Christopher Unborn

1. The Diary of a Writer

Médoc d’Aubuisson, the López family’s cook, was the only survivor of the final explosion, attributed to the Princes of Turenne and the Abbesses of Tooloose (POTATOS), the legitimist terrorist organization that blew up the ancient Le Grand Vefour restaurant, which had occupied a beautiful corner of the Palais Royal in Paris since the times of the Duc de Choiseul.

The reason the POTATOS gave for their attack was that Le Grand Vefour was serving meals to functionaries from the neighboring Ministry of Culture on the rue de Valois and the ministry was the brain behind red, antimonarchist propaganda in France. Farewell Vefour, welcome Médoc: the survivor’s celebrity caused Doña Lucha Plancarte de López, wife of the ex-Superminister Ulises López, to demand the services of the chef de cuisine: how the girls would howl when they found out!

Fought over by the bourgeoisies of Peru, the Ivory Coast, and the Seychelles, the emir of Abu Dhabi, and, last but not least, the Republic of Mexico, Médoc accepted the last offer because of one special circumstance: his great-great-grandfather had been cook for Princess Salm-Salm, Maximilian’s lover in Cuemavaca during the ephemeral Mexican Empire. Besides, one of Médoc’s uncles, a hit man from Marseilles, emigrated to El Salvador and founded the death squads there. Médoc wanted at least to be near his American past, but he accepted only after making outrageous demands: these meteques from Las Lomas del Sol would not only pay him in dollars and in New York (twenty thousand per month) but would also unquestioningly accept his menus and would purchase the raw materials he required from wherever they were to be found — be it Roman truffles in season or Chinese ants from the tombs of Qin Shi Huang — at whatever the price; once a week the lady of the house (Doña Lucha herself) would prepare and serve him his meals, only so that insidious comparisons be established, and although Médoc had the right of veto with regard to the persons the Lópezes might invite to eat his delights, he absolutely ruled out dinners for more than eight people.

This last stipulation frenetically frustrated Doña Lucha’s ambitions; after all, if the lady wanted to have the best chef in Mexico (excuse me: the world), she also wanted to offer the most lavish and well-attended parties.

“Order sandwiches from a hotel,” Médoc told her when Doña Lucha weepingly explained that the imminent celebration of her daughter’s Sweet-Sixteen Party — her daughter Penelope López, the celebrated Epic Princess of Mexico-in-Crisis, the Debutante of Fashion in a Society with Nothing to Debut and Fashion Like No Other in the World — would require at least five hundred guests, well chosen to be sure, but five hundred nonetheless.

Having pronounced the statement recorded above, Médoc went on vacation in the Club Med’s Cancún barony, abandoning the López family to its own devices not only as to the creation of a suitable menu but also as to the composition of a guest list of five hundred young boys and girls who would celebrate Penny’s birthday with her. Yet another problem: the political plague that surrounded Minister López after the meteoric rise of Federico Robles Chacón and his creature, Mamadoc, made it improbable that what was left of the jeunesse dorée of 1992 would attend a celebration in the ghetto (also golden) of Las Lomas del Sol. The result would be a serious loss of prestige for both mother and daughter.

Enter Ms. Ponderosa, dried-out and galvanic, the purest Castilian stock, skinny as a rail but with the thickest of ankles, a Portuguese mustache to complete her Iberian physiognomy, and a whiff of garlic to give the lie to her appearance of implacable, Inquisitorial, Counter-Reformation austerity. Ms. Ponderosa pointed out, first, that for a real Castilian any goat will do for roasting and, second, that both the twelve-thousand-odd newspapers and the innumerable television stations in the city were constantly announcing a new public service called TUGUEDER, whose spokesperson, a charming boy with an egg-shaped head, was offering to those who desired to leave the labyrinth of solitude a matchmaking service (Ms. Ponderosa blushed), and that, third, his service would eliminate the possibility of party failure during the current crisis by guaranteeing that the number of guests required by the hosts would be there.

“We don’t even have a cake; I don’t know how to make cakes,” mooed Doña Lucha. “Do you, miss?”

Ponderosa triumphantly said she did not: “But here in the fine print it says: Birthday cakes specially made by Baby Ba.”

“But who runs this organization? Does it belong to anyone we know?”

“It says here the president of the company is named Angel Palomar y Fagoaga…”

“Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca!” exclaimed Doña Lucha, who knew the Mexican Gotha by heart: “The best families of D.F., Puebla, and Guadalajara!”

“If you say so,” Ponderosa commented dryly. She withdrew — without turning her back on the mistress.

2. Like a ghost

Like a ghost, Ulises López wandered through his darkened house in Las Lomas del Sol. During the day, ablaze with mercury vapor lamps, incandescent spots, and multicolored strobes, the mansion looked like the Duty-Free Shop in any international airport. Every one of the mementos of petroseventies opulence was piled up there for all the world to see: French perfumes, German cameras, Japanese computers, Yankee recorders, Swiss watches, Italian shoes. All of it, felt Doña Lucha, should be on display, because, as she never tired of saying:

“My money is my money and I have absolutely no reason to hide it from envious eyes. I do as I please!”

But at four in the morning the owner of the house flitted like a phantom from his severe mahogany-furnished bedroom with velveteen-covered walls to the preposterous Guggenheim staircase, to the cement garden, to the pool in the shape of the map of the U.S.A., with the stars and stripes painted on its bottom, from there into the private casino and to the cockfighting pit, muttering to himself about his career and his fortune, without knowing that Federico Robles Chacón, his archrival, had given the cook Médoc d’Aubuisson a farm with fruit orchards and a shooting range in Yautepec in exchange for which Médoc would put a tiny grain of sugar into Don Ulises’s breakfast papaya every day. The grain of sugar was actually the last word in computers invented in

— — — — — — ((Pacífica)) — — — — — —

Once ingested, it registers a person’s murmurs and most secret thoughts for twenty-four hours, transmitting them to a data bank in the office of Robles Chacón, where they are deciphered and processed by a Samurai computer, providing Minister Robles Chacón with infinite delight and inside information. However: since the microchip enters with the papaya, it also leaves with the papaya, so it must be replaced every day. Médoc will not scant his duties just because he’s going on vacation in order not to have to feed five hundred parvenus. Into the ear of Ms. Ponderosa, Médoc has whispered his promise that she will abandon, if not her virginity (of which she was deprived a long time ago by a powerful Spanish Civil Guard), then at least her current solitude as soon as he (Médoc) returns

TUGUEDER (flashes the neon sign in the Ponderosa noggin)

if she will slip the daily grain of sugar into the master’s papaya.

In a solitary cockpit at four in the morning, we find a sleepless Ulises López, who can only vent his rage against Federico Robles Chacón through a sentimental review of his own career: he was born a poor boy on the Pacific coast of Guerrero, but even then he was thrifty, a pack rat of a boy who saved everything, who found a use for everything, and that’s how he made his way: When no one else had toothbrushes — call Ulises! When someone needed a top — call Ulises! When a bus needed a nut — call Ulises! When a nicely stuffed box of votes for the PRI would win an election for the Party — call Ulises! And when Ulises requested admission to high school in Acapulco, law school at Chilpancingo, the doctoral program at the National University, and postgraduate study at USC, he got what he wanted because Ulises López always had something someone else needed: that was his secret, and that was his way to the top:

“I made my money following the national rules of the game,” he would say, and no one ever doubted the truth of that statement. From low-level jobs he rose to high-level jobs, but in all, low or high, he maintained or solidified his power base. Guerrero, where he achieved favorite-son status, was indispensable to him; then national private enterprise; foreign relations — U.S. finance and business; then national government and the PRI. All this was well known and fairly normal. The difference was that Ulises embodied this pattern at a unique moment in Mexican history — between 1977 and 1982, when more foreign money entered the country than had come in during the previous 155 years of our independence. During the oil boom, everything was expensive in Mexico except the dollar. Ulises realized that before anyone else. He founded the famous Theta Group (of which he was the only member) and took over banks in order to lend himself cheap money he used to import the torrent of consumer goods he sold at inflated prices in the status-conscious middle-class market; he deposited hundreds of millions in rival banks and then abruptly withdrew the money, causing his competition to collapse; he created financial empires within Mexico and abroad, vast labyrinths of paper within pyramids of noninsured credits and companies backed only by documents based on the country’s oil promise, taking advantage of low interest rates, petrodollar loans, and the rise in the cost of raw materials; he deposited carloads of profits in European and U.S. banks, but he was the first to stand up and cheer when López Portillo nationalized the banks and denounced the money exporters in 1982. What the hell: the people he denounced were standing right there with him, wildly applauding a denunciation the President — in a theatrical act unprecedented since Santa Anna staged a coup d’état against himself — directed toward other people and himself. Eventually, Ulises said to himself, and he said it with full confidence, I’ll be paid back for the loss of my banks and then I’ll send my money safe and sound to Grand Cayman; and that’s just how it happened. Now a cayman is a crocodile, but even a crocodile (like Don Ulises) can suffer the odd setback: he took a nasty hit because of his paper speculations, but by 1989 his 1982 losses had been paid back. Smack in the middle of the crisis, he realized that the foreign shareholders in his Mexico Black Gold Mutual Fund (a dummy subsidiary of the Theta Group) had bought ten million shares at twelve dollars per share in 1978; now they were worth two dollars each. To compensate for that loss, he became the first Latin American to enter into the greenmail racket — green, green: how I love you green, green cells, green stocks, green dollars, and green dolors: the loans that broke us were asshole loans made by asshole banks to asshole governments, said Ulises; we could have broken the international banking system by suspending payments, but we didn’t dare; they screwed us because we were honorable men and we forgot that the United States never paid its astronomical debt to English banks in the nineteenth century. I’m delighted — Ulises jumped for joy, clicking his heels (I’m faithful to capital, not to the fatherland!). Transformed into a greenmailer, Don Ulises was the star of a kind of financial fraud that worked like this: he’d buy a huge amount of stock in a famous transnational corporation, announce that he was about to take it over, thus sending its value into the multinational stratosphere and thereby forcing the company to buy — at a very high price — the stocks belonging to Ulises López in order to retain control over the corporation and to silence speculation. Using this method, our astute Guerrero magnate earned $40 million free and clear in one shot and could thus repair his fortune, damaged by the collapse of the paper empires — well, not damaged all that much, muttered the squatty, rapidly pacing Napoleon of the business world, after all, as Don Juan Tenorio was heard to say, time does eventually run out on you, and therefore there is no debt that can’t be negotiated so that you don’t have to pay in propeller-driven pesos what you contracted to buy in supersonic dollars; we’ve got lots of things to sell in Mexico, beginning with twelve hundred miles of elastic and continuous frontier, then moving on to revalued earthquaked property expropriated by the government in 1985 and renegotiated by Ulises in 1989.

Don Ulises López’s principal task during the Crisis of 1990, when he was named superminister, to supervise (from a very advantageous position) the de facto dismemberment that de jure disguised itself as condominiums, trusts, limited concessions, and temporary cedings, in which the Yucatán was handed over to Club Med, the Chitacam Trusteeship was created for the Five Sisters, the existence of Mexamerica was sanctioned, and no attention whatsoever was paid to what was going on in Veracruz or on the Pacific coast north of Ixtapa.

Nothing brought more fame to Ulises López than these deals, disguised in euphemisms like “realistic acceptance of interindependence,” “patriotic adaptation to dominating forces,” “a step forward in nationalistic, revolutionary concentration,” “patriotic contribution to peaceful coexistence,” etc., and whatever the individual’s party affiliations, there was something for everyone.

For his many efforts, Don Ulises was rewarded during the Crisis of the Year ’90 with the portfolio of SEPAFU (Secretariat of Patriotism and Foreign Undertakings); some people said that his business successes were balanced by his disastrous tour as minister, while others said he was rewarded with a brilliant portfolio for his business disasters. Our brave Ulises remained undaunted: from the Super Economic Secretariat he announced his market philosophy through all the media:

In public: “It does not matter who makes money, just as long as everyone pays taxes.”

In private: “I’m willing to lose all the money in the world, as long as it isn’t my money.”

In public: “Public service is the only justification for holding power.”

In private: “Like sex, power can only be enjoyed when it needs no justifications.”

In public: “We are all involved in production.”

In private: “This country is divided into producers and parasites. I had nothing in Guerrero. I made myself into what I am today out of nothing. No one ever gave me a free tortilla.”

In public: “When all of us get our fair share, production goes up.”

In private: “The government should only help the rich.”

In public: “The glory of our nation is forged by one hundred million Mexicans.”

In private: “The glory of Ulises López is forged by one hundred million assholes.”

In public: “As the poet says, no one should have too much when someone doesn’t have enough.”

In private: “Who needs a Jaguar or a Porsche to survive? I do! For whom is having a thirty-ounce bottle of Miss Dior a matter of life or death? Do I really have to answer that?”

Publicly or privately, Ulises and his policies were an open secret: Ulises and his pals got rich because the nation got poor; he made money thanks to bad government; oil ruined us but it set Ulises up; the government is tearing the country to pieces; foreign banks are tearing the government to pieces; Ulises tears all of them to pieces.

“Put me in jail for theft!” Ulises shouted with haughty bitterness at the invisible roosters that night he paced the empty cockpit. “Cut me down! And then wait for someone with my genius to pop up! All aspects of human nature are reborn, demand to exist, to grow, to bear fruit: ALL OF THEM!”

But, in a flash, the nefarious Robles Chacón usurped all the wisdom, the capacity for intrigue, the talent for scheming, the rhetorical skill, the balanced exchange of favors, and, in the same way, replaced the contradictions and the discredit, the lack of results and the animosity of the people toward Ulises López’s administration with a politics of symbols: Mamadoc, the contests, Circus and Circus, all with such spectacular results that Ulises, locked away in his mansion, sleeplessly pacing his cockpit, drinking coffee at all hours of the day and thinking how to take revenge on Robles Chacón, on that monster Mother and Doctor, on his former financial rivals who had accommodated themselves to the new situation. Ulises López believed in self-affirmation, and his shout into the night was this:

“I was a shark and I’ll be a shark again!”

All of the above meant absolutely nothing to Ulises’s distinguished wife, Lucha Plancarte de López — as long as it did not affect her lifestyle, which for her was everything. An essential part of that style was foreign travel, and when her husband announced that from then on they would only travel to Querétaro and Taxco, the lady almost had a fit:

“Why? Why?”

“We just can’t offend the middle classes, who are unable to travel because they have no foreign currency.”

“Well I, thank God, am not middle-class.”

“But you will be unless you watch out. The time is just not right for conspicuous consumption, Lucha. I’m not a cabinet minister anymore, and I don’t want to give Robles Chacón any pretexts to get even with me.”

“Maybe you should be thinking about getting even with him, dummy.”

Doña Lucha López was tall, outspoken, dark, with a good figure, curly-haired wherever she had hair, with an ass like Narcissus’ pond — deep enough to drown in, her husband said when he met her — and Tantalus tits — because they always bounced away when his fingers came too close. She had been known as a femme fatale in the city of Chilpancingo when the two of them went out dancing during their courtship, and Ulises had to protect himself from the train of punks and would-be Don Juans who would follow Lucha’s silhouette to the movies, to cabarets, on vacation, and when they went out for a snack. But Ulises made his first million before the others and that determined her choice: she tall and graceful, he short and nervous. They didn’t waste time on a honeymoon: he de-femme-fatalized her; she de-Don-Juanized her Chilpancingo lover boy and then they de-sisted. She put on weight, but always maintained — Ulises would say to himself—“a divine skull.” As long as she lived, she knew how to sit as if she were posing for a portrait by Diego Rivera. She was involved, even though her husband knew all about them, in a series of compensatory escapades, the price, he admitted, he had to pay, as he ate his daily papaya, for his own escapades with power and money:

“I only use those who would use me or who do use everyone else. If I exploit them, it’s because they also exploit; if I’m tricky, it’s because everyone’s tricky. Everyone wants exactly what you and I want. Power, sex, and money.”

“But not in equal quantities, dearie.”

She wanted sex and money, power she didn’t care about. As long as she felt young, she made herself the leading lady in a labyrinth of illicit love affairs, secret meetings, motels, threats, escapes, daily excitement, and above all the adventure of knowing she was being followed by a dozen or so thugs and private detectives working for her husband and none of them could ever find her or bring proof to poor Ulises. That captain of industry decided not to take revenge until the time was ripe; in the meanwhile, he would enjoy the disinterest of their sexual relations and the interest both said they had in their daughter and in her place in Mexican society.

The crisis ruined everything. Lucha never forgave Ulises for having given up on the trips abroad. Neither the mansion in Las Lomas del Sol nor the cook from Le Grand Vefour could compete with the emotion Lucha felt when she walked into a great department store in a foreign country.

“Are we or are we not wealthy Mexicans?” she asked in murderous tones as he ate his daily ration of papaya with sugar and lemon — without which the diminutive tycoon suffered dyspepsia and intestinal irregularity.

He did not respond to this recrimination, but he did share it. Ulises López’s reward to himself for his childhood in Guerrero and his dynamic ascent in Mexico City was a dream populated by waiters and maîtres d’, restaurants, hotels, first-class plane tickets, European castles, beach houses on Long Island and Marbella: oh, to enter and be recognized, greeted, kowtowed to, in the Plaza-Athénée and the Beverly-Wilshire, to call the maître d’ at Le Cirque by his first name … For Don Ulises, these compensations, nevertheless, put him in a state of perpetual schizophrenia: how to be cosmopolitan in Rome and a hometown boy in Chilpancingo? he didn’t want to lose either his provincial power base (without it, he would have no political support) or his international standing (without it, he’d have no reward of any kind for his labors).

Our little Lucha, on the other hand, had fewer refinements than her husband: for her there existed nothing beyond stores, stores, and more stores, especially U.S. malls; the reward for being proudly rich and Mexican was to spend hours obsessively patrolling the Galleria in Houston, Trump Tower in New York, the Hancock in Chicago, the Rodeo Collection in Los Angeles, and Copley Place in Boston: hours and hours, from the moment they opened until closing time, Lucha Plancarte de López walked more miles through those commercial corridors than a Tarahumara Indian through his mountains.

