ELECTIONS COME EVERY SIX YEARS,
BUT MISFORTUNE IS ALWAYS WITH US
Sixty-three years, my dear niece and nephew, what do you think of that, and no end in sight, said Uncle Fernando: not Hitler, not Perón, not even Franco, only the U.S.S.R. beats us and now not even them because now we have a PAN president, which allows the PRI to blame the opposition for everything and to govern with more power than ever, and for that very reason Don Homero Fagoaga adjusts the microphone to the height of his multiple chins, warms up his delivery, the crowds gather, curious, trucked in, bribed, a hundred pesos, a taco, lemonade, a beer, a brass band, you name it, things might get screwed up if you don’t come, let’s see now about your property-line suit, let’s see, let’s sue, let’s sewer: with a great sense of satisfaction, Homero scanned the multitude of Mixtec citizens spread out in front of him, standing there on the pavement stones next to the sickly pines and laurels near the church and beyond the gates out to the unpaved street and the market tents of opulent misery. He looked at the heads of the multitude of varnished straw hats, the heads of the women crowned with green, blue, and scarlet silk, their tresses tied up with orange and lilac wool, four thousand, five thousand heads carrying traditional offerings, with earthenware pots balanced on their heads, heads offering tomatoes and herbs, grasshoppers and onions, and the nervous little heads of the children, first running like porcupines but finally they too, the happy children in the land of sad grownups, captured by the sinuous words of Don Homero Fagoaga, who was comparing the Guerrero sierra “to Italic Latium and Hellenic Attica, glorious sites of humanistic honor, cradles of democracy, crucibles of society where a metaphysical tremor made men and mountains, children and stones all speak in one voice to repeat with the immortal tribune, quaestor, and consul, my model in action and speech, Don Marcus Tullius Cicero, of Arpino, mens cuisque is est quisque, which in the glorious language we speak thanks to the Hispanic Motherland, to, of course, no discredit to the Autochthonous Motherland, which I see here exemplified in its roots of impassioned telluric tremor, means the spirit is the true being and where, oh citizens of Guerrero, would that truth be more profoundly true and scientifically rational and precise than here in the Mixtec homeland, ever fertile cradle of the glorious motherland—MEEXXXIIICCCOOO: Civis Romanum sum, the glorious tribune exclaimed with pride but without arrogance and here we can repeat, Civis Guerrerensis sum, because if indeed the uncle of Augustus declared his modest and for being modest moving preference to be first a son of his village and second a son of Rome, it was not merely for that reason that he stood a model for legions of his admirers then and now, but above all looking forward to, anticipating, the Mexican meritocracy that our Revolutionary Institutional Party offers with equal opportunities for all, for each and every one of you, to rise, as the Well-Deserving Don Benito Juárez rose, from illiterate shepherd to the Presidential Throne, from being first in place of honor in Rome and saying to his people: You have Caesar and his fortune with you!”
He cleared his throat, was offered a turbid glass of tepache, his microphone, which the vibrations of his mighty word and the pulsation of his potbelly had pushed far away, was readjusted, a little old drunk raised his bottle of Corona Extra and shouted out Long Live Don Porfirio Díaz and Homero: oh, fellow sons and daughters of Guerrero, let it at least be said of Homero Fagoaga that he serves both you and Our Lord in Heaven (pregnant pause): there is, fellow voters, fellow citizens, friends, brothers in the Lord (significant pause), and coreligionists of the Revolution (hasty conclusion: con brio), no corner of the world that smiles on us more than this one, as the ancient bard Horace said of his native Venosa.
Uncle Homero paused with a distant but fierce blaze in his eyes: irritated at the stupidity of the people hired to plaster the walls of Igualistlahuaca with posters and how they’d confused the hour, the name, the theme, and the message of his sacrorevolutionary oratory with a vulgar wrestling match between Batman and Robin, and what, by the way, could be further from his five thousand listeners, Homero suddenly said to himself, the Match or Cicero? No matter, he sighed: a Mexican can make do with anything because he can be anything: the PRI not only allows it but makes certain he can. But in that briefest of instants in which the local Party hierarchs thought some things and the candidate thought others and Uncle Fernando, my dad, and my mom, and I inside her (a mere figment of the collective unconscious inside the spirals of history, the vicious circle) felt ourselves pushed, first pressured secretly, then little by little pressed by a human, incomprehensible power that could not be located in any one individual and even less attributable to that grand no one which is everyone, finally trampled, tossed by the multitude of Mixtecs who moved forward with impassive faces, devoid of laughter, devoid of hatred, devoid of tears, with their unmoving terra-cotta features, as Uncle H. would say from his bandstand, with a blind determination and an enthusiasm that was frightening precisely because of its silence, a quiet horde of Mixtec Maenads moving toward the bandstand occupied by Uncle Homero and the Sixty-three Hierarchs: can you guess what happened next? They didn’t applaud, they didn’t throw tomatoes or grasshoppers at the distinguished personages on the dais: they just moved, advanced, my father later said, in the same way the waves, the clouds, all the beautiful and terrible things in this world, move, as Homero opened his arms to receive the love of the masses which would waft him on to a senatorial bench, from this dump to SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW! oh, my Uncle H., in what moment did you realize what the Sixty-three PRI Hierarchs had begun to guess, the worst, seeing that silent mass, hardhearted, devoid of emotion, moving toward him with the fatality of the six-year term, with an imperturbable resolution that was open to any and all interpretations, and Homero asked the young coffee-cup-sized orator on his left, whose name was Tezozómoc Cuervo, LL.D.:
“Did they like it?”
“My dear sir, see for yourself.”
Homero sighed in the face of this native political dexterity and turned to the hierarch on his right, an old man with a pear-shaped body and loose suspenders, famous in local circles as the first and foremost supporter of President Calles in the state of Guerrero, Don Bernardino Gutiérrez:
“Tell me: why don’t they clap?”
“They don’t know how.”
“Then why don’t they throw tomatoes and onions if they don’t like my speech?”
“It isn’t a matter of their liking it or disliking it. To the contrary.”
“You mean they didn’t understand my Latin allusions, is that it?”
“No, sir. They didn’t understand anything. Not one of these Indians speaks Spanish.”
Don Homero had no time to show shock, fury, or disdain, much less to get on his horse and hightail it; impossible to know if it was excessive hatred, outrage, or fascination, or perhaps a love incapable of showing itself in any other way, that was moving five thousand Mixtec men, women, and children from the Guerrero mountains who, beyond communication, incapable of communication, reached the bandstand, stretched out their hands, pulled down the tricolor paper flags, the tricolor rosettes, and the PRI posters, then the eyeglasses belonging to the state delegate from Cuajinicuilapa, buck-toothed and myopic, the daisy in the lapel of the m.c. and the old politico’s suspenders, which snapped back against his feeble chest, and that’s when the panic began: the hierarchy turned its back on the people and went running into the church, shouting sanctuary, sanctuary!: the trembling candles were extinguished by their stampeding feet and their screams and my father, still wearing his rain poncho and with his face covered by four days’ growth of beard, led my mother, still on her burro and wrapped in a blue shawl and with me in the center of the universe, and the Indians gave way, they let us pass and my father made a sign with his hand and said come here Homero, you shall pass through the eye of a needle because that’s exactly how wide our mercy is: but virtue is measured in magnitude, not things, and of course our Uncle Don Fernando translated these holy words into Mixtec and all of them stood aside without ut
tering a word, like the waters of the watermelon-colored sea while the sixty-three hierarchs locked the church doors, and braced themselves against them to add to the bolts the weight of each one of their sixty-three years of political predominance, and Don Bernardino Gutiérrez, first and foremost supporter of President Calles in the state of Guerrero, exclaimed that you can’t get milk from an ox but that when it’s time to fry beans what you need is grease, and Elijo Raíz, LL.D., who came in in 1940 with Avila Camacho, added that it all had to end the way it began, in the bosom of the Holy Mother Church, hallelujah, amen, push, pull, and national unity!
6
Curiously enough, the first things we feel, even as mere monozygotes inside the maternal womb, are the fluctuations in the exterior dynamics that surround us and in which our mothers participate; for instance, the apprehensions entailed in our flight from the holy places of Igualistlahuaca when we were going against the tide of the masses who listened to my Uncle Homero’s discourse as they pressed up against the locked doors of the rose-colored church with its double cut-stone towers, against which doors sixty-three leaders of the Revolutionary Institutional Party of Guerrero were pushing with all their might, shoulders, hands, hips, and backsides to keep the aforesaid masses from entering, since those masses had just scared them out of their wits by moving without them and they didn’t understand (nor did we, the group running away) whether what the citizens, the faithful, the plebes, the helots, the great unwashed, the redskins (each of the sixty-three was muttering what he really thought about them as he pushed against the splintering door), wanted to show was a great love, a concentrated hatred, or an explosive despair devoid of hatred or love.
The first things we feel: the bustle, the ambition, the obstacles—other bodies—that impede our own movement, my mom’s and mine for instance, our tensions, our fear of everything around us that moves with or against us, said my mother and I. Don’t, your worships, jump to conclusions because I was there and you weren’t, as we were once again on burro or on foot heading for the hills and the mountains that Uncle Fernando knows like the back of his hand, as he heads for Malinaltzin, he tells us, because there is very little landscape left and even less land left in this land of ours: where are we Mexicans going to walk around? North of the Temazcal is off-limits because there’s a war on there, east of Perote is out of bounds because that’s where the oil is, north of the Infiernillo is out of bounds because that’s where …
“Pacífica is…” says my father in a low voice, but Uncle H. was not listening, neither to my father nor to my Uncle Fernando, as he snorted in rage astride the longest-suffering burro in burrodom: the rotund personage whines and regurgitates, not even listening to what my father and my other uncle, Don Fernando, are saying.
“Oh, Lord, what could I have done to deserve this humiliation, I, saved twice in the same year by my nephew Angel to whom I have done so much evil? Oh, I beg forgiveness, a thousand times I beg forgiveness.”
Homero Fagoaga slipped off his burro as they went down a mountainside and kissed the feet of my father—ramrod-straight, bearded, green-eyed, and Guelfish. Forgive me, nephew, I am in your hands, you saved me from the Acapulco mob by sending Tomasito to warn me in time so I could escape by speedboat and parachute instead of using the minisub I had prepared (they didn’t take my etc. into account) …
“It was Tomasito who warned you?” groans my mother.
“Precisely. And because of his loyalty the heroic son of the archipelago died, died, I say, at the hand of pimpish types whose faces and manners I seemed to recognize,” said Uncle H., staring at us with eyes that said I’m holding a royal flush too, but we’re all pals here, right? “Who will ever be able to explain what makes some people completely loyal?” he added, wagging his tremendous Tartuffesque jowls. “Tomasito is dead!”
“And you are alive, Uncle.”
“Thanks to you. And I had time to prepare my campaign and call my plane from Mexico City, so that I could keep my appointment with our well-beloved Mexican soil. Now you have saved me from those monolingual aborigines, oh how can I ever pay you for doing me such favors?”
“You miserable fat slob,” interrupted Uncle Fernando, “what are you running away from?”
“My best speech, dear oh dear, the one I’d worked over most, the one I’d virtually chiseled out of Parian marble, the most eloquent, the most erudite, my most heartfelt one as well, lost in the face of five thousand sandal-wearing plebes who didn’t understand a word! Mexico in a nutshell, my dear, dear relatives! Everything for nothing and nothing for everyone! But doubt, doubt is what’s consuming me! Did they love me? Did they hate me? Please, don’t take my doubt away from me!” said Homero, standing up with dignity.
“The one thing there can be no doubt about is what your buddies from the PRI will be thinking about you, you pudding on legs,” Uncle Fernando declared.
“Bah, after all that confusion they’ll understand my reasons just as I’ll understand theirs,” said Uncle H. with diminishing haughtiness, as he mounted his burro with bizarre agility.
“Well, my dear Uncle, it seems to me that even as we speak the tribe has probably already chopped up the hierarchs who vainly sought refuge in the religious sanctuary. Dear me, yes, Uncle. The purest tamale. Just you think about that.”
“All sixty-three, nephew?”
“But of course, Uncle.”
“Elijo Raíz, the delegate born in Cuajinicuilapa?”
“Ground up fine.”
“Don Bernardino Gutiérrez, first and foremost supporter of President Calles in the state of Guerrero?”
“Ground up fine.”
“But just yesterday, as we were leaving the airport for the hotel, I asked him, listen, Don Bernardino, you who’ve been in national politics since the days of General Calles, how have you managed to survive and adapt yourself to so many changes, fluctuations, and shake-ups? Think of me as a humble apprentice and let your experience illuminate my hope. Then Don Bernardino stuck his index finger in his mouth and stuck it out of the car window to tell which way the wind was blowing.”
“That’s how to do it, son.”
“Gelded like a hog.”
“And the young Tezozómoc Cuervo, pristine orator, formed like a jug and of coffeeish hue?”
“That boy, as Don Bernardino would say: now he’s a busted jug.”
“Good God, what have I set into motion?” whined Homero Fagoaga.
“The beginning of the end, you miserable swine,” interjected our guide, Don Fernando, without bothering to turn around to look at him as he drove the mules back the way we came.
“The end of the PRI?” asked Homero, about to fall off again.
“You look pale.”
“Deflated.”
“Oh! Ah!” The burro bucked, sending the not so future Senator flying through the air.
Homero hung on my father’s neck, who later said it was like being hugged by a gigantic vanilla ice-cream cone with chocolate sauce on the verge of melting.
“Hide me,” said this would-be Senator Fagoaga, desperately but alertly: “Don’t let them take their revenge on me, I’ll do anything you ask, but don’t abandon me to the revenge of the PRI!”
He stretched out his arm. “Fernando, my friend.”
“Will you be quiet, you miserable swine?” Our Uncle Fernando turned to face him. “You are going down in history as the man who destroyed the PRI! Damned if that isn’t historical irony! You, Homero Fagoaga, illustrious member of the PRI…”
“At your service!” exclaimed Homero, almost standing up, like one listening to the national anthem, but then fell instantly on his knees and begged to be hidden in the old house in Tlalpan that had belonged to my father’s parents, the house of bright colors near the Church of St. Peter the Apostle, the house the wicked fat man had ordered seized and sealed in his lawsuit against his nephew’s prodigality, but which was, said the finicky creep, the last place anyone would think to look for him. Hide me there, no one would ever
think to look for me there, the enmity between him and his relatives was well known, and thus he could respect the devout modesty of his sisters, Capitolina and Farnesia, the last two certified virgins in Mexico. Sure, and put up with Uncle H. in the house in Tlalpan, which would remain sealed, cut off from profane eyes, where no one would look for him, in such proclaimed modesty, within such a frugal space …
“And what do we get out of it?”
Uncle Homero, on his knees, spread his arms like a penitent.
“I’ll stop the suit that would declare you, my nephew, Don Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, prodigal and irresponsible, I’ll pay all court costs and damages, I will return the Tlalpan property to you, I will free up the gold pesos legitimately inherited by my aforesaid nephew after the perfectly legitimate, sudden, and undeniably accidental death of his parents, Don Diego Palomar and Doña Isabella Fagoaga de Palomar, my sister, the couple who came to be known as the Mexican Curies before the accursed taco crossed their scientific path. What else do you want? More?”