When he heard that name, the Orphan Huerta jumped up from behind a green velvet chair where he’d been hiding and with an audacious fury he repeated: López, López, Ulises López, Lucha López, as if they were the names of the devil himself and his henchman. They burned our houses, they said the land was theirs, they murdered my folks. Because of them, my lost brother and I fled!
My mother instinctively embraced the Orphan, and my father recited one of his favorite verses by López Velarde—the Christ Child left you a stable—and Benítez agreed that the city’s image is its destiny, but Ulises López did not, there was no destiny, there was will and action, nothing more, he would repeat to his wife Lucha Plancarte de López: wherever a band of squatters would set up on their lands, they would get them out with blood and fire, showing no mercy. After all, they only lived in miserable cardboard shacks, like animals in stables.
6. Fatherland, Your Surface Is Pure Corn
Uncle Fernando’s second revenge was to order the Four Fuckups to stand in front of lawyer Fagoaga’s Shogun limousine at the moment he was to leave for dinner.
Don Homero had spent an extremely active morning at his office, which provided him a perfect front for his activities: old-fashioned, supremely modest, on a fourth floor on Frank Wood Avenue, with old, fat-assed, half-blind secretaries who’d heard their last compliment during the presidency of López Mateos, folio upon folio of dusty legal documents, and hidden behind them a notary from Oaxaca wearing a green visor and sleeve garters. Don Homero had spoken on the telephone with his gringo partner Mr. Kirkpatrick, agreeing (Homero) to import from his partner (Kirkpatrick) all the pesticides prohibited by law in North America, to send them from Mexico to the Philippines as a Mexican export (our exports are highly applauded because they bring in revenue, ha ha), even though I pay you more than any Filipino could pay me, ha ha, don’t be a joker, Mr. Kirkpatrick, I’ll never eat a tortilla made from a kernel of corn sprayed with your pesticide. I have my baguettes flown in by Air France from that chic bakery on Rue du Cherche-Midi. Luckily there are no consumer protection laws here! It’s better to have investments and a job, even if they bring cancer and emphysema!
Now our esteemed LL.D. descended from his traditional offices on Frank Wood Avenue, putting on his kidskin gloves and his dove-colored fedora and making his way through the masses that at three in the afternoon were filing along this central street, which in other eras had been known as San Francisco, then as Plateros, and lately Francisco Madero, got into his wide-bodied car through the door obsequiously opened by his Filipino chauffeur Tomasito. At the time, Tomasito was very young but sinister-looking because of his Oriental features. As Don Homero was making himself comfortable on the soft seats, he saw that the street mob had gathered around his car, their eyes popping out of their heads, staring at him, Don Homero Fagoaga, lawyer and linguist, as if he were a two-headed calf or a millionaire who followed the President’s orders and brought back the dollars he’d exported in 1982.
Uncle Homero ordered the Filipino chauffeur to go on, to get out of here now, but Tomasito said in English No can do, master, and the multitude grew, rubbing its collective nose on the windows of Mr. Fagoaga’s Japanese limo, sullying the windshield, the windows, and the doors with their saliva, snot, fingerprints, and blinding breath. Such was the massive and to him incomprehensible curiosity Counselor Fagoaga provoked. He sat, fearful and besieged, in all his obesity within this Turkish bath which his automobile had become with its windows closed to fend off a death which the illustrious member of the Academy of the Language didn’t know whether to ascribe to excessive hatred, like the deaths of Moctezuma or Mussolini, or to excessive love, like that of any rockaztec idol of our times, stripped and dismembered by his groupies.
“Open the windows, my Manila-bred charioteer!” shouted Uncle H. to his chauffeur.
“Is danger master, me no likey lookey!” (En Anglais dans le texte.)
“Well, you’re starting to annoy me, you bastard son of Quezón,” exclaimed Uncle H., who valiantly opened his window onto the excited mob, in order, as it were, to pick out the kid with the bottle-capped head, shouting orbi et urbi, gather round, free show, the kid with the vulcanized feet held aloft by his disciples, a fat guy with limp black hair and a skinny kid who had a coyote’s snout and tangled hair, shouting look at this car, the windows are magnifying lenses, hoisted right off the ground by the horrible skinned kid with the huge snout and that soft fatty with long hair who could have been, ay! Homero himself at sweet sixteen, shouting look at the Japanese car, latest model with magnifying windows, and look at the fat man inside magnified, now or never, ladies and gentlemen.