“That’s why we made the money in the first place! And now what happens? I hate your guts!”

With these words skiing over the fissures and grooves in his cerebral cortex, Ulises went back into his bedroom, laid himself down, and instead of counting sheep, repeated: I did lots of favors, lots of favors were done for me, returned to me, there was never a contradiction between my interests and the interests of the nation, it’s all favors, I do the nation a favor, the nation does one for me, I’ll do it back, how will I get even with Robles, how will I get even with, how will I get zzzzzzzzzzzzz and Lucha, on her side, was trying to get to sleep by reading, at her husband’s entreaty, López Velarde’s Sweet Fatherland. Learn something, honey, he’d say, don’t always look so dumb, you’re Ulises López’s wife, don’t forget that, and all that seemed true to the lady, but what stuck in her craw was that line about “The Christ Child bequeathed you a stable,” an idea that instead of making her relax set her to hopping around, subliminally reminding her that Christ was the God born in a manger (they always pop up where you least expect them!) and literally reminding her that a mob of squatters left over from the earthquake were building mangers on her property. Bullshit, said Doña Lucha Plancarte de López, wife of the eminent financier and minister, stables for Christmas Eve, fine, God bequeathed to me my house in Las Lomas del Sol, 15,000 square feet, a tennis court, black marble toilets, the bedrooms lined with lynx to rub up against cozily before making whoopee on the water bed with a melodious musical background by the great composer Mouseart piped in and my televised scale that electronically tells me my weight and the image of the ideal figure to which I get a little closer every day: size 12 here, girls, so drop dead! Besides, think of all we did for our little Princess Penny to make her existence cute: a heart-shaped Jacuzzi, a ballroom right here with three hundred of the latest cassettes, a little casino where her friends can have fun with backgammon tables, roulette wheels, a screening room done in red velvet, a stable of ponies to pull cute little coaches when Penny rides around the garden dressed up as Marie Antoinette, she says, although to me she looks like an elegant little shepherdess, and a track for dog racing, a cockpit, a little heated pool in the shape of the States, a modest copy of the first floor of Bloomingdale’s, modest because we don’t want to cause any fuss, what with the crisis, and we almost never travel anymore, but it does have shopgirls imported directly from the U.S. and a perfume counter that, my God! makes my, my … my nose twitch! So have a good time with your stable! Me, I’ll take my cash, my property, my little girl who speaks English, my greenbacks to travel with once in a while even if it’s to Mexamerica, my little group of girls to laugh with and have a good time with and a few drinks, or more than a few — who’s counting? Stables: not for this filly!

* * *

My parents spent half of June running from one government office to another, from the SECULELA, which was where Angeles composed her Mexican versions of Shakespeare, and where, naturally, the contest ought to have some cultural impact. They were sent back to the Palace of the Citizenry, where the same old man in the blue visor read them the following regulation:

“You cannot enter the contest unless you present the child first.”

“But how can we present the child when he hasn’t been born yet?”

“No way around this regulation. It says right here that only those who present their child can enter,” all of which led them to the SEDECONT (Secretariat for Demography and Birth Control) to see if they could find an explanation for this requirement, but all they found there was the same old man who worked in the morning at the Palace of the Citizenry, with the same cripple in his wheelchair, eternally sitting in his own shit with no one to help him, acting as doorman. My parents, more fatigued than desperate (and Angel thinking: in any case, she’ll have the baby, contest or no contest, quincentennial or no) (and Angeles saying to herself: this contest is essential to Angel’s free, unstructured life, the contest gave him a goal; without it, I wonder if his adventure and his faith, his love for anarchy and his ideology of order will all be compatible…), decided that to cover all contingencies they ought to earn more money by means of new jobs and enterprises, and that explains the birth of their parallel activity in

TUGUEDER

A Service That Brings People Together

and Organizes Brilliant Parties

Get Yourself Out of the Labyrinth of Solitude!

“Do you know any lonely proletarians?” asked Egg, explaining why the project was a sure thing. “You don’t, right? Only the rich are going to need this service, mark my word.”

Baking Services Under the Direct Supervision of: Baby Ba

Service Director: Angel Palomar y Fagoaga

Meanwhile, Angel went on translating sayings, Angeles translated classics into street talk. Orphan Huerta hired himself out to the various newfangled political parties that had sprung up in the wake of President Paredes’s free-will reform: he became a political cream-pie thrower, an essential figure at all political rallies. Hipi Toltec, because he looked like a magician, sold pills that let you dream your favorite TV program, and Egg along with Baby Ba devoted themselves exclusively to TUGUEDER.

“Bet you can’t guess,” said Egg one June afternoon to Angel. “I just got a call from the house of Ulises López. They want us to organize a birthday party for their daughter, Penny.”

Egg paused as he was writing down a list and looked knowingly at Angel: “Remember her dancing at Divan the Terrible down in Aca?”

How could he forget her? Egg watched the reverie pass through the gypsy (if myopic) eyes, streaked with Moor and Aztec, of his friend Angel: even if Penelope’s golden butterfly eyes had merely fluttered over him that New Year’s Eve, his own were fixed on his memory of her that night: he’d only seen her once, and for that reason his visual memory was charged with nostalgia; she was more beautiful, more brilliant than if he’d seen her every day and, above all, more beautiful than if she had noticed him even once: ah, the golden girl, who abandoned the sun to come down here and console the stars, said Ada Ching that night (rightly, for a change), and it was then Penny’s eyes had settled like two dark butterflies on my father, only to move on, never to return. She danced, lifted her leg, showed her thigh under her sequined skirt, and a down-covered crease, a slice of quince, a tiny, moist copper coin which suddenly, tonight, my father desires more than anything in the world, as he spontaneously rejects my mother, the contest, and me, desiring more than anything else a night with Penny, his penis in Penny, penetrating Penny, forcing Penny to look at him with her butterfly eyes as they come at the same moment, all for the promise which in that instant passed through his mind, filling his with color fugues, red and blue circles that light up and go out, futuristic, energetic murals shot into the void, all in the name of his resurrected passion for Penny López, the daughter of the minister, and all because feeling nostalgia, living on nostalgia, on the unreachable becomes intolerable for my father, a kind of death in reverse, a waiting for the past in order to die in it, an impotent dissatisfaction with what is already dead and gone. A catatonic nostalgia for the films of Constance Bennett or the records of Rudy Vallee or Schiaparelli’s dresses or fin-de-siècle postcards from Baden-Baden was possible, but so was a violent nostalgia to recover Fiume, annex the Sudetenland, or manifest your destiny to Texas and California: my father didn’t want nostalgia, he wanted Penny and he wanted Penny to want penis, and when he desired all this, we (the contest, Mommy, and Baby Meme) faded into the background, although my father did feel enough remorse to admit the faults in his stable character, which was conservative, traditionalist; damn, man, he dared to say aloud to Egg, everything conspires against what I want to be; and that’s how it would be if you wanted to be just the opposite, our buddy Egg said with a smile in his eyes; I can’t stop playing the lover boy, even though it means putting my balls on the line, said my father in silence (I know he said it because later on he said it aloud to my mother):

“This is my worst contradiction, babe. I want to be a conservative without retiring as a lover boy.”

“What contradiction are you talking about?” my mother answered him. “Don’t fool yourself. You’re right smack in the tradition. Don’t think that playing around is some kind of progress.”

In any case, Angel cut out a color photo of Penny López from Nicolás Sánchez Osorio’s society page in Novedades and pasted it over an article by Philip Roth in a copy of The New York Review of Books that Angeles refused to read for fear of contracting even more ideas. My father trembled with the thrill of the risk he was taking.

* * *

But the rift occurred later on. Now it was time to organize for Penny López’s June 15 Sweet-Sixteen Party in the house of the magnate and ex-minister, Don Ulises, and his wife, Doña Lucha: five hundred guests of the highest quality was what the lady had requested; there weren’t that many, said Egg seriously. High society had either collapsed or run away a long time ago; only the ones who are really in love with power are still here because there’s no way they can exercise it from a Jacuzzi in Malibu, and besides, my mother reminded them, this Ulises guy is really a pariah and no one is going to want to become one too by going to his house. Then Pater Meus had a luminous idea: Concha Toro! The Chilean singer still existed. She’d appeared on TV for having won one of the Last Playboy Centerfold Contests, how long ago was it? They sent Orphan and Hipi out to wander the streets for the entire day, and twenty-four hours later they produced her c.v., which Egg translated from Anglatl slang with his renowned mental agility:

Concha Toro

(née) María Inez Aldunate y Larraín

in Chilián, Chile,

on January 6, [year blotted out]

aka Dolly Lama

Aristocratic family

Family ruined by the collapse of the

nitrate market

Education: Santiago College

Emigrates to Argentina as a young

woman

Proclaimed High Priestess of Sexual

Ultraism

Emigrates to the U.S.A.

Enters conga line with Xavier Cugat’s

orchestra

Sings celestial choruses for M-G-M

movies

Dancer, chorus line of 42nd Street road

company

Backup girl in Las Vegas Dionne

Warwicke and Boy George show

Success in Mexico singing boleros

Hostess at SIMON BULLY BAR

Supervises Home-Delivery Theater

services

“Perfect!” shouted Egg. “Who wants to interview her?”

“She took my virginity,” said Angel, my father.

“That lets you out. We want this deal to be totally professional, no personality factors, I’ll talk to her,” said our buddy with totally uncensored enthusiasm.

And my father reasoned that he already had enough on his mind with his soul divided between the presence of Angeles and the potentialities of Penny to allow himself the luxury of nostalgia for a woman who had to be in her sixties by now: let Egg arrange the Home-Delivery Theater in the López house to help Penny celebrate, while my father attempted to work out — though he knew he’d fail — the two anguishes he was feeling that June:

Could he rely on the contest as an avenue to the future?

Could he be faithful to Angeles without letting Penny get away this time?

* * *

The first anguish (and how rapidly you run, dear Dad, from disorder to despair!) got even more serious when, on his eleventh visit to the Palace of the Citizenry, he found all the employees abandoning the place: feverishly shredding documents, packing up books and typewriters, taking down the official photographs of President Paredes and Mamadoc, sweeping up the dry leaves that had invaded the corridors with a preternatural taste of autumn. The man with the visor was no longer in his window, nor was the crippled doorman in his place, Dr. Menges and his companion, the lady with the Goering cameo, were being taken out, quite stiff, on stretchers: their blue faces and their necktie-length tongues suggested a sinister end; and the operation was being directed by a face that Angel fearfully recognized as that of the implacable Colonel Inclán, chief of the metropolitan police. Who could ever forget his black glasses, his skull-like face, his greenish complexion, the green spittle running out the corners of his mouth, his hoarse voice giving rapid, precise orders:

“Quickly, or you’re all dead.”

I suppose that my father’s anguish resolved itself into a single desperate action: to speak to Inclán, to ask him about the contest, about what was going on with it; but when the colonel saw him running up and shouting What about the contest? he started to draw his pistol, as did his squad of bodyguards. Angel trembled, but he didn’t know if Inclán could see him through his black glasses. Show me your ID, my father was about to say, shitting in his pants, where’s your badge! his exquisite cinematic memory demanded of this Indio Bedoya of Treasure of the Sierra Madre fame for the nineties who was foaming yellow at the mouth as he repeated incessantly, his hand resting on his gun, caressing the grip:

“Only shoot when it’s really necessary. Count to ten. Remember how you were taught. We don’t want any more Tlateloco Massacres. Count to twenty. Don’t call this asshole an asshole. He dares mention the Mamadoc contest to me! He dares to mention Robles Chacón’s symbols to me! But don’t kill this asshole. Not yet. Offer him a friendly hand. A friendly hand. The paraffin test for my friendly hand. Take my friendly hand. Take it! Take it!”

Angel grabbed the hand of the Supreme Policeman, ominously backed up by his coterie of green-uniformed Janissaries, the cold of that superdry palm burned him, the gray, steel-sharp fingernails scratched him slightly. He sought in vain heat, sweat, or hair: like the skin of a crocodile, Colonel Inclán’s hand had no temperature. It wasn’t even cold, Angel said to himself, as he released it and withdrew like Ponderosa before her mistress — not daring to turn his back on Inclán in the half light of this cement Tenochtitlán where the colonel, immobile, devoid of temperature, surrounded by his assassins, muttered No violence, friendly hand, friendly hand, with a voice that grew more and more horrifying and thick. He was swallowed up by the Aztec night and the living eagle perched on the cactus outside began to fly against a red sky, but a few yards up he was stopped by the chain around his leg and after a bit he roosted on a parabolic antenna. But he never released the serpent he was carrying in his beak. Angel turned and ran.

3. “Life,” Samuel Butler once wrote

“Life,” Samuel Butler once wrote, “is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.” Our buddy Egg, dressed in his morning coat and striped trousers, cravat, and pearl tie pin, remembered that quotation as he tried to rehearse the seven-piece orchestra hired for Penny López’s Sweet-Sixteen Party by the amalgamated forces of the TUGUEDER service and the Home-Delivery Theater service of Concha Toro, alias María Inez Aldunate y Larraín, alias Dolly Lama. This combo, which crawled out from under God knows what rock, couldn’t understand Egg even with the sheet music our buddy composed right under their noses, and the musicians whiled away their time tuning their instruments. Although the five hundred low-caliber guests constituted a crowd, they certainly didn’t make a party: their costumes were depressing, folkloric or cosmopolitan, following the standards set in Mexican movies during the forties. There were people in tehuana and chinaco costume, society ladies with concrete beehive hairdos wearing gowns cut Greek-goddess style from the Eisenhower era, gentlemen wearing tuxedos and white vests that were too long or dinner jackets with white, very wide piqué ties, gentlemen wearing golf trousers and ladies wearing white foxes and pillbox hats inspired by the Maginot Line: the entire wardrobe supply of Churubusco Studios, the storage bins and inheritance of Virginia Zury and Andrés Soler made their phantasmal appearance chez Ulises López, his wife Lucha, and their daughter Penny, the day she turned sixteen. The ballroom in the mansion in Las Lomas del Sol turned out to be too small to hold — that’s how Doña Lucha began a society column she was writing in her head — the darling couples from our jeunesse dorée, accompanied by their distinguished chaperons, who looked like (Ulises held back his disgust) extras in some film starring María Antonieta Pons and, as it turned out, that and only that is what they were: Concha Toro’s Home-Delivery Theater gave work to thousands of old extras from Mexican movies. None of this seemed to bother my dad Angel in the slightest, because that night he only had eyes for the guest of honor, the adorable ingenue, Penelope López, who appeared wearing a miniskirt and a gilt breastplate, long golden legs, and high, stiletto heels. She was a bit dazed by the mob, and stared through the guests as if they were made of glass. The truth is that all they were doing was occupying space, adding to the body count, filling the ballroom that was enlivened by a combo that never managed to play a single number, tuning up endlessly, led by our truly desperate buddy Egg: what did these guys have against his music? why didn’t they play it? and with Penny on her cloud and Angel unable to make eye contact with her.

Mrs. Lucha Plancarte de López was instantly attracted to my dad Angel (descendant of the best families); she stalked up to him like a panther, led him to the punch bowl, and spoke to him about people like us, you know what I mean, young man, aristocratic Mexicans of means. She then gave him a detailed description of her first visit to Bloomingdale’s, an event of transcendent importance in her life, and she gave another detailed description of the suite she usually took at the Parker Meridien in New York in, alas, other times, the bubble having burst, but she (after taking my father’s arm, little Lucha’s hand hidden in my father’s armpit) could survive any crisis with a little tenderness and understanding. Mrs. López’s verborrhea enveloped my father Angel: she never stopped talking about trips abroad, and when she’d exhausted that theme she went on to relatives, illness, servants, and priests — in that order.

“I can’t stand any more of this idle chitchat,” my father said to her brutally.

“Last night I went to see a property of mine which had been illegally occupied by squatters,” Mrs. L. P. de López said suddenly by way of response. “I brought along my gunmen, and we set the whole place on fire. No one got out of there alive, son. Who is your confessor? Like to see some photos of Penny when she was a baby?”

She scratched my father’s hand. With a cigar in his mouth, Ulises López watched the crowd moving through the hall. From a distance, saw how his wife approached my father Angel, saw the anxiety with which Angel tried to penetrate Penny’s vacant stare, when the circle his extremely active mind was about to draw was broken by an apparition: a Chaplinesque boy, his eyebrows raised in astonishment, was helping another boy, this one dressed in snakeskin, to carry the stupendous birthday cake to the round table which had been set up in the center of the hall. They set it down, put in the sixteen candles, asked Penny to make a wish and blow them out, which our Valley (Anáhuac) Girl did, blasting away with an unexpectedly bullish snort. The candles went out without a whimper, everyone sang Jappy Burtay Two Jews (without musical accompaniment; the combo was still tuning its instruments), Orphan Huerta and Hipi Toltec cut the cake and served slices to the guests, first, of course, to the guest of honor and her proud parents. Out of the corner of his eye, as he was raising his first forkful of chocolate cake with vanilla sugar icing and strawberry filling to his mouth, Don Ulises saw a cinnamon-tea-colored girl, her dark skin visible through her transparent raincoat and clear-plastic gloves, enter the hall with the expression of a lost shepherdess on her face, dripping the acid rain of the June night at exactly the moment in which Ulises, Penny, Lucha, and everyone else bit the cake and spit it out, shouting, vomiting:

“It’s made of shit! This cake is make of shit!”

And the girl with sharpened teeth and transparent clothes shouted — in English: “I’m a lollipop!” Then she fainted.

* * *

Don Ulises offered my father Angel a brandy snifter of Ixtabentún-on-the-rocks while my elegant pater, the shit having been kicked out of him by the López family thugs, was drying the blood on his forehead with pink Kleenex. López confessed that the color scheme of the salon had been chosen by his wife, Doña Lucha, to replicate certain of their common associations from the time they were courting and would go to the movies together — you know, with little sisters, popcorn, and everything.

“Ha,” laughed the illustrious politician and financier, currently in the Republic’s reserve forces. “She calls those chairs Blue Angel Marlene, the upholstery is Rhonda Red, and carpeting is Garbo Beige. Isn’t she sweet? Isn’t she incomprehensible?”

Angel accepted the drink: he needed it after the beating he took (“So you run the TUGUEDER service? you muddahfuckah! yer gonna need that shiteatin’ grin!”), and when Angel touched Ulises’s hand he compared it with Inclán’s: What? Had everyone with power in Mexico stopped sweating? Did they ever go to the bathroom? How could they spend nine consecutive hours going from place to place, giving speeches, and constantly attending meetings of the PRI without having to pee or sweating? He looked at his host’s amiably cold eyes and filtered them through the edge of the glass so Ulises’s features would melt in the sickly-sweet tide of the liquor; it didn’t work; Ulises emerged the winner.

“But I love her deeply, young man. Do you understand me? I’m being honest with you because even though you offended me seriously I admire your nerve and your initiative, even if it all goes into dirty tricks. But, going back to Lucha: as long as I’m with her I can be generous, even magnanimous. Want to know something? Every day, in the penthouse above my offices on River Nylon Street, there’s a banquet all prepared for a hundred people, with galantines of turkey, pâté de foie gras, Gulf shrimp, carré d’agneau, cakes (real ones, ha ha ha, what a card you are!), whatever you could want, ready for a hundred people, whether anyone comes or not, and at five o’clock in the afternoon, whatever is left over is distributed to the neighborhood beggars. You see, when I’m with her I can be generous…” repeated Don Ulises, dreamily. “I’m afraid that without her I’ll get stingy and that’s why I love her, keep her, and worry about her dying.”

Ulises made a peculiar face — coyness, modesty, or some combination thereof.

“For me, my wife is still the girl I tried to seduce with flowers and chocolates when I got to Chilpancingo from the coast.”

He affectionately patted Angel Palomar’s knee with his open hand, and said that my father in all likelihood knew lots about him; most of what he knew was true, and he would admit it proudly. What in fact did people say about him? The worst things! requested Ulises. And Angel told him: “That you are an out-and-out thief.” Ulises López said with equanimity that he would prefer a great statesman who was a thief but who would make Mexico into a great nation to an honest statesman who would lead it to ruin: unfortunately, what we’ve gotten over the past few years have been thieves who ruin us as much or more than the honest ones, but I’m not talking about trying to balance the honest ones off against the thieves or throwing out the baby with the bathwater, Ulises went on, and that’s why mediocrity, envy, and resentment had conspired to freeze him out. But he was biding his time; a great politician, he said that night to Angel, has to be an abstract, immoral con man who manipulates the passions of others while he puts his own on ice.

“I like your initiative,” he repeated, concentrating his tiny, mandarin eyes on Angel. “Too bad you don’t know how to focus it. Take a lesson from me tonight, kid. Listen to my rules for getting to the top in Mexico. First: remember that your ruling passion has to be money. The others are private passions and whatever you do in private is your own business. Make use of the best and the brightest. But never tell them what use you’re making of them. Don’t talk much. Think a great deal. Remember that he who has power is great only when he wants power. But if that interferes with the possibility of being rich, it’s better to be rich than to be great. The problem is to have both dough and power, although it’s always better to have money without power than power without money because money is power: you don’t really need more. Understand, then, that it’s not a bad thing in Mexico to be a crook: what’s bad is not being a big enough crook. Always keep that in the back of your mind as you’re stating for the record that immorality in the management of public funds will in no way be tolerated any longer and then toss a couple of jerks from the previous administration into jail. Remember that in this country you can make hay for half your time in office on the sins of your predecessors. During the other half, make sure you get ready to be accused, asshole. Ha, ha!”

Don Ulises guffawed over his own witticism, and once again patting Angel’s knee, he concluded: “See, kid? I put all my cards on the table. Now it’s your turn. I noticed you like my little Penny.”

“I go where my peenie takes me,” said my father cynically. “If you really want me to be frank with you…”

“I’ll tell you again: I like the fact that you’re a wise guy, but you’ve got to focus your energy. Just imagine if you were my son-in-law…”

Angel’s eyes clouded over with emotion, not because of Ulises but because of Penny.

“See what I mean? I’m putting all my cards on the table.”

My father understood perfectly. This was a second invitation for him to come across with something, but he refused to give in to the temptation to fall into Don Ulises’s most obvious trap. The old master still had a couple of cards up his sleeve. He repeated that he was sincere but he could be cold and calculating. He had just repeated that his maxim in terms of political action was “Don’t talk about anything, but think things over again and again.” His conversational style was a chess game in which Ulises, in all sincerity, could always say afterwards: “I knew it all along. You can’t surprise me.”

Even so, Angel sighed as he looked at this Machiavellian figure. I’m me, my young friend, in Ulises López there exists a sentimental, generous man, a man in love. He pushed a button and one wall took on a glassy opacity.

“How could I not be in love with my wife?” Ulises asked uselessly. “She’s much better-looking than my daughter. Just look at her.”

He pushed several buttons and the lights went down in the salon, but those near the screen (or was it a whorehouse mirror so he could look in from this side without being seen from the other?) brightened. On the other side appeared Lucha Plancarte de López yawning. She was wearing a pink silk robe with white feathers fluttering at her cuffs and collar. She brushed her teeth. Then she took off her robe and stood there in a scarlet lace monokini, her big bouncy breasts decorated with enormous black nipples that looked like black plums. Doña Lucha rinsed off a tiny razor and began very carefully to shave her right armpit, which was covered by a black stubble. She did the same with her left armpit, but this time she cut herself. She winced and then used spit to close the cut. Angel was fascinated by the trickle of blood that ran out of the decidedly gray underarm. Then Lucha studied her extensive bush, which rose in baroque curls almost to her navel and spread out on both sides like a golf course, as Don Fernando Benítez would have said. Doña Lucha swiftly soaped up the perimeter of her pubic lawn: with one hand she shaved herself, while with the other she gently caressed her labia. Her husband said to my father, “She isn’t alone, ha ha, look,” as she stuck her finger into a jar of (wine-flavored) Celaya jelly and then spread it over her clitoris, “she isn’t alone”: a Siamese cat impatiently watched the lady’s every movement and in a flash, as if trained to do so, jumped into its mistress’s lap and began to lick her recently shaved skin, cleaning it of any traces of leftover hair.

Suddenly, Doña Lucha stopped touching herself, stood stock-still, and stared at them, stared at my father (at least that’s what he thought), stared at them through the mirror with all the emotions in the world crossing her face, rage at being discovered in an intimate situation, surprise that her husband was accompanied by that young man, desire for that young man, envy for anyone in the world who was not alone, jealousy toward herself, and the solitude of her own lasciviousness, invitation (But for whom? Ulises? Angel? Was she looking at both of them? Was she looking only at Ulises because she was used to putting on this little pantomime for him and found him standing there with a strange man next to him? Was she looking at Angel, expecting to find him alone as she had promised Ulises and instead finding the two of them there united against her? Or were the two of them — she smiled for an instant — desiring her? Or were they laughing at her, and she tossed the ill-favored cat off her lap). Perhaps she wasn’t looking at anything, didn’t know anything, and her stares were only a solitary, ruinous deception? Every passion in the world had flitted across Doña Lucha’s face except one: shame. She raised a finger dripping clit jam to her lips as she looked at them. Ulises turned off the screen. The reader is free to choose.

Someone knocked at the door of the Dietrich-Garbo-Fleming salon.

“Come in, Penny,” said her father.

The girl walked in without looking at Angel.

“Show this young man to the Gloria Grahame bedroom,” said Don Ulises, without giving Penny, who wanted to interrupt to say, “But Mommy sleeps next door,” or Angel, who perhaps might have wanted to say, “But I have a pregnant wife at home waiting up for me,” any opportunity to protest.

Ulises’s eyes said: “I already knew it. I guessed it. You don’t surprise me. But obey me.”

4. Emotion clouded my father’s eyes

Emotion clouded my father’s eyes, his reflexes, his very equilibrium as he walked ahead of Penny López down the spiral staircase in the Guggenheimic house in Las Lomas del Sol. He never turned his back on her, turning it instead toward the steep staircase that led to the bedrooms. She never looked at him, disdainful to the end, the bitch, he walking bowlegged, backward so he wouldn’t lose sight of her for an instant, so he could explain to her, tell her what he’d been thinking since New Year’s Eve in Aca, now that her sweet-sixteenish presence was within range, touchable, perfumed, so near and yet so far. She stared past him, and when he stopped right in front of her to force her to see him, she said something he took, to soften the blow, to be what Penny must have said to every man in her life, to him too, okay, but not only to him:

“You can look, but you can’t touch. You’re poor, ugly, and a boor. You’re not for me.”

She went on ahead, but he thought that if he didn’t do something right at that moment, he might never see her again, he might never be able to tell her what he was bearing inside, never mind that she wouldn’t understand a word. Angeles, my mother, now she would certainly understand, and I inside her, but of course! And if I know all this, Reader, it’s because the same thing my father Angel hastily told Penny López that night when the Valley (Anáhuac) Princess led him to her guest bedroom, he repeated on his knees and quite slowly to my mother some days later, when Angeles and I within her went to live in the house of Dad’s grandparents Rigoberto and Susana, leaving my father to his freedom, and he didn’t even have that because Uncle Homero, once again in favor with the Powers That Be (when he discovered that he’d never been hated by them and that they’d been anxiously searching for him everywhere, oh where oh where has our little Homero gone? which is what the PRI delegate asked who met him at the door of his house when the quondam candidate for Senator appeared and threw a tantrum when he realized they always waited for him there and that he’d spent all that lost time with his insane and unappreciative niece and nephew), returned with a squad of blue-uniformed thugs, agents of the district attorney’s office, and a team of lawyers to sue for the return of the house of bright colors in Tlalpan. But before that there occurred the following, which I faithfully reproduce for your lordships, more precisely, look at the dangers a fetus runs when everyone forgets he exists and, if they do remember, merely add it to a list of errors. So I exist and I exist as an error! A gigantic error, gigantic luck, an ephemeral and fleeting apparition in the infinity of a bubble — I—who managed to squeeze his drop of liquid out of creation at the exact moment that it coincided with the strange, improbable temperature of some moist drops in the improbable warmth of love, and what the fuck do all these accidents matter to the great prestellar cloud that is immutable, eternal, infinite, and I tell you parents of mine and universe what I, hidden here, know all on my own:

ONLY ERRORS MAKE MIRACLES POSSIBLE

I am already another, Christopher or Christine, it doesn’t matter, I am as different as if I had been created a dolphin or an armadillo, I am already different and already unique and even if I come from you I am no longer you, I am myself and I am different and I am everyone. You forgot that, right? I am another, I am everyone, my poor little life pierced with pins is the triumph of life, as triumphant in my own environment as stone mountains, obstinate cacti, or the coyotes that came down to eat gringos and literary critics. I am Myself. I rest, breathe, sigh. And you? Go right on fighting:

* * *

“Penny López,” my mom repeated that night, quickly adding with anger and sadness: “Why do your eyes shine like that when I mention her name?”

“What? Oh, I thought she was dead — so did you. That’s all.”

“Listen to me and stop reading that newspaper.”

“It’s not a newspaper. It’s The New York Review of Books. I get it sent by contraband from Sandy Ego. What do you think of that?”

“Cut it out. Don’t change the subject on me. Remember: we went to Aca to finish off people like her.”

“Her? Who do you mean?”

“Penny! People like her! Symbols, man! But what are you so interested in…?”

“I’m reading an article by Philip Roth, that’s all. Writers of Newark, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your baseball gloves…!”

“Bull. Listen to me now: why are you getting so nervous?”

“It’s what I was saying: what women love to do is make men feel guilty. It’s your mission in life.”

“The mission of all women?”

“Right.”

“But not of all men?”

“No. Not us. Men are loyal and sincere with each other. We never say bad things about our friends.”

“Know something? I wish I had a notebook to write down all these things we say to each other, but only if it could be in ancient Chichimeca. What bull!”

“Not at all. What you want is for people to know what you accuse us of. Don’t kid yourself.”

“And what would you accuse me of?”

“Me? Nothing. I’m merely alienated by the means of reproduction.”

“Is that a fact? Well, just think about this baby that seems to be weighing so heavily on your mind…”

“I never said anything like that!”

“You did!” she shouted, pulling out her rollers, sitting there against the headboard while Einstein sadly stared from the wall, sticking his tongue out at her.

She throws the rollers at my father, and they go crack, crack, crack against the open pages of The New York Review of Books and drop down onto my father’s lap, piling up on the fly of his pajamas.

“Just think that I could have had this baby by myself, that I could have gone to a sperm bank for famous people and had my baby without your famous contest!”

“The contest!” my highly distracted father suddenly remembered. All he’d been thinking about was conquering Penny López during my mother’s pregnancy.

“That’s right, I could have gotten sperm from Don Ulises López, your little Penny’s daddy, or Minister Robles Chacón, or Julio Iglesias, or Duran Duran, or from Pope John Paul himself, or maybe even from Einstein, sticking his tongue out at me there on the wall. He must have left a little come behind in the refrigerator! Ozom!”

“You wouldn’t win the contest, big mouth, because the rules say the baby has to be the child of the parents that enter…”

“The mother always knows the child is hers, the father never knows: voilà!”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I’m not trying to say anything: I’m saying and I repeat and I reiterate and I proclaim: I had the child without you. I don’t need you for anything, and besides, the child belongs only to me, no one can prove that it isn’t mine, but no one can prove who the father is, and it isn’t you, bastard, it isn’t you,” said my mother, kneeling on the bed and beginning to throw whatever came to hand at my father’s bobbing head, the six volumes of The Indians of Mexico by Fernando Benítez, Luis Echeverría’s Charter of the Rights and Obligations of States, a souvenir ashtray from Tlaquepaque, Fernando del Paso’s Palinurus of Mexico, and Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra, finally revealing the color photo of Penny from Novedades glued to the page of the New York Review article by Philip Roth = jealousy finally made visible, jealousy focused on the palpable object of desire, the blind stare of hatred, all her tenderness and understanding now forgotten, the chalk scattered all over this house filled with blackboards, the photo of Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue, the chamber pot with flowers painted on it left behind by Uncle Homero, my mother shouting I could have had it alone! only the mother knows that the baby is hers! consummating the break with my father that perhaps he wants even more than she, showing to me at this early stage of life how delicate dreams are and how easily images are destroyed: leaving me unsheltered, an orphan of the storm, just when I need them most because, as I listen to them, I realize that the world is always an act with two performers, equally determined by the one who moves and speaks and the one who hears and receives: my body.

my body

is the system

with which I am going to answer

the physical world, I shall answer the world

by creating the world, I shall be the author of what precedes me,

by answering it, no matter what they do, whether they love

each other, hate each other, separate, come together,

I shall have to answer with my body and my words,

answer the world they are creating for me

creating, careful! as soon as I appear

I shall create their world

for them

by answering that world they have created for me. They will not escape without paying the price, they shouldn’t even dream of getting away with it, their action, whether it’s fighting or being happy, maybe they think that as soon as I appear I will no longer intervene with

word and flesh

to create my world beginning with them, by thus changing their world which they still don’t imagine me affecting, their ridiculous squabbles, they don’t have a clue, poor jerks!

Here I come!

Careful!

There will be three of us in the world and you will never again be able to act or speak exactly as you did today! just be careful, I’m telling you!

—… nothing, Penny was saying as they went down the ramp, ’cause my mom is one tough bitch and she like says to me better learn now for when you grow up, like you give one of these parvenus an inch and he’ll like give you six back, don’t turn your back or your front on any of them, yesterday Mommy set fire to the shacks those squatters set up on her property and I think they all went up in smoke like a barbecue and today she like asked Daddy to have my chaperon Ms. Ponderosa shot at the garden wall because she was like the one who made the deal with your service, the gay old freak, the ya know reeall ahhshole, and had all those reeally yuucky mummies come as guests, well I mean, ya know, I mean ooooh, and then that cake made of shit, I mean that was uh like uh soooo grotty, ya know, but I like went down on my knees and begged them not to shoot her and my daddy decided it would be better just to send her back to Segovia, that’s worse than death, must be like Chilpancingo, where my poor daddy came from, and like here’s your bedroom, young man, sleep tight now, and don’t even think of trying anything with me, I’m out of your range, scuzzbag, buzz off.

Angel watched Penny López’s bouncing little head as if in a dream, as it gradually disappeared with its shiny carrot-colored curls, her tiny painted eyebrows and her eyelids coated with gold dust, her eyes of oneiric depths and her face alive with twitches that turned out to be its saving grace: it was, en fin, an isthmus of beauty and emotion, or, as my father punned to himself: her strawberry lips, her cute little perfumed ears, pierced by orchid-shaped earrings, her pneumatic gait — Michelin legs, Pirelli thighs, Goodrich (of course?) ass, pulling out of his life: he walked into the aforementioned Gloria Grahame bedroom, named thus, said my film-loving father to himself, because it looked like a set from a fifties film noir: anemic Art Deco, devoid of personality, conceived to rebuff any ideological identification either with President Eisenhower or with Senator McCarthy: a bed with a satin spread …

My father, say I in imaginary complicity with him, fell into a slough of frustration, incompetence, and reduced social, moral, and sexual scale: Penny communicated all this to him, but here he was, the conservative rebel, the window washer of the filthy building that was Mexico in ’92, the purifier of the once Sweet and now Debauched Fatherland, on his knees in front of this pretentious bonbon from Las Lomas del Sol, and what else: well, the old boy reacted — how could he not if he was going to supply himself with a measure of self-justification. Out loud he said:

“I am going to screw Penny! That’s why I’m here!”

“But, honey, why don’t you just screw me?” said a voice through the door while invisible but inflammatory fingernails scratched with a singular, invitational rhythm.

Angel put his face close to the door: he smelled a whiff of seafood mixed with Joy de Patou.

The door opened and his expected, unwelcome, but exciting neighbor appeared in all her glory, which she’d mail-ordered from Fredericks of Hollywood: a transparent black peignoir whose wide sleeves were trimmed with raven feathers, the neck idem, and underneath, a pastry-crust bra, just waiting to be ripped off, layer by layer as if it were a biscuit, and stiletto-heeled, black-velvet slippers, black stockings held up by a garter belt, beneath which the lace panties split right over the jackpot, where was embroidered:

FOND HOPES!

When my father gave the same explanation to my mother that he’d earlier given to Penny López on that corkscrew staircase, the words were the same, gentle Readers, but it all sounded different. For example, all that about leaving my mom because she was his ideal woman and he needed Penny to keep his rebelliousness alive, his hatred, seemed insanely funny to us, because where did he get off coming around telling us that he was leaving for ideological reasons when it was nothing but sex. It was like adding a tiny lie to the huge lie that he said he was struggling against. I don’t know how aware my father Angel was that his rebellion was merely a romantic pose, which is what my mother thinks; but she tells him his explanation doesn’t matter because for her he’s always been a different sort of man and that therefore she naturally sees him that way, a different sort of man, and she doesn’t have to come up with complicated explanations.

In all this, Angeles fears that Angel is using her own desires against her, without understanding that she shares them with him; this is what hurts us most in my dad’s betrayal (what else should we call it?) — setting yourself up in the Gloria Grahame bedroom in the López mansion and enjoying the favors of Doña Lucha without realizing that my mother’s words were not idle talk, that she was with him even in this business but that she couldn’t tell him for fear of humiliating him:

“I didn’t sleep all night I was so happy I met you”—hoping that he would answer her with her words, which he had picked up in order to make them belong to both of them:

“I was there too, remember?” and culminating with something like a chorus in which, poco fa, my own little voice chimed in:

“Let’s never hurt each other.”

But nothing like that happened. She was left alone with a great big belly (with me inside it), while we knew nothing about Mr. Angel Palomar y Fagoaga except what he told us the afternoon in which he put on his big sincerity act and sprayed us with his absurd pretexts, without realizing (the jerk) that my mother’s halo, which he said he was defending, was quite extinguished, battered, worn out. The worst thing my father said to us was that they had created me with the contest in mind but that she was certain the contest was nothing more than a fraud perpetrated by the government, and if the contest was in fact a farce, the superbastard went on, then it didn’t matter that he was abandoning my mom and me. Was the reason for getting pregnant the contest? This particular insult, which to me seemed unpardonable, my mother took quite serenely, and although he never became so rude as to tell her that Penny was nothing more than a passing fancy and that she should let the sickness run its course and he would be back by August or September, in any case, before she gave birth, she actually accepted both maternity and solitude, even though I shouted to her from the vast silent echo of my six months of conception: “When a woman’s left alone, a vacuum is created, and anything can fill it!” But perhaps she didn’t believe that I was filling it to the brim (I adore her!). She could understand the fear in a man who doesn’t dare abandon his wife because he feels unsure about conquering (not loving, merely conquering) another woman, and she preferred that he take a chance, that he not get frustrated — taking the risk that he might not return at all. But if he came back, she would accept him again, hoping that he would realize it was she who let him go. That was her way of loving him: letting him go.

To me this seemed like the dumbest thing in the world, a harebrained idea that was unworthy of my mother and me, so from that moment on I decided to work by means of the mysterious powers I might lose the moment I was born, so that my mother, belly and all, with me and all, would make an instant cuckold of my father Angel. Like a real Boy Scout, I started looking around, and quite soon, without my having to persuade him in any way, the correspondent turned up, although in a very peculiar way. You can’t have everything.

* * *

As I was saying, she was left alone with me swelling her belly while he lived the rebellious illusion of penetrating the sanctum sanctorum of the López family. What a blast! as Doña Lucha López would say. But, by the way, how do we know now what’s being said and in what way? Easy: the Lópezes sent Ms. Ponderosa off to Segovia on a fatal Iberia flight which naturally crashed when it reached Barajas Airport in Madrid: poof! and there goes the dream of a lifetime and the secret of the chaperon — to whit: to be possessed passionately by the chef de cuisine Médoc d’Aubuisson (during whose absence these tragedies took place), through force majeure that microchip-in-Ulises’s-papaya business was interrupted. To sum up: when Don Ulises told Doña Lucha that the sugar they sprinkled on his papaya gave him double his normal sexual strength, the lady stole the tube of granules and served them to my dad every day at breakfast; my errant progenitor’s internal information ended up in the Samurai computer of the disconcerted minister Don Federico Robles Chacón, who at first couldn’t understand what the fuck was going on with the truculent Don Ulises, why the functionary and financier’s mind was sending him bizarre messages such as:

• How long does passion last? How long does hatred last? I would like to carry on my rebellion to the edge of life, not to the edge of ideology

• I am afraid of going mad. I am afraid of going sane

• What’s harder: being free or dropping dead?

• I looked for a nation made to last, like the stones of the Indians or the Spaniards: was only Mexico’s past serious?

• I am a romantic, postpunk conservative.

• Does Mexico’s future have to be like its present, a vast comedy of theft and mediocrity perpetrated in the name of progress?

• My heart is filled with an intimate reactionary joy: as intimate as that of millions of Mexicans who want to conserve their poor country: conservatives.

• I WANT ORDER FULLY KNOWING THAT NO ORDER WILL EVER BE ENOUGH.

• I am going to reinvent myself romantically as a conservative rebel: am I betraying myself by screwing Mrs. López and desiring her daughter?

It was this last sentence that finally convinced Robles Chacón that his Samurai was not telling him Ulises’s thoughts, that he would not be betraying himself by screwing his wife, although it might be the case if he really desired his daughter.

INCEST IS BEST BUT ONLY AS LONG AS YOU KEEP IT IN THE FAMILY, flashed the Samurai in immediate dialogue with Federico Robles Chacón. He turned it off and said to himself: Who can be eating those microchips disguised as sugar which I had intended for my rival Ulises López?

5. Reader: Think about us

Reader: Think about us. Don’t abandon us like that, just because your prurience has been tickled by my father’s adventures in the López household. Stop. Think. Remember that she and I are left here alone. She with her abdomen weighed down by an intense increase in blood circulation, in pain because of the expansion of her uterus, as heavy-breasted as a cow: look on her and sympathize with her irritated nipples and her colossal appetite, her weight increasing, hormone production in her placenta increasing, all her glands stimulated, tired, sleepy, ferociously nauseous, imagining banquets of foie gras and couscous, goulash and Aztec ants, and no one there to go out and get them for her, with this absence without leave of that bastard, pater meus, who has decided to drain his life to the bottom (the ass!) before becoming a pure and idealistic man. When? On October 12 next? And as if that weren’t enough, I’m here robbing the poor thing’s calcium, milk, almost half her iron (I want ostrich eggs with truffles!), and she threatened by the loss of all her teeth! Shit, gentle Readers, just think: why in the world did my mother have me? Why did hundreds of thousands of millions of mothers have all the sons of bitches born after Citizens Kane and Able? That’s the way it goes: no going backward: I’m in my fifth month since conception, and I can use my little feet to swim, tap out secret messages, dance in the water, and kick: until this month I paddled in the water without touching her; from now on, on top of Angel’s infidelity, the poor lady has to put up with kick after kick on the walls of this homeland of mine: my mother thinks she’s got Moby Dick in person inside her, the poor dear lives in the bathroom, tenser and tenser, with vaginal secretions, hemorrhoids, cramps, upset stomach (my father doesn’t give her love, so she uses Maalox instead), her hands, feet, and face all swell up, she gets hypertension, she has difficulty breathing, she’s bloated, thankful she has no wedding ring because she could never get it off, she feels hot at the oddest times, sweats, would like to eat but also to put on talcum powder, toilet water, smell fresh, she is constantly afraid she smells and doesn’t realize it, a secretion dries on her nipples, she’d would like to squeeze a tub of Suzy Chapultepecstick onto each of them, God help me! and there I sit or stand or float uselessly inside her, goddamn Olympic swimming champion, the poor man’s Mark Spitz, yippie, and tell me, your mercies benz, if all that wouldn’t make you think twice before trying it!

Which is why I ask you, Reader: now more than ever, don’t abandon us! Understand that your reading is our company, our only consolation! We can put up with everything so long as you hold our hand! Don’t be cruel! Go on reading!

6. What would my father remember

What would my father remember, ultimately, of his stormy but forgettable affair with Mrs. Lucha Plancarte de López? Just this: how on the first night she told him it didn’t matter what her husband Ulises had said: take a good look at her now while she’s naked. She didn’t know if Ulises had actually said that, and she would never tell Angel if she’d seen them spying on her from the star’s water hole. She asked him to believe that she had surprised him ogling her, she made him her lover, but she didn’t demand that he kill her husband in exchange for her favors. The idea would never have occurred to Angel if she hadn’t repeated it a hundred times: I would never demand you kill my husband for having incited you to look at me while I was naked. But the truth is that at least half the ideas that feed a love affair belong to neither partner and come instead from the couple; the bad thing is that the same is true for destructive ideas. What was great about Doña Lucha was that her vagina had a life of its own, it was more self-propulsive than, say, a dog, its movements were like those of an open mouth (a banal comparison, I know), but also like a gloved hand, an undulating, down-filled duvet, a bowl of boiling hot fudge, a swirling Jacuzzi, Seabiscuit winning the Kentucky Derby, the emotion of the Quartetto Italiano playing Haydn’s Emperor, to say nothing of the peregrinations of the wind god Ehécatl when he met the sea goddess Amphitrite right in the middle of the Sargasso Sea and above sunken Atlantis: wow!

And the way they sat down, night after night, the Scheherazade of Las Lomas and her innocent Sultan, to tell each other stories about street violence, encounters with the police, armed robberies, ecocidal horror stories, the criminal drip-drip-drip of toxic waste, truck exhausts, water and air contamination: and how hot that made them, she hotter than he, but even he got really hot (Doña Lucha knew it perfectly well) when she brought out a blue-velvet album and showed him the outline of Penny’s foot when she was a baby, the list of the presents she got when she was baptized, who came to the baptism, and especially the lock of the little girl’s hair, pasted onto the blue page and decorated with a blue ribbon. Doña Lucha’s excitement grew:

“Look, Angel, here’s the proof that she had light hair when she was a little girl, look, it just isn’t true what those gossipy bitches say, I never bleached her little twat, I never straightened her hair down there, which is what my enemies say. Penny’s light, she doesn’t have kinky hair, she doesn’t have any of that half-breed blood from the Guerrero coast like her daddy, she took after me, and my pa was an honest businessman who emigrated from Zapotlán in Jalisco, where the French left behind a ton of kids during the Empire, and they’re all fair-haired, don’t you believe me, Angel honey? And then she asked him to look at her mons veneris, with its thick bush, almost wavy it was, but he should screw her as if she were a black rumba dancer, what the hell, she knew how to move her hips like the best Afro dancer. Alas, but my father, no matter how much he tried, he could not ascend with her to the febrile climax that marked my conception nor attain the anticipated glory he would have with Penny. Finally he reached the point when, with Doña Lucha, it just wouldn’t get hard unless he had Penny’s childhood curl right before his eyes.

One night, when she received him sobbing and he didn’t even bother to ask why, she blurted out:

“Are you married?”

“No.”

“Your wife’ll like that news.”

That night, after Doña Lucha sucked him dry, wore him out, left him mere skin and bones, Angel became desperate because he realized his sacrifices were not bringing him any nearer to that eagerly desired night with Penny. So, toward the end of June, he set about making the lady feel old and decrepit, by reminding her every once in a while about how old she was (forty-eight, fifty?), by tricking her into betraying herself by recalling the remote past, setting traps for her so she’d admit having learned how to roll her hips studying the belly dancers at the Tivoli during the fifties, that she’d learned to sing boleros listening to Agustín Lara in the wee hours of the morning in the old Capri cabaret in the Regis Hotel. He tried to get Doña Lucha to hate him by forcing her to do hideous things like sitting her in front of a mirror and having her make faces, or no dickie ce soir, or making her take out her false teeth in front of him, or having her make herself up as a gargoyle by painting on thick, pointed eyebrows, emaciated lips, creases in her forehead, and hollows in her cheeks, forcing her to pull out chunks of hair so he could have it as a souvenir, to limp around the room and give herself diarrhea by forcing her to share huge amounts of papaya and granulated sugar, which she secretly served him, hoping that the aphrodisiac would bring about certain effects and unintentionally sending multiple incomprehensible and garbled messages to Robles Chacón’s computer, overloaded to the point of saturation because when Chef Médoc returned from his vacation, confirmed with a sardonic smile that the Sweet-Sixteen Party was a failure, did not weep over the premature disappearance of Ms. Ponderosa, but did anxiously hunt for the minicomputers in the shape of granulated sugar to start serving them again to Don Ulises, he had to ask for a new supply from his secret Maecenas, Robles Chacón, who in this way learned that Ulises was no longer using sugar on his papaya and that instead the not very secret lover of Mrs. López did and that he was a certain Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, the nephew of the newly resurrected senatorial candidate for Guerrero, Don Homero Fagoaga, and that there was something fishy about this whole deal, or as Don Bernardino Gutiérrez, first supporter of President Calles in the state of Guerrero would say, even the lame are high-wire walkers in this country.

* * *

“Come on now, ma’am, hate me a little!”

“The worse you treat me, the more I love you. And if you were to treat me nicely I would love you even more. There’s no escape for you, Angel, my cherub!”

“All right, all right. I think about your daughter when I’m inside you, like that idea?”

“I just love the thought of it, my little cherub! The mere idea gets me hot! Come over here!”

“Your husband let me look at you naked, ma’am, should I remind him of the fact? Don’t you hate him?”

“I love him more than ever. I owe having you to him!”

“I hate you, ma’am, you disgust me, you’re like Miss Piggy with all that cellulite, terminal halitosis, your ass looks like a dish of cottage cheese, you’ve got dandruff, and you’ve always got little pieces of tortilla stuck in your teeth!”

“And, despite all that, you still get hard! You love me, you love me, don’t deny it!”

In effect, that was my priapic father’s problem: his masculine vanity was stronger than his disgust in potentia, and even if he didn’t want to, precisely because he didn’t like Mrs. López, he would think about other things, about the unreachable Penny, about my mother when she excited him, and all that got him ready for Doña Lucha, who, as she said, didn’t give a damn about what made it hard just as long as it stayed hard.

“Look! It’s hard as a rock! Again! Don’t you ever get tired?”

“It’s not hard because of you, I swear.”

“Well, I don’t see anyone else in this bedroom, do you? There’s only me, your worn-out but loving old pelican!”

“I think about other women.”

“Let ’em eat cake! You’re locked in with me.”

“I am not. I can leave whenever I please.”

“There’s the door, cherub!”

“You know very well that my passion for your daughter won’t let me leave.”

“Well then, why don’t you go conquer her?”

“You know very well she won’t give me the time of day.”

“She doesn’t give anybody the time of day.”

“I know it, and that’s why I’m going to keep on screwing her through you.”

“Well, charity begins at home, lover boy!”

“Mein Kampf!”

“I do as I please!”

7. The current Servilia served tea

The current Servilia served tea (was it a Lapsang Suchong smuggled in by their little brother Homero from Mexamerica and/or

Pacífica?)

to Capitolina and Farnesia, who were dressed in robes that made them look like cocottes in a Feydeau farce: all silk, wide sleeves, feather boas at neck and cuffs, velvet slippers. Both said that at least during breakfast in their shared boudoir they could dress with a certain frivolity (man does not live by religion alone; nor do women). Their multiple social obligations forced them to be ready for last rites, wakes, and funerals, so they wore black almost all the time, because, as Capitolina was in the habit of declaring:

“Mourning is what you wear on the outside.”

Morning was also the time in which they exchanged their most intimate confidences, but this particular morning in July of 1992, ten years after the catastrophes of the López Portillo era (the greatest of which, for the two sisters, had been the flight of their nephew Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, on whom they’d set their fondest hopes), there was malice in the eyes of the decisive Capitolina, which, if not unusual, was more energetic and, at the same time, more restrained, hungrier to show itself and implacably astonish the younger sister, who was usually plagued by vagueness:

“Besides…” was the first word either uttered that morning, and naturally it was Farnesia who said it, but Capitolina simply cast that penetrating and intelligent look on her that seriously upset the younger sibling.

“How silly, I’m falling asleep,” Farnesia suddenly said in order to cover up her lapse as she sat in her favorite love seat and covered her eyes with a dark hand, which resembled nothing so much as a dark swan. Capitolina slowly sipped her tea (reclining in very very Madame Récamier style in her favorite chaise longue, her chubby little feet crossed) and stared with indecipherable intentions at Farnesia.

“You seem upset this morning,” said Capitolina inquisitorially. “What’s wrong? Tell me!”

“Oh dear!” Farnesia sighed. “It’s something you already know about.”

She swiftly got up out of the love seat, threw herself at the feet of her sister, and rested her head on those knees Julien Sorel might have envied.

“Swear,” said Farnesia, forgetting for once her habitual use of the first-person plural, “swear, Capitita, that when I’m dying you won’t let the old ladies into the house to go through all my boxes and chests.”

“Is that what’s bothering you today?”

“Yes.” Farnesia sobbed, with her head nestled in Capitolina’s lap. “Today and always.”

“Are you still afraid that someone will discover your secret?”

“Yes, yes, that’s what we’re afraid of!” Lapsing into her usual form of address, Farnesia wept.

“Aren’t you even more afraid of dying without sharing it?”

“Oh dear, wouldn’t that be a gift! We don’t have any right to hope for so much: to have a secret and nevertheless be able to find someone worthy of sharing it with!”

