It is burning ice, frozen fire,
a wound that pains but is not felt,
a dream of good, an evil right at hand,
a brief but tiring rest
.….
an imprisoned freedom
Then we heard the shouting, the whistles, the ratatatat, and the bombs, the boots running over the oldest cobblestones in Mexico, along that street now called Virgin Knights to the infinite confusion of Uncle H., who never did for the Castilian tongue what my Angel and I did to celebrate our meeting, leaving the signature of our love which cannot go beyond imprisoned freedom, and why bother deluding ourselves: we ran far away from the noise of the police, who could have been chasing us for having written a poem in the wet cement on Donceles, or perhaps they were chasing someone else for some other reason, but if they’d found us they would have grabbed us along with the rest (the rest? who are the rest in the Mexico of ’92?), spreading their persecution without asking questions.
The supreme law was once again Shoot first, ask questions later.
How could I forget the first thing Angeles told me over our Benito Juárez telephone circuit?
“Let’s never hurt each other. We’re all here together.”
“We’re invincible, baby.”
“I couldn’t say anything more spontaneous or truthful. I could only tell you because I don’t intend to be hurt by you. The others don’t matter to me.”
We ran fleeing from a threat that was all too real and yet absent at the same time, the worst kind, the threat that can both be and not be, strike or not strike, ask questions or not: we certainly did not have to be born, she and I, in the sixties to know that in Mexico the law remains, nunc et semper, the whim of whoever happens to be holding power. We ran to Fat St. Mary, far from the solitude of Virgin Knights, where we were saved by homeless squatters, by kids asleep on top of the hot grilles covering the subway vents next to the brotherly pelts of dogs with bloody noses. So, who told you, Ixcuintli, to go around sniffing the pavement? Around here the stones burn, but you and I, Angeles, left a sonnet by Quevedo written on the hot palm of the cement, and repression, immutable, stopped at the frontier of darkness and silence.
“Tell me, what language will the child speak?
9
Things didn’t just happen all by themselves: they met several times, they talked about why they were going to do what they were going to do, was it was only to try to fuck up Uncle Homero, who had sued Angel, confiscated his house and fortune, and had in all likelihood tried to suffocate Egg in his namesake in a botched attempt to suffocate his nephew? My mother Angeles asked all this when she met the group in order to find out what she was getting herself into. Then she added: “Would you be doing this if you didn’t know Uncle Homero, if you didn’t hate him?” Yes! And that was Angeles’s first impression of the Four Fuckups:
She thought Hipi Toltec was disturbed, his eyes weepy because he had so much trouble falling asleep, which he did by counting Aztec gods instead of sheep, and because he lived within himself and his historical confusion: “La serpent-à-plumes, c’est moi,” but he had a strange notion of justice, clear and swift. At first she feared him, but eventually felt a tenderness for his mystery. She saw the Orphan Huerta pass from an unfocused resentment to a sensual enjoyment of the things that success brought when the Four Fs got famous for their renditions of Egg’s ballads. The first thing she heard him say was: “I don’t remember anything. I never knew my father or my mother.” The second thing she heard him say was: “We’ve only seen milk and meat in newspaper photos.” But after the success of “Come Back, Captain Blood,” the single was later reissued with the songs in the album Take Control and another single “That Was the Year,” and Orphan Huerta began to buy himself (wholesale) china-doll shoes, Guess jackets, and Fiorucci sweaters, calling them my china dolls, my Guess jackets … Angeles noted that Egg was observing his two comrades with compassion and understanding, although he reserved his glances of real tenderness for the invisible Baby Ba, to whom he dedicated his most loving expressions: precious girl, chubby girl, my lollipop with curls, how’s my little birthday cake today? and other cute expressions Angeles caught him making up in flagrante. Embarrassed, Egg would say things to her such as: “Children should be sin but not hurt.” Or, blushing furiously: “I’m not crazy, miss; every once in a while my mind wanders, see?” But she began to realize that he was looking at her more and more as he made his cute remarks to the absent Baby Ba, that the more he looked, the more quickly he would avert his eyes or look in another direction if my mother caught him in the act. Or he’d start talking to Angel, the Orphan, and Hipi in English:
“Where you going?”
“I’ll go in a while to the River Nile…”
“Have some fun…”
“Where’s fun in Makesicko ’91?”
