“It’s made of shit! This cake is make of shit!”
And the girl with sharpened teeth and transparent clothes shouted—in English: “I’m a lollipop!” Then she fainted.
* * *
Don Ulises offered my father Angel a brandy snifter of Ixtabentún-on-the-rocks while my elegant pater, the shit having been kicked out of him by the López family thugs, was drying the blood on his forehead with pink Kleenex. López confessed that the color scheme of the salon had been chosen by his wife, Doña Lucha, to replicate certain of their common associations from the time they were courting and would go to the movies together—you know, with little sisters, popcorn, and everything.
“Ha,” laughed the illustrious politician and financier, currently in the Republic’s reserve forces. “She calls those chairs Blue Angel Marlene, the upholstery is Rhonda Red, and carpeting is Garbo Beige. Isn’t she sweet? Isn’t she incomprehensible?”
Angel accepted the drink: he needed it after the beating he took (“So you run the TUGUEDER service? you muddahfuckah! yer gonna need that shiteatin’ grin!”), and when Angel touched Ulises’s hand he compared it with Inclán’s: What? Had everyone with power in Mexico stopped sweating? Did they ever go to the bathroom? How could they spend nine consecutive hours going from place to place, giving speeches, and constantly attending meetings of the PRI without having to pee or sweating? He looked at his host’s amiably cold eyes and filtered them through the edge of the glass so Ulises’s features would melt in the sickly-sweet tide of the liquor; it didn’t work; Ulises emerged the winner.
“But I love her deeply, young man. Do you understand me? I’m being honest with you because even though you offended me seriously I admire your nerve and your initiative, even if it all goes into dirty tricks. But, going back to Lucha: as long as I’m with her I can be generous, even magnanimous. Want to know something? Every day, in the penthouse above my offices on River Nylon Street, there’s a banquet all prepared for a hundred people, with galantines of turkey, pâté de foie gras, Gulf shrimp, carré d’agneau, cakes (real ones, ha ha ha, what a card you are!), whatever you could want, ready for a hundred people, whether anyone comes or not, and at five o’clock in the afternoon, whatever is left over is distributed to the neighborhood beggars. You see, when I’m with her I can be generous…” repeated Don Ulises, dreamily. “I’m afraid that without her I’ll get stingy and that’s why I love her, keep her, and worry about her dying.”
Ulises made a peculiar face—coyness, modesty, or some combination thereof.
“For me, my wife is still the girl I tried to seduce with flowers and chocolates when I got to Chilpancingo from the coast.”
He affectionately patted Angel Palomar’s knee with his open hand, and said that my father in all likelihood knew lots about him; most of what he knew was true, and he would admit it proudly. What in fact did people say about him? The worst things! requested Ulises. And Angel told him: “That you are an out-and-out thief.” Ulises López said with equanimity that he would prefer a great statesman who was a thief but who would make Mexico into a great nation to an honest statesman who would lead it to ruin: unfortunately, what we’ve gotten over the past few years have been thieves who ruin us as much or more than the honest ones, but I’m not talking about trying to balance the honest ones off against the thieves or throwing out the baby with the bathwater, Ulises went on, and that’s why mediocrity, envy, and resentment had conspired to freeze him out. But he was biding his time; a great politician, he said that night to Angel, has to be an abstract, immoral con man who manipulates the passions of others while he puts his own on ice.
“I like your initiative,” he repeated, concentrating his tiny, mandarin eyes on Angel. “Too bad you don’t know how to focus it. Take a lesson from me tonight, kid. Listen to my rules for getting to the top in Mexico. First: remember that your ruling passion has to be money. The others are private passions and whatever you do in private is your own business. Make use of the best and the brightest. But never tell them what use you’re making of them. Don’t talk much. Think a great deal. Remember that he who has power is great only when he wants power. But if that interferes with the possibility of being rich, it’s better to be rich than to be great. The problem is to have both dough and power, although it’s always better to have money without power than power without money because money is power: you don’t really need more. Understand, then, that it’s not a bad thing in Mexico to be a crook: what’s bad is not being a big enough crook. Always keep that in the back of your mind as you’re stating for the record that immorality in the management of public funds will in no way be tolerated any longer and then toss a couple of jerks from the previous administration into jail. Remember that in this country you can make hay for half your time in office on the sins of your predecessors. During the other half, make sure you get ready to be accused, asshole. Ha, ha!”
Don Ulises guffawed over his own witticism, and once again patting Angel’s knee, he concluded: “See, kid? I put all my cards on the table. Now it’s your turn. I noticed you like my little Penny.”
“I go where my peenie takes me,” said my father cynically. “If you really want me to be frank with you…”
“I’ll tell you again: I like the fact that you’re a wise guy, but you’ve got to focus your energy. Just imagine if you were my son-in-law…”
Angel’s eyes clouded over with emotion, not because of Ulises but because of Penny.
“See what I mean? I’m putting all my cards on the table.”
My father understood perfectly. This was a second invitation for him to come across with something, but he refused to give in to the temptation to fall into Don Ulises’s most obvious trap. The old master still had a couple of cards up his sleeve. He repeated that he was sincere but he could be cold and calculating. He had just repeated that his maxim in terms of political action was “Don’t talk about anything, but think things over again and again.” His conversational style was a chess game in which Ulises, in all sincerity, could always say afterwards: “I knew it all along. You can’t surprise me.”
Even so, Angel sighed as he looked at this Machiavellian figure. I’m me, my young friend, in Ulises López there exists a sentimental, generous man, a man in love. He pushed a button and one wall took on a glassy opacity.
“How could I not be in love with my wife?” Ulises asked uselessly. “She’s much better-looking than my daughter. Just look at her.”
He pushed several buttons and the lights went down in the salon, but those near the screen (or was it a whorehouse mirror so he could look in from this side without being seen from the other?) brightened. On the other side appeared Lucha Plancarte de López yawning. She was wearing a pink silk robe with white feathers fluttering at her cuffs and collar. She brushed her teeth. Then she took off her robe and stood there in a scarlet lace monokini, her big bouncy breasts decorated with enormous black nipples that looked like black plums. Doña Lucha rinsed off a tiny razor and began very carefully to shave her right armpit, which was covered by a black stubble. She did the same with her left armpit, but this time she cut herself. She winced and then used spit to close the cut. Angel was fascinated by the trickle of blood that ran out of the decidedly gray underarm. Then Lucha studied her extensive bush, which rose in baroque curls almost to her navel and spread out on both sides like a golf course, as Don Fernando Benítez would have said. Doña Lucha swiftly soaped up the perimeter of her pubic lawn: with one hand she shaved herself, while with the other she gently caressed her labia. Her husband said to my father, “She isn’t alone, ha ha, look,” as she stuck her finger into a jar of (wine-flavored) Celaya jelly and then spread it over her clitoris, “she isn’t alone”: a Siamese cat impatiently watched the lady’s every movement and in a flash, as if trained to do so, jumped into its mistress’s lap and began to lick her recently shaved skin, cleaning it of any traces of leftover hair.
Suddenly, Doña Lucha stopped touching herself, stood stock-still, and stared at t
hem, stared at my father (at least that’s what he thought), stared at them through the mirror with all the emotions in the world crossing her face, rage at being discovered in an intimate situation, surprise that her husband was accompanied by that young man, desire for that young man, envy for anyone in the world who was not alone, jealousy toward herself, and the solitude of her own lasciviousness, invitation (But for whom? Ulises? Angel? Was she looking at both of them? Was she looking only at Ulises because she was used to putting on this little pantomime for him and found him standing there with a strange man next to him? Was she looking at Angel, expecting to find him alone as she had promised Ulises and instead finding the two of them there united against her? Or were the two of them—she smiled for an instant—desiring her? Or were they laughing at her, and she tossed the ill-favored cat off her lap). Perhaps she wasn’t looking at anything, didn’t know anything, and her stares were only a solitary, ruinous deception? Every passion in the world had flitted across Doña Lucha’s face except one: shame. She raised a finger dripping clit jam to her lips as she looked at them. Ulises turned off the screen. The reader is free to choose.
Someone knocked at the door of the Dietrich-Garbo-Fleming salon.
“Come in, Penny,” said her father.
The girl walked in without looking at Angel.
“Show this young man to the Gloria Grahame bedroom,” said Don Ulises, without giving Penny, who wanted to interrupt to say, “But Mommy sleeps next door,” or Angel, who perhaps might have wanted to say, “But I have a pregnant wife at home waiting up for me,” any opportunity to protest.
Ulises’s eyes said: “I already knew it. I guessed it. You don’t surprise me. But obey me.”
4
Emotion clouded my father’s eyes, his reflexes, his very equilibrium as he walked ahead of Penny López down the spiral staircase in the Guggenheimic house in Las Lomas del Sol. He never turned his back on her, turning it instead toward the steep staircase that led to the bedrooms. She never looked at him, disdainful to the end, the bitch, he walking bowlegged, backward so he wouldn’t lose sight of her for an instant, so he could explain to her, tell her what he’d been thinking since New Year’s Eve in Aca, now that her sweet-sixteenish presence was within range, touchable, perfumed, so near and yet so far. She stared past him, and when he stopped right in front of her to force her to see him, she said something he took, to soften the blow, to be what Penny must have said to every man in her life, to him too, okay, but not only to him:
“You can look, but you can’t touch. You’re poor, ugly, and a boor. You’re not for me.”
She went on ahead, but he thought that if he didn’t do something right at that moment, he might never see her again, he might never be able to tell her what he was bearing inside, never mind that she wouldn’t understand a word. Angeles, my mother, now she would certainly understand, and I inside her, but of course! And if I know all this, Reader, it’s because the same thing my father Angel hastily told Penny López that night when the Valley (Anáhuac) Princess led him to her guest bedroom, he repeated on his knees and quite slowly to my mother some days later, when Angeles and I within her went to live in the house of Dad’s grandparents Rigoberto and Susana, leaving my father to his freedom, and he didn’t even have that because Uncle Homero, once again in favor with the Powers That Be (when he discovered that he’d never been hated by them and that they’d been anxiously searching for him everywhere, oh where oh where has our little Homero gone? which is what the PRI delegate asked who met him at the door of his house when the quondam candidate for Senator appeared and threw a tantrum when he realized they always waited for him there and that he’d spent all that lost time with his insane and unappreciative niece and nephew), returned with a squad of blue-uniformed thugs, agents of the district attorney’s office, and a team of lawyers to sue for the return of the house of bright colors in Tlalpan. But before that there occurred the following, which I faithfully reproduce for your lordships, more precisely, look at the dangers a fetus runs when everyone forgets he exists and, if they do remember, merely add it to a list of errors. So I exist and I exist as an error! A gigantic error, gigantic luck, an ephemeral and fleeting apparition in the infinity of a bubble—I—who managed to squeeze his drop of liquid out of creation at the exact moment that it coincided with the strange, improbable temperature of some moist drops in the improbable warmth of love, and what the fuck do all these accidents matter to the great prestellar cloud that is immutable, eternal, infinite, and I tell you parents of mine and universe what I, hidden here, know all on my own:
ONLY ERRORS MAKE MIRACLES POSSIBLE
I am already another, Christopher or Christine, it doesn’t matter, I am as different as if I had been created a dolphin or an armadillo, I am already different and already unique and even if I come from you I am no longer you, I am myself and I am different and I am everyone. You forgot that, right? I am another, I am everyone, my poor little life pierced with pins is the triumph of life, as triumphant in my own environment as stone mountains, obstinate cacti, or the coyotes that came down to eat gringos and literary critics. I am Myself. I rest, breathe, sigh. And you? Go right on fighting:
* * *
“Penny López,” my mom repeated that night, quickly adding with anger and sadness: “Why do your eyes shine like that when I mention her name?”