“We almost had it with little Angel when he was a boy.”

“Almost, little sister, almost. But there you have it … In the first place…”

“Of course, of course,” interrupted Capitolina, taking her sister’s head in her hands and forcing her to raise her face. “And what if I were to tell you that we can achieve that desire?”

Farnesia’s huge, round, dark Kewpie-doll eyes opened questioningly.

“Now I’m going to tell you what should be upsetting you most this morning, little sister. Our nephew Angel is going to have a child.”

“With whom, with whom? Do we know her? Are they married? Tell me, tell me … I’m fainting from curiosity, in the second place and finally, I’m fainting!”

“Don’t faint, Farnecita. Her name is Angeles. We don’t know her. They aren’t married. Now get a hold of yourself: he’s abandoned her to chase after that nouveau-riche Penelope López who lives in one of those brand-new developments where they just put in the septic tank yesterday.”

“But tell us more!” said Farnesia breathlessly.

Miss Capitolina Fagoaga had never had such an opportunity for drama before, so she played it for all it was worth, standing up (so suddenly that Farnesia’s head bounced off the Récamier armrest), walking toward the high French window in the house on Durango Street, and playing with the curtain strings, closing the curtains bit by bit until the boudoir lay in darkness.

“More, more…” (The shadows were swallowing Farnesia’s voice.)

Capitolina paused majestically, her silhouette barely visible in a thin line of light.

“Sister: we have managed to defend this home against all the horrors of the past fifty years.”

“And we’re still young and vigorous, we can…” said Farnesia without finishing, jumping back into her love seat.

“That’s not the problem. We have to ask ourselves who is going to get custody of the child when he’s born.”

“Well, of course it would be his mother…”

“And did you bring up your baby when it was born?” said Capitolina ferociously, snapping open the curtains so that the light would blind Farnesia, who covered her eyes, burst into tears, and said, “Things were different in those days, I was a Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Monies de Oca, with a name, a position, a family. How was I going to raise an illegitimate child, how…?”

“But our nephew’s trollop can?”

“We’re living in different times, with different people,” whimpered the younger sister, her face entirely covered by an organdy handkerchief with raised embroidery pierced by an arrow and with the initials FB.

“You are an incorrigible romantic,” Capitolina said, dropping the curtains and walking toward Farnesia. “You still have that ridiculous handkerchief with your lover’s initials on it.”

“That’s why I don’t want anyone poking around in our drawers when we die,” she said in her highest voice.

“That’s not what I’m talking about!” Capitolina shouted this time. “That’s all over and done! He never renounced the child, he begged you that if you didn’t want it, to give it to him, it was you who made it disappear, don’t you remember? What did you do with your son, blockhead?”

“Don’t scream at me, Capitita. I forgot! I swear that I forgot … I mean, we forgot, no, no … I mean that you must have known … it’s my way of speaking … no, I didn’t kill him, I swear, I gave him to, I don’t know who it was, I don’t remember, all I remember is that I put a silver chain around his ankle, one that could expand and grow with him, and our names, Farnesia and Fernando, there’s the key in a jewel box over there, that’s why I don’t want … we don’t want, isn’t that so?… anyone poking around in our…”

“Don’t be a fool and don’t take me for one. You must have given the child to Servilia.”

“To whom?”

“To whoever was the maid then. Don’t you remember?”

“How can I when they all have the same name? Who was Servilia in 1964? In any case, it’s our secret…”

“You wanted to share it with Angel.”

“Yes. You know why.” Now it was Farnesia’s turn to stare directly and maliciously at her sister. “You know what we were going to ask him for in exchange for our secret. You know very well.”

“That’s not what matters here. What matters is something infinitely more important.” Capitolina rose majestically. “What matters is that we get all we ever wanted — in one fell swoop.”

“A child to share our secrets,” said Farnesia, stretching out her hand to touch her sister’s. “A child to replace my own, sister, and to replace Angelito, who abandoned us…”

“Especially a child of our own blood, who should not grow up on the street, whose mother is unmarried and whose father abandoned him. In a word, a Fagoaga!”

“Yes, yes, we should educate him ourselves,” exclaimed Farnesia.

“Don’t give me any of that Commie propaganda,” her sister answered her haughtily. “You don’t give education. Education’s something you drink in your mother’s milk. Our religion is all we need!”

“Excuse my lack of ignorance,” said Farnesia humbly. “How silly, I must be falling asleep … you know.”

“All right now. Try to understand our plan: we are going to get custody of that child. I’ve found out he’ll be born in October. We’re three months away from the delivery date. We have time.”

8. The reader ought to know

The reader ought to know that in point of fact my father did attempt to escape the vicious circle of love that locked him in Lady Lucha’s arms, promising that one day he would obtain Penny’s favors. He accosted her at various times throughout the day — while she was playing roulette in her private casino, or sitting in her red velvet movie theater watching the complete films of Shirley Temple, or swimming in the heated pool in the shape of the United States. But the girl had a gift for never looking at him and thus fanned the flames of his almost medieval desire, as if he were a knight frustrated by the inviolable distance between himself and this maiden imprisoned behind drawbridges, chastity belts, and within the improbable purity she had constructed around herself.

One desperate day, he entered her room only to find she was not there (she always seemed to be elsewhere). He rubbed his cheek with a towel she had tossed aside, smelled her hairbrush; his unsatisfied passion was so strong he even wished to find one of Penny’s used tampons so he could put it under his pillow, just as he’d once left a condom filled with his semen under Penny’s pillow only to see it later floating in the garden pool, blown up and with Superman painted on it.

One night when he hid behind the curtains in Penny’s bedroom to watch her sleep, he discovered some of the small secrets of this princess who would not allow herself to be touched by princes, plebes, or anyone else: Penny smelled herself! He saw her in bed amorously, slowly smelling first her armpits, then the hand which she’d held between her legs for such a long time, then her pinkie, which she’d hidden in her anus, and then came her farts. These tiny peals of thunder, fully audible, were jealously swept up in her little fist and instantly brought to her nostrils and absorbed there in a spasm, her eyes closing delightedly, her mouth agonizing in ecstasy; she gave her farts more than she gave him, her unknown lover! A gas got more affection than he did!

This discovery drove my father Angel right out of his foreseeable — monotonous but promising — game plan. And so he arrived, not in a bad mood, but distracted and ill-humored at the dinner table around which, perversely, the three members of the López family and my father gathered to enjoy Médoc d’Aubuisson’s opulent cuisine.

“Perhaps at the end of summer we’ll go someplace nice for a vacation,” said Don Ulises without conviction, trying to initiate a trivial conversation.

“Where?” His wife arched her plucked and painted eyebrow. “To your native Chilpancingo? to the floating gardens of Xochimilco? Or might we venture to the far reaches of Pachuca, Hidalgo?”

“Patience, sweetheart,” said Ulises to Lucha, patting her hand. “Things will straighten themselves out, I promise.”

“Bah,” grunted the lady. “Things will only straighten themselves out if Mexico is annexed by the United States. How I wish it would happen! Then I wouldn’t have to go abroad just to go shopping.”

“Don’t be frivolous,” Ulises sweetly chided her. “The reason you say that is because they are organized and we are disorganized. In the long run, we’ll only be saved if we’re governed from Washington. All the rest is nothing but outmoded patriotism.”

“Well, I’d be happy with being Puerto Rico,” said the lady. “It’s better than nothing.”

“Oooooh, I get so mixed up,” said Penny. “I don’t, ya know, like to traaavel, no way, because I never know where I aaam, or, like, what the name of the place is. I’m reeelly dumb in, like, geography, even though I went to the Ibero-American School.”

“Well, where haven’t you been, Penny?” asked my poor father, as innocent as a lamb.

“Oooooh, even I can answer that one. Almost nobody’s been there, like, what’s that place with the reeely funny name,

Pacífica,

is that, like, what they call it? How come we never go there, huh?”

A frozen silence from Doña Lucha, a kick under the table from her father’s short leg, a sudden curiosity in my father, who, in that instant, felt tired of this passion, this comedy …

“Have you ever been in

Pacífica?”

he asked with the same innocent expression on his face, repeating the question put to him by Deng Chopin in the defunct Acapulco boîte, Divan the Terrible.

No one answered, and my father will swear that something happened there that he could not explain but which did explain Don Ulises’s invitation to visit him in the Salon of the Stars (Marlene! Rhonda! Greta!), where, with no preambles, forgoing all etiquette, not even asking him to sit down, with not a hint of political caviling or philosophic evocation, the millionaire said to my father:

“Let’s see now, Palomar. You’ve been here over a month now. You must be wondering why I brought you here and why I’ve kept you on.”

“Don Ulises: I came here to get your daughter, not your wife.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said López impatiently, “I confess I need sexual collaborators for my wife. Her nymphomania wears me out and you’re certainly not the first stud to dirty her sheets. But let’s get to the point: you haven’t been able to seduce my daughter. Want me to hand her to you?”

My father didn’t know if the polite thing was to say yes or no. In the confusion that overpowered him, he could only say emphatically: “A pleasure.”

This non sequitur, like a lapse in synchronization between the actor’s lips and the sound of the words, did not correct itself over the course of the dialogue between my father and Ulises:

“You’ll be able to take a break from my wife and all her demands.”

“An honor to meet you.”

“But you will not even be able to touch Penny with a rose petal.”

“My name is Angel Palomar y Fagoaga.”

“Unless you do for me exactly what I’m going to tell you to do.”

“After you.”

“I need a seraph to do my dirty work for me.”

“Hello.”

“What you did so well with my wife, I want you to do with my rivals.”

“Happy to meet you.”

“My business rivals. My rivals in the government. I want you to take advantage of your good looks, your social connections, your aristocratic pedigree, all of that, to open doors that will not open for me or my family, I want you to seduce wives and daughters, discover secrets, communicate them to me, and when necessary, to humiliate all these people and lead them to bankruptcy, and — why not? — get rid of them if necessary.”

Don Ulises jumped up, almost did a flip, clicked his heels noisily in the air, and landed on his feet, while Angel said, as if talking in his sleep:

“No, I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”

“See, Angelito, I’ve always had something that someone else has needed, and today that someone is you.”

“Would you mind passing the salt?”

“Depending on how well you perform for me, little by little I’ll get you into my saintly daughter’s good graces. What do you say?”

“How nice! It’s been such a long time. Really, it’s been ages!” exclaimed my stunned father as he withdrew from the presence of Don Ulises and instinctively stepped into the garden for a breath of air. In the distance he spied something shining in the darkness. He allowed himself to be led to that light. It emanated from the Bloomingdale’s replica. He approached the revolving doors, pushed them, then mounted the half-flight escalator. As he regained his composure, he thought nostalgically about the days when he felt free to intertwine his fingers with a woman’s forbidden hand going up or down an escalator. He loved women he didn’t know, longed for those he hadn’t yet discovered, wondered if he’d used up my mother, if he knew her completely by now, if she thought he was an imbecile, wondered if he’d perhaps worn out Doña Lucha as well, although he was sure she’d worn him out, but that he still had to know if Penny could be worn out or could wear him out and why not ask her directly since there she was, in the facsimile of this Cathedral of López Delights, the first floor of Bloomingdale’s. Penny was seated at Bloomie’s perfume-and-makeup counter, her back to him, hiding that brilliant face illuminated by two butterflies on her eyes, gold dust on her eyelids, strawberry hearts on her lips, her nostrils fluttering, her little ears perfumed by Miss Dior, her insinuatingly cleft chin, that slightly sluttish beauty he had admired, desired, been obsessed by ever since New Year’s at the Aca disco. Now she was sitting there, presenting him with her bare shoulders, wearing a striped T-shirt, her waist and ass covered by a tweed miniskirt, a whore, yes indeed, that’s how he wanted her, a little half-breed from the Guerrero coast, fed for generations on rice and beans and fried plantains, squid in its ink, and Larín chocolates. Everything her mother had revealed, the farthest thing from Palomar y Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca and the best Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Puebla families: Penny López with her back to him, a pencil in one hand and a tissue in the other, and he, gawking at her, awkwardly crashes into the Estée Lauder counter, knocking down a row of bottles, and she, surprised, drops the pencil and raises the tissue to her mouth as she spins on her seat and allows herself to be seen without makeup, clean-faced, devoid of her tropical bordello glitter: Penelope López Plancarte without makeup, her face washed clean, was (my father almost fainted) the very image of a nice little prim-and-proper Mexican girl, with centuries of Creoles behind her, early Masses, and lonely nights, late suppers of eggs and beans and vermicelli soup, corn-flour porridge for breakfast, centuries of church candles strained through her blood, and he knew how to tell all of them apart genetically: Penny López without gold dust and butterflies on her eyes was a pale, clean-faced nun, barely distinguishable from the nuns that the high-bourgeois girls of Mexico imitate so they won’t look like the whores who are the other alternative in their reality: Penny López was one of them, like them, barely inclined to erase her resemblance to them. She, too, derives from the legion of ghosts with bloodless lips and suspicious eyes, rice-powder skin, holy-water-rinsed hands, rosaried fingers, scapulary breasts: devout bourgeois flesh hidden for five centuries of colonialism in convents, far from the sun, in somber houses with humid patios and masturbatory bedrooms: women with dead cells and the scar of a hair shirt on every freckle: he saw her like that, bloodless, pale, traditional, and in a dark flash he saw Agueda in the Oaxaca church, the mad Agueda’s dried-up or dead friends in the Oaxaca plaza, saw my mother Angeles materialized among the balloons and trees in the Alameda, the woman he desired or deserved or fatally loved in a kind of desperate lottery in which his real wife, the one he should have loved madly, had still not been born or had died four centuries earlier, in a bordello in Seville or a convent in Quito: what would he say to an ideal woman that wouldn’t be this absurd phrase that he repeated to the terrified Penny, poor little Penny surprised in flagrante in her monastic, colonial, genetic nakedness:

“I dreamed about words,” my father said to her.

She covered her face with the tissue, like a Veronica, and told him through the paper: “My daddy gave me uh like permission for you to uh kiss my ass. But nothing else, right? Careful, prole, just the cheeks, okay?”

She stood there saying over and over “Just the cheeks, okay?” while my father slowly exited the brilliant sphere of Bloomingdale’s and walked into the cold night of the high-altitude tropics, toward the gate to Don Ulises López’s mansion, toward the chilled and hunched-over figure waiting for him there, on the other side, always in the street, always patient, protecting herself from the acid drizzle with her tiny clear-plastic parasol, her boots, her gloves, her see-through raincoat. Colasa Sánchez shook hands with my father through the gargoyled gate, and she told him I’ve been waiting for you, I knew that someday you’d come out, I waited and I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.

Ulises and Lucha felt something the night Angel my father abandoned the house in Las Lomas del Sol in the company of Colasa Sánchez; they felt something when they heard Penny sobbing in her bedroom, something they hadn’t felt, neither together nor separately, for a long time, something that led them like sleepwalkers out of their respective rooms and up the serpentine staircase into each other’s arms, to an embrace they hadn’t shared in years, since …

“Chilpancingo,” said Don Ulises with his Lucha in his arms.

“What are you thinking about?” she whispered, trembling, in his ear.

“I don’t know. Unimportant things. It wasn’t an ugly town. On the contrary. It was a pretty town, with pine trees along the streets and pure mountain air.”

“Are you thinking that we could have been happy if we had stayed there?”

Ulises nodded his shiny head. “I always liked picking you up at your house. You lived, let’s see now, on…?”

“The street was called Heroínas del Sur. That’s what put the idea in your head to start producing drugs in Chilpancingo … The name of my street! The street your pure little girlfriend lived on, Ulises!”

“We’d walk along Avenida Juan Alvarez, under the pines, to the movie, holding hands. I’d bring you flowers.”

“It was in the national parks that you began to plant poppies, Ulises, remember?”

“You were so pretty, Lucha. All the boys were after you.”

“And now they all get me.”

“I took you out of Chilpancingo, I made you into a queen, I gave you a castle, all so no one would take you away from me. Just look. All the money in the world hasn’t kept me from having to share you with other men.”

“And I thank you for the favor, shorty. I really mean it. You don’t hear me complaining.”

“Lucha, wouldn’t we have been happier if we’d stayed in Chilpancingo all our lives?”

“You’ve wondered about that too, Uli?”

“Yes.”

“Well, keep thinking about it: your whole life in one of those flea-bitten towns. Your whole life. All of it. No change. Always the same, always the same. Always the same thing, what you call monotony, Ulises! I just don’t see you there. Can you see me there?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not the girl I used to be. And you’re not the same either.”

“Let me love you tonight.”

“Thanks, shorty. I feel real lonely tonight, I really mean it.”

Penny listened to them, poking her head through the half-open door of her bedroom, upset, doubtful, just as she was when they traveled and she never knew where they were, if it’s Monday it must be Andorra and if it’s Tuesday it must be Orchids, listening to them talk in voices that were not those she knew; now they were strange, melancholy voices, or could that be tenderness, or whatever you call it? Talking about pine trees and parks and secluded plazas and a church that was so white it blinded you just to look at it, that invited you in to relax in its shade: Mom and Dad holding hands. Penny almost began to cry, and wondered if a little white house surrounded by pines on Heroínas del Sur Street in Chilpancingo was worth more than this monstrosity, with its replica of Bloomingdale’s, its dog-racing track, and its pool in the shape of the U.S.A. Poor Penny; she let her head fall and felt affronted by something that had nothing to do with these places or with her. The way in which that boy saw her when he finally saw her as she was. No one had ever looked at her like that — not with desire, but with shock and disgust, with revulsion. She could really go for a boy like that. She could not say to him, “I’m not for you.” She heard her parents making love and realized that the boy was no longer there and that she could not imitate Lucha and Ulises.

9. As soon as they found out

As soon as they found out that Angel had abandoned Angeles, the Four Fuckups returned, one by one, like birds to the nest to be near her in the Tlalpan house: when the Orphan Huerta and Hipi Toltec, Egg, and the invisible Baby Ba got there, they found the door sealed by the district attorney’s office; there were no windows, but through the wrought-iron grating the friends could clearly see that no one was there.

