mess jacket de rigueur for nocturnal visits to discos. But now excuse me, if I don’t get the FUBARS rolling again there’s going to be sikhening melee here.

My dear parents: I tell them that the dark little girl who was dipped in tea wearing the caramel Carmelite habit dancing with Mariano Martínez Mercado is looking at her escort as if he were Cervantes’s Glasscase Licentiate and her low, fearful eyes only see my father. The golden Miss López rests her eyes like two dark butterflies on my progenitor-to-be and then looks elsewhere without paying him any more attention. But my mother Angeles does indeed pay him more attention and stares at him. I was still hanging around my dad’s egg pouches, but I can say to the reader straight from the heart, the fact is that my very life depended on that stare, look here your mercies benz! I’ll never forget it.

Ada Ching on the bandstand, bathed in a glow of mercury vapor, asking her clientele what it was you desire, my minettes, what do you wish my infants. You know Ada! Ching! all shout in chorus, except the ones you know straightaway to be nouveau hicks who have never been here before, like the tea-stained dark girl who never takes her eyes off my dad Angel. What do mes minettes want to see? That ass with class, drop those pants! And on those delectable half-moons shine forth two tattoos: on the left cheek of this Norman Magdalene we see the ruddy countenance of the Great Helmsman, swimming across the broadest part of Ada Ching’s gluteus maximus as if it were a milky Yangtze; on the right cheek, Breton bread, emblazoned for all the world to see, is our dear uncle, smiling Steely Joe, with his pipe in his mouth, pointing toward Ada Ching’s delightful curves as if he were asking for a light: with a coquettish gesture inherited from the improbable memory of Renée St.-Cyr, Ada Ching pulls off her blouse and pulls up her drawers; D. C. Buckley begins shouting Moon-Ah, Moon-ah, and the Four Fuckups pick up the rhythm of the M’s — after all, that’s what everyone’s here for — and mooooooo groans Homero from the bowels of the beached rubber galleon, mooooo, M, My M’s, they sing

My Mexico My Mortification My Muerte My Mordida Marina Mystery Malfeasance, and each one takes the M the Musicians assign and each one shouts back his own M toward the altar of the moooosicians, Hipi at the drums, Egg at the synthesizer, the Orphan manning the balalaika, Ada shaking her breasts and panting out the rhythm into the microphone, Mictlán, says Marianito, and all of them repeat it in a roar, both funereal and joyful, Malediction, says Decio, and that too is chorused, Marina Mystery. Mordida, Mamacita, Merde, interpolates Ada, Muck, the Fuckups, Mystery, Mother, Malinche, Mortification, and Mustang, Miramón Mariano looks with indifference at Decio the pestio, and Mariano Monkey Mendicant, Machineguns Mexican M’s, all together não

My M’s Muddy Murdered Miraculous Monks they sing, they answer, they shout, the boys and girls mixed, mestizos, mixed, all together não

Mixing bowl Mesalina Monk Mortification Mortar Mamá, Máaaaamá, Mammary, Mamado …

Penny’s bodyguards have their hands on their holsters, an instant of terror flew over one and all like a foamy angel soaring over the bobbing heads in the disco Divan the Terrible, Penny herself did not seem to understand what was happening as she danced the rockaztec called MEXICAN M’S with Decio

the pop style of the nineties, Penny López choruses the new series Mesa, Maraca, Martyrdom, Mixtec, Matamoros Matamoros. When he heard that name shouted and sung by the band and the dancers, my father Angel stopped, thought something (what it was, Reader, I don’t know; I’m not omniscient, all I know is what my genes have set aside for me since the days of Mock the Summa), I say that he got an idea, this was the night of the loose ends, the unfinished suggestions, the unkept promises: it was his fault, his and only his, he wanted to be free and available for the great event set for Epiphany, and everything unrelated to that day made no impression on him, his mind was an opaque veil For whom the veils soil except for What’s Going to Happen on Epiphany:

He looked at Penny: the audience was urging Penny to take off her shoes; she was the only woman who hadn’t done it, and now she did, no hands, lifting her leg, her thigh, showing her thigh under her sequined skirt, along with a downy crease, a nosegay of quince, a tiny coin made of moist copper. My father looked at her but she took no notice of him. The tea-dipped girl did look at my father, but he took no notice of her. My mother Angeles looked at my father; he wanted to take notice of her but he thought something, an idea occurred to him, Matamoros, a seed of concern, hostility, enervation. He felt the arm and the iron hand seize his own.

He looked down. Deng, impassively sad, observed him. My handsome father, my tall father who could not be a poet because he was too handsome (says my mother, forgetting Lord B, the young Percy B. S. and John K., the divine Alfred de M. and old Ezra P.), had the delicacy to bend down while Deng Chopin stood on tiptoe. All he said to my father was this, but this was all my father heard under the waves of music and happy shouting:

“Have you ever been in Pacífica?”

The tide of people separated my father from the fine, long, extended hands of Deng Chopin.

It’s my mother who only has eyes for the dialectic of eyes. She looks at my father Angel and says to herself (she says to my genes) that for him there must be three kinds of woman. First, the ones like Penny who look elsewhere and don’t take any notice of you. Second, the ones like my mother who do take notice of you and look at you. And third, the women like this dark little girl dressed as a Discalced Carmelite who look at you but who actually look through you at someone behind you: the demon, the angel. She was not jealous of Penny. She was not sad. The dark little tea-dipped girl scared her. Her little breasts were bouncing under her scapularies.

2. I declare that my mother’s black eyes are a beach

I declare that my mother’s black eyes are a beach that changes only so that it will look even more like itself.

I declare that my father’s nearsighted yellow-green eyes are a sea devoid of progress or being: my father changes constantly but always remains the same.

I declare that my father and mother meet in the dance, but that they know this is just one more ceremony for postponing death.

I declare that she, silent and astonished, suddenly feels light, elsewhere, running through a garden of modest statues and walkways of smoke, my mother laughing, delicately treading on the grass with her silk slippers, my mother discreetly raising her crinoline, my mother feeling the thumping of her skirt hoop on her pubis and the starched brushing of her ruff under her chin. My mother is blind: a green handkerchief covers her eyes, and she laughs, not knowing if she is being chased or if she is chasing someone: ballads, gallantries, old-fashioned games.

I declare that she does not know how she came to be in this garden or why she glides with such agility through the past, she who remembers no past at all: my mother appears and disappears among the cypresses, distanced from the boomboomboom of her heart in the Acapulco night and the rockaztec and the barrockanroll but the handsome gentlemen with forbidden faces listen to her more closely than she listens to them: they hear the rustle of her green taffeta, the game of the blind doubles is brought to conclusion awkwardly, rapidly, head over heels: forehead to forehead, he and she, without seeing each other: both blindfolded, they embrace, they kiss under a sky of green flashes in an old-fashioned garden of smoke and symmetry:

I declare that he tears off her blindfold, and she looks at him and screams: dressed completely in black, my father with his ruff and his white cuffs brings the round, the game, to a successful conclusion with the capture, but she looks into my father’s eyes, and in them she sees a man she knows and doesn’t know, she knows him in the past and doesn’t know him in the present, a man simultaneously young and old, innocent and corrupt, barely a novice in matters of love and at the brink of satiety, one foot in the bedroom and the other in the cemetery. A caddish gentleman, he embraces her, tears off her blindfold (it’s the San Silvestre dance at a tropical port; it’s the San Silvestre in a Fragonard landscape; it’s the San Silvestre dance in an Andalusian patio), and she, horrified, stares at a man with forbidden eyes, covered by another blindfold: it doesn’t matter, by the mere mute movement of his lips she knows what he is saying: I love myself through you, and I could only love you if in touching you I would touch all the women in the world: Can you offer me that? Can you swear to me that you are all the women I desire? Can you convince me you are Eve restored for me? Can you swear to me that your love will send me where I want to go: to hell?

I declare that she tears off his blindfold, and he screams in horror: she’s been branded on the forehead with a hot iron. It’s possible to read her forehead. Her forehead says: SLAVE OF GOD.

I declare that she has not existed in the past. But she has been in the game.

I declare that he takes her by her perfumed nape, bares her shoulders, picks her up by the hips so the crinoline opens like a rustling bud. He takes her by the feet, he raises her by the feet, he shows her to all those dancing, holding her up like a candy statue.

I declare she is dressed in green and he in black.

I declare they are on a barge floating on the Thames and on a floating discotheque in Acapulco. The fireworks go off.

I declare that she is annihilated by this violent manifestation of a past she does not remember.

I declare that he is frightened because he sees the burning seal on my mother’s forehead.

I declare that he asks her, Did you see, Angeles? and each time he does it he swears he sees my mother’s eyes change: they change color or place or perhaps they only change intention, which is like changing color or place: each time he embraces her, an icy, blue, clear, foamy splinter of ice passes through my mother’s eyes.

I declare that my father takes my mother’s hand in order to resist the temptation to kiss her perfumed nape, the acidity of her underarms, the oven of her tiny feet.

I declare that my father says to her, Angeles, give me time to get to know you.

I declare that when he touches her she screams: Death is a long way off!

3. Behind Deng Chopin he emerged

Behind Deng Chopin he emerged, hahaing and hungry, Uncle Homero Fagoaga, just when the dance was breaking up in exhaustion; Don Homero collapsed listlessly onto a curule chair screwed to the deck opposite the table covered with a paper tablecloth where Angel and Angeles were sitting. Behind him, as rigid as a statue, Tomasito took up his place. Uncle turned his veiled, febrile eyes, like those of a wise tortoise, upward, where the scarlet sails decorated with Chinese ideograms were fluttering in the ominous silence of the tropical night; peering through the masts, he could see the Byzantine cupolas that marked the dominions of Ada and Deng.

Let’s get cracking! Mrs. Ching imperiously ordered the musicians, I pay them more than anyone so they think they have the right to rest between sets, no way! see what the gentlemen and the lady want: no, Homero imperiously said to Hipi Toltec, who was arranging the table, no, not a fourth seat: don’t sit down, Tomasito, fan, Tomasito, you shall dine when we get back to the house.