“What? Oh, I thought she was dead—so did you. That’s all.”
“Listen to me and stop reading that newspaper.”
“It’s not a newspaper. It’s The New York Review of Books. I get it sent by contraband from Sandy Ego. What do you think of that?”
“Cut it out. Don’t change the subject on me. Remember: we went to Aca to finish off people like her.”
“Her? Who do you mean?”
“Penny! People like her! Symbols, man! But what are you so interested in…?”
“I’m reading an article by Philip Roth, that’s all. Writers of Newark, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your baseball gloves…!”
“Bull. Listen to me now: why are you getting so nervous?”
“It’s what I was saying: what women love to do is make men feel guilty. It’s your mission in life.”
“The mission of all women?”
“Right.”
“But not of all men?”
“No. Not us. Men are loyal and sincere with each other. We never say bad things about our friends.”
“Know something? I wish I had a notebook to write down all these things we say to each other, but only if it could be in ancient Chichimeca. What bull!”
“Not at all. What you want is for people to know what you accuse us of. Don’t kid yourself.”
“And what would you accuse me of?”
“Me? Nothing. I’m merely alienated by the means of reproduction.”
“Is that a fact? Well, just think about this baby that seems to be weighing so heavily on your mind…”
“I never said anything like that!”
“You did!” she shouted, pulling out her rollers, sitting there against the headboard while Einstein sadly stared from the wall, sticking his tongue out at her.
She throws the rollers at my father, and they go crack, crack, crack against the open pages of The New York Review of Books and drop down onto my father’s lap, piling up on the fly of his pajamas.
“Just think that I could have had this baby by myself, that I could have gone to a sperm bank for famous people and had my baby without your famous contest!”
“The contest!” my highly distracted father suddenly remembered. All he’d been thinking about was conquering Penny López during my mother’s pregnancy.
“That’s right, I could have gotten sperm from Don Ulises López, your little Penny’s daddy, or Minister Robles Chacón, or Julio Iglesias, or Duran Duran, or from Pope John Paul himself, or maybe even from Einstein, sticking his tongue out at me there on the wall. He must have left a little come behind in the refrigerator! Ozom!”
“You would
n’t win the contest, big mouth, because the rules say the baby has to be the child of the parents that enter…”
“The mother always knows the child is hers, the father never knows: voilà!”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I’m not trying to say anything: I’m saying and I repeat and I reiterate and I proclaim: I had the child without you. I don’t need you for anything, and besides, the child belongs only to me, no one can prove that it isn’t mine, but no one can prove who the father is, and it isn’t you, bastard, it isn’t you,” said my mother, kneeling on the bed and beginning to throw whatever came to hand at my father’s bobbing head, the six volumes of The Indians of Mexico by Fernando Benítez, Luis Echeverría’s Charter of the Rights and Obligations of States, a souvenir ashtray from Tlaquepaque, Fernando del Paso’s Palinurus of Mexico, and Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra, finally revealing the color photo of Penny from Novedades glued to the page of the New York Review article by Philip Roth = jealousy finally made visible, jealousy focused on the palpable object of desire, the blind stare of hatred, all her tenderness and understanding now forgotten, the chalk scattered all over this house filled with blackboards, the photo of Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue, the chamber pot with flowers painted on it left behind by Uncle Homero, my mother shouting I could have had it alone! only the mother knows that the baby is hers! consummating the break with my father that perhaps he wants even more than she, showing to me at this early stage of life how delicate dreams are and how easily images are destroyed: leaving me unsheltered, an orphan of the storm, just when I need them most because, as I listen to them, I realize that the world is always an act with two performers, equally determined by the one who moves and speaks and the one who hears and receives: my body.