“Is information really power?” asks my dad, and I start trotting along like a burro, wishing I could tell him that his sperm only had half of my vital information, and my mother’s reproductive cells only had the other half, and then
I ARRIVE
and just for being myself I gather together all the NEW information, oh what a glory, to know it now, from this moment on, I combine the total number of chromosomes that my father and mother can give to a new being so he will be new and will not be they, even if they have engendered him, and so that one day I can return them what they lost, their memory, their prophecy, their complete being: so why are they mistreating me like this, bouncing me along a ridge on top of a burro in a rainstorm, with night coming on? What did I ever do to them? We barely know each other and already they start fucking me over!
What do they know?
INFOTEL: Someone called Uncle Homero’s house in Acapulco, saying he has a radiogram from my Uncle Fernando Benítez transmitted from an NII helicopter to the presidential antenna in Mexico City and from there to the private telephone of Dr. Fagoaga, LL.D., in the Pearl of the Pacific, the Mecca of Tourism, the Oriental Port of the New World, the Bay of the China Galleon and the Manila Galleon:
“Have you ever been in Pacífica?”
This is what the message says to my nephew and niece Angel and Angeles Palomar: I expect you on the 22nd of February, the anniversary of the day President Madero, the Apostle of democracy, was murdered, in Cuajincuilapa, all communication between the D.F. and Aca inexplicably cut did you know Homero is a candidate question mark yours Benítez.
What do any of us know?
Wake up, children, wake up, said Grandpa Rigoberto Palomar in an alarmed but serious voice, wake up, today is Saturday, the 22nd of February, and they pulled the blanket off the still-sleeping President Francisco Madero, they took him, surrounded by bayonets, out of his cell, they put him in an automobile along with Mr. Pino Suárez, they stopped the car at the gates of the penitentiary, they made them both get out, they shot each one, a bullet in the head, at 11 o’clock p.m.: Wake up, children, we have to go to the Revolution.
What do I know?
The day of the great uproar, the blind young Indian, wild from the intensity of the invisible noises and smells, took the virgin girl he’d been sniffing after for over a week with a dizzy delicacy: it was after the girl’s first visit from the sticky sorceress, and the smell of blood both repelled and attracted him. She said nothing, she allowed herself to be touched, and she herself touched the man’s smooth hot cheek with pleasure.
INFOGENES: This only I know: That in the vertigo of my Uncle Fernando Benítez’s visit to the people up on the plateau, a blind boy was created at the same time that I was created in Acapulco.
The right to information: this only I know. Grandfather knows which day it is in history, Uncle Fernando knows what days those are in the calendar. But my parents, do they know anything?
INLOCOPARENTIS: They must not even be aware that they’ve created me; they just couldn’t be so cruel, such children of their own genes that they have created my death without even acknowledging my life: acid and arid, irritated and insecure, scraping against everything around me, everything that comes to me in this seesawing around (seesaw my eye, something between a gallop and an earthquake!), which in reality is a throbbing racket for one who was conceived on the beach under the palm trees and who now knows he is in another place, savagely transported in one jump to a restless, volcanic, thorny landscape: one day they’ll tell me about it, and I’ll visualize it, even though I know it right now, I know that (it’s my darkest secret) one day I’ll forget it because your mercies should know that no one is willing to give a child the supplementary days to which he has a right: nine months extra, winning the lottery and getting a Christmas bonus all at the same time, nine months more than the adults, but the adults say, how can this be? They think that it’s enough to recognize that
WHEN WE’RE BORN WE ARE ALREADY NINE MONTHS OLD
which means we possess an intolerable advantage, namely that we have the power to impose the laws of our infancy on them and there is nothing they fear more even though they won’t admit it: what I’m dreaming is, what is is what I dream, what I want I touch, I touch what I want, what I desire exists, what exists is what I desire, I have no reason to work, intrigue, screw other people, covet my neighbor’s property, what for, when all I want I have right here at hand, can you see this your mercies idem?
