Christopher Unborn

1. Thunderclap

In August the highways of the Republic of Mexico began to echo with rumors that were both expected and unusual: the federal turnpikes, the toll roads, the frigüeys as the jeunesse dorée of the Ibero-American School called them, had been maintained in (Egg is telling my mother, educating both of us in the process) a sort of autonomy with respect to the other realities of the nation. To drive on one of these highways, the Pan-American to Mexamerica, the Christopher Columbus to Oaxaca, the Transistémica to the Chitacam Trusteeship, was like heading into a country that belonged to all and to none, a free territory. The highways of the nineties are buffer zones in which all the weight of the newly mutilated Sweet Fatherland resolves itself in a kind of rapid, fleeting freedom — a swift and ephemeral freedom, but a freedom nonetheless. The highway knows no obstacles, like an arrow piercing the air.

At the end of the eighties, CB radios were brought into Mexico from the North, allowing truck drivers to communicate with each other on the superhighways. This further fomented the movement of contraband, drug trafficking, and highway prostitution. Egg told Angeles (and me) that CB culture in the U.S. had developed its own slang, which our long-haul truckers rapidly adapted to the needs of rural, desert, and mountain roads, the yellow basalt and the dusty trees of the Mexican Republic: soon we, too, had our Smokeys, plain brown wrappers, Tijuana Taxis, and bubble-gum tops — called bubble-gómez here. Bubble Gómez also happened to be the name of the young leader of the truck-drivers union. Bubble Gómez, an albino, drove a spectacular eighteen-wheel Leyland seventy-two feet long, with jukebox lights around the windshield, fog lamps on its roof, exhaust pipes that could create darkness at noon in Vulture Gulch, pictures of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mamadoc, and Margaret Thatcher on the dashboard directly opposite the leader’s light eyes, which were in turn covered by fabulous wraparound sunglasses. The albino was also surrounded by opaque glass as he drove his British behemoth, which was equipped with the Whistler, the indispensable radar detector he used to warn his colleagues: listen up: speed trap at kilometer 13, pass the H to Chotas, who’ll be coming in the other direction, slow down. The CBs were used for more innocent activities as well: three putas are waiting for us at the Palmillas Tamps diner … Or let’s all sing and beat the boredom of crossing the Stinko Sierra, or get the dough ready for the Tijuana Taxis who’ll be waiting for us at the La Chicharrona exit.

The unfortunate drivers who had no CB or radar were picked off by the Smokeys at strategic points along the highways: they were novices, naïfs. But when it happened to Bubble Gómez himself, one night just a few yards from the Mexamerica border, in Corralitos, Chihuahua, and near the Nuevas Casas Grandes airport, the news spread like wildfire over the CBs, from Palmillas, Chihuahua, to Palmillas, Querétaro, and to Palomaras, Oaxaca, from radio to radio and truck to truck: the Boss has been nabbed!

Bubble Gómez was caught by a plain old Smokey in Chihuahua!

Bubble Gómez’s immediate loss of prestige (he must be an asshole!) combined with the general bewilderment (who can take his place?). Instinctively, the drivers tried to find the answer using their CBs, and the answer was waiting for them on every channel, repeated by every voice, running now from south to north, from Palomares Oax to Palmillas Qro to Palmillas Chih, the message was repeated insistently, the slogans offered by a velvety feminine voice, sometimes a virgin’s voice, sometimes a whore’s voice, listen good buddy in Nuevo León or oye buencuate in Hidalgo. Quite exciting, quite attractive the woman’s voice, whoever she is, and again and again that message, which had never gone out before and was now coming through every truck radio:

WHEN YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN ANYTHING,

WHAT DO YOU HAVE LEFT?

YOUR HOLY LITTLE MOTHER!

which became personified, as it should be, in:

TRUCK DRIVER, WHO PROTECTS YOU?

YOUR LITTLE MOTHER THE VIRGIN!

and since there was not a single one of these trucks that in addition to its CB and its radar detector did not also have its picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe and often even a blessed rosary hanging right under that picture, sometimes even a candle burning in front of the dark image, the slogan caught on, since the truck drivers heard the word and instantly saw the picture and the picture told them that the word was true and that outside the truck there was nothing more than tumbleweeds and cactus or ravines or bare bluffs: outside, desolation, and here inside, fellow traveler, the comforting warmth of a woman’s voice and a message for you:

Blessed are those who drive alone night and day along the highways of Mexico, exposed to all kinds of danger, victims of corruption and immorality, chased by the Smokeys and the Tijuanas, adrift in a sea of stone, dust, and thorns, blessed be the long-haul drivers because they can carry the good news in all directions:

OUR VIRGIN IS NOT ABANDONING US!

OUR DARK LADY KEEPS WATCH OVER US!

OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE SHALL RETURN!

and then in every diner along the way, in every tollbooth, in every melon, crackling, or tepache stand along those endless roads, a woman waited to surreptitiously pass every driver a cassette and the drivers were already prepared to hear that sweet sexy voice, which was now explaining more, saying more “to all those who feel adrift in modern society, hello and good news: Salvation is coming! Don’t lose hope! Our little Mother is thinking about you and is sending you an emissary! You will recognize him when you see him because you will recognize the son of our Mother!” Cassette after cassette announced the blessed news:

TRUCK DRIVER: THERE’S AN AYATOLLAH IN YOUR FUTURE PASS IT ON

and the woman’s voice: “Blessed be all those who have rolled through this world and faced its dangers. A truck driver is the favorite son of the Virgin. Blessed are they who walk through this world in time of danger.” The truck drivers began to communicate their opinions to each other, to feel they were a chosen people, to join together so that what had been prophesied would happen: they were chosen for what was going to happen, the Virgin was speaking to them — they were told by a man’s voice, rough and assimilable, that complemented the modulated, sweet, and sexy voice of the woman who swallowed her s’s in a Caribbean drawl, that they were the Comanches of the Virgin, they galloped over deserts and mountains like the brigades of the Virgin of Guadalupe. They didn’t have horses, but they had something better: their trucks, their Dodges, Leylands, Macks, like roaring chargers, their diesel sorrels, the Comanches of Guadalupe crossing the fatherland in all directions, tying together

THE NATION OF GUADALUPE

which had been separated and mutilated: Comanches! Remember, said the sonorous and Mexican voice of the man, Coahuila never belonged to the central government: it was Comanche territory! Texas never belonged to the Americans: it was Comanche territory! The Comanche nation is the nation that moves, unites, takes over land by running over the land. Comanche truck driver, spread the news far and wide, take it as far north as Presidio and as far south as Talismán: knock down the false borders, truck driver, you are the Comanche, the Man of Silver, the Knight of Guadalupe in 1992! They all came together on August 15, the Assumption, where the voices convoked them, thousands of drivers rolling in from north and south, from both coasts, from all the scattered borders of Mexico, gathered first in the Zoquiapan truck stop at Río Frío and from there to the Cuatro Caminos Bull Ring at Ciudad Satélite in Mexico, D. F., taken by surprise (and silent) attack by the motorized Comanches, curious, excited, committed, catechized, touched to their very roots, with their rolled-up sleeves, their bulky sweaters, their scratched boots, and their newly whitened Adidas, their elegant T-shirts, their beer bellies, their tight blue jeans, their underpants stuffed with Kleenex in front, their rippling muscles, their baseball caps, and some, the coquettish ones, even wearing white gloves with rhinestones on them which they’d bought in the Michael Jackson Shops along the border: they were all there and her voice (though she remained invisible) announced over the loudspeakers that HE was coming, THE AYATOLLAH OF GUADALUPE, AYATOLLAH MATAMOROS, THE MAN they’d all been waiting for, exactly as they’d imagined him, because he was the very image, the dream, the personification of Mexican machismo: tall, powerful, dark, big mustaches, with flashing eyes and an angry expression, but also a flashing smile, his head tied in a red scarf worthy of the Servant of the Nation, the liberating Generalísimo José María Morelos, in his Mexican cowboy suit, which was all black except for a huge silver cross over his chest and an old-fashioned cape which the man took off the way Manolete took off his bullfighter’s cape, and then began the whistling, the jokes, yo it’s Mandrake the Magician, giddyap cowboy, but the Ayatollah Matamoros stood his ground in the very center of things and looked at them as no one had ever looked at them, fearlessly but with fraternal tenderness, looking straight into their eyes, no “I’ll look down,” no “I’ll look aside,” without the eternal Mexican way of looking: suspicious, crafty, traitorous, ill-meaning, insincere, resentful, double-meaninged: he wasn’t afraid of them, he looked straight at them, and the voice of the woman they knew and loved for her voice, and whose voice they thought was that of the Virgin herself, told them, “Love him, this is my son, follow him, he walks for me, listen to him, his words are mine.”

Ayatollah Matamoros spoke and his voice fused with that of the Madonna and he reminded them that Mexico was the second largest Catholic nation in the world, the largest in the Spanish-speaking world, 130 million Catholics, not 130 million members of PRI or PAN or Communists or peasants or ragpickers or functionaries or anything else: only 130 million Catholics could equal 130 million Mexicans, that was the only equivalence, that was the force, that was the reason, and nevertheless, despite all that, the Ayatollah Matomoros exclaimed in his hoarse, moving voice: THERE IS NO NATION!

THERE IS NO NATION!

and he told them

WE WANT A NATION!

WE WANT A COUNTRY!

all culminating in the phrase

LESS CLASS AND MORE NATION

and they shouted back what he said in chorus and now he asked them: Where are we? What should be our idea? And they supplied the slogan that would link the nation to its Prophet:

WE ARE ALL HERE!

We are all here, the long-haul truckers roared, gathered in the bullring and proud of having invented this unifying slogan, and their “We are all here” was a “We already exist” and “There is a country” and “There will be a nation” and “The Virgin will come to help us so that we, Brothers, can help the country”: Go out over all Mexico, organize those you find in the name of the Nation of Guadalupe and the Ayatollah Matamoros, who is, listen carefully now, the YOUNGER BROTHER OF JESUS CHRIST, who wants for our Mexico

Guadalupan nationalism! Your kind!

Catholic morality! Your kind!

Holy Little Mother! Your kind!

New energy! Everybody’s kind!

New Faith! Our kind!

shouted the Ayatollah and all answered in chorus, on foot, inflamed by the mission. No one had given a hoot about them before, no one had ever preached to them before, except some Protestant missionaries who gave them decals that said I DRIVE WITH JESUS, but they forgot to include the Little Mother. That’s why they all carried their polychromed picture of Mamadoc, most loving Mother of all our appetites. But who was this holy woman standing next to the Ayatollah, this hatchet-faced Indian woman, hair pulled straight back, a severe bun, without a speck of makeup: savagely melancholy eyes, lips as straight as an arrow, like a blessing, like a promise, dressed in black, no shape, her head a shiny porcelain skull, her body a furrow of age-old suffering, early deaths, lost children, absent husbands, hands simultaneously cold and boiling, red from washing so much, from grinding so much, dry and yellow from burying so much, from praying so much?

The August rain poured down, but they all went on chanting the slogans with the Ayatollah in the center, his arms spread wide, and the rain running off his face like tears and the voice of the Woman, of the Mother, she never wept, begging her sons:

Organize and move the nation of Guadalupe!

Carry the message! Carry the message!

One hundred and thirty million Mexicans!

One hundred and thirty million sons and lovers of mine!

Follow the Mexican Ayatollah!

Who am I? asked Concha Toro with a trace of skepticism and a degree of shock as she sat before her dressing-room mirror, rapidly transforming her “look” and her makeup (actually: her lack of “look” and cosmetics, her Gothic and Araucanian nakedness) into her usual character, the Chilean bolero singer, in order to stand before the nocturnal audience, but already imagining, day after day, her reappearance as Galvarina Donoso, the sorceress, the mother of the Ayatollah.

Damn fool idea! It surprised her to see in the mirror how easily her Basque and Irish ancestors disappeared from her face and how the essential Araucanian face of Chile reappeared.

However, she did feel that something was missing from what she saw. As she scrutinized the mirror in front of her and was surprised not to see the number of the beast 666 appear, or the seventh cup filled with the wine of God’s vengeance, or the gathering (in the bullring, in the cabaret, on the highways) of the One Hundred and Forty-four Thousand just men called for by St. John on Patmos.

That frightened her.

However, she did see a lost but serene woman clearly reflected in the center of the jungle.

2. The Ayatollah Matamoros’s first order

The Ayatollah Matamoros’s first order was: NO MORE MONEY! He put his power to the test: he triumphed: the carts Made in Whymore full of devalued paper money (the Mexican peso plummeted to 25,000 per dollar in August) were exchanged for barrels of oysters made in Guaymas: all it took was for the long-haul drivers to refuse to accept money in exchange for goods in the markets of MonteKing, GuadalaHarry, or Makesicko City.

“I’ll give you this load of Sheetrock for a load of pineapples.”

“I don’t want your hardware. How about you take my wire and give me your steers?”

The pineapple sellers and the owners of the steers exchanged the wire and the Sheetrock for a delivery bike or for labor to build an outhouse, the drivers ate some of the pineapples and slaughtered a couple of steers, but they exchanged the rest for bricks, which they brought from Pachuca, where they had too many, to Zihuatanejo, where they didn’t have enough: Federico Robles Chacón realized what was happening, a political genius had organized the most mobile sector of the Mexican populace, the long-haul truckers, and in one stroke had eliminated the money economy and restored the barter system: Why? The minister was scratching his head in his SEPAFU office: Why? before asking himself Who? From the terrace of his ministry he could see the bonfires of paper money burning all over the city, people of every class throwing bills of all denominations into the fire, but the poor more than the rich, the poor having no doubt whatsoever about the worthlessness of the paper, which wasn’t even good for wrapping things: yesterday’s newspaper, a brown paper bag — these were worth more than currency; the poor knew the value of the barter system better than the rich, they knew how to set it up and how to present things as if they were sumptuous gifts and do it all by means of an incredibly swift army, the nation’s truckers. Why didn’t it occur to me before! Federico Robles Chacón slapped himself across the face to release his fury, and the official statistician hidden in the closet heard that sadistic slap-slap and decided to stay right where he was, so those slaps wouldn’t reach him, and besides, he didn’t understand what was going on, not only in the city but in what was left of the country.

From his office, Federico Robles Chacón could see the desperate outskirts of the city and observe the repetition of the nightmare that every millionaire, government functionary or not, and every government functionary, millionaire likely as not, had been having obsessively for over a decade: on the fringes of the suffering city, the outskirts of the lost city’s garbage dump and the sand dumps and the caves and cardboard houses of the anonymous cities inhabited by millions of people as anonymous as the places in which they lived, the shit city where seven million animals and three million human beings defecated right out in the open so that thirty million people could breathe the shit dust, an army of the miserable was waiting for the order to march on the downtown fortresses of power and money. No one had anticipated a Zapata-style agrarian revolution, never again; and yet it would have been easier — said Minister Robles Chacón to President Paredes as the President distractedly played with a new kind of ball-and-cup game made of a tiny barrel of oil and a drilling rig with a hole in it — to manipulate peasants than these marginalized urban masses: the peasant had a history, a culture, his past was known, as was his face, his little wiles; but these new people had no history, no culture, no face to recognize: they were the forgotten, and no one had ever had to fight with them, manage them, defeat them while making them think they’d won, the way the agrarian rebels had been taken care of. What are we going to do?

The President was frustrated because he couldn’t get the oil drum into the hole; perhaps for that reason he said calmly, “Turn the troops on them, that’s why we have Colonel Inclán.”

“That’s the last option, Mr. President.”

“So they tell me.” He sighed, the toy dangling from his hands. “But just explain to me why, Mr. Secretary: for years and years I fought in the opposition with the secret desire to be president and turn the troops on people whenever I wanted instead of having them turned on me. Now here I am and I find out that troops are the ‘last option,’ that I should avoid it so as not to have a rerun of Tlateloco or a Corpus Christi and lose everything. Look here: I’m in PAN, I have to govern through PRI cadres and I can’t tell the Army, ‘Get out there and kick some ass.’ Tell me now, is it worth being president if I can’t do this?”

“Mr. Paredes,” said Robles Chacón after looking at him for a long time with incredulous severity.

“Yes?” said the President, alarmed that someone, especially a Minister of State, was not calling him “Mr. President.”

“No one forced you to be president,” said the minister, not in an absolutely conclusive tone, but in one that invited a response that never came, which gave Robles Chacón yet another victory.

3. The fact is they didn’t have faces

The fact is they didn’t have faces: they had numbers, mass, vague labels; they were the insane released from sanatoria, bands of eunuchs from Jalisco, desperadoes from Hidalgo, clowns from Nuevo León, rogues originally from Puebla; but now they were not attracted by the mirage of the city, consumerism, jobs: now they were called by that macho voice that told them through the thousands of cassettes carried by the truckers to every corner of the country:

THERE IS A NATION! WE ARE ALL HERE!

WE ARE THE NEW NATION!

LET’S BE GLORIOUS!

REAL MEN AREN’T ASHAMED TO PRAY

FOR THE FATHERLAND!

Know something? Matamoros Moreno said right at the beginning to Concha, now rebaptized for the sake of the grand campaign with the sonorous Chilean name of Galvarina Donoso: Did you know that for the first time in my life I’ve discovered that there’s a huge number of poor people, a freaking mountain of screwed-over jerks who hate themselves?

“Better late than never,” answered Galvarina. “If I didn’t know that, I’d be a damned fool, but they’ve stopped believing that the blonde in the beer ads would be waiting for them when they got to the city: one blonde coming up, son! These boys ain’t so stupid!”

“You took the words right out of my mouth, ma’am. You always know everything, and that’s why I adore and respect you: just what I was thinking, and now put it in a song. I swear you’re terrific!”

Which is what Concha Toro did: “One song coming up,” as she would say, and she transformed the driest political ideas into bolero lyrics, songs people could hum all over the roads of Mexico: “The sky on this earth may be ever so high / The sea may be ever so deep / But nothing can keep our love from the Virgin / who watches over our sleep…” Or: Save us! Save us, Ayatollah: we ask you now as before / we wandered full of anguish and suffering: no more, Ayatollah, no more! / beautiful Ayatollah, you’re our heart’s delight / thanks to your message, we’ll make it through the night!

No one knew exactly where these jingles came from, the scattered drivers could not have invented them, but they were everywhere, they upset some people, excited others, angered still others, and made everyone stop and think. Egg told my mommy all this when he visited her. He never gave up: he was bald, and they never paint hope bald. Egg himself was fed up with his new job, which was as a salesman for Souvenir Portraits, which is to say, tapes which the customer could have made of himself while alive which could then be put in the coffin so he could speak to his descendants. All you had to do was push a button.

“A terrific idea, but nobody wants to leave even a memory of himself anymore. Neither the deceased-to-be nor his heirs-to-be want to survive in any way. They hate themselves too much.”

“So turn it around and offer them total oblivion when they die. Nothing, néant,” said my mother.

“Oblivion insurance!” exclaimed Egg: “People hate themselves.”

* * *

(A lie, I’ll never be like that handsome devil in the ad driving his Meiji-Maserati, I’ll never wear that Bill Blass blazer made in Hong Kong, I’ll never fly to Tokyo on the Concorde, the chicks will never be all over me because I put Yojimbo in my armpits, I’ll never be accepted by the Diners Club, the Blonde of My Dreams will not be waiting for me at Indios Verdes when I roll in from Pachuca in overalls looking for love, fortune, and glory in the city: it’s not true, exclaimed Orphan Huerta as he painted election ads on the walls for the election of August 31, which came before the President’s address to Congress on the first of September.) (President Paredes had reduced the year’s electoral calendar to two days: on the first you voted, on the second you applauded, and in the meantime we had lots and lots of National Contests to amuse us, and the Orphan worked painting walls for President Parades):1

CANDIDATEIZE YOURSELF

FEEL LIKE A CANDIDATE!

slogans that summarized the President’s obsessive philosophy: there should be no former presidents, only candidates; the most important obligation of a president in 1992 is to choose his successor and then die: did he really believe it? Is that why he walks around so slowly, so desperate at times, so taciturn, so given to playing ball-and-cup and delegating decisions to Minister Robles or Colonel Inclán?

People hate themselves because they can never be what they’ve been told they can be, my father Angel had said when he fled from the threat of Colasa Sánchez’s vagina dentata and realized, sadly, mediocrely, with no glory whatever, that he’d been left without either dark or light meat: poor Daddy — no Colasa, no Penny, not even my poor knocked-up mommy! The Orphan Huerta paints slogans on walls and it bores him so much that he succumbs to the amusing vice of memory and wonders about his brother, the Lost Boy. What a laugh! He starts playing with words as if he were writing a song, a song no one will ever sing: Lost Boy, Copper Field, Twisted Oliver, Little Lord Fartalot, Eddy Piss, Eddy Poe, Eddy Feets, and he looks at his own torn-up feet, feet burned up since he was a kid because of having to walk, with no memories, through the garbage dumps of the city: Where ma brudder at? Suddenly, painting walls and elsewhere with English names: Little Dorrit, Copperfield, Oliver Twist Again Like We Did Last Summer, said the Orphan Huerta tapping his toe as he painted walls.

He has the sensation he’s surrounded by phantoms and he does this work mechanically as he dreams. The Orphan Huerta has the overwhelming sensation he’s surrounded by water, that he’s falling, brush in hand, into a vast liquid dream: the city once again floats over its lake, the placid skiffs ply the canals laden with flowers — geraniums and zempazúchiles and wild roses, the ahuehuetes, grandfather trees, lend their shade to those on foot and the weeping willows moisten their branches like green handkerchiefs in the clean river waters: the Orphan Huerta opens his eyes and looks at the white wall devoid of destiny before his abandoned eyes: the dead lakes he sees, the canals transformed into industrial burial grounds, the roasted rivers, a burning shield of cement and black wax devouring what it was going to protect: the heart of Mexico.

The Orphan Huerta, full of the rage and bitterness accumulated in his twenty years, scratches the white wall, leaving in it a wounded trace, his fingernails bleed, his signature is blood: a sign on the clean wall, a destiny for me and mine, a scratch on the clean wall of destiny, damn it to hell!

The old tree falls, fulminated by old age, and my father raises his eyes from his sad job. Now he has neither wife nor home. (“I know how to give fags the whipping they deserve,” his grandfather had him told by the Orphan Huerta, he’d better not turn up on Calle Génova, Angeles would have his son, me, the great-grandson of General Palomar, the grandson of the scientists Diego and Isabella; my Great-grandmother Susy would take care of me, my father’d better not turn up around there, let the faggot go live with the Fagoaga sisters, go ahead.) (I’d take you in with pleasure, and you know it, his Uncle Fernando Benítez told him, I’m not a pharisee, I’m telling you this with a grief that keeps me up at night and that perhaps someday you will understand and I may be able to explain to you: not yet, patience is an art and you, my little friend, are a talker, a poseur, a kid with a lot of gravy and no meat, in sum, a miserable rat; take stock of your life before you go on, and you’ll see that nothing of what you have done has much weight; it doesn’t glow with talent or move us with its sincerity. Come see me when you decide what you are going to do. For the time being you’re nothing but a poor fool: all your nonsense did not get you to revolutionary happiness, only to reactionary despair. Look: the only thing I can do for you is lend you the van the people in Malinaltzin gave us, the one you called the Van Gogh. You can live in it and get around in it: it’s roomy and fully equipped — after all, it was acquired for the PRI political boss in the Guerrero mountains. You can pick it up tomorrow at my house on Lerdo de Tejada. I’m leaving. There is no salvation in this city: people hate themselves too much here. Ask my wife Georgina for the van; she has the keys; she’s just come back from her commune in China and she’ll give them to you. I wish only pure, good things for you, Angelito. I hope we all come out of this imitation apocalypse in good shape: I’m going to spend a month with the Huichole Indians, because I’d rather see what happens when the sacred moves, I’d rather see it at its origin than in its final phase. After all, boy, the sacred, before anything else, is a celebration of origins. Here the only thing we’re going to see is force disguised as religion. We shall start out in the realm of the sacred and we shall end up with a government of priests. The only constant in all this, Angel, is the sacralization of violence. I shall watch it all from the mountains, so I don’t lose my perspective the day this apocalypse wears itself out. Farewell, nephew!)

* * *

Discouraged, my father wondered what he was doing in this tourist business in which he was now working, located in the ruins of the Zona Rosa, itself infested with muggers, addicts, CIA agents who specialized in neutralizing Central American leftists, and waiters without jobs standing in long lines outside of restaurants. What was he doing, he, Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, a young man people used to say had ideas, imagination, daring, a sense of humor, erotic talents, even tenderness, even love, what was he doing here now sitting in a dark and dilapidated attic on Niza Street at the corner of Hamburgo, spending his time making up lying slogans to make national and foreign tourists think it was possible to get anything in Mexico, that Mexico was a cosmopolitan center, that Mexico was a constellation of international attractions: my father inventing things all day long, solitary, bored, and scornful even of himself:

SINATRA!

FAREWELL CONCERT IN THE

ACAPULCO CONVENTION CENTER

SEPTEMBER 15, 1992

(BALONEY)

THIS IS IT, THE TOWER IS HERE!

TOUR D’ARGENT IS OPENING ITS ONLY FOREIGN

BRANCH RIGHT HERE IN MEXICO!

GUESS ITS LOCATION AND WIN

A FREE ESCARGOT PROVENÇAL!

(LIE)

FINALLY: ZIPPERS THAT ACTUALLY WORK!

FOR YOUR LUXURY BAGS!

DON’T PUT UP WITH MEXICAN ZIPPERS ANYMORE!

VISIT THE MARK CROSS STORE ON POLANCO STREET:

ZIPPITY-DOODAH-ZIPPITYAY!

(FALSE)

while in the streets of the shocked city the thing he’d vaguely foreseen was happening, the thing he’d wanted to start was now in full swing, not like that carnival in Acapulco organized by the government that made Angel and his buddies think that they, the puppets, were pulling their own strings.

Now Angel heard that noise, riding alone in the Van Gogh through the strangely awed city, as if it were on the eve of an eclipse, hunkered down like dogs who smell the nearness of death, which only they can see — and which they see before anyone — in black and white, the only colors dogs can see; a city beaten and angry: Angel saw rise up among all its things (just as Angeles said, my Angeles, what a fool I’ve been, and then the silly ass choked up) that were lost out of haste, poverty, and indifference, he saw rise up the signs of ancient newness; and suddenly the invisible enveloped him. Everything that had always been there and the new as well, all gathered together at last: the roar of tens of thousands of long-haul trucks entering the city at night from all directions, all driven by those men convinced they’d been born to drive and that today at last their work was their destiny: chosen to move an entire country and to enter the city this way at the vanguard of the desperate, the disinherited from all the slums: all moving at last toward the heart of the city, millions and millions of faceless people, people with no future, with nothing to lose, the misery of all the nameless slums mixed with the despair of those who had lost everything, the newly unemployed, those permanently displaced by earthquakes, police fired for corruption, bodyguards out of work, warriors and condottieri of the future in search of their chance, all behind the brightly lighted trucks, their loudspeakers blaring:

COME TO ME!

WITH FAITH!

TO CONQUER MEXICO!

FOR THE FAITH!

FOR THE VIRGIN!

YOU IN DESPAIR!

YOU OUT OF A JOB!

YOU WHO ARE HUMILIATED!

YOU WITH NO ROOF OVER YOUR HEAD!

COME TO ME!

WITH THE HOLY MOTHER!

TAKE YOUR FIRST STEPS!

TO THE NATIONAL PALACE!

TO POWER!

NO ONE CAN OVERCOME THE NATION OF GUADALUPE!

ALL TOGETHER!

COME TO ME!

YOU WITH NO JOB!

YOU WITH NO JUSTICE!

YOU WITH NO HOPE!

COME TO ME!

The truckers gathered in the Zoquiapan bus depot, on Río Frío, distributing torches from their trucks, a river of flames flooding down Santa Fe to Paseo de la Reforma and from Contreras to the Pedregal and from Peñon de los Baños to the Zócalo and then scattering confusedly, unforeseeably, in all directions in the city, the city as vast as an inexhaustibly curious spiderweb, sweeping everything in its path, devouring everything, creating an enormous, unexpressed doubt: was this mob creating or destroying? was it cleaning up or swallowing up? or had the time come when the two functions were indistinguishable? The supermarkets were the instinctive objective of the mob. My mob of Guadalupe! shouted the Ayatollah Matamoros from the roof of his black truck, his head tied up in the scarf evocative of martyr priests, headaches, beggar thieves. Saintliness and death, torture and violence all shone at the same time in the Mexican Ayatollah’s black eyes and white teeth, and his mob invaded all the supermarkets in the city. The immediate recompense: Kellogg’s gave them cornflakes and Chocokrispis, Heinz its ketchup, Campbell’s its soups, Lipton its tea, Nestlé its coffee, Hardeez’s its sauces, Coronado its jams, Adams its Chiclets, Del Monte its peas, Clemente its pickled chiles, Ibarra its tuna, Bimbo its bread, Mundet its Sidral, French its mustard, and Buitoni its raviolis. Like a liquid painting by Andy Warhol the supermarkets emptied through the hands of Matamoros’s mobs: IT ALL BELONGS TO YOU, IT’S ALL YOURS, IT WAS ALL TAKEN AWAY FROM YOU, TAKE IT BACK! THE VIRGIN BLESSES YOU! the voice of the cassette rang out, the voice of the truth, a voice that was real even if it was on tape, a persuasive voice, there among the stolen chickens and the steaks laid over the eyes of the poor the way Veronica laid her cloth over Christ’s eyes and the eggs snatched up with passion, then bobbled, and then smashed on the floor. Matamoros’s voice splits the air, the light, the corrupt velocity of the night lighted up with mercury in the galleries: Aurrerá, SUMESA, Commercial Mexicana; like an animated Warhol picture (and my father in the middle of this fiesta of plunder, driving the van without knowing if what was happening was good or bad, was able to think of my mother, wish she were sitting next to him, confess that he would have wanted to have her there with him, how could I sacrifice you to my vanity, to the conquest of Penny López, and end up sucked dry by her mom, Mrs. Dracula! Man, are you an asshole, Angel Palomar y Fagoaga: alone in the multitude, he wished he could take my mother Angeles’s hand and ask her forgiveness), and instead the cold hand that seized his belonged to a very young but very emaciated face under the funerary lights of the supermarket, the shadows of fear under those eyes, the sunken cheeks, the deep creases at the corner of her eyes and mouth: and she was only thirteen years old! Colasa Sánchez grabbed my father’s hand in the middle of the chaos in the invaded supermarket and implored him:

“Let me be your girl again.”

“No, Colasa.”

“Pretty please?”

“Frankly I appreciate my John Thomas too much. I didn’t know how much I loved it until it came up against your nether teeth, baby.”

“Let me be your rug.”

“Sure, a bear rug with nice sharp teeth.”

“Your dog. Let me be your dog.”

“Right, my little pit bull.”

“Just a shadow between your life and mine.”

“But you bite! Your bite is definitely worse than your bark!”

“All I want is to adore you. Let me.”

“What happened? I thought you hated me.”

“I did, because you killed my gringo.”

“I killed your gringo?”

“That tall, really handsome blond. You set the coyotes on him. He really knew how to screw me, even if he had to use a stick so I wouldn’t bite him. All I did was splinter the stick.”

“So that’s how it works?”

“We all work things out the best we can.”

“But even if you don’t hate me anymore, your daddy sure does. But it’s okay, any port in a storm!”

“But who says I don’t hate him, too?”

“Why would you?”

“Take a good look at me, my love, just look: I’m totally screwed. He didn’t give me anything I need to get married: no dowry: no plane tickets, no toothpaste, no parabolic antenna, nothing! An outcast bride, that’s me!”

“Castrating, too.”

“There have been other devouring women,” she said in falsetto, the poor, bored girl. “They called other women that and they made a big deal of them!”

“That was metaphoric devouring.”

“Well, look here, my boy. I see you’re all alone. You don’t have to put a thing in me, I promise, no inserts, no deserts. There are other ways of making each other happy. Let me be your barnacle. Let me hang around with you. I swear I won’t be a bother. I know people. I know the country. You know my little defect. We’ll need each other. We don’t have anyone else!”

My father admitted the validity of these arguments, and against his better judgment, he accepted Colasa Sánchez’s company during the revolution taking place that night and in the days to come. It was a way of resigning himself, without being alone.

4. Without asking permission

Without asking permission, the Toluca road parachutists — the homeless who had “parachuted” into vacant lots or abandoned buildings — took a detour through Las Lomas del Sol and hurled themselves against the fence around Ulises López’s mansion: We want the slut! they shouted, We want the slut! and Ulises’s bodyguards started shooting, surprised when the fence fell, but when all is said and done, the philosophy of the good bodyguard is “Do you really think I’m going to give my life to save the boss?” And away they ran, while the squatters shouted, Burn the bitch who burned us, death to the murderess, and inside the house astonishment and confusion scattered one and all: the smell of flames wafted into the nostrils of the superminister in his office, and he said to himself, well, here it is, what we always feared, and he tried to prepare a convincing statement, assume a dignified pose. What would he say to them? What would he do, he couldn’t hide, he couldn’t be a coward, but could he be brave and clever simultaneously? Ulises López was profoundly confused; he was the master of doing what he shouldn’t do and his political success consisted of doing nothing but disguising it as action in order to conceal his only real activity, which was piling up cash: what was he going to say to these deadbeats who were coming up the Guggenheim-style staircase shouting and waving their torches: Listen, I only appropriated what was superfluous, not what was necessary. I left that to you. Listen, I was once poor like you and now just look at me; no, not that; and not the stuff about being a self-made man, no one ever gave me a free tortilla. No: how would he explain to them that in reality he, Ulises López, the nice millionaire from Chilpancingo, in reality had done nothing, that everything they saw here was, well, like winning the lottery, something undeserved, something as unexpected as a miracle, an answered prayer; no, that wouldn’t work (the noise got closer) and they would never understand that his passivity was more subtle, exemplary, and refined: Ulises got to be a millionaire and got to be a minister knowing how not to do things and by not doing them, but who would forgive that? Who would answer his most secret question now that their fists were beating on his mahogany door, those questions that followed him wherever he went, hanging over his head like the sword of Damocles: Do I deserve to be admired by others? Do I deserve to be loved? Do I perhaps love and admire those who love and admire me? And the admirable mahogany door (thanks to my architect, Diego Villaseñor!) did not break under their fists, so Don Ulises had time, he was going to tell them, Look now, there is no contradiction between public and private interests, my interests are the interests of the people, of the nation, of the fatherland! Then he was shocked to see the spears piercing his door, the pointy pickets of the fence around his house, and now they were splintering his fine door, with an oceanic roar succeeding every thrust.

He’d give them back as good as he got: “Stop! You don’t need a chain saw to cut butter! Everybody in Mexico has been through this office! They did me favors! I did them favors! What do you want from me? Everything’s possible when we have peace!”

He was babbling; but how was he going to respond when the door fell and Ulises López saw the detested faces. He could not dissemble, he hated them, hated them for being dark-skinned, filthy, smelly, toothless, their hair a mess, resentful, vengeful, slow on the uptake, thick-bodied, out of fashion, screwed from the time they were born, he hated them and was going to do nothing to get on their good side. Are you kidding? he was going to shout when they threw themselves on him after admiring him a second and seeing that it was really Ulises López, the one from the posters and the electoral photos, and the TV news: at the exact instant their lances nailed him to his bookcase, right between the complete works of Vilfredo Pareto and the campaign speeches of Homero Fagoaga, Don Ulises was about to shout these last words:

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

* * *

Dragged along by the mob, forced to get out of the Van Gogh and join them, with Colasa hanging on to his shirttails, bewildered and tormented, and, ultimately, fascinated when he realized where he was, at the foot of the majestic, Guggenheimic staircase of the López family, my father watched her descend: the crowd with its lances and torches in hand stopped and Lucha Plancarte de López descended, for once as majestic as her staircase, wrapped in her rose-colored peignoir with matching boas at cuffs and neck and her stiletto-heeled shoes tipped in pink satin and with tassels on their toes and a gold orchid around her neck and her robe tightly fastened at the waist and with her breasts like a bull’s horns, proud, tauromachic, poised for the last corrida, and with her sulky cat in her arms, the cat that licked the hairs off her cunt: like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, that same crepuscular videocassette image is what my father saw in Lucha López’s insane dignity, Lucha, who had attacked the squatters’ camps on her properties on the Toluca road, setting them on fire, and now she dared to face retribution, the eye-for-an-eye, Asiatic revenge of Hammurabi right here in Las Lomas del Sol, in the high fortress of her security and comfort. For an instant her eyes met those of my father, who had screwed her so well for more than a month right here, and only then did Doña Lucha seem to lose her nerve, but in her eyes my father saw only a fleeting nostalgia for pleasure. What remained permanently, like a longing that became more and more real with each second, was a small-town street shaded by pines and lined with white houses, tranquil plazas and cool mountains: Chilpancingo, Chilpancingo bore Lucha Plancarte de López to her death with dignity, perhaps the only moment of dignity she had in her life, and Angel, my father, covered his eyes when they set fire to her boas and her satin and Colasa Sánchez next to him hugged his waist and began to cry. The spoiled cat screeched as well and jumped in flames away from his mistress.

The Ayatollah forbade nothing: it was forbidden to forbid, as it was in Paris in May ’68. Now the Ayatollah was going to prove it right here in the house of Superminister Ulises López and his wife Lucha Plancarte de … and their little girl the prom-queen Princess Penélope López. The crowd drew aside to let him pass, between the pincushion corpse of Ulises and the charred body of Lucha, and he ritually intoned sacred chants, having been trained and advised by the Pygmalionish Chilean Concha Toro:

“Liberated from time! Liberated from the body! What will happen, brothers and sisters, if they are set free? What will they do with their time? What will they do with their bodies?”

He didn’t see Angel, but in Ulises López’s devastated house everything was happening simultaneously, theater in the round, theater without footlights, theater and its double; then, on that same staircase of death, appeared the deluxe chef Médoc d’Aubuisson wearing a liberty cap and a ripped shirt, singing “La Carmagnole” as loud as he could, Ça ira, Ça ira, les aristocrates à la lanterne, but no one knew French or had ever heard of the Bastille, so they beat him up, and next to my father a familiar hand pulled on his sleeve, and my father twisted around in the crowd; it wasn’t Colasa anymore, she’d been displaced, disappeared, swallowed up by the tide: it was Homero Fagoaga! Homero Fagoaga alive, dressed strangely, wearing a hat with bells and a ruff that reminded my father for an instant of his favorite, forgotten poet Quevedo:

Into the water, swimmers,

Swimmers into the water.

A well-shaved shark

Is in these parts.

In addition he had on a Roman toga that wrapped his slightly thinner body, as if death itself could not take ten pounds off him, not even that, the phantasmagoric Uncle Homero. My scourge, my nemesis! My disaster! whimpered Angel Palomar, desperately seeking even the support of Colasa Sánchez amid the mob that was now completely out of hand. In the pool shaped like the U.S.A., scores of people were urinating, adding their tears to the sea. At the dog track, the racing hounds were first set free and admired, then compared with the mutts from the Mexican slums that dragged their teats around, castrated, tangled in their own filth and sickness, their eyes infinitely covered with grime, and, as a result, the greyhounds were abominated, damn hounds probably eat better than we do, throw gasoline on them, set them on fire, they lived better than we do, kill them! And in flames the greyhounds, following a strange instinct, kept on running around the track, will-o’-the-wisps, and smoking muzzles, barking until they died:

“Weeds never die, do they, illustrious nephew? As the Maiden of Orléans said or might have said on a rising occasion to the one who had a better time of it than your beloved Princess Penny, hahaha. Look at the Ayatollah! Remember him? Remember him from the Malinaltzin highway exit? Remember how he beat us up? Remember how he screwed your pregnant wife? Hahaha.” Homero was laughing in a new style, professionally, festively, as if this were his new role: to laugh. “The best is yet to come! It was I who put this idea into the head of Our Guide!”

The Ayatollah? Our Guide? His schoolmate Matamoros Moreno? Could a frustrated writer reach any height in Mexico? Hadn’t Uncle Homero died when he fell from the balcony of his penthouse as a result of Uncle Fernando’s efforts?

“Tell that nearsighted fool of a dwarf that it would take more than a second-string pseudo-Mazatec witch doctor to finish off Homero Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca!” said Homero, pointing to himself with an eternally sausage-thick finger, disabusing his nephew once and for all of the illusion that he was dealing with a ghost that resembled his deceased uncle. “Destiny is more unexpected than any logic, more of a bastard than luck itself, and wider than any individual life,” he proclaimed now, with the burning greyhounds as a backdrop. “Listen to me and just see if you can contradict me: under my balcony, a little circus had set up, and the circus had a tent that broke my fall and then tore, dropping me nervously but safely onto a flexible, playful safety net, and I bounced around in it for about a minute and a half, as naked as the day I was born, my distinguished if rather diminished nephew, and the audience laughed, applauded, and made so much of me that the owner of the circus, a certain Bubble Gómez, an albino ex-truck driver whose lifelong dream was to own a circus, signed me up right on the spot, as Lana Turner, the never-to-be-forgotten starlet, might have said when she was discovered at the marmoreal soda fountain where she was ingesting a cloying ice-cream soda — cherry — and wearing a very tight sweater; he introduced me to his patrons, the Ayatollah Matamoros and the singer Concha Toro, now transformed into Galvarina Donoso, of Chilean and aristocratic origin, as that mad geographer Don Benjamín Subercaseaux was apt to invoke on nitrate evenings of cuecas and lilacs, as in turn might have been said by…”

“And what about this getup?” said my father, recovering the floor. “You look like a fifth-rate Rigoletto.”

“Momus!” exclaimed Uncle Homero. “I am King Momus of this stupendous carnival!”

“Stupendous? They’ve emptied the supermarkets where you used to sell your poisonous baby food! They’ve ruined you, you barrelassed old fart!”

“Careful with the insults now.” Homero Fagoaga laughed, pointing with his sausage finger in a superior gesture. “The oven’s not ready for cakes like that; now try to translate and export that proverb.” He laughed with even greater pleasure.

“My oven is no place for your muffins. How’s that?”

“I mean: all sacrifices are worthwhile! My protectors have proclaimed me king of laughter!”

“Mock-king, you fool.”

“As you wish, Angelito: but my scepter is real in a revolution that is, after all, carnivalesque, a revolution of mad laughter, finally, my anarchic but idiotic nephew, finally! A horizontal Mexican revolution, everything for everyone and everyone for everything, here in the land of the vertical Aztec Empire followed by the vertical Spanish Empire followed by the vertical, centralized, patrimonial, and pyramidal Republic, the inversion of the hierarchy.” Homero Fagoaga laughed loudly, pushing my father all the time toward the replica of the first floor of Bloomingdale’s, where the holy mob was touching everything without understanding what those things they’d never seen or even dreamed were, perfumes, and more perfumes, Estée Lauder, Givenchy, Togarama, dresses and more dresses, Saint Laurent, Valentino, Cio Cio Sanel, riding clothes, clothes for hunting in Africa, sailing off Cape Cod, mountain climbing in Tibet, vaginal spermicide with the color and taste of strawberry, grapes, carob, camellia, cherry. How do you use this, how, when, what for? They passed alongside the destructive fury that broke and burned everything in Penny’s personal sanctuary, where Penny stopped looking like a nun and started looking like a whore, but where was Penny in all this? “The inversion of the hierarchy!” Homero Fagoaga laughed, disguised as the King of Laughter, Prince of Comedy, Lord of Levity, Sultan of Smiles: Ah, what laughter, what crazy laughter! To think they began with me, you all begin with me, little nephew, you and your grimy proletarian friends and your pregnant, well-fornicated little wife — fornicated by my Luminous Guide — you began by making fun of me, oranges, pears, and figs, of course, hahaha, magnifying glass, Shogun limousine, remember? Jell-O baths, anything goes to make fun of Homero Fagoaga, sadistic Chinese and cow yokes and bottle caps in my dessert, why not, killing my Tomasito, even that, the destruction of my electoral campaign, my humiliation by that ragged bum Benítez, ha! my genes and not his Hegels are going to win, not your gelatines: laugh at me now, fools, laugh at the King of Laughter and the inversion of hierarchies and see what’s before your eyes, beloved nephew, look carefully and remember that

FAGOAGA NEVER LOSES

AND WHAT HE LOSES HE SNATCHES BACK!

5. Matamoros Moreno rehearsed his every gesture

Matamoros Moreno rehearsed his every gesture in front of Concha Toro’s dressing-room mirror; the singer showed him how to turn movement into ritual: she taught him how to look at his audience, raise one arm or both, take a step forward then stop dramatically, smile, throw his head back, get angry, speak, be silent. Matamoros went through the extremes of pride and trampled humility in front of that mirror, where Concha Toro purged herself of her own histrionic frustrations. Little by little, Matamoros Moreno, who in Concha’s company had discovered a surprising new kind of lovemaking, full of nuances and refinements (even secrets) he had never known before, transcended the gestures and the rituals and persuaded himself in his innermost being that what he was doing (outside the dressing room, for the public, for the people) was the external manifestation of what he was within: a solitary man who had stored up a power that was only now revealing itself. His gratefully accepted sexual encounters with Concha-Dolly-María Inez (for which she was thankful, now that she was fifty, or perhaps a bit older) revealed to Matamoros the dark and blind energy he had held in reserve, which only now burst forth. The only condition was that he believe what he said: the Ayatollah Matamoros had to speak, move, and be seen with a total faith in what he said, the way he moved, and in how he looked. He would tell the masses that followed him that “faith is faith. It can’t be proven, insulted, judged, or even jailed.” Let them think about this; just in case, he said during the weeks in which he had hastily, secretly gathered together those bands of official thugs — those falcons — who had been scattered after their last operation way back in 1972, a police corps disbanded ever since those remote days of moral renovation, bodyguards left unemployed in the wake of the exodus of the rich to Houston, Miami, and Los Angeles. But he had to convince even these swine that now they had to act out of faith, that the policeman or bodyguard who joined the movement had to do what he did for something greater than they had ever done before: like the thieves and fire-eaters, like the beggars and squatters, they all had to seek and feel the same thing:

“Why follow me? So you can become new again. So you can save yourselves. So you can have good or bad luck as long as you have a destiny. Don’t just sit there like a bump on a log!”

He had to believe it himself so that they would believe it: that’s what he learned in the amorous tricks of the Chilean big Moma who was so wise, so sexy, and such a mistress of sexual secrets the brutal Matamoros had never practiced. In her arms, he discovered the absolute realization of everything he had written and tried to publish through his double-dealing fellow student Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, whose doom Matamoros had already pronounced: it would be a slow death, by inches, in the Grand Inquisitorial tradition: he’d already screwed Palomar’s wife, he’d already beaten Palomar’s relatives, he’d already buggered Palomar himself, just so he’d learn something about length, thickness, and nightmares that become reality. Matamoros was sure that he could achieve his own destiny, but that destiny included two things: to achieve total revenge on Angel Palomar for having frustrated his literary ambitions, and to prove before the entire world that he, Matamoros Moreno, was worth more than Angel Palomar: the proof would be that the people would follow him and not Palomar, dream about him and not Palomar, would love and hate him, not Palomar. Matamoros Moreno did not shudder as he came in Concha Toro’s mouth because he had to be believed and followed, but in the instant when he was dropping his load between Concha’s teeth (thinking as he did so about his little daughter Colasa, as a black counterpoint to the act he was involved in, a dream of the act: father and daughter), in that instant he told himself that no one would believe in him or follow him if he didn’t believe in himself … Matamoros followed by Matamoros: the demon of hope could move the world, accompanied by its acolytes, passion and ambition, only if in that moment Matamoros Moreno realized (he gave himself: ceded) that “I have another man buried inside me, oh pretty Mama, there was another man with me and I didn’t know it; why didn’t you tell me, Mommy, don’t you love me?”

After that internal and external orgasm, Matamoros Moreno could say what he wanted and he convinced all the unemployed, the lumpen, the deformed, the mad, the bodyguards and cops, the rockaztec groupies, he convinced everyone, intellectuals, housewives, Hipi Toltec and Orphan Huerta, even Baby Ba, who left Egg in the company of my mother and went to follow the Ayatollah. And what about me, Baby, don’t you love me anymore?

“Don’t let your hatred rot inside you. Get cracking. Look over there. Look at the city. It belongs to you.”

“The Mexican hero is neither proletarian nor Communist. He belongs to Guadalupe, and in my hand, brother, I hold a power that is neither of the left nor of the right, but one that reveals my own nature, natch.”

“Stop living a life of anguish. Join us.”

“What do you get by slicing each other up? Get cracking.”

“Don’t hate yourself. There are better things to hate. Look at that house. Look at that store. Look at that car. Why don’t they belong to you? It’s up to you. Take them!”

“Blessed are those that walk the face of the earth in its dangerous moments!”

“Mexico should drown herself in the ocean of confusion in order that it be reborn on the beach of hope.”

“I want a world in which prayers come true! Come with me, old woman, pray as you walk, pray.”

They believed everything because he believed it: in bed with Concha, he let the other penetrate him while he penetrated the woman. His body resists. His body tells him that it is going to go mad just so that the other man inhabiting him can come out of him. He resists: his skin has always been his own, there was nothing behind it, nothing more inside. Yes: another man is emerging from within him, but his body resists and his mind resists even more: you will not be a saint, you will be a criminal and a madman. But the other man is already his spirit. He didn’t realize that the spirit within him also had a body. This didn’t matter to the body of the other man: he fed on the environment, on tension, on fear, on the frustration, self-loathing, disillusion: all this fed the spirit of the other within him, and the funniest thing is that it transformed bad tensions into good tensions. During the long nights of cabaret and sex with Concha Toro, when, after the pleasure of music and sex, they prepared the cassettes that Colasa — terribly diligent, animated (perhaps more so than her father) by a desire for vengeance against that fop Angel Palomar (an object of terrible hatred, you’ve turned out, oh, padre mío!) — brought early every morning to the Trucking Center, whence they were scattered all over what remained of the Honorable Republic of Mexico, the tension of resentment, frustration, the colossal screwing that was Mexico and Mexicans humiliated and handed over to disgrace from birth until death, became passion, dream, hope, movement. Only one thing remained the same; the spirit moves because of the tension surrounding it: it yearns for catastrophe.

Matamoros Moreno let the other come out to fuse with him in body and soul. That’s how the Ayatollah Matamoros was born.

He was born to impress and defeat my defeated and insignificant father, Angel Palomar. Dear Dad, what’s happened to you? Why don’t we share our imagination any longer, you and I? When are we going to get together again, dear old Dad?

Thus he dragged all of us into his passionhope.

* * *

That same man, whatever he might be and however he might be, was now in a brilliant space of lights and reflections from silver and crystal, holding down a girl on the perfume counter in a replica of Bloomingdale’s seeing herself reflected in the thousand mirrors and the thousand eyes of that night. This ritual was expected of him, the spiritual guide was the carnal guide, the revolution did not exalt the spirit at the expense of the flesh: sex was part of the passion and the hope of the revolution for all, in which the perennially frustrated desires of Mexicans would be gloriously brought to fruition: Screw the boss’s daughter! Fuck the unreachable princess! Nail Don Ulises López’s daughter! Bring the impossible close to the possible in one ferocious and vibrant blow! Matamoros Moreno owed it to himself and owed this to all those who stared at him that August night in Las Lomas del Sol: to take off his cape, unbutton his fly, take out his rod, and bring it closer to the open legs of the valley-girl princess, who managed to murmur at the edge of the deaf-mute idiocy that would afflict her from then on:

“You can look but you can’t touch. You’re ugly, poor, and a prole. I’m not for you.”

That I’m not for you was the code murmured and repeated by everyone, which made everyone participate vicariously in Matamoros’s pleasure taken on Penny, who began to scream more, more, more, don’t take it out, don’t come, wait for me, more, more, more, she staring and the luminous guide looking at my father, the terrible joke jabbing him like a spear is the stare of my father hugged, naturally, by Uncle Homero Fagoaga, giggling: “A penis for Penny!”

6. Colonel Inclán raised his fingers

Colonel Inclán raised his fingers, knotty as mesquite roots, to his eyes, threatening everyone with something no one had ever seen: the eyes he always hid behind those pitch-black glasses. Neither Secretary Federico Robles Chacón nor President Jesús María y José Paredes had ever seen Colonel Inclán’s eyes and the two of them trembled slightly at the prospect. The mere idea of facing his gaze frightened them, and the colonel knew it. With a smile like a death’s-head, he dropped his clenched hand: If not now, when? Hadn’t he told the President that the time still hadn’t come? Well, now it had! The damn bodyguards weren’t worth a shit, they’d all either run away or joined up with the Coca-Cola or aymapepper or whatever that faith healer was calling himself, but they’d been killing the colonel’s best people, there were cops hanging off the lampposts, goddamn it! How far were they willing to let this thing go before they started shooting, how far, Mr. President, how far?

Colonel Inclán and Federico Robles Chacón exchanged ugly looks: Robles Chacón quietly stated that his generation had grown up in a flood of unpunished crimes that undermined the very thing they were attempting to strengthen: the Mexican State, the Party of the Revolution, and the controlled working class. The public image of the president, the PRI, the CTM, turned to dust just as their power was turned to mush by the memory of October 2, 1968, when the students were killed in the Tlateloco massacre, or by Corpus Christi in 1972, when they were again slaughtered on the Alvarado Bridge, or by May 10, 1990, when the strike by Mexican mothers was broken up when the Perisur mall was turned into a free fire zone. All that had to be paid for, said Robles, because the system no longer knew how to do with the opposition what it had always done, namely, to coopt it and to incorporate it into the system. These failures were very costly because they were debilitating both internally and externally: the mutilated fatherland was the price they paid for internal political inability and was not the result of external diplomatic ability.

“You’re a fast talker and you think a lot,” said the colonel, “but I want to know what to do with my machine guns now that the time is ripe to use them.”

“You go out and get hold of that Matamoros guy,” said Robles Chacón.

“What are you going to do, son?” exclaimed the President, who saw in Federico Junior the resurrection of Federico Senior, the man who had launched Paredes’s political and financial career back in the forties.

Inclán answered for him: “I’ll bring you your nut, and then I’m going to go to bed, hugging the pillow where my mom — may she rest in peace — laid her head down for the last time before she died. All right: calm down, gentlemen, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Let me sleep on it. But…”

The colonel stalked ominously out, and Federico made his point once more to the President. The chain of crimes must be broken: we need imagination and memory. I offered a symbol as a sacrament between memory and hope, said Robles to the President: were they the saviors? What do you think, Mr. President? Didn’t we win the game down in Acapulco when those asshole kids saved our butts from the Guerrero political crisis or when we liquidated Ulises López’s (may God have mercy on his soul) power and the colonel’s mom? News travels fast. Power remains. Or it should remain. Mr. President, be careful. This is a key play.

They didn’t speak for a long while, and then the minister said: I don’t know if you understand me, sir, and frankly I don’t care. I have to talk. I have to say something: one thing in particular. Almost seven years ago, I was a young volunteer during the September 19 earthquake. We didn’t need the PRI, a president, or anything else. We organized almost by instinct, I mean, all the young people in the neighborhood, or several neighborhoods. We took scooters, vans, pickups, whatever we could find, shovels, picks, bandages, one guy joined up with us carrying a bottle of Mercurochrome. What moved us that day? The sense of solidarity, a humanitarian feeling, the need to save our neighbors. We realized they were our neighbors! Do you understand me, sir? That morning, the man next to me was my fellow man. I was another fellow man. We went beyond institutions. But once the heroic moment passed, we went back to wondering what moved us that day. And our answer was something else. We acted because we were a generation of educated Mexicans, forty years of education, of reading, going to films, talking with everyone, studying Mexican history, whatever; it all came to the surface that painful morning. Civil society transcended the state. But it was the state that created civil society. That is our political conundrum, sir. We owe too much to the revolution to trade it in, no matter how old, smelly, or ugly it’s become, for adventure, whim, nothing. They say the system coopted me. I was a volunteer facing up to what was judged to be the disorder of a fearful government devoid of imagination. Today I’m Minister of State in a government that is neither better nor worse than all the others: your government. Our country’s history is its frustrated youth. But, despite everything, that’s what a mature country is: a corrupt country. And yet, sir, no matter how much I justify myself honestly, because you listen so to me patiently, sir, because you were a friend of my father, I want to tell you that the only good thing I ever did in my life I did that morning of the earthquake. I would exchange all my current power for the satisfaction of digging at a mountain of rubble and pulling out a little girl buried there alive and only a week old.

7. This … is what Minister Federico Robles Chacón said

This — but these are not his exact words — is what Minister Federico Robles Chacón said to the Ayatollah Matamoros Moreno when they brought him to Robles Chacón’s office at the intersection of Insurgentes, Nuevo León, and the Viaduct:

“It all depends on you — we can postpone death and fulfill our destiny. Look, Mr. Holy Man, you’re not the first of your kind around here, don’t believe it for a minute, and all of you end up the same way. Open your eyes: you reach into your hat for a paradise and you pull out a hell.”

Matamoros looked at him with that carbonizing gaze, like a black diamond, the one that had proven so effective on stage. But the rational Robles Chacón decided that Bela Lugosi’s cinematic stare was much worse: where does he get off with this Dracula bit? At the same time, he did not want to laugh at Matamoros; Federico Robles Chacón did not laugh at losers, especially when they still had direct control over a mob on the loose all over the city. Besides, why plead with him? What the Mexican Ayatollah had to understand was that the surprise effect of his movement had passed, the spontaneous fiesta was over, the López family had been murdered in exemplary fashion taking the rap for all the families of government functionaries who’d gotten rich in the past seventy years.

The cops who should have been hung had been hung.

The supermarkets that should have been looted had been looted.

The permissive instant had passed, and now — the minister gestured toward the city — now look, Mr. Holy Man, and don’t play dumb: there are five helicopters flying over your divine mobs; each chopper contains two machine guns; the elite battalions of the presidential guard are posted on every corner, surrounding every plaza, standing guard on every rooftop with their M-16s in their hands. Take a good look at how long an insurrection can last in Mexico, Mr. Holy Man! But you’ve managed to wake up a savage Mexico and what I’m offering you is the chance to be useful and glorious as opposed to being useless and dead. Look, Mr. Holy Man, I’m making you a proposition: let’s talk it over. You give me something, I give you something. What do you say?

How many chances do I have to give you the right answer? asked the Ayatollah, bruised and blackened by the flames, but smiling like an idiot, his teeth arranged like corn-on-the-cob, and bound up with who knew how much myth, fable, and atavism.

Three, smiled the Secretary of State, nowhere nearly as charismatic but far more astute.

I want the entire cabinet to parade through the streets, from the Zócalo to La Villa, each minister carrying a cross and singing the hymn to the Blessed Sacrament.

Okay, said Robles Chacón. You, in turn, will have to use your people to kidnap all those who have drained the country of dollars and hold them until they return the $300 billion they’ve taken out of Mexico since 1975. He said it affably.

I’ll go along with that, muttered Matamoros Moreno with a sly sparkle in his eye, a gesture of craftiness that the Chilean María Inez, Dolly, Concha, Galvarina would not have allowed him to make had she been there next to him, dangerous, dearest, don’t go too far, don’t stretch your luck too far, it would be damn silly to … But the Ayatollah had already allowed that other man he had within to push his way out and fulfill his destiny. For a fleeting instant he saw himself from outside, as if he were looking at someone else, and he did not see two men, only one, although he could see a wider destiny than that allotted him by circumstance: he was an orphan, and that already meant having half a destiny or a destiny like no other, Matamoros said to himself. He never knew his father or mother, only the orphanage, his scholarship, the Heroes of ’82 school, his frustrated literary vocation, his early love affair with a woman who was as anonymous as he was (he could no longer remember her face) in a dark place and the woman always in the dark, saying don’t try to see me, don’t ever try to see me, because if you do I’ll stop being excited: an intensely anonymous woman, no, there will be no melodramatic revelations here, Colasa Sánchez is the daughter of Anónima Sánchez, Nobody, Personne, the Daughter of Sánchez, no one had a daughter with her, he always knew that the daughter would be his and with him, a young stud of a father at fifteen years of age, a writer frustrated by the envy of Angel Palomar, a man hallucinated by the idea of myth as immediate substitute for imagination. Myth is ready-to-wear imagination, as his Chilean girlfriend jokingly said: the tribe’s imagination. His daughter Colasa incarnated it, she was no fantasy, myths lived and Colasa had a vagina dentata. She should have, to be transformed from an invalid into a valid political and economic asset. They should have made a fortune with that thing. It didn’t turn out that way, but there can be no doubt the idea illuminated Matamoros Moreno’s imagination. From a hilltop outside Acapulco, he saw the anarchic destruction of the port, and he told Colasa: “Not that way, not that way.” Myths were something else, not anarchy but love, the desire for order, morality, knowing what could be counted on, understanding that the oldest traditions were the only ones that had survived and that could unite this people and make it love itself, make it feel noticed, respected, the center of its own history. Traveling around the country with his gang of workers, he of all people reduced to such a thing in the Mexico of the nineties, totally devoid of direction, when it was every man for himself and survival was the name of the game, one day here, the next somewhere else, juggler, or bricklayer, what did it matter as long as you had something to eat today, who knew what tomorrow would bring?

Matamoros Moreno fixed his terrible eyes on Federico Robles Chacón, who trembled less under those eyes than he had hearing the laughter of the mad monk on the radio and who felt that mass of people behind him, agitated, furious, gathered at the intersection where the SEPAFU offices were located, under the interminable acid rain, in the morning that always looked, as it did now, afternoon and he told him what he had to tell him in order that he carry his destiny one step beyond, one step forward. One more step had to be taken in order to fulfill Matamoros Moreno’s duplicated destiny, Matamoros, the screwed orphan who stood Columbus’s egg on its end: one hundred and thirty million Mexicans are Catholics, not Communists, not PRIists, not PANists, but Guadalupeans, and thousands of people had followed him who were just waiting for someone to tell them that and to lead them.

* * *

Federico Robles Chacón scrutinized the man opposite him (he didn’t dare think of him as his prisoner: Mexico was not Jerusalem and this man was not the Nazarene, nor was the minister, God forbid! Pontius Pilate) and tried to read his thoughts, to guess his feelings in that instant in which he awaited the second demand of the Mexican Ayatollah, who had invaded and interrupted Robles Chacón’s project of national symbolization, his creation in the lab of a symbolic form that would replace the need for repression, sublimating it. That’s why he had invented Mamadoc. He believed deeply in the ability of an enlightened minority to govern Mexico. He had no illusions, what little this country had achieved was due to a series of elites that had drawn the line, forced into submission or defeated the savage majority, that majority without direction, that barbarous majority, so much so that when they triumphed they put minorities as obscurantist and brutish as themselves in power: the anarchic ghost of Santa Anna, the nation’s leading man, the cockfighter, the lady’s man, the stud, transformed into a plebeian dictator, a clod, grotesque, a lackey to foreign powers, he haunted the history of Mexico like an evil omen that was constantly to be taken into account: keep the plebes out of power, no matter how noble a Zapata or a Villa might look, to preclude a reincarnation of Santa Anna. Enlightened minorities, always, right- or left-wing, conservative or liberal, Lucas Alamán or Dr. Mora, the men of the Reform: a liberal minority; the men of the Porfirio Díaz regime: a positivist minority; the men of the Revolution: a meritocracy that was much more broadly based than its predecessors, more porous, more permeable: Robles Chacón and his father, who in past centuries would have been peons chained to peasant debt, the hacienda system, and the whip, if they’d been born in 1700 or 1800, in … But instead they were born with the Revolution, they made it, they inherited it, and they governed instead of being governed. The price they paid was becoming themselves an enlightened minority. If they had been an anarchic majority, they would never have governed.

And now they found themselves face-to-face with the newly resurrected masses, who were once again on the move. Not for the first time, recalled Robles Chacón, not the first and not the last, but this time it was he who had to face them and the Ayatollah Matamoros. Robles Chacón knew it only too well; he read Matamoros’s theatrical wink, so dramatic that it had to communicate his intention: that was his strength and his weakness as well. Matamoros Moreno was going to act out — to the death if necessary — the role he had created for himself, the role the mob had conferred upon him. He would take his chances, he wouldn’t come to terms without some sort of drama, he wouldn’t accept negotiation without some tragedy. Robles, son of Robles, knew it because of his millennial Mexican genes, he knew it and it tasted like bile to him because this necessary drama was going to force him to do what he did not want to do, it was going to put Mexican history to an unnecessary test, but one that was absolutely necessary for the Mexican Ayatollah’s melodrama and for sacralized violence.

What I want to know, said Matamoros, is if you are really capable of murdering my people. That’s my second question.

It was asked with impavid security.

The minister lowered his eyes, closed them, prayed that these things weren’t really happening, that some dramatist somewhere was dictating these words to his character Matamoros, but that they weren’t really his words and that he’d take them back, have second thoughts instantly. But the Ayatollah repeated, I want to know if you are capable of massacring my people, all those people supporting me down there on the street. He said it because that’s what his character was supposed to say and he wouldn’t have said it if that hadn’t been his role.

Is that your second demand? said Robles Chacón, in total calm.

Matamoros nodded his head, still wrapped in the red kerchief, which was soiled with ash and fresh blood.

Robles Chacón simply placed his left hand on his right wrist and pressed one of the golden buttons on his wristwatch. Button, button who’s got the button? he thought, mournfully and unconsciously leaving every level of his consciousness open to what was going to take place despite him, despite all his philosophy and politics.

Like a thunderclap in reverse, the staccato buzz of the machine guns preceded the flash of the fire burst of death and blood. Matamoros, shouting, hurling himself against the windows in the minister’s office, smearing his fingerprints all over the blue glass that filtered the corrupt glare of the sun in the city “where the air is clear,” saw his people rising up down there in the crowded intersection of Insurgentes, Nuevo León, and the Viaduct, his people! those who had followed him and who were there shouting freedom for our guide set Matamoros free! He saw them fall silently like flies, the noise more and more distant, echoing through the valley morning, and the fire, by contrast, growing, mustard-colored, spreading throughout Colonia Hipódromo, toward Tacubaya and Lomas Altas, down Baja California and Colonia de los Doctores, along Parque Delta and Xola and Colonia del Valle, up Patriotismo and Colonia Nápoles, blotting out the high rose-colored sunglasses of the Hotel de México and the glass temples of the Mexican National Airline Building, fogging over Siqueiros’s acrylic murals: the brownish scum hid the dying from Matamoros Moreno, the long-haul truckers and the devout little old ladies, the angry young men, the unemployed office workers, the bankrupt store owners, the deinstitutionalized lunatics — all invisible, machine-gunned, dead, their destinies now complete, at least more so than those of Matamoros Moreno and Federico Robles Chacón.

The minister didn’t blink an eye. The Ayatollah shouted, save my girlfriend! save my daughter! save…!

Robles Chacón just laughed. So many requests! The lover, the daughter, what about that albino truck driver, a lost grandma, who was Colasa’s mother? who were Matamoros Moreno’s parents? the poor little orphan boy, son (of a bitch) of the morning, do you suppose that his unknown parents might be among the dead? Did he think that before he opened the doors to this bastard of a country, this savage Mexico, this sleeping tiger, did he think about that and about all those who, in addition to his daughter and his lover, came to his mind? Did he dare to condemn the albino, for example? Or was Matamoros Moreno incapable of thinking about death in the singular, was he incapable of saying “Colasa’s death,” “Galvarinaconchadollymanés’s death,” “the albino’s death,” was that it? That’s what Robles Chacón icily said to him as he imagined all those victims. But Robles Chacón did not fool himself for an instant: he, Federico Robles, fils, was the principal victim of this day of blood, just one more on a long list of bloodstained days, wasn’t that right? Can you only imagine collective death, the death you asked me for, you bastard?

We know everything, said Robles Chacón, after a pause. He smiled. Didn’t you want to save that overstuffed Judas, Don Homero Fagoaga, your King Momus? How many of your people did you want to save? All he had to do was push a button on his Mikado wrist radar to show that he could sentence all of them to death …

The minister let the Ayatollah stew in his own juices for an instant and then he protected him with his own arm, a buddy’s arm that he put around his shoulders in order to hug him close, the minister would give him anything, not one more murder, if the Ayatollah agreed to appear on the night of September 15, 1992, on the balcony of the National Palace, at Mamadoc’s side, not one death more if he did them the favor of illustrating and incarnating the reality of national unity. The Ayatollah would not have to request amnesty for those who might not accept the deal or call him a Judas, and Robles Chacón didn’t point out that those who might not respect the deal hadn’t been taken into account: it was not necessary to worry about these details, there was no reason to humiliate anyone, facts are facts, I’ll put myself to the test: the Ayatollah looked down on the bloody intersection, the people running for their lives, the weeping, the wail of ambulances, scattered shots, and the noise of water being sprayed over everything, as if a gigantic oilcloth throat couldn’t manage to swallow all the dirty water running over the surface of the bloody city.

That water pump was like the city’s heart, my father said to himself, and in a bakery he found Hipi and the Orphan happily distributing loaves of bread, rolls, Campeche cakes and powdered-sugar cookies, crackers, and pastries to the mob, who would have taken them even if our two friends weren’t there giving them out, but the two of them were so happy to be taking part in things, as if they were washing themselves clean of all the grime and disaster of Aca, and the manipulation they’d learned of later, and now they thought they were acting on their own but this time for everyone, and they shouted to my father, join in! we need more bakeries like this one! they laughed it was their mission: let them eat bread!

Angel Palomar shook his head.

Would they meet later with Egg and Angeles over at his grandparents’ house?

Who knows, let’s see, my father shrugged his shoulders.

8. On the night of the Ayatollah

On the night of the Ayatollah, Mexico City once again witnessed everything it could bear: only the memory (extinct) of the fall of the Aztec capital or the forgetting (voluntary) of the memory of the earthquake of September 19, 1985, could be compared to this new disaster. Nevertheless, amid the smoke and blood of the defeat of Tenochtitlán or in the thick of the devastation of the collapse and burning that had put the capital into mourning seven years before, no one ever saw two figures like these, who are now running in a low crouch, their heads covered with woolen shawls, virtually smeared along the leprous walls, between Avenida Durango and Calle Génova; they stop on every corner, look around, move along if they detect no danger, retreat if they see or suspect any.

“I know that all we’ve ever wanted is peace and quiet,” said Capitolina, delicately — but showing her disgust — detouring her sister around a mass of slaughtered animals in front of the aqueduct on Avenida Chapultepec.

“Peace first and finally quiet, and in the second place…” began Farnesia, but her sister interrupted her, excuse me Farnecita, excuse me, little sister, for exposing you to this violence, I who have so faithfully tried to fulfill my promise to our dear parents that I would protect and defend you. Careful now, don’t step on that dead cat …

“In the first place, let’s set the record straight, finally zero catastrophes, in the third place no crisis,” whimpered Farnesia.

“We thought things would always turn out that way…”

“Just as our dear parents taught us…”

“May they rest in peace…”

“In peace, amen, in peace!”

But stealing a look filled with palpable fear at the city of quickly dug trenches overflowing with dead bodies, the rows of men hung from the lampposts along Paseo de la Reforma in front of the Social Security Building, the burning of the fried-food stands along the avenue and the shacks of the jugglers and fire-eaters on the traffic islands, the Fagoaga sisters finally looked at each other out of the corners of their eyes and burst into raucous laughter until they had to quickly cover their mouths, the small and decisive Capitolina with her pudgy little hand, the tall and tremulous Farnesia with her black shawl: they had always imagined the worst — a lie, a lie: they had always fervently desired the worst: accidents, sickness, revolution, earthquakes, death … And here it was! No one would escape! All of them ground into dust! This was the finishing touch to a decade of disasters, and it’s true the sisters both believed what their wise and experienced older brother, Dr. Homero, told them: all that was needed was a little push, barely a flick of a fingertip to cast down the abysmal metropolis: its destiny was now its image, there was no need for any soothsayer to cut open a bird, and columns of fire, weeping women, or mirrors that reflected the stars in broad daylight were all unnecessary.

How many times had the Misses Fagoaga made a dinner unpleasant by warning an unwary guest:

“If I were you, I wouldn’t eat that, sir.”

That’s how they survived.

Until today. Bankruptcy and devaluations didn’t touch them: they had property, savings, and high interest here, dollar accounts across the frontier. The earthquake of ’85, which flattened their neighborhood, providentially left them unscathed, as it had their brother Homero: God loves the Fagoagas! The evidence speaks for itself! Until today, until today when death became general not out of error or natural catastrophe or divine will, now death was policy, enacted from above, and Capitolina was realistic enough to imagine that not even they would survive the disaster.

An ambulance, its siren howling, passed along the deserted avenue. It was dawn, the hour chosen by the Fagoaga sisters to carry out their final mission. Walking rapidly in fits and starts, feeling their velvet slippers grow thinner and wetter as they walked on the dust of the footpath soaked with blood and Coca-Cola, sighing, they crossed Florencia Street, until they turned onto Génova and headed toward the modest one-story residence that belonged to General Rigoberto Palomar, which was protected by the kind of iron gate found on garages, which might make the uncertain visitor confuse the house where Angel my father grew up with a vulgar shop.

The dawn negated the death of the Mexican vespers.

The morning light blazed like a pearl in a pigsty.

The air of the tree-covered mountains and the snow-covered volcanoes whisked away the layer of dust, along with the smell of blood and garbage. But soon the crystal would break again; the mask of sickness would reappear.

Capitolina and Farnesia approached the door of the general’s house. General Palomar opened the door before they made even the slightest attempt to enter or knock. The old man had put on his belt, strapped his.45 around his waist, and clapped his red liberty cap on his shaved head.

Capitolina said: “We want to see the girl.”

“What girl?”

“You know, the one amorously linked with our nephew.”

“Does she have a name, so far as you vultures know?”

“Angeles, someone said it was.”

“Well, and what do you spinsters want to find out?”

“Nothing, General, merely to ascertain the degree of her pregnancy.”

“We have only come to say hello and then we’ll be on our way,” said Farnesia, taking note of the murderous light in my great-granddaddy’s eyes.

“We have come for her,” declared Capitolina, “so that she may deliver the child properly and so that the new member of our family may come into the world protected, loved, and in a Christian cradle.”

“Are you saying that the devil would get him here?” Don Rigoberto laughed quietly.

“Well, that’s what my little sister and I fear most.”

“You’d turn him into a holy little hypocrite of a pharisee son of a bitch like you two…”

“Sticks and stones, General, sticks and stones!” Capitolina shrugged her shoulders. “Humph!” chimed in Farnesia.

“And in the process you’d have yourselves named heirs of the heir, the Palomar fortune would come to you, you pair of grave robbers.”

“Our considerations are of a purely moral nature!” Capitolina shook her finger directly into the general’s nose. Farnesia, who had eaten an extremely early breakfast in order to fortify herself for the day’s vicissitudes, tried to copy her sister but gave up when she realized that on her finger there glistened a few drops of rich blackberry jam, so she quickly licked her finger instead.

“Moral my ball bearings!” shouted the general, but just then there appeared behind him, her shoulders trembling with cold, his wife, Doña Susana Rentería.

“Tell them the truth,” said Great-grandmother Palomar serenely.

“You tell them.”

“Angeles disappeared yesterday in the riot.”

“You’re hiding her from us!” Capitolina managed to shout before the general slammed the door in their faces. Farnesia, standing on the sidewalk, burst into laughter, a laughter that did not seem to be caused by the events but rather by the absence of any cause, a distant torment, a foreseeable humiliation, as if the immediate cause, the disappearance of my mother Angeles with me (quite frightened, I might add, your mercies), meant absolutely nothing to her.

Capitolina silenced her with a slap in the face: “Sniveling fool.”

The elder sister turned her face toward the Paseo de la Reforma, and the younger, shocked, ran after her, wrapped in her shawl, laughingly observing that the destiny of an unmarried woman is to be a leader of monkeys in hell.

“A tour guide for monkeys!”

Both thought the same thing; both felt (I shall feel, I shall know when I feel, I shall feel when I know, I shall know) the immense pain of the lost child (that’s why I feel and know: all of us fetuses are like the Corsican brothers for all those who have been born or who are about to be born): the lost child, one more, again without a child, women alone, empty houses, lost children.

They took each other by the hand and felt like dying.

Where can my child be, with his bracelet around his ankle? whimpered Farnesia.

Where can the child about to be born be? sighed Capitolina.

Where can I be?

9. The din of the loudspeakers

The din of the loudspeakers was only made worse by the lugubrious silence that weighed on the city that September 1, 1992. Buoyed up by the acclamations of Congress, President Jesús María y José Paredes stood at the tribune of the National Assembly and released these messenger pigeons — or were they doves of light? — one after another:

The threats to the nation had been extinguished; the obstacles to Mexican progress had been overcome; the extremist riot had been violently repressed because it was born of violence; but the heroic actions of the police, whom we salute here and now (ovation; Colonel Inclán stands at attention, does not smile, is wearing his black glasses, the green spittle runs down his chin; he sits stiffly down), protected us from having to surrender our civil government to the armed forces: neither anarchy nor tyranny, only Mexico! Her institutions saved! Her revolution permanent! Neither order without liberty nor liberty without order, neither progress without tradition nor tradition without progress, neither justice without authority nor authority without justice! exclaimed our Chuchema at the climax of what was in effect a chiasmic delirium in Mexican politics, and he exclaimed it so loud over all the loudspeakers of the Mexican Republic (or what’s left of it) that even I, within the maternal womb, heard it: Let us honor Colonel Nemesio Inclán (second ovation; this time the man in black glasses, either modest or annoyed, who knows? doesn’t even stand up), who subordinated his personal ambition to the triumph of institutional order; glory to the Lady, Mother, and Doctor (she is not present; she is looking at herself in the mirror; she only shows herself to give the cry, to proclaim a contest; she neither steals nor shares the show: she, the Lady Pharaoh, works alone!), who held on high the symbols of the nation threatened by chaotic licentiousness disguised as freedom for the majority which so crudely sought to wrest from the Mexican people their own symbols, conquered with so much difficulty over five centuries of national experience. President Paredes, after excoriating the duped and criminal anarchists, topped off his speech by assuring one and all that the time for reconciliation and unity had come. He admitted that the nation had been threatened; he revealed to the astonished nation that since last January the United States Military Command (Caribbean) had asked permission to land twenty thousand Marines at Veracruz to carry out maneuvers that would put pressure on the totalitarian tyrants of Costaguana and protect the oil refineries of the Chitacam Trusteeship, threatened like mere dominos by the red tide but essential to the strategic health of the free world. Permission was granted in accordance with the prior commitments of Mexico within the Modified and Reaffirmed Inter-American Rio Treaty (MORE-RIOT), but when the time allotted for the maneuvers had passed, the twenty thousand Marines had refused to withdraw from the state of Veracruz, saying that they’d never actually been there since not a single one of them had remained longer than 175 days in Mexico, and that they would, according to the treaty, have to be there for a minimum of 180 days in order to be considered fully transferred from their home base in Honduras. How could the Marines pull out if, legally, they had never arrived: rotated, transferred quickly to the neighboring Republic of Shadows, relieved by replacements who in turn never remained the full 180 days. There were twenty thousand Marines in Mexico, but there were not twenty thousand Marines in Mexico: what were we going to do? And those nonexistent Marines had already advanced to Perote and scattered in the mountains, and even though President Rambolt Ranger had assured President Jesús María y José Paredes (with whom he maintains a most cordial relationship) over the red hot-line telephone that the Marines are on their own, not under orders from Washington, motivated exclusively by their autonomous decision to defend democracy wherever and however they can, it is also true that the U.S. President does not want to disavow them publicly as long as they are objectively serving the interests of the United States and the will-to-greatness of the people of the United States, and President Paredes is announcing today to the Congress that, despite all, it is incumbent on Mexico to expel those troops, which are, after all, an invasion force, to which end it is essential that the national unity be renewed, and what better example than the one proposed by the President in this moment in which all of us (even me in my ultrasonic and impermeable cabin) are listening: this is no time for selfish party politics, we must all militate in one single party, the Party of Mexico!!

“Which one, Mr. President, which one?” Peregrino Ponce y Peón, Senator from Yucatango, dared to shout, interrupting the executive’s discourse.

“Don’t torture us any more, Mr. President, tell us which party it will be,” said Doña Virginia Iris de Montoya, deputy from Tamaleón who also represented the union of actors.

To which, deeply moved, the President answered as the entire nation fell into a collective hush: “I have always been, I am now and I shall always be, even when I have said the contrary, a faithful militant in the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI).”

The legislative body of the nation leapt to its feet, cheering the President in his moment of glory; they drown out his final words, the PRI, the only party, the only power, with which, out of patriotic zeal, all other lesser parties should fuse. That is what we hoped for from you, shouts Hipólito Zea, deputy for the ninth district of Chihuahuila, standing tall, thank you for showing us the way, Mr. President, shouts the peasant leader Xavier Coruera y Braniff, we are with you to the death, Mr. President, long live Mexico, long live the PRI!!!

* * *

Minister Federico Robles Chacón lowers the volume on his VCR when the applause explodes. Night has fallen, and he has reviewed the President’s speech for the thousandth time, he has estimated its effect, he savors the defeat of the pro-Yankee faction headed by Ulises López. Now the magnanimous minister can receive the Pasionaria of the defeated movement, the lover of the frustrated Mexican Ayatollah:

“Send in Madam Toro,” he says to his tuxedo-clad toady.

Yes, Matamoros Moreno is dead, Robles Chacón brutally informs the woman, who walked in dressed as if for a Ramón Pereda movie, circa 1945: a strapless evening gown with red sequins over strawberry satin and in her hair — especially black and massive, thanks to a stuffing of store-bought hair — quetzal-feather aigrettes. Mesh stockings and supremely pointed, rose-colored velvet shoes with stiletto heels complete the outfit.

Yes, Matamoros Moreno is dead: Robles wants to get this off his chest and erase all illusions, all hope. What he doesn’t explain is that he tried to save the Ayatollah’s life but that Colonel Inclán demanded it: he demanded nothing else, just as Juárez had demanded the death of Maximilian despite Victor Hugo’s plea, that’s what he said the colonel did in order to save the nation and deliver a definitive message to the mob, the idea here is to cut off a few heads so they don’t cut yours off, he said, with his eyes veiled by his black Pinochet-Huerta glasses, with his mouth dripping green slime. But after a few seconds of silence she merely chants “Baby Love.” It was a political crime, declares Robles, who tonight wants to be totally sincere in order to be able to look himself in the eye tomorrow. The feathers hide Concha Toro’s face, her head hangs down, lost love, because, madam, it was the response to another political crime, her feathers hang so low that the quetzal tail threatens to blend with the false eighteenth-century quill pen set in the bronze desk set on the secretary’s escritoire. That’s why it was a legal crime, long live pleasure, long live love (sings Concha née María Inez, her head hung low), because the country has already suffered enough from natural causes and acts of God for it to have to suffer a political, anarchic, bloody torment, oh love, if you could see how desperate I am because you aren’t here with me, an earthquake can’t be stopped, oh! but a revolution can.

“I am not going to tell you that I’m sorry.”

“Can it be true that sin has its price…”

“Excuse me?”

“How high a price I’m paying for loving you…”

Concha Toro sang with the melancholy voice of those who sing unaccompanied, thereby doubling their solitude.

“Madam, please…”

“Leave me, sir.” She hung her head even lower. “I must pay my tribute to my man now; in the moment in which I find out his fate. This is my requiem for my man, a little song, now, okay…”

“I would prefer you learn the truth from me personally.”

“And I thank you for it. You should hear the lies people are telling!”

“Why are you singing here in my office?” he asked in his rational way, his arms crossed, devoid of the elegance of intuition.

“Ay, señor, do you want me to sing at his grave, when the government isn’t going to give me back my sweetheart? Don’t you think I know it, damn it all!”

Robles refused to feel anything. He asked her if there was anything he could do for her. It went without saying that she had been granted a full pardon, the government was magnanimous and understood that she had only followed him out of love, and she might also ask for anything she might want.

“Except Matamoros’s body.”

“It’s very strange,” said Concha Toro after a moment. “When I found out that my man would never be coming back, I began to dream, I dreamed about a wild bull in a ranch down in my part of the world, in Maule, I saw him running in the fields and then suddenly fall down wounded, can you imagine that? How silly wounded and castrated by the wind from the mountains, the wind slicing up my bull, the wind like a knife and a meat hook turning my bull into steaks. And you know what happened then?”

Robles looked at her courteously.

“I felt real nostalgia for Chile. It hit me in the face, right during that dream of horror and the blood of that night, an aroma of plum trees in bloom and lilacs and the salty coast and rivers flowing into the sea with a wreath of kelp. Sir, I want to go back to Chile, that’s what I want!”

She looked at him with languid, liquid eyes. “Please, sir, send me back to Chile!”

“It’s impossible.”

Robles did not lower his eyes.

“But it’s that…”

“Madam: there is no Chile.”

Robles forced himself to go on telling the truth without circumlocutions. It was a sure method, without complications; on him there could be fixed an entire symbology; symbols don’t grow on symbols, symbols only grow over realities, the sage statesman reminded himself. The painful silence of the Chilean singer had the liquid eloquence of her big gray sad eyes, where there was room for all the rain of Temuco.

“Sir,” said Concha after another long pause (Robles Chacón was armed with patience: he only wished someone else had shown it before making a show of power), “we Chileans are big globetrotters, but at the end of our lives we always come back to Chile, don’t tell me any more of your cruel stories, sir, I’m begging you, have a heart…”

“I’ll tell you again, madam: Chile no longer exists.”

“But the tortures … the house of the bells … Pinochet in power until 1999…”

“Tales made up to make people think nothing changes. I’m sorry.”

“What happened to my country, sir?”

“What do you think happened? A horrible earthquake, the Pacific fault. All of Chile sank into the sea. The whole country, from the mountains to the sea. From La Serena to Cape Horn. It wasn’t anyone’s fault: like a sugar cube, Chile dissolved in the sea.”

“What about the desert up north?”

“Peru and Bolivia split it between them.”

“Well then, I can go to the desert!”

“The Peruvian Army shoots all the deluded Chileans who disembark in Arica or Antofagasta. Don’t delude yourself, madam, really.”

“Always the Army! Always the Peruvians! Shit! Grant me another favor, then. Please, where is he? Let me bury him? Take care of his grave, sir? At least make that one exception?”

“We cannot tolerate the existence of a site for pilgrims to gather. Are you going to celebrate his death year after year by visiting his grave? You can understand that…”

He did not finish his sentence, but his gesture was definitive. Concha Toro in that instant must have remembered every pose, every fatal gesture of every femme fatale that ever appeared on the silver screen.

“All right.” She pushed her aigrette back with as much style as Marlene Dietrich when she played a spy standing in front of the firing squad. “Don’t give me anything but the truth, Mr. Minister. Tell me if my man triumphed or failed.”

Robles Chacón knew the answer, but he preferred to leave Concha Toro with a margin of doubt. “That wasn’t his problem, madam. He neither triumphed nor failed. He had a destiny. That is, he triumphed and failed at the same time.”

“Ah.” Concha’s eyes shone. “That’s good. We all learn something. I’ll remember that, what you’ve just said.”

“That’s fine,” the minister answered, not yielding anything, but impatient.

“I” (she mixed haughtiness and tears in a strange way) (she mixed the affirmative tone of her voice with a broken, soul-wrenching cry) “also learned something. Your country, too, Mr. Minister, was also swallowed up by the sea. Mexico doesn’t exist any longer either. It has no future. There will be no progress. It’ll be screwed up until eternity. You can’t accept that. Screwed up for all time. You don’t want to accept that. You cover it up. My man made you see the truth. That’s why you killed him.”

“That’s your opinion,” said Robles. He bowed before her and gestured to the toady at the door to show the lady out.

Concha Toro walked down the staircase of honor in the ancient viceregal palace of New Spain, which had been built on the ruins of the Emperor Moctezuma’s palace: the rulers in that palace now were the de facto triumvirate: President Paredes, Colonel Inclán, and Federico Robles Chacón, who stared blindly at Diego Rivera’s murals celebrating Mexico’s national glory. Tonight the epic was coming to a close, and in its place, for Concha Toro, there was only a broken heart and some coral lips singing to an absent man I swear to you enchanter love, little love, lost love, that I shall never forget you …

No more epics, the last epic: Rivera’s murals would be sold a few days later to the Chase Manhattan Bank in partial payment for interest due, and then transported, yard by epic yard, to Rockefeller Center, where they’d been expected for more than half a century.

Galvarina, Concha, Dolly, María Inez put on her lipstick, took off her uncomfortable stiletto-heel shoes, and walked out barefoot between two files of soldiers, thinking (it’s you who communicate this news to me, Reader) about her reopening debut at the Simon Bully Bar, timed so that this faggot Giuseppe Birthday in the Guadala Harry’s Bar wouldn’t beat her to the punch, mentally choosing her numbers and telling herself how that frog Ada Ching would really turn green if she could see me now, alive and kicking and getting ready for a new season! Life is a cabaret!

10. Like the plague entering the village

Like the plague entering the village mounted on the bony spine of a serpent: that’s how I felt in my eighth month of gestation, carried away, tossed in the air, victimized by this original and intolerable fact: for the first time, Reader, I feel I’m being taken somewhere I don’t want to go, and this feeling opens my eyes to another fact which until now I was unaware of: I am afraid of not being what my genetic plan has determined for me and instead being determined by outside forces, all those phenomena that my intelligence (private, interior) has been observing (with the urge to communicate them to your worship the reader; even though you, too, are outside, you lack, perhaps for that very reason, the perspective I give you) and taking note of (out of the pants-wetting fear that I have that I am going to forget all this the moment I am born and that I’ll have to spend the rest of my life remembering and relearning what I once knew), all these exterior details separate from my own self (I count on you to remember what I’ll forget on being born, please, Reader, course and recourse with me!), all that circumstance (that famous pair: Ortega und Gasset), all that setting, take me over, nullify my will and my intelligence. Here inside, tell me things that gratify me immensely: for example, that the only source of my innate structure is my genetic information; that no matter how far back I go, I shall never find another source of what I am except that information; that my genes configure me:

100yes, but within, always from within, always thanks to the previous genetic constellation: no, I say to myself now that I’m bouncing around in these boondocks, the garbage (I smell it, by God, that’s all there is here: rubbish, decomposition, mountains of garbage, an implacable circle of garbage, a chain of garbage, linked by a network of plastic and rags), only today, only here, I swear to your mercedes that this horrifying doubt has presented itself to me:

If I’m not the son of my genes, then must I be the (bastard) son of the environment? my heritage, instead of being the one I know within, might not my heritage be the one I do not know, outside? What a hungry fear!

Eight months after my conception, my little body is a model of

equi …………………………………. librium

ex ………………………………………. libris

I feel how my body responds, adapts itself to the changes out there: from the waters of the Pacific Ocean that washed us when I had barely been conceived and baptized in shit to the sweet tranquillity of my great-grandparents’ home, I’ve adapted to everything, even to the worst: the journey through the Guerrero mountains, the carnal attack of that scoundrel Matamoros, even the murky whirlwind of El Niño wasn’t able to interfere decisively with my slow but certain development!

But now, Reader, now I feel for the first time that I’m being deprived of everything necessary for life; now the air, water, earth, voices (corrupted sound) have conspired in an alliance of insults, and I cannot adapt myself to that. Something’s going on here that seems to have been preestablished so that I can’t breathe, digest, see, hear, or speak: the insult is way out of proportion! My genes have determined (I know it for a fact!) that I will have chestnut eyes and that I will walk upright, but now that we’ve reached the place they’ve brought us to (you see that I include you in my story, Mom), I think that can change, too: we’re surrounded by a death sentence, or at the very least an accident sentence, or a defect sentence, sentences so implacable, so fearsome that I would like to scream from the solar center of my gestation: CUT ME LOOSE FROM THE D. F.! I’m going to walk upright and have brown eyes! I’m going to breathe and drink and shit and screw and hear like a normal person!

The environment is not going to kill me, my genes are going to be more powerful than this vile concatenation of garbage!

I think my mother must be having the same thoughts, except that her fear is greater than mine: we’ve been taken from the grandparents’ house, supposedly because of the days of violence, by this so-called Hipi Toltec, who has promised to bring us to a safe place where my father Angel — conciliatory, loving, and, above all, alive — is waiting for us; but as we make our way, we are surrounded by everything but security, and if I can identify and tolerate the violence of the times we’re living through, I already know that all history is ephemeral.

FLYING DOWN TO VICO!

(A mental flash from Mamma Mia’s roof: even the passage of History is a passing thing: there is more time without time and more history without history than avec: time before time: not time, time that doesn’t know it’s time, time incapable of imagining itself, history that isn’t even prehistory because it doesn’t conceive history: death of what precedes us in the absolute origin; why not then, thinks Angel, the death of a future without us; she rebels and desires my father, desires his company, his being with her, my padre mío.)

Hipi, on the other hand, brings us to a place of violence (of permanent history: is this hell? So burning hot, dry, stinking, beyond redemption, eternal, as eternal as paradise?). (My God, sighs my mother Angeles, when will you forgive the devil so that all this can come to an end. Let Lucifer ascend to your place so that your authentic grace shines forth: God has forgiven the Fallen Angel! Hallelujah, hallelujah: there is no more temptation, fear, or doubt about divine goodness; we all know it now because Lucifer appears seated at the right hand of the Lord; so don’t we all believe because seeing is believing? Is it the case that we don’t have faith because we have certitude? Is there faith only when we know it is true because it is impossible?)

FARE FEAR STARVING STRIVING

I was saying that even she, Angeles my mother, with her bare feet sunk in a corrupt mud (she’d abandoned her black low-heeled pregnant woman’s sandals in a puddle of dying grass and liquid shit), is beginning to wonder, here, in the misery belt, whether the environment can force the genes to change me into another individual unforeseen in my DNA: something innate and even comforting tells me I shouldn’t regard my genetic inheritance and my environment as enemies but as allies that divide up the work and that mutually support each other: the nature of nature consists in never working alone; nature and all things that nurture it act within previously established limits; but this nature of the Mexican city, this città dolente, has gone way out of proportion:

QUASIMODO CITY

SAMSAVILLE

HUITZILOPOCHTLIBURG

a misshapen and bloody cockroach, I receive you like the eucharist this violent morning, sacrament of dying, plague communion: I haven’t been born yet and you already threaten to transform me: I’ll be a scientific exhibit, numbered and classified, like the Mexican salamander: under different conditions, I’ll take on different forms; if I had remained in the waters of Kafkapulco forever, I would have developed scales and gills and a tail for swimming; what will I develop if I stay in this neighborhood of garbage and thieves, this cemetery for automobiles where Hipi Toltec has brought us after the night of the Ayatollah, claiming that my father had sent him to get us? Will I be like the Orphan Huerta, rubber feet, leather soles, the Little Rascals, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit of D.F., Eddypoe, Eddyfuss?

My class intelligence, genetically uncertain, rebels against all this: I am not now nor have I ever been a plebe, a lumpen, or a vulgar swine: I am Don Christopher the Classy, you might as well know it here and now, your Mercedes-Benz, no matter who it hurts, and now I remember a smell, I recall a sound, we’ve left the sick air in order to enter the sickness of the air, what a misty jail, how close the zinc ceilings are and the cement water tubs, burning and hostile like a bath in lava, how close we are to a ravine in the garbage belt that surrounds the city, what a mass of people there, people who are invisible but who are kissed, spoken to, and greeted by Hipi:

“Ne netilztli!”

“Xocoyotzin!”

“Ollohiuhqui, ollohiuhqui!”

“Cíhuatl!” Hipi points to my mother.

“Xocoyotzin, ixcluintli!” An old man points to my mom’s belly, to me!

“Toci, toci.” Hipi points to my mother and then points to himself.

They speak a bit more, and then Hipi tells us that his family is happy he’s gotten married and that very soon he will have his first child. Amid so much misery and slaughter, they are happy to see that life goes on. Welcome to the wife and soon-to-be-born son of our young pup Xipe!

The old folks offer us their house along with all the electric appliances Hipi has been bringing them over the years: let the offerings be ours, translates the flayed boy. He asks my mother to sit down near the old folks, between the smoke and the stench, and to make ourselves comfortable, because we will be staying here until the child is born.

“Ixcluintli, ixcluintli,” the old folks say, announcing our evening meal, raw, smoky dog — without hair.

“We greet the young son of the gods who is about to be born.”

Take note, your mercies, take careful note, dear Readers: these oldsters are referring to ME when they say these things, THEY REFER TO ME! Just think how frightened I am, trapped you know where, consulting my genetic chain like a madman to see if something was condemning me to be born in a hut belonging to some tipsy Aztecs and to incarnate, who knows? the sun, sacrifice, and who knows what the fuck else! NOTHING, Readers, exactly NOTHING. If a kind of proto-Quetzalcoatl is going to be born in this miserable hut, it isn’t going to be me, maybe my fraternal twin, born from my mother at the same time as I will be but formed from an egg different from mine, fertilized by another sperm than the one I call my own: ladies and gentlemen, I feel around in the fetal night that surrounds me to see if this fraternal twin, dizzygothic (gothic and dizzy!), is within reach, coexisting near me in the womb of Doña Angeles Palomar my mother, and if it’s that way, just understand, because of what might happen later, that this dizzygothic twin was not created by the same father who created me, that we inhabit different placentas and that the only thing we share is the same time within Mom’s womb: only that, nothing more, not paternal origin, not destiny in the world, he is not the OTHER CHRISTOPHER, in any case he’s probably the other Hipi Toltec, and good luck to him: so keep your eyes open, gentle Readers: listen to what I say, watch out for my face, my gestures, my words: we’ve been getting to know each other now over hundreds of pages, don’t fail me now, in the moment of truth, of Baby Ruth, of the Bambino! Anagnorisis is what it’s called: recognize me, it all depends on you, so when Hipi and his paleototonacs come to claim me: I am Christopher Palomar, not the (bastard) Son of the Gods!

11. No sooner had Grandfather Rigoberto Palomar

No sooner had Grandfather Rigoberto Palomar slammed the door in the faces of the Fagoaga sisters than his spirits began to soar: he turned to face his wife, Doña Susana Rentería, leaned against the door, closed his eyes, and tilted his aged head back.

“Su, dearest Su,” said the old man, with his eyes closed.

“What is it, Rigo? Here I am.”

He opened his eyes, kissed his wife passionately, and smiled as he stepped back. “Do you remember when your father handed you over to me and you were a little girl and I’d tuck you in every night?”

“And you were thirty, but you liked being called ‘old fellow’ by a girl because in those days all the young men wanted to look old so people would take them seriously. You were such a young soldier.”

“Things go in circles! It’s the same now. Look: Angel and Angeles dress the way you and I did when we were young.”

“Fashions that come to us from the North,” said Doña Susana Rentería. “Don’t pay any attention to it. Twenty years ago — remember? — everybody wanted to look like a teenager.”

“Ah, those barbarians to the North!”

They laughed at all this, looking tenderly at one another. After a moment, she took him in her arms.

“Did you hear the President?” Don Rigo asked her. “We have to fight again. Of course, nothing is perfect, Su, and I’ll tell you again that I’m not mistaken. It doesn’t matter to me that Mexico is all fucked up, but what does matter to me is that Mexico exists. We shouldn’t give up on the country just because it’s in a bad period. To reform a country you have to have a country. I know people think I’m crazy, but just tell me if you and I could have had a better life than being taken for lunatics by everyone and only being crazy on a single point, which I chose, while being sane on all the rest. If I weren’t insane about the Revolution, they wouldn’t let me be sane about the rest, namely the love I have for you, and the skill with which I manage my affairs, and how well I know how to use my leisure time and have friends. It’s a concession, sweetie.”

“I understand you, old boy. Nothing is perfect.”

“Su: when I was a boy, there was nothing here but a little boastful elite and the mass of peons. I’m right; we didn’t fail, my madness is reasonable. What had to be done was done; this country had no roads, no dams, no telephones, no schools, no industry, no freedom of movement. All that we accomplished. You say that nothing is perfect. Ask those who came after us why they were so irresponsible with what we created, those who worked from 1915 to 1940, when I was young and you a little girl. Anyway, the problem with a revolution is not to betray it. It’s not going through with it for fear of betraying it.”

“What are you trying to tell me, old man?”

“Susy. Once again, I have a mission in life. I don’t have to lie to myself and say that the Revolution is not over. You heard the President. The Yankees have invaded us! We have to defend the fatherland!”

“Let me remind you of a mission a bit closer to home. Our granddaughter has been kidnapped. Along with our unborn great-grandson.”

“What do you think I should do, Susana Rentería?”

“General: delegate and give orders. You’re too old for these fracases. You’re over ninety. Behave like a commander-in-chief.”

“I thank you for your wisdom, Su. What orders should I give?”

“Egg knows where this Hipiteca person, the boy with the peeling skin, lives. Angel should rescue his wife. And if he doesn’t, well, then he should owe the favor to his friend. That first. Then you can order Angel to fight in Veracruz and redeem himself for all the idiotic things he’s done. Get your priorities straight, General.”

“How talented you’ve always been, my dear girl!”

But all their attempts to find Angel were useless. Don Fernando Benítez was incommunicado, out with the Huicholes, taking a bath in the Golden Age. The Simon Bully Bar was closed, and no one knew where Concha Toro or her dog Fango Dango was. The piano player and barman in the new club that had opened across the street, Giuseppe Birthday, said that he was new in the neighborhood, that he knew nothing about any Chilean woman, and that he hoped the general and his wife would have a libation in his new bar the Lady of the Camels: Quench Your Thirst Here. The López mansion had been looted and its inhabitants (Ulises and Lucha) murdered, although the girl (Penny) wanders around the U.S.A.-shaped pool tossing in sunflower petals and muttering:

“You can look but you can’t touch. You’re ugly and a plebe. If it’s Thursday, this must be Philadelphia.”

Dear Readers:

Only my genes, the current seat of my intelligence, can assure you that my vision, activated perhaps by a dream or one of my mother’s desires (I dream of you without wanting to, Angel, I desire you without dreaming of you, without knowing why. You receive the seed from both of us, my son, dream and desire, my son), is capable of dreaming of desiring and of seeing my father in this particular instant: I cling to that intelligence, which, after all, I inherited from him and her and not from the stinking environment where I’m suffocating in this shack that belongs to Hipi Toltec’s family. (One hundred genes determine intelligence! superior intelligence dominates inferior intelligence! eighty percent of the differences between individuals are genetic! neither race nor country of origin nor social class nor climate nor pollution: intelligence is what counts.)

I mean that I feel sure of my genes, you see, and my genes feel sure of me. This mutual confidence allows us to see what others only imagine: by illuminating my genes, I see my father from the kidnapped belly of my mother:

On the highway out of the black hole called Mexico, D.F.cation. My father and Colasa Sánchez look from Paso de Cortés, where the Van Gogh gave up the ghost, out of gas, sick, deaf (the other loudspeaker fell off). They look toward the swamp of toxic waste and contaminated water. Angel realizes that for her all this is normal. The city under the persistent acid rain is not something different. But culture and nostalgia have set my father apart. But she doesn’t know that the city is the cramped waiting room of eternity. Perhaps she doesn’t even know that her father is dead. My father feels remorse for having abandoned us, although his feeling grows weaker when he looks at the external city (the extreme city) and its distant rumbles of hunger, crime, and violence: the persistent dripping that he cannot locate continues to pursue him; she is pursued by her own vulnerability: she’s run after this young man — my father — since she was eleven years old, she obeyed the homicidal orders of her father Matamoros Moreno, she owns the only vagina dentata in America the Toothyful, and nevertheless here they are, the two of them, chilled to the bone this early September night, looking at the city’s deceptive lights from the Paso de Cortés. He slips his jacket over her shoulders, protects her, accepts her, and the two of them feel that being a loving couple is more difficult but also more important than having no ties. Angel covers and protects Colasa because he remembers my abandoned mother (and perhaps me!) and he feels guilty. But Colasa doesn’t know this and accepts Angel’s tenderness with a little shudder of pleasure that is also not without its tinge of guilt. She wanted to kill this man she desires. She’s loved and hated him since she was a girl, when she set herself up in a striker’s tent outside his door on Calle Génova. Today, on this cold, sad night up on the heights, she is going to have to decide. If she gives herself to him, she destroys him with her teeth. If she doesn’t give herself to him, she will have to sustain love in some other way, without physical contact, and she doesn’t know how that can be done, but she fears that he does know and that he’ll go back to Angeles and keep her as a mascot. What problems I make for myself! Colasita exclaims, hugged, protected by my father, covered by my father’s 1920s-style jacket this cold night in the mountains, but she doesn’t have time to express her doubts or make decisions, and for one reason alone: this city of death should, despite everything, live. The fog lifts suddenly and the caravan of lights blinds the night: it’s the armada of long-haul trucks that travel in the darkness to fill thirty million bellies in Mexico City. They enter the city with their ephemeral cornucopia of fruits and vegetables, meats and cheeses and chickens and lobsters and fowl and oysters and beer, but Angel Palomar and Colasa Sánchez want to flee from the city. To flee because he feels guilty, overwhelmed, no compass, his reasons forever scattered (he tells Colasa: I’ve lost my reasons, understand? and she says no, that she doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but it doesn’t matter because it’s so nice being together, the two of them, keep talking, keep talking. Once I went to Oaxaca and I found my reasons; maybe I ought to go back; in any case, I ought to get out of here, I wanted to confront Mexican society and Mexican society defeated me; and do you know how, Colasa? by not paying me any attention, Colasa! And she: But you talk so pretty, gosh), and all the trucks entering the city: only one is leaving, going in the opposite direction. They are doubly blinded by the clash of lights, like blind men fencing, the beams of light from the powerful headlamps of the trucks crossing each other and Colasa squirming free of the arm of my protective father, Colasa always excessive and impetuous in the middle of the highway exposing herself to death, my father shouting to her from the shoulder of the road, Colasa, be careful, you’re crazy! and the enormous wheels of the only truck abandoning the city, an eighteen-wheel Leyland, fourteen feet high, with a revolving light on its roof, brakes to a screeching halt in front of the small figure still dressed as a Discalced Carmelite.

“What the hell was that! I can’t see a thing! I almost killed you, you idiot!”

The driver’s voice screams from the truck, he leans out a face that looks like a made-up clown; it’s a white skull wearing enormous black glasses. Irritated, he takes off his baseball cap and shows his hair, which has no color, not even white.

“Help, help a poor devout girl, show mercy, sir, says the clown Colasita Sánchez, kneeling before the albino driver, the girl bathed in scales of mercury, and the driver opens the door, helps her to her feet, while she points to my father: “And my friend, too. Won’t you give us a ride? Jesus, Patron of the Needy, will love you for it!”

12. Inside the border checkpoint

Inside the border checkpoint between Mexamerica North and Baja Oklahoma, the immigration agent, Mazzo Balls, stares attentively at the infrared screen that detects heat from human bodies. Tonight the screen is blank. No heat waves activate the detection device and none shows up as a ghost-like image on the screen. Nevertheless, Mazzo Balls’s sixth sense tells him that there are ghosts crossing the forbidden frontier tonight, just as there are every night. The exception does not prove the rule — a maxim they taught him in his training course for interdicting illegal aliens. The invasion from the South is constant, unstoppable, a flood. It takes place at all hours.

Tonight would be the first night in his entire three-year tour of duty (a solitary posting in this no-man’s-land out on the Texas plains) in which he would not detect at least one Mexican, Honduran, or Salvadoran trying to sneak into Baja Oklahoma, not happy with the nice reception arranged for him in Mexamerica, that version of the Polish Corridor between Mexico and the United States, which supposedly declared itself independent from both countries, although in reality it served the interests of both, absorbing eighty percent of the illegal aliens that used to sneak into Texas, California, the Midwest, and the Great Lakes states …

Agent Mazzo Balls was the most zealous enforcer of the final version of the Simpson — Nobody law, which, in exchange for metaphysical control over the U.S. frontier, sanctioned fines and prison terms for employers of illegals. Foreseeably, this punishment was applied indiscriminately to anyone who employed dark-skinned workers, whether they were U.S. citizens or not, and ended up (also foreseeably) forcing every traveler to carry first an identity card, then a passport, and finally being able to move only within hermetically sealed zones — just like South Africa. Blocking the entrance and employment of Latin American laborers into the United States not only heightened the social crisis in Mexico and Central America but brought about the collapse of the labor market in the United States. The absence of Hispanic workers in hospitals, restaurants, transportation, farming, and manufacturing left a horrible vacuum which, contrary to the laws of physics and the baroque (noted our Uncle Fernando Benítez with a bitter smile), was not filled by anyone: no one wanted those jobs, but everyone had to take a step down as far as getting loans, good salaries, and jobs was concerned, in order to disguise the labor shortage.

All this (Don Fernando would have wanted to warn the city and the world) had to contribute to pauperization and the current disintegration of the States in the Union, with no one winning anything: how could Uncle Fernando explain all this to the pair of blind young Indians who one day turned up at the house of the blackboards on the way to their chimerical goal: Chicago, the city of the big shoulders, far from the fatality of poverty, sickness, and tradition, breaking the circle of their age-old destiny. Don Fernando foresaw a catastrophe for the young couple (the girl, remember, your mercies, made pregnant at the same time as my mother, she bearing a baby who would be my contemporary, olé!).

* * *

Now I foresee: the day we meet Uncle Fernando again, he will tell us what probably happened: Mazzo Balls cannot believe that the greasers have skipped a night in their attempt to slip through the rat trap, which is emblazoned with a huge sign in Gothic letters:

VOTE WITH YOUR FEET

and just to give himself the satisfaction, he orders the service helicopter to take a look and see if there aren’t any illegals crossing the border. It’d be a miracle! A peaceful night! Silent night, holy night! hums Mazzo Balls, his Miller Lite in one hand, his unlit Marlboro dangling from his lips, his feet perched on the console, and his favorite TV program on: The Forsyte Saga. The series transports him to another era, like a fairy tale: how Mazzo would have liked living in Edwardian England, with butlers, kitchen boys, and parlor maids running up- and downstairs all day long!

But it wouldn’t be tonight: the helicopter takes off and the pilot radios an urgent call to Mazzo Balls, listen, shithead, did your detector break down on you? What made you think there weren’t any Spies? I put on my night-vision glasses, the ones activated by moonlight, and I hope you realize that it’s a clear, starry night, and I’m following two, a man and a woman, I’ll describe them to you since your fucked-up screen can’t pick them up: the two of them are wearing straw hats, white outfits, all ragged, both barefoot, the miserable rats, they’re carrying something that looks like a supermarket bag, or it might be a shoulder bag, hanging down on one side, they’re staggering as if they’re drunk, scratched up by the wires, as if they don’t see them, do you hear me, Mazzo? It’s the first time in my life that I turned these searchlights on greasers and they don’t automatically look up or get scared shitless when they see me with my black mask on and my robot eyes, they think I’m Darth Vader, hahaha, dazzled or covering their eyes with one arm, listen, fat man, this time we’re going to arrest them, right? What do you say, jerk-off? And Mazzo Balls flushed with rage and shame and said into the microphone no, you know that it isn’t worth the trouble to arrest them, and we don’t have the funds to pay for the gas to send them to Norman, but we do have funds to pay for the gas in this stupid chopper? asked the pilot. That’s right, answered Mazzo, that’s the way the funds are distributed, you have gas, you get the good part, stop complaining, the highway patrol doesn’t have a cent. Well, I’m a son of a bitch if I don’t feel like giving away my gasoline so we can capture this pair of savages, you should see them, Mazzo, they look like Powhatan and Pocahontas or something like that, we would have wiped them out around here years ago, savages, barefoot, they don’t seem to see me, Mazzo, but they sure do hear me, she’s got her hands over her ears, and he’s waving his arms around as if he were scaring off a horsefly or a swarm of bees, listen, Mazzo, check it out, he thinks I’m a bee, hahaha, buzzbuzzbuzz, how did that song about the flight of the bumblebee go? an old radio program used it as its theme song, buzzbuzzybuzz, hahaha, I’m gonna drop down and really scare ’em, they don’t seem to see me, these stupid Indians, but they know I’m here, uh-oh, her ripped skirt’s blowing up, Jesus, she’s knocked up, the slut, they can’t stop screwing and having kids, these pigs, the woman’s disgusting, she must be eight months gone, her gut’s almost as big as yours, Mazzo Balls, hahaha, that swollen, Christ, but not from Miller Lite, like you, but with one more little brown greaser, another shitass who’s here to take the food out of our mouths and steal another American’s job, walkin’ in here like it was their own home, Jesus, the woman’s stuffed with another little easy-livin’ fucker! they’re takin’ rocks out of their bag, rocks, haha, they’re gonna chase me away with rocks, Mazzo! rocks against the chopper! Who do they think they are, Sitting Bull? Viva technology! Listen, Mazzo, this is getting cute, I wish you were here, I swear this is the best battle I ever saw since they cut off General Custer’s balls at the battle of the Little Bighorn, did you ever see Ronald Reagan in Santa Fe Trail on the Late Show? haha, well I’m gonna get even for Custer, I’m gonna blow away this pair of Indians, I’ve been asking for a license to kill for over a year now, but I’m takin’ matters into my own hands here, haha … Mazzo, they hit me on the head, Mazzo, can ya see me? Mazzo, the rock’s blinded me, what an eye that guy’s got, can’t ya see me, Mazzo? If only the Congress had bought you an infrared ’scope like the one they have at Sandy Ego so you could see at night, track down the illegals, see them under the midnight sun, Mazzo, Mazzo, I’m comin’ down, they’re … Mazzo, do ya read me?… Mazzo…?

Sitting on his splendid backside, Mazzo Balls looked through his window at the desolate frontier and saw the helicopter drop swiftly, then spin madly, and crash in a ball of fire.

Just before the crash, Mazzo looked at his screen for any sign of the couple: they produced no heat whatsoever. But the helicopter certainly did — the needles were jumping off the scale, and the screen filled with an orange glow.

One day, Uncle Fernando Benítez will tell us that on the Baja Oklahoma frontier a strange man received the blind Indian couple, doffed his bowler (although they could not see that courteous gesture), and with his other hand straightened his starched butterfly collar. With a gesture of his gloved hand and an innocent sparkle in his big black insomniac and persecuted eyes, he said: Welcome to the Grand Theater of Oklahoma.

Then this tall, thin dark man, who resembled a question mark, pointed to a place far away on the plain where a mirage appeared, that is, it had to be a mirage: a circus tent, a papier-mâché Arc de Triomphe, a circle of flags fluttered by the wind blowing over the prairie. The tall, sleepless man called the two Baltic poets, the extremely pale man and woman, so that they could help the blind Indians. Take them to live in the round house and then bring them to the Grand Theater so they can tell their dreams there, said the man with the bowler and walking stick, who had ears like Nosferatu, trembling as if he already knew that the two Indians from the plateau of the blind tribe dreamed everything they could not see:

“I hope you get your heart’s desire, that you reach your goal, that your dreams become reality!” said the man in the bowler.

“Let’s go to the round house,” said the Baltic poet in Nahuatl to the Indian.

“Let’s go,” answered the Indian. “Let’s go with my wife and my unborn son.”

“Let’s go,” said the woman poet, taking the new arrivals by the hand in the Baja Oklahoma night, the mirages dissipated by now. “We’re going to your house. My name is Astrid. My husband’s is Ivar. But that’s another story. Let’s go.”

And the Indian couple: We have nothing, we’ve come home, this land was always ours, we passed through here on our way south, one day a long time ago when we first walked on this land, do you remember, woman? We’ve brought our son to be born on our land, not strange land, not the frontier: our land, the North, the place of meetings.

13. It turns out that I, Christopher

It turns out that I, Christopher, am capable of finding relationships and analogies (I don’t divine things: I relate things, make things similar!) others don’t see because they have forgotten them. For example, all I have to do is establish the relationship between a couple on the run, two blind Indians from the mesa visited one day by my Uncle Fernando, she pregnant like my mother, he in search of something better like my father (see how I keep my faith in you, pro-gen-i-tor!), and the Indian fetus perhaps imagining my parents just as I imagine his. Accordingly, I establish the relationship between that couple in flight and the disunited couple constituted by my dad and mom: looking at the two Indians on the frontier between Mexamerica and Baja Oklahoma, I see my parents crossing other frontiers, and thus I conclude, in the first place, that we are always in frontier situations, either exiting or entering, as in stage directions — enter Hamlet and Ophelia — exeunt Quijote and Dulcinea, etc. But, the reader exclaims indignantly, your parents aren’t even together, each one is in a different corner of the woods, one in Montesinos’s cave, the other in El Toboso, we left your mother a hostage in the bosom of Hipi Toltec’s Nahuatl-speaking family, with you (inevitably) in her belly, sharing with them (with Them) a dinner of cactus salad and orange slices (Plato’s banquet in a somber thieves’ den: by the way, what page are you on, Mom?), while your father climbed up into the truck of the albino driver, Bubble Gómez, which Colasa Sánchez had flagged down with tricks worthy of Claudette Colbert, of enchanting memory: your father in the company of the Discalced Carmelite dazzled by the jukebox lights and the pictures of Guadalupe, Virgin, Thatcher, Margaret, and of Doctor and Mother, so where’s the comparison, Christopher (finally you wake up, Reader, and you ask me something!)? Only this one, I note, I newt:

We’re all different, but it’s good that we resemble one another as well. In this world, everything is different, but only if everything is related to everything else. Readers, I don’t know another secret to be truer after my eight months of gestation: we’ve always got to be in the situation where difference is in tension with sameness. We are recognized because we are different, but also because we are similar I, Christopher, am likely to be recognized because of the form in which I share and admit the sameness of my gestures and my words with those of others. We human beings are not the only animals who need and recognize the scattered members of our species: the lamb, ladies and gentlemen, can always recognize his mother (who happens to be a female) in an anonymous flock of one hundred animals.

In the same way, I recognize, from my solar center, which orders establishes hierarchies, yet is most free, my distant father and my infinitely close mother and I join them in my vision as one with the pair of illegal Indians, and I’ll stake my reputation on it:

My mother Angeles is sitting in the cave of tin water tubs and cardboard that belongs to Hipi & Family, bereft of hope, when suddenly an unusual disturbance resounds in the jailed night and the fires of the circular wall of garbage join together and run like the proverbial scalded cat. (Do proverbial cats have nine lives?) (Or should those who keep proverbial cats as pets be tickled with a cat-o’-nine-tales?) Don’t forget, dear Readers, that the vast Cittá del Messico is totally surrounded by garbage dumps, its genetic chain is a circular mountain of trash dumps all linked together as if to announce to the city: Garbage is Your Destiny. And now it seems that the foreseeable is happening:

The fire burst into life at the very door of Hipi’s family’s house, and everyone ran to put it out, all of them (the old, the babies, the huehuetiliztli and the xocoyotzin grab what they can); the suffocating smoke billows, asphyxia is imminent, there is no water, so one man quickly makes some orange juice and throws it on the blaze, another man shouts, laughs, and urinates powerfully on the fire (my mother remembers the day she reached the city and peed on the flame in the monument to the Revolution, remembers her dream about urinating until she refills the Lake Texcoconut; she remembers and I dream about the lost city of lakes! the place where the air is clear!), but it isn’t enough, they all scatter through the thief-ridden slum (dolorous city, lost city, city without a name), all except one old man as stubborn as a stone. He remains seated in the cave when our buddy Egg rushes nervously in and pulls my mother to her feet (and me along with her, horrified — it goes without saying!), telling her, Angeles, get a move on, if this fire really catches, it’ll consume all the oxygen in the city, the city will suffocate, and then they see the old veteran sitting there, immobile, waiting for the catastrophe, immutable, his face fixed, the inexpressive screen of the play of lights and shadows, and the philanthropic Egg tries to pull him to his feet as well, he warns him about the danger, but the old man is wrapped in his serape, and with his immobile face he says something in Nahuatl and our buddy Egg abandons him and swiftly guides my mother (and me, Readers, and me!) out of the dark shack to an Army jeep, where the grandparents, Rigoberto and Susana, wait and hug my mother and the general does the driving, throws it into reverse, gets stuck for an instant in the garbage. Hipi Toltec fighting the fire, but when he sees us, he becomes disconsolate. He picks up a long stick, sets it on fire, raises it as if to threaten us, then acts as if he were going to toss it on the garbage pyre, but instead he smiles in an ugly way, blows out the burning point of his javelin, and throws it at us. It looks like he’s let us get away, let us save ourselves, my mother and I, Egg, and the grandparents, in an Army jeep, vintage 1944, about which General Palomar says: “This relic has finally come in handy! You drive, Mr. Egg, all right? I’m getting too old, and get us out of here, head for Oaxaca! Aaaaah, the city is burning! Let’s head for the pure air, Susy, don’t be afraid of anything. I’ve been in worse situations! Don’t be afraid, Miss Angeles! Or your unborn baby!”

General Rigoberto Palomar falls forward, his face smashing against the windshield, then back, into the arms of his wife Doña Susana Rentería. In his back is the spear thrown by Hipi Toltec. My mother screams. It’s the same lance that killed Tomasito down in Acapulco. Exactly the same. Doña Susana smiles and caresses the shaved head of her dead husband.

Hipi sheds his skin before the incredulous eyes of Egg and Angeles, and it’s our fat friend, accelerating in horror, who shouts out a description of him, they were real tight, they played in the same group, he was tying up his trousers with a belt made of snakes, and he was shedding, he always was, but now in the light of the fire all his skin was vanishing. Hipi is peeling, right down to the muscle, his skin is coming off in huge chunks, like a peeled banana, right down to the white but corrupt, worm-eaten bone: in the distance, Hipi’s skull shines after a while, smiling, amid the red night, and they can no longer see, no longer know, no longer imagine that new skin grows on him instantaneously, only the skull smiles, and we flee, and Doña Susy Rentería caresses the shaven head of her old husband, and Egg drives the jeep like a soul who is carrying the very devil who brought us here.

At the same time, my father is traveling next to Colasa, who sits alongside the albino driver, and no one can talk because of this man’s constant chatter, this man the radio calls Bubble Gómez. He gives instructions nonstop, avoid the curve at mile 8, there’s been a landslide, there’s an unnoticed Smokey at the Atlixco exit, slow down with the Manila provisions at the intersection of Highway 2 and the Christopher Columbus Highway, Inclán knows about your load, use your radar detector so they don’t pick you up on Huamantla, the Tijuana Taxis at Teziutlán look funny to me, this is Bubble Gómez, do you read me, Bubble Gómez here, I’m protected, I’m carrying a little girl dressed like a religious nut (watch those personal comments now, son), accompanied by a guy who looks like a fag (come on now, son, you’re charging a lot for this ride!), and it seems to me they could be like camouflage to screw up the cops if I have close encounters of the worst kind, okay? Okay, Bubble Gómez, you’re the man of the hour, you know your mission, but stay out of the way of the gringo Marines headed toward the Chachalacas River, and our own soldier boys, too, because some haven’t been notified by Inclán, remember the situation is confused, a huge fire has broken out in the slums, it’s hard to breathe here, go south young man, stay out of trouble, good buddy, roger, Bubble Gómez effectivesuffragenoreelesion, no more lesions, CB radio signing off, good night.

“I’m hungry!” exclaimed Colasa Sánchez when Bubble Gómez turned off his CB. “Don’t you have anything to eat?” she asked, and he just laughed. “What are you carrying in back?” A big old refrigerator, said the albino. “Is it empty?” asked the girl. No, no way, answered Gómez, my job is to bring food back and forth to D.F. “So can we take a little to eat?” If you like, baby, but why don’t you tell your main man here to take a nap and to stop looking at me like that, I don’t like people to look at me like that, tell him it’s dangerous to look at me like that, tell him later we’ll stop and have some salt pork for breakfast! The driver laughed, and my father has no desire whatsoever to think or act, he prefers to tell himself you’re an idiot, Angelito, you don’t hear or understand anything, take Colasa’s hand, it’s there so you don’t feel so alone and so fucked up so suddenly, go ahead, better than nothing, go ahead, pimp, aren’t you hungry, too?

14. I’m an honest guy

I’m an honest guy: the reader should know that a third situation is interpolating itself between these two, involving the circumstances of my mother and father; it’s as if the citizens band the truckers use had squeezed between the AM and FM bands on the radio, so that if on the first band Colasa says I’m hungry, on the second Egg translates they’ve been tricked, they take shadows for reality, but on the third, the intruder band, Minister Federico Robles Chacón laughs and, like a child kept after school, writes one hundred times: You can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system. He suddenly forgot which number he was on and bucked like a bad-tempered horse when the flow of his inspiration was cut off by the buzz of the telephone.

Robles picked up the presidential hot line with a stratospheric storm of curses; he felt, suddenly, full of self-pity. In the simple act of picking up the receiver of that green apparatus, he proved once again that he was sacrificing his time and his talent to the common good, to the highest goals of the state. And what did the community, personified in the voice of President Jesús María y José Paredes’s private secretary, say to him? What? Whatwhat? Whatwhatwhat?

The secretary had left his temporary office in the National Palace to return to his regular office on Avenida Insurgentes, the one decorated with Roche-Bobois furniture. It was a sign that the crisis had passed. And now — whatwhat? — were they saying that Mamadoc was refusing to give the Cry this year? What the fuck was all that about? Say that again, Mr. Private Secretary? She refuses…? But what the hell … what the fuck does that old slut think she’s here for anyway? Does she think we brought her here to knit booties and watch soap operas? You get her over here now! Whatwhat? She’s already in my waiting room? That that’s what she wants, to see me to speak to me, or she won’t give the Cry? The President says to go easy with her, that this monster is more useful to us than ever, that after all, she’s your Frankenstein, you invented her, Mr. Secretary, you imposed her on us. Of course, of course …

He hung up in a rage and ordered his toady to be sure that the Mother and Doctor of Mexicans was in his waiting room.

Meanwhile, the secretary of the SEPAFU calmed down, carefully put his papers away in a schoolboy’s botany portfolio, and neatly tied the ribbons with bows.

Smiling, he received the apparition, as serene, certainly, as she, who came to ask him for God knows what, one of those little caprices of women in power, send the presidential jet to carry my angora sweater from Mexico to Rome, fire those three functionaries for having taken me to a fifth-rate restaurant, and get rid of these other five for having made jokes about me over the telephone, build me a swimming pool in the center of the Zócalo, burn the writings of my predecessors, their hospitals, movies, schools, there can be nothing before or after LITTLE OLD ME!

But now it was nothing like that, and he would have expected anything but this: the Holy Lady, wearing a riding cape of orange suede and chaps decorated with silver, and underneath a Mexican riding outfit, in the Jesusita in Chihuahua mode, suede, silver, short jacket, Andalusian riding skirt, and a riding crop in her hand, with which she instantly slapped Robles Chacón’s face. Now he was astonished; she then dropped to her knees before him, weeping, damn it, with almost the same words as Concha Toro begging for the body of the Ayatollah, oh, my love, my little love, turn around and look at me at least, my little lovey-dovey, be nice, it’s your honey talking to you, don’t make me suffer, do it to me pretty, sweetie pie, give your honey what she wants, don’t make me stay here on my knees like this, don’t you see I’m dying for love of you?

No one had ever said anything like this to the vibrant but austere Robles Chacón: My honey man, give me some honey. (Mamadoc hugging the knees of the minister, who felt he was living through the worst nightmare of his life, but for that very reason he kept hoping that this one, like all the others, would end: this was merely an unpublished chapter in the Ayatollah saga. He closed his eyes and said: I am living through something that man I had the obligation to have killed should have lived through, this must be my punishment, these things don’t happen to me, this is a scene from the theater of the incomplete, the incomplete that accompanies each and every one of our acts, this is the shortened apocalypse, only I had to live it because I killed that witch doctor. We have not gathered the One Hundred and Forty-Four Thousand Just Men. Forgive me, oh Lord — jabbered Robles Chacón, with Mamadoc still hugging his knees — nor have we left the Babylon that dizzies nor has the seventh cup been filled — I’ll drink the others in Guanajuato! — with the wine of God’s vengeance, and I did not find the number 666 on Matamoros Moreno’s hirsute body when I carefully examined it, and I don’t know if there is a woman in the jungle, but the harlot in purple did appear. Here is this great whore, hugging me, squeezing her cheek against my fly, God help me! and it’s getting hard against my will, and she, give me your rod give me your son give me your come don’t deny to me what you have given to all Mexican women, the right to a son on October 12.)

“There’s no time!” the minister stupidly exclaimed.

“We can extend the contest a year or even ten years, we have the power to change dates, and if we don’t, what good does it do to be us? Ten years, why not? it doesn’t matter as long as our little boy wins the contest and the dynasty is ours, honey man! yours and mine, my little lovey-dovey, you and I can play with time, set the clocks back, put them ahead, whatever we want, I’ve been thinking a lot while I’ve been all alone, why do we have power if we can’t change time? What good is power if you can’t stop time and even tell death to get lost, tell me, boss man?”

She opened her eyes wide and looked at him, her mascara running because of her tears, potholes in her plastered-over face where she’d been rubbing against his fly, her original dark skin showing through here and there.

“We can’t do that,” the cornered minister whimpered meekly, convinced that the Lady had gone mad. “It’s a law, we have to obey it, laws are meant to be obeyed…”

“But not carried out!” She gave vent to her emotion, spattering her viscous saliva over the functionary’s trousers.

He looked at her as if she were some apparition fabricated by Maybelline: he realized that this woman had been born expressly to play this scene; her whole life had been a preparation for this moment she was now living out. For that reason, Robles Chacón concentrated his intelligence and said the best thing he could:

“Dear Lady: laws are terrible, but customs are even worse.”

With that sentence, which he felt was worthy of him, Federico Robles Chacón began to reconstitute his shattered aplomb. He realized where he was, but the outrageous woman at his feet was whimpering, either you make me yours or I don’t give the Cry, either you give me a son or I go on strike, either you extend the time for the contest or I kill myself, I swear I will! I was living very happily with my boyfriend Leoncito and my job as a stenographer, you came and transformed me, now pay up, I’ll kill myself, I swear, and the chaps whipped against the ministerial carpeting like slaps.

Federico Robles Chacón painfully pulled himself back together again. He was in the SEPAFU Secretariat Building on Avenida Insurgentes, almost at the intersection with Viaducto, at the ill-named Insurgentes Bridge, fifteenth floor, private telephone number 515-1521, the place from which the Ayatollah Matamoros had observed the most terrible action in the life of FRCH (as the press called him), his having ordered the death of several thousand rioters (innocent? guilty? the system doesn’t judge, it concludes: you can’t fight the system, it is all of us, but it is more than all of us, not better, all of us with power, said Robles Chacón, trembling, he who considered himself a liberal man, on the left, humanitarian, enlightened, sensitive), and at his feet his creature, the Mother and Doctor of all Mexicans, who negated everything he thought about himself, kneeling, weeping, threatening to ruin all the symbolic ceremonies of the nation: FRCH thought of himself as a little Christopher (just like me!): in looking for the Orient, he fails and finds America; his success derives from his failure, his perception tells him the world is flat, but his intention tells him the world is round: someone else’s perception negates his visionary intention, but it is intention that triumphs.

Could that be true once again, here, tonight, with this serpent woman, this Cihuacóatl hugging his knees?

He stretched out his arms, tried to stand her up, rejected the vision that succeeded the one about Columbus: now the Minister of State’s perception told him that the country was flat and repetitive and that hell must be the same, everything repeats itself eternally in Mexico, the same cruelties and injustices, the same useless jokes that exorcise each other, the same stupidities, so it’s ultimately in stupidity repeated eternally where injustice and jokes blend and dissipate and become eternal.

Now all of it (the fatal perception of the country) was getting mixed up, the effect of the cause, the cause of the effect, with national planning: economics = fatalism. And a woman at his feet asking him for something that wasn’t economics and wasn’t fatality either …

FRCH felt overcome by the kneeling embrace that Mamadoc was bestowing on him, screw me or there’s no Cry: fornicate with me or there will be no contest, give me a son or give me death, come on, don’t be a fag:

What was better, to succumb to economics or to succumb to fatality? And suddenly my direct line was disconnected, my vision of that scene faded, and I was left without knowing what Federico Robles Chacón decided or what the ex-stenographer from the SEPAFU secretarial pool decided. But in this I shall from now on resemble you out there. Enjoy yourselves, your mercies, and remember that whatever you do, Minister Federico Robles Chacón and the Mother and Doctor of all Mexicans are going to be short of breath because the oxygen in the city is disappearing, consumed by the flames from the garbage …

You give them their destinies, svp! This novel belongs to you, dear Readers!

15. “I’m hungry!” Colasa Sánchez shouted

“I’m hungry!” Colasa Sánchez shouted again at dawn; my father opened his eyes and woke up from a long dream in which my mother appeared to him, always close and always (reach for her!) untouchable! no matter how far my father stretched out his hands and repeated to himself: “I’m not worthy of her. Not yet. I have to deserve her.”

He’s a romantic, a knight errant. Colasa is hungry. Bubble Gómez pays no attention to Dad’s reasons. On the other hand, he does share with a trace of cruelty, her reasons. He knows that the reasons belong to all three of them, and that the dawn has overtaken them in a new landscape, as different from the uplands all consumed in fires and asphyxia as heaven is different from hell: here a rolling plain announced in the glare of the morning light its descent to the sea. The mists were lifting along the wide rivers, and the coconut palms, the lemon and orange trees, charmingly shook off the dew, indifferent to their fate at the hands of the Tropicana juice company; the warm breeze shakes the clothes left to dry on the red stone and the roof tiles shine as if varnished; the whitewashed façades of the houses, the smell of the early-morning coffee and papaya opened by machete, the pineapple and tamarind reach the most secret corners of the tongue and palate.

This is the albino driver’s supreme cruelty. Like Lucifer in the desert, he shows the pilgrims this temptation of sweet, tropical Veracruz, with its hint of the nearby Gulf and the Caribbean, where all the sweetness of life in the New World given by Columbus to Castile and Aragon is concentrated, between Cartagena de Indias and New Orleans, Havana and Campeche, Barbados and Jamaica: the prodigious cornucopia of red snapper, lobster, oysters, and swordfish; dyes, baroque pearls, and huge turtles.

And once he’s tempted them, Bubble Gómez says: “We’ll eat raw meat.”

He opens the rear doors of the trailer. A polar exhalation paralyzes their facial muscles. Bubble Gómez, used to it, does not flinch; he jumps into the icebox, similar to a bank vault, where the steers become visible, hallucinations dreamed, Uncle Fernando Benítez once said, by Soutine, red and skinned, their blood and fat congealed, decapitated, their hooves cut off, swinging on the black hooks: a red, white, and black world where the albino driver is totally at ease, choosing the steer he likes best, bored, whistling that old song about the old milch cow, and how, and how, until he raises an arm as white as the frost surrounding it, rose-colored like the dry blood of the beasts, and unhooks a peculiarly shaped steer, long and narrow, small in comparison to the others, but tasty, very tasty, says Bubble Gómez when the three of them kneel down around the skinned, decapitated animal, which has a metal band encrusted with frozen blood on its rear leg. That’s how they hang up this animal: the leg bracelet is connected to the frozen hook.

Bubble Gómez cuts off slices of raw meat, and Colasa looks interested in the metal bracelet, and Angel tries to be friendly, saying that all they need are these slices and some chiles, and nosy Colasa lifts the beast’s leg and reads the inscription on the bracelet

and she stops a second, closes her eyes, and eats quickly, while the driver comments as he devours the steer that it’s like eating steak tartar or beef sushi, or deer stew, or beef broiled creole-style, he knows about these things, tricks of the trade, and then goes back to singing: she ambles through the meadow, killing flies with her tail, tail, tail.

16. Why Are We in Veracruz?

The belly of the jungle is like my mother’s belly, mud and water, but why am I so happy where I am while this ghostly man runs flees wishes he could scream surrounded by the night and the luminous eyes shine as if they were imagining themselves seeing because they do not see in the dark seeing what they should imagine: running out of the jungle and occasionally looking back desperate running and always seeing how close the pyramid is in the jungle like a back projection gigantic in the distance.

Villa Cardel on the banks of the Chachalacas River has everything you could want for your vacation: Pepsi-Cola and Raleigh (ralley-rattle-railing) cigarette signs, mud streets and equally attractive mud-holes, an astonishing variety of insects an entire zoo walking around the streets freely amusing groups of black, ravenous pigs with raspberry-colored markings among the tightly packed antennas of TV CANTINAS, from which only half the citizens who enter ever leave alive abundant discotheques with tin roofs where you can dance to the latest hits of the Four Fuckups the best bordellos on the Gulf an everlasting unparalleled offering of pretty girls who came down from the mountains to give pleasure to the motley crew of white and black gringos in perpetual rotation never more than 179 days in Cardel troops from the Central American Army made up of Salvadorans and Hondurans trained by the gringos and also dark-skinned gringos Chicanos Puerto Ricans who aren’t noticed here in Veracruz and don’t have to be rotated in accordance with the law since they are identical to the little boys who show their swollen bellies and tiny penises among the shacks and alleys of Villa Cardel but the little boys don’t screw and the troops do with the sad whores down from the highlands in search of dollars whores up from Honduras when Operation Big Pine moved to Veracruz women from Panama Colombia Venezuela known as Contadora widows when the peace collapsed whores who came from the halls of Moctezuma and the shores of Tripoli suffering from IRS (Illnesses Related to Sex) who came here to give them to the gringos and their collaborators from Honduras and Salvador and saddest of all the Señoritas Butterfly from Veracruz the local ingenues seduced and abandoned with their children as green as the jungle blond like the golden eyes of the fallen Angel of Independence which my mother saw from close up the day of the earthquake always crying these hated, hateful children: at the entrance to Villa Cardel a hand-lettered, badly painted wooden sign that says in red letters: Now Entering Little Saigon, and beyond, a horizon made up of tents stained with oil and field-kitchen smoke, tortuous mud paths and mudholes abandoned jeeps helicopters that fell down for lack of fuel or screws dogs and on the promontory where the officers live the CAT HUTS with mosquito netting at the doors to let the rancid breeze in and to keep the insects, the bat shit, and the wild pig snouts out he never stops running while the back projection of the El Tajín pyramid grows and grows. The man shouts call me Will in order to get out of the jungle and enter a novel because he has forgotten that this jungle is in a novel in the same way that I, Christopher, am inside my mother’s belly OUCH! an extremely tall man bald but with a long mass of yellow ash cascading down the shoulders of his black leather jacket he plays bowls in a jungle clearing he has in his hand a wooden ball he throws it down an improvised path and the ball is going to smash against the pins set up on a platform of rough boards the ball does smash against the pins, which don’t fall but break into pieces under the impact of the wooden ball painted with white stars on a blue background call me Will. Will Gingerich running with no force left out of the jungle wanting to abandon forever the pyramid surprised by the permanently navy-blue sky of this night which is really day but he doesn’t know it under the shadow of the pyramid and the foliage woven like a wet overcoat over the jungle of Veracruz: Will Gingerich feels trapped inside the pyramid he cannot distinguish between open air and trapped air makes no distinction between stone and foliage.

NOW ENTERING LITTLE SAIGON: at the door of a one-story house painted indigo blue with a sign that says THE CELESTIAL EMPIRE a diminutive Oriental man with shaven temples an aroma of opium dressed in an anachronistic, suffocating Mao uniform is sitting in his straw rocker and fanning himself (his feet never touch the ground) while he shouts to and solicits the blond, dark, black soldiers from Detroit Mongoloids from Vermont Chicanos from Chicago Neoricans from Amsterdam Avenue disturbed violent homeless people recruited from the cities of the North Entel the most bootifull gills of the two seas, the Pacific and the Atrantic, await you he says fanning himself unhurriedly with no apparent sadness only his long yellow fingers clutching the fan as if it were a life preserver his eyes more veiled than ever as if once the light had disguised itself as fire because that day the sun just imagine that day the sun came up in the west … I Little Christopher in my mother’s belly

You, Reader

My enormous superhuman effort (I swear it) to listen to the OTHER in order to know myself to be UNIQUE

That day the sun rose in the west: like an angel made of yellow ash and black leather, the tall man with watery eyes and square jaw, which he shaved every six hours so it would shine with a chrome-plated luster, his face is bluish and his cheeks metallic, a shiny gray: he wears a black shirt with a clerical collar and a black leather jacket and blue chinos combat boots two cartridge belts cross over his flat stomach and are held up by his hook-like hips, which are obscenely narrow, and from the cartridge belts hang hand grenades and from the man’s hand flies a ball decorated with the Stars and Bars and on the back of his jacket he wears his title: THE PRIEST OF DEATH The frightened eyes of a tiger in the jungle night two yellow medallions set in the foliage that covers the pyramid CAT HUTS is an acronym for Central American Tropical Habitat created for the War of the Isthmus and the invasion of Nicaragua during the eighties: their peculiarity is that they last only six months in the Central American climate and then they disintegrate: a cute way of suggesting that we get our job done in six months and get out no Vietnams a limit of six months to the campaign before the Nervous Nellies of Nebraska and the Anxious Aunties of Alabama go crazy seeing so much blood spilled right out of their TV sets onto the floors of their living rooms furnished by J. C. Penney’s seeing so many boys come home dead in black plastic body bags dead in the jungles of Veracruz all of it planned as a lightning campaign no need even to take into account troop movements governed by law number — which mandates giving official notice of troop movements only when those troops have remained more than 180 days in a single place and around here no one stays a minute more than 179 days so no one knows anything and nevertheless the number-one bestseller during the year 1992 in the United States is called Why Are We in Veracruz? by Norman Mailer the always energetic (sixty-nine years of age) Brooklyn-born author: Why does Norman Mailer dare to write this book? Why is he trying to dishearten the national effort to eradicate the Communist threat on our frontiers? Doesn’t Mailer believe in the domino theory? Doesn’t national security matter to Mailer? Or is he only interested in fame? Doesn’t he see the red tide rolling toward Harlingen, Texas, bringing with it the destruction of American youth by the Managua-controlled drug traffic? asked President Dumble Danger from his hospital room, where he was surrounded by plastic flowers and TelePrompTers. (The President was wearing a World War II paratrooper’s uniform, ready, as he said, for the final jump, and had a quilt over his legs, on which pious hands had embroidered his motto: GOD IS MY CO-PILOT.

The pins split apart under the impact of the ball with the stars on it and a nine-year-old boy, as green as the forest, retrieves the wooden ball and returns it to the man with the long, ash-yellow hair tumbling down his back and wearing the black jacket: The boy goes back to the platform and sweeps away the splinters with a broom

Will Gingerich running out of the jungle under a permanently navy-blue sky

I in my mother’s belly one month before my happy arrival in the world a Mexican boy like me but he already born and I not yet he picking up the broken pieces of clay the broken earth varnished blood-red the boy picks up the pieces of idols vessels ceramics and patiently replaces them with another twelve figurines and the man with the title THE PRIEST OF DEATH written across the back of his black leather jacket again throws the ball and breaks only ten of the twelve figurines and then turns his fury against the promontory where the CAT HUTS are crowded together: he looks at the ruins-to-be of the prefabricated shacks set to self-destruct in September they’ve been here since April replacements have not arrived he turns and looks with a resigned ardor at the eternal ruins of the Totonacas how long is this going to go on I thought we were going to clean this up in six months and get out I thought we would never have to request more CAT HUTS because we weren’t going to be here in this clearing between the pyramid and the temporary housing for the invading Army more than six months what frightens the tiger?

the officers’ city on the hill is surrounded by concertina wire, the entrance is flanked by twin machine-gun towers and a sign legible at a distance of a quarter of a mile:

RESTRICTED AREA. USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED

I, Christopher, do not understand why the Priest of Death again tosses the ball, sending it spinning against the clay figurines, and this time he rolls a strike because within a month I will be BORN and now I must take more and more account of the presence of the OTHER, that OTHER to whom I speak even if he doesn’t speak to me and I only have you, READER, to understand finally what I intuit outside my chamber of genetic echoes you must tell me for example that … Reverend Royall Payne looks one day with his eyes of burnished steel at his intelligence officer, Professor Will Gingerich, and he says in his most truculent tone stroke my chopper Prof go on just feel how smooth its sides are close your eyes and tell me please if it doesn’t make you as hot as I am to wipe out these greasers in a single day, which I could do by firing my portable Minuteman 92 against Jalapa and make pickled jalapeños out of those spicy jalapeño chicks hahaha tell me the truth egghead why are we in Veracruz?

Will Gingerich’s terror as he flees through the jungle has an echo: the jungle of red suns and blue nights tells him it isn’t possible you can’t come back to me there is no possible reconciliation none none The Priest of Death little Christopher is a veteran of the Contra wars in Central America, Grenada, and Vietnam his name is Royall Payne (Reverend Royall Payne) and he’s a fundamentalist preacher who made a fortune by refusing merely to preach comfortably and only practicing his preaching under the protection of a pleasure dome built by the contributions of the faithful in a southern city, instead he decided to put his anti-communist, fundamentalist crusade into practice and be present on all the battle fronts where the red menace is being confronted: when Royall Payne returns from his sanguinary tourism in praise of the Lord, multitudes crowd the entrance to his pleasure dome in Savannah, Georgia (it was a beautiful Southern port with a muggy, sugary Caribbean atmosphere until Payne turned it into the seat of his fundamentalist crusade, surrounded it with gas stations built in the shape of tabernacles, turned the mansions into motels and filled the labyrinthine streets and plazas with shops that sold the Bible on cassette — read by Reverend Payne — Bible videos — acted out by Reverend Payne, his family, and his associates — rubber baby bottles stamped with the picture of Reverend Payne blessing the city and the world, and plastic bottles of holy water to put into the formula so that children would learn from the cradle on to recognize the preacher who would guide them toward their reunion with Jesus, outwardly Protestant but actually Catholic the Reverend, since he sells holy baby bottles and also sells holy enemas the extremes meet but, brothers and sisters, be very careful not to mix up the orifices), his only condition being that wherever he was there be television cameras the Reverend would never abandon the faithful but instead of appearing every Sunday on TV wearing shiny shantung or costly double-knits and Cardin shirts or lizard Lacoste shirts like the other TV preachers, now utterly displaced by the energy of the most Fundamental of Fundamentalists, he would always appear in battle dress wearing his black jacket with THE PRIEST OF DEATH emblazoned on the back like the prophets of the Old Testament, the OT in the Reverend’s personal shorthand, his fax machine to the Almighty his direct line to Divine Grace: he marched out to battle just as Joshua had tumbled down walls and crossed rivers and made the sun stop in its path across the sky and now they don’t let him carry out his mission, they force him to be content stroking the metallic body of his Apache attack helicopter, as smooth as the cheeks he shaves four times a day, petting the decals tenderly stuck onto the fuselage and being satisfied with climbing up to the cockpit of his chopper and sermonizing his intelligence officer, Professor Gingerich, the greenish boy who sets up the Totonaca figurines on the board, the inimitable ruins of El Tajín, the parrots, the tigers, the river:

GOD IS PLEASURE! shouts the Reverend to his intelligence officer in this wasteland of Veracruz as long as we carry on His work on earth He rewards us pleasure is only odious when we do not deserve it when we seek pleasure before we seek the Lord but if we first seek the Lord we shall always find Him He is only absent when we do not seek Him out all we have to do is seek Him to find Him and the nothing is a sin NOTHING NOTHING is impossible and everything is possible is permitted in the name of the Lord everything is permitted to him who has found the Lord and the voice of the Lord has said: Go forth and be my soldier exterminate my enemies and then I shall receive you and you will have the pleasure which I am! says the Reverend to Professor Gingerich of Dartmouth College and Will Gingerich realizes that the Reverend is surrounded by a luminous, orange-colored square and the feline purring of a TV camera (a tiger in the jungle): If you turn your back on Jesus, Jesus will turn his back on you, concludes Royall Payne, followed by organ music and a list of thanks to the program’s patrons and an announcement that this program reaches your home via satellite thanks to a subsidy from the Union Carbide Corporation from somewhere in Veracruz: now you know why we’re in Veracruz! Close-up of the Reverend’s fists and slow fade:

Royall Payne jumps off his designer helicopter picks up a towel to wipe off his sweat lathers up his cheeks picks up his razor and reminds Will Gingerich you are here to tell Washington what it wants to hear nothing else don’t work so hard don’t even leave your CAT HUT just write your weekly report saying there are Communists in Veracruz Soviet agents Cuban bases even if it isn’t true: modern intelligence consists in telling your superiors what they want to hear: the rest of the time, well, there’s a case of beer over there and in Cardel there are very pretty girls if you don’t mind dying of some venereal disease but what can stop sex, eh, Professor? Go on tell me what can stop it. I’ll tell you: the fear of God, but you, an agnostic secular humanist, what do you do, Professor? Screw and die!

The helicopters that still work leave the jungle clearing near El Tajín in search of nonexistent targets / they see a nosegay of roof tiles and they drop a bouquet of napalm / they seek out the thickest places in the forest / the mangrove swamps the rotten vines / the wavy fronds of the palm trees and they open the valves of Agent Orange to exterminate all greenery /a chemical, dark-red cloud to defoliate the jungle / an orange-colored juice to defoliate its inhabitants: they come back late from their incursions when the tiger opens his golden eyes and begins his nocturnal prowling / they withdraw to their CAT HUTS and open their refrigerators and drink Iron City beer and tear open their cellophane bags and eat pretzels Doritos and individual-sized pizzas: then they drop a nickel into the beer bottle and try to see while they laugh and make jokes about Thomas Jefferson’s being a shithead, if what they say about Iron City beer is true, that it can dissolve a nickel, but they don’t know that the orange pesticide is dissolving them and they that now are twenty, thirty years old and then go home with medals and beer bellies and hearts swollen with patriotism to Allentown, Pennsylvania, and Lansing, Michigan, years later will wonder why is my pancreas my liver my fucking brain my colon my rectum dissolving?

they don’t wonder about this now now they go out on patrol carrying their Backpack Nukes: this is a green knapsack which contains a nuclear device equivalent to 250 tons of TNT and they go down to Villa Cardel spend a jolly Saturday in the cantinas where half of those who enter do not leave alive but they emerge safe and sound: who’s going to mess with a Detroit black six feet tall and carrying 250 tons of nuclear explosives? or with a Puerto Rican from the island of Vieques armed with / who walk in shouting THIS IS RAMBOWAR! and later on they decide to visit one of the bordellos they’ve been in all of them except one: the one that belongs to the old Chinese / he’s put them off / but they have bet each other that before leaving Veracruz they are going to screw every available woman and they’re about to reach 175 days here so they know that in four more days they’ll be transferred so that there will never be any official record of their ever having been in Veracruz they walk out singing happy tunes by Stephen Foster and Irving Berlin America America from sea to shining sea: the Oriental guardian of the Celestial Empire fans himself and rocks smiles at them and invites them Amelica? flum sea to shiny seamen? you go in now see mos’ elotic woman flom sea to shiny seamen smiles the diminutive Deng Chopin inviting the gringo soldiers in with his long mandarin pianist’s fingers and the boys from Detroit or PR look at each other, elbow each other with a joking air of complicity and they enter the Celestial Empire giggling Will Gingerich doesn’t know it but he’s delirious and in every one of the jungle’s shapes he sees a frightened tiger he imagines he’s a big sports hero a pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals a fullback for the Los Angeles Rams the oldest winner at Wimbledon he’s delirious but not even that can diminish his fear they’re going to come back they’re going to get him he walks in circles through the jungle they’re everywhere and he nowhere; the navy-blue sky splits open: the moon parts the veil and sticks to the sky like a silver decal: Will Gingerich flees and the Reverend Payne argues: why are we in Veracruz? Caressing the metallic body of his Apache attack helicopter, as metallic as his cheeks shaved four times a day, caressing the tenderly applied decals on the Apache each decal a star with a skull in its center and surrounded by statements in which only the geography varies: I WAS IN VIETNAM. I WAS IN GRENADA. I WAS IN NICARAGUA. MEXICO NEXT: Reverend Payne begins to pound desperately on the fuselage of his helicopter scratching the decals saying with a hoarse voice: Why are we in Veracruz? and Gingerich trying to quiet him down telling him we’re here to protect the oil installations in the Gulf of Mexico without which the free world would be strategifucked … and the Reverend interrupts him with an open, hard slap on the body of the helicopter that echoes like a gigantic can of Campbell’s soup allowed to swell monstrously in the boiling humidity of the jungle: the truth! shouts the Reverend the truth! We’ve got to terminate this country that exports greasers who are invading us like the plague of locusts that destroyed Pharaoh’s power! Michigan is not growing South Carolina is not growing Georgia isn’t growing, not even your own home state Texas is growing, Professor, we aren’t having kids but all these greasers grow and grow and cross over and cross over and they’ll end up coupling with our own daughters and mothers and wives who have emerged like Venus from the Caucasian genetic pool Are you listening to me, Professor? haven’t you heard how often they call each other motherfuckers? well I want to send them back to their mommas air-mail with my faithful Minuteman 92 kill them in their father’s seed before they enter their mother’s belly repulsive filthy greasers invaders of other people’s clean white American property / camping out on our green lawns Are you going to allow it, Professor? But you’re opposed to abortion, Reverend, how are you going to halt the demographic explosion of the Hispanics if you are an apostle of the anti-abortion movement in the good old U.S.A., but they are not U.S. of A. nor are they good nor are they old said the Reverend in a horrible explosion of rage, throwing himself on the unarmed figure of Professor Will Gingerich and killing an unborn child is not the same as killing a grownup Mexican with a mustache to keep him from procreating, it isn’t the same, Prof, admit it! Will Gingerich, assaulted by Reverend Payne, lands face-down next to a slow river surrounded by burning tigers

there is only one room in Deng Chopin’s bordello: it is divided by a vaporous but stained gauze curtain stained with what only God knows / semen from an onanistic Chicano, bat shit or beer or guacamole it’s impossible to tell: the tiny Oriental lets the men in invites them to undress and then silently approach the canopied bed, which in turn is wrapped in complicated mosquito netting arranged like theater curtains, without waking up the sleeping woman: she is the sleeping beauty that’s the secret of this celestial house, that there is only one prostitute here and she makes love asleep: asleep? The two gringos laugh and Deng Chopin closes his eyes significantly and invitingly: asleep and the two soldiers nudge each other and laugh finally Nat what we always wanted none of these pigs let us listen Macho Nacho making love at the same time you from the front and me from the rear then we trade places why not smiles Deng Chopin: only in Caldel can you carry out your illusions he invites them to undress and take off their backpacks ah no laugh Nat and Macho Nacho never, we can be naked but we never give up our BACKPACK NUKES even for a second they laugh but don’t you worry now Chink man, the only rockets that be gonna go off here are when my buddy and I come inside your sleepin’ beauty they cackle Deng Chopin fans himself doesn’t laugh only raises his eyebrows and goes back to his rocker on the main street of Villa Cardel: Now Entering Little Saigon

they told me there wouldn’t be any killing! exclaims Professor Gingerich they recruited me to help the cause of peace to avoid a war between the United States and Mexico I got out of the Acapulco catastrophe and they told me in the U.S. Embassy that the way to work for peace was to do some intelligence investigation in Veracruz the alternative? we send you to Texas to work on the border I’m a professor in Dartmouth College it doesn’t matter it says here that you’re a Texan it doesn’t matter where you work but where you’re from as far as repatriation is concerned Professor Gingerich the honorable way out of this fix is an intelligence mission in Veracruz our reward to you will be to send you back to Dartmouth College where Christmases are indeed white and the mountains are green and the summers are as slow and hot as deep lakes and the pale dahlias and yellow jasmines flower: don’t worry Professor there won’t be any killing it’s a reconnaissance-intelligence mission: we’ve got to find a reason, Professor Gingerich: why are we in Veracruz? Reverend Royall Payne gets into his black helicopter, which is like a spider a caterpillar a hidden diamond a diabolical crown the devil’s cloven hooves the anus of the vampire as black as the night of the day in which the sun set in the east and the cats closed their eyes and the dogs did not dare to bark / the Reverend gets into his Apache attack helicopter, which he learned to fly on direct orders from President Rambold Ranger who told him: “Royall, you are God’s co-pilot. If I weren’t here, you would make the Big Decision in my place”: the President personally gave him this marvelous apparatus, which can fly at 327 miles per hour for six consecutive hours at thirty thousand feet detecting and calibrating the distance to every aircraft that comes within three hundred miles: capable of locating more than 250 targets and making thirty air interceptions: but the most beautiful aspect of Royall Payne’s chopper is its rotodome, the disk that holds the radar and radio antennas of the craft with a range that duplicates that of the most advanced systems currently known — it looks like a white emblem mounted on top of the helicopter and thinking about the decals stamped with the death’s-head and the anxious difference between stamping the skull on the name of Mexico and adding the address of the newest decal: CANADA NEXT COLOMBIA NEXT TRINIDAD NEXT said Royall Payne, who had decided in that instant to speak to the world through the microphone of his trusty Apache broadcasting his message of war and salvation with each steel pulse of the blades of his helicopter blades that shine like the shining blades that every six hours shave the shining cheeks of the man of steel the Priest of Death striking fear into the air of the old Totonaca cemeteries bending the trunks of the palm trees beating the zinc roofs against the cardboard walls shortening the life of the CAT HUTS, which are already on the point of disintegration: someday you’ll thank me the Reverend whines as if in a stellar sermon but the voice from the radio says don’t come back Roy go back to your base no roars Reverend Royall someday you’ll thank me he shouted in pain biting his hands on which was tattooed

DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR

but the voice from the radio a distant faggy voice paid by the reds an anti-American insolent Massachusetts voice Roy don’t forget that we are only here to protect the oil supply we do what we have to do we follow orders Roy we apply the instructions of the CIA pamphlet we try to neutralize all Mexicans within a radius of ten miles around Villa Cardel and the banks of the Chachalacas but we cannot go any farther there is an agreement with the Mexican government not to go any farther you can’t launch your missiles against Mexico City not even against Jalapa Roy: pay attention to the Gulf of Campeche Resolution! Then we’re involved in the same old thing we won’t win this war either! shouted the preacher, his hands bleeding bitten by his own teeth don’t be stupid Roy remember that this little war is only a media event an informative show covered by TV and the press to prove to the world but above all to ourselves that we really are macho and it’s also being staged so that the Mexican government can prove to its people that they have to unite in order to defend this shitty country it’s important for both of us don’t forget that what are you going to do Roy where are you going Roy Roy! don’t forget how the script goes don’t do anything weird remember that at the end we’re going to say we won the war then we get out we win and we get out Roy don’t forget that everything’s already set WE WIN AND WE GET OUT ROY!

A river appears in the middle of the night it flows luminous and slow like a caress a distant guitar is heard and Will Gingerich wonders why all this makes him afraid Christopher don’t you ever feel terror amid the placental pleasures and protection of your mother Angeles’s womb?

She doesn’t move Nat told Macho Nacho the chink told you that she’s asleep go on open the curtain Nat one mosquito net after another sure so she can sleep in peace but if my black dingaling doesn’t wake her up I don’t know how yours will better measure mine why do you black guys always think that God gave you bigger bananas than anybody else? okay set her up so we can have some fun with you in front and me in back then we switch listen look at her lift up her legs and look at her she’s not very young see around here who cares if they’re young or old the important thing is a piece of ass forget if it’s young or old Macho it isn’t that her legs weigh a lot heavy sleep Nat try to turn her over I’m telling you she weighs a ton the equivalent of 250 tons of TNT

BACKPACK NUKE

FRONT-ROW DICK

NEVER LEAVE HOME WITHOUT THEM

and her arms are real stiff let’s see these marble tits frozen spread her legs and what about her ass? frozen too frozen and locked tighter than a safety-deposit box at Chase Manhattan Bank stick your finger in it doesn’t go in Nat this ass is a dry CAT BOX! no one’s gone through there in a hundred years and what about behind? BACK DOOR! something’s going on back here and the face what’s it like Harry made of porcelain it looks like a doll’s face made of Chinese porcelain it’s pretty but it’s old white real white with closed eyes powdered and with red hair touch her hair Nat do it for me I’m looking down here Nat it isn’t hair it’s a wig what the fuck it slipped off there’s a liquid running out her ears what’s she got in her nose cotton wads holy shit Harry what she’s got running down her ass stinks like hell like disinfectant it smells like formaldehyde holy shit she just now opened her eyes Macho Nacho but she isn’t moving them they’re made of glass holy papaya this bitch is sick Nat this bitch’s got something wrong with her this bitch is dead don’t be a moron this fucking bitch is spoiled cold cuts don’t shout like that Macho for the sake of Luis Rafael I beg you Sánchez don’t make such a racket that’s right be careful watch out what you’re doing don’t clench your teeth don’t clench fists don’t move your BACKPACK NUKE like that if you pull on that string shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit

someday you’ll thank me

the greasers breed like rats so they can go for the good life

so they can end up the way everybody wants to end up

as in a stellar sermon

TV and refrigerators and football stadiums and

white asses and things that work and hospitals

and cereals that snap crackle and pop and bread without flies

and American cars Akutagawas and Togos and Meijis and Kabuki 2002s

each one of your little brothers who stays here means one red-blooded

American home saved thanks to me!

Cardel Chachalacas Tajín Totonacas

Reverend Royall Payne looks at the vision of the Peak of Orizaba which is rapidly approaching his whitish-blue eyes reverberating looking at the frozen peak of the volcano an image of his own gaze as if the humble toiler in the Lord’s work could transform himself into nature

tall white eternal rock and ice: permanent

NO MORE DEFEATS! MORE DEFEATS MEAN MORE REVENGE!

NO MORE VIETNAMS! LETHAL FORCE IS AUTHORIZED!

NO MORE DEFEATS!

in the river crossing the river under the water masked by the fiery water imagining that his pantheistic anthropologist’s dream is finally going to resolve itself in the nightmare of dying and becoming hamburger repeats Will Gingerich under the slow and flaming river but the flames only consume the town of Cardel the river is a border and the professor of Dartmouth College crosses to the other side and falls face-down on the fertile mud of the river

the United States lost its innocence in Veracruz muttered Professor Gingerich when the hands of others (friendly? unfriendly?) grabbed him under the armpits and pulled him out of his mud bed on the banks of the slow river surrounded by tigers with golden eyes and backs of fire the butterflies crowning the waters the ghost of the moon in the eternal blue black night

in Veracruz

in Vietnam

in Korea

in Hiroshima

in Dresden

in Santo Domingo

in Bluefields

in Managua

in Port-au-Prince

in Santiago de Cuba

in Manila

in Andersonville

in the Little Bighorn

in Tripoli

in Chapultepec

in Chapultepec

in Chapultepec

and in El Tajín

the broken clay

bells of the moon

hummingbird magician

serpent skirts

stars of the south

the tiger said: fire in half of the night

the clay said: mirror of smoke

I said crisscrossed with voices:

17. The Other Bank of the River

After he’d been rescued from the mud on the floodplain, Professor Gingerich said all these things as he was eating some hamburgers cooked up by the albino trucker. My father and the girl dressed as a Discalced Carmelite listened to him.

The Yankee spoke to her, raising his voice slightly above the din behind us, endless said my father: Gingerich only stared at the girl, recognizing her, as he spoke near the low, hospitable fire in this forest clearing.

He stopped occasionally to chew the hamburger. Then he revealed, staring at Colasa Sánchez, that he was speaking and imagining at the same time; such was the scope of his gaze. When I am born, I may perhaps have a better opportunity to understand how people look at things and persons and to read in looks the names of desire. Although from this moment on I do know (my father looks for me, you understand, Reader) that if desire is only the imitation of another desire it’s because when we want something we want at the same time to be wanted. That’s the way Gingerich and Colasa look at each other. Both know what the Professor heard from the lips of his deceased friend D. C. Buckley. Be careful with that woman. Use a wooden penis. Penis du bois.

Tonight my father divines in the trembling of Gingerich’s features, a man just saved from death in the jungle, an availability in the face of another’s desire. An aperture. She needs no introduction: Colasa Sánchez, Matamoros Moreno’s bastard. He says simply, as she swallows a piece of hamburger, which she holds delicately between her fingers, the way one might pick up a host, that he came from the other bank. What did he want? Something huge, something very difficult, for him to have risked death by crossing over.

The other bank: my father was going to interrupt, by saying something banal: he swam. He stopped just in time. The night, the light of the fire, the clamor behind us (I am my father! you are the reader!) transformed her; Colasa Sánchez was a necessary being, she revealed herself as a daughter of necessity, more even than her father Matamoros Moreno and her mother Anónima Sánchez. She needed; that was her supplication that night.

The other bank: Will Gingerich stretched out his hand and touched Colasa Sánchez’s fingers with his own. Cinnamon-colored skin, tea-colored, Carmelite-colored. Guess: where are the scapularies? Will closed his eyes and accepted the necessity of Colasa. Desire is necessary and it must run the risk of transformation. We desire what we desire not only in order to have it but also in order to change into the image of our desire: into our own image.

Would the object of desire resist?

Would it admit its own need, the need of the other, even at the cost of transformation?

When my father saw their fingers touch and when he imagined the cruel union of their sexes, he stood up trembling, masked his emotion in the frontier darkness, and said to himself what he would say to my mother and me, turbid and luminous in her bosom, when he found us once again:

“I saw this couple take that risk and I saw things clearly in the darkness of the jungle. I am not risking anything by returning to you, who are my love, Angeles, and to our about-to-be-born son. Accept my return. Let me explain why I love you and how much I desire you.”

Colasa and Will, holding hands, staring at each other with passion, conscious of the danger, laughing at the myth, at Matamoros dead, at the bitten Manhattanite’s wooden dildo, at the Mexican Ms., the mortal manuscript: Will Gingerich had no book, Matamoros’s words would not be eaten: he was the owner of a body,

“My body is yours,” said the girl Colasa, free at last.