Homero Fagoaga was decked out with two lustrous pitch-black tresses tied up with tricolor ribbons; he’d shaved off the tuft of hair he wore under his lip, rouged his cheeks, powdered his brow, smeared his lips scarlet, and restored the sparkle to his dying eyes with the help of some Maybelline; naturally, he had no need to powder the milky whiteness of his bosoms and his bare arms, given the rather small size of the blouse embroidered with carnations and roses he’d managed to squeeze into, although it was true he did have to tighten the red rebozo around his waist and, finally, work his way into the tiny red velvet slippers and shake out the beads on the wide skirt of the china poblana outfit he’d tricked himself out in.
Dear niece and nephew, please don’t look at me that way. You know how curious I am: well, this morning I was poking through the chests and armoires in the Malinaltzin sacristy. I found no white vestments, no stoles, no bodices, but I did find this proudly national costume. Think what you like, imagine what you please. I’ll simply repeat the famous words of the onetime chronicler of this magnificent city—which, it seems, is keeping us at arm’s length for the nonce—Don Salvador Novo, when a press photographer discovered him sitting at his dressing table: “I feel pretty, and witty, and gay.”
He hummed a tune from West Side Story and delicately stepped out of the Van Gogh to deal with the ill-featured but well-armed cop who was about to question us. He swirled his beaded skirt even more: Uncle Homero needed no crinolines to stand out in a crowd. The width of those homeric hips was such that the design of the eagle perched on the nopal devouring the serpent did not flaccidly hang down from his waist to the ground but virtually flew, proudly unfurled over Uncle Homero’s ass.
“I’m coming, I’m coming, if I don’t that eagle’s gonna lay an egg!” exclaimed the policeman. With a graceful gesture, Homero pushed aside the cop’s submachine gun and, with his eyes as bright as streetlights, said, “I can see you’re happy to see me, Mr. Policeman, but let’s not get carried away; come on now, put your little gun away!”
“Got a pass?”
“A pass?” swaggered Homero, his hands resting on his hips. “A pass for the queen of the bullring, the empress of the arena, Cuca Lucas, who’s needed no pass to get into Buckingham Palace or the White House?”
“But it’s that…”
“Don’t say a word. Our national honor has been carried through the world on my songs, young fellow. Neither the world nor love has ever closed its doors to me—so do you think you’ll be the first?”
“But it’s that we’ve got to know where you’re coming from.”
“Where do my songs come from,” said Homero in a singsong voice, “and where do they go: to praise the singularity and the beauty of the fatherland!”
“We’ve got our orders, miss.”
“Madam, if you please.”
“Okay. Madam.”
“Don’t bully me now, young man. Put that gun away. So you want to know where I’m coming from, do you now, dearie? From my little farm just beyond the wheatfield there.”
“And what about your friends here, ma’am?”
“Friends? You could treat me with more respect, handsome.”
“Ma’am, the law…”
“The law, the law, handsome! Papers, license plates, influence, friends, isn’t that what you mean?”
The representative of the law looked sadly and apprehensively at Uncle Fernando’s handlebar mustache and his broken glasses. “I’m her agent,” said the loyal Benítez as the cop closed his eyes. Then he opened them in curiosity at the resort shirts and blue jeans my parents were wearing: “We’re the lady’s musical accompanists,” said my father. “I play the guitar and she plays the violin.”
“Okay…”
“You can believe me, Mr. Policeman,” said Homero, climbing back into the van. “Thanks to me, the glories of Mexico are known throughout the world. Why, because of me, people know that only Veracruz is beautiful, how pretty Michoacán is, that there is no other place like Mexico, how pretty the morning in which I come to greet you is, that I’m a guy from the borderland, hurray for Ciudad Juárez, hurray for Chihuahua, and my pretty country! and Granada, a land I’ve dreamed of…”
“Okay, okay…”
The cop closed the door behind Don Homero’s ass—including the eagle in repose—just barely resisting the temptation to stretch out his hand, resisting the reflex action of firing his machine gun.
“My, how pretty Taxco is, that cute little town with a saintly face! Toledo, the shining star of the world is what you are! Matamorelos the handsome, with your superb orange groves, and Puebla is just the frosting on the cake, that’s what Puebla is!”
“Enough, ma’am…”
“Din-din-din go the bells of Medellín; ay, Jalisco don’t give up; Querétaro, rétaro, rétaro, don’t hold me back, ’cause here I come!”
“All I’m gonna say now is get the fuck out of my sight, ma’am, get going ’cause you’re blocking the way…”
“The way to Corralejo, my beautiful Pénjamo, you shine like a diamond…”
“Stop, ma’am!” shouted the cop in a flood of tears.
“Don’t stop, nephew, step on it now!”
“Ma’am,” sang out the cop, “I want to hear more about Pénjamo, that’s where I come from…”
“Step on it and don’t lose your nerve, Angelito! Just what I was afraid would happen…!”
“Oh, honey, don’t do this to me, it’s breaking my heart!”
“Will you get going, you idiot!”
He could hear the weepy voice of the trooper—“a girl from Cuerámaro told me I looked as though I came from Pénjamo”—and then he entered the gray-skied world, near to where Hernán Cortés had his private hunting preserve on Peñón de los Baños, plastered up with signs advertising beer, lubricants, and cockroach poison, while Angel stuck his head out the window trying to find a way through the wheezing jalopies and Angeles began to cough: her eyes vainly sought the birds of Moctezuma’s aviary, the quetzals with their green plumage, the royal eagles, the parrots, and the fine-feathered ducks, the flower gardens and fragrant trees, the pools and cisterns of fresh water, all of it built in cut stone and stuccoed over, and instead they found the monumental series of one-dimensional façades of famous buildings and statues and bodies of water all lined up at the entrance to the city to raise the spirit of traveler you have reached the place where the air is etc.: the Arc de Triomphe and the Statue of Liberty, the Bosphorus, and the Colosseum, St. Basil’s, the Giralda, the Great Wall and the Taj Mahal, the Empire State Building and Big Ben, the Galleria in Houston (Texas) and the Holiday Inn in Disneyland, the Seine, and Lake Geneva, all lined up in a row, in hallucinatory succession, like a vast Potemkin Village erected in the very porticos of Mexico City in order to facilitate self-delusion and so we could say to ourselves, “We aren’t so badly off; we’re at least at the level of; well, who knows, we’re as good as; well, who said we didn’t have our very own Galleria Shopping Mall and our own Arc de Triomphe: who says this is the only great metropolis without a river or a lake; who would dare say it; only a bad Mexican, a sell-out, someone green with envy…”
But as they stared at this hallucination, Angel and Angeles knew (Don Homero was rubbing off his makeup, removing his wig; Don Fernando refused to believe what he was seeing through his glasses broken by Matamoros Moreno’s thugs) that this one-dimensional cardboard prologue to the city was identical to the city itself, that it wasn’t a caricature but a warning: Potemkin City, Potemkin Land in which President Jesús María y José Paredes heads a government in which nothing that is said is done, was done, or will ever be done: dams, power stations, highways, agricultural cooperatives: nothing, only announcements and promises, pure façades and the President goes through a series of ritualized actions devoid of content which are the content of TV news programs: the President of the Republic ritualistically distributes land that doesn’t exist; he inaugurates monuments as ephemeral as these painted backdrops, he pay
s homage to nonexistent heroes: have you ever heard of Don Nazario Narano, hero of the Battle of the Coatzacoalcos Meat Packing Plant? About the child heroine Malvina Gardel, who gave her life for our sister republic wrapped in a true-blue sky-blue Argentine flag? About Alfredo Mangino, who donated his entire bank account—in dollars—to the tune of $1,492, to the nation during the 1982 crisis? About the oil worker Ramiro Roldán, who ripped off his wife’s ears and cut off her fingers so he could donate her earrings and rings to the National Solidarity Fund to pay our foreign debt? About the Unknown Giggler, who died laughing sitting in front of his television set and seeing all the aforementioned acts of heroism and seeing functionaries in mansions surrounded by stone walls in Connecticut and condos next door to the Prince of Wales and Lady Di in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, and in Parthenons over the sea in Zihuatanejo, receive the life savings of Mexico’s poor?
The President of the Republic has declared war on make-believe countries and has celebrated totally fantastic historical dates. Did you know there is a battalion of Indians defending, even as we speak, the honor of our nation against the outrages and insults of the dictator of the neighboring Republic of Darkness? Did you know that the seasoned veterans of Squadron 201 from the Second World War have bombarded, just to humiliate them, the haughty despots of the tropical dictatorship of Costaguana? We’ve run out of the patience necessary for a Non-intervention Policy—what the hell!
And, fellow citizen, how is it possible you missed the August 14 celebration, the anniversary of the date Mexico City and Calcutta were declared Twin Cities? And what about September 31, Fatherland Plus Day, February 32, the day we Mexicans celebrate You Can’t Do That to Us Day: or You Can Have Your Leap Year; I’ll Keep the Five Proud Extra Days in the Aztec calendar! Don Homero is about to begin singing yet another gem from his patriotic songbook:
I’m a real ol’ Mexican, my land is a tough one,
An’ I swear by my manhood there’s no place on earth
Prettier or tougher than my land …
But all of them (including Homero) flee from Homero the bard of the vinous smog, they fly far away from the van that coughs as often as its crew, they arise now with their mental cameras and zoom back to a far-distant point in order to reenter the Mexican metropolis, the most densely populated city in the world, a city with more people in it than all of Central America, with more than there are Argentines between Salta and Cabo Pena, or Colombians between Gorgona island and vibrating Arauca, or Venezuelans between Punta Gallinas and the Pacarima!
2. Taking Wing with the Crippled Devil
The truth is that the biggest city in the world, the city into which, in waves and successive seismic shudders, entered faceless Aztecs in 1325, Spaniards disguised as gods in 1519, gringos with their faces washed by Protestantism in 1847, and French, Austrians, Hungarians, Bohemians, Germans, and Lombards with the prognathous face of the Hapsburgs in 1862, the city of the priest Tenoch, the conquistador Cortés, General Scott, and the Emperor Maximilian, always deserves a spectacular entrance. My Uncles Homero and Fernando, my parents Angel and Angeles, and I, mere layabout that I am, Christoham, have no other choice but to imitate the first narrator of all things, the first curious individual, the crippled devil who still remembers his angelic wings, mere stumps now it’s true, but stumps that rise in flight through a power God does not know, which is that of telling stories: and on this afternoon of our return to Mexico City (okay, okay: I’m here for the first time, but my genetic memory is only the scientific name for my innate sense of déjà vu) the buzz of creation is coming in loud and clear, the interminable hiss
of the original bang: creation can still be heard, I say, above the ashy scum of the city, and there is nothing strange in the fact that we all try to fly toward it, my parents hanging on to the mutilated wings of the crippled devil, Homero still dressed in his china poblana costume, holding on to the demon’s scarlet, pointed tail, Fernando clinging to the black, broken cloven-hoof of the genius of storytelling, I, disoriented, because I don’t know if I’m still swimming in the ocean inside my mother’s womb or if I’m swimming in the corrupt air, which nevertheless is better than the black hole we flew out of, saving ourselves from the sensation of sinking into a fetid swamp: from above we see millions of beings crowded against the entrance to the Taco Curtain, we see the one-dimensional façades of prestige, against which crash the dark waves of peasants fleeing from violence, crime, theft, repression, and the mockery of centuries: for them we invent the illusion of a city of opportunity and promotion, a city equal to its television screens, a city of blond people advertising beer, driving Mustangs, and stuffing themselves in supermarkets before taking a well-deserved vacation in Las Vegas, courtesy of Western Airlines and Marriott Hotels: they prefer the illusion of the city to the barren fields where they were born: who can blame them? Now they want to enter the city which is just as barren, violent, and repressive as the land they left and they don’t know it or they do know it (from the air, we look at the city decked out in dust) and they go on preferring it because the more of them who come, the more the image of the beer, cars, supermarkets, and vacations will be blotted out.
Off we go into the wild gray yonder, hanging on to the wings, tail, and hoof of the only angel interested in telling a story, the curious fallen angel who only has his imagination left to raise himself up, and we’re flying over a city whose roofs, faithful to his own tradition, the devil begins to lift: the roofs of Mexico, D.F. (hold on tight, little Christopher) (the crippled devil coughs, spits, spits some phlegm on the posh Zona Rosa, phlegm that lands smack in the center of a bowl of stracciatella soup in a restaurant located on the Génova mall and which is eaten as if it were floating egg yolk) (the limping devil scratches at the thick air with his free hoof; Don Fernando is clinging to the other and the dust from the free hoof falls like snow devoid of temperature on the Nueva Anzures zone, upon which all the locals bring out their Christmas trees): FLYING DOWN TO VICO!
The crippled Lucifer of storytelling simultaneously raises the roof of one house in Bosques de las Lomas and another in Santa María Camarones: we did not see, in the first case, if in fact we used our eyes (and mine still lack the veil of eyelids), any material or physical movement inside that mansion surrounded by nationalized banks or, in the second case, inside that shack trapped between railroad tracks: in the mansion we saw a naked couple embracing, but the physical reality was the desire to suppress the difference between the two of them and their fear of being changed or changing; in the shack we saw another naked couple embracing and they were afraid of staying inside the shack and they were afraid of leaving the shack: prisoners within, exiles outside: Mexico City.
We rose so high, so very high, that my mother was afraid of smashing against the dome which, according to what Uncle H. said in Aca, was being built to dole out to each and every inhabitant of the city a ration of pure air, and she screamed out in fear, but Uncle Homero laughed in the heaven of heavens because the dome was a lie, an illusion, another governmental placebo: all they had to do was announce one day that it was being built and announce on some other day that it was finished for everyone to breathe more easily: like an aspirin posing as a vitamin, and this is the snake oil that brings the dead back to life: we did not, therefore, smash into the arc of the nonexistent dome, but the devil laughed at what Homero said and dropped us, and we fell coughing and spitting into the black hole that swallows all, we dropped like meteors tearing through the layers of pollution (only Homero’s fall was slowed, because of his full skirts). From a distance we saw a tourist attraction: a bulldozer half buried in a lake of cement next to some hastily abandoned mansions patrolled by howling dogs, we scraped our noses against the extravagant slogans of the past peeling off walls more eternal than words:
and we flew like a flash over the thousands crowded together who had not been allowed to enter the city and then we lost our bird’s-eye view of the closed city, the concentration of wealth, migration, and unemployment; the
capital of underdevelopment: Mexico City here I come! and when we could make out the noble cupolas, real and solid this time, of San Juan de Dios and Santa Veracruz, opposite the Alameda, where my parents met, I realized, if not what my destiny would be, at least what my vocation was:
I shall attempt to decipher the perennial mystery of names
I shall fight untiringly against the unknown
I shall irreverently mix languages
I shall ask, speak familiarly, imagine, finish just to start a new page
I shall call and answer relentlessly
I shall offer the world and its people another image of themselves
I shall undergo a metamorphosis while remaining the same:
CHRISTOPHER UNBORN
3. Time
Time flies: barely had the eternal devil lifted the roof of my parents’ house in Tlalpan and dropped us all inside (all of us: Uncle Homero dressed as a china poblana; Uncle Fernando with his slicker and his broken glasses; my parents with beach shirts and blue jeans, and I Christopher inside my dear mother Doña Angeles Palomar) when we all felt that time was different: we were inside the capital city of the Mexican Republic, where, by definition, everything is faster, above all time: time flies, leaves us behind: time weighs on time itself, it drags, because, as my dad says to my mom, who’s making us be modern: before, time was not our own, it was providence’s own sphere of influence; we insisted on making it ours just so we could say that history is the work of man: and my mother admits, with a mixture of fatal pride and responsibility, that if such is the case we must make ourselves responsible for time, for the past and the future, because there is no longer any providence to coddle our times: now they are our responsibility: we must sustain the past; invent the future:
“But only here, today, in the present, only here do we remember the past, only here do we desire the future,” my mother tells my father as she caresses his cheek the night of their return to the city; cleansing herself of the filth of the road, simple things, enjoying them the way they enjoy them (for my recovered happiness), without accepting that something broke on the road from Malinaltzin and now she is going to wait until after they make love to tell him: