Neither. This hot April night, a woman barely fifty years of age, well preserved, pretty, although with thick Andalusian ankles and without a jolly Cuban ass, square in the waist and with a cinched-in bosom, her hair tightly curled, red—a grownup version of Little Orphan Annie—a plunging neckline that went nowhere and revealed nothing, forcing the viewer (in this case, my parents and my uncle) to concentrate on the strange glimmer of her teeth, inlaid, overlaid, and plated with silver and gold even if they may have been rotten, turns out to claim the title of Last Playboy Centerfold.
“Clown of a whore,” she said. “It’s not that I haven’t had anything to eat, but there’s going to be some hair pulling if my rights are not recognized, you bunch of stinking ragpickers. I won’t move from here, even if the cops come to cart us off to jail. Shit! Long live Chile!”
“Concha Toro!” exclaimed my father. “The woman who took my virginity! The Chilean bolero singer!”
But the picture, which really did not seem posed, quickly disappeared, and in another television studio someone was handing the prize for the Last Flower Child to none other than Hipi Toltec, while the announcer explained that they had first intended to award the prize to the oldest hippie (there were lots, since someone who was twenty in 1962 was fifty in 1992: no matter how fragile he looks, Mick Jagger is going to reach his fiftieth birthday, and Paul McCartney can indeed ask in a trembling voice “Will you still need me / Will you still feed me / When I’m sixty-four,” which is how old Shirley Temple will be this year, along with Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes). So, since there is really no one more out of it than someone who was a flower child in the sixties, they chose instead to give a prize to the youngest, the person who personified the prolongation and not the extinction of a nostalgic tradition
OBLIVION AND UNION:
Hipi Toltec, shredding, took the little sugar skull and said the contest organizers had made an error, he was neither a hippie nor young: he was the plumed serpent who had finally returned to demand
UNION AND OBLIVION:
The channels turned into scrambled eggs: both the video and the audio; a bolero sung by Concha Toro and a rockaztec ballad sung by the Four Fuckups got blended into the audio and mental confusion of the TV managers, but my parents turned off the set, left Don Homero sitting there with his mouth hanging open, got dressed in their own style, my father in a three-piece black suit, tie and tie pin, starched collar, patent-leather boots, spats, white gloves, stick, and bowler (models: Adolphe Menjou and Ramón López Velarde); my mother in the tragic style of the early twenties, which looked so well on her: black satin top and skirt, to which she added languid tulle veils that turned her outfit into a dark cascade from her bare knees to her covered ankles; a black satin ribbon went around her forehead, leaving her wild, frizzy hair unfettered (models: Colette and Pola Negri), and free at last from having to feign, to vegetate, to stare endlessly, they walked out (the switches that turned them on, their inspiration: Concha Toro and Hipi Toltec) into the city because the city, after all and legitimately, was calling them, waiting for them, offering them these two solid moorings in a world left adrift, because:
“Where do you think the Bulevar is these days, baby?”
7. You Live Day to Day, Miracle to Miracle, a Lottery Life
Would they find the Bulevar? They’d been out of town since December, and since March they’d been locked in with Uncle Homero in Tlalpan; the Bulevar changed location every week, sometimes every twenty-four hours; it was never the same twice, but it was always everything: the place to meet in the capital, the place to see and be seen, the Plateros, the Madero, the Paseo de las Cadenas, the Zona Rosa of yesteryear, but now with this scandalously wonderful singularity: where that meeting place was no one knew, as secret as language (the new languages) it mutated every day, every hour, in order to remain ungraspable, uncorrupted by writers, orators, politicians, or any other manipulators.
The dripping sky is one of the constants in Mexico City; it rains incessantly, a black, oily, carboniferous rain that darkens the grandest neon signs; the sensation of a veiled dark sky in whose fogs fade the skeletons of the buildings, many of them unfinished, many just rusted steel beams, truncated towers, the temples of underdevelopment, skyscrapirontemples, others mere canvas, like those at the entrance to Puebla, others just cubes of cardboard dripping acid rain, but very few real, inhabited structures: the city lives by moving, permanence has become secret, only movement is visible, the stands along the old Paseo de la Reforma, fried foods, fruit stands, wilted flowers, black candy, sweetmeats, burro heads, pigs’ feet, maguey worms (perpetual humidity of the city, immense breeding ground for mildew, moss, rotten roe, peevish ants ready to be eaten), and the files of figures bent over devouring the tacos sold along Reforma in front of the tents illuminated by naked bulbs and burning mosquito repellant. But these details can only be seen with a microscope because from above (the view our happy foursome had as they entered the D.F.) the city is an immense, ulcerated crater, a cavity in the universe, the dandruff of the world, the chancre of the Americas, the hemorrhoid of the Tropic of Cancer.
Since the earthquake of ’85, tens of thousands of the homeless have taken over the traffic-circle islands and medians along Reforma and other main, divided arteries: shacks and pup tents, little shops and stalls: with each passing day the capital of Mexico looks more and more like a hick town. The somber but comic outfits Angel and Angeles are wearing, very twenties, as they drive the Van Gogh along Paseo de la Reforma, are an answer, a conscious and collective answer made by all young people with some spirit left, to the ugliness, the crudeness, and the violence around them.
The neon sign on the pockmarked façade of the theater in the Social Security Building blinked AFTER THE FIESTA THE SIESTA, and Angel and Angeles followed a horse-drawn coach shaped like a seashell. Who could be in there, behind those drawn curtains? Angel and Angeles exchanged glances: what they were thinking was probably what everyone who saw that coach right out of Cinderella’s nightmares thought: wherever that pumpkin on wheels is going is where the party, the Bulevar, the place, the sacred oasis of crime and cathartic violence is, for sure. The crowds grew larger as they went along Constituyentes, but it still wasn’t the Bulevar, they instinctively knew it. The packed, pallid throng tossed mango skins into the faces of those they didn’t like. Many young men walked quickly, without looking at anyone, all of them with bags hanging over their backs. From her window, an old lady was throwing flowerpots full of dirt and geraniums down onto the street, indiscriminately smashing the skulls of the passersby. No one even bothered to look up at her; no one looked down at them. They all wear identification labels on their chests (blouses, lapels, sweaters): name, occupation, and existence number for D.F. It rains ash. The ID cards neither fade nor come loose. The slow collapse of all hydraulic systems—Lerma, Mexcala, Usumacinta—have been compensated for by the constant acid misting caused by the industrialization of this high, burning, and enclosed valley.
“The problem is water,” said Don Fernando Benítez to Minister Robles Chacón. “You make people think it’s the air just to distract their attention from the real problem, then you make up this Disneyland story about the Dome that’s going to protect us from pollution and give a fair share of pure air to every inhabitant of the city. You miserable rats lie and lie and lie! The problem is the water, because every single drop of water that reaches this city costs millions of pesos.”
“Don’t you worry about it, Don Fernando,” answered the minister in a calm, friendly voice. “We know how to distribute our reserves and how to ration out that precious liquid. How are your water tubs doing, tell me. Have you had any problems? Haven’t we taken care of you just as you deserve?”
“Like everyone else, I’m saving as much water in them as I can, so my tubs are just fine,” said Benítez despondently. Then he quickly recovered his fighting spirit: “And how’s your mom?”
“Blind and buried,” said Robles Chacón unflinchingly
.
“Well, let’s hope you have enough water to keep the flowers on her grave alive,” said Benítez before leaving.
“We forgive writers all their excesses! Ah, legitimization, history, all that’s left!” The minister resignedly sighed. He looked incredulously at his feet and called his aide-de-camp, the statistician he kept hidden in the armoire:
“Let’s see now”—Minister Robles Chacón snapped his fingers explosively—“get out here and catch me that rat, and make it snappy! A rat in the office of the Secretary of Patrimony and Vehiculi … But get a move on, you jerk, what’s your problem?” shouted the minister to the little man who’d emerged from the closet at the sound of that betitled and superior snap, and who then skulked his way through the furniture bought in Roche-Bobois, hunting for the rat and explaining that Mexico City has 30 million human inhabitants, but it has 128 million rats. He fell on his knees and stretched his hand under a table made of aluminum and transparent glass, a model people in the luxury market called the New York Table—they inhabit sewers, Mr. Secretary, drains, and mountains of garbage, every year they contaminate more than ten million people with parasitosis—he looked at his own white hand under the glass, floating under the transparent crystal, the hand gesturing in its search for the invisible rat—and other intestinal ailments.
“And they consume thirty tons of corn and other cereals every two weeks. These rats are murderers, sir, but they themselves die mysteriously when they eat certain grains that cause the death of the very rats that eat them.”
“Stop hiding in your damn statistics. I’m telling you to catch this specific rat that’s gotten into my office, damn your soul!” shouted the minister.
But the statistician lacked the strength to get up, so instead he put his head under the New York Table and flattened his nose against the glass, moistening it with his breath.
“Mounds of dead rodents have been found, dead from eating imported corn. And the cats, coyotes, and other animals that eat those dead rats also suffer serious sicknesses.”
“Then aren’t those grain importers taking part in the deratification campaign?” inquired Robles Chacón.
The diminutive statistician dressed in his tuxedo cleaned his breath and drool off the bottom of the glass table in the French office of the minister:
“No, sir, because rats breed every twenty-one days.”
He got to his feet with difficulty, adding, as he smoothed his hair into place, “Perhaps the importers simply contribute to the…”
“Statistics, no moral judgments,” said the minister to the statistician as he slammed the closet door closed in his face and sat down to chew on a Minnie Mouse lollipop.
* * *
The city lights up and goes out like a Christmas tree without presents.
“What a national hangover!” someone shouts from the intersection of Patriotismo and Industria.
“Pay the bill. And nobody take off without paying the bill!”
“But the bankers already done it, gone from Mexico to Grand Cayman, cash in hand.”
“What about that banker Don Mamelín Mártir de Madrazo? Made everybody think he was kidnapped so he could send his ransom money to the Bahamas.”
“And all that foreign money poured in here poured out again to safe countries.”
“Let’s hear it for safe Paraguay.”
“Oil glut.”
“Foreign debt.”
“Population explosion.”
Bodily functions are going backward. The smell of the people in the swirling mass at the corner of Tacubaya and Avenida Jalisco, where the Hermita building is slowly turning into sand, is like flatulent breath, an anal breathing. Everywhere there are more people than fit. The roofs have become a second plateau, surrounded by dark abysses, canyons where the dark rain drips. Signs of antennas and tubs are barely visible now. Horrified ladies wrapped in rebozos run with their shopping carts filled with bank notes, they form lines, there are neighborhood guards (adolescent boys with clubs and lengths of pipe) who protect them on the long lines leading to the tortilla vendors and pharmacies, the crackling stands. A shout from a grocery store in Mixcoac: “We only sell sugar for dollars.” A mango skin splatters against Angel and Angeles’s windshield.
“Devastated city.”
“Screwed city.”
Angel points to the old men in threadbare shit-colored jackets and ties playing guitars at stop lights,
only once in my life did I love anybody
and they run huffing and puffing, their Buskin shoes worn through, their Arrow shirts frayed, their High Life ties stained, to pick up the thankyoumisterlady as they doff their old Tardán borsalinos now devoid of band (in their melted brains the advertising slogan of their youth and of national promise rings out incessantly: From Sonora to Yucatán/ Gentlemen all wear hats by Tardán/ Twenty million Mexicans can’t be wrong: when the entire nation had fewer inhabitants than the capital in 1992: 1932), clean old men spitting on the windshield then cleaning it off with the remnants of towels purchased at the Iron Palace before the lights change. The Mixcoac stones reflect and project what’s left of the daylight. Along Avenida Revolución, a barter economy flourishes: underwear for combs, marjoram for tobacco, brass knuckles for Barbie dolls, condoms with feather crests for pictures of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, two Madonna cassettes for a sack of beans: I worked in an office, I was a student, I was a pharmacist, I imported grain, I was a chorus girl; now all of us are on the Street, check-out clerks in the black market scatter along Altavista toward Insurgentes, in the little plaza in front of the Obregón monument the hoods set up their illegal, swift, the-hand-is-quicker-than-the-eye games, under the walnut shells, in between the curtains of the deeds of the Revolution, in the confusion of pots, papier-mâché Judases, funny money only worth what the market says it’s worth today next to the graffiti smearing the monument of the Hero of Celaya.
LENIN OR LENNON?
The street theater for the city of thirty million people spreads toward San José Insurgentes, flamethrowers, shoeshine boys, lottery vendors, car washers, strolling musicians, beggars, people selling all kinds of things, mix with clowns, dancers, people giving recitals in the eternal night.
“So, what did you assholes expect?”
“Don’t delude yourselves.”
“So, what did you bastards expect?”
“We killed the water.”
“We killed the air.”
“We killed the forests.”
“Die, damned city!”
“Come on and die: fucked-up city, what are you waiting for?”
The people push their way along Taxqueña, yo asshole watch where you walkin’ man / fuckin’ old lady whut you need dat cane fo’? Give it here so ah can play golf wit’ yer doggy’s head / look dis cripple Nureyev’s pushin’ / why you wanna get in front of me, lady, go fuck youself old fart / yo blindman len’ me your glasses chuck dat nonseer in front of dat truck getta moveon fuckers he look like a wad o’phlegm someone done stepped on / a car stops at the intersection of Quevedo and Revolución / got to get movin’ / who’s stoppin’ / dis meat wagon don’t move / a thousand vendors suddenly surround the car it doesn’t move anymore / it’s a whale beached in an asphalt gulf on which descends the interminable banquet of things to buy an asphyxia of secret languages offering useless objects and unserviceable services hyperbolically described:
“Here you are, sir, awzom chewing gum.”
“Yo, I’m the kool kat wit the winning ticket.”
“I swear man, dese cigs is the real thing.”
“Take a look, lady, genuine humongous bras.”
“Check it out, man, look at these galoshes here.”
“Wanna learn to French kiss, got da bes’ book right here, man.”
Angel and Angeles stared at the rows of young people with no future, the long rows of bored people on guard before the nothingness, expecting nothing from the nothingness, Mexico City, decrepit and moribund and the street theater set up on tubs
and broken-down trucks representing everything, reason and unreason:
AFTER THE FIESTA THE SIESTA
Step inside, step inside, just see how the oil prices plummeted
THE OPEC-AND-ONE NIGHTS
Step inside, step inside, see how the border was closed to wetbacks
TALES FROM THE TACO CURTAIN
Right this way to see how Mexicans bred until they exploded demographically
NO SECTS PLEASE WE’RE CATHOLIC
Right here on the big stage, ladies and gentlemen, events in Central America, or how President Trigger Trader made the worst prophecies come true just by saying them out loud
WELCOME TO SAIGONCITO
Ladies and gentlemen, don’t miss these scenes of virile violence in which President Rambold Rager widens the war to include Mexico and Panama
IF I PAY THEM THEY ARE MY FREEDOM FIGHTERS
Step inside, don’t miss the extraordinary comedy about the rise in import duties
IS THAT A GATT YOU’RE CARRYING OR ARE YOU JUST HAPPY TO SEE ME?
Right here on the big stage: in 3-D and Cinerama, back up your optimism with the complete history of our foreign debt, or how we beat out Brazil and Argentina in the race to disaster!