Renewed, happy, and retrograde, my heart spent many more weeks in Oaxaca. I let Oaxaca penetrate and possess me, just as I had wanted to penetrate and possess the vanished Agueda. Slowly but surely, I purged myself of the need to hurry. I wisely reconquered the softness of Agueda’s back, sitting alone on a bench in an anonymous park. I won it all little by little, my boy: the willowy bodies of the girls, their sugar lips, their loving provincial modesty, my nostalgia for the feet of my beloved, the clear Sundays, the cruel sky and the red earth, the chronic sadness, the miraculous illusions, the wells and the windows, the dinners and the sheets, the prolonged funeral rites, the prophecy of the turtle …
I made everything mine. Even the source of Matamoros Moreno’s prose: I recognized it, I shared it; we were brothers, doubles, barely separated by the lines on an open hand: courtesy and camp. Brothers, doubles, because López Velarde transformed the commonplaces of our small-town kitsch into poetry and mystery, and that’s something Matamoros knew better than I.
In Oaxaca, I even acquired the insanely heroic habit of talking to myself.
I returned to Mexico City when I thought the danger of Matamoros and Colasa had succumbed to my prolonged absence, by which time they would have avidly sought new, more promising opinions, backing, and recommendations for Matamoros’s efforts.
I returned by bus, alone, repeating, repeating to myself the verses of López Velarde’s Sweet Fatherland
surface: maize
oil wells: devil
clay: silver
tolling bells: pennies
smell: bakery
fowl: language
breathing: incense
happiness: mirror
I looked for Agueda and I did not find her
I looked for the Sweet Fatherland and didn’t find it
Three months later, I found your mother.
I searched for a nation identical to itself. I searched for a nation built to last. My heart filled with an intimate, reactionary joy: as intimate as the joy felt by millions of Mexicans who wanted to conserve at least the borders of their poor country: conservatives. I said I learned to love true conservatives. Bishop Vasco de Quiroga, who constructed a utopia in Michoacán in 1535 so that the Indians could conserve their lives and traditions and not die of despair. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, the Franciscan scribe who saved the memory of the Indian past. The Indian and Spanish builders whose structures were meant to last. Resistant stone, faithful countries: was only Mexico’s past serious? asked my father Angel after his return from Oaxaca, his loss of Agueda, his meeting my mother. Does Mexico’s future have to be like its present: a vast comedy of graft and mediocrity perpetrated in the name of Revolution and Progress? Thus, I want the Sweet Fatherland, my father Angel ordered us to say, ordered, that is, my mother, whom he had still not met, and me, still in the most perfect of limbos: a country identical to itself: hardworking, modest, productive, concerned in the first instance with feeding its people, a country opposed to gigantism and madness: I refuse to do anything, plant anything, say anything, erect anything that will not last five centuries, Christopher, my son, created to celebrate the five centuries: beloved Angeles.
This was his resolution, mulled over in the few instants of solitude he enjoyed in his coach-house merry-go-round over in Colonia Juárez. But putting the resolution into practice presented him with a mass of contradictions. He would understand these contradictions later in February when he met his friend the fat little guy, the projectionist and lyricist for rockaztec, who explained to him that the tragedy of his life and the source of his artistic inspiration was his father, a living (when he was alive) contradiction. When he married, his father was given a horrible gift, nothing less than a vast, hideous bronze sculpture, dominating and inexorable, that contained images of Father Hidalgo, Don Benito Juárez, and Pancho Villa, together raising the national flag (executed in tricolor silk) above the Basilica of Guadalupe, on whose portals (executed in polychromed wood) hung the tricolor shields of the PRI. This gift was sent to the fat guy’s father, who was an engineer specializing in public works, by his principal client, the head man at the Secretariat of Public Works, and even though our buddy’s dad detested the sculpture and huffed and puffed about it the whole day, and even though its presence in the entryway of the family house in Colonia Nápoles almost caused his divorce and was certainly the source of a conjugal irritation that lasted throughout his parents’ life, our buddy would tell us all that his dad would never take it away from there: suppose the Director General of the Secretariat comes around and doesn’t see his present? Suppose people think that in our house we don’t respect the symbols of the nation? Our national heroes? The flag? The Virgin? I’ll tell you what could happen: bye-bye contracts, bye-bye three squares per diem!
