“Calm down, Rey,” said Matilde to her husband, and the three of them—father, mother, and son—entered the vast Acapulco amusement park, but at the gate the guard told Pepito that the parrot was not allowed, that it was dangerous, an insane animal, and the little bastard gave him the finger and ran in anyway, even if Matilde and Reynaldo stopped for an instant to contemplate the entryway, whose arch was made up of gigantic plaster whales, Moby Dick ballerinas, which Matilde said were very cute and Reynaldo said he was shocked at her lack of ignorance since anybody knew that this was the posthumous creation of David Alfaro Siqueiros, his 3-D Acapulco polyforum, ah, said Doña Matilde as they walked into that implacable paradise unblemished by a dot of shade, all cement and still waters, completely dedicated to the cult of sunstroke.
They walked toward plaster islands decorated with pirate ships, squirting fountains, hoses, jungle slides reached by bamboo and sand ramps that rise to Tarzanish heights and from which you slide down, ass to the burning tin, here comes someone down said the kid as a vulgar girl cools her steaming backside in the pool where a young, thin, dark-skinned life guard wearing a racing suit and a cap decorated with bottle caps on his hairy head waits for her, he’s got to protect himself from the sun, poor guy, out here the whole damn day in the sun to help the kids who slide down, but Pepito is now running, followed by his breathless parents, to the gigantic pool, the sea in miniature, the Pediatric Pacific, which is calm one minute and the next, to the accompaniment of an air-raid siren, becomes artificially turbulent, full of waves higher than their heads, and Pepito is happy, that’s what he’s here for, Mati, yes it is, Rey, look how much fun our son and heir is having, it was worth all our sacrifices, don’t say it wasn’t, you didn’t go to the Laredos so the kid could come to Aca, right? oh Rey, don’t go on like that, you’ll make me cry, forgive me, honey, you’re right, you’re always right, don’t worry, Matilde, we’re going places, they’ll always need accountants, some because they’ve got dough, others because they don’t, some because they make a lot, others because they lose a lot, but I’m telling you they all need accountants. What’s that, Rey? What, sweetie? That noise, I mean it isn’t normal.
That’s exactly what the folks on the Sun & Fun Toltec Tour were wondering—go on cooperating out there, Reader—as they breakfasted in the Coastline Burger Boy, whose mercury vapor lights blinked and then darkened to the color of the omnipresent Log Cabin syrup: that noise is not normal, mused Professor Will Gingerich, lecturer attached to the tour, young and nervous, and eager to communicate his thesis, even at this time of smiling pancakes from smiling Aunt Jemima. We North Americans always try to get to the frontier, the West, that was the source of our energetic optimism, there will always be a new frontier, we joyfully look for it within the American continent, sadly outside the continent, and hysterically when we use both up: Isn’t there any other place left? Is the whole world California, the end of the earth, the shaky cliff over the sea, the San Andreas Fault? And the ground here in Acapulco is shaking too, but with a frisson the Richter Scale doesn’t register: That’s just how a herd of buffalo sounds, said a sleepy old man from the Wisconsin flatlands as he lit up his old corncob pipe: but what they saw first were not buffalo but three swift camels racing along the beach, mounted by an old man, a black, and a Chinese, all scattering golden nuggets and thick perfumes: oh, typical Mexico—fiesta, carnival, joy, but the Vogue model asked if she might wash her hands after four hours of posing, and when she pulled the chain at the beach club, a tide of shit came bubbling out of the toilet bowl. The model wrapped her green tulle around her, patted her nonexistent stomach, right, that shit was not hers, certainly not hers; she tried to open the door, the lock, naturally, did not work, a strange beach boy, fat and hairless, had removed the handle, the shit tide rose, gobbled up her beribboned, silver Adolfo slippers, wet her infinitely discreet Kotex blemish, her flat tummy, swirled in her belly button and her pursed asshole, she had no time to scream, to escape.
Mariano Martínez Mercado woke up in his room in the Mr. President Hotel wrapped in the arms of his rival, Decio Tudela, both extremely satisfied after a night of shared marijuana that compensated for Penny López’s refusal to leave with either of them. But Marianito wondered about the discomfort of his nightmare, the lethargic stench of his room, which was not solely the burnt-straw-mat stink of marijuana; he got up, dizzily untangling from between his legs the bottoms of the Brazilian tropical pajamas Decio had lent him—barely a suggestive loincloth—in order to feel his way blindly to the air-conditioner controls. “Shit,” he said to himself, “it’s busted.” Then he went to the window, but the window would not open, and a label stuck to the greenish glass informed him:
THIS SUITE HAS BEEN CLIMATE CONTROLLED FOR YOUR
C O M F O R T
DO NOT OPEN THIS HERMETICALLY SEALED WINDOW
and amid the growing cloud of smoke that poured out of the air-conditioning vents with an aroma of burnt mustard as suggestive as his carioca topless pajamas, Marianito fell to his knees, scratching the glass and recalling his not so distant childhood, as if he had lived it a thousand years before and not merely fifteen: he remembered the signs under European train windows, as though they were decal Madeleines:
E PERICOLOSO SPORGERSI
NICHT HINAUSLEHNEN
INTERDIT DE PENCHER EN DEHORS
In the words of Eugenio d’Ors, Against the rules to pinch the whores, he inexplicably chanted, looking out the window at the full length of the coffee-colored stain on the bay, like the juncture of the Amazon and the Atlantic Ocean, he said to the Brazilian, but Decio Tudela was no longer moving, Decio Tudela was dead, suffocated, and Marianito cried out in horror and pleasure when he touched him, still warm, and decided to die hedonistically, that at least, seeing the dead and naked body of Decio in the bed. Marianito gently spread his legs and said he was going to give meaning to his life with an act of mortal pleasure, a gratuitous, erotic culmination, he left his whole vain and frivolous life behind him in that instant: he was going to affirm sex even in death, above and beyond death: there would be witnesses, yes sir, because they would be found this way, coupled like dogs, like this, in a perpetual ecstasy, oh, a huge dark-colored tub was invading the purity of the sea, a coffee-colored flow, a vomit of all the garbage from the hotels and restaurants in the half June moon between López Matthews Avenue and Witch Point. Jogging along the public beach of Little Sunday, where he would surely find the supreme justification for Lawrence & Lowry’s ultra-Mexican formulas, D. C. Buckley could not appreciate things in exactly the same way Marianito had in his death throes, but he was the first to see and suffer the worst.
The steady trot, controlled, not rapid but worse than rapid because it was so controlled, like an infernal drum, distant at first. D.C. stopped jogging, cocked his ruddy ear: the noise came down from the hills, crossed the street that ran along the coast, now it had become a trot over sand, horrid, eerie. Would D. C. Buckley survive thanks to his Yankee communion with savage nature, the landscape of evil, according to the precepts of Larry & Lowry? The long, blond, chromomacaronic Wasp asked himself this in a fleeting presentiment while thinking about the group of North American government functionaries and military men vacationing in the Last Breezes Hotel. As they were taking their preprandial dip in the saltwater pool of the Shell Beach Club, they discussed the current dearth of bad guys in the world: without reliable adversaries, we can’t know who we are. What would become of us without a Bad Guy—Nazi, Commie, Chinese, Korean, Bulgarian, Cuban, Vietnamese, Nicaraguan. The United States can’t survive without enemies, even though we have the source of all evil: Russia, the Evil Empire. At the same time they played pat-a-cake with their little feet, noting that between pats there was not only a ludic will and a strange love but also little patties of shit. Then, above their heads, above the seawall, above the beach umbrellas, indifferent to everything that held it back, as ferocious as a Campuchean defoliation, as inexorable as a Chilean putsch, the grand wave of poop sen
t with unparalleled energy by the reversed currents of El Niño from the coasts of Chile and Peru buried Professor Vasilis Vóngoles, a Romanian expert in Mexican affairs in the State Department, General Phil O’Goreman, commander in chief of Panama Canal defenses, Ambassador Lon Biancoforte, North American representative in the neighboring republic of Costaguana, and Mrs. Tootsie Churchdean, North American Ambassador to the Ministry of Colonies in Washington. The wave surprised all of them, cocoloco in hand, gardenia-scented straws in their mouths: it buried them in the Suzukis, the Hondas, the Honduras, the Guatemalas, and the Nicaraguas they had forged: the tide swept away Professor Vóngoles’s glasses and D. C. Buckley saw them from afar, before anyone else, in that morning’s repentant fog, the derelict, diplomatic specks in the sea, while on the beach the disciplined trot, the dark eyes, the wet muzzles, the copper-colored skin: all the dogs of Acapulco fell silent: they were going to hear their masters, their atavistic fathers: D. C. Buckley thought quickly: in California he’d been told never look a coyote straight in the eye, they hypnotize you, feign indifference, walk slowly, go into the water, perhaps they won’t dare follow you.
He never had a chance: the coyotes went right for him, all intent on attacking a single part of his body, carefully protected but also exhibited in its sleeping eloquence, exhibited to the admiration of the beaches and the savage dark girls on the beaches: the pack of coyotes assaulted Buckley’s sex behind the curtain of a blue Speedo bathing suit, they devoured the carefully folded Kleenex Buckley used to augment his admirable priapic dimensions, they dined on the nervous, shrunken flesh, they tore it off in one piece, and Buckley fell flat on his face in the sea at Little Sunday Beach, thinking that a few days before he had escaped Colasa Sánchez’s vagina dentata and that her tight, skinny little ass had been a whirlwind of foam and blood.
9
The coyotes run along all the beaches, from Little Sunday to Tamarind, to Califurnace, to El Ledge, to La Countess, but they do not always attack. Nor do they even stop every time, as if they know where they are going. They all follow the oldest, and he follows the ragged boy who nurtured and trained them so tenderly during all those months. Like a banderilla of tattered skin planted in the center of a red coconut grove at the heights of the communal lands of Holy Cross, the boy, his eyes closed, invokes the most secret genealogies, the most perverse atavism: the children of wolves, river of wolves, Guadalupe—where the wolves ford the river—Matamoros Moreno mutters silently, as if he were pushing an entire artillery train, followed by the blossoming Colasa Sánchez, seeking out his enemy: my father, Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, seen in the disco the previous night by Colasa. But the coyotes are faster than Matamoros, faster than the cars, they turn away from the beach and head for the street in order to avoid the gigantic tidal wave that bites the very nails of the beach to the quick, and the bald fat kid at the municipal pumping station gives the order to all the allies of the Four Fuckups, those who had been run off the hills, their relatives and friends: Pump the sewage back to the bathrooms, give it back to the places from whence it came, the toilet bowls and hotel kitchens, block up the pipes, let shit return to shit.
Faster than the cars, the coyotes: panic seized those in traffic-bound cars when they understood that they were cut off, surrounded by ferocious beasts, windows closed tightly, horns silent out of fear, like the dogs that silently watched the return of their savage ancestors. The pack poured in through the service entrance of El Grizzly Hotel in the same way that the papayas injected with prussic acid, the pineapples spiked with copper sulphate, and the Mirinda lemonade blended with santonin had poured in from delivery trucks earlier that same morning. The Mayor of Acapulco Town Council, Don Noel Guiridí, pauses in the heat to have a lemonade, reaches his arm through the window of his navy-blue Ford LTD, and receives the opened bottle without even looking at the Mirinda. Delighted, he drinks, checking over the keynote address he is about to give at the Literary Symposium. Our Don Noel is not only the standard-bearer of the PRI’s revolutionary revindication in the port of Acapulco, but also a qualified literary critic, thus demonstrating that belles lettres are not estranged from the political fray, a man who is transported in a luxurious limousine wearing (the reason why he is so fatally thirsty!) a scarf, earmuffs, and a camel-hair overcoat, because of his mania for trying to convince people that Acapulco is not in the tropics but is actually a spa with a wintry climate where the human mind comes alive and ready for literary creation: the figure he cuts, even more than his speech, constitutes an attempt to add an unpublished chapter to the history of Ice at the Equator (such was the monomania of the monograph he was prepared to read that morning: the Venezuelan novelist, and quondam president, Rómulo Gallegos sent an Indian downriver along the Orinoco to Ciudad Bolívar to eat ice cream for the first time in his life; Gabriel García Márquez took a child to experience ice in Macondo; Sergio Ramírez Mercado causes it to snow in a fictional Managua just so the pro-Somoza ladies could show off their fur coats; and cotton snowflakes fall on the spectators during the production number “Flying Down to Vigo” in Carlos Diéguez’s film Bye-Bye Brazil), but instead of all that, he begins to shout ay, I’m seeing everything green; he loses control and urinates a purple liquid; he becomes delirious, trembling, he falls unconscious, then dies. His horrified chauffeur rapidly raises the car’s pitch-black windows. Then the coyotes attack the armored car and for once are frustrated.
On the other hand, inside the hotel, one coyote leaps at the throat of the eminent Antillean critic Emilio Domínguez del Tamal at the exact moment he is finishing his habitual lecture with the words The peoples of our nations demand this revolutionary commitment from the writer and is awaiting the usual counter-statement from the no less celebrated South American critic Egberto Jiménez-Chicharra with questions such as what about preterition? And diachrony? And epanidiplosis? But this time the words of the Literary Sergeant are mortally tasted by the coyote’s saw-like canines, since Chicharra decides to express his scorn for del Tamal by skipping his lecture and sinking instead into his bath, which is bubbling with wonderful lemon-colored Badedás bath salts. He leaves his book of structuralist criticism on a book stand next to the tub and leaves the door to his suite open as well, open to chance, danger, and sin, said the eminent critic to himself, even though he was frankly annoyed that homosexuality was no longer a sin for anyone and merely one more practice among so many others, tolerated by all, denounced by none. He wanted homosexuality to be a sin again, that it be the vice that dares not speak its name, not an activity as neutral as brushing one’s teeth. Why did the idea of sodomy as a sin excite him so much and leave the young men cold? he wondered, when through his bathroom door, like a miraculous dream, came, fleetingly and busily, a naked young man, covered in gold dust, his whisk-broom hair covered by a horrid rimless borsalino decorated with bottle caps but oooooh what a penis and what a hard little ass … The Orphan Huerta said not a word; at the same time, he dropped a hair dryer, an FM radio, and an electric mixer (all three plugged into a transformer) right into Chicharra’s bath; he died fried without responding to del Tamal: a silent critic, a thankful Angel would sigh, but the same was not to be said for Matamoros Moreno, who violently strode toward the congress, followed by his daughter Colasa, in hopes that he would have his works published by one of the participants, perhaps with a prologue by Sergeant del Tamal and perhaps with an epilogue by Jiménez-Chicharra: father and daughter hear the repeated sound of the song “Flying Down to Vigo” played on a broken phonograph, but it does not rain cotton flakes, here what is coming down is darkness, their blood freezes, and Matamoros says to Colasa:
“If I find out that this opportunity was also stolen from me by that punk Palomar, I swear, Colasa, I swear to you I’ll…”
He had no time to finish; outside, the phalanx of coyotes once again advanced toward the sea, pushing the phalanx of Vogue models toward the water’s edge; the coyotes howled and the models shrieked, and there were no more photographers to be seen.
&n
bsp; The symptoms of arsenic poisoning are convulsions and leg cramps, vomiting and diarrhea; the throat dry and closed; unbearable headache; precipitous fall in pulse rate, cessation of breathing, finally collapse of the frozen bodies (snow in Managua, ice in Macondo, refrigerators in Ciudad Bolívar, Flying Down to Vigogogo! Forever/ Forever!), and those on the Fun & Sun Toltec Tour exhibited quite a few of those symptoms. They lay there over the counters, on their backs on the tile floors, clutching a handful of straws in the Coastline Burger Boy; Professor Gingerich, overly absorbed in his theory of frontiers, had eaten nothing and walked out onto the avenue trembling with fear, abandoning the death that had been injected into plastic bottles of Log Cabin syrup: he looks at the desolation around the Tastee-Freez, the Kentucky Fried Chicken, the Denny’s, the VIPS, the Sanborn’s, the Pizza Huts, all overwhelmingly silent while their neon signs finally fall dark and the howls of the coyotes are followed by their almost human laughter, a cross between the laugh of a hyena and an old man, the laughter of clowns and witches.