Christopher Unborn

1. Potemkin City

The city is the poetry of passion and movement; quietude is part of that poetry; it is rare; it is definitive; in fearing it we fear disguised death.

My father composed these sentences in his head as he realized he was returning for the second time in his life to the capital he had only left on two occasions: when he found his country in Oaxaca and when he lost it in Acapulco. On the first occasion, he’d left the provinces bearing two fears: that of not finding anything in its place when he went back to look for it; that of having too easy a time finding another woman instead of Agueda or those shadows of Agueda, her cousins with invisible shoulders and enigmatic hair: the “governesses of his heart” whom he exiled from his life when he exchanged glances with them, glances in which he imagined them all dried out, mad, or dead.

My mother Angeles has fallen asleep leaning on my father’s shoulder as he negotiates one curve after another on the old abandoned road from Apango to Mexico City. But I do not sleep: my eyes, you know, are open all the time; my eyes are transparent within the opacity of the maternal womb; my eyes still devoid of veils read my father’s words: this is something only we recently conceived types know; later on, even we forget it; but now we are too close to the origin: the pleasure and pain of that first expulsion flooding down the long chain of genetic information. What are my father’s thoughts as he takes heed of the faded signs DANGEROUS CURVE 600 FEET AHEAD compared to my DNA as it loses itself in the night of Aztec and Andalusian centuries crisscrossed by Moorish and Hebrew flashes! Well, it’s like Uncle Homero’s tongue as he sleeps there in the back of the PRI propaganda van!

For which reason I am well positioned to inform you, Reader dear, that as he drives, my father looks at the signs but he also looks at my mother’s nodding head, her hair parted down the middle, and the hint of spectral whiteness to be seen in the part itself, and he knows that, despite everything, he was not mistaken about the resolution of his second fear; there are women we see just once and see completely and others we only discover little by little; Angeles was one of the latter: he never fully discovered her; she was not the López Velarde-style woman, nor Agueda or her mourning-clad cousins: Angeles was modern, intellectual, independent, and left-wing: but as with those numinous cousins, he never fully found her, and in this movement in which he knew where things were (Agueda in the San Cosme and San Damián Church, Angeles in the Alameda Park) but things were transformed, they ran away, they reappeared enriched, they turned over their golden fruit and fled once more with the hope but not the certainty of a return. He wanted to find the harmony of the contradiction that nibbled at the apple of his life: to be a modern Mexican conservative. Thus, to find Angeles without finding her completely was never like returning to a place, experiencing the comfort of recovering it there, but knowing that he would never completely know it or understand it. This, said Angel Palomar, my father, to himself, was the secret of his soul.

And she, asleep, loving, raped, both of them raped by Matamoros Moreno, physically raped, immediately abused, not from a distance by money and power, not emblematically, as by poor Uncle Homero, who was now awake and arguing interminably with Uncle Fernando in the rear of the van. And what about her? Did she know all his secrets, understand them, keep mum about them in order not to break the harmony? The idyll of their meeting, the secret surprise:

“I couldn’t sleep all night, I was so excited after I met you…”

“And what about me, babe? I was there too, remember…”

And what about her? Before her, before Agueda, women always came to my father, sought him out, he didn’t look for them: but they were an urban nuisance: spongers, droppers-in, pests: the problem, ultimately, was always how to get rid of them; he only tracked down two women in his life. Angeles, asleep now on his right shoulder, smelling of resin and earth; Agueda, asleep on his left shoulder, as if she’d flown in through the open window smelling of dust and incense. He wondered if they knew that the ferocious promiscuity of this man who tracked them down so monogamously was only taking time out, that it was like a latent infection, a moral herpes that made him confuse the economic and political disorder of Mexico with amorous chaos: how long could the contradiction between social disorder and erotic fidelity last?

Placing his life at risk, he closed his eyes for an instant in order the better to smell my mother’s hair, and prayed that he would never fully understand her; that there would never be a third desire in his life: that he would never again be tempted to include his erotic life in the collective disorder of which he was a victim and which he wanted to judge and damage for that very reason. But my mother Angeles had her own dream, unknown to my father. He had met her in a garden in the heart of Mexico City. On the highway, she dreamed that she had never left that garden; as in some ancient book illustrated with the romanticized image of nineteenth-century childhood she’d seen in Angel’s grandparents’ house, the curious little girl opened the window of her cabin to see the forest and venture out into it, but the forest had another door to a garden and that garden yet another door to a park and the park led to a jungle and the jungle to the sea, which was the most mutable garden of all. He thought he found her in a park. But he didn’t know that she had always lived in parks. And that it was an illusion to think he could find her anywhere else. My mother has not just been found by my father because the garden she lives in has not been completely explored by him; but he doesn’t know it yet. The doors of that storybook might be the lock on the door to Aunt Capitolina and Aunt Farnesia’s bedroom.

She woke up when they were on the bridge over the Atoyac River in Acatlán and a barrier forced them to detour uselessly to Puebla and avoid — for what reason no one could tell — passing through Cuernavaca. She opened her eyes and saw the ineluctable and elemental signs of human life: women on their knees washing clothes at the river (women on their knees to enter the church, to make tortillas, to prepare to give birth), a boy happily urinating off the bridge, an angry man tugging at a mocking burro (patience is the burro’s irony), another boy’s white funerary procession: a distracted potter spinning his wheel just as God idly gave a single spin to the universal top.

Then the first walls painted on the shores of the desert:

IS GOD PROGRESSING?

The mutilated van rolled along like just one more tumbleweed past the agaves and the yuccas in the high desert, all of them hoarding water, as if they knew what was waiting for them as soon as the car dove into the sudden black hole that seemed to swallow everything around it — in this case, the backed-up line of cars and the multitude on foot, some barefoot, others wearing huaraches, all poor and fine, with the aristocratic bones of misery piercing the skin of their faces, arms, and ankles: the jammed-up cars and pilgrims who wanted to enter Mexico City through the eye of a needle, a genuine and not even slightly metaphoric Taco Curtain, said Uncle Fernando Benítez, one that completely surrounded the capital, with strategically located entrance points at Texmelucan, Zumpango, Angangueo, and Malinalco: but the Malinalco entry is closed because the son of a governor or mayor — no one bothers to remember — seized by force of arms all the land adjacent to the new highway from Yautepec to Cuernavaca and no one knows if the complaint lodged by the people from the communal land, who haven’t seen a miserable endomorphic peso, has been taken up by the authorities, or if the highway is being built, or if the son of the governor or mayor ordered it closed forever, let’s see anyone try to get through: who knows? who knows? who knows? and what about us, how are we going to get through the inspection held at the Taco Curtain, especially now that a powerful fourteen-feet-high Leyland eighteen-wheeler is getting in front of us. its driver staring ferociously out the window at my father, still driving the Van Gogh, challenging him to pass the long line of vehicles ahead on the curve, not caring that there is an armada of wheezing buses coming from the other direction. My mother wakes up instinctively at that moment and, along with my father, stares back at the truck driver, a cut-off albino about twenty-five years of age, dressed in leather, wearing gloves decorated with chrome-plated studs, clearly visible because the albino grasps the truck’s gigantic steering wheel so ferociously. The albino stares at us ferociously (they say) through his black wraparound glasses, the kind worn by blind singers (felicianos we could call them, charley rays, wonderglasses): what’s ferocious about him are his white, high, curving, mephistophelian brows. My parents see the pictures of the Virgin, Mrs. Thatcher, and Mamadoc as well as the portrait of an unknown Lady, all surrounded by votive lamps inside the cab, while, outside, the truck’s jukebox-style lights go on and off, and on the roof a light spins around, throwing out even more multicolored lights.

“Let him pass,” my mother says. “Truck drivers don’t care who you are or whether you live or die. In my town…”

She stops talking; the noisily insolent truck went ahead of us. The truck had the right (or wrong) of way and showed it in its open back door, which revealed its refrigerated interior, where the cadavers of steers swung back and forth on bloody hooks; fresh cow and calf carrion, fresh pig heads and trotters, shimmying gelatines, brains and liver, kidneys and lamb heads, testicles, sausages, loins, breasts, the albino’s armada gets ahead of our van, drowning out the joyous exclamation of Uncle Fernando: “A Soutine!” drowning out everything with the prepotency of its mission: all of that was going to feed the monstrous city of thirty million people: we, if we were lucky, were going to be fed too, and if we were on the highway, it was because there was no other way to get to the city: first the roads were left to rot when it only cost ten pesos to go from Mexico City to Acapulco by plane, but then the creaking planes stopped working because there were no spare parts and inspection was totally inadequate, airports without radar, colonial backwardness, less than what you find in Botswana, whined Don Homero!

The truck armada passed us laughing, giving us the finger, all of them with their doors open and their hacked-up wares hanging out so we could see what they were carrying and why they had the right to pass us, put our lives at risk, and enter Mug Sicko City before we did, they were carrying the red, chilled death just to bring life to the pale, suffocated life of the capital; they were the long-haul drivers, a race apart, a nation within the nation, who possessed the power to starve people and link the remotest parts of the squalid, disconnected territory of the Sweet Fatherland. A decal on a fender proclaimed:

TRUCK DRIVERS WITH THE VIRGIN

Their cargo would be our lives: we let them pass by and just miss smashing head-on into the Red Arrow that was coming from the opposite direction, and we waited our turn, exhausted, paralyzed, inching along just to have the privilege of reentering the Federal District by means of the highway, without having Uncle Homero — which would have been the easy way to do it — take out his PRI identification, which he cannot do because he has to keep a low profile for a bit, and Uncle Fernando can’t appeal to President Jesús María y José Paredes without bringing Uncle H. to grief, and as for us, well, it’s better no one knows where we’re coming from or what we did in Kafkapulco in what seems a century ago now — time flies, time flees, time fleas, time flies, tempus fugit!

“Eheu, eheu, fugaces!” sighed our fecund Don Homero Fagoaga, as if he were reading my intrauterine thoughts. My parents turned around to see both uncles: Don Fernando had his head in his hands and was muttering, his eyes turned upward: “Oh, Lord, please, please free us from our relatives, Lord. What a nightmare! This is the last straw.”

Homero Fagoaga was decked out with two lustrous pitch-black tresses tied up with tricolor ribbons; he’d shaved off the tuft of hair he wore under his lip, rouged his cheeks, powdered his brow, smeared his lips scarlet, and restored the sparkle to his dying eyes with the help of some Maybelline; naturally, he had no need to powder the milky whiteness of his bosoms and his bare arms, given the rather small size of the blouse embroidered with carnations and roses he’d managed to squeeze into, although it was true he did have to tighten the red rebozo around his waist and, finally, work his way into the tiny red velvet slippers and shake out the beads on the wide skirt of the china poblana outfit he’d tricked himself out in.

Dear niece and nephew, please don’t look at me that way. You know how curious I am: well, this morning I was poking through the chests and armoires in the Malinaltzin sacristy. I found no white vestments, no stoles, no bodices, but I did find this proudly national costume. Think what you like, imagine what you please. I’ll simply repeat the famous words of the onetime chronicler of this magnificent city — which, it seems, is keeping us at arm’s length for the nonce — Don Salvador Novo, when a press photographer discovered him sitting at his dressing table: “I feel pretty, and witty, and gay.”

He hummed a tune from West Side Story and delicately stepped out of the Van Gogh to deal with the ill-featured but well-armed cop who was about to question us. He swirled his beaded skirt even more: Uncle Homero needed no crinolines to stand out in a crowd. The width of those homeric hips was such that the design of the eagle perched on the nopal devouring the serpent did not flaccidly hang down from his waist to the ground but virtually flew, proudly unfurled over Uncle Homero’s ass.

“I’m coming, I’m coming, if I don’t that eagle’s gonna lay an egg!” exclaimed the policeman. With a graceful gesture, Homero pushed aside the cop’s submachine gun and, with his eyes as bright as streetlights, said, “I can see you’re happy to see me, Mr. Policeman, but let’s not get carried away; come on now, put your little gun away!”

“Got a pass?”

“A pass?” swaggered Homero, his hands resting on his hips. “A pass for the queen of the bullring, the empress of the arena, Cuca Lucas, who’s needed no pass to get into Buckingham Palace or the White House?”

“But it’s that…”

“Don’t say a word. Our national honor has been carried through the world on my songs, young fellow. Neither the world nor love has ever closed its doors to me — so do you think you’ll be the first?”

“But it’s that we’ve got to know where you’re coming from.”

“Where do my songs come from,” said Homero in a singsong voice, “and where do they go: to praise the singularity and the beauty of the fatherland!”

“We’ve got our orders, miss.”

“Madam, if you please.”

“Okay. Madam.”

“Don’t bully me now, young man. Put that gun away. So you want to know where I’m coming from, do you now, dearie? From my little farm just beyond the wheatfield there.”

“And what about your friends here, ma’am?”

“Friends? You could treat me with more respect, handsome.”

“Ma’am, the law…”

“The law, the law, handsome! Papers, license plates, influence, friends, isn’t that what you mean?”

The representative of the law looked sadly and apprehensively at Uncle Fernando’s handlebar mustache and his broken glasses. “I’m her agent,” said the loyal Benítez as the cop closed his eyes. Then he opened them in curiosity at the resort shirts and blue jeans my parents were wearing: “We’re the lady’s musical accompanists,” said my father. “I play the guitar and she plays the violin.”

“Okay…”

“You can believe me, Mr. Policeman,” said Homero, climbing back into the van. “Thanks to me, the glories of Mexico are known throughout the world. Why, because of me, people know that only Veracruz is beautiful, how pretty Michoacán is, that there is no other place like Mexico, how pretty the morning in which I come to greet you is, that I’m a guy from the borderland, hurray for Ciudad Juárez, hurray for Chihuahua, and my pretty country! and Granada, a land I’ve dreamed of…”

“Okay, okay…”

The cop closed the door behind Don Homero’s ass — including the eagle in repose — just barely resisting the temptation to stretch out his hand, resisting the reflex action of firing his machine gun.

“My, how pretty Taxco is, that cute little town with a saintly face! Toledo, the shining star of the world is what you are! Matamorelos the handsome, with your superb orange groves, and Puebla is just the frosting on the cake, that’s what Puebla is!”

“Enough, ma’am…”

“Din-din-din go the bells of Medellín; ay, Jalisco don’t give up; Querétaro, rétaro, rétaro, don’t hold me back, ’cause here I come!”

“All I’m gonna say now is get the fuck out of my sight, ma’am, get going ’cause you’re blocking the way…”

“The way to Corralejo, my beautiful Pénjamo, you shine like a diamond…”

“Stop, ma’am!” shouted the cop in a flood of tears.

“Don’t stop, nephew, step on it now!”

“Ma’am,” sang out the cop, “I want to hear more about Pénjamo, that’s where I come from…”

“Step on it and don’t lose your nerve, Angelito! Just what I was afraid would happen…!”

“Oh, honey, don’t do this to me, it’s breaking my heart!”

“Will you get going, you idiot!”

He could hear the weepy voice of the trooper—“a girl from Cuerámaro told me I looked as though I came from Pénjamo”—and then he entered the gray-skied world, near to where Hernán Cortés had his private hunting preserve on Peñón de los Baños, plastered up with signs advertising beer, lubricants, and cockroach poison, while Angel stuck his head out the window trying to find a way through the wheezing jalopies and Angeles began to cough: her eyes vainly sought the birds of Moctezuma’s aviary, the quetzals with their green plumage, the royal eagles, the parrots, and the fine-feathered ducks, the flower gardens and fragrant trees, the pools and cisterns of fresh water, all of it built in cut stone and stuccoed over, and instead they found the monumental series of one-dimensional façades of famous buildings and statues and bodies of water all lined up at the entrance to the city to raise the spirit of traveler you have reached the place where the air is etc.: the Arc de Triomphe and the Statue of Liberty, the Bosphorus, and the Colosseum, St. Basil’s, the Giralda, the Great Wall and the Taj Mahal, the Empire State Building and Big Ben, the Galleria in Houston (Texas) and the Holiday Inn in Disneyland, the Seine, and Lake Geneva, all lined up in a row, in hallucinatory succession, like a vast Potemkin Village erected in the very porticos of Mexico City in order to facilitate self-delusion and so we could say to ourselves, “We aren’t so badly off; we’re at least at the level of; well, who knows, we’re as good as; well, who said we didn’t have our very own Galleria Shopping Mall and our own Arc de Triomphe: who says this is the only great metropolis without a river or a lake; who would dare say it; only a bad Mexican, a sell-out, someone green with envy…”

But as they stared at this hallucination, Angel and Angeles knew (Don Homero was rubbing off his makeup, removing his wig; Don Fernando refused to believe what he was seeing through his glasses broken by Matamoros Moreno’s thugs) that this one-dimensional cardboard prologue to the city was identical to the city itself, that it wasn’t a caricature but a warning: Potemkin City, Potemkin Land in which President Jesús María y José Paredes heads a government in which nothing that is said is done, was done, or will ever be done: dams, power stations, highways, agricultural cooperatives: nothing, only announcements and promises, pure façades and the President goes through a series of ritualized actions devoid of content which are the content of TV news programs: the President of the Republic ritualistically distributes land that doesn’t exist; he inaugurates monuments as ephemeral as these painted backdrops, he pays homage to nonexistent heroes: have you ever heard of Don Nazario Narano, hero of the Battle of the Coatzacoalcos Meat Packing Plant? About the child heroine Malvina Gardel, who gave her life for our sister republic wrapped in a true-blue sky-blue Argentine flag? About Alfredo Mangino, who donated his entire bank account — in dollars — to the tune of $1,492, to the nation during the 1982 crisis? About the oil worker Ramiro Roldán, who ripped off his wife’s ears and cut off her fingers so he could donate her earrings and rings to the National Solidarity Fund to pay our foreign debt? About the Unknown Giggler, who died laughing sitting in front of his television set and seeing all the aforementioned acts of heroism and seeing functionaries in mansions surrounded by stone walls in Connecticut and condos next door to the Prince of Wales and Lady Di in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, and in Parthenons over the sea in Zihuatanejo, receive the life savings of Mexico’s poor?

The President of the Republic has declared war on make-believe countries and has celebrated totally fantastic historical dates. Did you know there is a battalion of Indians defending, even as we speak, the honor of our nation against the outrages and insults of the dictator of the neighboring Republic of Darkness? Did you know that the seasoned veterans of Squadron 201 from the Second World War have bombarded, just to humiliate them, the haughty despots of the tropical dictatorship of Costaguana? We’ve run out of the patience necessary for a Non-intervention Policy — what the hell!

And, fellow citizen, how is it possible you missed the August 14 celebration, the anniversary of the date Mexico City and Calcutta were declared Twin Cities? And what about September 31, Fatherland Plus Day, February 32, the day we Mexicans celebrate You Can’t Do That to Us Day: or You Can Have Your Leap Year; I’ll Keep the Five Proud Extra Days in the Aztec calendar! Don Homero is about to begin singing yet another gem from his patriotic songbook:

I’m a real ol’ Mexican, my land is a tough one,

An’ I swear by my manhood there’s no place on earth

Prettier or tougher than my land …

But all of them (including Homero) flee from Homero the bard of the vinous smog, they fly far away from the van that coughs as often as its crew, they arise now with their mental cameras and zoom back to a far-distant point in order to reenter the Mexican metropolis, the most densely populated city in the world, a city with more people in it than all of Central America, with more than there are Argentines between Salta and Cabo Pena, or Colombians between Gorgona island and vibrating Arauca, or Venezuelans between Punta Gallinas and the Pacarima!

2. Taking Wing with the Crippled Devil

The truth is that the biggest city in the world, the city into which, in waves and successive seismic shudders, entered faceless Aztecs in 1325, Spaniards disguised as gods in 1519, gringos with their faces washed by Protestantism in 1847, and French, Austrians, Hungarians, Bohemians, Germans, and Lombards with the prognathous face of the Hapsburgs in 1862, the city of the priest Tenoch, the conquistador Cortés, General Scott, and the Emperor Maximilian, always deserves a spectacular entrance. My Uncles Homero and Fernando, my parents Angel and Angeles, and I, mere layabout that I am, Christoham, have no other choice but to imitate the first narrator of all things, the first curious individual, the crippled devil who still remembers his angelic wings, mere stumps now it’s true, but stumps that rise in flight through a power God does not know, which is that of telling stories: and on this afternoon of our return to Mexico City (okay, okay: I’m here for the first time, but my genetic memory is only the scientific name for my innate sense of déjà vu) the buzz of creation is coming in loud and clear, the interminable hiss

of the original bang: creation can still be heard, I say, above the ashy scum of the city, and there is nothing strange in the fact that we all try to fly toward it, my parents hanging on to the mutilated wings of the crippled devil, Homero still dressed in his china poblana costume, holding on to the demon’s scarlet, pointed tail, Fernando clinging to the black, broken cloven-hoof of the genius of storytelling, I, disoriented, because I don’t know if I’m still swimming in the ocean inside my mother’s womb or if I’m swimming in the corrupt air, which nevertheless is better than the black hole we flew out of, saving ourselves from the sensation of sinking into a fetid swamp: from above we see millions of beings crowded against the entrance to the Taco Curtain, we see the one-dimensional façades of prestige, against which crash the dark waves of peasants fleeing from violence, crime, theft, repression, and the mockery of centuries: for them we invent the illusion of a city of opportunity and promotion, a city equal to its television screens, a city of blond people advertising beer, driving Mustangs, and stuffing themselves in supermarkets before taking a well-deserved vacation in Las Vegas, courtesy of Western Airlines and Marriott Hotels: they prefer the illusion of the city to the barren fields where they were born: who can blame them? Now they want to enter the city which is just as barren, violent, and repressive as the land they left and they don’t know it or they do know it (from the air, we look at the city decked out in dust) and they go on preferring it because the more of them who come, the more the image of the beer, cars, supermarkets, and vacations will be blotted out.

Off we go into the wild gray yonder, hanging on to the wings, tail, and hoof of the only angel interested in telling a story, the curious fallen angel who only has his imagination left to raise himself up, and we’re flying over a city whose roofs, faithful to his own tradition, the devil begins to lift: the roofs of Mexico, D.F. (hold on tight, little Christopher) (the crippled devil coughs, spits, spits some phlegm on the posh Zona Rosa, phlegm that lands smack in the center of a bowl of stracciatella soup in a restaurant located on the Génova mall and which is eaten as if it were floating egg yolk) (the limping devil scratches at the thick air with his free hoof; Don Fernando is clinging to the other and the dust from the free hoof falls like snow devoid of temperature on the Nueva Anzures zone, upon which all the locals bring out their Christmas trees): FLYING DOWN TO VICO!

The crippled Lucifer of storytelling simultaneously raises the roof of one house in Bosques de las Lomas and another in Santa María Camarones: we did not see, in the first case, if in fact we used our eyes (and mine still lack the veil of eyelids), any material or physical movement inside that mansion surrounded by nationalized banks or, in the second case, inside that shack trapped between railroad tracks: in the mansion we saw a naked couple embracing, but the physical reality was the desire to suppress the difference between the two of them and their fear of being changed or changing; in the shack we saw another naked couple embracing and they were afraid of staying inside the shack and they were afraid of leaving the shack: prisoners within, exiles outside: Mexico City.

We rose so high, so very high, that my mother was afraid of smashing against the dome which, according to what Uncle H. said in Aca, was being built to dole out to each and every inhabitant of the city a ration of pure air, and she screamed out in fear, but Uncle Homero laughed in the heaven of heavens because the dome was a lie, an illusion, another governmental placebo: all they had to do was announce one day that it was being built and announce on some other day that it was finished for everyone to breathe more easily: like an aspirin posing as a vitamin, and this is the snake oil that brings the dead back to life: we did not, therefore, smash into the arc of the nonexistent dome, but the devil laughed at what Homero said and dropped us, and we fell coughing and spitting into the black hole that swallows all, we dropped like meteors tearing through the layers of pollution (only Homero’s fall was slowed, because of his full skirts). From a distance we saw a tourist attraction: a bulldozer half buried in a lake of cement next to some hastily abandoned mansions patrolled by howling dogs, we scraped our noses against the extravagant slogans of the past peeling off walls more eternal than words:

and we flew like a flash over the thousands crowded together who had not been allowed to enter the city and then we lost our bird’s-eye view of the closed city, the concentration of wealth, migration, and unemployment; the capital of underdevelopment: Mexico City here I come! and when we could make out the noble cupolas, real and solid this time, of San Juan de Dios and Santa Veracruz, opposite the Alameda, where my parents met, I realized, if not what my destiny would be, at least what my vocation was:

I shall attempt to decipher the perennial mystery of names

I shall fight untiringly against the unknown

I shall irreverently mix languages

I shall ask, speak familiarly, imagine, finish just to start a new page

I shall call and answer relentlessly

I shall offer the world and its people another image of themselves

I shall undergo a metamorphosis while remaining the same:

CHRISTOPHER UNBORN

3. Time

Time flies: barely had the eternal devil lifted the roof of my parents’ house in Tlalpan and dropped us all inside (all of us: Uncle Homero dressed as a china poblana; Uncle Fernando with his slicker and his broken glasses; my parents with beach shirts and blue jeans, and I Christopher inside my dear mother Doña Angeles Palomar) when we all felt that time was different: we were inside the capital city of the Mexican Republic, where, by definition, everything is faster, above all time: time flies, leaves us behind: time weighs on time itself, it drags, because, as my dad says to my mom, who’s making us be modern: before, time was not our own, it was providence’s own sphere of influence; we insisted on making it ours just so we could say that history is the work of man: and my mother admits, with a mixture of fatal pride and responsibility, that if such is the case we must make ourselves responsible for time, for the past and the future, because there is no longer any providence to coddle our times: now they are our responsibility: we must sustain the past; invent the future:

“But only here, today, in the present, only here do we remember the past, only here do we desire the future,” my mother tells my father as she caresses his cheek the night of their return to the city; cleansing herself of the filth of the road, simple things, enjoying them the way they enjoy them (for my recovered happiness), without accepting that something broke on the road from Malinaltzin and now she is going to wait until after they make love to tell him:

“I’m quite certain.”

Six weeks have gone by since my conception; menstruation is more than four weeks late and I’m already floating in all my splendor — I’m fully half an inch long — convinced, deluded that I’m still in the ocean, giver of life and origin of the gods, with no more ties to terra firma than the umbilical cord and with no clouds on my horizon except the dark cloud that will be my circulatory system, still alien to my body, still distanced from, outside of, me, in the placenta, sucking blood and oxygen, filtering out waste; if this is my new ocean, it’s only a sea of blood that threatens to blind me:

My skin is thin and transparent.

My spinal cord is phosphorescent.

These are the lights I use to fight the strange tide of blood that envelops me.

My body is arched forward. The umbilical cord is thicker than my body. My arms are longer than my legs: I would really like to touch, caress, embrace; I don’t really want to run: Where would I go? What place could be better than this one? Have I learned of anything out there better than this place? After all, home is where you hang yourself …

I am my own sculptor: I am shaping myself from within with living, wet, malleable materials: what other artist has ever had available to him as perfect a design as the one possessed by my hammers and chisels: the cells move to the exact spot for building an arm: it’s the first time they’ve ever done it, never before and never again, do your mercies benz understand what I’m saying? I will never be repeated.

Nothing could be more dynamic than my fetal art, ladies and germs, just like that a foot appears, and at the same time five condensations on my hand that will be my bones and fingers: feet and hands detach from the trunk (but I don’t want to run away; I only want to touch); and my cheeks, my upper lip all join in the work: my nasal cavity sinks so it can take part in the development of my palate; my face begins to take shape; the cells on both sides of my trunk start moving in twelve horizontal currents to form my ribs; my future muscle cells emigrate between my ribs and under my chest, the subcutaneous tissue stretches backward and forward, the cells on the external layer of my little body begin to form my epidermis, my hair, sweat glands and sebaceous glands: do your mercies know of any combined action more perfect than this one, one that is more exact than the dancing little feet of the Rockettes, the southern flight of ducks from Canada in October, the perfect rainbow the butterflies form in the hidden valleys of Michoacán, the Wehrmacht goose-step, or the deadly aim of General Rodolfo Fierro: the precision of a parachute battalion, of a triple-bypass cardiac operation, of one of Le Nôtre’s gardens, or of an Egyptian pyramid?

My blood pulsates rapidly, it runs toward the forest of my nascent veins; a tunic falls over me, like the shroud over the city we saw from the air:

My eyes are about to close for the first time!

Can you understand this terror?

Do you even remember it?