But this same man, his father, as our buddy again remembers, mocked authority all day. He said he would take nothing from no one, let’s see someone try to give him an order, he was a serious professional, independent, an engineer, to be more precise: he’d like to see someone try: he refused to do his military service or to pay income tax (which, according to him, ended up in the Swiss accounts of government officials); he refused to join with the neighbors to create a neighborhood patrol; he refused to get on line for movies or bread (lines? me? I’d like to see the guy …); he never stopped for a red light; and he never ever (it redounds to his honor) paid off any cop or meter maid: he hated all uniforms, even those of street sweepers or ushers: he would urge them to be individuals, to dress as they pleased, they weren’t nuts and bolts in a machine, they were individuals, damn it, INDIVIDUALS! not rags, not doormats; he never signed petitions of any kind, never bought a lottery ticket, never lent candles to the neighbors when the power went out, never depended on anyone so that no one would depend on him, never helped anyone, never asked for help; but he never got rid of that hideous sculpture down in the entryway: he would say, what if the boss comes?; then bye-bye three squares per diem; but more than that, he never dared to touch the symbols: his individualism became abjection in the face of those domineering symbols; just as he always refused to go to a political meeting or obey a traffic light, he refused to act against any abstract abuse by the powers that be, even an abuse that condemned him and his family to walk in front of that sculptural monstrosity every day of their lives: individualist to the end, but abject to the end as well: my poor old man, our pudgy little pal would sigh, anarchist and synarchist, and that’s the way we are in these parts: rebels in our private lives and slaves in our civic lives.
This is the dilemma my father Angel expressly tried to avoid. It was easy to distinguish and decide, but very difficult to do things. No sooner would he act than he would fear falling into total disorder and ending up not in a bower of bliss but in the slough of despond. He denied that being conservative meant being an “hidalgo,” because hidalgos only try to prove themselves in love and war and end up with no roof over their heads and no brains left, and what turns out to be the ultimate test of hidalgos is doing absolutely nothing. And what my young father began to fear was that if he didn’t watch out, he too would disappear, chewed up by the jaws of Mexico and her Institutions: he tried to imagine himself in a trashy Iwo Jima, a mock Laocoön, which the father of his future pal Egg installed in the vestibule over in Colonia Nápoles. In any case, the Canaima Option, the grand Latin American solution, was best: remain immobile in a jungle landscape, with no more company than an araguato monkey and slowly but surely let the vines cover you up. The jungle swallowed him up!
Neither was he going to carry on like a creole aristocrat with old-fashioned expatriate nostalgia for Spain, because he knew that in Mexico there have traditionally been two ways of being Spanish: being the gachupín with the grocery store, the frugal Don Venancio who sleeps on the counter and keeps an exact inventory of how many cans of sardines have been sold every day, or being the anti-Don Venancio, the creole gachupín who, in order to get a taste of what it’s like not to run a grocery store, keeps bl
issfully chaotic account books, goes into debt up to his sideburns, and in doing so puts the nation into debt: all to show he’s no shopkeeper, but an hidalgo: not Don Venancio the Sober but the spendthrift conquistador, the Very Magnificent Don Nuño de Guzmán, to bankruptcy and collapse, full speed ahead. My father had read Emilio Prados, Luis Cernuda, and León Felipe, the Spaniards who were exiled by Franco and who came to live in Mexico in 1939. These were the real Spaniards: not Venancio or Nuño, neither a Spaniard returned with his pockets full of New World gold nor a conquistador. He never wanted a Creole Camelot.
How would he be? He romantically reinvented himself as a rebellious conservative, in the same way that he would be an assassin if he could get away with it: but he was much more concerned that no one dare judge him, banking on his dishonesty, as was normal in Mexico, but banking instead on his virtue. He believed that in order to achieve his goal he would always have to do not the “right” thing but whatever he wanted to do and that would be the “right” thing. He tossed a veil over his personal failing: sensuality.
“Now tell me, buddy, what finally happened with that statue or monstrosity or whatever it was?”
“Well, what happened was that one night some thieves broke into our house—because, of course, my father refused to join the neighborhood patrol. Dad and Mom went downstairs in their pajamas, and the thieves threatened them with a knife. I saw it all from the stairs.”
“Who threatened them?”
“A great big guy wearing a mask. He seemed to be dragging a ball and chain and had what looked like a dwarf with him who was also wearing a mask. My mother saw her chance, Angelito, the heavens opened up to her. She ran to where the sculpture was so she could hand it over to the thief. But the truth is that she hugged the thing as if it were her dearest possession. At least that’s how the crook saw it, ’cause he apparently couldn’t stand for whatyacallit in psychology, a resistance, and right then and there he cut my mom’s throat … Christ! shouts my old man, forgetting everything he’d ever said about the Director General over at Public Works, and then screams at the thief: ‘Asshole! What she wanted was for you to take the thing! She wanted to get rid of…!’ He never got a chance to finish. Who knows what the crook was thinking, because he cut my old man’s throat, too. Then he took the damn statue, helped by the dwarf. He must’ve thought it was made of gold or had secret drawers stuffed with dollars, God knows…”
One February day, my father Angel attended a session of the Academy of the Language presided over by my Uncle Homero Fagoaga. He was dressed up like Francisco de Quevedo (it was the first time he wore the disguise in public). He listened politely to Don Homero’s speech in honor of the newest member of the Academy, the gongorhythmic poet J. Mambo de Alba, listened to Mr. Mambo’s sublime nonsense—he praised the crisis because it enclosed Mexico within itself and kept out foreign books, movies, art, and ideas. Now we were to scratch ourselves with our own nails! To read Proust is to proustitute oneself! To read Joyce is to make a poor choice! Reading Gide is doing a bad deed! Valéry is the valley of the shadow of evil! Mallarmé is marmalade! E. E. Cummings—well! He should be condomed! Let’s hear it for Tlaquepaque, coffee with cinnamon, serapes from Saltillo, Michoacán pottery, let’s head structuralism off at the pass, forget nouvelle cuisine and postpunkrock, let’s be like Ramón López Velarde, who, nourishing himself exclusively on the Revolution, with no foreign readings or fashions, found the essence of the Sweet Fatherland. It was the reference to López Velarde that aroused my father Angel’s rage. He’d always imagined his favorite poet wearing out his eyes looking for and finding and reading Baudelaire and Laforgue, while the colorless (but not odorless) poet and academician celebrated the dearth of imported books, the closing of the cultural borders, all so we could scratch ourselves with our own nails! Impetuously, Angel leapt up from his seat, went to the podium, and grabbed both his uncle and the poet by their noses. While he twisted one nose with each hand, he declared to the stupefied audience the things he’d just said here:
I SEEK A NATION IDENTICAL TO ITSELF
I SEEK A NATION MADE TO LAST
NOTHING THAT DOESN’T LAST FIVE CENTURIES
FATHERLAND, ALWAYS REMAIN THE SAME
FAITHFUL TO YOUR OWN REFLECTION:
LONG LIVE ALFONSO REYES! MEXICAN LITERATURE WILL BE GREAT
BECAUSE IT’S LITERATURE NOT BECAUSE IT’S MEXICAN!
and my father forced everyone there, beginning with the uncle and the poet, to breathe onto a mirror:
“I knew it. You’re all dead. I will not bestow the conservative tradition on a gaggle of exquisite corpses.”
He was very young. He mixed his metaphors. He was sincere. He didn’t know if his anarchic whims, outlandish jokes, and premeditated disorder would give him the key to happiness: Sweet Fatherland!
6
In these annals of a wonderful life prior to my conception (which makes me wonder if I’ll be lucky enough to find something amusing in my intrauterine life and—and even this I don’t dare hope for—later on), my father returned in February 1991 from Oaxaca, transformed, even though he still didn’t know it.
He went on leading his bachelor’s life, protected by his Grandparents Rigoberto and Susana. He still hadn’t found my mother and took up again with an old girlfriend named Brunilda, a great big sexy girl, lively and sentimental, with eyes like limpid pools and the mouth of a clown.
He was not faithful to her, nor she to him. And they both knew it. But he had never asked her to have a drink in the Royal Road Hotel bar along with one of his other girlfriends. She, on the other hand, enjoyed those collisions between rivals, allowing the two gallants to stare each other down like two polite basilisks while she chewed on the fringe of her ash-blond hair and observed them from the depths of her twin pools.
“So you think you’re terribly liberated, eh?” she would say, making catty faces from time to time. “So you think you’re terribly civilized, eh? A pair of little English gentlemen, is that it?”
Photos and letters from the rival accidentally left on Angel’s bed.
Now they were all together in the VIPS in San Angel, the afternoon of Thursday, February 28, 1991, neutral territory where they could explain all these things. Angel yawned. He shouldn’t have done it: life in Mexico City contains more surprises than any yawn imaginable deserves.
In the ecumenical and inexhaustible taxonomy of Mexican pests, Angel gave a high place to professional wives: these women feel it’s their job to promote their husbands twenty-four hours a day, to see to it that they are invited to elegant dinners, to castigate verbally any misguided critics of their divine consorts, and to imagine cataclysmic snubs provoked by the envy of others. But above all, the professional wife feels authorized to cash checks, an activity without which anything else she did would be meaningless.
Among the members of this subspecies for whom Angel felt special revulsion was Luminosa Larios, wife of the millionaire magazine impresario Pedrarias Larios, and it was not without a tremor of fatal anticipation that he saw her sit down at two in the afternoon on that same day at one of the tables in the VIPS.
No sooner did Luminosa Larios lay eyes on my father Angel than she obliterated any imaginable possibility for the couple sitting there to air out their problems. Luminosa always acted as if there were two people in the world: she, the quasi-ecclesiastical representative of her Genial Husband, and the person privileged to hear her revelations. She now began to enumerate these glories, stretching her hand with its voracious green nails toward Angel’s shoulder: her husband Pedrarias had just opened—simultaneously—twenty-four gas stations in the Nations of North America, The New York Times had published an article by Tom Wicker in which he compared Pedrarias with early Hearst or late Luce or murky Murdoch, she didn’t remember quite the way it went now (she scratched the air with her green claws so that the gold charms on her bracelets would tinkle more musically). Pedrarias had a cameo in the new Pia Zadora film, Pedrarias was received by President Donald
Danger, Pedrarias may have earned seven hundred million pesos last year, but he still has a social conscience, and emblazoned across the cover of his magazine Lumière: SOLIDARITY WITH THE SUBJUGATED PEOPLES OF THE FOURTH WORLD VICTIMS OF THE OIL IMPERIALISM OF THE THIRD WORLD.
“What a whirlwind! What publicity!” exclaimed Luminosa in satisfied tones. “But even my husband has his limits: even though they’ve asked him repeatedly, he would never do the ads for those Cuban heels made by Rising Star Shoes. I mean, really! Where do they get off, making up stuff like that? It came out in some two-bit paper published in Mexamerica that nobody reads; here’s the article and some other interesting clippings. Next year my husband’s book comes out, an exciting, stupendous confession entitled Epic of a Paranoid Hick in Paris. We deny completely that we’ve been evicted from seven different apartments for not paying the rent, the telephone bill, or for fixing the broken furniture. And it was our enemies who made up that lie about our using towels to wipe our asses. Nothing but lies!” shouted Luminosa, bright red and cross-eyed.
With growing excitement, the lady began to pass around catalogues, posters, press clippings, photocopies of checks, magazine covers on which she appeared wearing a bikini, as if the fame and merits of her husband depended now and forever on them. The printed matter flew over Brunilda’s head, messing her hair and annoying her, as her cat-like eyes showed. Then the words settled in the tortilla soup the couple were eating. And amid this avalanche of luminous publicity, Luminosa took the opportunity to mention, as if in passing, this bit of news, which changed my father’s life:
“Oh yes, Angelito, I just found out that your Uncle Don Homero has disinherited you or something like that.”
My father Angel did not know what to take care of first: Tom Wicker’s article floating in his tortilla soup, Brunilda’s horribly fulminating and disappointed stare, or Doña Luminosa Larios’s infinitely hypocritical smile, fixed on her face as she cocked her little head to one side as an invitation to middle-class approval. Her Gorgon eyes were bulging because no quantity of scalpels doing any quantity of plastic surgery could erase those crow’s-feet that looked like quotation marks between which she eternally recited her husband’s deeds. She dripped joy at the sight of someone suffering.