“Madness is in the mind of the beholder”
“Madness is only a state of mind”
“Don’t let your feelings show”
“Reward yourself!”
The band’s first great hits emerged from this daily banter, and they went on to put together the thirty-million-copy-selling album That Was the Year in the same way. The Four Fuckups intended to debut the songs in that album at New Year’s in Acapulco, where, to lay the groundwork for their apocalyptic disorder plans, they had allowed themselves to be hired by the famous French Marxist chanteuse Ada Ching for her floating discotheque, Divan the Terrible. My mother noticed that things gestate in the same way I’m going to gestate: art or a child, drop by drop, the only hair on opportunity’s head is that long forelock we’re supposed to grab, and to think that this hit song began when Uncle Homero F. (?) locked the fat boy in the egg, and then it gestated to the rhythm of these conversations and the band’s comings and goings through the deteriorated city where only Angel had his own place but never invited his pals over so he wouldn’t make them feel bad about it or so that he wouldn’t bother his grandparents, who were by now quite old. The buddies had no place to live and no relatives, but Uncle Fernando lent them the living room in his house in Coyoacán and that’s why they ended up involving him in their intrigue against Uncle Homero (Don Fernando didn’t have to be begged, even though his mind was on the Indians up in the mountains and not on the tourists on the beaches) and with Benítez they planned their escape from Aca when … and with the Four Fs all the details of the destruction of the Babylon of Garbage. Angeles said nothing, Angeles only looked and tried to understand without compromising her language in the underground, carnivalized, cannibalized noise buzzing around her feminine mystery: like the Orphan, she had no past; like Hipi, she imagined herself unknown; like the Baby Ba, she thought she was invisible; like Egg, she feared she was mad; like Uncle Fernando, she aspired to be an instrument of justice, and, in her indignation at what she saw in Mexico, she felt like a composite of all of them, her comrades and friends (did she have others before? she didn’t remember). At the same time, she felt strangely alienated from the man she came to love and with whom she slept in a sexual uproar; my mother tried to guess the reasons behind the terrible act they were preparing to commit at year’s end in Aca. She listened to my father talk about the Sweet Fatherland, about the need for an exemplary act of cleansing, complete with biblical fury: Bye-bye Babylon, So long Sodom, Go, go Gomorrah, only a ninny could like Nineveh, So ciao to Baby, So, go, Ninny:
Babylon? You mean Baby Loan, since we’ve mortgaged our children’s future. Of Babylon nothing remains: she looked at Angel and understood that the entire situation prior to her arrival, the crisis, the impotence, the rage, the corruption, the past, the youth—all of it was forcing Angel (explicitly), Egg (a bit less), Hipi and the Orphan (intuitively), to exorcise the demons, to upset the order, to humiliate the king, sweep out the garbage, find (Angel!) the Sweet Fatherland: Angel the postpunk, romantic, conservative who went from disorder to anarchy to the sadism of underdevelopment in order to find the utopia of the spotless fatherland: she would see him plu
nge into horror in order to destroy it; or would they be destroyed, he, she, all of them, by the horror which was indifferent to them?
These thoughts transformed my mother during the Acapulco ape-pick (simian and marine) into the most cautious and taciturn woman in the world; at times she thought she was going to win the Johnny Belinda deaf-mute contest, and, frankly, she could not foresee that her participation in the extraordinary events of the month of January would prove to be so tranquil. She would participate from now on in a silent dialogue in the hope that all of them (the band of buddies) would be able to speak together afterwards, and that triangular dialogue would go something like this:
ANGEL: I WANT ORDER
(FULLY KNOWING THAT NO ORDER WILL EVER BE SUFFICIENT)
EGG: I WANT FREEDOM
(FULLY KNOWING THAT I SHALL FAIL)
ANGELES: I WANT LOVE
(FULLY KNOWING THAT LOVE IS ONLY THE SEARCH FOR LOVE)
and that’s why Angel marched toward disorder, Egg sought the commitment of the invisible by singing songs to the world, overcoming his inability to express himself fluently, and my mother Angeles kept silent in order not to reveal that perhaps she hated what she was doing.
“Besides,” my dad said to her, “if we succeed in fooling Uncle H., we might get the house of bright colors back. That’s where I spent my childhood. I love the place. I’m sick of having to see you just now and again in your Uncle Fernando’s house or in my coach house. I have to live with you all the time.”
He dressed her as Annie Hall (tweed jacket, man’s tie, blue jeans), while he wore faded chinos, a Hopi shirt, and love beads. Both put on wigs of long, thick hair for their visit to Don Homero Fagoaga’s penthouse on Mel O’Field Road. They were going to ask him if they could make peace and spend New Year’s together in Acapulco.
My father had no real reason to be there, and Uncle Homero smelled a rat: he did, however, receive them. Just looking at them, he could see they were harmless. But just looking at my mother was all he had to do to suffer a shock: Don Homero Fagoaga’s sexual fantasies were infinite, and my mother put him into such a state of erotic excitement that he became a stuttering teenager:
“Well … indeed … so we have a little couple here, huh? I mean, are you thinking of getting married…? Excuse me, I didn’t mean to imply … Well!”
Angeles realized that the success of the expedition depended on her, so she coquettishly lowered her eyes and touched the hand of the invincible Don Homero.
“Ah,” groaned Don Homero, wagging his sausage-like finger, “aaaah, my innocent niece, I may call you niece, may I not? thank you: out of pure honesty, sacred temple, as the bard from Córdoba, Don Luis de Góngora y Argote, wrote on an amorous occasion…”
He carefully looked Angeles over, adding pure alabaster, small door of precious coral …
“Uncle,” my mother interrupted him sweetly but decisively, “in the first place, don’t change the subject on me: may we come to your house in Acapulco? In the second place, don’t let that lemonade go to your head, and in the third, if you go on in that way, comparing my body to hard alabaster and my cunt to a small coral door, my husband here, your nephew, is liable to take matters into his own hands. Isn’t that right, Angel?”
“Angeles! Good gracious! You’ve mistaken me, niece! That Gongoristic metaphor refers to your mouth, not to your, your…”
Don Homero dropped the spoon he used to stir his martinis: “Tomasito, fan me.”
“Yes, master.”
“My wife is right. Don’t get out of line, Uncle Homero.”
“How dreadful! For God’s sake, I hope you accept my invitation to spend New Year’s with me in Acapulco. You did receive my invitation, didn’t you? No? How awful the mails are these days, as our invincible sovereign Philip II said when he received the news about the Armada! The rest of Europe was right to say: ‘I hope my death comes by way of Spain so it gets to me late!’”
That’s why all of them except for Angeles and the Baby Ba are there stretched out on the Countess Beach listening to three chicks chatter relentlessly about if it wasn’t a bit much that each one went with two hunks to the Divan last night or if the vibes were good but right then they started in, ya know: Ya can take the boy outta Brooklyn but ya can’t take Brooklyn outta the boy; they got all hot and bothered and tried to start necking. But the girls said enough was too much now that they’d showed what grotty chauvinist pigs they really were. Situations like that were sticky, ’cause when these nouveaus get going they don’t ever wanna stop, and they chanted:
I don’t want to live forever
But I’m afraid to die
and when they saw my dad, Egg, the Orphan, and Hipi stretched out there sunning themselves in their bulging bikinis, the three chicks said, oh sorry about that, we’re not letting you rest with all our gossiping, and my father the provocateur said no, I didn’t hear you, I was thinking, and they, hmm, he didn’t even hear us, we seem so uninteresting to these nouveaus, and Egg, just to be nice, said yes, yes we did hear you, how could we not, everything you said was instructive, while the girls were putting on sun cream, ah, so these nosy nouveaus are real pests, always sticking in their noses where they shouldn’t, to which the boys: a one and a two and a three, they began to throw sand at the bonbons, who at first laughed, then enough already, then they coughed, then they screamed; finally they were buried in the sand, and Hipi danced the deer dance over them to flatten them out and make sure they were good and dead and in complete privacy, and the most curious thing is that no one turned around to look at the scene, much less to interrupt them. A lesson that did not escape the attention of Pappy & Company.
Out of all these elements, as usually happens in artistic affairs, was born the great hit broadcast by the Four Fuckups for the New Year’s parties: and with what pleasure do I transcribe them for you, from their Dickensian inspiration (a tail of two cities; hysteria of two cities; the color of Aca and Defé) up until the time they released it officially in the discotheque run by Ada Ching and her lover Deng Chopin: Here it is, all together now:
It was the worst of times
It was the worst of times
The year was the jeer
The day was the die
The hour was the whore
The month was the mouse
The week was the weak
It doesn’t get better than this!
and my folks make love in the bridal suite Uncle Homero reserved for them, and she feels opulent, sensual, rich, new things, delicious things, she’s afraid to feel things she’s never felt before, she feels more modern than ever when luxury surrounds her and she doesn’t understand why she’s never been in a place like this, air-conditioned, piped-in music, unknown smells that expel the usual olfactory experiences (markets? churches? damp patios? leafy jungles? carved stones? quince, mango, laurel and silk-cotton trees?: now what is not there begins to come back to her): she is afraid to remember everything that happened before, now that she’s in something that could never happen there, in a there she says to my father after having an orgasm, where I see myself moving, light, suddenly I saw myself a minute ago, moving and light in the past. What does that mean?
Neither one could answer. For the first time, she was terrified of her openness, her willingness to be everything that fell upon her and stuck to her in her newness or innocence. She’d never seen towels marked His and Hers, or sheets with Mickey and Minnie Mouse, or personal hair dryers, or peach-flavored vaginal ointments. She missed her history, and said to my father:
“Of what interest could these sordid provincial tales be to you: bastard children, runaway father, new lover for mother, exile with relatives who live far away? Of what possible interest could my past be?”
10
Let’s see now: six years after Uncle Homero’s green Jell-O bath, the Four Fuckups are playing rockaztec in the floating disco moored off Califurnace Beach down old Acapulkey way, and my parents take advantage of the circuntstance (as you might say)
to ask Uncle Homero to bury the hatchet and invite them to spend New Year’s of 1991–92 in his castellated house on Peachy Tongue Beach, where their fat relative has constructed a kind of Foreign Legion fort right out of Beau Geste to protect himself from whatever might happen. He gave his niece and nephew the complete guided tour this end-of-December morning, marching them past towers and battlements that shot up out of the sand, blockhouses and casemates, parapets and escarpments, and even fearsome concertina rolls of razor wire, ranks of poised, pointy lances—excellent defense against cavalry charges!
In the center of his fortress, Uncle Homero built a pool in the shape of a tongue, with a secret tunnel disguised as a drain which would allow him to escape in a minisub (How would he fit? Like a pig in a sausage, said my father; like a rabbit in a pâté, like Christ in the host, host! said my mother) into the sea, shot out like a cork, in case of emergency.
“I’m making you a gift of some beach property,” Uncle Homero said one day in a tone of magnificent condescension to Uncle Fernando, some twenty or so years earlier, after the Tlateloco riots. He compounded this felonious friendliness by clapping Uncle Fernando, a small, high-strung, but sturdy little gent, on the back. “You can build a house there for your declining years.” To which Don Fernando said no thanks, how would I ever defend it against the guerrilleros who’ll be coming along in twenty years?
Tomasito the waiter served my mother a pineapple filled with whipped cream and then slipped directly into a reverie, staring obliquely and nostalgically toward the Pacific route of the Spanish galleons. Acapulco, key to the Orient, warehouse for the silks of Cipango, the ivory of Cathay, the scents of the Moluccas: good old Acapulkey!
My mother follows his eyes and stares at the sea as the sun goes to the Philippines. None of this distracts Uncle Homero from his task of presiding over the al-fresco dinner in the patio illuminated by the torches that Tomasito lights so that the flames and the glow of the setting sun can clash on the grand cheeks of the grand personage, as if they were fighting over the round color of the soft, saliva-drenched, cushioned tongue that slithers over lips, molars: Don Homero sighs and looks at my parents, who had felt obliged to dress in folkloric costumes. He then raises his glass of piña colada and gives instructions to Tomasito, which the Filipino does not manage to understand completely: when Uncle Homero says “More drinks,” Tomasito answers, “More stinks? No, master, smell fine.” Don Homero wilts and proffers his glass as if he were a blind man selling pencils. He sighs: There you see it all: four centuries a Spanish colony and all they have to show for it is pidgin English. Pigeon, master? Pigeon make too much shit on head. Shit on head, eh? Well, as the patient Filipino public servant, Don Manuel Quezón, said on a memorable occasion, you must have fallen out of your crib and landed on your head!