“You are going to resign publicly from the PRI, Homero.”
From then on, my mommy is going to tell to anyone who might care to listen that the shock of our Uncle Homero Fagoaga was eclipsed and simultaneously magnified by the afternoon glow in the mountains, that shock of the earth as it looked at the clouds, the shock of the clouds as they looked at the cut stone, and the shock of the stone as it contemplated itself in the light, and the shock of the light as it found the flashing expanse of the field of heather. Nothing in all that could match the historical shock painted on our uncle’s face.
In the oleaginous eyes of the man kneeling before his detested saviors, in his equally oily syllables, in the very posture of his defeudalized abjection, which contrasted with the indifferent splendor of invisible nature, my mother managed to distinguish a plea for compassion, destroyed, of course, in the act by Homero’s words:
“But, Fernando … Fernando … I was born with the PRI, it’s the source of my national pride and my personal destiny, Fernando: I can’t conceive of life without the PRI, I am oriented, synchronized, plugged into the Party, I owe my language, my thoughts, my ideals, my deals, my schemes, my opportunities, my excuses, my acts of daring, Fernando: my entire existence, right down to my most intimate fibers, I swear to you, to the PRI and its system, I am Catholic because I believe in the hierarchy and the sweet dogmas of my political church; but I am a revolutionary because I believe in its slogans and its most archaic proofs of legitimacy; I am conservative because without the PRI we head directly to communism; I am liberal because without the PRI we head directly to fascism, and I am a Catholic, revolutionary, progressive, and reactionary millionaire all at the same time and for the same reasons: the PRI authorizes it. Without the PRI I wouldn’t know what to say, think, even how to act. Just think: when I was born, the Party was only three years old; it’s my brother! We grew up together; I don’t know anything else! Without the PRI I’d be an orphan of history! Can you really ask me to give that up? Have mercy! Without the PRI I don’t exist! The PRI is my cradle, my roof, my soup, my language, the nose I smell with, the palate I taste with, my eardrum, the pupil of my eyes!”
Homeric pause.
“Can you really ask me to give that up? What else?”
Don Fernando Benítez, wrapped in his corn-husk mantle, with his head bare and his old, muddy, scuffed boot resting on the lowered nape of this conquered Gaul, our Uncle Don Homero Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca, LL.D.
“Yes, you filthy barnacle bloodsucker, there is something more.”
“More, more?” whined Homero.
“This you will have to do and confess, Homero, to pay for your sins. You shall believe in liberty and democracy, Homero. You will go forth to fight for them whenever I order you to do so, Homero. You will have faith in your fellow citizens, the faith no one has ever wanted to have in them. You will give this disdained land the chance to be democratic, Homero.”
“But it has never been democratic!” exclaimed the hollow-eyed Don Homero as Don Fernando ground his cheek into the mud with his boot.
“You will have to do it despite all evidence to the contrary, you coward. The important thing is that you believe it without proving it, that you confess it, admire it, and defend it: Mexico can be a democratic country! With your powerful arm on our side, Homero, we shall undo all the wrongs of our history in order to proclaim to all, blessed age and blessèd century.”
I’m inside my mother, but my mother can’t know it yet, and nevertheless one day I’ll know that she doesn’t say anything out loud that afternoon because in a strange way she feels that she’s trying to confer an impossible dignity on things with her silence, my mother says in secret, staring at Uncle Homero, submissive to the insane demands of Uncle Fernando, who stands, as small and nervous as a prancing fighting cock, bald and pink, with his handlebar mustache and his blue eyes, his tiny glasses in a creolized Franz Schubert style, expert on Indians, and author.
“Get down off that burro, Homero, and do me the honor of leading me to Malinaltzin!”
7
Don Fernando paused triumphantly and told the humiliated Don Homero and my parents (and me, hanging on as best I could, unrecognized by them just as they are not recognized by Nature) that in memory of this victorious campaign for democracy we would all take refuge in the baroque beauty of the Malinaltzin church, which the Indians had built, and thus unite—this was our Uncle Fernando’s permanent intention—tradition and modernization, culture and democracy. He turned his steps and his trots toward the church, but soon they discovered that the sacristan wasn’t there, that he’d gone to the state capital (Chilpancingo) to drink up a good tip given him by a tourist who’d come yesterday, and so who had the keys? Don Fernando asked one of the locals, So-and-so, and where might this person be? well, working on the highway, breaking rock and laying asphalt, why didn’t they get someone to stand in for the sacristan? who knows, go ask him yourself, and they walked and trotted toward the highway under construction on the outskirts of the village, this miserable hamlet, which is a vast brown hole dotted with puddles, which were its only amenity and distraction. Its walls were made of sad mud, a lament of dry adobe, and on them the opposition had plastered slogans denouncing Don Homero and his party.
MIXTEC PEOPLE, AWAKE!
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
MEANS VICTORY FOR THE PROLETARIAT
cheek by jowl with:
CHRISTIANS YES! COMMIES NO!
VOTE WITH THE SYNARCH FALANGE AND
CROSS OUT THE ATHEISTS!
and just beyond the usual fucked-over faces, my mother sends me effluvia of vibrant acid, all to this drop of tremulous life, this tiny Mercury without wings that I am, beyond the walls and among the puddles and dogs are the men, women and children, the mass of fleas, hunger, sickness, self-centered pride, and abysmal ignorance of what really matters in the modern world and equally abysmal knowledge of what no one can any longer touch, listen to, understand. My mother orders me to say, not you Homero, not you Fernando, not you Angel, not I, not you, Reader, not even you, my own future offspring.
From a distance, they caught sight of the workers busily paving a stretch of the access road to the highway: the mounds of gravel, the barrels of tar, sieves, and an ancient leveler that ecumenically announced its passage in a series of steam hiccups.
“The time has come!” exclaimed Don Fernando Benítez, sitting astride his burro, to Don Homero Fagoaga, who was docilely leading him along by the reins just as my father Angel was leading my mother Angeles through the rose-colored fields of heather in this provincial place where he had learned to love a land which he had not given up for lost, doubtless because between strolling through the garden and sitting immobile in church he’d learned to talk to himself and in doing that he’d heard for the first time: don’t give me up for lost; wipe off my makeup; I know how to endure.
“The time has come!” repeated Uncle Fernando energetically.
“The time for what?” Homero asked in consternation.
“The time for you to prove your loyalty, villain.”
“I don’t understand what you mean,” said Uncle Homero, regaining a measure of his tottering conceit.
“You most certainly do: you are going to go up to that group of workers we see in the distance and you are going to speak to them, Homero, not in official jargon but in the language of democratic truth.”
“What do you want me to tell them?” asked Homero with less irony than resignation.
Don Fernando scanned the horizon.
“I’m willing to bet they’re not unionized. In these parts, they subcontract some jobs and the worker is not protected in any way. Bah, the economic philosophy of that skunk Ulises López has spread and now people think that the democratic way to do things is for each worker to make his own contract with the boss. You must convince them in socialist-style talk of their need to join together and bargain from a position of strength about salaries. Get going, you rat.”
Don Homero’s protests were useless; the group made up by my two uncles, my father, and my mother (and I, bouncing along without anyone but your worships knowing anything about it) went trotting along in the classic style toward the workers, who stopped working when they saw them; someone whistled, laughter rang out, and a huge, powerful, dark man got down from the leveler. The machine ground to a halt, either as if the man had been pedaling it and simply stopped or as if it simply refused to go if he weren’t driving it: the image was that the man, who was wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat pulled down over his eyes, its brim turned downward so that his face was always in the shadow, was consubstantial with the machine he drove. A centaur of our national machinery.
The other workers were all wearing old khaki, as if they were in uniform. And, just like the man who got off the leveler, they, too, wore old hats to protect themselves from the sun. My mother squeezed my father’s hand, trying to tell him something’s going to happen, I have a feeling, this is no joke, I swear I suddenly feel more afraid than I did in Acapulco, as if all that had been a joke and now being here with these people was not.
But there was no time for any more hunches. Uncle Homero, following Uncle Fernando’s irrevocable command and showing the agility he only revealed on grand occasions, ran toward the leveler recently abandoned by the somber, powerful man, who was walking as if he were dragging a chain and cannonball. Still agog, Uncle H. clambered up the leveler, on the side facing a row of dried-out agave, slipping and sliding, squeezing himself over under and around the driver’s seat and finally posing on the outside stair.
Two things happened: first, our admirable relative, as soon as he realized he was once again on a speaker’s platform, recovered all his flatulent self-confidence; second, his traditional lordly bearing was comically undermined by his having to cling to the iron handle on the outside of the leveler so he wouldn’t fall into the fresh tar above which he was swinging while the members of the work squad nudged each other. Don Homero launched into the second speech of his nerve-racking electoral campaign: he always knew to whom he was speaking; in his bosom and in his tongue all opposites came into harmony; Fagoaga never loses, so: Comrades!:
“Just one look at your callused proletarian hands tells me that only a divisive, murderous faction could detour you away from the route of workers’ internationalism. But I am here to remind you that in the proletarian struggle the real enemy is the enemy within, always the one inside us.”
He glowered in a sinister way at the workers; one of them put his index finger to his temple and made a circle with it. My father tried to interrupt with a shout, as if he’d been impelled to do so by Angeles’s foreboding: “We’ve come about the keys! Who’s got the keys to the church?” he shouted, trying to speed things to their conclusion.
But Don Homero Fagoaga, master of distraction and fraud, would not allow himself to be distracted or defrauded, especially after what had happened in Igualistlahuaca.
He went on intrepidly: “The front line of the left-wing parties is made up of groups so divergent that they will never manage to form a single party unless we first search our bosoms for the vermin hidden there whose divisiveness will ultimately succeed in chaining us to the chariot of the upper classes who, even though they have been conquered, nevertheless cannot resign themselves to disappearing forever from the stage of history. But as soon as you unite, expel the turncoats, discover and break up the network of traitors and provocateurs that exists right here among you”—and here Uncle Homero’s ill-fated rhetorical impulse caused him to point his finger at this man, that man, the other man, all of whom raised their eyes from their tacos, left their bottles in peace, and wiped their mouths (which were smeared with dark plums) on their sleeves—“because, comrade, we don’t know if you, or you, or even you, comrade, have the perverted intention of sniping against the working class and the revolutionary movement.” And now the first plum splattered against Uncle Homero Fagoaga’s already ill-used jacket, another plum to the stomach, plum to the knees, plum to the backside when Homero uselessly tried to retreat. A final plum caught Uncle Homero right in the face, a black flower splattered along his nose and cheeks while our brave Uncle Fernando walked right up to the man standing with his arms crossed and his face covered by the brim of his hat, the man Fernando had intuitively singled out as the leader of the group.
“Tell this bunch of jerks to knock it off. All we came to ask you to do is form a union if you haven’t already done so, so you can better defend the rights you should enjoy under a democracy.”
“We don’t need any union,” said the man slowly.
“You work by subcontract and for a lump sum, so don’t let yourselves be exploited.”
“Now listen up, you old jerk,” said the chief impatiently, “get off our backs.”
Barely had he spoken these fierce words to my bantam-rooster Uncle Fernando when Fernando was all over him with two punches that were so well delivered to the aforementioned leader that the surprise of the attack knocked off his hat and revealed his face, which looked like a photo of a guerrillero. Surprised and angry, my father instantly recognized the face as that of his literary pursuer, the frustrated author Matamoros, father of Colasa Sánchez. However, that discovery was itself obliterated by a rapid series of events: first, the plums were replaced by stones and Uncle Homero did a belly flop into the freshly poured tar; this was followed by an outcry from the twelve workers, who cursed Homero up and down for ruining their day’s work; then some of them picked up sticks to defend their leader Matamoros and beat Uncle Fernando; still others were busy kicking Uncle Homero out of the mud pond the tar they had poured and leveled that morning had become, which tar was to have been the road President Jesús María y José Paredes would have driven over two days later, thinking that a highway had been built linking Chilpancingo to Malinaltzin, even though the President knew full well that the funds allotted to the project had been divided in not precisely even lots among the state governor (50%), Minister Ulises López (20%), the contractor (another 20%), and a few other local officials (5%), leaving only 5% for actually building the national highway. So the President will certainly be the most surprised of all to see, when they point it out to him from the governor’s swift Fujiyama limousine, that a highway really does exist, but these poor workers, what do they know about all this; all they know is that their job won’t be finished on time and all because of this miserable, fat, progressive or synarchist or sonofabitchist tub of shit, and others are looking at my father, who has rushed to defend the octogenarian Don Fernando, who is shouting to Matamoros and his gang:
“Calm down, boys, I swear I never slept with your sisters.”
“It’s only because you’re an old asshole that I don’t beat you to death,” said Matamoros Moreno truculently. “I wouldn’t care even if you were my father, damned old fool.”
“I could have been your father, but I didn’t choose to be,” said Don Fernando Benítez, at the crest of a wave of sarcastic dignity, all of which only made the men beat him all the harder, while the others were tugging Uncle Homero out of his lake of pitch and then tossing him, all three hundred pounds of him, until they let him fall in a death cry that blended with Uncle Fernando’s peremptory threats, just as my father arrived to rescue them like a knight in shining armor. He and Matamoros glared at each other, eyeball to eyeball, as they used to say about nuclear confrontations, and Don Fernando blared out:
“Unions! Democracy! Justice!”
To which the workers, laughing their heads off, responded:
“Food, Clothing, Shelter, wherever they come from, wherever they are, a place to sleep, a girl to sleep with!
All eyes turned toward my mother sitting on her burro; then they saw Don Fernando stumbling blindly along the highway looking for his glasses and shouting, Miserable rats, all we did was bring you a democratic message, left-wing pep talk, poor lost people, degraded people, foul mongrels, scarecrow beggars, and poor Homero was lying black and sti
cky in the tar.
The eyes of the work team turned toward their leader and Matamoros gave them permission with his eyes. Four of the workers pinioned my father, the rest grabbed my mother. A red, foreign light, unrecognizable, alien, belligerent, so strong and so horrible, so without even a by-your-leave, so long and oiled and without ears like a garrotted worm, as ruddy as someone totally drunk, that only I could shout to my own inner self, I don’t know you, I don’t know you, you are not the same one who approached Guanahaní, who upset Fernandina, who took Veragua, who took Honduras, who collared Tabasco, who landed in Puerto Rico and tossed me into my first voyage of discovery, into my infinite sailing in the uterine sea, twinkle, twinkle little star / how I wonder what you are, but she didn’t care whether I felt like a foreigner in the bosom of my own gestation, I exiled within the womb of my own mother, my golden age: kaput, my noble savage: ciao, ciao! my happy age all fucked up: this is where the age of iron took its toll, and the bubble of my conception was burst by these detestable times of ours and the enclosure law closed up throughout my refuge, pushing me inside, until I hit my head against a wall: this was a refuge no longer; it was a desert; no longer a cloister; it was an avenue passed first by a strong man who seemed to push me, my mother, and the world as if we were cannonballs; then the rest, less strong but more avid, each one taking his turn to visit little Chris: my debut in society, 1992 style, the reminder that we are not alone, see? the bastard solidarity of my destiny if by chance I still believed in the illustrious solitude of my destiny: welcome to Christopher’s egg, afflicted working masses of Mexico!
Matamoros Moreno released my father Angel Palomar and buttoned his fly.
“To make up for what you did to me, bastard. For having laughed at my literary first steps. For having refused to help me get published. For having snubbed my precious little girl Colasa. You didn’t give a shit about me, right? Well, let’s see if you forget me now! All that’s left now is for the gringo to make you eat my book on the vagina dentata, that’s the last detail, stuck-up bastard shitass!”