Feeling abandoned themselves, they stood there in the middle of the street, the very image of bewilderment. Then Egg, who was a man (to his misfortune, he would say to himself) with a memory, put two and two together and told the others that when Angel had run away from the Fagoagas he had found sanctuary with his grandparents, Rigo and Susy. Angeles had no doubt done the same thing.

“Come along now, girl, don’t lag behind, honey, we’re going to look for our pal Angeles,” said our buddy Egg, and perhaps it’s time that I reappear after such a prolonged absence and take this opportunity to tell your lardships that in this my sixth month of gestation there begin to mount up pros and contras with regard to my making my sudden but expected appearance next October, adding my existence to the thirty million citizens (or the dirty million prolecats in the powwow, as the Orphan would say in his slang), and from now on I shall try to note down in two columns, like a bookkeeper—Debit and Credit—the reasons why I should be born and the reasons that discourage me right off the bat from doing so. Okay, Egg’s reference to Baby Ba is perhaps, I will admit this, the most powerful reason I’ve come across yet for someday appearing.

I have the feeling that she’s waiting for me, that she’ll look at me when I’m born and fall in love with me, and that I will be the only person able to see her, even if I can’t talk to her, not in the way the aforementioned Egg now feels able to declare to my mother: “At last I can say it, Angeles. I love you very much. Before I couldn’t, as you know, because Angel was my best friend. But I’ve loved you ever since I met you. I looked at you while I played the piano in the boîte in Acapulco, and you looked at your husband, and your husband looked at Penny López: I, your friend Egg, have loved you from that moment!”

Our buddy Egg’s soul is tormented (mildly) by love and by the fact that he doesn’t want to create any class differences between himself and the Orphan and Hipi, who have never been in the house of the Palomar grandparents and who don’t have the same sort of background as my father and his friend.

But when they finally reach the house on Calle Génova and are let in, they find Angeles and your Humble Cervix (invisible still) in the coach house, where my father grew up surrounded by useless mementos. What joy, what a quantity of hugs, how many tears, unusual in my mom, how many hand squeezes and kisses on the cheeks, what a lot of running around by Grandfather Rigoberto greeting everyone and what a lot of bustling around in the kitchen by Grandmother Susy, who promises to bring glasses of eggnog and quesadillas with sauce, and sopes in green sauce, and salted guazontles, Aztec ants dipped in egg like freshwater pearls, and maguey worms fried and crunchy wrapped in warm tortillas with guacamole, what a party, how happy everyone is, the best I’ve ever had, the hottest, the most loving, the most fraternal, after all that horrifying “fun” in Aca and Igualistlahuaca, and the streets of Mexico Shitty: Grandfather and Grandmother sing a few corridos, Hipi dances a dance dredged up from the beginning of time, as monotonous as the night or the rain, and the Orphan, forgetful as usual, has to invent a tune and hope the others join in, as in fact they do, Hipi and Egg (and Ba, invited by Egg to take part while I dream about her) make up lyrics for the Orphan Huerta’s song:

Old at twenty, no good, no plenty

Half are under ten

At thirty, one foot in the grave

Twenty years of age!

“Búfala!” says Hipi Toltec.

“What a fresh set!” comments Egg, worn out.

“Cool, coolísimo,” exults the Orphan Huerta.

“Animus!” says Angeles.

Then they all tell my mother she can count on them, that they are her buddies; no one mentions Angel or reproaches him for anything, what the hell, you know how complicated life is, man, and nobody’s going to cast the first adlaistevenstone; they kiss her, begin to leave, don’t want to, but

“What are you going to do now?”

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

“Have some fun…”

“Where’s fun in Mexicalpán, man?”

“Guwhere whasi’ B-4?”

“Don’ le’ yur filins chouenlai!”

“Abyssinia.”

“Humongous…”

“Awzom!”

“Serbus!”

“In ixtli!”

“In yóllotl!”

A gigantic error, gigantic luck, a fleeting apparition: I rest, I breathe, I sigh.

10. Only Egg stayed behind

Only Egg stayed behind with my mother that night of our happy reunion in the grandparents’ house, and he smilingly told her that his usual verbal come-on with women was to talk to them about ecology or about the effects of television on children, but that he suspected that this time it wouldn’t work.

My mother only smiled at him as she had so many times over the course of their relationship: Egg, my father Angel’s best friend. That’s what I am, he said, reading the situation, or whatever I take it upon myself to be tonight now that we’re all alone, right? (And me, bastard, what am I? air? a streamer?) It’s that friendship is perhaps the first true form of eroticism, I mean that you see a friend’s body and you love it because you love your friend even though it would never occur to you to go to bed with him, his body becomes erotic for you because not only does it not occur to you to have sex with him, but above all it would never occur to you to have a child with him, and you see a body that is useful for something more than reproduction and that’s the most erotic thing in the world: imagining a body, desiring a body, without its being useful for reproduction. Egg said that was how he loved my father Angel — well, he’d let the cat out of the bag, the name, to see what might happen — and now suddenly he wasn’t there and it was as if a wall or a screen had disappeared and now he could see Angeles for the first time, without the separation that had always stood between them.

She was in the process of reproducing, my mother said silently. (Thanks, oh protectress; hip, hip, hurray!)

But he desired her for something other than reproduction, he told her. And he insisted: “Angel is my friend and will always be my friend. I want you to understand that.”

“You mean you love me now for what he did?” asked my mom; note by the way that she didn’t say “what he did to me” or (even better) “did to us.”

“No,” answered Egg, “I love you so that I can be with you. Not because I’m sorry for you. Not at all. But I don’t want you to be alone. I don’t want you to have to give birth alone. I want to guarantee that the child wins the contest. And that no one takes it away from you.” This last he added out of pure intuition, irrationally.

She simply looked at him, caressed her belly, and said: “There’s going to be an earthquake tonight. I know it for a fact. The Angel on the Independence monument is going to fall off its column. I don’t know what kind of premonition this is, Egg, or if we should wait. Last night I dreamed about bats, lots of bats filling the sky, and that I did understand. I said it was a premonition about the world to come. In my dream I followed the bats — they were squeaking, blind, with big ears, and only they knew where to find food. Only they knew.”

I give an intrauterine jump out of pure shock. Surprised in flagrante labore! My job is to send nightmares to people! I confess that ever since I began this sixth month I’ve been doggedly sticking people with nightmares! I had to start at the beginning, so I hit Mom first. A direct hit! I just found out now! How should I react? Should I be happy? sorry? Must I test my power by turning these words into realities? I’m getting French waves: cauchemar! I hear the clattering hooves of that old English night-mare! And the Spanish word for it hits me like a plumbeous plumb, its brows knitted, its jaw fixed, muttering Castilian obscenities, and in a perennial fit of pique: pesadilla! What shall I do with this language of mine but bring it up-to-date, as I just did; Mom: dream about bats — they’ll come squeaking back to you; Mom: dream about an earthquake and a fallen Angel: it’ll all happen, I swear to you.

But she is already saying, not caring that I have just acquired this power by realizing that I have it: “I feel surrounded by all the things not used up by haste, poverty, or indifference.”

“All the things Angel left here?”

“No, no, only that. The parks. The past. The ugliness of the city, it doesn’t matter. The real ugliness is oblivion.”

“You may be right.”

“I’m sorry, Egg. Thanks, but I just can’t.”

“Friends?”

“Forever.”

“Nothing more?”

* * *

Yes, WORDS, she said, she who believed in words and didn’t waste them, who had a terrible fear of these verbal carnivals in which all of us have put her, but with good intentions, you do see that, don’t you, Mom? We want to attack all official, finished, used-up languages, all the phrases that try to pass for good taste, every classical verbal image, right in the nuts, I say, laughing my head off, totally gross, implacably clownish, so that all those present who hear this know that nothing is stable anymore, nothing is perennial, not even Spanish pique, that everything’s mutable, mutating, imperfect, unfinished. Mom, listen to me, no prohibition, no norm, life turned upside down, life in drag, wearing only a crown made of gold paper, let me be born laughing, Mommy, let me live my unborn novel, which is like a vast sacred parody, a scandalous liturgy, a eucharistic diablerie, a banquet, an Easter festival, the union of body and soul, head and ass, word and shit, ghost and fornication, Mom, and now it’s beginning to shake around here, and I do a delightful front one-and-a-half because the earth in these parts trembles as if it were floating on water, oscillating, and I sway, I swing and sway with Sammy Kaye — or without! And my oh so astute mom grabs on to Egg, who says thank you God for your telluric decisions and we’re on our way through sette e mezzo on the Jaroslav Richter Scale, wailing away on the geological Steinway with Ludwig van’s Emperor and the tremor does not stop and the open-beaked eagle drops its serpent out of its mouth and tries unsuccessfully to get loose from its chain to set out on an impossible flight, and Hipi gets the snake leftovers to make himself a belt avec and Julio Iglesias deigns to give an autograph to the Orphan without having to be asked twice in the trembling suite of Hotel President Grasshopper Hill, Josú, since the world is falling down once again and it’s more important to die signing your own name and Colasa Sánchez’s cunt incontinently and infinitely opens in front of the astounded eyes of my father Angel who was getting ready to eat pussy but who instead sees shark teeth lining the sweet treasure of Miss Colasa, daughter of the ineffable Matamoros Moreno, while the golden Angel noisily falls onto Paseo de la Reforma, its gigantic metal wings smashing the shops and stands on the traffic circle where Tíber intersects with Florencia, finally ending up such that its head — blind eyes and sensual lips — faces directly toward Chapultepec Castle, quietly but repressively taken back that very afternoon by the forces of order under Colonel Inclán, who at this very minute is inviting President Jesús María y José Paredes to stroll through the castle’s belvedere, where he thinks what he always thinks, namely, that what this country needs is a dictator-for-life, that the drama of Mexico is that it has gone too long without a traditional, recognizable tyrant who would attract adherents and concentrate hatred and who would end, once and for all, this damn symbolic dispersion. Then the tremor begins, and from Chapultepec it is easy to see how the Angel of Independence falls and the colonel wonders if he should take it as a sign, almost a command: he looks at the ex-PAN president, who in that shocking instant loses all sense of ideological relationships and, in the face of this visible portent, falls quickly to his knees. But the colonel makes him stand, pulling him up by his lapels, no one should see you that way, Mr. President, no one, and the President says to the colonel: “I don’t want power anymore! I can’t carry the burden! You take it!” And the colonel, with his green beard and his dark glasses, craftily and slyly says:

“No, Mr. President, thank you, but Don Benito Juárez would turn over in his grave if the Army were to take power again in Mexico, no, Mr. President. The respect for civilian authority in the Mexican Army is sacred.”

“This is a portent,” says President Paredes, quieted down somewhat, although he has always been terrified of earthquakes. “Just like the warnings to Moctezuma in the year Ce Acatl. What do we do if there’s a revolution?”

“Don’t worry, Mr. President. I’ll take charge of bringing you your daily quota of dead men. All contingencies have been planned for. Neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street, wherever we find them: your daily quota of dead men. The revolution will be stopped dead in its tracks.”

“Thank God!” Don Jesús sighs.

“He’s always on the side of those with power.”

He leaves the colonel, with the green saliva oozing out from between his parted lips.

* * *

Unknown to these men of power, far away, invisible to them, Mamadoc in person is looking directly into the Angel’s golden eyes, and she tries to read in them a warning that the fallen statue does not dare to communicate to her. Capitolina and Farnesia hug each other, full of anguish, thinking that death is coming for them, they have left so much undone, who will take care of the unborn child? They will perhaps die together and that makes Capitolina happy, but Farnesia weeps bitterly, thinking that everyone will come to go through her drawers and leaf through her secrets. Don Fernando Benítez is not daunted by earthquakes, and he bangs his fist against the door of Don Homero Fagoaga’s penthouse. The owner quickly, fearfully, and nervously opens the door, fleeing but wrapped in a towel, and Fernando rebukes him, you’ve gone back on your word, you fat faggot, you have not defended democracy, you have not protected your niece and nephew, you’ve besmirched your honor! Well, now you’ll go out with me, you miserable stewpot, to combat those who get rich from the toil of the masses, you will come, you filthy barnacle, to walk with me along the roads of Mexico, losing all your extra pounds and ready, with me, to give your life so that in Tepatepec Hidalgo the right of the peasants to organize is respected and so that in Pichátaro Michoacán the municipal election is not tampered with!

By the force of his insults and threats Fernando drives Homero back into the apartment, miserable lump, bloodsucker, fixture of waiting rooms, survivor of the United Front of Asslickers (UFA), with a good condom the world would have been spared your lamentable presence. He went on attacking the fat man and stripping him now that he had no Tomasito to defend him, although the lawyer screams, Tomasito! Au secours! and the implacable Don Fernando Benítez: you will have the faith in your fellow citizens no one has ever had and you will see that from below, my fat and greasy relative, if we allow them to, Mexicans will practice democracy without gunmen, without crime, without bribes, without orders and abuses. Don Homero Fagoaga cornered, shouting back to Benítez, sure, sure, this mass of lazy good-for-nothings, this irresponsible people, you’ll see what they’ll do if you leave them alone, what they’ll do to you, to us, just what they did on the Malinaltzin highway! they’ll beat us to a pulp because we’re the enlightened minority that for good or ill has made this poor country despite its flea-bitten, passive, asshole masses, stupefied by incest, liquor, genes, the hopeless race, the damned race, the ra …

Cornered now, Don Homero, who entered this story flying through the air under a parachute, now leaves it tumbling off his balcony over Mel O’Field Road and onto the vacant lot, across which on a distant day he chased Orphan Huerta with conflictive intentions, the Orphan (pears, lemons, an’ figs!) and now, with the threatening Fer Ben (Fer-de-lance!) in front of him, demanding all these horrors of him, the naked lawyer and academician falls, naked, from the tenth floor of this bouncing building down toward the trembling earth, clutching his immense Cannon towel, imported of course! He does seven flips in the air, his naked body just like mine inside Mamma Mia because the tremor does not stop and finally she is holding on tight to Egg, my father’s best friend, our buddy Egg, and he has an uncontrollable attack of the giggles, finally hugging my mother Angeles filled with me and I, Reader and Friend, ready to take over this text, if not the entire world then at least the novel, amid the noise of a golden Angel that falls and Egg who says to my mother: “Look. Your halo had gone out. Now it’s on again, and I Christopher, I with no weapons but my stubborn battle against the unknown, my irreverent mix of languages and my decision to put them all into play, the conflict and the cause: I tell myself that when the Mexican earth shakes and when the Angel of Independence falls and when the bats fly in search of the food that remains, that History is faster than Fiction (here, in Mexico, in the New World!) and that it’s time to get a move on, no more holdups, to the month of August and what awaits us in it, pushing forward, toward the conclusion, toward my Na-ti-vi-daddy! my Mother-Ni-Dad!

* * *

But sleep, which is memory set free from action, gets between reality and my desire, and this is the dream of the grandparents the night of the earthquake and the fall of the Angel and the visit of the Four Fuckups to the coach house, where my mother and I take refuge, and the dream is this:

11. Fatherland, Always Be Faithful to Yourself

Ayayay, Grandfather Rigoberto Palomar woke up screaming: a nightmare. It’s just a dream, Grandmother Susana Rentería lying at his side consoled him; it was nothing. An uprising? said Don Rigoberto, astounded. No, nothing but your balls, laughed his wife. Ay, my little innocent girl, said General Palomar, my great-grandfather, to his wife my great-grandmother, sixty-five years of age, merely because he was ninety-one, and do you remember, Susy?

“You’re not going to tell me you dreamed about me, are you, Rigo?”

The lady smiled, pausing, and caressed her husband’s silky-white mustache.

“Because remember you said it was a nightmare.”

He covered her with kisses — on her hair, on her cheeks, on her lips, until one of the sleeves of his brown-and-white pajamas tore open at the shoulder and the two of them laughed. She asked him to take off his pajama top and sat on the edge of the bed to sew it up, swinging her legs, which were too short to reach the floor, her ideal feet.

Don Rigoberto, a skinny old man, wrapped his arms around himself as he sat next to her on the edge of the bed. She sighed. “Tell me your dream, Rigo.”

Now, my innocent little girl, let me see. I was about twenty and I was in President Benito Juárez’s personal guard up in the northern part of the Republic. We were being chased by the French and the Mexican traitors who helped them. Two years of travel, Su, imagine what that was then, on worn-out coaches and carts pulled by oxen, all loaded with the national archives, and Mr. Juárez with a sort of portable desk in his black carriage, where he wrote and signed things.

Just imagine, my pure little girl, from Mapimí to Nazas to San Pedro del Gallo to La Zarca to Cerro Gordo to Chihuahua and from there across the desert to the far north. Every day fewer and fewer soldiers, less water, less food. Juárez put up with everything because when we began the journey he told us: “We’ll never have a chance like this again in our history,” and whenever we got tired, Susana, or whenever we started wondering what the devil we were doing there pushing carts loaded with old papers through mud holes and up mountains, we remembered his words and we understood them very, very well. The opportunity granted us was that of saving Mexico from a foreign invasion and an Empire imposed on us by force of arms.

The opportunity to defend a legally constituted government, which for the moment consisted of some old archives and a desk on wheels.

I don’t think our fatherland was ever so poor or so beloved by Mexicans as it was then. Have you seen, sweetheart, how ugly this country becomes whenever it is wealthy and arrogant? Well, you would have seen it beautiful in my dream.

What did I have to say in those days, honey? Nothing: I was a poker-faced lancer protecting the President, who one day decided to redistribute the Church’s wealth, to make people respect the laws of men so they’d be better at respecting the laws of God, and to take privileges away from the Army and the aristocracy. Just like that, the roof fell in, and all the furies in heaven and hell were loosed on the land. He defeated the conservatives, but the conservatives left him saddled with a foreign debt of fifteen million pesos, which was the price of some bonds bought by French bankers in exchange for a pound of Mexican flesh. The bonds had no real value. The debt, for which France demanded payment, did. Juárez suspended payments. Napoleon III responded with an invasion and an Empire. Looking at Don Ben, you could see he was so serious, so worthy of his position, so — how to put it? Susanita, he was, well, so sure of his role in history. And since he didn’t doubt for a minute that despite all its sorrow Mexico would end up being an independent and democratic country, he never doubted it was his job to make it so, no more, no less. I really wanted to ask him, listen, Don Benito, and if you’re not here, will this country collapse, will it go on fighting, or what? I don’t know how he would have answered. Lots of people thought they did know: that he thought himself indispensable. And since he was heroic, poor, and a firm believer in the law, there was no one who could argue with him. There was something else: he was a model husband and father. He protected his family; he sent them to the United States to be safe; he wrote his wife and children, punctually and lovingly. Excuse me, Susy, but I was starting to get upset: I saw him sitting like an idol inside his carriage, imperturbable, dressed all in black, frock coat, trousers, vest, a Zapotec idol dressed up — as what?

From looking at him so much, I ended up saying to myself, listen to me now, sweetie, that this man was disguised as something he loved and hated at the same time. Why was he so different? Sometimes he’d let it out in conversation; he’d been an Indian boy, a shepherd in Oaxaca, illiterate and without the Castilian language until he was twelve; between the twelfth and the twentieth year, just imagine, my dove, that farm boy, dispossessed heir to a spectral culture, as old as it was dead, Susana, that boy, lost in the light of a magic simplicity, learns to look on his past as an irrational night, can you imagine that, honey? A horror from which he’d have to save all Mexicans: in ten years he learns to speak Spanish, learns to read and write, becomes a liberal lawyer, an admirer of European revolutions, of U.S. democracy, of the law-loving French bourgeoisie, marries a white bourgeois lady, dresses up as a Western professional man, and just when he finds himself armed with all the writings and laws of Western civilization, boom! Susy, that same world he admires so much turns against him, denies him the right to modernize Mexico, denies Mexico her independence, and I wept for Benito Juárez, I swear I did, angel, when I understood that: the man was sad, divided, masked by his great contradiction, which from then on would belong to all of us, to all Mexicans: we would feel uncomfortable with our past, but even more so with our present. We would be in permanent disharmony with our modernity, which was supposed to make us happy in a flash and which only brought us disasters. How Mr. Juárez stared sadly on that desert he was rapidly leaving behind, where nothing was his, not a cactus, not a yucca.

And there I was wanting to tell him, let yourself go, Don Ben, don’t hold it all in, I, your most screwed-up lancer, tell you this because I love you and I spend my time looking at you through the window of your carriage, I look at you as I bounce along to the lean and hungry trot of my horse and you lurch along to the broken and violent rhythm of your carriage; the ink spills, Mr. President, the papers are covered with blots, your top hat slides over on your head, but you are impassive, as if you were presiding over a court in Poitiers when you’re right here with us, surrounded by mesquite and Apache feathers; just look over there, look at what Durango is, what Coahuila is … Christ!

The first time I saw him break down just a little bit was when common sense told him, listen here, you simply cannot go on carrying the archives of the Republic from the presidency of Guadalupe Victoria to yesterday as if they were nothing more than a bundle of love letters: Don Benito, we’re talking about tons of paper here, even if you think paper creates reality, as do all the blessed shysters of our Holy Roman juridical tradition, there is a limit to human patience: the papers are going to drown us, are we going to lose the paper war the way we lost the War of the Cakes in ’38 against these selfsame frogs? I swear his mask cracked a bit when he resigned himself to leaving the archives hidden in a cave in the Sierra del Tabaco, over in Coahuila. He bade farewell to those papers as if they were his own children: as if he had just buried each and every piece of paper, each of which for him had a soul.

He never closed his door. It was one of his principles: the door would always be open so that anyone who wanted to see him could come in. Also so that people would always see he had nothing to hide.

He was as clear as crystal. At times he went so far as to take the liberty of sitting down to write with his back to the shacks, the old ruined mission buildings, the houses of friends of his that happened to be on this road which we thought was the road of exile — but no, he’d say, it was merely the desert, which is not the same thing. The point is that for a lancer under orders to protect him, he made my life very difficult because of his self-conscious acts of bravado, fitting for a national leader destined to be immortalized in marble.

On one occasion, right in the Chihuahua desert, he got tired of writing all night and watched me guarding the open door that faced the desert, me half asleep because it was just coming on dawn, but leaning on my lance, which was firmly stuck into that hard earth. He smiled and said that the gray brush surrounding us was wiser than men. That at dawn I should look over the rise punctuated by bushes spaced out perfectly with an almost legal symmetry, like that of a good civil code, he said. Did I know why it was laid out that way? I didn’t. And he said that the bushes kept their distance from each other because their roots are highly poisonous. They would kill any plant that grew next to them. We’ve got to keep our distance in order to respect each other and to survive. That is the foundation of peace, he said, and he quickly walked over to sit down again, to write something rapid, short, and assuredly lapidary.

No, I would have wanted to say to him, it isn’t that I want to see you going to the bathroom, wiping yourself, or expelling a gas, Don Benito, or even picking your nose, Mr. President, nothing like that, but something that would not harm your dignity or mine, that’s it, I would like to see you brush your teeth, Mr. Juárez, or shine your boots, because don’t tell me you don’t do it yourself, here we are rolling around among cactus and scrub and you don’t have a valet, as Maximilian does, but you always have shoes shinier than those of any Austrian archduke: how do you do it? Would you lose some of your dignity if you let yourself be seen shining your shoes, sir?

We celebrated Columbus Day, October 12, 1864, in the city of Chihuahua, and President Juárez spent it reading back issues of newspapers written in English that had arrived from New Orleans, God knows how, but he had memories of that port in Louisiana where he’d been exiled by the dictator Santa Anna and had earned his living by rolling cigars in a tobacco factory (oh, Lord, and now his beloved papers were all rolled up in the Sierra del Tabaco, he thought ironically) and he learned English, just as his children were learning it now in schools in New York.

One item caught his attention: a gringo named E. L. Drake had discovered a new substance by digging sixty-foot wells in western Pennsylvania. According to the article, the substance was extracted from the wells from deep deposits of sedimentary rocks. This material, which occurs both as a liquid and as a gas, read Mr. Juárez, can be readily substituted, in either form, according to Mr. Drake, for whale oil, which is growing scarce, and can supply bright, cheap light to modern cities. Mr. Juárez nodded his dark head, thinking perhaps about the candle stumps that he had to use in these northern villages in order to write at night.

He talked about the discovery with other guests of Mr. Creel in Chihuahua, and an engineer said that the part about light, while certainly important, was not as significant as the use this famous “petroleum” (the name given the new substance) would have in locomotion, in steam engines, in trains, and in factories. In that instant, Susanita, I saw a vision pass through the usually impenetrable gaze, as if he were imagining himself swiftly traveling through the desolation of the Republic, free of the trammels of terrain or climate, both of which were so rough, sweetheart, so hostile to men.

He shook his head; he exiled his dream. If the important thing was to recover the Republic inch by inch, slowly, in love and poverty, perhaps Don Benito Juárez, cutie, managed to imagine himself, why not? flying by plane from Mexico City to El Paso, Texas, with a stopover in Chihuahua; but then he would have lost the country: the idea was to show that the country was ours, that here we were, and that like our native briars we had very deep roots and thorns all over our branches: let’s see anyone try to pull us out, let’s see who was going to come live with us in this penury, not in this fiesta. That was the unrepeatable opportunity as he saw it: “We’ll never have another chance like this in all our history.” Not the oil, Susanita, but dignity. Can you imagine Don Benito Juárez getting rich on the oil boom of the seventies to take off in a Grumman jet to Paris to have a good time, Susy, with a stopover in Las Vegas to play a little poker in the Sands Hotel? Not a chance.

But let’s go back to my dream. My dream started filling up with death. You’ll see. First he found out that his favorite son, Pepe, was sick. All the intuition, all the atavism, all the innate fatality surfaced in this Zapotec disguised as a French lawyer. His Indian fatalism told him, Susy my dear innocent girl, that Pepito was already dead and that no one would tell him so he wouldn’t suffer, already they were treating him like a statue. You should have seen him then in Chihuahua, honey, fearful about his kid, the son he called “my delight, my pride, and my hope.” He fell apart; he said he lost his head and filled his letters with smudges. Then he pulled himself together; but I saw him as a victim of what he thought he’d left behind forever: the Indian sense of fatality. His will took over. He went back to being his old self. No one wrote to him from home. The mail system, an accident in a situation full of accidents.

When his premonition came true, Susana, all he did was walk around like a ghost repeating, as he strode through the halls of Creel’s huge house in Chihuahua:

“My beloved son is dead … my beloved son is dead … Nothing can be done about it!”

I felt that Pepe’s death precipitated one disaster after another; for later on, Mr. Juárez, right in the same house, received the news of President Abraham Lincoln’s death, and then in July the French launched a general offensive against Republican resistance in the north, and in August we had to leave Chihuahua for the border — but that’s as far as we could go, captured in Mexico, cornered in Mexico, but never outside of Mexico, he said, never an exile who could be accused later on of having abandoned his country:

“Don Luis”—I heard him say to his friend Governor Creel, who was urging him to save himself by crossing the border—“you know this state better than anyone. Show me the most inaccessible, the highest, the most arid mountain, and I’ll go up there to die of hunger and thirst, wrapped in the nation’s flag, but I will never leave the Republic.”

We went bouncing off again, in the carriages and with the carts, through sagebrush and cactus, the sun on our heads and the rocks under our feet … What can I say? Well, one night in a village in the Chihuahua desert, when I was on guard duty, posted behind a wall of crumbling adobe, he closed his door. He’s going to sleep early tonight, I said to myself. But soon after I heard him weeping. I didn’t dare to interrupt him; but I had the same duty the next day, and when I went to my post with my lance, which wasn’t standing as straight as it once did, Susy, I said to myself, well, if he doesn’t cry again, we’ll forget about it. Well, as Talleyrand said to Napoleon, look, even me, the one in charge of the door, doesn’t spend so much time looking into the street; in other words, I’d stay out of his business. But if the old man cried again …

“Is something troubling you, Mr. President?”

“No, Rigo. It’s nothing.”

“In that case, excuse me, Mr. President.”

“What is it, Rigo?”

“You know I don’t meddle…”

“Yes.”

“But why don’t you talk to me a little?”

He wasn’t a saint, he had no reason to be one, he was happy being a hero, and there are lots of heroes we never hear of, heroes who don’t have streets named after them or statues put up in their honor: but of what use is a saint? That night he told me about his love affairs, about the children he’d had out of wedlock, about his son Tereso, who was ugly and brave and who was fighting like his father against the invaders; he told me about the poor suffering Susana — like you, my love, the same name, did you know that? — his invalid daughter in Oaxaca, condemned to virginity, drugged to alleviate her pain, and my own for my grownup daughter, what? far away, in pain, my strange daughter captured in an artificial dream: Susana …

I told the farm girl to come in, not to be modest, that everything was all right, she knew it, and Mr. Juárez, too; he should look at her the way I, Rigoberto Palomar of the Second Lancers Company of the Republic, looked at her, nothing more, nothing less; we were at war, but we didn’t stop living because of that; he should look at her rosy cheeks and her black eyes, her hair streaming down to her waist, and her shape like a newly turned vase; she has a name, it’s Sweet Names, that’s her name, I rustled her starched blouse, she’s barefoot so she won’t make any noise, one day not so far off she’s going to die because her hands prophesy mourning, I wanted her for myself, Mr. Juárez, but I’ll give her to you, you need her, we need for you to have a night of illicit love, Don Benito, tender, sweet love like a stick of cinnamon, and as strong as an earthquake, which is so close to the life from which it comes that to you it might seem, because it gives itself to you so readily, like an answer to death: go to it, Mr. Juárez, screw this farm girl, get rid of your melancholy, win the war, reconquer the country, love this girl as you loved your dead son, as you love your invalid daughter; this is as good a thing to close the door for as going to the bathroom or opening it to receive friends: don’t turn into a statue on me, Mr. Juárez, you’re not dead yet.

I closed the door on them, Susana, and even though I ran the risk of being punished, I abandoned my post. You see, my innocent girl, I didn’t want to hear a thing. That night was his alone; he deserved it more than anyone. I hoped he was happy, but I didn’t want to rob him of even an instant of pleasure. So I began to think about sad and impossible things, Susanita. Suppose Mr. Juárez wins. The Republic will be poorer than ever. How can it ever pay the debts piled up by the conservatives, the Empire, the war? How can he rebuild the country? Oh, Lord, I said to myself, closing my eyes in the cold desert, which was like a bedroom at the bottom of the sea: if only Mr. Juárez had that gringo Drake’s discovery in Pennsylvania to light up all the cities in the world like glowing coals! Oh, Lord, if instead of owing fifteen million pesos to the French, Don Benito Juárez had received $15 billion a year for exporting liquid fossils! That’s why I screamed, Susana. I had that horrible nightmare.

“Don’t worry, Rigoberto. Your dream will turn out all right.”

12. When the earth calmed down

When the earth calmed down, my mother Angeles tried to calm down with it and to speak rationally. While our buddy Egg strolled around my father’s old coach house playing the guitar, she said that when a woman’s left alone a vacuum is created and that anything can be pulled in to fill it; she did not want Egg to be a mere fill-in, so she thought it was better that he hear her out and understand her point of view. When I met him — she told us — I told him I didn’t sleep all night because I was so happy I met you. And it was true: Angel made me happy by creating me. He didn’t find me: he invented me, he made me his by inventing me. I didn’t sleep, I was so happy, because Angel met me exactly the way I met myself and exactly when I met myself; neither before nor after. I don’t remember anything before him. I don’t know who I am, where I come from, nothing.

“Let me confess something to you. I saw him as young and rebellious. So I instantly appropriated everything I thought he liked — feminism, left-wing politics, ecology, Freud and Marx, university exams, every opera ever written — the whole deal, whatever I found at hand, as if it were in someone else’s closet. Imagine how surprised I was when he turned out to be a conservative rebel! No way. There was no way I was going to change my symbols just for him, Eggy boy.

“I decided it was better for us to complement each other, so I kept my mouth shut, the better to enjoy making love without understanding too well about making ideology. Love, love, love, Egg, ideology, ideology, ideology, and at the same time, running neck and neck with all this, my question: what is the meaning of all these things we do? It may help him to see in me everything that is opposite to him, to see at the same time everything that completes him. And he even shares with me the hope that we will become equal by being different (the ideal?). At what moment will Angel pass from nonsense to despair without having picked up something positive in the process? What are all of us afraid of, going insane or going sane? Who really loses, who really wins in all this? And who will leave the other one first when both of us realize that nobody can live only in rebellion without ending up in despair? You need something else, I swear, I swear, buddy, something else, and I swear that I tried to find it, quite rationally, I tried to believe in Angel, seriously, in his ideology, only because I want to believe that the good things in this world should be repeated someday, not be left behind, not necessarily rendered obsolete by progress. While you play your guitar, think about this: can progress kill your song because it is your song each time you play it, Egg, an event again and again, with or without penicillin, with television or without? Does what you play go on being an event, while infections do not and the pictures you see at home do? Art is a continuous event or a continuity that takes place: I would have wanted to communicate that to Angel in order to save him from his either/or, you know, his madness or reason, stagnation or progress, his world of dramatic possibilities which he likes so much and which does him such damage. I agreed to have his child in order to bring this idea to reality, the idea of the continuity of happening between the nonsense and the despair that will devour my poor Angel if he doesn’t understand me. Even if he ends up doing it alone, without me, just as long as he understands me.”

“You are lovable,” Egg said in English as he stopped strumming. “With a little humor and intelligence, I think you’ll survive all the disasters of Mexican life. That’s why I love you. You are totally lovable.”

“Animus intelligence!” she shouted, but she realized that her exclamation was a reflex action. So she looked at our friend, an interrogatory expression on her face, her head turned to one side. She told him that he, too, was a survivor.

“The only kind of genius that exists in this country is that of survival. It’s lost everything else. But it survives.”

What about him?

He took my mother’s hand and remembered that after his parents’ death, when he had no friends, no money, neglect, not caring, and ignorance possessed him for a time. He realized what was happening, became terribly alarmed because he could look at himself as if he were someone else. Then he wrote his first hit, “Take Control.”

What about her?

She was afraid. She was afraid that things would happen and we wouldn’t notice and that we would only realize that the most important event in our lives had already taken place when it was too late. She also dreamed that a vine sprouted out of her vagina.

“We all have days when nothing goes right. Options, movements, not being what people see, not seeing what’s there, believing I do know, knowing I think everything is a mistake. I’ve been like this for thirty days. Help me, Eggy, please, help me, little buddy. I swear I’ll be eternally grateful to you.

“Help me get my halo back, buddy. Don’t you see it went out on me?”

That’s how August began: the step toward the eighth month of my gestation.

13. Dear Reader, you may remember

Dear Reader, you may remember that in the month of March Angel and Angeles saw the Chilean bolero singer Concha Toro on one of the National Television Contests, presenting herself as the Last Playboy Centerfold, and that in June Egg went to interview her at the Simon Bully Bar to request the services of her Home-Delivery Theater, which participated — with what disastrous results, we all know — in Penny López’s Sweet-Sixteen Party. The reader may also recall that Angel refused to do that chore because Concha had taken his virginity sometime during the mid-eighties at the solemn insistence of Grandfather Rigoberto Palomar (a revolutionary general at age fifteen), who could not tolerate the idea of having a virginal fifteen-year-old grandson in his house.

Since the Four Fuckups did not want personal matters interfering in their apocalyptic projects (perennially frustrated, as your lordships fully realize), Egg went to see the dear lady, but Concha Toro’s appearance, her fame, and her life story impressed him so much that he blurted out that he’d been sent by Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, did she remember him?

“Of course I remember him, such a well-hung kid, remembered his name just like that, step right in, son, place’s a mess, I know, but last night we, uhh, had a little fight with the cops, you know, and the police almost locked us up. But there’s wine, and avocados, and peaches and white jam left over, so just help yourself. No one ever called Concha Toro a cheapskate, especially when a hungry poor boy like you turns up. The question is, what are you hungry for, son?”

She asked that last question with a lowering of her eyes that had driven several (though, it must be admitted, recent) generations of senior citizens wild in the velvet basement of the Simon Bully Bar, the entrance to which, a long, smooth red tunnel, was like a velvety, deep vagina — not unlike that of Concha herself.

Egg looked her up and down: she wasn’t what she used to be, and if she was never really a knockout — her real charm was her coquettish Chilean savvy, not her beauty — she was not really faded either: she was a strange palimpsest in which all the stages of her life coexisted in a kind of transparent simultaneity: Concha Toro! Née María Inez Aldunate Larraín y Cruchaga Errázuriz in Chillán, Chile, the night of the terrible earthquake of 1939, which destroyed the city and sank half the coast, from Concepción to Puerto Montt, into the Pacific. She grew up in the shadow of Siqueiros’s murals in the school the Mexican government donated to Chile after the disaster: the powerful white and black punches delivered by the native heroes Cuauhtémoc and Galvarino made a profound impression on her tender aristocratic mind. At school she saw revolution and melodrama, while on her father’s estate she saw reaction and drama: agriculture in southern Chile was the last refuge of her family, which had prospered early on, in the days when Chile was exporting nitrates, a business that covered late-nineteenth-century Santiago with mansions and the resort cities of Viña and Zapallar with chalets; nitrates paid for trips to Europe and wild spending sprees. The bubble burst in 1918, when the Germans invented synthetic nitrates, but the family managed to save the estate from the general economic collapse. So off they went, to do to the peasants what they’d already done to the nitrates: exploit them. The difference was that they couldn’t export peasants. How María Inez laughed when the ineffable President Wrinkle Wrecker requested that the United States export farmers and keep the harvests at home! That’s exactly what the Aldunate Larraín y Cruchaga Errázuriz family would have wanted to do, but who would have wanted to buy these flea-bitten scum, shitasses, drunks, thieving rats, with no balls whatsoever! Don’t make me laugh!

María Inez resolved her conflicts by giving herself at the age of fourteen to a well-hung peasant boy — as well hung as my father Angel Palomar, I suppose — with the improbable name Randolph Pope. She immediately crossed the Andes at Puente del Inca, went to Mendoza, and from there to Buenos Aires, where this highly intelligent Chilean girl quickly got the lay of the land, changed her name to Dolly Lama and won a tango contest singing with Aníbal (“Dicky”) Troilo; she read Borges’s Other Inquisitions, disguised herself as Miriam Hopkins in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: perfumed and platinum-haired, she was able, one night in the Armemonville pavilion, to seduce Jorge Borges, the blind guardian of the fragrant clove that a young Patagonian maiden stole from Magellan’s circumnavigating ship in 1521 and instantly hid in what elegant Buenos Aires gentlemen used to call “la leure de sa nature”: María Inez, alias Dolly, obtained the famous fragrant clove of Magellan in exchange for a sensational screw with Borges, and armed with the Illustrious Clove and the Illustrious Blind Man, she was proclaimed Priestess of Sexual Ultraism in a ceremony held in the Ateneo Bookstore. Immediately afterwards she accompanied the writer to Memphis, Tennessee, where the author of The Universal History of Infamy asked the poet Ossing (probably a descendant of Ossian) to lead him into the waters of the Mississippi — up to the ankles — and then give him a drink of Mark Twain’s river. Dolly felt she’d done her duty as far as Latin American literature was concerned when she overcame the stupefaction of the citizens of Memphis, who were astonished to see a river of industrial waste and wet garbage pass by, by offering old Georgie a glass of Coca-Cola, which the Illustrious Blind Man drank slowly, interjecting from time to time: “Ambrosia, ambrosia!”

With her clove but without her poet, Dolly Lama emigrated to Hollywood, joined Xavier Cugat’s Catalonian — Cuban orchestra, and began a successful career as a backup singer, which enabled her to sing booboopidoop behind Dionne Warwicke in Las Vegas, to whine ohohohuhm-huhm narcotically and orgasmically behind Diana Ross in Atlantic City, to shake spasmodically and masculinely despite having put on a few too many pounds and years in order to establish a contrast with triumphant androgyny behind Boy George and the Culture Club in Radio City Music Hall and Madison Square Garden. At age forty-five, she decided that she’d closed a circle by traveling from Old George to Boy George without ever having left the Culture Club and with more metamorphoses than a Kafkameleon. Fearing that a closed circle could become a vicious circle, she traveled to Mexico, invested her savings in the bar on the corner of Bull Bar and Car Answer, changed her name to Concha Toro, and finally found her true genius, her destiny, the synthesis of her life in the resurrected bolero, the bolero disdained by Mexican modernity, by the youth of the postpunk rockaztec of the early nineties, conserved by Saldaña and Monsiváis as a museum piece, a musical Tezozómoc wrapped in moth-eaten cotton: she came on the scene in one of those unexpected, genial, unsuspected, and purifying conjunctures and restored to the bolero what Homero Fagoaga could never restore to the Spanish language: brilliance, fame, emotion, incalculable splendor. The impoverished, abandoned middle class, its men nostalgic, its women longing for certitude, filled the agora of the Simon Bully Bar to listen to Concha Toro’s boleros, because boleros are music to listen to while holding hands, reviewing the vocabulary and the sentiments of our intimate Latin American kitschiness, the yeast in our melodramatic optimism — my father is listening to the bolero “Tropical Path”:

With her night after night I strolled to the sea

To kiss her lips so fresh and so free

And she swore to love me evermore

Never to forget as we kissed on the shore

Those nights of our love by the sea

Disguised as Quevedo, alone in Concha Toro’s cabaret, suspended between the vertices (or vortices) of my pregnant mother, demythified Penny, and resigned Colasa, my father is listening to boleros a certain night in the year of the Quincentennial of the Discovery of America: and he rediscovers the New World of the bolero, the degraded but never renounced utopia sprinkled with water that falls from heaven: the utopia of the islands, of Eldorado, of the Indian monarchy. My father looks around him, as he listens to Concha (whom he does not recognize) sing, at the captivated ruins of the once-upon-a-time prosperous middle class as they collectively regain paradise — the tropical path — by means of the operations of the heart: that is the bolero’s impossible project: the precious language of the fin de siècle adapted to the sentimental necessities of the bedroom, the beach, and the bordello:

It was a captive kiss of love on a hand that had the look of a lily in a book the flutter of a dying dove

I was the enchanting butterfly in the garden of your life I was the princess from on high who relieved you of your strife

by Luis G. Urbina

by Agustín Lara

“Metamorphosis” (Poem)

“Captive” (Bolero)

recites my father and defines:

sings Concha Toro and evokes:

“Melodrama is comedy without humor.”

“I don’t know if there’s love in eternity, but there, as here, on your lips you will have my taste.”

My father, staring at Concha Toro, whispers under soft, diffused lights (they, too, like dying doves, enchanting butterflies, torches quenched by destiny, burning kisses) the immortal words: Hypocrite, nothing but a hypocrite, queen of perversity, you made a fool of me.

* * *

Something unforeseeable began when old people started pouring out of old-age homes to hear Concha sing boleros. Time put her on its cover under the rubric The Darling of the Senior Citizens, and night after night the entire overaged populace of Mundet, Actors Guild, Gray Power, and the Adolfo Ruiz Cortines Gerontoclub, all on the wings of the purest nostalgia, set impossible rendezvous in the velvet-lined basement of the Simon Bully Bar: a tide of little white heads, bald heads, freckled heads, and, at times, the very coquettish little blue heads, would flow in and out, sentimentally nodding, nodding approvingly when they heard lines like:

When silver threads appear while you’re still young

Like the moon reflected in a blue lagoon

The bad aspect of this gerontocratic emigration was that the enchanted old folks refused to go back to the home; they got a second wind in Concha’s bar, and there was no way they were going to cut themselves off from their refound youth; they stood their ground on the dance floor and in the aisles, overflowing all the way to Car Answer, and just when the police, following the inveterate habit and Pavlovian reflexes of Colonel Inclán, were on the point of dispersing them with clubs and gas, Federico Robles Chacón, having at that time joined the cabinet as an answer to the Crisis of 1990, decided to end repression as a solution and to use symbolism as euphemism. His suggestion was to set up the old folks in their own neighborhood, on some lots along the Toluca road, where they’d build their dwellings and their lives, and he would promise to bus them in every night to hear Concha. The lots, by the way, were supposedly the property of the wife of Superminister Ulises López, assumed to be the cause of the crisis because of his friedmaniac monetary remedies. When Minister Robles Chacón was asked if he knew whose property those lots were, his only comment was:

“I know. What about it?”

He forgot to say, “All the better,” but his subordinates understood him. It turns out that this maneuver was the model for others with even more important consequences: the federal disbursement office pointed out that the closing of old-age homes meant a saving of such-and-such millions of pesos, and Ulises López, grasping this particular proof, turned it, as happens so often in politics, into a general principle: Ulises put the ball right back into Federico’s court by ordering the closing down of insane asylums; thousands of patients in psychiatric clinics and mental hospitals were deinstitutionalized between 1990 and 1992, under the pretext that they were costing the government too much money. But the insane had no Concha Toro to entertain them and no Bully Bar where they could congregate.

Artist that she was, Concha Toro regarded all these disturbances as matters of political corruption that were of little concern to her. But her great success hid a profound emptiness in her life: Concha Toro didn’t have a man, and looking at herself in her dressing-room mirror — there she was, in her fifties, and with only her Pekingese Fango Dango for company — she said to herself here I am, a good old Chilean girl, a wanderer worse than a Jew, who’s been around the world, who’s got all the success in the world, but who’s far away from home and without a man to love her!

She looked into the mirror and she liked what she saw, she saw herself in her red sequins, a long dress to cover up her fat Chilean calves, makeup to emphasize her Chilean sea-green eyes, radical décolleté, lots of powder, snow white, a few well-placed beauty marks, her lipstick heavy in order to cover up her bad Chilean teeth, the result of drinking water from the mountains that flowed swiftly to the sea without calcium: bad teeth, but only a traitorous dentist could tell the world María Inez’s real age: María Inez!

She spoke her own first name near the mirror, her hot breath misting up the glass: Chile, she chanted, asylum against oppression, embroidered field of flowers; pure, oh Chile, is your blue sky: far away, with no return, Pinochet in La Moneda palace forever. Bah, Concha Toro reacted. She forgot her aristocratic childhood, the estate, the Aldunates y Cruchagas in her genealogical tree, and repeated:

“I look at myself in the mirror. I see myself dressed this way, with my red sequins and my satin pumps, gold dust in my hair and my lips in Joan Crawford style: that’s what my oldies come to admire, that’s what I give them, that’s what I grab on to, even if the others stand head and shoulders above me: they need my sincere vulgarity and sentimentality as much as they need a shopping trip to Houston.

She looked at herself, she liked what she saw, she sighed, Concha Toro, she walked out on the stage near the bar and sang:

You walked past me with cruel indifference

Your eyes didn’t even turn toward me …

They loved her, she loved herself. She told a famous joke:

“When sex is good, it’s good. But when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.”

The old folks laughed and elbowed each other: Maybe tonight…? Singing that night under the submarine lights, blue and shimmering, and afterwards back in her dressing room, alone with Fango Dango, once again before her mirror, she analyzed her personality, her success. What had gone into it? Her success was loving to love, loving to be loved, but making clear with the cruel lyrics of the bolero that her tenderness was merely a crack in her indifference: loving but without giving herself up,

You walked past me with cruel indifference

Your eyes didn’t even turn toward me …

What she wanted was what her frozen, banal, pedantic family with aquiline noses and pink skin and cruel gray watery eyes disdained the most: a Latin friendship, complete, abusive, sticky, immortal, cliquish, noisy. She gave Fango Dango a vicious kick and his howling filled the empty cabaret, but then she hugged him, petted him, begged him to forgive her, and, as she did on all other nights before turning out the light and getting into her nineteenth-century, canopied, red damask curtained bed, she wrote with lipstick on the mirror:

SHIT, LONG LIVE CHILE!

14. Concha Toro’s life

Concha Toro’s life of wandering and change suffered a new transformation — perhaps the most important of all — the night of May 10, 1992, Mother’s Day of the Year of the Quincentennial, which for her evoked her beloved southern seas.

She was singing sweetly, her eyes closed:

Through the palms that peacefully sleep

The silver moon cuddles in the tropical sea

And just when she opened her arms to her audience of senior citizens and opened her eyes to say:

… my arms open hungrily, looking for you …

her eyes met those of that young man, much younger than she, eyes that from that moment on she could never escape, not even to save herself, because, as Concha knew, anyone who looked away from those eyes ran the risk of being demolished by them. Concha Toro trembled, stopped feeling nostalgic about Chile, felt for the first time she was in Mexico: that face, that mustache, those teeth that came directly from the movies she’d seen as a girl in the Cine Santiago: Pedro Armendáriz, Jorge Negrete, Marlon Brando as Zapata…!

In the night the scent of flowers evokes your perfumed breath

sang Concha with her eyes closed, but when she opened them the wandering light of the bar fell on the woman sitting next to that mexaphysical guerrillero, and no, he had not brought his white-haired mom to celebrate Mother’s Day; he’d brought a strange girl, strange but very young, dressed as a Carmelite, her bosom covered with scapularies, her complexion the color of cinnamon tea.

I feel that you are near to me,

but it’s a lie, an illusion

sang Concha Toro, née María Inez Aldunate Larraín y Cruchaga Errázuriz, alias Dolly Lama, full of despair and bitterness. Then she fainted, right onstage.

When she was a kid in Chillán she’d always wanted to play hooky, cut class, fool around, and now she was being carried piggyback, as if she were on vacation, by the only person in the cabaret strong enough to do it. A man was carrying her from the stage to her dressing room, but in her dreams the cowboy Randolph Pope was once again carrying her in his arms to a spot behind the wheat field on the riverbank where he was going to deprive her of what he wanted most and she needed least: now a tall, powerful, dark, ultramustachioed man was carrying her as if he were pushing a cannon up a hill: she clung to the man’s neck passionately, and when he deposited her in her nineteenth-century bed, she, instead of singing a bolero, recited the most beautiful love poem, the most memorable love poem, and, she said to herself, the most Chilean love poem as well:

I loved her, and she, at times, loved me as well …

The tall powerful, dark, ultramustachioed man said:

“I, too, wanted to be a writer.”

“What happened?” whimpered Concha.

“The envious frustrated me.”

“You don’t look frustrated to me,” said Concha coquettishly, as she looked at the girl dressed as a nun.

“This is my daughter Colasa.”

“Ah!” sighed Concha, with no frustration whatsoever.

“I had her when I was very young.”

“Colasa Sánchez, at your service, ma’am.”

Ma’am stared with an intensity worthy of the bolero “Think About Me” at the girl’s father. “And what’s your name?”

“Matamoros Moreno, putting both of us at your service,” said the man. Concha Toro fainted again.

* * *

Don’t forget now, dear Readers, that in the meanwhile, no matter how many things go on out there, inside here we aren’t exactly sitting around killing time: add up all the things that have gone on outside: love, disasters, jokes, trips, politics, economics, language, fashion, myths, customs, and laws, and compare all that with my simple and essential activity: my hands, for example, have grown more rapidly than the arms they’re attached to, they first appear with the fingers looking like buds; the last phalanx has emerged from the palms of my hands, my fingertips have formed, little tiny nails have appeared on all my fingers and toes, and the transparent and cartilaginous skeleton I had in my first four months is now bone and I move my arms and legs energetically: I have little accidents, I scratch my face with my nails unintentionally; I have pleasures: I suck my thumb incessantly; I make discoveries: I can touch my face.

Ah, my face: there is no greater accomplishment in my small organism! I couldn’t envisage a greater visage! First, I have a cranium, which is the refuge of my brain. It was made of transparent skin; in the seventh week a huge vascular tide spread toward the crown to protect and feed my little, recently born brain, which is now floating in a fluid bath (never let it dry out, your lordships!) and absorbs all the catastrophes outside my delicate mechanism (and you tell me if there haven’t been lots of them in these first seven months of mine!). How strong my subcutaneous tissue is getting! How the bones of my skull grow, moving toward the crown, but without fusing with it, in order to maintain the exquisite flexibility of my shell, granting me a malleable head which will permit my brain to keep growing: when I’m born, my noggin will not be as large as it will be someday — if I live that long!

But I was talking about my face: I can touch it with my hands! Do you realize what that means, your mercies? I have a face and I can touch it with my hands! My face, which at the beginning was only a bulging brow above my future mouth, soon was focused over the window to my dark soul, my eyes: a retina appeared which became dark, pigmented; a lens and a cornea. The eyelid formed little by little. My ears were very low. My brain shone under my translucent skin. My eyes closed. But they were enormous, and there was a long distance between them. Thick lids covered them. I am blind, ladies and gentlemen! My closed eyes are awaiting eternity! But they are not closed because I am asleep. Just think: I close them but I’m not asleep. My closed lids are merely protecting my eyes, which have not yet finished forming yet. I’ve taken the veil. I grasp even more firmly on to my umbilical lasso, just as Quasimodo clung to the bell rope at Notre Dame. I never get tangled up no matter how much I swim, no matter how many times I ring the bell: can you hear me, Mom? I can hear you! I hear the world better than ever! I hear your heart, Mother, boomboomboom, it’s my turn and my dance, and when I hear your pals’ band play rockaztec, believe me, Mom, I only hear, redoubled, intense, the rhythm of your own heart and that of my gestation in your womb: boomboomboom.