Until now, weak and unformed, at least I had my eyes wide open, always wide open: now I feel as if had gone to sleep inside my white thin tunic, as if a weight against which I have no strength were covering my eyes little by little:

My time changes because I don’t know if from now on I will not, deprived though I am of sight, know anything about what’s going on outside, nor will I be able to connect my genetic chain with the simulacrum of vision: I’m going to accelerate a time I thought eternal, mine, malleable, as subject to my desire as are the fragments of information supplied by my genes: now my eyes close and I am afraid of losing time; I’m afraid of turning into a being who only bursts into different times without knowing with whom or with what he’ll meet whenever he makes one of his sudden appearances: I close my eyes, but I am preparing to substitute desiring for looking: I want to be recognized, known, please Mommy, swear you’ll recognize me, Daddy swear that you’re going to recognize me: don’t you see that I have no other weapon but desire, but that there is no desire that achieves that condition if it is not known and recognized by others and without knowing that you know that I am condemned to the unsavory condition of unknowing: I could have been conceived in Untario!

Without my desire reflected in yours, Pop and Mom, I shall succumb to the terror of the fantastic: I shall be afraid of myself until the end of time.

4. The Devil’s Wells

And I begged them: Please give time and tenderness to your little Christopher. Tell him everything that happened in the time between our arrival in the city and the third month of his gestation.

Which is to say, once we’d moved into the one-story, rainbow-hued house whose balcony faces the plaza and a hospital of the Porfirio Díaz period, near the symmetrical stairways of the Church of San Pedro Apóstol, the Campidoglio of underdevelopment, the Place Vendôme of the Parvenus, the Signoria of the Third World, our basic situation was this:

First, Uncle Homero Fagoaga, whose political instincts were infallible, decides to hide out in my parents’ house until he finds out what the official reaction is to the events surrounding the electoral riot in Igualistlahuaca; it’s likely he’ll be blamed for that outburst, which could be confused with either love or hate, depending, but in Mexican politics you’re better off not depending on depending — Don Homero pontificates, having seated himself, as if by divine right, at the head of the table during all three daily meals, with a view of the aforementioned hospital, wolfing down pastry after pastry — and should only skate on thick ice, like that old supporter of President Calles, Don Bernardino Gutiérrez, who wouldn’t make a move without finding out which way the wind was blowing. In other words, don’t take a step without having your sandals on, especially if you’re in scorpion country, and he fully intended to spend two months in retreat here, at least until the beginning of May, when the combined festivities of the Virgin Mary and the Martyrs of Chicago might just allow him to show himself in public with the assurance that the politicos would recognize his liberal merits, which would shine once more, while his conservative defects would be forgotten. Was there anyone in our political world who hadn’t at one time or another done the same thing?

When my incredulous and gaping father and mother stopped listening to him in order to eat a slice of coffee cake, they noticed that Uncle Homero, who never stopped talking for an instant, had devoured the mountain of powder cakes my mother had delicately arranged on a blue platter of Talavera ware. Now Don Homero was dunking the last bit in his hot chocolate and was asking my mother Angeles if she would be so kind as to make him another cup — but it had to be freshly ground chocolate, comme il faut, to give the Aztec nectar its aromatic foaminess. A chocolate stain occupied the place once reserved for Don Homero Fagoaga’s mustache, only now beginning to reappear.

My parents, malgré their recovered lovemaking, and despite as well their happy certitude that I was on the way and could compete in the national Little Christophers Contest, had a secret fissure in each of their souls, one they preferred not to reveal. It was no longer the Matamoros Moreno horror; I think that event actually drew them closer together. It was, rather, the terrible suspicion that in this country at this time and in this history everyone was being used. The Spanish tongue, lawyer Fagoaga admitted during the long meals in which he made his domestic appearances, did not possess expressions as well-wrought to indicate in laconic fashion a colossal joke as did that lapidary French possessive:

Tu m’as eu

or its no less terse Anglo-Saxon equivalent:

We’ve been had.

You just can’t say these things because in Spanish (gigantic wink from Uncle Homero) they have an excessively sexual charge: Don Homero strongly suggested they not comment in public about the events that transpired in Guerrero, in return for which he would himself keep silent: he had seen nothing at the highway construction site; they had seen nothing at the Igualistlahuaca riot and the events that followed: Don Homero was not tossed in a blanket; they weren’t raped. Everything that happened in Acapulco resulted from the government’s clever maneuvers.

Thus, the increasingly infrequent visits by Uncle Fernando Benítez to remind Don Homero of his promise to sally forth and defend the honor of Lady Democracy as soon as his retreat was over were deflated not only by the obese academic’s understandable desire not to be the object of a routine extermination at the hands of the uncontrollable and ignorant police force run by Colonel Inclán but by my parents’ lack of support:

“But are you really going to let this beached whale rot here for another month?” exclaimed Benítez. “If you keep this up, I’m going to disown you.”

Whenever he bothered to notice the look on their faces, Uncle Homero would tell them not to worry, that he would keep his promise to withdraw his suit about Angel’s prodigality, so they could live in luxury until the end of their days. Ah! in life everything was exchange, give to receive, receive to give, according to the law of convenience, and when my parents sat down at the table, they found there was nothing to eat: Fagoaga had swallowed, as if his mouth were a rapid, cannibalistic straw, the chicken in red sauce my mother had prepared with her own dainty little hands. All that was left were the bones and a sigh of satisfaction made by Don Homero as he wiped his lips with a king-size napkin. My parents were still afraid, given the absolute whimsicality of Mexican public decisions, of an unexpected change in the rules of the Little Christophers Contest; but no, the national contests sponsored by Mamadoc followed one on the other, undisturbed. During the month of March, for instance, quiz shows called the Last of the Last were broadcast almost every day: at the end of the show, a representative of Mamadoc would personally hand a prize (a sugar skull with the name of the winner written in caramel over the forehead) to the Last Fan of Jorge Negrete, a decrepit gentleman who in his wicker-seat wheelchair would pedomaniacally play the first bars of “Ay Jalisco Never Give In,” or to the Last Supporter of President Calles in Mexico (a title won, foreseeably, by Don Bernardino Gutiérrez, previously mentioned as the First Supporter of President Calles. Don Bernardino took advantage of the prize ceremony to hurl veiled accusations against the Cristeros who might be hiding in the ranks of the Revolution, nefarious types who with their intention to reconcile things that were simply unreconcilable — the flowing, crystalline water of the temporal with the heavy, priestish oil of the eternal — undermined the foundation of the Party of Revolutionary Inst …). Uncle Homero nervously turned the television off, taking Don Bernardino’s words as a direct allusion and a certain index of the officially low fortune of our relative, who sighed and pulled a tea cozy over his head.

Sitting immobile for an entire month in front of nationalized television, my parents and their Uncle Homero Fagoaga resembled catatonics awaiting the reliable news that would galvanize them and pull them out of this TV-induced hypnosis.

Uncle Homero Fagoaga, his Turkish slippers resting on an old telephone book, drowsily pointed out that the government was constantly creating false news items they broadcast as live action: just look, he said, languidly pointing one morning, at that police agent, caught by the cameras just at the precise moment he is refusing to accept a serious bribe from a North American tourist arrested for drunk driving, who is now compounding the felony by trying to bribe a representative of the police force; look now at those pictures of retroactive justice being meted out to government functionaries who got rich under past regimes; look now at that auction of bibelots, paintings, and racing cars for the benefit of the people, look at these ceremonies for the transfer of private parks to public schools and the return of tropical golf courses to members of rural collectives: every single event is false, it’s all made up, nothing of what you’re seeing is really happening, but it’s all presented as a fact freshly caught by the camera. Now look, Mamadoc in person just dove into Lake Pátzcuaro to save a group of pure-hearted girls who were bringing little headache poultices of onion and rose petals to the statue of Father Morelos in Janitzio because, in their gay naïveté, they thought he suffered from perpetual migraines — after all, didn’t he have a handkerchief tied around his head all the time? Well, in the enthusiasm of their ingenuous fantasy they capsized their canoe, which, by the way, dear niece and nephew, allows us to admire the cathedrallike figure of Our Mother and National Doctor in her lacy bathing costume of Copacabana design, and this, dear niece and nephew, is happening right now, at 12 noon, March 18, 1992, as President Paredes enters the Azcapotzalco refinery to celebrate fifty-six years of nationalized oil production — switch to the other channel, Angelito — and to remind us that our lack of sovereignty over the black gold is transitory. By paying the nation’s debts, oil is still serving Mexico, and Mexico faithfully keeps her currently pawned word to the International Monetary Fund: it doesn’t matter who administers the devil’s wells, as long as Mexico gets the benefits; and now a word about the construction of the famous dome which is to purify the atmosphere of our capital and distribute the pure air fairly among its thirty million inhabitants, but you, dear niece and nephew, already know by experience that this is just one more trick to give a longed-for distraction to our people, and when some innocent demands an explanation about the construction from some functionary, that bureaucrat knows just what he has to answer:

“As the Lady says, it’s part of a Strategic Beautification Plan.”

* * *

They sit there for a month watching TV. My mom makes trips to the market to buy the food my Uncle Homero gobbles down. We are visited, infrequently but cathartically, by Uncle Fernando Benítez, who would often arrive at around 5 a.m., pounding on the door. My alarmed parents would discover Don Fernando on the threshold, dressed in a trench coat, a Stetson pulled over his eyes, and pointing a flashlight into my parents’ bleary eyes:

“Proof that we live in a democracy: if someone’s knocking at your door at five in the morning, would you think it was the milkman?” At other times these visits would end with a heated exchange of noncommunication between Fernando and Homero:

“Immanuel Kant.”

“But Cesare Cantù.”

But the sign just doesn’t come. What is not a contest is a news flash, and what is not a news flash is a subliminal ad, which runs for a fraction of a second every fifteen minutes: the defining motto of Mamadoc’s regime:

UNION AND OBLIVION

UNION AND OBLIVION

UNION AND OBLIVION

And then the television goes back to running contests and celebrations, because, as our Mother and Doctor reminds us, not a day goes by, not a second passes, without something worthy of being celebrated in it, Bach is born, Nietzsche dies, the sun comes up, Tenochtitlán is conquered, black thread is invented, the last time it rained in Sayula, finally we hit a whole new level of

UNION AND OBLIVION:

They created a brand-new prize for the parvenu poet Mambo de Alba for Not Having Written Anything during the year 1991: Literature Is Thankful; the contest about the Last Mexican Revolutionary was voided because there were no contestants; President Jesús María y José Paredes, from the PAN party, impulsively declared that the PRI, after recent local events (our Uncle H.’s heart if not his dessert almost flew out of his mouth), reaffirmed its respect for the most absolute pluralism and admitted the existence of splinter groups in its very bosom which, if the citizens of Mexico so desired, could become authentic political parties.

To add spice to this political pizza, President Paredes, in a master stroke, renounced his membership in the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) — just to set an example — and then declared, in absolute impartiality, that he was joining millions of voters like himself who had to debate very seriously in their heart of hearts a decision pregnant with consequences: to which party do I wish to belong from now on?

This took place at the end of March. Then there was a long silence, until April 2, when President Paredes asked at a joint session of Congress meeting to honor Porfirio Díaz (UNION AND OBLIVION), whose name was inscribed that same afternoon in gold letters in the Congress, why citizens were so slow about massively joining the new parties, upon which Representative Hipólito Zea, deputy from the ninth district of Chihuahuila, stood up to exclaim emotionally, spontaneously, and brilliantly from his place:

“Because we are waiting to see which party you join, Mr. President!”

And that shout was followed by another from Representative Peregrino Ponce y Peón, Senator from Yucatango:

“Your party will be our party, Mr. President. Just tell us which way to go, so we can be with you!” added the peasant leader Xavier Corcuera y Braniff, deputy from the twentieth district of Michoalisco, and “Please stop torturing us, Mr. President,” tearfully whined the deputy from Tamaleón and representative of the actors’ guild, Ms. Virginia Iris de Montoya.

Genuinely moved, the President answered amid an impressive national silence:

“You just can’t make a snap decision in a situation of such transcendence as this one. I cavil. I ponder. I consult the core of my Mexican being. In September I will reveal my decision. But let it not be an impediment to anyone else’s decision: let everyone freely choose the party that’s best for him.”

This time, Uncle Homero rose from his semirecumbent position, the tears in his eyes reflecting those of our President, and from his lips came forth this exclamation, one of his favorites, almost as an involuntary reflex, the essential expression of his political being: “At your service, Mr. President!”

But knowing himself to be excluded, for the moment, from these events of historical transcendence, his candidacy for the Senate suspended (he hoped) but not nipped in the bud, he had to limit himself to lucubrating in the void, like the proverbial man on the street who has no access to well-founded rumors, political breakfasts, high-quality gossip, unnamed sources, and other funds of solid information: what does this declaration mean for the fortunes of the National Action Party (PAN), to which until this very moment President Paredes said he belonged, having won the election under its blue-and-white banner? Might the situation have so bettered that the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) could once again take control of the executive responsibility and symbolism, without piling the blame of all our problems on the back of the opposition? What part would Mamadoc play in all this as the central symbol of unity amid this inter- and intraparty squabbling? Would her creator Minister Federico Robles Chacón lose power because of what happened to her? Does this decision mean a return to power of the most eminent emissary of the past, Minister Ulises López? Enigmas, enigmas that Homero, in despair, could not resolve, which made him once again sink into the contagious languor of pure spectatorship; and what, he mused, were the majority of Mexicans if not spectators for those endless contests served up by national television, betting on every conceivable thing: how many miles is it from Acaponeta to San Blas, how many tortillas were sold in the month of March in the state of Tlaxcala, be the first to call, we will give a prize to the first caller to our studio, the first letter, the first coupon; how many miles are there on the odometer of the Red Arrow Mexico City — Zumpango bus number 1066, manufactured by Leyland and sold to Mexico because it was spewing out clouds of carbon monoxide, nicknamed Here’s My Sword, Follow Me, Men? Hold on! Looks like Leyland’s getting a corner on the prize market: the driver who’s brought most merchandise into the City of Palaces in a single day has also won himself a prize. (There appears on the screen an albino boy dressed in black leather, said to be named Gómez, long-haul trucker; he disappears from the screen as quickly as he appeared.) They all saw the entire nation immersed in prizes, tests, anniversaries, which don’t leave them a free minute, as they await the grand prize, the perpetual superlottery of Makesicko Shitty: useless, exhausted, dead — but about the Mexican middle class we can at least say that it was never bored: this was its solution and its paradox: UNION AND OBLIVION and yet one more subliminal message that each afternoon blinks on all the TV sets and which says, redundantly:

CIRCUSES AND CIRCUSES

and further transcending Roman demagoguery which promised, besides, bread bread the doctor’s dead, the blessèd smell of the bakery, but who likes bread without butter? yeah, but what about circuses and circuses? Ah, sighed Don Homero, the meaning of Catholic carnival was to abolish terror, even if our relative Benítez would say that among our Indians it’s the devil who organizes the carnival.

