No, I would have wanted to say to him, it isn’t that I want to see you going to the bathroom, wiping yourself, or expelling a gas, Don Benito, or even picking your nose, Mr. President, nothing like that, but something that would not harm your dignity or mine, that’s it, I would like to see you brush your teeth, Mr. Juárez, or shine your boots, because don’t tell me you don’t do it yourself, here we are rolling around among cactus and scrub and you don’t have a valet, as Maximilian does, but you always have shoes shinier than those of any Austrian archduke: how do you do it? Would you lose some of your dignity if you let yourself be seen shining your shoes, sir?
We celebrated Columbus Day, October 12, 1864, in the city of Chihuahua, and President Juárez spent it reading back issues of newspapers written in English that had arrived from New Orleans, God knows how, but he had memories of that port in Louisiana where he’d been exiled by the dictator Santa Anna and had earned his living by rolling cigars in a tobacco factory (oh, Lord, and now his beloved papers were all rolled up in the Sierra del Tabaco, he thought ironically) and he learned English, just as his children were learning it now in schools in New York.
One item caught his attention: a gringo named E. L. Drake had discovered a new substance by digging sixty-foot wells in western Pennsylvania. According to the article, the substance was extracted from the wells from deep deposits of sedimentary rocks. This material, which occurs both as a liquid and as a gas, read Mr. Juárez, can be readily substituted, in either form, according to Mr. Drake, for whale oil, which is growing scarce, and can supply bright, cheap light to modern cities. Mr. Juárez nodded his dark head, thinking perhaps about the candle stumps that he had to use in these northern villages in order to write at night.
He talked about the discovery with other guests of Mr. Creel in Chihuahua, and an engineer said that the part about light, while certainly important, was not as significant as the use this famous “petroleum” (the name given the new substance) would have in locomotion, in steam engines, in trains, and in factories. In that instant, Susanita, I saw a vision pass through the usually impenetrable gaze, as if he were imagining himself swiftly traveling through the desolation of the Republic, free of the trammels of terrain or climate, both of which were so rough, sweetheart, so hostile to men.
He shook his head; he exiled his dream. If the important thing was to recover the Republic inch by inch, slowly, in love and poverty, perhaps Don Benito Juárez, cutie, managed to imagine himself, why not? flying by plane from Mexico City to El Paso, Texas, with a stopover in Chihuahua; but then he would have lost the country: the idea was to show that the country was ours, that here we were, and that like our native briars we had very deep roots and thorns all over our branches: let’s see anyone try to pull us out, let’s see who was going to come live with us in this penury, not in this fiesta. That was the unrepeatable opportunity as he saw it: “We’ll never have another chance like this in all our history.” Not the oil, Susanita, but dignity. Can you imagine Don Benito Juárez getting rich on the oil boom of the seventies to take off in a Grumman jet to Paris to have a good time, Susy, with a stopover in Las Vegas to play a little poker in the Sands Hotel? Not a chance.
But let’s go back to my dream. My dream started filling up with death. You’ll see. First he found out that his favorite son, Pepe, was sick. All the intuition, all the atavism, all the innate fatality surfaced in this Zapotec disguised as a French lawyer. His Indian fatalism told him, Susy my dear innocent girl, that Pepito was already dead and that no one would tell him so he wouldn’t suffer, already they were treating him like a statue. You should have seen him then in Chihuahua, honey, fearful about his kid, the son he called “my delight, my pride, and my hope.” He fell apart; he said he lost his head and filled his letters with smudges. Then he pulled himself together; but I saw him as a victim of what he thought he’d left behind forever: the Indian sense of fatality. His will took over. He went back to being his old self. No one wrote to him from home. The mail system, an accident in a situation full of accidents.
When his premonition came true, Susana, all he did was walk around like a ghost repeating, as he strode through the halls of Creel’s huge house in Chihuahua:
“My beloved son is dead … my beloved son is dead … Nothing can be done about it!”
I felt that Pepe’s death precipitated one disaster after another; for later on, Mr. Juárez, right in the same house, received the news of President Abraham Lincoln’s death, and then in July the French launched a general offensive against Republican resistance in the north, and in August we had to leave Chihuahua for the border—but that’s as far as we could go, captured in Mexico, cornered in Mexico, but never outside of Mexico, he said, never an exile who could be accused later on of having abandoned his country:
“Don Luis”—I heard him say to his friend Governor Creel, who was urging him to save himself by crossing the border—“you know this state better than anyone. Show me the most inaccessible, the highest, the most arid mountain, and I’ll go up there to die of hunger and thirst, wrapped in the nation’s flag, but I will never leave the Republic.”
We went bouncing off again, in the carriages and with the carts, through sagebrush and cactus, the sun on our heads and the rocks under our feet … What can I say? Well, one night in a village in the Chihuahua desert, when I was on guard duty, posted behind a wall of crumbling adobe, he closed his door. He’s going to sleep early tonight, I said to myself. But soon after I heard him weeping. I didn’t dare to interrupt him; but I had the same duty the next day, and when I went to my post with my lance, which wasn’t standing as straight as it once did, Susy, I said to myself, well, if he doesn’t cry again, we’ll forget about it. Well, as Talleyrand said to Napoleon, look, even me, the one in charge of the door, doesn’t spend so much time looking into the street; in other words, I’d stay out of his business. But if the old man cried again …
“Is something troubling you, Mr. President?”
“No, Rigo. It’s nothing.”
“In that case, excuse me, Mr. President.”
“What is it, Rigo?”
“You know I don’t meddle…”
“Yes.”
“But why don’t you talk to me a little?”
He wasn’t a saint, he had no reason to be one, he was happy being a hero, and there are lots of heroes we never hear of, heroes who don’t have streets named after them or statues put up in their honor: but of what use is a saint? That night he told me about his love affairs, about the children he’d had out of wedlock, about his son Tereso, who was ugly and brave and who was fighting like his father against the invaders; he told me about the poor suffering Susana—like you, my love, the same name, did you know that?—his invalid daughter in Oaxaca, condemned to virginity, drugged to alleviate her pain, and my own for my grownup daughter, what? far away, in pain, my strange daughter captured in an artificial dream: Susana …
I told the farm girl to come in, not to be modest, that everything was all right, she knew it, and Mr. Juárez, too; he should look at her the way I, Rigoberto Palomar of the Second Lancers Company of the Republic, looked at her, nothing more, nothing less; we were at war, but we didn’t stop living because of that; he should look at her rosy cheeks and her black eyes, her hair streaming down to her waist, and her shape like a newly turned vase; she has a name, it’s Sweet Names, that’s her name, I rustled her starched blouse, she’s barefoot so she won’t make any noise, one day not so far off she’s going to die because her hands prophesy mourning, I wanted her for myself, Mr. Juárez, but I’ll give her to you, you need her, we need for you to have a night of illicit love, Don Benito, tender, sweet love like a stick of cinnamon, and as strong as an earthquake, which is so close to the life from which it comes that to you it might seem, because it gives itself to you so readily, like an answer to death: go to it, Mr. Juárez, screw this farm girl, get rid of your melancholy, win the war, reconquer the country, love this girl as you loved your dead son, as you love your invali
d daughter; this is as good a thing to close the door for as going to the bathroom or opening it to receive friends: don’t turn into a statue on me, Mr. Juárez, you’re not dead yet.
I closed the door on them, Susana, and even though I ran the risk of being punished, I abandoned my post. You see, my innocent girl, I didn’t want to hear a thing. That night was his alone; he deserved it more than anyone. I hoped he was happy, but I didn’t want to rob him of even an instant of pleasure. So I began to think about sad and impossible things, Susanita. Suppose Mr. Juárez wins. The Republic will be poorer than ever. How can it ever pay the debts piled up by the conservatives, the Empire, the war? How can he rebuild the country? Oh, Lord, I said to myself, closing my eyes in the cold desert, which was like a bedroom at the bottom of the sea: if only Mr. Juárez had that gringo Drake’s discovery in Pennsylvania to light up all the cities in the world like glowing coals! Oh, Lord, if instead of owing fifteen million pesos to the French, Don Benito Juárez had received $15 billion a year for exporting liquid fossils! That’s why I screamed, Susana. I had that horrible nightmare.
“Don’t worry, Rigoberto. Your dream will turn out all right.”
12
When the earth calmed down, my mother Angeles tried to calm down with it and to speak rationally. While our buddy Egg strolled around my father’s old coach house playing the guitar, she said that when a woman’s left alone a vacuum is created and that anything can be pulled in to fill it; she did not want Egg to be a mere fill-in, so she thought it was better that he hear her out and understand her point of view. When I met him—she told us—I told him I didn’t sleep all night because I was so happy I met you. And it was true: Angel made me happy by creating me. He didn’t find me: he invented me, he made me his by inventing me. I didn’t sleep, I was so happy, because Angel met me exactly the way I met myself and exactly when I met myself; neither before nor after. I don’t remember anything before him. I don’t know who I am, where I come from, nothing.
“Let me confess something to you. I saw him as young and rebellious. So I instantly appropriated everything I thought he liked—feminism, left-wing politics, ecology, Freud and Marx, university exams, every opera ever written—the whole deal, whatever I found at hand, as if it were in someone else’s closet. Imagine how surprised I was when he turned out to be a conservative rebel! No way. There was no way I was going to change my symbols just for him, Eggy boy.
“I decided it was better for us to complement each other, so I kept my mouth shut, the better to enjoy making love without understanding too well about making ideology. Love, love, love, Egg, ideology, ideology, ideology, and at the same time, running neck and neck with all this, my question: what is the meaning of all these things we do? It may help him to see in me everything that is opposite to him, to see at the same time everything that completes him. And he even shares with me the hope that we will become equal by being different (the ideal?). At what moment will Angel pass from nonsense to despair without having picked up something positive in the process? What are all of us afraid of, going insane or going sane? Who really loses, who really wins in all this? And who will leave the other one first when both of us realize that nobody can live only in rebellion without ending up in despair? You need something else, I swear, I swear, buddy, something else, and I swear that I tried to find it, quite rationally, I tried to believe in Angel, seriously, in his ideology, only because I want to believe that the good things in this world should be repeated someday, not be left behind, not necessarily rendered obsolete by progress. While you play your guitar, think about this: can progress kill your song because it is your song each time you play it, Egg, an event again and again, with or without penicillin, with television or without? Does what you play go on being an event, while infections do not and the pictures you see at home do? Art is a continuous event or a continuity that takes place: I would have wanted to communicate that to Angel in order to save him from his either/or, you know, his madness or reason, stagnation or progress, his world of dramatic possibilities which he likes so much and which does him such damage. I agreed to have his child in order to bring this idea to reality, the idea of the continuity of happening between the nonsense and the despair that will devour my poor Angel if he doesn’t understand me. Even if he ends up doing it alone, without me, just as long as he understands me.”
“You are lovable,” Egg said in English as he stopped strumming. “With a little humor and intelligence, I think you’ll survive all the disasters of Mexican life. That’s why I love you. You are totally lovable.”
“Animus intelligence!” she shouted, but she realized that her exclamation was a reflex action. So she looked at our friend, an interrogatory expression on her face, her head turned to one side. She told him that he, too, was a survivor.
“The only kind of genius that exists in this country is that of survival. It’s lost everything else. But it survives.”
What about him?
He took my mother’s hand and remembered that after his parents’ death, when he had no friends, no money, neglect, not caring, and ignorance possessed him for a time. He realized what was happening, became terribly alarmed because he could look at himself as if he were someone else. Then he wrote his first hit, “Take Control.”
What about her?
She was afraid. She was afraid that things would happen and we wouldn’t notice and that we would only realize that the most important event in our lives had already taken place when it was too late. She also dreamed that a vine sprouted out of her vagina.
“We all have days when nothing goes right. Options, movements, not being what people see, not seeing what’s there, believing I do know, knowing I think everything is a mistake. I’ve been like this for thirty days. Help me, Eggy, please, help me, little buddy. I swear I’ll be eternally grateful to you.
“Help me get my halo back, buddy. Don’t you see it went out on me?”
That’s how August began: the step toward the eighth month of my gestation.
13
Dear Reader, you may remember that in the month of March Angel and Angeles saw the Chilean bolero singer Concha Toro on one of the National Television Contests, presenting herself as the Last Playboy Centerfold, and that in June Egg went to interview her at the Simon Bully Bar to request the services of her Home-Delivery Theater, which participated—with what disastrous results, we all know—in Penny López’s Sweet-Sixteen Party. The reader may also recall that Angel refused to do that chore because Concha had taken his virginity sometime during the mid-eighties at the solemn insistence of Grandfather Rigoberto Palomar (a revolutionary general at age fifteen), who could not tolerate the idea of having a virginal fifteen-year-old grandson in his house.
Since the Four Fuckups did not want personal matters interfering in their apocalyptic projects (perennially frustrated, as your lordships fully realize), Egg went to see the dear lady, but Concha Toro’s appearance, her fame, and her life story impressed him so much that he blurted out that he’d been sent by Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, did she remember him?
“Of course I remember him, such a well-hung kid, remembered his name just like that, step right in, son, place’s a mess, I know, but last night we, uhh, had a little fight with the cops, you know, and the police almost locked us up. But there’s wine, and avocados, and peaches and white jam left over, so just help yourself. No one ever called Concha Toro a cheapskate, especially when a hungry poor boy like you turns up. The question is, what are you hungry for, son?”
She asked that last question with a lowering of her eyes that had driven several (though, it must be admitted, recent) generations of senior citizens wild in the velvet basement of the Simon Bully Bar, the entrance to which, a long, smooth red tunnel, was like a velvety, deep vagina—not unlike that of Concha herself.
Egg looked her up and down: she wasn’t what she used to be, and if she was never really a knockout—her real charm was her coquettish Chilean savvy, not her beauty—she was not really faded either: she wa
s a strange palimpsest in which all the stages of her life coexisted in a kind of transparent simultaneity: Concha Toro! Née María Inez Aldunate Larraín y Cruchaga Errázuriz in Chillán, Chile, the night of the terrible earthquake of 1939, which destroyed the city and sank half the coast, from Concepción to Puerto Montt, into the Pacific. She grew up in the shadow of Siqueiros’s murals in the school the Mexican government donated to Chile after the disaster: the powerful white and black punches delivered by the native heroes Cuauhtémoc and Galvarino made a profound impression on her tender aristocratic mind. At school she saw revolution and melodrama, while on her father’s estate she saw reaction and drama: agriculture in southern Chile was the last refuge of her family, which had prospered early on, in the days when Chile was exporting nitrates, a business that covered late-nineteenth-century Santiago with mansions and the resort cities of Viña and Zapallar with chalets; nitrates paid for trips to Europe and wild spending sprees. The bubble burst in 1918, when the Germans invented synthetic nitrates, but the family managed to save the estate from the general economic collapse. So off they went, to do to the peasants what they’d already done to the nitrates: exploit them. The difference was that they couldn’t export peasants. How María Inez laughed when the ineffable President Wrinkle Wrecker requested that the United States export farmers and keep the harvests at home! That’s exactly what the Aldunate Larraín y Cruchaga Errázuriz family would have wanted to do, but who would have wanted to buy these flea-bitten scum, shitasses, drunks, thieving rats, with no balls whatsoever! Don’t make me laugh!
María Inez resolved her conflicts by giving herself at the age of fourteen to a well-hung peasant boy—as well hung as my father Angel Palomar, I suppose—with the improbable name Randolph Pope. She immediately crossed the Andes at Puente del Inca, went to Mendoza, and from there to Buenos Aires, where this highly intelligent Chilean girl quickly got the lay of the land, changed her name to Dolly Lama and won a tango contest singing with Aníbal (“Dicky”) Troilo; she read Borges’s Other Inquisitions, disguised herself as Miriam Hopkins in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: perfumed and platinum-haired, she was able, one night in the Armemonville pavilion, to seduce Jorge Borges, the blind guardian of the fragrant clove that a young Patagonian maiden stole from Magellan’s circumnavigating ship in 1521 and instantly hid in what elegant Buenos Aires gentlemen used to call “la leure de sa nature”: María Inez, alias Dolly, obtained the famous fragrant clove of Magellan in exchange for a sensational screw with Borges, and armed with the Illustrious Clove and the Illustrious Blind Man, she was proclaimed Priestess of Sexual Ultraism in a ceremony held in the Ateneo Bookstore. Immediately afterwards she accompanied the writer to Memphis, Tennessee, where the author of The Universal History of Infamy asked the poet Ossing (probably a descendant of Ossian) to lead him into the waters of the Mississippi—up to the ankles—and then give him a drink of Mark Twain’s river. Dolly felt she’d done her duty as far as Latin American literature was concerned when she overcame the stupefaction of the citizens of Memphis, who were astonished to see a river of industrial waste and wet garbage pass by, by offering old Georgie a glass of Coca-Cola, which the Illustrious Blind Man drank slowly, interjecting from time to time: “Ambrosia, ambrosia!”