“Yes, master.”

“Io non voglio più servir.”

Our buddy Egg looked under the table, asking in a complaining voice, “Baby Ba, where are you? Don’t hide anymore, sweetie, come out so we can give you some candy…”

Our homeric uncle looked at this bizarre waiter, who was as white as an egg, as hairless as an egg, depilated to the point of avarice, depilated till death us do part, and then he looked at the other waiter: he was shredding, his skin was peeling off right before their very eyes. When the waiter with the porcupine hair and the bottle-capped hat approached the table of our suspicious Uncle Homero, Uncle H. simply did not look at him: he smelled him, he smelled the sweat and grime the boy had had the misfortune to possess since birth. Where? Tell us now, little orphan boy, little boy lost, an irrepressible tide of repulsion seemed to drown our uncle’s eyes: “Why is it that we have to be served by these stinking inferiors?” he exclaimed, his rage, his age, this page at its highest pitch. “What we’re paying for here in crisp dollar bills is a fine meal beautifully served by people as elegant as we are! Why do we have to go on putting up with being served by our inferiors? Don’t we have enough power to be served by our equals?” he shouted in a delirium to which the imperturbable chanting of the waiter with the bottle-capped hat served as a musical accompaniment, while his peeling colleague went on setting the table, while the fat one was down on all fours looking for the girl, and while the selfsame bottle-capped Ganymede waited patiently to take the order of the Palomar y Fagoaga family.

“Now then, boy,” said Uncle Homero, lolling on the curule seat opposite my parents, perpendicular to the nocturnal breeze fanned by Tomasito, and beneath the rubber cupolas floating on the rolling sea.

“Wha’ chu’ wan’, sir?” said the boy in a nasal, whining voice.

“Wha’ chu’ wan’, sir?” he who gives purity and splendor to our tongue mimicked him in atrocious disdain. “Now then, boy, bring me a dry, straight-up twist of lemon.”

“Oliver Twist?” inquired my father.

“This is no time for silly jokes,” said the President of the Academy severely, focusing his eyes ambivalently on the waiter/crooner. “Don’t mess around, you damned darky.” (The waiter with the sleepy eyes and the whisk-broom hair, naturally, screwed up his order completely, bringing him a lemonade and straw along with a Canada Dry, instead of a dry martini. Uncle Homero swept the lot off the table onto the floor, scattering cherries and olives to the four winds, and said to the waiter, “Down on your knees, slavey, mop up that slime, you mountain monkey, then come back, use your brain, if you can, cretin, and then bring me, let’s see if you can get it right this time, what I ordered, you poor illiterate donkey, and learn how to serve a gentleman!”)

He paused as if to congratulate himself — you’ve rarely been in such great form, Homero — and then stared with redoubled fury at the waiter, who was bent down, picking up the cherries and olives: where did you stick your fingers before you put your cherries in my lemonade, slimebag? Just as I thought, as that great Argentine educator Hugo Wast remarked to his intimates, implacably remarked as he took his place in the Argentine military cabinet, this is no time for modesty, there can be no doubt, I repeat, no doubt that he’s scratched his testicles or picked his nose or wiped his tushy before he touched and served my food. Don’t you ever think about things like that when you eat in a restaurant?

He raised his voice so that everyone could hear him clearly, above all the filthy boy, who was now bringing him a sumptuously arranged pineapple sorbet.

“The boss lady sends it to you,” said the boy, trying to overcome the powerful chortles of our robust Uncle H. “Compliments of the house, is what she said.”

“Learn how to serve a gentleman, you grimy slavey!” intoned Uncle Homero. “Hold on there, servant, you used condom, you demented lollipop!”

Don Homero looked the waiter up and down: he was no longer sporting his bottle-cap hat, just his tangled broom, as if he wanted to upset everyone’s concept of zoology by wearing a sea urchin as a toupee, standing there with his arms crossed after serving our uncle his sorbet, while Homero surveyed the chaos the floating disco had become that New Year’s Eve.

He raised his spoon to attack the sorbet: “People like me are used to living with beggars but not with proles. No one has a greater sense of honor than a Mexican beggar. When you offer a nickel to an authentic beggar, he responds by refusing to take it: ‘A man’s hunger is his castle.’ An authentic beggar is a poor man in the classic style, that is, with no place in the world to rest his head, but possessing the whole Spanish-American code of honor intact.”

With his nervously avid nails, Don Homero incised the poor tablecloth, on which alternated pop icons and the faces of Steely Joe and Mighty Mao.

“These waiters, you see, and this one in particular, are crooks, thieves who work by night and lurk in the shadows, bandits disguised as waiters. They don’t ask you for money honorably the way beggars do, certainly not! they mug you, my dear niece. They’re con men, they rile up the people who are happy in honorable poverty and organize them into unions. They embitter them with their utopian ideas, and they end up by stealing private estates, saying they were communal lands during the times of King Cuauhtémoc. They produce nothing, they scare off tourists, they ruin the nation, and they should be jailed, the sooner the better. This is my social philosophy, as we are entering, my dear niece and nephew, 1992, which promises to be quite a turbulent year. For ages now, we, the gentry, have defended ourselves from the Indians and the peasants — after all, we’ve been in charge of them since 1521. But these filthy brutes who pop up out of nowhere, how are we going to dominate them?” he asked with some anxiety.

“What I mean to say”—he was going into high gear—“is that we have to kill these scorpions, as the poet Horace says, ab ovo, that is, in the egg, before they can do any damage, and destroy the crows in their nest before they peck our eyes out: look right over there at that lost boy (he stabbed at the Orphan Huerta with his spoon). In him you can see the arrogant bureaucrat, the demagogic redeemer, the implacable ideologue, the Salvador Allende in potentia, why have you stopped fanning, you Luzon poltroon? Look at him and suffocate him, as the martial statesman from Chile, General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, said recently, and he is a man who, by fair means or foul — but in either case to our great relief — continues to be the supreme leader of that southern nation.”

Having said that, Uncle Homero finally stuck his spoon into the pineapple sorbet, as if it were a mound of frozen gold: even his desserts were Klondikes over which he assumed he could exercise a patrimonial right of conquest: he sucked and slavered noisily, belching, until he actually seemed likable, after all, doesn’t all the world love a fat man?

Nevertheless, the noises Don Homero made drowned out the lovable innocence of the archetypal glutton because they sounded like erotic provocations, with all kinds of uncontrollable squints and lip-licking directed either toward my mother Angeles or toward the sullen boy with tangled hair and golden legs, legs now adored by Uncle Homerosexual. But damn it all to hell, where the devil had he seen that boy before? How beautiful his niece was! Angeles, bah! There was nothing angelic about her, and she only went by that name because Angel decided they would both have the same name, because Angel and Angeles sound good together, but our fat uncle knew something better: at night he’d crept to the window of the bungalow where the two slept and he heard them screwing, so, as far as being angelic was concerned, well, for him she was a devil and that was that.

Diabolical Angeles, he whimpered hopelessly, seriously attacking the ice cream, and how deliciously the velvety sorbet stood in for other pleasures, other tongues!

Only in the instant in which he finished the ice, eating mechanically but with his eyes fixed on his dreams, did Don Homero look down. It was then he realized that the dessert was resting on an artifact which was not a pineapple hollowed out to receive the cold joy of his palate, nor was it a crystal vessel cut with elegant, starry facets in imitation of a pineapple made of ice; no, it wasn’t even a vulgar tub of the kind used for the washing of plates (oh, how Don Homero wished he could be excused from the disaster he felt to be so imminent by exercising his oratorical skills, by using language, divine language, his reason for being). No, it was what now shone metallically and tasted acridly, and sagged soddenly: he had eaten pineapple sorbet ladled into the brimless, bottle-cap-encrusted hat of, of, of this waiter! Of that bastard boy who befouled his life night and day! The Orphan Huerta emerged triumphantly from the drawer of forgotten things where Uncle H. stored every disagreeable event that had occurred during his exceptional life, oranges, limes, and lemons, or was it apples, figs, and pears? Don H. stood up trembling with rage, but the waiter with porcupine hair had already scampered out of range, while Tomasito reproached him, “Say ‘yes, master,’” and Orphan Huerta shouted from a safe distance ‘Yes, Mother, yes, Mother,’ and lawyer Fagoaga clutched his hands to his throat, shouting for help, poisoned, his windpipe blocked, old Coca-Culo caps, rusty metal Orange Crotch, Cerveza XX — like my potential genes — rows of lances like those I have on my beach to defend me from intruders, especially mounted cavalry, especially surly servants, nouveaus who think they have the right to be there, Indians in revolt, HOLY JESUS, oh, my poor tongue pierced by bottle caps, my reason for being and the being of my reason: my tongue cut to ribbons! my palate cleft by base metals which will cause me to speak in a high-pitched nasal twang like that odious runt, oh my good taste, my savoir faire, ruined forever!

Tomasito fanned his master with his usual tenacious patience; Deng Chopin, immutable, appeared through a hatch to see what was going on; Uncle Homero slipped off the curule seat to the deck and the owner Ada Ching approached to calm, to thank him — it was an honor for the floating discotheque Divan the Terrible to receive the President of the Academy of the Language as well as Angel and Angeles, whom she counted among her most favored guests. This was no time for anger, because in a few minutes it would be time to celebrate the New Year of 1992, perhaps the year chosen for the renewal of alliances, the Third Rome and the Middle Kingdom, culture wresting control from ideology, ha! only culture would survive the ups and downs of politics, and culture was dancing, carnival, Saturnalia, it was the moment to celebrate. Uncle Homero only wanted to throw himself on the Orphan Huerta, to embrace him, to kiss him, to kill him, to fuck him, to beat him, Orphan Huerta once again on the bandstand with Egg and Hipi Toltec. Suddenly, a drunken D. C. Buckley but sat down on Uncle Homero’s lap, Buckley arguing in a high-toned Massachusetts accent, Let us hang on foah deah lahf to the planks left aftah the sinking of the Anglo-Saxon Pequod, which has dragged us with its bloody hahpoons into a hunt foah all the illusions of the twentieth century: it is impossible to save ouahselves in this rush to disastah, impossible to be modahn without participating in Annglo-Sexon populah cultcha. Uncle Homero, despite the weight of the ultratall gringo, groped for a napkin wide enough for his belly and resigned himself in despair to using the edge of the tablecloth: thrust now between the African white hunter’s stained blue tunic and his smoked Hamingwegg stomach.