Don Fernando Benítez rapidly sketched out a map of the republic on one of the blackboards in the Tlalpan house. He made Don Homero Fagoaga, dressed as always in red-striped pajamas and barefoot, sit down in front of it as if he were the class dunce.

“Where are we?” asked Benítez, marking an X with green chalk on the blackboard.

“In Tepatepec Hidalgo,” huffed Homero, “prepared to give our lives so that the peasant organization shall be respected.”

“And now?” asked Uncle Fernando, marking another spot on his map.

“In Pichátaro Michoacán. We’ve just walked into Pichátaro to defend the workers’ cooperative.”

“Look — and don’t shut your eyes, fatso — where’s this?”

“I’m in Cotepec de Harinas, struggling to have the municipal election respected.” Homero stood up with his eyes closed and grabbed Benítez by the throat. “I’m going to send you to jail for life, your honor”—Benítez shaken about by the furious Uncle Homero—“for allowing yourself to be suborned so you’d be on the good side of the stronger party”—and Benítez slams his elbow into Homero’s paunch. “It’s you who’s going to prison, your honor, because unless the judiciary is independent everything else is an illusion.” And Benítez raised his miner’s-boot-covered foot to squash Homero’s bare toes. “Listen here, your honor,” snorted Homero, hanging on to the neck of the semi-asphyxiated Benítez, “we Mexicans can practice democracy without any need for hit men, or crimes, or bribes, or hucksters!” and Don Fernando had doubts about what to do: “Do I allow him to go on living out my teaching with such conviction, or do I stop him from strangling me?” He stopped doubting and let his miner’s boot fall on Homero’s bare toes, the fat man shrieked and sat down in his dunce’s seat once again, rubbing his smashed toe. Benítez straightened his tie and went on, coughing from time to time:

“You shall walk the byways of Mexico untiringly, shedding those extra pounds, ready to give your life so that in Tepatepec Hidalgo the peasant organization shall be respec…”

* * *

My father, an apostle (though now he was somewhat reluctant about it) of disorder, then imagined a diabolical play in which laughter and fear would coexist perfectly: the humor would not annihilate what is individual in terror, only what is finite in it. My mother did not understand this, later on, in bed, my father pointed toward a photo from the Cristero war, taken around 1928, which they had tacked up next to their bed: a religious guerrilla wearing a felt hat, open shirt, vest, riding trousers, and boots with spurs, stands against a wall and waits for his death. The government rifles are already cocked. But he holds a dry cigarette in his stained fingers and bends a knee forward as if he were expecting his girlfriend and not death (and who said what?) and he smiles the way no one has ever smiled. Baby, I swear: can you imagine yourself smiling like that when you’re about to die, when they’re going to shoot you? Could you do it? Would you like to try? She said no; things like that were macho myths, magic ceremonies for jerks; she wasn’t interested in dying, with or without dignity.

He says how hard it is to die.

She says how hard it is to be free.

And that’s what he wants too, he says, but if he has to take his revolt to the edge of life and not the edge of ideology, that means taking it to the edge of death (he says to my mother in secret this dry night of mid-April the ***est month under the sheets that isolate them from the part of their space occupied by Homero Fagoaga: during the day he swills, at night he snores, he’s always pushing his way in, what a pain this uncle is!), but she repeats, I do not accept death, even with dignity: if you die on me you’ll create a void in the world, a woman’s left alone and anything can be pulled in to fill her void; she said she didn’t want a void left by him and he answered that she mustn’t forget she’s expecting a son; that — he laughed — should fill all her voids. But, without wanting to, he dreamed about something (he dreamed when he pulled away from my mother and fell asleep with his knees touching hers) that walks into a discotheque bathed in the cold light of the spots and covered with sequins: she has eyes like two cloudy butterflies and as she dances she raises her leg and, without wanting to, reveals her thigh under her short skirt, a crease of down, a moist little copper coin: my father dreams, without wanting to, of her.

In the meantime, my eyes close. But my ears open.

* * *

My mother dreams while she’s asleep (because sometimes she dreams while she’s awake, the divine diviner): she’s already missed two periods, sleeping like this with her hair down, hiding her light-olive-complected face, sleeping deeply with me now, breathing deeply, hot under her arms and on her nape and between her legs: hot and me there all complete now, as if to make up for my sudden blindness: all complete now in myself, small, I don’t need anything more, too many cooks spoil the broth: I am already a tiny little person who from now on will do nothing but grow and perfect my functions: do you know my heart’s been BEATING for a month? That my muscles have begun their exercises? My mother wakes in surprise; she wants to tell my father Angel; she smiles and keeps her secret; I feel happy knowing she’s happy, and in the marvelous pool she’s given me, I, out of pure pleasure, do a few aquatic flips, like the little seal that I am: but I am already beginning to acquire my human face, and my priest-like hands invite prayer and peace. My face is human, I say, but my eyelids have closed up tight. And I don’t know if I’m going to fall asleep or if I’m going to wake up. But if I say all this it’s because I want to convince myself quickly that I am becoming the artist of my own creation, and I say this big fat lie only to protect myself from the suspicion that my father can believe I am not his son, that I am no longer his son or that I was never his son, after that gang of thugs had free run of my mommy’s guadalcanal: now I depend more than ever on her convincing him that I was made before then and that what happened in Malinaltzin doesn’t affect me, but suppose it affects him, suppose it turns him into a Mexican macho, and even if he was buggered by Matamoros Moreno himself, in this sibylization it’s the men who are priests and their auguries say permit all and forgive all men all things, but the women, the eternal vestals, no way: is that how it’s going to be? Well then, I’m already screwed, Readers, and for that reason my fetal scream in this instant of my return (all right, my arrival) in Makesicko Seedy is:

Give time and tenderness to your little Christopher!

Sing ballads to one another!

Remember one another!

Screw yourselves into Siamese twins!

Love each other, Mom and Dad!

5. Ballad of the Cruellest Month

Says my father: Time out. I have to explain to my son who he is, who we Angeles and I are: his unknown soldiers: I say it right into Angeles’s tummy: in you Angeles I see everything opposite to me, everything that completes me and the hope that we become equal without ceasing to be different: I say to you give me things to think about at night which is exactly what you are going to ask of me: the most important thing we can think about each other now is that I believe in you because I believe that the good should recur someday, it cannot remain behind, and only if I accept that, my love, can I admit that I am not what I would like to be. Help me, Angeles, to be what I want to be even if it is something very different from what you want, that would be good: say something just for me, don’t just stand there immobile and silent, and she (my mother, that is) will smile and say Angel we met each other when we were very young and incomplete, I’ll give you what you ask of me, we can form each other (share our formation) after we know each other: would it have been better to meet when we were already mature?

I interrupt the ballad of the month of April; or perhaps I merely add a voice to the dialogue, turning it into a chorus: Mommy, remember you swore that in April you’d tell me how you and my daddy met, don’t let the month go by without telling me: Mom!

“Angeles. I found you because I looked for you. That afternoon on the Juárez monument was no accident.”

“You think not?”

“I want you to know for a fact that I did not find you by chance or because I lost Agueda or because you are so different from Agueda that I perversely came up to you…”

“It doesn’t matter. Our first meeting happened; it’s done. Why bother bringing up that moment so often?”

(Is she saying it to him? Is she saying it to me?)

“It’s that only by remembering it can you understand that if I lose you or if we separate, I will look for you again: I’m leaving nothing to chance, my love…”

“Okay. Now we live together, perhaps we’ll have a son in October; for the moment we’re performing together. Okay. What page of your book are you on?”

“Look: on the page where Plato says that we’re living in the post-Marxist, post-Freudian, and post-industrial era.”

“We’ve had enough wise Jews already, now we need a few asshole Christians. Go on quoting Plato.”

“What about death?”

“Isn’t it a long way off?” My father laughed.

“That’s why I love you, because you’re a mass of contradictions.”

* * *

Angel romantically reinvents himself as a conservative rebel. He would be an assassin if he could get out of himself completely. He can’t. His memory won’t let him. We would all be assassins if we had no memory. Memory reminds us: Cain. The Tiger of Yautepec. Caryl Chessman. Dr. Crippen. Goyito Cárdenas. But you just can’t say to crime because of memory I will not make you mine. I want Angel to be able to say that no one would dare judge me betting on my dishonesty or on my virtue even though I do as I please and not what people think proper. I want a world (with me, Angeles) in which the proper thing is not to do the proper thing but what we please: doing what we please would then be the proper thing. Is it possible? Angel is not what he’d like to be. I want him to need me in order to be it. I know that all this is impossible. But I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts and I’m going to try to make it last, without his finding out about my secret: I am in love with my love for Angel, I love loving him, I don’t want him to find out. Angel, on the other hand, is going to find out that love is a matter of pure will: we love what we want to love. Understanding that is going to make him very sad. But for a while he won’t have the power to fight that power: he’ll love whatever he wants. Angeles will be in love with her love for Angel. Angel will be in love with his will to love. When Angeles understands this, she’ll want his will to be to love her, to concentrate in her all the power of his will to love. This cannot happen, gentle Readers, until Angel unfurls his will to love, imagining that the variety of the will is the proof of its existence; he will confuse the will to love with the different kinds of love and the different kinds of love with the imagination of love. Poor guy: he’ll have to eliminate the different kinds so that imagination and love really see each other face to face, kiss, screw: the singularity of sexual love between man and woman is that we see each other’s face and animals turn their backs on each other to screw; you and I, my love, can look into each other’s eyes but we are like animals in that we can never see ourselves as others see us making love: are we good for love or are we bad? How can we compare? How can we know? Is it true when she says: you screw divinely, Angel, who taught you? Is it true when he answers: you taught me everything, aren’t you the one who screws like a queen? Why do my parents say these things? to screw around? to dominate? or because it’s true? to love each other more? can people love each other without dominating each other? screw around without screwing up? My father’s love takes place within what he is and what he believes: He loves my mother as part of what he wants: an order. And he knows very well that no order will ever be sufficient. My mother on the other hand (we’re in April, the ***est month) loves love but knows very well that love is only the search for love. How the hell can they understand each other? She proves to him that she’s right: no order is sufficient if the value is to love and to love is to search for love. He proves to her that he is right: love cannot be part of an established order, it questions it and passes it by and transforms it every time two lips touch two lips and one hand stretches out to touch a sex as if it were its own that belongs to another: domination has begun, Angeles, it’s inevitable that you women generate guilt, that you persecute us so that we feel guilty, the bitches are not happy unless they see us accepting that we are guilty and for that reason I accept what happened in Malinaltzin: I won’t make you take the blame today so that you never make me feel blameworthy and let’s be that way, my love, the first happy couple in history hip hip hurray! hip hip my rib!

“Is it true or not?”

And Angeles: if you accuse me of something which I think but don’t do, I cannot deny it. That isn’t guilt. But desiring even if it isn’t carried out, is that blameworthy for you? Don’t just sit there without speaking, say something. Angeles dreamed she urinated and urinated until she refilled Texcoco Lake, and refloated the damned dried-out city, restored its canals, its water traffic, its liquid death. Angeles dreamed that they returned to Mexico City and lived again in the house of bright colors and I asked them, please:

Give time and tenderness to your little Christopher.

What a lack of imagination! They don’t listen to me.

6. Hollow-Eyed and Made Up

I don’t know if I’m going to sleep or waking up.

But my big old ears grow and listen.

I hear someone say that the domestic situation has become impossible. My parents have never been examples of Calvinist parsimony; no matter how postmodern, post-industrial, enlightened, conservative, Freudian, Marxist, or ecologist they declare or have declared themselves to be over the course of their brief and disturbed existences, Angel and Angeles are Catholic — Hispanic — baroque prodigals, spendthrifts, anachronisms: it’s impossible to be modern without being Protestant, even if you happen to be Catholic, Angel muses again as he watches Uncle Homero devour the groceries of the young married couple in the house of bright colors: he wouldn’t dream of asking permission or saying thank you or offering to raise a finger, that is, until my mother says to my father Angel one April morning:

“I’ve just smashed the last piggy bank, honey. What a pain. What do we do now?”

In a certain sense they exempted Uncle Homero because, after all, he did say that he would withdraw the suit against Angel, and, in this world of great expectations and perpetual illusions which is Mexico ’92, that means that the kids (my parents) had in their possession forty million in gold pesos. Just like that. The fact is that the cupboard was bare, and they, looking seriously into one another’s eyes, declared the primary truth: we’ve got to get jobs. The secondary truth was that, without the help of the Four Fuckups, they didn’t stand a chance in the job market.

Their logical conclusion, after hearing what Uncle Homero said in Malinaltzin, was that their buddies, Egg, Orphan Huerta, Hipi Toltec, and the Baby Ba (despite the fact that she was invisible) had perished in the hecatomb arranged by the government in Acapulco and blamed on the victims.

My parents were vegetating as they watched the alternative reality offered on television, when suddenly two things happened. The Last Playboy Centerfold Contest, a hard one to win because that enterprising Chicago-based magazine hadn’t yet given up the ghost, not even in the face of the puritanical reaction of the eighties (monogamy, condoms, herpes, and AIDS), not even in the face of the change of generations, not even in the face of geographical distances — statistics proved they’d photographed more than 80 percent of the cunts on the planet. No: the magazine had defied age and, some suspected, would defy death itself. But the file of dead beauties in the safes facing windy Lake Michigan, in the iron-steel axis that ran from Chicago to Philadelphia, was closed to public scrutiny, even as the photos of naked crones began to be peddled around in a very discreet fashion. Who would win? The postmortem centerfold of the divine Swede, Lola-Lola, sitting astride a gravestone, or the venerable grandma of the bobbing breasts, Doña Sara García, posing naked as a jaybird?

Neither. This hot April night, a woman barely fifty years of age, well preserved, pretty, although with thick Andalusian ankles and without a jolly Cuban ass, square in the waist and with a cinched-in bosom, her hair tightly curled, red — a grownup version of Little Orphan Annie — a plunging neckline that went nowhere and revealed nothing, forcing the viewer (in this case, my parents and my uncle) to concentrate on the strange glimmer of her teeth, inlaid, overlaid, and plated with silver and gold even if they may have been rotten, turns out to claim the title of Last Playboy Centerfold.

“Clown of a whore,” she said. “It’s not that I haven’t had anything to eat, but there’s going to be some hair pulling if my rights are not recognized, you bunch of stinking ragpickers. I won’t move from here, even if the cops come to cart us off to jail. Shit! Long live Chile!”

“Concha Toro!” exclaimed my father. “The woman who took my virginity! The Chilean bolero singer!”

But the picture, which really did not seem posed, quickly disappeared, and in another television studio someone was handing the prize for the Last Flower Child to none other than Hipi Toltec, while the announcer explained that they had first intended to award the prize to the oldest hippie (there were lots, since someone who was twenty in 1962 was fifty in 1992: no matter how fragile he looks, Mick Jagger is going to reach his fiftieth birthday, and Paul McCartney can indeed ask in a trembling voice “Will you still need me / Will you still feed me / When I’m sixty-four,” which is how old Shirley Temple will be this year, along with Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes). So, since there is really no one more out of it than someone who was a flower child in the sixties, they chose instead to give a prize to the youngest, the person who personified the prolongation and not the extinction of a nostalgic tradition

OBLIVION AND UNION:

Hipi Toltec, shredding, took the little sugar skull and said the contest organizers had made an error, he was neither a hippie nor young: he was the plumed serpent who had finally returned to demand

UNION AND OBLIVION:

The channels turned into scrambled eggs: both the video and the audio; a bolero sung by Concha Toro and a rockaztec ballad sung by the Four Fuckups got blended into the audio and mental confusion of the TV managers, but my parents turned off the set, left Don Homero sitting there with his mouth hanging open, got dressed in their own style, my father in a three-piece black suit, tie and tie pin, starched collar, patent-leather boots, spats, white gloves, stick, and bowler (models: Adolphe Menjou and Ramón López Velarde); my mother in the tragic style of the early twenties, which looked so well on her: black satin top and skirt, to which she added languid tulle veils that turned her outfit into a dark cascade from her bare knees to her covered ankles; a black satin ribbon went around her forehead, leaving her wild, frizzy hair unfettered (models: Colette and Pola Negri), and free at last from having to feign, to vegetate, to stare endlessly, they walked out (the switches that turned them on, their inspiration: Concha Toro and Hipi Toltec) into the city because the city, after all and legitimately, was calling them, waiting for them, offering them these two solid moorings in a world left adrift, because:

“Where do you think the Bulevar is these days, baby?”

7. You Live Day to Day, Miracle to Miracle, a Lottery Life

Would they find the Bulevar? They’d been out of town since December, and since March they’d been locked in with Uncle Homero in Tlalpan; the Bulevar changed location every week, sometimes every twenty-four hours; it was never the same twice, but it was always everything: the place to meet in the capital, the place to see and be seen, the Plateros, the Madero, the Paseo de las Cadenas, the Zona Rosa of yesteryear, but now with this scandalously wonderful singularity: where that meeting place was no one knew, as secret as language (the new languages) it mutated every day, every hour, in order to remain ungraspable, uncorrupted by writers, orators, politicians, or any other manipulators.

The dripping sky is one of the constants in Mexico City; it rains incessantly, a black, oily, carboniferous rain that darkens the grandest neon signs; the sensation of a veiled dark sky in whose fogs fade the skeletons of the buildings, many of them unfinished, many just rusted steel beams, truncated towers, the temples of underdevelopment, skyscrapirontemples, others mere canvas, like those at the entrance to Puebla, others just cubes of cardboard dripping acid rain, but very few real, inhabited structures: the city lives by moving, permanence has become secret, only movement is visible, the stands along the old Paseo de la Reforma, fried foods, fruit stands, wilted flowers, black candy, sweetmeats, burro heads, pigs’ feet, maguey worms (perpetual humidity of the city, immense breeding ground for mildew, moss, rotten roe, peevish ants ready to be eaten), and the files of figures bent over devouring the tacos sold along Reforma in front of the tents illuminated by naked bulbs and burning mosquito repellant. But these details can only be seen with a microscope because from above (the view our happy foursome had as they entered the D.F.) the city is an immense, ulcerated crater, a cavity in the universe, the dandruff of the world, the chancre of the Americas, the hemorrhoid of the Tropic of Cancer.

Since the earthquake of ’85, tens of thousands of the homeless have taken over the traffic-circle islands and medians along Reforma and other main, divided arteries: shacks and pup tents, little shops and stalls: with each passing day the capital of Mexico looks more and more like a hick town. The somber but comic outfits Angel and Angeles are wearing, very twenties, as they drive the Van Gogh along Paseo de la Reforma, are an answer, a conscious and collective answer made by all young people with some spirit left, to the ugliness, the crudeness, and the violence around them.

The neon sign on the pockmarked façade of the theater in the Social Security Building blinked AFTER THE FIESTA THE SIESTA, and Angel and Angeles followed a horse-drawn coach shaped like a seashell. Who could be in there, behind those drawn curtains? Angel and Angeles exchanged glances: what they were thinking was probably what everyone who saw that coach right out of Cinderella’s nightmares thought: wherever that pumpkin on wheels is going is where the party, the Bulevar, the place, the sacred oasis of crime and cathartic violence is, for sure. The crowds grew larger as they went along Constituyentes, but it still wasn’t the Bulevar, they instinctively knew it. The packed, pallid throng tossed mango skins into the faces of those they didn’t like. Many young men walked quickly, without looking at anyone, all of them with bags hanging over their backs. From her window, an old lady was throwing flowerpots full of dirt and geraniums down onto the street, indiscriminately smashing the skulls of the passersby. No one even bothered to look up at her; no one looked down at them. They all wear identification labels on their chests (blouses, lapels, sweaters): name, occupation, and existence number for D.F. It rains ash. The ID cards neither fade nor come loose. The slow collapse of all hydraulic systems — Lerma, Mexcala, Usumacinta — have been compensated for by the constant acid misting caused by the industrialization of this high, burning, and enclosed valley.

“The problem is water,” said Don Fernando Benítez to Minister Robles Chacón. “You make people think it’s the air just to distract their attention from the real problem, then you make up this Disneyland story about the Dome that’s going to protect us from pollution and give a fair share of pure air to every inhabitant of the city. You miserable rats lie and lie and lie! The problem is the water, because every single drop of water that reaches this city costs millions of pesos.”

“Don’t you worry about it, Don Fernando,” answered the minister in a calm, friendly voice. “We know how to distribute our reserves and how to ration out that precious liquid. How are your water tubs doing, tell me. Have you had any problems? Haven’t we taken care of you just as you deserve?”

“Like everyone else, I’m saving as much water in them as I can, so my tubs are just fine,” said Benítez despondently. Then he quickly recovered his fighting spirit: “And how’s your mom?”

“Blind and buried,” said Robles Chacón unflinchingly.

“Well, let’s hope you have enough water to keep the flowers on her grave alive,” said Benítez before leaving.

“We forgive writers all their excesses! Ah, legitimization, history, all that’s left!” The minister resignedly sighed. He looked incredulously at his feet and called his aide-de-camp, the statistician he kept hidden in the armoire:

“Let’s see now”—Minister Robles Chacón snapped his fingers explosively—“get out here and catch me that rat, and make it snappy! A rat in the office of the Secretary of Patrimony and Vehiculi … But get a move on, you jerk, what’s your problem?” shouted the minister to the little man who’d emerged from the closet at the sound of that betitled and superior snap, and who then skulked his way through the furniture bought in Roche-Bobois, hunting for the rat and explaining that Mexico City has 30 million human inhabitants, but it has 128 million rats. He fell on his knees and stretched his hand under a table made of aluminum and transparent glass, a model people in the luxury market called the New York Table — they inhabit sewers, Mr. Secretary, drains, and mountains of garbage, every year they contaminate more than ten million people with parasitosis — he looked at his own white hand under the glass, floating under the transparent crystal, the hand gesturing in its search for the invisible rat — and other intestinal ailments.

“And they consume thirty tons of corn and other cereals every two weeks. These rats are murderers, sir, but they themselves die mysteriously when they eat certain grains that cause the death of the very rats that eat them.”

“Stop hiding in your damn statistics. I’m telling you to catch this specific rat that’s gotten into my office, damn your soul!” shouted the minister.

But the statistician lacked the strength to get up, so instead he put his head under the New York Table and flattened his nose against the glass, moistening it with his breath.

“Mounds of dead rodents have been found, dead from eating imported corn. And the cats, coyotes, and other animals that eat those dead rats also suffer serious sicknesses.”

“Then aren’t those grain importers taking part in the deratification campaign?” inquired Robles Chacón.

The diminutive statistician dressed in his tuxedo cleaned his breath and drool off the bottom of the glass table in the French office of the minister:

“No, sir, because rats breed every twenty-one days.”

He got to his feet with difficulty, adding, as he smoothed his hair into place, “Perhaps the importers simply contribute to the…”

“Statistics, no moral judgments,” said the minister to the statistician as he slammed the closet door closed in his face and sat down to chew on a Minnie Mouse lollipop.

* * *

The city lights up and goes out like a Christmas tree without presents.

“What a national hangover!” someone shouts from the intersection of Patriotismo and Industria.

“Pay the bill. And nobody take off without paying the bill!”

“But the bankers already done it, gone from Mexico to Grand Cayman, cash in hand.”

“What about that banker Don Mamelín Mártir de Madrazo? Made everybody think he was kidnapped so he could send his ransom money to the Bahamas.”

“And all that foreign money poured in here poured out again to safe countries.”

“Let’s hear it for safe Paraguay.”

“Oil glut.”

“Foreign debt.”

“Population explosion.”

Bodily functions are going backward. The smell of the people in the swirling mass at the corner of Tacubaya and Avenida Jalisco, where the Hermita building is slowly turning into sand, is like flatulent breath, an anal breathing. Everywhere there are more people than fit. The roofs have become a second plateau, surrounded by dark abysses, canyons where the dark rain drips. Signs of antennas and tubs are barely visible now. Horrified ladies wrapped in rebozos run with their shopping carts filled with bank notes, they form lines, there are neighborhood guards (adolescent boys with clubs and lengths of pipe) who protect them on the long lines leading to the tortilla vendors and pharmacies, the crackling stands. A shout from a grocery store in Mixcoac: “We only sell sugar for dollars.” A mango skin splatters against Angel and Angeles’s windshield.

“Devastated city.”

“Screwed city.”

Angel points to the old men in threadbare shit-colored jackets and ties playing guitars at stop lights,

only once in my life did I love anybody

and they run huffing and puffing, their Buskin shoes worn through, their Arrow shirts frayed, their High Life ties stained, to pick up the thankyoumisterlady as they doff their old Tardán borsalinos now devoid of band (in their melted brains the advertising slogan of their youth and of national promise rings out incessantly: From Sonora to Yucatán/ Gentlemen all wear hats by Tardán/ Twenty million Mexicans can’t be wrong: when the entire nation had fewer inhabitants than the capital in 1992: 1932), clean old men spitting on the windshield then cleaning it off with the remnants of towels purchased at the Iron Palace before the lights change. The Mixcoac stones reflect and project what’s left of the daylight. Along Avenida Revolución, a barter economy flourishes: underwear for combs, marjoram for tobacco, brass knuckles for Barbie dolls, condoms with feather crests for pictures of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, two Madonna cassettes for a sack of beans: I worked in an office, I was a student, I was a pharmacist, I imported grain, I was a chorus girl; now all of us are on the Street, check-out clerks in the black market scatter along Altavista toward Insurgentes, in the little plaza in front of the Obregón monument the hoods set up their illegal, swift, the-hand-is-quicker-than-the-eye games, under the walnut shells, in between the curtains of the deeds of the Revolution, in the confusion of pots, papier-mâché Judases, funny money only worth what the market says it’s worth today next to the graffiti smearing the monument of the Hero of Celaya.

LENIN OR LENNON?

The street theater for the city of thirty million people spreads toward San José Insurgentes, flamethrowers, shoeshine boys, lottery vendors, car washers, strolling musicians, beggars, people selling all kinds of things, mix with clowns, dancers, people giving recitals in the eternal night.

“So, what did you assholes expect?”

“Don’t delude yourselves.”

“So, what did you bastards expect?”

“We killed the water.”

“We killed the air.”

“We killed the forests.”

“Die, damned city!”

“Come on and die: fucked-up city, what are you waiting for?”

The people push their way along Taxqueña, yo asshole watch where you walkin’ man / fuckin’ old lady whut you need dat cane fo’? Give it here so ah can play golf wit’ yer doggy’s head / look dis cripple Nureyev’s pushin’ / why you wanna get in front of me, lady, go fuck youself old fart / yo blindman len’ me your glasses chuck dat nonseer in front of dat truck getta moveon fuckers he look like a wad o’phlegm someone done stepped on / a car stops at the intersection of Quevedo and Revolución / got to get movin’ / who’s stoppin’ / dis meat wagon don’t move / a thousand vendors suddenly surround the car it doesn’t move anymore / it’s a whale beached in an asphalt gulf on which descends the interminable banquet of things to buy an asphyxia of secret languages offering useless objects and unserviceable services hyperbolically described:

“Here you are, sir, awzom chewing gum.”

“Yo, I’m the kool kat wit the winning ticket.”

“I swear man, dese cigs is the real thing.”

“Take a look, lady, genuine humongous bras.”

“Check it out, man, look at these galoshes here.”

“Wanna learn to French kiss, got da bes’ book right here, man.”

Angel and Angeles stared at the rows of young people with no future, the long rows of bored people on guard before the nothingness, expecting nothing from the nothingness, Mexico City, decrepit and moribund and the street theater set up on tubs and broken-down trucks representing everything, reason and unreason:

AFTER THE FIESTA THE SIESTA

Step inside, step inside, just see how the oil prices plummeted

THE OPEC-AND-ONE NIGHTS

Step inside, step inside, see how the border was closed to wetbacks

TALES FROM THE TACO CURTAIN

Right this way to see how Mexicans bred until they exploded demographically

NO SECTS PLEASE WE’RE CATHOLIC

Right here on the big stage, ladies and gentlemen, events in Central America, or how President Trigger Trader made the worst prophecies come true just by saying them out loud

WELCOME TO SAIGONCITO

Ladies and gentlemen, don’t miss these scenes of virile violence in which President Rambold Rager widens the war to include Mexico and Panama

IF I PAY THEM THEY ARE MY FREEDOM FIGHTERS

Step inside, don’t miss the extraordinary comedy about the rise in import duties

IS THAT A GATT YOU’RE CARRYING OR ARE YOU JUST HAPPY TO SEE ME?