There is nothing more subversive than instantly turning desire into reality, and that’s why they try to surround us unborn types, and later, when we’re children, they limit us, surround us with schools and jails and churches and programmed vacations and calendar holidays and economic whorehouses erected between a child and the object of his desire, which would be Christmas in July and Two-Year Vacations and Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (which, for Julio Cortázar, would be July in Christmas), and the Garden of Delights—no, all pleasures deferred, we have to conquer it all by means of obedience the discipline of work austerity abstinence Calvinistic savings and the banishment of fantasy from the desert of reality instead of the fantasy of banishment from the desert of reality, Satan: look, says my old and interminable chain of genes to me, look where we’ve gotten to since puritanism took over the world, pretty well fucked up since Simon Peter, say my chromosomatic chains, and Saul-Saul-Why-Do-You-Persecute-Me imposed his rules of abstention after abstention, says my father on foot behind my mother trotting along on her burro through the Sierra Madre, riding the burro along the steep, curved, almost virgin paths that go, says Uncle Fernando, who is guiding us, from Acapulco to the Sierra, not even Cortés knew about these routes, adds our uncle, who knows all of them, and says put on your ponchos here comes a cloudburst and the peaks grow gray suddenly, crowns of misty iron, fleeting heart flutter in the sky: my mother’s nearby heart also beats faster and my father recites out loud, almost sings, scolding the storm that whips us and is about to take revenge on us, say I thoroughly saturated by the Acapulco excesses organized by my mom and dad, by the contradictions I already perceive between their condemnations of puritanism and their indiscriminate extermination of vice in Acapulco: did two young homosexual lovers deserve to die merely because they went around wearing mess jackets à la Tyrone Power? Did Egberto deserve to die because he was a fag or because he was a critic? And Emilio, because he was a puritan or because he was intolerant? And the models, because of the pleasure they gave or for the money they earned? Ada and Deng because…?
“What are you talking about?”
“Nothing, nothing at all,” said my father and he looked for an instant at the mask of his Uncle Don Fernando Benítez, who would be turning eighty in a few days and who still walked energetically through the tropical highland storms, leading us on foot through mountains he knew better than the back of his hand, Don Fernando Benítez’s creole mask, his blue eyes blurry from the storm that beats against the lenses of his gold-plated wire-rimmed glasses, his slightly bulbous nose distilling the essence of the squall that drips off the ends of his handlebar mustache bathed in the idem, his mouth a rictus of sad wisdom:
“You two asked me about Pacífica, but do you know where I’ve just been? Doing an interview with the last Lacandon Indian. But guess what happened? The last of the Lacandon Indians interviewed me instead.”
He groaned and furrowed his brow, raising a hand to the imaginary knot of an imaginary tie. He says the Indians are all we have left; they are our ghosts; for thirty years he’s been interviewing them, defending them, going to the most remote places to see them before they disappear, oh of course, saying to Mexicans, we owe loyalty to the world of the Indians, even if we disdain them, exploit them, because it’s the loyalty we owe to death. He gets excited about the idea, he stops a moment, just for theatrical effect, damn but we’ve become just as eccentric, just as fragile, just as condemned to extinction as they have, why don’t we recognize the fact?
“Killing a
n Indian is like burning down a library.”
He roared out a lament that conquered the storm and echoed through the sierra:
“Oh, God, all of us are Lacandons!”
“So no one in the rest of the country said anything about Acapulco?” asked my mother Angeles, insistently but serenely. I suspect that she hasn’t got the remotest idea that I’m bouncing around like a marble in these boondocks she’s carried me to.
“No.” Uncle Benítez shook his hat-covered head, turning his back on them once again and stubbornly maintaining the pace. “Nobody knows a thing about it.”
Our Uncle Fernando Benítez made his nemesis face, and I registered what happened in the seed of what would soon be my cerebral cortex: “Killing an Indian is like burning down a library,” and we’ve already got more than two hundred pages written, one movie hour, two TV hours (including commercials), several oppressive nightmares because it’s all over, and nevertheless we persist in reliving it every twenty-four hours: Father and Mother, my genes tell me better get used to it, Chris, that’s Mexico for you, live one more day so you can live on that day the seven centuries since the advent of the Heagle and the Herpent.
Please, your discriminatory worships, please do not ask to know what my parents and Uncle Fernando Benítez see at 2 p.m., three days after their climb up the sierra, the southern mommy, in the storm, three days after sleeping in shacks Don Fernando knows and in Indian villages which take him in with astonished recognition, as if they were getting ready to visit him quite soon and don’t bother coming out here to see us, Quetzalcoatl: cold, high nights I remember (I shall remember), the smell of burned forests, the grunting of hogs running around freely and the soulful laugh of the burro who is sadly, happily sure we don’t understand him simply because he doesn’t speak to us. Now we descend to the flatland, where the sun and shadow are equally long at all hours of the day, sculptures made of air, astonished at their own existence (we are in Guerrero, at the corner of Oaxaca, says my father; let’s go to the market in Igualistlahuaca, I’m hungry and they make delicious grasshoppers in red pepper there and then they say he who eats grasshopper never leaves this place):
Better look at what’s written on the hillsides:
MEXICANS: INDUSTRIALIZE
YOU WON’T LIVE LONGER, BUT YOU WILL LIVE BETTER
The saying that made Don Ulises López, Penny’s father, remember?, famous. My mother threw the rebozo that had been covering her head over her shoulders, good old Penny sure does get around.
MIXTEC: ACT RESPONSIBLY!
VOTE DIALECTICALLY!
but my father says look at the farmers on horseback, riding at a controlled pace, wearing grimy straw hats, the bridles black with sweat, the red tulips, the blue sky through the leafy laurels, the burros laden with hay, the light rain, a three-minute sprinkle, the noise of the rivers hidden underground and the vast rose-colored fields, a valley of rolling heather and the sudden end of the rain.
No, says Uncle F., you don’t have to look so far away, just look over there at the gangrenous walls of Igualistlahuaca, Guerrero:
CITIZENS OF GUERRERO STATE
VOTE FOR A MAN WHO’S REALLY GREAT
VOTE FOR PRI, VOTE FOR HOMERO
HE’LL MAKE A FUTURE FOR GUERRERO!
and if any doubts remained
INSTITUTIONAL REVOLUTIONARY PARTY
Today at 2 P.M.
Igualistlahuaca Arena
DON’T MISS THE BIG WRESTLING MATCH
His Honor, Homero Fagoaga, Senatorial Candidate
Mass Meeting Outside Igualistlahuaca Church
ROBIN VERSUS BATMAN
Eight O’clock Sharp
A five-fall match
It all begins at 2:00, right in front of the church
Citizens Unite Behind Homero
Fagoaga, He’s Our Man
Bluedevils versus Ungrateful Pussy
FAGOAGA, HE’S OKAY!
HIT A HOMER WITH HOMERO!
CITIZENS OF IGUALISTLAHUACA: WAKE UP!
GET BEHIND THE INTERNATIONALIST SOCIALIST PARTY
LUXEMBURGIST FACTION OF
LIEBKNECHT TENDENCY
OAXACA PLEKHANOV CHAPTER
FIGHT FOR THE VICTORY OF THE DICTATORSHIP OF
THE PROLETARIAT!
ALL UNITE AGAINST HOMERO!
HOMERO: THE LANGUAGE CANDIDATE
Yes, I, Homero, am your homer, I win the game and save hometown honor for the forgotten masses of hometown Mexico, intoned His Honor Homero Fagoaga, from the bandstand set up in front of the Igualistlahuaca church. He insisted on it, my debut, my maiden speech, if you’ll allow me to play the coquette with you, brother Delegate of the PRI, maiden speech in the language of Shakespeare means a virgin speech, ha ha, see, just imagine for a moment, after all that this tongue, bequeathed to me by the glorious hand mutilated at the battle of Lepanto, has been through! By which I mean, metaphorically, you’ve got to understand the subtleties of our maiden-spain prosody, that is, you’ve got to understand the language of Spain, Mr. Delegate, made in pain, because Pain Is Spain, Mr. Delegate, the Spanish tongue taken as a perpetual and painful wedding night of proper discourse, and since the local Delegate, a bucktoothed, myopic lawyer from Cuajincuilapa, baptized, of all things, Elijo Raíz, was staring at him in incomprehension, Homero said to himself, humm, out in these boondocks there isn’t a single shyster, graduated from some music school or other, who doesn’t think he’s potential Benito Juárez: now they’re going to see what it means to use language to fascinate the multitudes, right now! He demanded and was granted permission by the local PRI to give his first speech, his virgin speech, his maidenspich made in Spain maiden’s pain Maiden Spain and Mad in Spain in the plaza outside the Igualistlahuaca church, with the street and the market in front of him and the altars behind, demonstrating in that way, candidate Fagoaga explained to his crosseyed interlocutor, that in the Party of Revolutionary Institutions all Mexicans should coexist, rich and poor, chauvinist and xenophile, reactionaries and progressives, after all Mr. Delegate, what was the meaning of our national political system if not to overcome, once and for all, the fratricidal confrontations between liberals and conservatives which in their nineteenth-century avatars condemned us, as they did our sister republics of Bolivaresque destiny, to swing back and forth between anarchy and dictatorship, self-perpetuating despotism and savage hatred, worthy of Shakespeare’s Verona: the Mexican Revolution, Mr. Delegate, reconciled the Masonic Montagues of the Scottish Rite with the Capulets of the Yorkish Rite, it overcame Mexico’s Sicilian weaknesses and the Balkanic lethargy of Latin America and only erred in its rhetorical opposition to the banners of Christ.
“But now,” said Uncle H. as he swallowed an armadillo in green mole sauce in one of the incomparable culinary retreats lining the Igualistlahuaca plaza, “it falls to us to reconcile secular faith with divine faith, the sacred with the profane.”
Who could forget the visit of the Polish Pope to Mexico fourteen years before, the most spectacular entrance into the capital since that of Hernán Cortés, when, sotto voce, the most prudent strategists in national politics said to themselves, as they peeked out from behind the thick brocade curtains at the Seat of Executive Power at the seven million souls who awaited, who followed, and who surrounded the Vicar of Christ in the Zócalo and the Cathedral:
“All the Holy Father would have to do is order them to seize the National Palace. They would do it, your honor, and nothing could stop them. Am I right?”
“Well,” Uncle Homero directed his beautifully enunciated prose against the difficulties of a bit of crackling (overcoming that recalcitrant tidbit, of course), “the time has come for us to reconquer the sacred for the Revolution. Let us stop, Mr. Delegate, being fools and playing at anticlericalism. We’ve recaptured everything in order to achieve our heart’s desire, National Unity: left and right, bankers and field hands, now also, thanks to our August National Guide, even our Ancestral Matriarchy. I warn you, let us capture the world of the sacr
ed before it captures us. I warn you, Mr. Delegate from the state of Guerrero, Coreligionist in PRI, Don Elijo Raíz: there is an Ayatollah in our Future. Now let’s finish up this crackling!”
A parrot squawked on the shadowed portal of the plaza, and Homero, flying on metaphoric wings, swallowed his plum dessert in one gulp, eagerly thinking about the Mixtec-Zapotec homeland.
5
And so it was that at midday Don Homero Fagoaga ascended the bandstand erected in front of the old rose-colored church in Igualistlahuaca, equidistant, our budding national figure, from the two towers and from the bell towers worked in pale cut stone and watered-down marble. Uncle H. standing before his microphone, surrounded by sixty-three local PRI hierarchs, the tribunal festooned with banners that repeated the slogans of the day, Don Homero surrounded by small-town orators eager to be seen with the future Senator but also with the sixty-three hierarchs, one for each year the Party had been in power, to think there are men sixty-three years old who have never seen any other party in power, murmured Uncle Fernando indignantly as he led my parents Angel and Angeles (and, as a bonus, me as well, though none of them knew about it at the time, they’ll only remember me retroactively, retroattractively—really acting retro is what I understand it to be), who were now entering the crowded square, she on the burro, he wrapped in his poncho, heading toward the tribunal where Uncle H., saved from the Acapulco furies right under the noses of my impotent parents Angel and Angeles, lets himself be loved by the PRI ephebocracy, the young men who make sure his microphone is set at the proper angle, who smile at him by smiling at the sun, and who seek their own rapid, not to say meteoric, rise through the hierarchy of our civil church, the P–R–I, their black eyes already shining with the dream of being Pope, cardinal at least, what about archbishop? okay, bishop would be enough, deacon if there’s nothing better to be had, sacristan sounds good, altar boy’s better than nothing, Swiss Guard, whatever, whatever your mercies say as long as they’re not left out in the cold, and his honor Homero Fagoaga glowing amid the ambition of the young men and the fatigue of the old ones, ayyy the survivors of heighty campaigns like this one, height million height hundred heighty-height glasses of Hi-C, mountains of black mole, horse meat, barbecued pork with everything on it, skin and hair, civic parades and social nights dancing polkas with fat ladies, in town after town, village after village, survivors of phantasmagoric campaigns—the sexennial Mexican presidential nonrace—for president and senator, the triennial races for the Congress, biennial races for local legislators and municipal presidents, all of them bewitched by this need to campaign, to become president, as if they were going up against the Italian Communists, the English Tories, and the French Gaullists: bah! exclaims Uncle Fernando, whose speech my mom is recording amid the Mixtec Mass this morning for the future reference of my collective unconsciousness, only the gringos beat us out with a single party that pretends to be two parties. The only truly authentic slogan should be: