“Hello.”
“What you did so well with my wife, I want you to do with my rivals.”
“Happy to meet you.”
“My business rivals. My rivals in the government. I want you to take advantage of your good looks, your social connections, your aristocratic pedigree, all of that, to open doors that will not open for me or my family, I want you to seduce wives and daughters, discover secrets, communicate them to me, and when necessary, to humiliate all these people and lead them to bankruptcy, and—why not?—get rid of them if necessary.”
Don Ulises jumped up, almost did a flip, clicked his heels noisily in the air, and landed on his feet, while Angel said, as if talking in his sleep:
“No, I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”
“See, Angelito, I’ve always had something that someone else has needed, and today that someone is you.”
“Would you mind passing the salt?”
“Depending on how well you perform for me, little by little I’ll get you into my saintly daughter’s good graces. What do you say?”
“How nice! It’s been such a long time. Really, it’s been ages!” exclaimed my stunned father as he withdrew from the presence of Don Ulises and instinctively stepped into the garden for a breath of air. In the distance he spied something shining in the darkness. He allowed himself to be led to that light. It emanated from the Bloomingdale’s replica. He approached the revolving doors, pushed them, then mounted the half-flight escalator. As he regained his composure, he thought nostalgically about the days when he felt free to intertwine his fingers with a woman’s forbidden hand going up or down an escalator. He loved women he didn’t know, longed for those he hadn’t yet discovered, wondered if he’d used up my mother, if he knew her completely by now, if she thought he was an imbecile, wondered if he’d perhaps worn out Doña Lucha as well, although he was sure she’d worn him out, but that he still had to know if Penny could be worn out or could wear him out and why not ask her directly since there she was, in the facsimile of this Cathedral of López Delights, the first floor of Bloomingdale’s. Penny was seated at Bloomie’s perfume-and-makeup counter, her back to him, hiding that brilliant face illuminated by two butterflies on her eyes, gold dust on her eyelids, strawberry hearts on her lips, her nostrils fluttering, her little ears perfumed by Miss Dior, her insinuatingly cleft chin, that slightly sluttish beauty he had admired, desired, been obsessed by ever since New Year’s at the Aca disco. Now she was sitting there, presenting him with her bare shoulders, wearing a striped T-shirt, her waist and ass covered by a tweed miniskirt, a whore, yes indeed, that’s how he wanted her, a little half-breed from the Guerrero coast, fed for generations on rice and beans and fried plantains, squid in its ink, and Larín chocolates. Everything her mother had revealed, the farthest thing from Palomar y Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca and the best Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Puebla families: Penny López with her back to him, a pencil in one hand and a tissue in the other, and he, gawking at her, awkwardly crashes into the Estée Lauder counter, knocking down a row of bottles, and she, surprised, drops the pencil and raises the tissue to her mouth as she spins on her seat and allows herself to be seen without makeup, clean-faced, devoid of her tropical bordello glitter: Penelope López Plancarte without makeup, her face washed clean, was (my father almost fainted) the very image of a nice little prim-and-proper Mexican girl, with centuries of Creoles behind her, early Masses, and lonely nights, late suppers of eggs and beans and vermicelli soup, corn-flour porridge for breakfast, centuries of church candles strained through her blood, and he knew how to tell all of them apart genetically: Penny López without gold dust and butterflies on her eyes was a pale, clean-faced nun, barely distinguishable from the nuns that the high-bourgeois girls of Mexico imitate so they won’t look like the whores who are the other alternative in their reality: Penny López was one of them, like them, barely inclined to erase her resemblance to them. She, too, derives from the legion of ghosts with bloodless lips and suspicious eyes, rice-powder skin, holy-water-rinsed hands, rosaried fingers, scapulary breasts: devout bourgeois flesh hidden for five centuries of colonialism in convents, far from the sun, in somber houses with humid patios and masturbatory bedrooms: women with dead cells and the scar of a hair shirt on every freckle: he saw her like that, bloodless, pale, traditional, and in a dark flash he saw Agueda in the Oaxaca church, the mad Agueda’s dried-up or dead friends in the Oaxaca plaza, saw my mother Angeles materialized among the balloons and trees in the Alameda, the woman he desired or deserved or fatally loved in a kind of desperate lottery in which his real wife, the one he should have loved madly, had still not been born or had died four centuries earlier, in a bordello in Seville or a convent in Quito: what would he say to an ideal woman that wouldn’t be this absurd phrase that he repeated to the terrified Penny, poor little Penny surprised in flagrante in her monastic, colonial, genetic nakedness:
“I dreamed about words,” my father said to her.
She covered her face with the tissue, like a Veronica, and told him through the paper: “My daddy gave me uh like permission for you to uh kiss my ass. But nothing else, right? Careful, prole, just the cheeks, okay?”
She stood there saying over and over “Just the cheeks, okay?” while my father slowly exited the brilliant sphere of Bloomingdale’s and walked into the cold night of the high-altitude tropics, toward the gate to Don Ulises López’s mansion, toward the chilled and hunched-over figure waiting for him there, on the other side, always in the street, always patient, protecting herself from the acid drizzle with her tiny clear-plastic parasol, her boots, her gloves, her see-through raincoat. Colasa Sánchez shook hands with my father through the gargoyled gate, and she told him I’ve been waiting for you, I knew that someday you’d come out, I waited and I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.
Ulises and Lucha felt something the night Angel my father abandoned the house in Las Lomas del Sol in the company of Colasa Sánchez; they felt something when they heard Penny sobbing in her bedroom, something they hadn’t felt, neither together nor separately, for a long time, something that led them like sleepwalkers out of their respective rooms and up the serpentine staircase into each other’s arms, to an embrace they hadn’t shared in years, since …
“Chilpancingo,” said Don Ulises with his Lucha in his arms.
“What are you thinking about?” she whispered, trembling, in his ear.
“I don’t know. Unimportant things. It wasn’t an ugly town. On the contrary. It was a pretty town, with pine trees along the streets and pure mountain air.”
“Are you thinking that we could have been happy if we had stayed there?”
Ulises nodded his shiny head. “I always liked picking you up at your house. You lived, let’s see now, on…?”
“The street was called Heroínas del Sur. That’s what put the idea in your head to start producing drugs in Chilpancingo … The name of my street! The street your pure little girlfriend lived on, Ulises!”
“We’d walk along Avenida Juan Alvarez, under the pines, to the movie, holding hands. I’d bring you flowers.”
“It was in the national parks that you began to plant poppies, Ulises, remember?”
“You were so pretty, Lucha. All the boys were after you.”
“And now they all get me.”
“I took you out of Chilpancingo, I made you into a queen, I gave you a castle, all so no one would take you away from me. Just look. All the money in the world hasn’t kept me from having to share you with other men.”
“And I thank you for the favor, shorty. I really mean it. You don’t hear me complaining.”
“Lucha, wouldn’t we have been happier if we’d stayed in Chilpancingo all our lives?”
“You’ve wondered about that too, Uli?”
“Yes.”
“Well, keep thinking about it: your whole life in one of those flea-bitten towns. Your whole life. All of it. No change. Always the same, always the same. Always the same
thing, what you call monotony, Ulises! I just don’t see you there. Can you see me there?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not the girl I used to be. And you’re not the same either.”
“Let me love you tonight.”
“Thanks, shorty. I feel real lonely tonight, I really mean it.”
Penny listened to them, poking her head through the half-open door of her bedroom, upset, doubtful, just as she was when they traveled and she never knew where they were, if it’s Monday it must be Andorra and if it’s Tuesday it must be Orchids, listening to them talk in voices that were not those she knew; now they were strange, melancholy voices, or could that be tenderness, or whatever you call it? Talking about pine trees and parks and secluded plazas and a church that was so white it blinded you just to look at it, that invited you in to relax in its shade: Mom and Dad holding hands. Penny almost began to cry, and wondered if a little white house surrounded by pines on Heroínas del Sur Street in Chilpancingo was worth more than this monstrosity, with its replica of Bloomingdale’s, its dog-racing track, and its pool in the shape of the U.S.A. Poor Penny; she let her head fall and felt affronted by something that had nothing to do with these places or with her. The way in which that boy saw her when he finally saw her as she was. No one had ever looked at her like that—not with desire, but with shock and disgust, with revulsion. She could really go for a boy like that. She could not say to him, “I’m not for you.” She heard her parents making love and realized that the boy was no longer there and that she could not imitate Lucha and Ulises.
9
As soon as they found out that Angel had abandoned Angeles, the Four Fuckups returned, one by one, like birds to the nest to be near her in the Tlalpan house: when the Orphan Huerta and Hipi Toltec, Egg, and the invisible Baby Ba got there, they found the door sealed by the district attorney’s office; there were no windows, but through the wrought-iron grating the friends could clearly see that no one was there.
Feeling abandoned themselves, they stood there in the middle of the street, the very image of bewilderment. Then Egg, who was a man (to his misfortune, he would say to himself) with a memory, put two and two together and told the others that when Angel had run away from the Fagoagas he had found sanctuary with his grandparents, Rigo and Susy. Angeles had no doubt done the same thing.
“Come along now, girl, don’t lag behind, honey, we’re going to look for our pal Angeles,” said our buddy Egg, and perhaps it’s time that I reappear after such a prolonged absence and take this opportunity to tell your lardships that in this my sixth month of gestation there begin to mount up pros and contras with regard to my making my sudden but expected appearance next October, adding my existence to the thirty million citizens (or the dirty million prolecats in the powwow, as the Orphan would say in his slang), and from now on I shall try to note down in two columns, like a bookkeeper—Debit and Credit—the reasons why I should be born and the reasons that discourage me right off the bat from doing so. Okay, Egg’s reference to Baby Ba is perhaps, I will admit this, the most powerful reason I’ve come across yet for someday appearing.
I have the feeling that she’s waiting for me, that she’ll look at me when I’m born and fall in love with me, and that I will be the only person able to see her, even if I can’t talk to her, not in the way the aforementioned Egg now feels able to declare to my mother: “At last I can say it, Angeles. I love you very much. Before I couldn’t, as you know, because Angel was my best friend. But I’ve loved you ever since I met you. I looked at you while I played the piano in the boîte in Acapulco, and you looked at your husband, and your husband looked at Penny López: I, your friend Egg, have loved you from that moment!”
Our buddy Egg’s soul is tormented (mildly) by love and by the fact that he doesn’t want to create any class differences between himself and the Orphan and Hipi, who have never been in the house of the Palomar grandparents and who don’t have the same sort of background as my father and his friend.
But when they finally reach the house on Calle Génova and are let in, they find Angeles and your Humble Cervix (invisible still) in the coach house, where my father grew up surrounded by useless mementos. What joy, what a quantity of hugs, how many tears, unusual in my mom, how many hand squeezes and kisses on the cheeks, what a lot of running around by Grandfather Rigoberto greeting everyone and what a lot of bustling around in the kitchen by Grandmother Susy, who promises to bring glasses of eggnog and quesadillas with sauce, and sopes in green sauce, and salted guazontles, Aztec ants dipped in egg like freshwater pearls, and maguey worms fried and crunchy wrapped in warm tortillas with guacamole, what a party, how happy everyone is, the best I’ve ever had, the hottest, the most loving, the most fraternal, after all that horrifying “fun” in Aca and Igualistlahuaca, and the streets of Mexico Shitty: Grandfather and Grandmother sing a few corridos, Hipi dances a dance dredged up from the beginning of time, as monotonous as the night or the rain, and the Orphan, forgetful as usual, has to invent a tune and hope the others join in, as in fact they do, Hipi and Egg (and Ba, invited by Egg to take part while I dream about her) make up lyrics for the Orphan Huerta’s song:
Old at twenty, no good, no plenty
Half are under ten
At thirty, one foot in the grave
Twenty years of age!
“Búfala!” says Hipi Toltec.
“What a fresh set!” comments Egg, worn out.
“Cool, coolísimo,” exults the Orphan Huerta.
“Animus!” says Angeles.
Then they all tell my mother she can count on them, that they are her buddies; no one mentions Angel or reproaches him for anything, what the hell, you know how complicated life is, man, and nobody’s going to cast the first adlaistevenstone; they kiss her, begin to leave, don’t want to, but
“What are you going to do now?”
“I’ll go in a while to the River Nile…”
“Have some fun…”
“Where’s fun in Mexicalpán, man?”
“Guwhere whasi’ B-4?”
“Don’ le’ yur filins chouenlai!”
“Abyssinia.”
“Humongous…”
“Awzom!”
“Serbus!”
“In ixtli!”
“In yóllotl!”
A gigantic error, gigantic luck, a fleeting apparition: I rest, I breathe, I sigh.
10
Only Egg stayed behind with my mother that night of our happy reunion in the grandparents’ house, and he smilingly told her that his usual verbal come-on with women was to talk to them about ecology or about the effects of television on children, but that he suspected that this time it wouldn’t work.
My mother only smiled at him as she had so many times over the course of their relationship: Egg, my father Angel’s best friend. That’s what I am, he said, reading the situation, or whatever I take it upon myself to be tonight now that we’re all alone, right? (And me, bastard, what am I? air? a streamer?) It’s that friendship is perhaps the first true form of eroticism, I mean that you see a friend’s body and you love it because you love your friend even though it would never occur to you to go to bed with him, his body becomes erotic for you because not only does it not occur to you to have sex with him, but above all it would never occur to you to have a child with him, and you see a body that is useful for something more than reproduction and that’s the most erotic thing in the world: imagining a body, desiring a body, without its being useful for reproduction. Egg said that was how he loved my father Angel—well, he’d let the cat out of the bag, the name, to see what might happen—and now suddenly he wasn’t there and it was as if a wall or a screen had disappeared and now he could see Angeles for the first time, without the separation that had always stood between them.
She was in the process of reproducing, my mother said silently. (Thanks, oh protectress; hip, hip, hurray!)
But he desired her for something other than reproduction, he told her. And he insisted: “Angel is my
friend and will always be my friend. I want you to understand that.”
“You mean you love me now for what he did?” asked my mom; note by the way that she didn’t say “what he did to me” or (even better) “did to us.”
“No,” answered Egg, “I love you so that I can be with you. Not because I’m sorry for you. Not at all. But I don’t want you to be alone. I don’t want you to have to give birth alone. I want to guarantee that the child wins the contest. And that no one takes it away from you.” This last he added out of pure intuition, irrationally.
She simply looked at him, caressed her belly, and said: “There’s going to be an earthquake tonight. I know it for a fact. The Angel on the Independence monument is going to fall off its column. I don’t know what kind of premonition this is, Egg, or if we should wait. Last night I dreamed about bats, lots of bats filling the sky, and that I did understand. I said it was a premonition about the world to come. In my dream I followed the bats—they were squeaking, blind, with big ears, and only they knew where to find food. Only they knew.”
I give an intrauterine jump out of pure shock. Surprised in flagrante labore! My job is to send nightmares to people! I confess that ever since I began this sixth month I’ve been doggedly sticking people with nightmares! I had to start at the beginning, so I hit Mom first. A direct hit! I just found out now! How should I react? Should I be happy? sorry? Must I test my power by turning these words into realities? I’m getting French waves: cauchemar! I hear the clattering hooves of that old English night-mare! And the Spanish word for it hits me like a plumbeous plumb, its brows knitted, its jaw fixed, muttering Castilian obscenities, and in a perennial fit of pique: pesadilla! What shall I do with this language of mine but bring it up-to-date, as I just did; Mom: dream about bats—they’ll come squeaking back to you; Mom: dream about an earthquake and a fallen Angel: it’ll all happen, I swear to you.
But she is already saying, not caring that I have just acquired this power by realizing that I have it: “I feel surrounded by all the things not used up by haste, poverty, or indifference.”