“Take this staircase,” said the crippled guard.
“Thank you.”
My parents started to walk toward the stairs.
“Just a moment,” said the guard.
“Yes?”
“Are you going to go up or down?”
“I don’t know. We’re going to the contest office, and you told us…”
“This is a down staircase.”
“Okay, is the contest office upstairs or downstairs?”
“That depends.”
“Depends? Depends on what?”
“On if you go up by going down or if you go down by going up. There’s a big difference.”
“Where is the contest office?”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“I don’t want to change the subject, what I want is information…”
“Well, why didn’t you say so? The information window is right over there, where that gentleman with the blue visor is standing…”
“Let’s go over this again calmly, sir. You told us that we should take this staircase. Now tell me: should we go up by going up or go down by going down.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“Well?”
“It all depends.”
“On what, now?”
“Well, before you get to the stairs, there’s the door.”
“I can see it. I’m not blind.”
“Well, tell me if you think you’re going to go out the door or enter it.”
“Go out, go out, no question about it: go out.”
“In that case, go down three levels and on the left you’ll find the Columbus Contest office.”
“The Columbus Contest?” suspiciously asked a lady who looked like one of the Bergen-Belsen jail guards in an early-forties Warner Brothers movie: hair pulled back, chignon, pince-nez, shadows under her eyes, lips like Conrad Veidt’s, high collar, scarf, and cameo with the profile of Hermann Goering painted on it, and the Ride of the Valkyries playing insinuatingly on the Muzak:
“Mozart,” said my mother.
“What?” The lady sitting there narrowed her serpent’s eyes as she carved an Iron Cross into the wood with the knife she held in her hand.
“We would like to know where to sign up for the Christopher Columbus Contest set for the twelfth of Oct…”
“You’ve come to the right place.”
“What do you know.” My father sighed, putting on his pince-nez so as not to be a step behind the receptionist.
“Who is going to have the baby?” said the bureaucrat directly.
“I am,” said my mother.
“It will have to be verified.”
“Certainly.”
“Dr. Menges!” barked the lady. “Another one for the Götterdämmerung!”
A man with black-dyed hair, twitching cheeks, and blue, slightly crossed eyes appeared behind a white hospital screen. He himself wore a white gown, black patent-leather shoes, and brick-colored gloves. He smiled.
He asked my mother to come into the space behind the screen (I inside, trembling with fear), my father tried to follow her, but the lady stopped him.
“Spread your legs,” said the doctor.
“Isn’t my verbal statement enough? I had my last period almost two months ago and…”
“Spread your legs!” shouted the doctor.
“Think the rain will let up?” my father asked the lady with the chignon.
“Don’t try making small talk with me,” answered the lady.
“So sorry, but when do you think World War III will break out?”
“Don’t get all gemütlich with me, I’m warning you.”
“Me? I wouldn’t dare. I’d rather listen to you.”
“What do you want to know?”
Suddenly a light went on inside my dad’s head: “What law governs the activities of this office, what is, shall we say, its Kantian categorical imperative?”
The lady in charge answered with great seriousness: “Everyone can do whatever he pleases as long as there is someone to blame.”
Angeles screamed horribly when the doctor brought a white-hot branding iron with a glowing swastika on its tip close to her labia: the entrance, meine Damen und Herren, to Ali Baba’s cave, where the final treasure is ME; my mother gave the doctor a kick in the jaw, and as he fell to the floor he shouted that this baby is not Aryan, this baby should not be allowed to enter the contest, this baby has the blood of slaves, gypsies, Indians, Moors, Jews, Semites, he mights, he did go insane, screaming his head off, and we fled. We ran up the three levels, we saw the guard in his wheelchair, abandoned, unable to move, soaked in his own urine, asking us: “Where are you going, folks? Stop! First ask me! You can’t go that way! That window is not for looking out but for looking in!”