Right here on the big stage: in 3-D and Cinerama, back up your optimism with the complete history of our foreign debt, or how we beat out Brazil and Argentina in the race to disaster!

AFTER THE FIESTA THE SIESTA

and from car to car along the Beltway, the shouts of the city of gossip, the nation of rumors:

“The peso’s dropping to thirty thousand per dollar.”

“Did you hear that Mamadoc got fed up and is quitting tomorrow?”

“What I hear is that it’s Mamadoc and the President.”

“No, what Mamadoc wants is for Colonel Inclán to fuck her.”

“Get out, man, where’d you hear that?”

“I’ve got a brother-in-law in SEPAFU.”

“He’s lyin’, man.”

“That minister Don Ulises is a wife-beater.”

“They say he broke his wife’s legs.”

“How’d you find out?”

“Ask the lady herself, there she is coming out of Sanborn’s.”

“They say President Paredes took a billion pesos to Switzerland.”

“Who told you that?”

“They say it came out in the Gall Street Journal.”

“Since when do you know English?”

“I’ve got people to translate for me. But it’s box populi, box dei.”

“Didya hear that Mamadoc had a copy of the Petite Trianon built for her in El Pedregal?”

“Some people saw Don Ulises López in Las Vegas.”

“Yeah, and he lost three million dollars in one shot playing baccarat.”

“And we don’t even have enough for a trip to Xochimilco.”

“I hear Robles Chacón can’t get it up, and that’s why he loves power so much. Just like women.”

“Colonel Inclán’s really a queer.”

“And Mamadoc’s a transvestite.”

“No, man, she’s supposed to be Julio Iglesias wearing a wig.”

“Wrong, man. It’s that old group Menudo under one big skirt.”

“Yeah, I hear she only likes to sleep with dwarfs.”

“Robles Chacón’s a junkie.”

“Apparently the Minatitlán wells went dry, but nobody’s saying anything.”

“Wheredya hear that?”

“My brother-in-law has access to Pemex.”

“Well, someone told me that Guatemala just occupied the entire state of Chiapas and nobody even noticed.”

“No way. My nephew was just drafted and he says the real war is with Australia over the Revillagegedo islands.”

“Right. It’s about that nodule thing.”

“Whatsat?”

“Instead of oil, it’s nodules now, didn’t you hear?”

“Never heard of it.”

“With these manganese nodules, man, we’re gonna take off again.”

“All have to do is administer our wealth!”

“But President Jomajeezus wantsa sell the islands to the Vatican.”

“No way. Who toldya?”

“I got an uncle who’s a sacristan in the Basilica.”

“I don’t believe anything anymore.”

“I’m telling you tomorrow they’re gonna announce another nationalization.”

“But there’s nothing left to nationalize.”

“There sure is: the air.”

“But who wants it?”

“They’re gonna make a window tax, just the way Santa Anna did.”

“Tomorrow they declare a moratorium.”

“You’d better get your savings out while you can.”

“Sell everything.”

“Spend it all.”

“The whole thing’s going down the tubes.”

“How many people are here?”

“Enough.”

and along Emita — Ixtapalapa an army of impostors and con men besieged each other, besieged each other trying to make deals, if you want to get into Los Pinos / I was just named superintendent of the Tuxpan refinery / I’m on my way to be ambassador to Ruanda-Urundi / I’m writing Mamadoc’s memoirs / the President has commissioned me to / the IMF has ordered me to / I have the job of bringing Dr. Barnard to operate on private individuals, just sign here / I’ve been offered a corner on the U.S. corn crop / the Rockerfeller Foundation has assigned me the job of distributing scholarships in Mex / would you be interested in spending a month free at the Ritz Hotel in Paris? Just sign here / I’m selling a condo in Beverly Hills at a hundred Mexican pesos the square yard: just sign here / the New York production company PornoCorno would be very innarested in offering you a contract, baby: just sign here /

The women selling shrimp tacos in the snack bar for Churubusco Studios note:

“Look here now, Sadie, my only contribution to the crisis of confidence we’re suffering is, as Don Paul Volcker declared recently, the U.S. deficit undermines confidence there, too.”

“Can you imagine, Frannie, the U.S. is asking for loans of $100 billion out of foreign savings accounts every year now, isn’t that incredible?”

“Well, Sadie, all I know is that when the dollar’s high it means high interest rates.”

“Frannie, you just said a mouthful. Gimme another shrimp taco / and the Van Gogh plods along the Tlalpan causeway, where the dwarfs, eccentrics, and scribes the provinces export in large numbers to the capital in order to raise cash meet and offer their services to their urban clientele. The van stops in the little plaza of the San Pedro Apóstol Church, about one hundred and fifty feet from the house of bright colors. The seashell-shaped coach drawn by horses also stops there: the meeting place was their own house, it was here the Bulevar was to be today, they’d gone around a big old circle, everyone making a sincere effort to keep up a certain style, to restore the romantic image, make dark suits, high hats, feather boas, crinolines, Nankin trousers, embroidered vests, ostrich feathers, suffocating chokers, and Derbys fashionable, today they’re parading here, they can’t avoid all the urban gangrene, but they do avoid some of it, yes, the carriage doors open and out tumble the Orphan Huerta (very much changed), Hipi Toltec (with a tiny electric fan in his hand), and Egg asking Baby Ba not to get left behind, now baby, we’re almost there, look: Angel and Angeles, our buddies …

“Serbus!” shouted the Orphan by way of greeting.

“In ixtli, in yóllotl!” said Hipi Toltec.

“Animus intelligence,” answered my mom.

“Buffalo,” synthesized the Orphan.

“We thought we’d never see each other again,” said my dad.

“You thought the Four Fuckups were

said the Orphan

“As a matter of fact, I did,” said Angeles.

A group dressed in green began clubbing the horses pulling the coach, first beating them to their knees and then continuing to pound them until they died, always shouting Equus, equus, the horses of the conquistadores. As they rolled over, the two Percherons tipped over the conch-shaped carriage.

Angel was the only one who looked. Without turning his head, Egg said: “There’s this competition to get included in the frieze on the Monument to the Heroes of Violence.”

“So they didn’t kill you in Aca?”

“Níxalo; draftearon us for to clinup Aca.”

“Under what conditions?”

“Jus juan: that we not sing for a whole year so people’d think we died wit de udders in Aca.”

“Ce Akatl!”

“Wich mean dat da Babosos Brudders gonna teikover da calpulli.”

“Disisdapits.”

“Bulook: der’s no competencia in the mágica of da marketa except da Immanuel Can’t.”

“Parvenus an home boys facetaface.”

“Awzom!”

“Don’ spase out, Orphan, an stop wit da self-flagellation, ’cause der’s broken glass anstoff.”

“Laic yunó.”

“Cheesis, man, ay mus eet seben time ahuic Damningo Loonys Madness Mercolates Hoovers Bernaise an Savagedog.”

“Good buddy.”

“Ay too mus tacofy from damningo to savagedog.”

“Baby Ba says she’s hungry: won’t you invite her to your house for dinner?”

“We ain’t got much.”

“Except for Uncle Homero.”

“You forget it’s the first of May: he’s gone with the wind.”

“We saw him from here: he gone.”

Alone in the house of bright colors, Don Homero Fagoaga said to himself: “This is my chance.” For the first time he found himself without Angeles, who, though she did sometimes go out shopping, would leave him with Angel, who never left the television set alone; but what a time to choose to abandon him: would that missionary Benítez pop in again to catechize him about democracy? Alone and permanently dressed in red-striped pajamas: the owner of Pichilinque and Mel O’Field and Frank Wood harbored the feudal suspicion that his sister Isabella Fagoaga and her husband the inventor Diego Palomar were not as disinterested and spiritual as it seemed; aside from the forty million gold pesos that Isabella left her son Angel, there had to be something else, Homero felt sure of it this morning; he had investigated bank accounts, stocks, CDs, but had turned up nothing: there had to be a hiding place in the house, money, jewels, papers, something.

Like a teenager who takes advantage of the fact that parents and servants are out of the house to get out his pornographic magazines and excite himself, exciting himself above all with the prospect of the imminent return of those guardians and punishers, in the same way Homero threw himself into exploring the house of the Curies of Tlalpan, crammed with blackboards and portraits of famous scientists and mousetraps. Homero immediately went down to the cellar to find the family treasure, where the first thing that happened to him was that a mousetrap caught his pinkie, and the pain, the anger, and the humiliation of the uncle were so great that he came charging back upstairs, knocking over blackboards and smashing a prehensile mousetrap against the photo of Niels Bohr, as if only a human face deserved the reaction of this rage, but barely had the trap hit the glass covering the photo when the fragments reassembled themselves instantly and once again covered the benign face of the Danish scientist, who looked like the benevolent captain of a whaling ship. Don Homero fell over backward, tripping over a stepladder that instantly folded up, allowing a pail of black paint to fall on a white cat that just happened to be there searching for the house’s celebrated photogenic mice; and the cat, now transformed into a black cat, jumped on top of a cabinet and knocked a box of salt onto Homero’s shoulders. Homero grabbed an umbrella that happened to be handy in order to protect himself from the rain of objects, but as he opened it, a rainstorm hidden inside it fell on his head, and Homero in despair threw himself on a bed where there happened to be twelve top hats, which, because of the homeric obesity, snapped open, forcing our startled academic out of bed, and making him run through the halls in hopes of destroying all the other photos of scientists, but he found the frames empty, the glass all broken expressly to cut his feet, and at the end of the corridor, he found a long banquet table and twelve men sitting at it, dining by candlelight: as they had in the Sun & Fun Toltec Tour of Acapulco, under the tutelage of Will Gingerich, each guest had a name tag on his chest: E. Rutherford, Cambridge; N. Bohr, Copenhagen; M. Planck, Berlin; W. Heisenberg, Göttingen; W. Pauli, Vienna; R. Oppenheimer, Princeton; A. Einstein, Princeton; E. Fermi, Chicago; J. D. Watson, Cambridge; F. Crick, Cambridge; L. de Broglie, Paris; L. Pauling, Berkeley, and as soon as they saw Homero they all politely stood and invited him, in a friendly way, to join them and take the last seat at the table: number 13, shouted our uncle, horrified, turning his back on them, running away, tripping over blackboards, paint cans, umbrellas, top hats, cats, mice, and mousetraps intent on pinching his naked toes: he fled out into the street, in pajamas, barefoot, and those who saw him thought he was a madman escaped from the nearby Tlalpan sanatorium or perhaps an escaped convict, what with those stripes on his uniform and with no shoes on, Sadie!

8. They decided to look for jobs

They decided to look for jobs while everything that had to happen did happen, meaning that I had to be born on exactly October 12 in order to win the contest, and after that, watch out, baby, but how was the contest going? Did anyone know anything? Even so, it would have to be checked out and in the meantime all of them would have to stay together in the Tlalpan house, unless it turned out that our miserable Uncle Homero had flown the coop merely to order the police to keep anyone from living in it while he mended fences with the PRI, God knows what goes on behind that feverish brow. In the meantime, everybody is here in the tits of the family, so to speak — Hipi still disintegrating, portable electric fan in hand; the Orphan changed forever, my mom says that now he looks like Charlie Chaplin when Chaplin was young, an amazed look on his face, all eyebrows, with a tiny black mustache and kinky hair, and complaining that without the income from rockaztec he won’t be able to dress in style.

Woe is me, he complains as he strolls through the secondhand clothing stores with their wares hanging in huge stalls along the streets of Ejido with the monument to the Revolution in the background and under its dome dealers in products whose importation is strictly forbidden, blackmarket clothes that aren’t even in style but were ten years ago; woe is me, complains the Orphan, followed by Egg and Baby Ba among the clothes hangers on the avenue, succulently caressing the tweed and leather, the glittering hobnails, and the soft cotton of the gringo T-shirts, all forbidden because of a year of abstinence imposed by the government on the Four Fuckups. Our buddy Egg stares nostalgically at the brands of internationally produced consumer goods sold illegally but right out in the open under the dome of the monument to the Revolution, the things he’d like to buy Baby Ba so she’d look better, and he limits himself instead to serving her in secret: he makes her bed, he puts her to bed, he tucks her in, he gives her her favorite Cabbage Patch dolls: that’s how we know he’s got a past and what fucks me up about these fucked-up types is that I have just as much past (genetic info) and they, the Orphan most of all, don’t have any past, and Hipi only the past he’s invented, which isn’t even his: je suis la serpent-à-plumes, sure, buddy, with that fan in your hand.

One day, my mother (with me inside her, remember) goes out with him because Hipi wants people to think he’s got a girl and that she’s even going to have a baby. My mom is for the idea and does him this favor and he brings us to his parents’ house, which is on a roof and surrounded by water tubs near Balbuena and the Puebla highway: a shack whose walls are tubs and a crowd of people there you can’t even see because it’s so dark, but Hipi kisses all of them, talks to them in Nahuatl, repeats that greeting of his “in ixtli, in yóllotl” and my mother repeats it in Spanish (my mother would like to be minimally rational in this era in which we live), “a heart and a mind,” gravely curtsying before the shapeless old men and women wrapped in ponchos and serapes and old newspapers in the shack in the lost, nameless city built on the garbage belt, but surrounded by gadgets which, we suppose, Hipi Toltec brings them from his expeditions, because he gives his electric fan to a little old man as wrinkled up as a prune, a real prune, and the little old man carefully piles it next to his Mixmaster and his Sanyo icemaker and his Phillips TV set and his Sears toaster and his Machiko Kyo hair dryer and his Osterizer microwave oven and his Kawabata alarm radio, all stored there in that smoky, sepia-colored darkness devoid of electricity, which doesn’t even get light from the street. And my mother wonders, will they go on accumulating the trophies this prodigal son brings them forever? Like Columbus or Cortés returning to the Court of Spain loaded with coconuts and maguey, hammocks and rubber balls, gold and precious woods, feathered crowns and opal diadems, they thank him for it, he kisses their hands, they pat his long, greasy, straight hair, they all speak Aztec and say, my mother thinks they say in any case, things that are very poetic and beautiful:

“Ueuetiliztli!” (Old folks!)

“Xocoyotizin!” (Young pup!)

“Aic nel toxaxahacayan.” (We shall never be obliterated)

“On tlacemichtia.” (There everything was stolen)

“Olloliuhqui, olloliuhqui!” (How the wheel of fortune spins!) and with enormous satisfaction they look at my pregnant mother, they look at the center of my mom, where I launch into an Olympic dive, but when we get back to Tlalpan I still cannot understand Hipi’s world as a past (I want everyone to have a conscious past so I can be born a bit better) but as something very different: he has a secret family and in it there is only a memory of silence.

Something similar is going on with the Orphan Huerta (with all of them in fact, these are their pasts, barely what passes by, nothing more, my tranquil genes tell me, the past is only the past), but the Orphan at least talks about a brother who disappeared, the Lost Boy, he calls him, and about a grandmother who lives in Chicago, where she forgot her Spanish and never learned English: so she became a mute: a memory of silence, I tell them again, this time captured between the successive infernos of wind and ice and a suffocating purgatory: Chicago, City of the Big Shoulders, says my mother, reciting something or other, and the light of reverie goes on in the eyes of all present — Egg, Orphan, Hipi, the invisible Baby Ba (who suddenly I want to see more than anything in the world, convinced suddenly that only I will be able to see her: but in order to do that, I’ll have to be born, to be born and see her, it’s not true she’s invisible, I convince myself because no one sees me either, nor do they pay me the slightest attention, unless I kick or jump around or take swan dives in the stomach of Chicago and Lake Michigan).

There was lots of talk about Chicago in those May days because that’s where the Orphan’s grandma lived, condemned to silence. But there was another reason as well: Uncle Fernando passed by the San Pedro Apóstol house with two Indians, a couple he said he’d met during his excursion in February to a land of blind people, and we saw this strange couple with light eyes and dark skin, standing like two flexible statues in the doorway of the house of bright colors, I don’t know if they were blind (I’ve already said it: they don’t see me, so how can I judge those who are also not seen and who just accumulate, if your mercies would care to do the arithmetic: Baby Ba, Hipi’s smoking family, now this couple my parents tell me are handsome, strong, with a strange determination in their clouded-over eyes).

Uncle Fernando speaks for them, but my parents say the couple’s silence is even more eloquent: there is no one better, no one more intelligent in this country than this couple and people like them, no one, not the financier Don Ulises López, not the minister Don Federico Robles Chacón, not the academician Don Homero Fagoaga, not my father, the sensitive and tormented conservative rebel, not the serene and (she tries to be reasonable!) reasonable mamma mia on the left, who is so silent at times in order not to interfere in the obvious results of everything that’s happening, all of them together are not as intelligent, as determined as this pair of Indians who got married the day of the great noise and the night of her first moon, creating another child at the same time I was created, giving me an invisible brother who would never be seen by his parents, created (remember, Reader) in the final moment of an incomprehensible, noisy, incomparable day in which all times went mad and no one could tell whether he was awake or dreaming.

Uncle Fernando returned to the sierra of the blind people, and this couple, who had used his earlier visit as reason for marrying and making a child, recognized the smell (unmistakable, that odor of creole historian) of his return, they stuck to him like glue, repeating again and again a word they’d learned only the gods know where (Chicago, Chicago), and Benítez said to them, “Not Chicago, Chicago, no, you stay here, this is your homeland, you’re needed here, you’d get lost in the world, and two months later here they are, she pregnant, both of them blind, Indians, monolingual, idol worshippers, mythomaniacs, shamanic, syncretic, and, all in all, screwed up, how does that sound for a collection of handicaps, eh? What more can I say? And by saying Chi-ca-go, full of determination, magically willful, here they are and no one’s going to stop them: they are going to escape from the vicious circle of their rural, age-old poverty, they are the most valiant, most stubborn, craziest people in the world: and they have created my brother, the child who was conceived with me! They are going to break with their fate. Will it be worth the trouble?

I don’t really understand what’s going on, I admit it. Don Fernando reasons and fights; they say “Chicago”; it’s cold; that’s where the Orphan Huerta’s grandmother is; if they insist, well here’s her address; but they’re asking for trouble.

In bed, my father says to my mother:

“Quetzalcoatl went east.”

“Cortés came from the west.”

“Wetbacks go north.”

“The dead go south.”

“Those are the cardinal points of Mexico, and no one can escape them!”

9. My father needs a compass

My father needs a compass to find his way through the city: he’s like a navigator in the Unknown Sea. The group has decided that if they’re going to survive, all of them will have to find work in a city overflowing with the unemployed; suspiciously, no one knows anything about Uncle Homero, and Uncle Fernando, who lives off a modest university pension and the success of his books in Poland and Yugoslavia (he’s piled up millions of zlotys and dinars he never expects to see, but he does consume the income in pesos of thirteen Polish and Yugoslav writers in Mexico), has dedicated himself to sowing panic in D.F. parking lots.

Example: he materializes and announces he’s the parking-lot inspector. People think it’s Jupiter turning up at the Last Judgment: they all run, hide, pour water on the heroin, flush the grass down the drain, pretend they know nothing about the smell of marijuana in the air, and even though everyone knows that in parking lots, in trunks, motors, and under seats is where drug trafficking takes place, only Don Fernando takes the bull by its moralizing horns and tells people he’s an incorruptible inspector. No one ever saw such shock, and sowing moral terror is all our Uncle Fernando desires: the point is not to accept any bribe, so that his activity benefits neither himself nor us.

“In any case, with us bribes have become very exclusive. Before, there was a certainty and a democracy to them — they were available to all. In fact, the only human right won by the Mexican Revolution was the right to corruption, which in El Salvador or Paraguay is the privilege of a minority, but which in Mexico belongs to all, from the president to newspapermen, to the cop on the beat — and anyone who isn’t corrupt is an asshole. In any case, in Mexico bribery used to be natural, as it had been since the Aztecs and the colonial period: why, in the court of Carlos III of Spain, bribes were called “Mexican grease.” But nowadays, dear niece and nephew and you FUBARS here present, functionaries refuse the first bribe and play to see who’ll give more, they make scenes — How dare you, sir! International Baby Foods offered me double that, the Emirates Baksheesh Corporation triple that, what an idea! Come now, you can do better than that, sir. They even use an international vocabulary nowadays: the pure and simple bribe is called the perquisite or baksheesh, kickbacks are called pot-de-vin. Even the bribers have begun to put on airs; now they choose those they want to bribe and don’t try to buy off just anyone. There are categories, what did you think, eh? Anyone who bribes a transit cop is committing a serious breach of Mexican etiquette. Bribing a customs agent brings a total loss of face. Bribing, real bribing, takes place only if you bribe the Cardinal Primate, the President, Minister Robles Chacón, Mamadoc, or, extraterritorially, the North American President, Ronald Ranger (if in fact he really exists and isn’t merely what he always was: a photo opportunity, a fleeting TV image no one could hear because his voice was drowned out by the roar of the helicopter whisking him away for a weekend at Camp Goliath, just one more decal on vans with Colorado oasis windows, a hologram!). Okay, let’s see you bribe the Iron Lady, Emperor Akihito, Bishop Tutu, or Mother Teresa. Now that’s bribery, not some flea-bitten congressman, the cop on the corner, or the customs officer, forget it!”

This being the situation, my father took his compass and, together with my mother (me inside her) and the Four Fuckups, organized first their jobs within the generalized unemployment in order to survive until we won the Christophers Contest in October, when we’d live it up and up and up, oh don’t be perverse, universe, or as Dad says, “Avoid the mess, avoid the mess…”

This is what they managed to do in the merry month of May:

Egg was hired as a TV weatherman for the Tlalpan district, but he was fired because his powerful resolve led him to scorn storms, hurricanes, earthquakes, and other forms of excitement that traditionally and officially were suggested to make the programs more pleasant. He was content to say, “The weather today is the same as it was yesterday,” or “Yesterday’s weather was a little better than tomorrow’s will be.”

Fired from this job, he managed to get a job as cleanup man in the Sanborn’s on Avenida Universidad. When the restaurant and the stores were finally empty, our buddy Egg would first clean up all the trash and mop the floor, and then he would take down from the book rack a volume published by Alianza Editorial in Madrid (prohibitively expensive books) and would sit down to read in the solitary café until dawn. He thus became something enormously secret: the Sanborn’s Reader. Without knowing it, he took the same book that Angeles, my mother, never finished reading: Plato’s Cratylus, that dialogue where all they talk about is names: What is a name? Does a name exist because the thing demands to be named? Is a name merely a caprice? or, perhaps: Was it God who named us?: Egg and Angeles, that book connected Egg to the world of Angeles and neither one knew it.

Hipi Toltec was, successively, a tobacco spitter and fire-eater out on the streets, dresser (or tailor) for fleas, fireworks expert, and a walker of elegant dogs. But he contaminated all the dogs he touched with rabies; one of his skyrockets went so high that it proved convincingly that the dome was nothing more than a fairy tale; the fleas abruptly formed a union; and his longest tobacco expectoration hit the license plate of Don Ulises López’s black Transnational limo and no one could ever get it clean: what Hipi spits, I think, is the liquid equivalent of the fire in the Fifth Sun.

The Orphan Huerta began by going to Cuernavaca as a pool digger, but he gave up the job because every time he finished digging, it was dead bodies instead of water that flowed into the hole, right on his head. He didn’t want to find out any more about it, so he went back to Mexico City, where his new look, that Chaplinesque air of innocence, guaranteed him a certain success as a house sitter. That’s how he came to be taking care of the immense house that belonged to Don Ulises López and his wife Doña Lucha, when they went to Taxco on vacation in May. He also informed my father that Miss Penny López, whom we thought killed in Ada and Deng’s nightclub in Aca, was alive and kicking (that’s kicking, not screwing): all alone in her mansion in Las Lomas del Sol, under the protective eye of her somber duenna, Ms. Ponderosa.

Dad filed that precious bit of information and offered his services to SEPARVE, which was looking for a translator of Mexican sayings, since — to everyone’s surprise — they’d found a European market for Mexican folk sayings: such was the hunger for certitude and wisdom in the Vecchio Mondo.

Among the most celebrated of my pop’s exports are these, which were received with open arms, even in London and Paris:

You left me whistling on the hill

A qu’elle est naine ma fortune, que est-ce qu’elle grandira?

Thou hast made me muffins with goat’s meat!

La prudence, on l’appele connerie

Here only my fried pigskins crackle!

Aux femmes, ni tout l’amour ni tout le fric

We only visit the cactus when it flowers

Faute de baguette, mangez des tortillas

Don’t call me uncle, we haven’t met yet

Les amours à la distance sont pour des cons à outrance

This clean industry (except when Angel had to translate “Aguacate maduro, pedo seguro” and came up with “Art Is a Fart”), devoid of problems (even “rosario de Amozoc” had illustrious equivalents in “Donnybrook” and “Branlebas”), yielded a nice income which, in accordance with the Tlalpan pact, my father divided up with my mother, Egg, Hipi, the Orphan, and (possibly) with Baby Ba, not to mention your humble servant.

At the same time, my mother was hired by the Secretariat of Culture, Letters, and Literacy (SECULELA) to devise ordinary-language versions of Shakespeare that could be understood in the proletarian neighborhoods (are there any other kind?) in the D.F., DeeEff, DeeFate, DeeForm, De Facto, Defecate, Dee Faculties. Her greatest success was her translation of Hamlet:

“To be or what?”

But then she had to revise everything because perhaps she should have begun:

“To be here or not?”

Not all members of the group knew such success. The Four Fuckups were deeply demoralized by having their musical vocation frustrated, enervated by their absence from the space preemptively occupied by and divided up among the affected intellectuals in the Immanuel Can’t group.

The critique of reason puuure

For madness a sure cuuure

To say nothing of the crude, gross violence of the Baboso Brothers:

Last night as I watched yer daddy screw yer mom

Ah jes had to puke my guts up, the grits an’ eggs an’ ham

which was all you heard on the radio from morning till night, while the Fuckups had to hide their great nineties lyrics under a bushel for a year:

If ah stay, ah’l jes forgit her,

So it’s better that ah go.

Oh, Lady Disdain, do not

Let me be your Swain:

If ah stay, ah’l jes forgit her,

So it’s better that ah go.

which they composed at night, exhausted, in the Tlalpan house, at which, one day, the following note from Uncle Don Homero Fagoaga inevitably arrived:

Doubtlessly Distinguished Niece and Nephew:

I saw you both leave the house on May 1. I observed your costumes and listened to your comments. I thought that since we’d all taken refuge under a common roof, to which all of us had a right, that at least, juris tantum, we’d all spoken the absolute truth about what happened in the recent past. I must confess my disillusion. You two, with perfidy and with an eye to profit, caused yourselves to pass for old-fashioned hippietecs with long hair and blue jeans, using the slang of the sixties in order to deceive my habitual sagacity and make me think I was dealing with naïve greenhorns from the age of Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin, and Chic Guevara. But it was all a huge hoax! You both are part of the reactionary avant-garde of rebel conservatism! You look for your fashions in the first half of the century, before any gringo left his poop on the moon, forever changing the balance of the universe! I’ve had to suffer lots of shocks in my life, but none of them has put my understanding of the world into such a crisis as this trick of yours. You may expect my revenge. Pack up your gear, because that house won’t belong to you for very long!

Effective Suffrage. No Reelection.

(signed) Homero Fagoaga, LL.D.

Hipi and the Orphan said they should get ready for the siege of Tlalpan: Homero would only get them out by force, and before that happened they’d pour molten lead on him and shove a stake up his ass, even if it gave him infinite pleasure, but Angeles my mother said that what really surprised her was the idea that Uncle H. had managed a reconciliation with the Party and the government (the rest was a pretext) and would screw up the Christophers Contest: that would be his greatest perversity, it had to be stopped. So, one morning in May, my parents, dressed in the most conservative and old-fashioned way, took the Van Gogh and the compass and set out (I a marble within) to find out the status of the contest and to enter it in proper form now that there remained no doubt whatsoever that Angeles, as Capitolina and Farnesia would say, was “in a family way.”

10. More Rumors Than Pennies in a Piggy Bank

The Palace of the Citizenry, in the northern sector of the city, was the symbolic end point — when it was built — of the Pan-American Highway and was flanked on both sides by statues of the Green Indians. From there, a causeway, surrounded by recycling water, ran to the vast central island, where, no joke, an eagle perched on a cactus devoured several serpents every day. If the eagle was replaced every so often, it was something no one ever checked or even desired to check.

From that central island a dozen stairs descended to the tunnels, where, in an asymmetrical arrangement, the barred windows opened for the business that more than justified this multimillion-dollar structure, erected by the government of President Jesús María y José Paredes in the midst of our ongoing crisis.

ALL CITIZENS HAVE THE RIGHT TO INFORMATION

ALL CITIZENS HAVE THE RIGHT TO COMPLAIN

ALL CITIZENS HAVE THE RIGHT TO GIVE UP

Dressed in black, he flourishing his walking stick, she flouncing her mourning veils, Angel and Angeles walked down a stairway to the tunnel and, before doing anything else, got on the INFORMATION line. Their first order of business was to find out how a couple went about entering the Columbus Day contest for 1992. Two hours later, a man with his hair combed forward to cover his baldness, dressed in the old-fashioned bureaucratic style, wearing a blue eyeshade and sleeve garters, listened distractedly to my parents’ request:

“Gosh, there are sooo many contests…”

“Yes, but this is the Christopher Columbus Contest, arranged for October 12, 1992—this year…”

“Of course, but, you know, there are lots of contests every day…”

“There certainly are, but there is only one Columbus Contest…”

“Are you sure of that, sir?”

“Of course I am, and so should you be, if you know what you’re doing…”

“Now don’t you get nasty with me, young fellow … Next!”

“The next person is my wife, who will ask you the same question: about the Christophers Contest…”

“Didn’t you just say Columbus, the Columbus Contest is what you said a moment ago. Have you changed your mind?”

“Christopher or Columbus, it’s all the same, Christopher Columbus: don’t you know who he was?”

“Look, if you get smart with me, I’ll slam this window shut right in your face.”

“Let’s see you do it…”

“I’d just be dumping you on one of my office mates here, sir, and that would not be kind.”

“Knock off the crap. The Columbus Contest, announced by Mamadoc on October 12, 1991…”

“Didn’t you say that it was for 1992, this year? How can anyone help you if you can’t say things straight?”

“The contest will be held in 1992, but it was announced in 1991 by Mamadoc…”

“Trying to use influence on me now?”

“It just so happens that she announced the contest.”

“You know what happens to people who threaten to use influence around here? Have you ever heard of moral renovation?”

“I was just a kid when that came out.”

“And now he insults me for being old, what a lack of respect!”

“Look, sir, all I want to know is how I can find out about this contest, I don’t want to have anything to do with you…”

“Very nice. Now he calls me an incompetent. Keep it up, son, keep it up. I want to see how far this insolence of yours will take you.”

“With all due respect, sir, where can I…”

“Now listen, I have a name, why do you keep calling me sir, it’s as if you called me buddy.”

“Okay, what’s your name?”

“Use your imagination.”

“I don’t have any left. You used my last drop when you wore out my patience.”

“In that case, go over to the personnel office and find out what my name is so you learn how to treat a public employee with respect.”

“But all I…”

“Soon you’ll be calling me that guy or damned old baldy there behind the bars, that’s what I expect from you, come on, why don’t you call me a miserable bureaucrat with smelly feet standing there all day like a jerk, careful when you call me a jerk, sonny, or I’ll have you thrown out of here, hey, security, get over here, this guy’s threatening me, what else am I going to have to put up with!”

My parents, still followed, like it or not, your mercies, by the cloud of suspicion resulting from the Acapulco caper, stepped out of line and headed in the opposite direction, looking for another information window. They actually and respectfully dared ask a middle-aged guard with a sweaty upper lip, wearing a gray uniform and a strange French kepi, sitting in a wheelchair next to a staircase: “Information about the Christopher Columbus Contest, please?”

“Take this staircase,” said the crippled guard.

“Thank you.”

My parents started to walk toward the stairs.

“Just a moment,” said the guard.

“Yes?”

“Are you going to go up or down?”

“I don’t know. We’re going to the contest office, and you told us…”

“This is a down staircase.”

“Okay, is the contest office upstairs or downstairs?”

“That depends.”

“Depends? Depends on what?”

“On if you go up by going down or if you go down by going up. There’s a big difference.”

“Where is the contest office?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“I don’t want to change the subject, what I want is information…”

“Well, why didn’t you say so? The information window is right over there, where that gentleman with the blue visor is standing…”

“Let’s go over this again calmly, sir. You told us that we should take this staircase. Now tell me: should we go up by going up or go down by going down.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“Well?”

“It all depends.”

“On what, now?”

“Well, before you get to the stairs, there’s the door.”

“I can see it. I’m not blind.”

“Well, tell me if you think you’re going to go out the door or enter it.”

“Go out, go out, no question about it: go out.”

“In that case, go down three levels and on the left you’ll find the Columbus Contest office.”

“The Columbus Contest?” suspiciously asked a lady who looked like one of the Bergen-Belsen jail guards in an early-forties Warner Brothers movie: hair pulled back, chignon, pince-nez, shadows under her eyes, lips like Conrad Veidt’s, high collar, scarf, and cameo with the profile of Hermann Goering painted on it, and the Ride of the Valkyries playing insinuatingly on the Muzak:

“Mozart,” said my mother.

“What?” The lady sitting there narrowed her serpent’s eyes as she carved an Iron Cross into the wood with the knife she held in her hand.

“We would like to know where to sign up for the Christopher Columbus Contest set for the twelfth of Oct…”

“You’ve come to the right place.”

“What do you know.” My father sighed, putting on his pince-nez so as not to be a step behind the receptionist.

“Who is going to have the baby?” said the bureaucrat directly.

“I am,” said my mother.

“It will have to be verified.”

“Certainly.”

“Dr. Menges!” barked the lady. “Another one for the Götterdämmerung!”

A man with black-dyed hair, twitching cheeks, and blue, slightly crossed eyes appeared behind a white hospital screen. He himself wore a white gown, black patent-leather shoes, and brick-colored gloves. He smiled.

He asked my mother to come into the space behind the screen (I inside, trembling with fear), my father tried to follow her, but the lady stopped him.

“Spread your legs,” said the doctor.

“Isn’t my verbal statement enough? I had my last period almost two months ago and…”

“Spread your legs!” shouted the doctor.

“Think the rain will let up?” my father asked the lady with the chignon.

“Don’t try making small talk with me,” answered the lady.

“So sorry, but when do you think World War III will break out?”

“Don’t get all gemütlich with me, I’m warning you.”

“Me? I wouldn’t dare. I’d rather listen to you.”

“What do you want to know?”

Suddenly a light went on inside my dad’s head: “What law governs the activities of this office, what is, shall we say, its Kantian categorical imperative?”

The lady in charge answered with great seriousness: “Everyone can do whatever he pleases as long as there is someone to blame.”

Angeles screamed horribly when the doctor brought a white-hot branding iron with a glowing swastika on its tip close to her labia: the entrance, meine Damen und Herren, to Ali Baba’s cave, where the final treasure is ME; my mother gave the doctor a kick in the jaw, and as he fell to the floor he shouted that this baby is not Aryan, this baby should not be allowed to enter the contest, this baby has the blood of slaves, gypsies, Indians, Moors, Jews, Semites, he mights, he did go insane, screaming his head off, and we fled. We ran up the three levels, we saw the guard in his wheelchair, abandoned, unable to move, soaked in his own urine, asking us: “Where are you going, folks? Stop! First ask me! You can’t go that way! That window is not for looking out but for looking in!”

My parents and I (more upset than ever, more even than when I was visited by the proletarian, carnal cylinders in the Guerrero mountains, I horrified by what I saw, oh my, oh innocent, impure me, in the lightning flash of the instant in which my mother spread her legs and the doctor’s beswastikaed branding iron approached my exit — would that aperture be useful only as an entrance and not as an exit?) ran toward a fountain of light, and I, only I, saw in the burning swastika a pair of hypnotic blue eyes, a pair of eyes that was also a sea of eyes, wave after wave with the same eyes, as if the air, the ocean, and the land were made of blue, hypnotic, cruel eyes: my father in his haste collided with a man, and my out-of-breath mother fell into his arms in the grand marble corridor of the Palace of the Citizenry. The man blushed, held her so she wouldn’t fall, but actually offered her to my father with a strange sweetness that said, I don’t want her, she isn’t mine; is she yours?

The tall, thin man with huge black eyes, bushy eyebrows, a full, thick, black head of hair and the long, wolfish ears of a Transylvanian vampire, Nosferatu from the silents, begged her pardon for his clumsiness. He was looking for the exit.

“I’m looking for the exit.”

“I think it’s over there,” pointed my father.

“I’ve been looking for it for years,” added the man, wearing a celluloid collar and a black suit, vest, and thick gray tie, without listening to us.

He went on to say, with just a faint gasp of hope, that he never expected to find it, but that he would never give up trying.

My parents passed in front of the window where the employee with the blue visor was standing. He was saying to a fat, dumpy little fellow of indeterminate age: “I’ve already told him that you can’t go because you’re drunk, but what does it matter to you if you go tomorrow?”

He raised his eyes and caught sight of my parents. “You again? Now what do you want?” he shouted. “Do you want to know everything? Everything? Everything?”

11. I’ll Believe in You as Long as a Mexican Girl

The twenty-odd days they’d spent in Mexico City had transformed my parents. My genetives tell me that when we live with someone we don’t notice the passing of time, until one day we exclaim, just look at the old geezer! when did your clock strike midnight, man? but the guy was only a kid just the other day! and then we catch sight of ourselves in a smoky mirror and we realize that we, too, have not managed to save ourselves from the ravages of … Well, all I know is that my mom, as soon as she got to Mexico Circus, began to cough, her nose began to run, she started blowing her nose all day, she sneezed, things I sense and convulsively resent, you tell me, dear Readers, if I’m not right, there’s no one closer to her secretions than I am and I say this eternal postnasal drip is polluting my swimming pool. She coughs and the Richter Scale in here hits 7.

I’m inside her and that’s how I know what no one else knows: my mother Angeles may occasionally seem passive, but inside she’s extremely active, who’s going to know better than your humble servant, when the coconut inside her spins at about a thousand m.p.h. and the best proof is all of what I’ve been saying, because if she weren’t my intermediary, I’d be quieter than the Congress during Gustavo Díaz Ordaz’s administration. All I want to say on this occasion is that thanks to her I know that she sees my father Angel, twenty-two years of age, when they all return to Mexico, D. F., and says: “He’s young. But he looks tired. He’s going to inspire too much compassion. No chick will be able to resist him.”

There was solid evidence that something was happening. Because there were certain interesting earnings to be had in foreign exchange. Because of this proverb translation business, my parents had the pleasure of making incursions into the gigantic Tex-Coco-Mex-Mall, which was divided into the four arms of an enormous cross, Mall-efic, Mall-feasance, Mall-function, Mall-formed, where, on the bed of what in ancient times was Lake Texcoco, all the luxury, the elegant consumer goods, the chance to go shopping without getting on lines, abundance: my father says it’s something like the foreign-currency stores in Communist countries — if you don’t have dollars, don’t bother coming in.

Angel goes up the escalator in the Nuevo Liver Puddle, which happens to be going down: he has his hand resting on the rubber handrail. He doesn’t lift it, not even when (much less then) he sees a woman’s hand, which is coming down. He touches it. Sometimes the feminine hand pulls back. Sometimes it doesn’t. Other times it squeezes. Others it touches lightly. Others it caresses. And other women, no sooner do my mommy and I look the other way, return to the scene of the crime and leave tiny pieces of paper in my father’s predisposed hand. My father once again applies the eternal motto of the eternal Don Juan (which he is): Let’s see if it’s chewing gum and if it sticks!

Which doesn’t mean that amid this florid May, as my mom’s tummy grows (and I, too, inside her), my father was not assailed by the anguished desire to know if he was getting old without having experienced sexual plenitude, if he’d let opportunities slip away, even if the sense of the contradiction between his ideas and his practices held him back. His renascent sexuality, was it progressive or reactionary? Should his political activity lead him to monogamy or to the harem?

Ultimately he concluded that a good screw explodes all ideologies.

She forgives him everything, the jerk (I say), because, says the egghead, jealousy is an exercise based on nothingness: the other is not there, she refuses to see it (her): the other woman. What is there, finally, is jealousy and its object: which is invisible. What matters to her is that he comes to her at night and says forgive me, I’m not perfect, I want to be something else, and I still haven’t reached it, help me, Angeles, and she, the dumbbell, really loves him, since she sees in him everything that is opposite to what she is, everything, therefore, that completes her. But, for all that, she does not give up the hope that after a time they will be equals.

“Give me things to think about at night,” she said to him one day, and now she can’t complain. He’s giving them to her, by the ton. She does not know if little by little, instead of being fascinating, she is becoming fascinated by Angel and my father’s problem of creating a program of rebellion and personal creation and not being able to purge out the temptations that deny and smash that program. This fascinates Angeles, but Angeles ceases to be fascinating for him and she does not realize it and I don’t know how to communicate it to her. She doesn’t know how to say anything other than this hint of a reproach:

“I hope you’re not going to say someday that you wished you were like everyone else.”

Angeles, my mother, knows how to radiate an admirable confidence. People say that she and my father met when they were very young and incomplete. She thinks the two of them can shape each other, share their formation, and get to know each other. She’s an optimist. That’s why she admits that sometimes one wins and sometimes the other. It’s a game they have both accepted ever since the two of them were raped at the same time by Matamoros and his cohorts in Malinaltzin: there they both lost, but they both won the ability to accept what happened one afternoon in the month of March without blaming each other. Only in May did they begin to compensate for that sublime nobility and to make barbed little comments that meant, this time I win, this time you lose, since even Angeles’s intrinsic nobility, when it notes Angel’s peccadillos, becomes a figure of speech: this time I win because I’m noble and understanding. Then he lets her know that he will not feel blameworthy unless she shows a little outrage. What sickens him is precisely all this nobility of soul: my mom as Gerald Ford — let’s pardon everyone in sight so we can be home in time for cocktails. But if my mom shows the slightest disgust, then my father starts talking again about women as the creatures who created guilt. Then she gets indignant and says to him:

“Draw me a picture of them.”

“I’m better at telling,” says Angel and he puts out the light, and I’m left disconcerted. But, after a while, one or the other (and this is where they really take turns, punctually, mathematically) brings his or her cheek close to the ear of the other, one looks for the other’s little foot (like a hamster), one (him) slips his fingers into her luxurious mink triangle, one (she) has already taken the measure of the bag where the golden nuggets are stored, and we’re off and running: the sheets get hot, the pillows are fluffed up, and my old friend the guy with no ears is already inside his home and I happily greet him: Ahoy there! Animus intelligence!

How much time will pass before each one refuses to see him- or herself in the mirror of the other, before each one refuses to know through the other if he or she is getting older, if he or she still makes love well, if he or she should go on a diet, if he or she is taken seriously, if they really do share memories? Who knows, Reader! Better turn the page on this chapter.