“Be ernest about that,” said D. C. Buckley … or about a cetacean implacably hunted down by the furious Ahab …

“Oh, you movie dick,” said Buckley, tickling Don Homero’s sleeping little dicky bird, whose proclivities lay in another direction …

“W. C. Fields forever,” sand the rockaztec band of the Four Fuckups.

“Bathroom Campos!” giggled the drunken Buckley, inebriated with English and Spanish calambours, punnish the spinning spunning Spanish language! while Don Homero sighed in resignation, telling his niece and nephew that he in no way opposed the myriad puns they might create because he hoped that the Castilian language would digest them all and emerge triumphant from this test, that it would reach the beach of the twenty-first century alive, overcoming, digesting, excreting the Anglo-Saxon universe, and he remained there staring, embracing the unknown D. C. Buckley, staring at the bikinis of the musical waiters and the white buttocks of Ada Ching.

They would never remember in which moment the sad year 1991 ended and slipped away unnoticed, undesired like a thief in the night as Don Homero would say, the certainly fateful 1992 of our five Christophercolonized centuries:

My mother Angeles looked uneasily at my father Angel looking at the cinnamon-colored little girl who was dancing between Decio and Marianito made into brothers in their desire for classist intermingling and racist risk and partying with the people, the Acapulco Slumming Party, desperately seeking ménage à trois with innocent and telluric Mexican girly bathed in tea,

who only had eyes, nevertheless, for my dad,

who looked with a desire my mother wished to deflect (which she could not) to the sweet-sixteen dancer Penny López,

who looked at no one: she was dancing.

4. And that first dawn of the New Year

And that first dawn of the New Year, which arrived amid a premonitory silence, while the diminutive Sino-Pole delicately licked the foyer of her vagina while with tiny, equally delicate nibbles he removed the odd pubic hair and then dug in like a playful kitten to sniff her clitoris, Ada Ching said yes, Shorty, time for fucky-fucky, who knows, it could happen any time, the world may change forever, and we’ll be celebrating Russian Easter and Chinese New Year again. I don’t want to miss my chance if it comes around, my naughty little chinky, yes, my little golden nugget, yes my little yellow pearil, I’ve been waiting for it for twenty-three years, just imagine, when I was a girl of twenty-three and we got the terrible news that Moscow and Beijing had broken off relations, that’s right, make love to your Ada, your Sada, Bada, attaboy, that was a long time ago, I’ll make myself a beauty for the soirees to come, but now you see: no one even remembered to celebrate the New Year, it came and no one noticed, but come on now, make me remember my tongue with your tongue, goose tongue, your Ada of Provence the sea the sun, your final flower of the Albigensian tree, your heretical survivor of the criminal crusades of Gaston de Foix Gras, lick my culo you dirty little coolie, stick your tongue up my anus, you polack peking piggy, you and I we sure are going to celebrate the Year Four Twenties and Twelve, so that I am cleansed of all mortal desires, so that I am empty of all lust and so that there remains nothing of my body drained by your yellow tongue except my spirit, my words, my purified ideology, and a body white at last, clean at last, washed spotless, my dengchowprick, all my garbage swept away by the broom of your tongue, my chinaboy, and I finally free of the sin of the evil God who gave me guts and tubes and blood and excrement and the lewd buttocks that I show up onstage every night to that mob des cons, but without ever renouncing my political principles, all that in order thanks to you and your immense sex — as big as you are small, my putto — to reach the good God of justice, name of a name of a Lenin, name of a name of a Chou, Albigensian of a Marx who are waiting for me at the end of the long tunnel of my impatient, bored flesh, century after blasted century that finally join together in the telescope of pleasure, in the telescunt of history, yesterday’s millennia and today’s millionaires, apocalypse in the tenth century and pocky lips in the twentieth, you and I the last of the Albigensians, long-fingered dwarf, yes, try to screw me so you can be pure and we two can reconstruct the last chance for the proletariat, who’ve been dragging themselves from millennium to millennium, through the mud of history, that’s the way, just with your hands and tongue, I’m coming, I’m coming …

“What did you say to the fat old man, my little cabbage?”

“That it possible we all inside nightmare of bat.”

“And to Angeles?”

“Brind man no flaind snakes.”

“And to the garçon Angel?”

“You know where is Pacífica?”

“Do you think that it was enough for them to see the fat uncle humiliated?”

“No, no. They want kir him, not him suicide serf.”

“Well then, my little Papa-God, we won’t get out of this one alive.”

“Wolk of priest to save humanity, not save humble skin.”

Ada Ching looked at herself in the cabin mirror with a sense of misgiving and of having lost her way.

“I was really beautiful. When no one loved me. Not this painted-up, fiftyish old monster. Ooooh, they called me La Fellini when I was young. Until they finally understood the task I’d taken on and respected me.”

Deng Chopin looked at her with supplicating eyes. She caught the reflection of that glance and began a vigorous brushing of her red hair — almost burned to a crisp, Was it by Breton hot combs? Norman ones? Or Provençal?

“Don’t look at me that way. Throughout my childhood I had to put up with the humiliation my parents suffered after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Then in the sixties I myself had to say that it just wasn’t so. Beijing and Moscow have not had a fight, they are the bastions of the proletarian revolution. If Beijing and Moscow separate, there will be no revolution, no proletariat. No one could sacrifice that power, Sacred Blue!”

She put down the brush. Deng stared at her intensely.

“Well, what do you say, chinaboy?”

He shook his head in the negative and sadly looked at the sheets.

“And to the world then, what do you say to the world, my sublime dwarf?”

“When people talk you about it, paladise, when you living there, it hell. I tell it to you, World. But you undersand it, Universe.”

“And to me what do you recount, my adored rekeket?”

“With one hair from woman possible to lift elephant.”

“Papa-God!”

“Papa-papa, papagoda!”

“Ayy, now my little yellow pearil, wouldn’t you like me to take you inside, my dove, my dive, my divinity?”

“Yes, Ada Ching.”

“Well, how does it feel to want? Put your glasses back on and read something from the Palace of Pleasure and stop screwing around because you know very well that you don’t get into my pussycat until the Sino-Soviet alliance is reestablished. That’s that.”

“Tomollow maybe we dead.”

“That’s no reason to throw out one’s principles.”

“Nothing glow ’less seed planted, even death.”

“Alors, a fallen bud never returns to its branch. Bon soir, mon Chou.”

5. Well now, we were saying that sexual cells enter the sea

Well now, we were saying that sexual cells enter the sea to meet, to fertilize each other, without all the complications (my genes have been warning me about them for eons) that surround the simple conception of a human being and the philosophicomoralhistoricoreligious ceremony of copulation (I know all about whole eras of genes but only a little about gentlemen and ladies, after all): coral and jellyfish enter the sea to fertilize themselves and to peer through the corrupt water of the hotel drain and the turbulence caused by El Niño at the mountains where the people can no longer live, available now only to tourists and unsleeping advertisements: All the neon lights in Aca are lit, wasted during daylight hours:

WE HAVE ENERGY TO BURN!

Nobody else. Never again. Around here, yes, the coral and the jellyfish reproduce by external fertilization (listen, Reader, I’m going to talk about something your honor knows nothing about: about what I am: a sperm that left its ancestors behind and defeated his little brothers in the race of the charros of ire and who now has found the hot egg and is distributing his X’s and Z’s) and the sexual cells (I’m talking about my family history, living now and certainly external, which for me is a short, secret history unless your mercies deign to inform me starting now and from the outside, to which purpose I concede exactly one page to add whatever you might want, now or never, before I take up my discourse again, recapitulating, as follows):

Reader’s List

on seeing her from a dark balcony, without even daring to think of her as a human being: his statue, his bronze Galatea with wig and tricolor skyrocket

* (Ulises López nervously choosing between consulting his Hindustani guru at Oxford University or defending himself against the plots of Secretary Robles Chacón, his political rival, plots which will keep him from becoming president. He finally opts for forgetting economics and politics and thinks only about squash)

* (In the old El Mirador hotel: its shape

Christopher’s List

* (the two of them on Pichipichi beach washing themselves off in the sea after creating me)

* (Uncle Homero flying diarrheically through the skies of Acapulco, fleeing from the guerrillas)

* (Uncle Fernando flying through the skies of the Chiticam Trusteeship in a helicopter toward the Lacandon forest)

* (Mamadoc foaming at the mouth and spitting at the mirrors because she has understood the reason for the Christophers Contest: to deprive her of children and to invent an artificial dynasty for Mexico)

* (Federico Robles Chacón remembers how he saw his creation, the Mother and Doctor, conquer the people and

* (My parents on the beach remembering what happened days before during the New Year’s celebration that led to my conception)

* (I demanding from my new existence, which they don’t even suspect, that they explain to me how and when, the place and the time in which all this takes place, what space is, what happens within the within and outside the outside and within outside and outside within)

* (They answering my demands before I make them by pure intuition. I already adore them!)

* The first thing Professor Will Gingerich noted when he arrived at the New Year’s cocktail party on the terrace of the Hotel Sightseer (originally El Mirador) was that all the guests were made of glass.

that of layered terraces:

He didn’t blame his headache for this illusion. Aspirin should be delivered with the Acapulco sun. But now the sun was not shining. Night had fallen. His herd of gringos had met to get to know each other before before beginning tomorrow’s Fun & Sun Toltec Tour.