My parents and I (more upset than ever, more even than when I was visited by the proletarian, carnal cylinders in the Guerrero mountains, I horrified by what I saw, oh my, oh innocent, impure me, in the lightning flash of the instant in which my mother spread her legs and the doctor’s beswastikaed branding iron approached my exit—would that aperture be useful only as an entrance and not as an exit?) ran toward a fountain of light, and I, only I, saw in the burning swastika a pair of hypnotic blue eyes, a pair of eyes that was also a sea of eyes, wave after wave with the same eyes, as if the air, the ocean, and the land were made of blue, hypnotic, cruel eyes: my father in his haste collided with a man, and my out-of-breath mother fell into his arms in the grand marble corridor of the Palace of the Citizenry. The man blushed, held her so she wouldn’t fall, but actually offered her to my father with a strange sweetness that said, I don’t want her, she isn’t mine; is she yours?
The tall, thin man with huge black eyes, bushy eyebrows, a full, thick, black head of hair and the long, wolfish ears of a Transylvanian vampire, Nosferatu from the silents, begged her pardon for his clumsiness. He was looking for the exit.
“I’m looking for the exit.”
“I think it’s over there,” pointed my father.
“I’ve been looking for it for years,” added the man, wearing a celluloid collar and a black suit, vest, and thick gray tie, without listening to us.
He went on to say, with just a faint gasp of hope, that he never expected to find it, but that he would never give up trying.
My parents passed in front of the window where the employee with the blue visor was standing. He was saying to a fat, dumpy little fellow of indeterminate age: “I’ve already told him that you can’t go because you’re drunk, but what does it matter to you if you go tomorrow?”
He raised his eyes and caught sight of my parents. “You again? Now what do you want?” he shouted. “Do you want to know everything? Everything? Everything?”
11. I’ll Believe in You as Long as a Mexican Girl
The twenty-odd days they’d spent in Mexico City had transformed my parents. My genetives tell me that when we live with someone we don’t notice the passing of time, until one day we exclaim, just look at the old geezer! when did your clock strike midnight, man? but the guy was only a kid just the other day! and then we catch sight of ourselves in a smoky mirror and we realize that we, too, have not managed to save ourselves from the ravages of … Well, all I know is that my mom, as soon as she got to Mexico Circus, began to cough, her nose began to run, she started blowing her nose all day, she sneezed, things I sense and convulsively resent, you tell me, dear Readers, if I’m not right, there’s no one closer to her secretions than I am and I say this eternal postnasal drip is polluting my swimming pool. She coughs and the Richter Scale in here hits 7.
I’m inside her and that’s how I know what no one else knows: my mother Angeles may occasionally seem passive, but inside she’s extremely active, who’s going to know better than your humble servant, when the coconut inside her spins at about a thousand m.p.h. and the best proof is all of what I’ve been saying, because if she weren’t my intermediary, I’d be quieter than the Congress during Gustavo Díaz
Ordaz’s administration. All I want to say on this occasion is that thanks to her I know that she sees my father Angel, twenty-two years of age, when they all return to Mexico, D. F., and says: “He’s young. But he looks tired. He’s going to inspire too much compassion. No chick will be able to resist him.”
There was solid evidence that something was happening. Because there were certain interesting earnings to be had in foreign exchange. Because of this proverb translation business, my parents had the pleasure of making incursions into the gigantic Tex-Coco-Mex-Mall, which was divided into the four arms of an enormous cross, Mall-efic, Mall-feasance, Mall-function, Mall-formed, where, on the bed of what in ancient times was Lake Texcoco, all the luxury, the elegant consumer goods, the chance to go shopping without getting on lines, abundance: my father says it’s something like the foreign-currency stores in Communist countries—if you don’t have dollars, don’t bother coming in.
Angel goes up the escalator in the Nuevo Liver Puddle, which happens to be going down: he has his hand resting on the rubber handrail. He doesn’t lift it, not even when (much less then) he sees a woman’s hand, which is coming down. He touches it. Sometimes the feminine hand pulls back. Sometimes it doesn’t. Other times it squeezes. Others it touches lightly. Others it caresses. And other women, no sooner do my mommy and I look the other way, return to the scene of the crime and leave tiny pieces of paper in my father’s predisposed hand. My father once again applies the eternal motto of the eternal Don Juan (which he is): Let’s see if it’s chewing gum and if it sticks!
Which doesn’t mean that amid this florid May, as my mom’s tummy grows (and I, too, inside her), my father was not assailed by the anguished desire to know if he was getting old without having experienced sexual plenitude, if he’d let opportunities slip away, even if the sense of the contradiction between his ideas and his practices held him back. His renascent sexuality, was it progressive or reactionary? Should his political activity lead him to monogamy or to the harem?
Ultimately he concluded that a good screw explodes all ideologies.
She forgives him everything, the jerk (I say), because, says the egghead, jealousy is an exercise based on nothingness: the other is not there, she refuses to see it (her): the other woman. What is there, finally, is jealousy and its object: which is invisible. What matters to her is that he comes to her at night and says forgive me, I’m not perfect, I want to be something else, and I still haven’t reached it, help me, Angeles, and she, the dumbbell, really loves him, since she sees in him everything that is opposite to what she is, everything, therefore, that completes her. But, for all that, she does not give up the hope that after a time they will be equals.
“Give me things to think about at night,” she said to him one day, and now she can’t complain. He’s giving them to her, by the ton. She does not know if little by little, instead of being fascinating, she is becoming fascinated by Angel and my father’s problem of creating a program of rebellion and personal creation and not being able to purge out the temptations that deny and smash that program. This fascinates Angeles, but Angeles ceases to be fascinating for him and she does not realize it and I don’t know how to communicate it to her. She doesn’t know how to say anything other than this hint of a reproach:
“I hope you’re not going to say someday that you wished you were like everyone else.”
Angeles, my mother, knows how to radiate an admirable confidence. People say that she and my father met when they were very young and incomplete. She thinks the two of them can shape each other, share their formation, and get to know each other. She’s an optimist. That’s why she admits that sometimes one wins and sometimes the other. It’s a game they have both accepted ever since the two of them were raped at the same time by Matamoros and his cohorts in Malinaltzin: there they both lost, but they both won the ability to accept what happened one afternoon in the month of March without blaming each other. Only in May did they begin to compensate for that sublime nobility and to make barbed little comments that meant, this time I win, this time you lose, since even Angeles’s intrinsic nobility, when it notes Angel’s peccadillos, becomes a figure of speech: this time I win because I’m noble and understanding. Then he lets her know that he will not feel blameworthy unless she shows a little outrage. What sickens him is precisely all this nobility of soul: my mom as Gerald Ford—let’s pardon everyone in sight so we can be home in time for cocktails. But if my mom shows the slightest disgust, then my father starts talking again about women as the creatures who created guilt. Then she gets indignant and says to him:
“Draw me a picture of them.”
“I’m better at telling,” says Angel and he puts out the light, and I’m left disconcerted. But, after a while, one or the other (and this is where they really take turns, punctually, mathematically) brings his or her cheek close to the ear of the other, one looks for the other’s little foot (like a hamster), one (him) slips his fingers into her luxurious mink triangle, one (she) has already taken the measure of the bag where the golden nuggets are stored, and we’re off and running: the sheets get hot, the pillows are fluffed up, and my old friend the guy with no ears is already inside his home and I happily greet him: Ahoy there! Animus intelligence!
How much time will pass before each one refuses to see him- or herself in the mirror of the other, before each one refuses to know through the other if he or she is getting older, if he or she still makes love well, if he or she should go on a diet, if he or she is taken seriously, if they really do share memories? Who knows, Reader! Better turn the page on this chapter.
7
Accidents of the Tribe
… the city is an accidental tribe …
Dostoevsky
The Diary of a Writer
1
Médoc d’Aubuisson, the López family’s cook, was the only survivor of the final explosion, attributed to the Princes of Turenne and the Abbesses of Tooloose (POTATOS), the legitimist terrorist organization that blew up the ancient Le Grand Vefour restaurant, which had occupied a beautiful corner of the Palais Royal in Paris since the times of the Duc de Choiseul.
The reason the POTATOS gave for their attack was that Le Grand Vefour was serving meals to functionaries from the neighboring Ministry of Culture on the rue de Valois and the ministry was the brain behind red, antimonarchist propaganda in France. Farewell Vefour, welcome Médoc: the survivor’s celebrity caused Doña Lucha Plancarte de López, wife of the ex-Superminister Ulises López, to demand the services of the chef de cuisine: how the girls would howl when they found out!
Fought over by the bourgeoisies of Peru, the Ivory Coast, and the Seychelles, the emir of Abu Dhabi, and, last but not least, the Republic of Mexico, Médoc accepted the last offer because of one special circumstance: his great-great-grandfather had been cook for Princess Salm-Salm, Maximilian’s lover in Cuemavaca during the ephemeral Mexican Empire. Besides, one of Médoc’s uncles, a hit man from Marseilles, emigrated to El Salvador and founded the death squads there. Médoc wanted at least to be near his American past, but he accepted only after making outrageous demands: these meteques from Las Lomas del Sol would not only pay him in dollars and in New York (twenty thousand per month) but would also unquestioningly accept his menus and would purchase the raw materials he required from wherever they were to be found—be it Roman truffles in season or Chinese ants from the tombs of Qin Shi Huang—at whatever the price; once a week the lady of the house (Doña Lucha herself) would prepare and serve him his meals, only so that insidious comparisons be established, and although Médoc had the right of veto with regard to the persons the Lópezes might invite to eat his delights, he absolutely ruled out dinners for more than eight people.
This last stipulation frenetically frustrated Doña Lucha’s ambitions; after all, if the lady wanted to have the best chef in Mexico (excuse me: the world), she also wanted to offer the most lavish and well-attended parties.
“Order sandwiches from a hotel,” Médoc told her when Doña Lucha
weepingly explained that the imminent celebration of her daughter’s Sweet-Sixteen Party—her daughter Penelope López, the celebrated Epic Princess of Mexico-in-Crisis, the Debutante of Fashion in a Society with Nothing to Debut and Fashion Like No Other in the World—would require at least five hundred guests, well chosen to be sure, but five hundred nonetheless.
Having pronounced the statement recorded above, Médoc went on vacation in the Club Med’s Cancún barony, abandoning the López family to its own devices not only as to the creation of a suitable menu but also as to the composition of a guest list of five hundred young boys and girls who would celebrate Penny’s birthday with her. Yet another problem: the political plague that surrounded Minister López after the meteoric rise of Federico Robles Chacón and his creature, Mamadoc, made it improbable that what was left of the jeunesse dorée of 1992 would attend a celebration in the ghetto (also golden) of Las Lomas del Sol. The result would be a serious loss of prestige for both mother and daughter.
Enter Ms. Ponderosa, dried-out and galvanic, the purest Castilian stock, skinny as a rail but with the thickest of ankles, a Portuguese mustache to complete her Iberian physiognomy, and a whiff of garlic to give the lie to her appearance of implacable, Inquisitorial, Counter-Reformation austerity. Ms. Ponderosa pointed out, first, that for a real Castilian any goat will do for roasting and, second, that both the twelve-thousand-odd newspapers and the innumerable television stations in the city were constantly announcing a new public service called TUGUEDER, whose spokesperson, a charming boy with an egg-shaped head, was offering to those who desired to leave the labyrinth of solitude a matchmaking service (Ms. Ponderosa blushed), and that, third, his service would eliminate the possibility of party failure during the current crisis by guaranteeing that the number of guests required by the hosts would be there.