“Take off, yellow peril!” said Uncle Homero furiously to Tomasito, who was rapidly closing the window. “Take off, don’t worry, run them over if you have to, I’ve told you already, you know the official opinion of the Federal District police force: If You Run Over a Pedestrian, Do Not Stop. Get moving, Tomasito, they’re using inquest reports as wallpaper in all the law offices and courts, get moving, even if you run them over and kill them. It’s legal, because it costs more to stop traffic, make police reports, and sue people. Kill these downtrodden masses, Tomasito, for the good of the City and the Republic. Kill them, Homero said, but in his crazed eyes desire trembled. He loved them and he hated them, he saw them running across vacant lots, barefoot, unarmed, but by now used to the wounds caused by dioxides, phosphates, and monoxides; he peeked out the closed, dripping window of the Nipponese limo, and stared angrily at them, as they ran along Frank Wood behind him; in front of the curious crowd: the bottle caps, the skinned one, and the pudgy little one; he observed their three pairs of legs, let’s see which ones he liked best, and their six feet which ran behind his automobile were deformed in some way, eddypusses, or Eddy Poes, says my dad now, punster supreme, feet deformed by that protective layer of human rubber which has been forming on the feet of the city kids and which is sure evidence that they spent their un-fancies in the streets, lots, in this place we call Mexico, DOA: eddypusses of lost children, running behind Uncle Homero Fagoaga’s limo: the Lost Boys, Orphan Huerta, Orphan Annie, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit, the gaseous exhalations of Mexico, DOA:
“Charge, O Horde of Gold!” Uncle Homero closed his eyes as his faithful Filipino obeyed and cut a swath through the curious bystanders—the spectacle looked like a Posadas engraving of Death on Horseback massacring the innocent. More than one nosy body was summarily dumped on his backside (“Fools!” exulted Don Homero), but in fact our uncle only had eyes for that boy with the ferociously grimy mien, the one wearing the bottle caps on his chapeau and running with his two companions … Nevertheless, as it usually turns out with even the obsessions truly worthy of the name, he eventually stopped thinking about them and the crowd scene he’d just endured. He was exhausted. When he got home, he went up to his apartment and asked to have a bath drawn. Tomasito ran to carry out the order and then returned, delight written all over his face: “Ready, master.”
Homero tweaked his cheek. “Just for that, I forgive you all your sins, because when you’re efficient, you’re a wizard, my little Fu Manchu.” He undressed in his black marble bathroom, coquettishly imagining in the mirrors another form for his body, one that while being the same would drive the obscure objects of his desire mad, he, Homero, a Ronald Colman with a Paramount mustache. He sighed, thankful for the liquid verdancy of the water in his Poppaeaish tub fit for a Roman empress. Deliberately, but fleetingly, he thought that in Mexico, D.F. (aka DOA), only private comfort—not only exclusive but actually secret—existed because anything shared with others had become ugly—streets, parks, buildings, public transportation, stores, movies—everything, but inside, in the corners left to wealth, it was possible to live luxuriously, secretly, because it did not involve a violation of national solidarity—like having to give back hard but illegally earned bucks, or giving up $5 million co-ops on Park Avenue, or selling off condos in Vail at bargain rates, it did not involve
offending those less fortunate than he who … He gazed with a sense of marvel at the intense green color, at the same time liquidly transparent and beautifully solid (like marble, one might say), of the water in his bath and gave himself up to it completely.
He let himself drop, with a jolly, carefree plop, into the tub, but instead of being enveloped by the delightful and warm fluidity of the green water, he was embraced by a cold, sticky squid: a thousand tentacles seized his buttocks, his back, his knees, his elbows, his privates, his neck: Lawyer Fagoaga sank into something worse than quicksand, mud, or a tank full of sharks: unable to move a finger, a leg, his head bobbing like that of a marionette, Homero was sucked in by a tub full of green gelatine, a sweet pool of viscous lime Jell-O in which Uncle H. looked like a gigantic strawberry.
“What have we here, a barrister in aspic?” guffawed Uncle Don Fernando Benítez from the door, wearing a starched butterfly collar, bow tie, and a light, double-breasted shantung suit.
“Tomasito!” Homero Fagoaga managed to scream, seconds before sinking into horror, surprise, and rage, which were even stickier than the gallons of gelatine put there by the Fuckups: “Tomasito! Au secours! Au secours!”
“Does your boss really know French, or is he just a disgusting snob?” asked Uncle Fernando, taking the stick and hat that Tomasito, the perfect though perplexed servant, handed him before he went to help his master, who was shouting, “Benítez, you Russophile! You café Marxist! You salon Commie!” His extravagant list went on, my mother noted, and every item pointed to the exact moment in which his political education had taken place and dated him.
Tomasito, after saving his master with vacuum cleaners, massage, and even corkscrews, withdrew to pray to a potted palm he carried around with him. He begged the gods of his country that he never again confuse his master with the relatives, confidants, or friends of his master, that he never again allow them to enter the domicile of his master, or that he ever serve more than one master at any one time.
Then, sobbing, he went back to Don Homero Fagoaga, prostrate in his canopied bed, to squeeze him out a bit more and beg his forgiveness.
“I think there’s still some gelatine in his ears and nose,” said my father Angel, but my mother merely repeated these words:
“What will my son breathe when he is born?”
“Perhaps I’d better answer your question about which language the boy will speak first. Didn’t you ask about that, too?”
“Okay. Which language will he speak? That was my third question.”
3
It’s a Wonderful Life
Child, girl, woman, hag, sorceress, witch, and hypocrite, the devil takes her.
Quevedo
1
My circumstance consists of certainties and uncertainties. One certainty: the boy has been conceived under the sign of Aquarius. One uncertainty: his chances of becoming a Mexican fetus are one in one hundred and eighty-three trillion six hundred and seventy-five billion nine hundred million four hundred thousand fifty-three hundred and forty-eight, according to my father’s calculations, which he made as he waded into the Pacific Ocean with my mom to wash away the shit that rained on them from the sky that midday of my cuntception. First day of the c(o)untdown they called it. I call it my first swing in the cemetery, as I moved toward the ovarian reading lesson, because even though they remember now what happened that day, I knew it absolutely and totally from the moment in which my dad’s microserpent knocked over my mom’s corona radiata (no, not a corona corona, Dad’s was an exploding cigar, a MIRV, come to think of it) as if it were made of rose petals, while the survivors I’ve already mentioned of the great battle of Hairy Gulch invaded the gelatinous membrane, de profundis clamavimus—but nobody was home: which of us will have the honor to fertilize Doña Angeles (no last name), wife of Don Angel Palomar y Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca, descendant of the most exclusive families of Puebla, Veracruz, Guadalajara, and Mexico City?; one in a million, the lucky little guy, the fortunate hunchback. All madly trying to penetrate, break the barrier, perforate the shell, and overcome the fidelity of this Penelope who will not invite just any old dick to dinner, only one, the champ, the Ulyssex returned from the wars, the greatest, the Muhammad Ali of the chromosomes, número uno:
YOU MEAN LITTLE OLD ME?
I, admirable and full of portents, I allowed in, bombarded by voices and memories, oh dear me, places and times, names and songs, dinners and fucks, speeches and stutterings, rememberings and forgettings, this unique I CHRISTOPHER and what they call genes.
“Hey, genes are to blame for everything,” said Uncle Fernando.
“Of course,” agreed Uncle Homero Fagoaga, “Hegels are to blame for everything.”
Why did two men who hated each other, who were so unalike in everything, my Uncles Fernando and Homero, have to be together, colliding, interrupting each other? What impels us to do what we don’t want to do, to self-destruction? Is it that we prefer an insult, a humiliation, even a crime—murder—to being alone?
My father and mother, for example, are no longer alone: they live together and they have just conceived me—ME. I will listen to them throughout this story and I shall learn, little by little, that their union, their true love, does not exclude a constant struggle between what they are and what they would like to be, between what they have and what they would like to have. I state here and now that what I have just said without breaking any rules of narrative (know it well, your mercies benz) because the difference between my father and my mother is that you’ll know all there is to know about Angel at the beginning, while about Angeles you’ll know a little at the end. There are people like that, and I don’t lose anything by stating it outright at the start. It’s more important to note the opposing forces within them: what I am and what I want to be; what I have and what I want to have. I, so solitary in the solar center of my narrative, I understand well what I’m telling you, Gentile Readers. Since I am so alone, I have to wonder incessantly: what is it I need in order not to be alone; who is the other I need most in order to be myself, the one and only Christopher Unborn?
My answer is clear and forthright: I need you, Reader.
2
At any hour of the day, in any social class, in any of the infernal circles of this selva selvaggia, there are two problems: how to be alone or, alternatively, how to be in good company. But in Makesicko City, the city where my father grew up, the problem is saving oneself from pests (Angel told Angeles).
They tell me that in other countries a person with manners would never dare interrupt someone’s morning work time or his well-earned leisure time without setting up a date in advance and then showing up at the exact time; they send blue pneumatiques (or used to until pneumatiques died prematurely in 1984) or at the least call. Not in Mexico. The D.F. is a village with village manners disguised as a megalopolis. “Hey, man, get over here right now.” “Listen, I’m coming right over, okay?” Complete with kings, tombs, tribes, and leeches.
The most virulent form of this social disease known as the leech is the “parachutist,” who “drops in” at any hour of the day or night without calling, interrupting a dinner (if it’s the gate-crasher variety, it wants to be invited to join in), interrupting sex (if it’s a refined voyeur and sniffs out the hours when others take their pleasure), interrupting reading (if it happens to suffer acute agraphia and feels annoyed if someone settles down to cohabitate with words).
Which language will the child speak? asks my mother insistently, and my father answers that our language is dying on us, and only because they know that will they (Mom and Dad) pardon the existence of my Uncle Homero. We just saw all that.
But for the parachuting or interrupting pest no pardon is possible: its language is pure chatter, yakitiyak, gossip, tongue-wagging, and championship bouts of chin-wagging, although these creatures often invent dramatic pretexts to justify their undesired intrusion to the victim: during his adolescence, my father Angel (he tells us) attracted these
creatures (of both sexes), especially those wandering around loose in Colonia Juárez or Colonia Cuauhtémoc.
In this city, then, populated by perpetually invading hordes (si j’ai bien compris) that arrive from anywhere at any hour of the day or night without being called or desired, who knock at the door (bambambam, Anybody home? knockknockknock, It’s the devil! Nobody home? Am I interrupting? Could you lend me your maracas? Don’t you have a little tepache in the fridge? For whatever reason, says my father Angel: in this city, he believes that when he was a young man he was sought out more than any of his friends or acquaintances because they all still lived at home or because of inflation they all went back to live with their parents or had to rent rooms in uncomfortable, promiscuous boardinghouses, fearful of ending up in old neighborhoods or the new, lost neighborhoods, and by contrast, Angel was an orphan, but an orphan with a nice place; and all of them were suffering under revived nineteenth-century discipline (or earlier: the interregnum of disorder in Mexico was born with the Rolling Stones and ended with the austerity of Rollover Debts: on the crumbling corners, the saddest song was once again the one about there being only four thousand pesos left from all the oil that was mine ay ayayayay; the happiest song, the one about the death of the petropeso, the death of conceit, you want a tiger in your tank?/ well money talks and bullshit walks): someone knocked on the door of his grandparents’ house, a beggar dressed as a monk, asking for alms:
“Please contribute to my grandmother’s funeral.”
Angel’s grandma, Doña Susana Rentería, pulled off her wedding ring and, trembling, handed it to the monk. Then she shut the door, embraced Angel, and begged: “Please don’t tell my Rigo what I just did.”
Okay, the pest rarely sets up a date and when it does it invariably arrives late; on the other hand, if it comes without warning, it always arrives (by definition) right on time: such was the case of the myriad parachutists who dropped in on my father when he was living—more freely than anyone in his generation as far as coming and going were concerned—in the coach house annexed to the house of his grandparents, Don Rigoberto Palomar (ninety-one years old) and Doña Susana Rentería de Palomar (sixty-seven years old) on Calle Génova. Having emancipated himself from the tyranny of Don Homero Fagoaga and his sisters Capitolina and Farnesia, my father enjoyed a unique reputation: if he lived alone—so the story went—it was because he was more respectable, more mature, more trustworthy than any other boy or girl in his public school: HEROES OF 1982. The school, originally private, was founded by Don Mamelín Mártir de Madrazo (better known in financial circles as Jolly Roger), who created it as proof of his public-spiritedness. Of course, Don Mártir, the most expropriated banker in Mexico before he was kidnapped and murdered, never imagined that this last bulwark of his civic prestige would also be expropriated. They never even bothered to change the school’s name, since HEROES OF 1982 by definition could apply just as well to the expropriators as to those expropriated—all the better, in fact, since those who expropriated the school would one day leave government for private industry, where they would in their turn be expropriated by the next government, revolutionarily ad infinitum. The net result was that at school Angel Palomar y Fagoaga paid dearly for his fame because pests dropped in at all hours to tell him their troubles, using metaphysical or physical anguish as a pretext: I’ll commit suicide if I don’t talk to someone, which actually meant: If I don’t commit suicide I’ll talk to someone, and by the way do you have anything in the fridge (an ocean), what are you reading (The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, gent.), how tired I am (go to bed, baby), aren’t you? (sure I am and here I come), what record should I put on (the last one put out by my favorite group, Immanuel Can’t), well, Kan’t you sing me something?