Each one had stuck a badge on his chest with his name and address on it. Damn! So why weren’t they looking at each other? He observed each of them looking at the badge of the person standing next to him just as that person looked at his, smiling in a happy but absent way and avidly seeking the badge of the next guest. Their eyes pierced the badges as if they were panes of glass framed so they could see the Vermont landscape in winter. But here, behind the glass, there was only more glass. All of them wanted desperately to leave behind the next traveling companion and meet another one, who was also made of glass, all of them waiting, innocent and crystalline.

An Acapulco waiter offered him a Scarlet O’Hara. Will Gingerich took the glass with its brittle stem and felt nauseous as he tasted the cloying liquor flowing around drunken strawberries. He looked into the thick, bovine, impenetrable eyes of the Mexican waiter: his body was as square as a black die, so thick that no glass gaze could ever penetrate it. Professor Gingerich breathed deep and remembered that he ought to be introducing himself and looking after his flock. He slowly strolled across the terrace balanced high over the rocky, sonorous sea that night.

“Hi, I’m your professional guide.”

He didn’t have to tell them his name because he, too, had it written on the chest of his faded windbreaker, which also had Dartmouth College Vox Clamantis in Deserto 1769 inscribed on it. The inscription was too light for anyone to decipher. He would bet on it. No one looked him directly in the eye. No one in fact did read the faded inscription. And he was not going to tell anyone that he had set himself up as a tour guide in Acapulco because Ronald Ranger had destroyed higher education in the United States with the speed of the fastest gun in the West. Among the items the President had certainly read on the hit list for budget cuts were two exotic subjects, Spanish-American Literature and Comparative Mythology. The President had wondered what earthly use they could have and marked them as definite cuts from the federal aid package. Gingerich consoled himself thinking that it was worse for the insane because the President had also eliminated federal aid for mental health: he had appeared on television with a statistical chart which showed beyond the shadow of a doubt that cases of mental imbalance had diminished sharply in the United States during the previous twenty years. Aid for an illness in decline was no longer necessary.

Will Gingerich did not want to think of himself as a victim of America in the eighties or announce it to his heterogeneous flock. Besides, the sixty-year-old couples who comprised it were not looking at him, even if they did squawk their appreciation, Oh, how exciting! as they read his badge. If only they were as excited about the age and prestige of Dartmouth College. But they neither read the inscription nor asked Will to translate the Latin.

“A voice crying out in the desert”—an index finger accompanied by a modulated, serious voice stopped him smoothly.

Will Gingerich stopped his wandering eyes in order to match his interlocutor with a body. Certainly it was something more than a finger and a voice. Gingerich shook his prematurely balding head. He was afraid of falling into the same malaise that possessed his flock. In front of him he saw a person who was not invisible. Will was on the point of introducing himself in a positive fashion: “Yes, I am a professor of mythology and literature at Dartmouth College.” But it seemed an insult to the institution.

He didn’t have to say a word, because his interlocutor had begun a unilateral evocation: “Ah, those white Dartmouth winters. Really a white hell, which is what José Clemente Orozco said when he went up to paint the frescoes in the Baker Library during the thirties. Did you ever see them?”

Gingerich said he had. He realized that the person speaking to him had not started this conversation because he thought Gingerich had bought his jacket at some university souvenir stand out of nostalgia, or a desire to impress.

“That’s why I took a job at Dartmouth. Those murals are a strange presence in the cold and mountains of New England. Orozco would be normal in California because California looks more and more like an Orozco mural. But, in New England, it was a pleasure for me to write and read protected by the murals.”

“For you, the murals were de luxe bodyguards.”

“Yes.” The professor laughed. “Orozco is an artistic bodyguard.”

He could not refrain from carefully scrutinizing the tall, thin man dressed in a tasteful combination of open-necked shirt, sports jacket, white trousers, mahogany belt with heavy buckle, and blucher moccasins, doubtlessly purchased from L. L. Bean. In one hand, and with no sign of nervousness, the man, who introduced himself as D. C. Buckley, held a Panama hat, which from time to time he comically twirled on one finger.

Buckley raised his other hand to a thin, hard-edged face, like the one in the old Arrow shirt ads, and ruffled his hair the color of old honey. He couldn’t be more than thirty-five years old, Gingerich (who, at forty-two, felt old) estimated, but his hair was old, prophetic, as if an ancient Seminole chief had lent it to him.

“Look, old salt,” he said to Professor Gingerich with the immediacy of the eternal frontiersman, “I suspect you’ve satisfied your primary obligations by this point. I’d rather be nonallusive, and I hope you wouldn’t think it illiberal of me (at least) when I assure you that your flock will not be needing your services for the time being.”

He posed and paused, looking at the sheer cliffs of La Quebrada, which were so highly illuminated by spotlights and torches that they ended up looking as if they were made of cardboard.

“First, they’ll numb their tongues and palates with these appalling cocktails until they’re quite immune to any kind of culinary offering. Later on they’ll eat — because they’ve demanded it, and, because they’ve demanded it, the trip organizers have provided food — baby food: pureed things, bottled dressings, vanilla ice cream, and cold water — and after a while they will be ready to fix their distracted gaze on the divers who plunge off the cliffs. The heights they dive from will be the main attraction, not what takes place in the heart of the Acapulco boy who, like you, only does what he must in order to eat. Don’t you agree?”

Gingerich said it wasn’t hard to guess that a university professor working as tourist guide in Mexico had to be doing it out of sheer necessity. “But,” he hastened to add, “at least I’m trying to kill two birds with one stone.

“I came here because I’m finishing a monograph on the universal myth of the vagina dentata.”

“If it’s universal, why did you want to come here specifically?” asked Buckley critically.

“Because this is where the Acapulco Institute is located,” said Will, as if the institute itself were a universal myth. He blushingly realized he’d been talking like a pedant and added, “The Acapulco Institute has amassed all the documentation relevant to this myth, Mr. Buckley.”

“For God’s sake, call me D.C.”

“Sure, D.C. You can understand why this field is not one that gets much support. Government opposes it. And the women who keep the cult alive would have anyone who even hinted anything about it killed.”

“My favorite detective, Sam Spade, says that only a madman would contravene the sentiments of a Mexican woman. The consequences, to put it that way, would be dangerous; illiberal at least.”

Buckley signaled that the dialogue was coming to an end by twirling his Panama hat: “If you agree, my dear professor, we can kill one stone with two birds, ha ha. I’ll accompany you to the Acapulco Institute if you go with me to investigate vaginas, dentatae or otherwise, to be found here in Acapulco, ha ha!”

And he clapped his Panama hat on his head at a rakish angle.

In D. C. Buckley’s swift Akutagawa coupé, they drove down the steep and twisted road from La Quebrada to the bananafied stench of the seawall road. Gingerich consulted his faithful Filofax with the seal of Dartmouth College embossed on its cover: the Acapulco Institute was on Christopher Columbus Street, between Prince Henry the Navigator and Ferdinand and Isabella Street, in the — the only name missing — Magellan district. The Mexicans were exploiting the didactic aspect of street names to the maximum, the professor noted, and then dared to ask D. C. Buckley what brought him to visit this country.

“You know, old salt. It’s possible, as Henry James wrote, to be faithful without being requited.”

Buckley said all that without taking his narrow and always unperturbed eyes off the twists and turns of the highway.

“No, no,” said Gingerich, amicably shaking his head. “Don’t think I’m some romantic gringo looking for the golden age and the noble savage.”

“It would be illiberal of me to think anything of the sort, old salt,” said Buckley. “I’m a native of New York and Adjacent Islands. I’m a member of the Anar Chic Party of the North American Nations. And though you might not believe in primitive man, that’s what I’m looking for here: an immersion in primigenial sensations, but with primitive woman, ha ha. And you, to which of the nations do you belong?”

“I left Mexamerica when it became independent. I’m too frugal to be from New York and the Islands, and too liberal to be a Dixiecrat. I think I have too much imagination to be part of the Chicago-Philadelphia Steel Axis, and I know I have too much of a sense of humor to sink into the hyperbole of the Republic of Texas, so I joined up with New England.”

“Have you ever heard of Pacífica?” Buckley twisted his mouth.

“I don’t know if I have any right to. In any case, I’m afraid.”

“Well, here we are. But there’s no sign of your Acapulco Institute anywhere.”

“No, they don’t exactly advertise. You have to go straight in.”

“It’s open at night?”

“Only at night. That’s what the pamphlet says. I’ve never been here before.”

They got out of the Akutagawa. The Acapulco night smelled of dead fruit. They stopped in front of a decayed building. They walked up some stairs, holding on to the rusted railings for support.

“At least the ventilation’s good,” said Buckley, brushing the reddish dust off his hands.

Buckley was alluding to the fact that the stairs went up past stucco pilasters badly in need of painting and windows devoid of glass; but then the deep blue of the windows made the night seem even darker. They stopped in a hallway whose only light came from a solitary, immobile bulb that hung over a nondescript door.

“Nothing worthwhile in Mexico is announced anymore,” Will Gingerich explained. “But the institute does send its pamphlets abroad.”

He knocked at the door, involuntarily letting himself be carried away by a forgotten jazz phrase.

“Is this proof that the institute is not worthwhile?” insisted D.C. courteously.

The door opened, and a man of perhaps thirty-two years of age, tall, powerful, wearing a large mustache, with eyes like the chief of an unconquered tribe photographed by Mathew Brady c. 1867, stared at them with no expression whatsoever on his face. Because of the heat, he was wearing Bermuda shorts. Despite the heat, he wore a thick turtleneck sweater. The professor gave his name and introduced D. C. Buckley as his assistant.

“Matamoros Moreno, pleased to serve Quetzalcoatl and you.” He nodded his huge head, and D. C. Buckley felt a tremor run down his spine: he, who had come to Mexico following the tracks of D. H. Lawrence, to receive this gift … and so out of nowhere! He thanked the professor for his liberality with a glance — thanks, old salt!

But he had no time to say anything because Matamoros Moreno ushered them in with a gesture of hospitality, closed the rachitic door of the Acapulco Institute, and shuffled into the naked space as if he were wearing a ball and chain. He slumped his gorilla shoulders and sat in a metal chair facing an ocote table finished in red lacquer.

The professor sat down in the other metal chair, with D.C., modestly adapting to his role as assistant, standing behind him, tall and distant from the terrestrial eyes of Matamoros, who even when sitting seemed to be pushing a cannon uphill. With no preamble, Matamoros said, “As you know, the ancient myth of the vagina dentata only survived in sixteenth-century texts thanks to the missionaries who took the time to listen to the oral histories of the conquered and wrote them down to use them in the Indian colleges. But those texts were soon destroyed by the colonial authorities, both civil and ecclesiastical, because they were deemed lascivious and impure.”

He paused, perhaps to show himself under the light of another bulb that deepened the shadows on a face that was threatening in its immobile simplicity. That face, D. C. Buckley said to himself, merely announces the danger of his body: anyone who doesn’t avoid those eyes runs the risk of not avoiding the body and of being demolished by it. Buckley decided to avoid both.

“The text and the illustration I possess”—now he looked only and terribly at Gingerich—“are the only ones on the vaginal myth saved from the estate of Don Fernando de Alva Ixtilxóchitl, the Indian prince transformed into a writer in the Spanish language, even though he descended from Prince Nezahualpilli of Texcoco.”

Like a cobra about to strike, Matamoros stared fixedly at Will Gingerich. The professor made a face of the kind he only remembered making at muggers in obscure residential streets in Cambridge, Mass., where he was assaulted sometime around 1985. Matamoros’s face simply expressed one thing: that payment was required for his information. But Gingerich said nothing — even a fish wouldn’t get into trouble if he learned to keep his mouth shut. Buckley, too, remained silent. His eyes had wandered a few minutes before from Mr. Moreno and were seeking the swift, hidden eyes lurking in the darkness of the Acapulco Institute.

“I make two conditions for showing you the documents, Professor,” said the president of the aforementioned institute in very grand, very Mexican style.

Gingerich did not ask; he merely waited.

“The first is that you try to publish what I’ve written in some prestigious magazine in the neighboring republics to the north.”

Matamoros’s eyes were nothing compared with his tremendous teeth, which he was now showing. Buckley did not see them because he was looking at the doe-like eyes of a woman in the darkness, behind a door with opaque glass panels, a door that led to…?

“I will certainly try to do that, Mr. Moreno.”

The professor cleared his throat and then went on in the face of Don Matamoros’s obstinate silence, “Of course, the publishing crisis in North America even affects the most powerful publishers, as you no doubt know. It will be very difficult…”

“I don’t give a fuck about any crisis,” said the fearsome Matamoros. “You figure out how to publish my stuff — with a powerful publisher or a weak one, I don’t care. You swear you’ll get me published, my dear professor, or you will never find out about the myth of the vagina dentata in Fernando Ixtilxóchitl.”

“In that case, I swear,” said Gingerich serenely.

“And if you don’t”—Matamoros Moreno smiled through his knife-sharp teeth—“may the fatherland call you to account.”

He blew his nose noisily, then looked at Gingerich, his handkerchief still covering his nose and mouth.

“And if the fatherland doesn’t call you to account, rest assured, my professorial friend, that your humble servant will.”

Gingerich swallowed hard in order to be able to say, “And the second point, Mr. Matamoros?”

“No, pal, it’s not a point, it’s a condition.”

Gingerich could not withstand Matamoros Moreno’s stare. He concentrated on the mustache of the director of the Acapulco Institute: it was not merely a bushy mustache; it was a bush. Matamoros soaked his mustache and covered his ears — it was the only way (said the professor) he could free himself from the din out on the terrace. Was he blind as well? Gingerich then realized that Buckley was no longer in the room.

The citizen of New York and Adjacent Islands was not looking at or listening to this supposed exchange between mythographers. Buckley had stealthily followed the doe’s eyes, which slowly but surely had withdrawn from behind the door with glass panels.

“Condition, of course, Mr. Moreno,” Gingerich agreed, swallowing again.

“This is it: once my work has been published in North America, you personally will take a copy, with the cover, The Myth of the Notched Cunt by Matamoros Moreno, clearly visible, and you will seek out, wherever he may be, a certain Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, Mexican citizen, resident of the capital. You will find him, Professor, somehow and you will force him, in your presence, to eat the paper on which my ideas are printed.”

“Page by page?”

“Ground up like confetti,” answered Matamoros with a truculent gesture.

“But I don’t know this Angel Palomar person.”

“You’ll find him.”

“May I delegate this function? Umm, to my assistant, for example? (Where are you when I need you, you Gothamite bastard?!)”

“You have to do it yourself. You have to be there.”

“What if I’m not.”

“There are other professors willing to accept my conditions. Here’s a letter from the University of El Paso, for instance…”

“I accept,” said Professor Gingerich hurriedly, his mind on the honor of Dartmouth College.

D. C. Buckley followed the little doe in the darkness, smelling her, stepping on the coffee-colored clothing she tossed onto the tiles, while Will Gingerich avidly read the document Matamoros Moreno set before him like some special treat. Despite his impatience, Matamoros’s eyes never left the professor. Buckley touched the girl’s shoulder. It was as smooth as a glass of eggnog with cinnamon. He touched her face. He dared to bring his finger to her mouth. She nipped Buckley’s finger and laughed. The New Yorker got used to the darkness. The naked girl got into a barrel, and invited him to join her. She opened her mouth until it was incredibly wide and cleansed the sky of storm clouds. Buckley lowered himself into the barrel next to her.

“And you are like the bored maguey; you are like the maguey; soon you will have no juices,” Gingerich read hastily. “You men have impetuously ruined yourselves; you are empty. In us, the women, there is a cave, a canyon, whose only function is to wait for what is given us. We only receive. You, what will you give us?”

“That’s enough,” interrupted Matamoros. “This is only a taste. Now read my things. But you must think I’m a boor. Colasa! Pour the gentleman a cup of coffee!”

But Colasa did not answer, and Matamoros laughed and said that the girl had suddenly taken up star counting as a hobby. Gingerich looked around for D. C. Buckley, but said nothing about his absence; Matamoros Moreno had forgotten about the assistant. Had he really forgotten about him, wondered the professor as he walked back down to Christopher Columbus Street with the sample of the myth in one back pocket and Matamoros Moreno’s manuscript in the other. D. C. Buckley’s Akutagawa was still there.

“I saw you dancing last night at the Divan,” whispered Buckley into the girl’s ear. “You looked as if you’d been dipped in tea.”

Colasa Sánchez brought her warm dark body closer to the gringo’s white cold body.

“Why don’t you say anything?” asked D.C.

The girl sang, My heart’s delight’s this little ranch/ Where I live content/ Hidden among the mountains blue/ With rainbows heaven sent, and stared at D.C. for a long time. Finally she told him that there was a boy at the disco, tall with green eyes, dressed Hippieteca style. His wife was in Tehuana costume and they were with their fat uncle. Didn’t he see them?

“I have the vague impression that there were lots of people there.”

Oh, she thought that place was like a club; the owners, the frog and the chink, were giving out free tickets to poor boys and girls to promote class confrontation, that’s how they explained it to her so she would go. It was terrific that the gringo had noticed her, now he was on top of her, it was terrific that she could count the stars, he couldn’t, he had his back to the sky down at the bottom of this barrel: couldn’t they both go find that boy she was talking about?

“What do you want to tell him? What do you want to give him?”

Just what I’m giving you, said Colasa Sánchez seriously, come on now, gringo, I’m moist and ready for you, come inside your sweet little girl, I’ve just had my thirteenth tropical birthday and all for you.

D. C. Buckley unbuttoned his fly, and Colasa opened her legs as if they were tea leaves and stared at him with the eyes of an anxious deer. D. C. Buckley’s member slowly felt around the entrance to Colasa Sánchez’s body, took aim like a bullfighter’s sword about to make the kill, and pushed its way in with strength and a single, brutal motion. The white teeth in Colasa Sánchez’s vagina shattered on D. C. Buckley’s infinitely hard phallus. The gringo laughed with pleasure, while Colasa wept for the same reason.

Later he took her brusquely by the nape of the neck, twisted her black hair, and said all right now count all the stars, and don’t leave out a single one.

6. This is the novel I am imagining inside my mother’s egg

This is the novel I am imagining inside my mother’s egg. I was certainly not going to be put in the shade by my parents’s buddy Egg. Of course, little Christopher: if the earth is round, why shouldn’t a narrative also be round? A straight line is the longest distance between two words. But I know that I am calling in the desert and that the voice of history is always about to silence my voice. But that’s all over with, and anyone might think I’m telling all this twenty years after my birth. But if the reader is my friend and collaborator, as I wish and am sure that … he will not stop to figure out whether this novel is narrated by me ab ovo or twenty years after (either in Horace’s fashion or à la Dumas). Whatever his premise, he will contribute something of his own, he will be an auxiliary, an external, respectful chronicler of the conscientious inquiry into my internal gestation and of what happened before it, because no event comes without its accompaniment of memories: in this you and I, Reader, resemble each other; we both remember, I with the syntony of my genetic chain, in the world exterior to my own: what I don’t know how to remember, you can remember for me; you know what happened, you will not let me lie, you remember and tell me that …

7. Gingerich returned to the Sightseer on foot

Gingerich returned to the Sightseer on foot and found a small group from his flock still drinking at the bar decorated with ship helms and dolphins next to the sea cliff. The tourists looked even more faded than they had before; as they age, North Americans lose color, even those with Mediterranean blood turn as white as talcum powder, their faces white as sheets until they die.

“Where are you from?”

“How much do you make a year?”

“When’s the last time you moved?”

He was tired, sweaty, and unwilling to answer the indiscreet questions asked by these happy, drunk, and old farts. No, philanthropy had not come to the rescue of higher education, Gingerich told them. President Ronald Ranger should have been sentenced to spend the rest of his life watching Robert Bresson movies or listening to someone read him select passages from the Quixote. The tourists could not understand what he was talking about, and behind his back one gestured that Gingerich must be mad.

Buckley saved him. He walked in, saying, “Hi there, Pastor Gingerich, what news from your lambs?” and ordering a double Scotch in the same breath. He then dropped into the sofa-rocker next to the professor. In his hand, he carried a wooden device in the shape of a phallus — it was battered, bitten, bristling with splinters, but still erect.

“The myth is alive, Mr. Shaman. Take it. It’s a souvenir. And now let’s get some sleep. Tomorrow I want to go to the beach.”

8. At 9 a.m. on Monday, January 6, 1992

At 9 a.m. on Monday, January 6, 1992, complaining about the duties entailed in this kind of meeting — comparable in ways to military training or obligatory sugarcane harvesting — the Antillean critic Emilio Domíngez del Tamal, known as the Sergeant because of his long record of denunciations, detective-like snooping, and thundering excommunications, carefully wiped the green sauce off his thin lips and caught sight of his pale reflection in the bluish windows of the tropical dining room, an imitation aquarium made of thick smoked-glass panels.

The Sergeant, the colors of passion dripping out of his mouth (ancient hope, eternal envy), grimaced and straightened his guayabera over his body, which was so thin he could only be seen from the front. He was getting ready to give his celebrated lecture on the responsibility of the writer in Latin America, a rhetorical jewel that had been his bureaucratic launch pad and in which he first enunciated abstract, philanthropic, and utopian goals, linked, naturally, to concrete historical-material realities and to prophetic warnings aimed at those who did not write for the people and who, therefore, were not comprehensible to the Party, and who, therefore, were ridiculing the representatives of the people incarnate in its leadership elite more than in its artistic elite: How could such things be allowed? the Sergeant would ask with rhetorical astonishment, standing before the crowds at the First Congress of the Newest and Most Recent Literature. Since when has the artistic elite paid the salaries of bureaucrats, since when!? This is a realistic question, an honest question; left adrift on the literary market, artists like him, who sacrificed their poetic inspiration to the Revolution, would not survive, so they stopped writing in order to advise, influence, perhaps govern, no, long live the governing elite because it pays the poet a salary, and not the public or people, which is incapable of understanding him. What am I saying!? But the Party and the state understand his silence, they appreciate it, they pay him for it, they reward him for it: because, although Domínguez del Tamal never writes a word, he is perfectly capable of demanding in no uncertain terms that everyone else write in such a way that the Party and the governing elite understand them: to demonstrate my sense of responsibility with regard to the people and my fidelity to the Revolution, I now read my list of art-for-art’s-sake snobs, CIA agents disguised as lyric poets, ingrate formalists who have turned their backs on the nation, francophiles! structuralists! aaaaah, the pleasure of denunciation replaces the pleasures of fame, sex, or money: I shall sacrifice myself for truth and let no one accuse me of having an impoverished imagination: in nine months, the exact time nature grants for human gestation, Sergeant del Tamal went from Vademecum of the Opus Dei looking to heaven, to Falangist looking to Madrid, to Christian Democrat looking to Rome, to Social Democrat looking to Bonn, to being unaligned and looking to Delhi, to Directed Democrat looking to Jakarta, to Tito Communist looking to Belgrade, to Marxist-Leninist looking to Moscow: all in nine months, I tell you! Imagination! Imagination! and Protection! Protection!: the Sergeant paused for an instant, looking at the roll with which he was about to dip into his huevos rancheros, and in that piece of bread he found the moving memory of his Latin American Catholic origins: oh, indivisible sacrament, how I need you, he confessed to his roll that morning, oh divine prostitution, possession of the body of truth and the word in my mouth that hungers for dogmatic security, oh Latin American with five centuries of Catholic Church, Inquisition, and dogma behind me, how can I abandon you in order to be modern, how can I deny you without setting myself adrift in the storm, oh Holy Trinity, oh Holy Dialectic, oh Papal Infallibility, oh Directive from the Politburo, oh Immaculate Conception, oh Proletariat, Fountain of History, oh Path to Holiness, oh Class Struggle, oh Vicar of Christ, oh Supreme Leader, oh Holy Inquisition, oh Union of Writers, oh schismatic heretics: Arians, Gnostics, Manichaeans, oh heretical Trots, Maoists, petit bourgeois, Luxemburgists, oh mystic ladder, oh democratic centralism, oh protecting cupola, oh Thomistic scholasticism, oh socialist realism, oh bread of my soul, oh matter of my bread, oh oh oh

Sitting across the room from the Sergeant, finishing his breakfast of waffles with pecans, the eminent South American critic Egberto Jiménez-Chicharra, fat and olive-complexioned, all beard, oil, and melancholy eyes. He looked toward the Acapulco beach and mentally reviewed the structuralist darts he would hurl with deadly accuracy that morning against Domínguez del Tamal: but despite the lecture on synchrony that was pouring between his cerebral hemispheres just as the Log Cabin syrup was pouring over his frozen, hard waffles smeared with unmeltable margarine, he could not erase the sense of delightful nocturnal obligation which would force him to choose between the handsome Jamaican poet and the rough Argentine novelist who had seduced him, literally, with a lecture whose referent was, d’ailleurs, ailleurs, the otherness of a literature that was being produced, metonymically, at the level of syntagmatic structure, but which also, semantically, in successive preteritions constituted substantive constellations without any sacrifice of the aforementioned preterition. Using his fork, he sketched out a tiny diagram in the syrup he’d poured on his waffles; it faded, only to be replaced by palindromes and palpitations that raced through his feverish mind.

Emilio and Egberto caught sight of each other. Emilio was the first to look away and move toward the exit that led to the hall where the First Congress of the Newest and Most Recent Spanish-American Literature that Never Grows Old and Always Astonishes, only to find, to his disgust, on the other side of the bluish windows a line of caryatids out in the open air, women as svelte as Sergeant Censor, with long white necks, twist the neck of the swan of sex, there is no socialism with sex, said Emilio to himself: it was as an article of faith. There is no capitalism without decadence, smiled the flabby Egberto, uncomfortable because he insisted on wearing his corset in the tropics. Deo Gratias both, both finally Catholic, both believers, frightened of being bereft of their Church, of their sins, the spice of their life, both of them staring at the gringa models with swan-like necks, in a phalanx on the sand, in the water, draped with blue, red, lilac, pistachio organdy, posing with their arms raised and their armpits shaved as smooth as ivory, wearing straw hats, the Acapulco touch, they who had not the slightest trace of heavy religious traditions, holding on to their hats with one hand while the wind, what wind? both literary critics asked themselves, when this January heat lowers your blood pressure and sentences you to drink cups of coffee (Emilio) or to stay in a tub of cold water with the door open and one of Madame Kristeva’s old books leaning against the bar of Palmolive just in case (Egberto), but those girls were fluttered by a wind that made the patresfamilias walking on the beach with their kids toward the playground tremble until naughty little Pepito, who was snapping his towel at a tropical parrot, said look, they’re blowing air onto those gringas, hahaha, they should have hired me to fart at them, shut up you little bastard, is that why we brought you on vacation here where the peak season never peaks, oh come on now honey, stop complaining, we’ll have a good time and look how nicely they make the wind blow on the pretty gringas with those breeze machines that flutter their clothes, when you gonna buy me some rags like that, hon, why do I always have to go around with Salinas y Rocha clothes when all the other ladies in the neighborhood take their little trips to Mexamerica to buy outfits in the Laredos and Juarazo. Because they’re smugglers and bitches, said her husband. What pisses me off, sweetie, is seeing these models surrounded by beggars, cripples, blind people, and hawkers trying to sell decorated gourds and embroidered blouses, as if there were only Indians in this country, look at them photographed for Vogue, holding serapes and things made of onyx: little burros, ashtrays, and bookends of Mexicans asleep with big sombreros over their eyes, the whole world’s gonna see that, Matildona, they’re gonna think that’s what we’re like here, so where do you get off with wanting to make a trip to Mexamerica to buy clothes, that’s why when you get there they look you up and down as if they were doing you a big favor to sell you their shit, because they think you just that minute walked away from your corn grinder, that you’re married to some slob who sleeps off his siestas under a big hat on a street full of lost burros and nopal cactuses, just like that, is that what we’ve progressed for? is that why we became dignified, clean members of the middle class? well, what about it?

“Calm down, Rey,” said Matilde to her husband, and the three of them — father, mother, and son — entered the vast Acapulco amusement park, but at the gate the guard told Pepito that the parrot was not allowed, that it was dangerous, an insane animal, and the little bastard gave him the finger and ran in anyway, even if Matilde and Reynaldo stopped for an instant to contemplate the entryway, whose arch was made up of gigantic plaster whales, Moby Dick ballerinas, which Matilde said were very cute and Reynaldo said he was shocked at her lack of ignorance since anybody knew that this was the posthumous creation of David Alfaro Siqueiros, his 3-D Acapulco polyforum, ah, said Doña Matilde as they walked into that implacable paradise unblemished by a dot of shade, all cement and still waters, completely dedicated to the cult of sunstroke.

They walked toward plaster islands decorated with pirate ships, squirting fountains, hoses, jungle slides reached by bamboo and sand ramps that rise to Tarzanish heights and from which you slide down, ass to the burning tin, here comes someone down said the kid as a vulgar girl cools her steaming backside in the pool where a young, thin, dark-skinned life guard wearing a racing suit and a cap decorated with bottle caps on his hairy head waits for her, he’s got to protect himself from the sun, poor guy, out here the whole damn day in the sun to help the kids who slide down, but Pepito is now running, followed by his breathless parents, to the gigantic pool, the sea in miniature, the Pediatric Pacific, which is calm one minute and the next, to the accompaniment of an air-raid siren, becomes artificially turbulent, full of waves higher than their heads, and Pepito is happy, that’s what he’s here for, Mati, yes it is, Rey, look how much fun our son and heir is having, it was worth all our sacrifices, don’t say it wasn’t, you didn’t go to the Laredos so the kid could come to Aca, right? oh Rey, don’t go on like that, you’ll make me cry, forgive me, honey, you’re right, you’re always right, don’t worry, Matilde, we’re going places, they’ll always need accountants, some because they’ve got dough, others because they don’t, some because they make a lot, others because they lose a lot, but I’m telling you they all need accountants. What’s that, Rey? What, sweetie? That noise, I mean it isn’t normal.

That’s exactly what the folks on the Sun & Fun Toltec Tour were wondering — go on cooperating out there, Reader — as they breakfasted in the Coastline Burger Boy, whose mercury vapor lights blinked and then darkened to the color of the omnipresent Log Cabin syrup: that noise is not normal, mused Professor Will Gingerich, lecturer attached to the tour, young and nervous, and eager to communicate his thesis, even at this time of smiling pancakes from smiling Aunt Jemima. We North Americans always try to get to the frontier, the West, that was the source of our energetic optimism, there will always be a new frontier, we joyfully look for it within the American continent, sadly outside the continent, and hysterically when we use both up: Isn’t there any other place left? Is the whole world California, the end of the earth, the shaky cliff over the sea, the San Andreas Fault? And the ground here in Acapulco is shaking too, but with a frisson the Richter Scale doesn’t register: That’s just how a herd of buffalo sounds, said a sleepy old man from the Wisconsin flatlands as he lit up his old corncob pipe: but what they saw first were not buffalo but three swift camels racing along the beach, mounted by an old man, a black, and a Chinese, all scattering golden nuggets and thick perfumes: oh, typical Mexico — fiesta, carnival, joy, but the Vogue model asked if she might wash her hands after four hours of posing, and when she pulled the chain at the beach club, a tide of shit came bubbling out of the toilet bowl. The model wrapped her green tulle around her, patted her nonexistent stomach, right, that shit was not hers, certainly not hers; she tried to open the door, the lock, naturally, did not work, a strange beach boy, fat and hairless, had removed the handle, the shit tide rose, gobbled up her beribboned, silver Adolfo slippers, wet her infinitely discreet Kotex blemish, her flat tummy, swirled in her belly button and her pursed asshole, she had no time to scream, to escape.

Mariano Martínez Mercado woke up in his room in the Mr. President Hotel wrapped in the arms of his rival, Decio Tudela, both extremely satisfied after a night of shared marijuana that compensated for Penny López’s refusal to leave with either of them. But Marianito wondered about the discomfort of his nightmare, the lethargic stench of his room, which was not solely the burnt-straw-mat stink of marijuana; he got up, dizzily untangling from between his legs the bottoms of the Brazilian tropical pajamas Decio had lent him — barely a suggestive loincloth — in order to feel his way blindly to the air-conditioner controls. “Shit,” he said to himself, “it’s busted.” Then he went to the window, but the window would not open, and a label stuck to the greenish glass informed him:

THIS SUITE HAS BEEN CLIMATE CONTROLLED FOR YOUR

C O M F O R T

DO NOT OPEN THIS HERMETICALLY SEALED WINDOW

and amid the growing cloud of smoke that poured out of the air-conditioning vents with an aroma of burnt mustard as suggestive as his carioca topless pajamas, Marianito fell to his knees, scratching the glass and recalling his not so distant childhood, as if he had lived it a thousand years before and not merely fifteen: he remembered the signs under European train windows, as though they were decal Madeleines:

E PERICOLOSO SPORGERSI

NICHT HINAUSLEHNEN

INTERDIT DE PENCHER EN DEHORS

In the words of Eugenio d’Ors, Against the rules to pinch the whores, he inexplicably chanted, looking out the window at the full length of the coffee-colored stain on the bay, like the juncture of the Amazon and the Atlantic Ocean, he said to the Brazilian, but Decio Tudela was no longer moving, Decio Tudela was dead, suffocated, and Marianito cried out in horror and pleasure when he touched him, still warm, and decided to die hedonistically, that at least, seeing the dead and naked body of Decio in the bed. Marianito gently spread his legs and said he was going to give meaning to his life with an act of mortal pleasure, a gratuitous, erotic culmination, he left his whole vain and frivolous life behind him in that instant: he was going to affirm sex even in death, above and beyond death: there would be witnesses, yes sir, because they would be found this way, coupled like dogs, like this, in a perpetual ecstasy, oh, a huge dark-colored tub was invading the purity of the sea, a coffee-colored flow, a vomit of all the garbage from the hotels and restaurants in the half June moon between López Matthews Avenue and Witch Point. Jogging along the public beach of Little Sunday, where he would surely find the supreme justification for Lawrence & Lowry’s ultra-Mexican formulas, D. C. Buckley could not appreciate things in exactly the same way Marianito had in his death throes, but he was the first to see and suffer the worst.

The steady trot, controlled, not rapid but worse than rapid because it was so controlled, like an infernal drum, distant at first. D.C. stopped jogging, cocked his ruddy ear: the noise came down from the hills, crossed the street that ran along the coast, now it had become a trot over sand, horrid, eerie. Would D. C. Buckley survive thanks to his Yankee communion with savage nature, the landscape of evil, according to the precepts of Larry & Lowry? The long, blond, chromomacaronic Wasp asked himself this in a fleeting presentiment while thinking about the group of North American government functionaries and military men vacationing in the Last Breezes Hotel. As they were taking their preprandial dip in the saltwater pool of the Shell Beach Club, they discussed the current dearth of bad guys in the world: without reliable adversaries, we can’t know who we are. What would become of us without a Bad Guy — Nazi, Commie, Chinese, Korean, Bulgarian, Cuban, Vietnamese, Nicaraguan. The United States can’t survive without enemies, even though we have the source of all evil: Russia, the Evil Empire. At the same time they played pat-a-cake with their little feet, noting that between pats there was not only a ludic will and a strange love but also little patties of shit. Then, above their heads, above the seawall, above the beach umbrellas, indifferent to everything that held it back, as ferocious as a Campuchean defoliation, as inexorable as a Chilean putsch, the grand wave of poop sent with unparalleled energy by the reversed currents of El Niño from the coasts of Chile and Peru buried Professor Vasilis Vóngoles, a Romanian expert in Mexican affairs in the State Department, General Phil O’Goreman, commander in chief of Panama Canal defenses, Ambassador Lon Biancoforte, North American representative in the neighboring republic of Costaguana, and Mrs. Tootsie Churchdean, North American Ambassador to the Ministry of Colonies in Washington. The wave surprised all of them, cocoloco in hand, gardenia-scented straws in their mouths: it buried them in the Suzukis, the Hondas, the Honduras, the Guatemalas, and the Nicaraguas they had forged: the tide swept away Professor Vóngoles’s glasses and D. C. Buckley saw them from afar, before anyone else, in that morning’s repentant fog, the derelict, diplomatic specks in the sea, while on the beach the disciplined trot, the dark eyes, the wet muzzles, the copper-colored skin: all the dogs of Acapulco fell silent: they were going to hear their masters, their atavistic fathers: D. C. Buckley thought quickly: in California he’d been told never look a coyote straight in the eye, they hypnotize you, feign indifference, walk slowly, go into the water, perhaps they won’t dare follow you.

He never had a chance: the coyotes went right for him, all intent on attacking a single part of his body, carefully protected but also exhibited in its sleeping eloquence, exhibited to the admiration of the beaches and the savage dark girls on the beaches: the pack of coyotes assaulted Buckley’s sex behind the curtain of a blue Speedo bathing suit, they devoured the carefully folded Kleenex Buckley used to augment his admirable priapic dimensions, they dined on the nervous, shrunken flesh, they tore it off in one piece, and Buckley fell flat on his face in the sea at Little Sunday Beach, thinking that a few days before he had escaped Colasa Sánchez’s vagina dentata and that her tight, skinny little ass had been a whirlwind of foam and blood.

9. The coyotes run along all the beaches

The coyotes run along all the beaches, from Little Sunday to Tamarind, to Califurnace, to El Ledge, to La Countess, but they do not always attack. Nor do they even stop every time, as if they know where they are going. They all follow the oldest, and he follows the ragged boy who nurtured and trained them so tenderly during all those months. Like a banderilla of tattered skin planted in the center of a red coconut grove at the heights of the communal lands of Holy Cross, the boy, his eyes closed, invokes the most secret genealogies, the most perverse atavism: the children of wolves, river of wolves, Guadalupe — where the wolves ford the river — Matamoros Moreno mutters silently, as if he were pushing an entire artillery train, followed by the blossoming Colasa Sánchez, seeking out his enemy: my father, Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, seen in the disco the previous night by Colasa. But the coyotes are faster than Matamoros, faster than the cars, they turn away from the beach and head for the street in order to avoid the gigantic tidal wave that bites the very nails of the beach to the quick, and the bald fat kid at the municipal pumping station gives the order to all the allies of the Four Fuckups, those who had been run off the hills, their relatives and friends: Pump the sewage back to the bathrooms, give it back to the places from whence it came, the toilet bowls and hotel kitchens, block up the pipes, let shit return to shit.

Faster than the cars, the coyotes: panic seized those in traffic-bound cars when they understood that they were cut off, surrounded by ferocious beasts, windows closed tightly, horns silent out of fear, like the dogs that silently watched the return of their savage ancestors. The pack poured in through the service entrance of El Grizzly Hotel in the same way that the papayas injected with prussic acid, the pineapples spiked with copper sulphate, and the Mirinda lemonade blended with santonin had poured in from delivery trucks earlier that same morning. The Mayor of Acapulco Town Council, Don Noel Guiridí, pauses in the heat to have a lemonade, reaches his arm through the window of his navy-blue Ford LTD, and receives the opened bottle without even looking at the Mirinda. Delighted, he drinks, checking over the keynote address he is about to give at the Literary Symposium. Our Don Noel is not only the standard-bearer of the PRI’s revolutionary revindication in the port of Acapulco, but also a qualified literary critic, thus demonstrating that belles lettres are not estranged from the political fray, a man who is transported in a luxurious limousine wearing (the reason why he is so fatally thirsty!) a scarf, earmuffs, and a camel-hair overcoat, because of his mania for trying to convince people that Acapulco is not in the tropics but is actually a spa with a wintry climate where the human mind comes alive and ready for literary creation: the figure he cuts, even more than his speech, constitutes an attempt to add an unpublished chapter to the history of Ice at the Equator (such was the monomania of the monograph he was prepared to read that morning: the Venezuelan novelist, and quondam president, Rómulo Gallegos sent an Indian downriver along the Orinoco to Ciudad Bolívar to eat ice cream for the first time in his life; Gabriel García Márquez took a child to experience ice in Macondo; Sergio Ramírez Mercado causes it to snow in a fictional Managua just so the pro-Somoza ladies could show off their fur coats; and cotton snowflakes fall on the spectators during the production number “Flying Down to Vigo” in Carlos Diéguez’s film Bye-Bye Brazil), but instead of all that, he begins to shout ay, I’m seeing everything green; he loses control and urinates a purple liquid; he becomes delirious, trembling, he falls unconscious, then dies. His horrified chauffeur rapidly raises the car’s pitch-black windows. Then the coyotes attack the armored car and for once are frustrated.

On the other hand, inside the hotel, one coyote leaps at the throat of the eminent Antillean critic Emilio Domínguez del Tamal at the exact moment he is finishing his habitual lecture with the words The peoples of our nations demand this revolutionary commitment from the writer and is awaiting the usual counter-statement from the no less celebrated South American critic Egberto Jiménez-Chicharra with questions such as what about preterition? And diachrony? And epanidiplosis? But this time the words of the Literary Sergeant are mortally tasted by the coyote’s saw-like canines, since Chicharra decides to express his scorn for del Tamal by skipping his lecture and sinking instead into his bath, which is bubbling with wonderful lemon-colored Badedás bath salts. He leaves his book of structuralist criticism on a book stand next to the tub and leaves the door to his suite open as well, open to chance, danger, and sin, said the eminent critic to himself, even though he was frankly annoyed that homosexuality was no longer a sin for anyone and merely one more practice among so many others, tolerated by all, denounced by none. He wanted homosexuality to be a sin again, that it be the vice that dares not speak its name, not an activity as neutral as brushing one’s teeth. Why did the idea of sodomy as a sin excite him so much and leave the young men cold? he wondered, when through his bathroom door, like a miraculous dream, came, fleetingly and busily, a naked young man, covered in gold dust, his whisk-broom hair covered by a horrid rimless borsalino decorated with bottle caps but oooooh what a penis and what a hard little ass … The Orphan Huerta said not a word; at the same time, he dropped a hair dryer, an FM radio, and an electric mixer (all three plugged into a transformer) right into Chicharra’s bath; he died fried without responding to del Tamal: a silent critic, a thankful Angel would sigh, but the same was not to be said for Matamoros Moreno, who violently strode toward the congress, followed by his daughter Colasa, in hopes that he would have his works published by one of the participants, perhaps with a prologue by Sergeant del Tamal and perhaps with an epilogue by Jiménez-Chicharra: father and daughter hear the repeated sound of the song “Flying Down to Vigo” played on a broken phonograph, but it does not rain cotton flakes, here what is coming down is darkness, their blood freezes, and Matamoros says to Colasa:

“If I find out that this opportunity was also stolen from me by that punk Palomar, I swear, Colasa, I swear to you I’ll…”

He had no time to finish; outside, the phalanx of coyotes once again advanced toward the sea, pushing the phalanx of Vogue models toward the water’s edge; the coyotes howled and the models shrieked, and there were no more photographers to be seen.

The symptoms of arsenic poisoning are convulsions and leg cramps, vomiting and diarrhea; the throat dry and closed; unbearable headache; precipitous fall in pulse rate, cessation of breathing, finally collapse of the frozen bodies (snow in Managua, ice in Macondo, refrigerators in Ciudad Bolívar, Flying Down to Vigogogo! Forever/ Forever!), and those on the Fun & Sun Toltec Tour exhibited quite a few of those symptoms. They lay there over the counters, on their backs on the tile floors, clutching a handful of straws in the Coastline Burger Boy; Professor Gingerich, overly absorbed in his theory of frontiers, had eaten nothing and walked out onto the avenue trembling with fear, abandoning the death that had been injected into plastic bottles of Log Cabin syrup: he looks at the desolation around the Tastee-Freez, the Kentucky Fried Chicken, the Denny’s, the VIPS, the Sanborn’s, the Pizza Huts, all overwhelmingly silent while their neon signs finally fall dark and the howls of the coyotes are followed by their almost human laughter, a cross between the laugh of a hyena and an old man, the laughter of clowns and witches.

The coyote’s laugh, if you’ve never heard it, sends real chills down your spine: Gingerich sees groups of the beasts on the hilltops, gathered in circles, as if they are holding a meeting before attacking the lost, helpless gringo tourists in their pink jeeps. The coyotes pour down crags and hillsides; no one on the coast road can move now, the animals are much faster than any old taxi or new Mustang: a knot of silence, no one dares to blow his horn out of fear of attracting their attention, so the traffic jam stretches from the new hotel Señorita Mariposa on the site of the old Navy base of Icacos to Elephant Stone Point on the Caleta peninsula, and at the amusement park the noise of the squirting fountains and hoses and the artificial waves isolate the happy families from the horror around them. Don’t tell me that all this isn’t cuter than the beach, more comfortable and modern, says Reynaldo, who imagines himself in the Cathedral of Amusement for Suburban Man, Eden Regained! Matilde, who is very Catholic, follows him intuitively because in nature it’s just like that, well, you know, that’s where Adam and Eve sinned, right? Our First Parents were chased out of there by angels snapping towels, just like Pepito snapping his towel at the parrot, who now reappears as a bird of ill omen, screaming on top of the slide: Bastards, It’s All Over, All Over, Bastards, which Pepito had taught his little parrot at night under the covers. Soak Your Ass for the Last Time, You’ll Be Drinking Through Your Ass Soon, My God, make him shut up, Rey, what will people say, at least no one knows it’s our son or our parrot either, said Matilde who prefers to look toward the pool, where the waves were beginning to stir again and her Reynaldo, what? Because the parrot from his forest perch is screeching Matilde Rebollo is a Whore and Reynaldo Rebollo is a Faggot, ay ay ay, Matilde starts to faint now for sure, everyone would find out, her husband stopped her, the fat matron gets away from him, falls into the pool, and there she becomes entangled with the insecure bodies of those of her class enjoying their tropical vacation, amusement paid for out of savings, mindful of advertisements, and the considerations of prestige: both of them, Reynaldo and Matilde Rebollo, hugging in the pool, amid one hundred and thirty-two other bodies defined by centuries of monastic pallor or canefield ringworm, and our Pepito, where, for God’s sake, is he? why don’t we see him? why can’t we get out of here? How slippery this is getting, Rey, the waves are getting higher, isn’t it too much now? Why don’t they stop it? Answer me, Rey, but Reynaldo was dragged to the eye of the cyclone along with the other one hundred and thirty bodies submerged by the artificial waves that kept them from moving freely, tossed like corks, less than corks! The pounding of water on their heads, once, again, again, and again and again, the machines manipulated by the Orphan Huerta down in the underground control room, the cascades of broken glass hidden in the slide water, the screams, the astonishment, and once again the silence.

The cockroaches checked out of the hotels of Acapulco that morning, the coyotes moved in to devour the asphyxiated bodies, the bodies with dilated pupils, clenched teeth, foam-covered mouths, and that smell like almonds; and the cadavers with acid guts, burning tripes, metallic tongues, and blue vomit. Behind the pack, the dispossessed from the hillsides reunited by the Four Fuckups along with Angel and Angeles, who told the homeless: Do unto them what they did unto you: Acapulco belongs to two nations, tourism below and squatters above, okay, now come down, and this young fellow here, Hipi Toltec, has been training the same coyotes they used against you.

Angel, an old connoisseur of garbage, had laid out, as if he were setting up an open-air market, bottles of Heinz ketchup, Cap’n Crunch and Count Chocula cereal boxes, bottles of relish and rancid mustard, rubbery bread, and plastic chickens, McDonald’s murderous hamburgers, the sickly concoctions found in gringo refrigerators, open bags of North American garbage food, chips, Fritos, Pop-Tarts, gobstoppers, smurfberry crunch, pizza-to-blow, and the spilled syrups of Coke and 7-Up and Dr Pepper, and side by side with the most grotesque examples of this antifood of suicidal madness — the balloon, fart, prepared, and greasy heart foods of the North — he put deodorants like Right Guard, the soaps and shampoos of Alberto V05, Glamour and hairspray and Dippity-Do jell, and capillary dye, Sun In, tanning creams made by Sea & Ski, and the most secret element of all, vaginal ointments — lemon-scented, strawberry, raspberry — menthol condoms, eucalyptus suppositories. All so the coyotes could smell them, know one from another, and attack those who used, digested, sweated, wore, put up with, or who were all this. All this escapes exclusive receptacles to join the shit in the sea and the national refuse of fried-food stands and plastic Virgins of Guadalupe, sumptuous zapote rinds and soda bottles used as nesting places for small mice and snakes; the garbage of the North comes out to join the garbage of the South and the coyotes are trained and fed by Hipi Toltec with pieces of his skin. Egg took charge of poison and gas logistics, the Orphan Huerta was responsible for drains and pumping stations, to say nothing of (he had a personal interest in it) the destruction of the amusement park: he spends half an hour looking at Pepito’s castrated cadaver, his balls cut off by the glass sent down the slide, and the Orphan, a crooked grin on his face, stands there watching him: so you had a mom and dad, did you, you little bastard, so you lived in Nouveau Heaven, and had your little vacations in Aca, so you had lots of Ocean Pacific swimsuits and lots of rubber balls, well now you’ve got glass balls, you little bastard!

The entire spectacle was conceived and directed by Angel and Angeles Palomar, as were the mottoes, especially the gigantic sign that now at midday is burning brightly on the decrepit walls of the last Sanborn’s in Acapulco:

SHIT MEETS SHIT

SHEET MEATS SHEET

LONG LIVE THE SWEET FATHERLAND!

LONG LIVE THE CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION!