With her clove but without her poet, Dolly Lama emigrated to Hollywood, joined Xavier Cugat’s Catalonian–Cuban orchestra, and began a successful career as a backup singer, which enabled her to sing booboopidoop behind Dionne Warwicke in Las Vegas, to whine ohohohuhm-huhm narcotically and orgasmically behind Diana Ross in Atlantic City, to shake spasmodically and masculinely despite having put on a few too many pounds and years in order to establish a contrast with triumphant androgyny behind Boy George and the Culture Club in Radio City Music Hall and Madison Square Garden. At age forty-five, she decided that she’d closed a circle by traveling from Old George to Boy George without ever having left the Culture Club and with more metamorphoses than a Kafkameleon. Fearing that a closed circle could become a vicious circle, she traveled to Mexico, invested her savings in the bar on the corner of Bull Bar and Car Answer, changed her name to Concha Toro, and finally found her true genius, her destiny, the synthesis of her life in the resurrected bolero, the bolero disdained by Mexican modernity, by the youth of the postpunk rockaztec of the early nineties, conserved by Saldaña and Monsiváis as a museum piece, a musical Tezozómoc wrapped in moth-eaten cotton: she came on the scene in one of those unexpected, genial, unsuspected, and purifying conjunctures and restored to the bolero what Homero Fagoaga could never restore to the Spanish language: brilliance, fame, emotion, incalculable splendor. The impoverished, abandoned middle class, its men nostalgic, its women longing for certitude, filled the agora of the Simon Bully Bar to listen to Concha Toro’s boleros, because boleros are music to listen to while holding hands, reviewing the vocabulary and the sentiments of our intimate Latin American kitschiness, the yeast in our melodramatic optimism—my father is listening to the bolero “Tropical Path”:
With her night after night I strolled to the sea
To kiss her lips so fresh and so free
And she swore to love me evermore
Never to forget as we kissed on the shore
Those nights of our love by the sea
Disguised as Quevedo, alone in Concha Toro’s cabaret, suspended between the vertices (or vortices) of my pregnant mother, demythified Penny, and resigned Colasa, my father is listening to boleros a certain night in the year of the Quincentennial of the Discovery of America: and he rediscovers the New World of the bolero, the degraded but never renounced utopia sprinkled with water that falls from heaven: the utopia of the islands, of Eldorado, of the Indian monarchy. My father looks around him, as he listens to Concha (whom he does not recognize) sing, at the captivated ruins of the once-upon-a-time prosperous middle class as they collectively regain paradise—the tropical path—by means of the operations of the heart: that is the bolero’s impossible project: the precious language of the fin de siècle adapted to the sentimental necessities of the bedroom, the beach, and the bordello:
It was a captive kiss of love on a hand that had the look of a lily in a book the flutter of a dying dove
I was the enchanting butterfly in the garden of your life I was the princess from on high who relieved you of your strife
by Luis G. Urbina
by Agustín Lara
“Metamorphosis” (Poem)
“Captive” (Bolero)
recites my father and defines:
sings Concha Toro and evokes:
“Melodrama is comedy without humor.”
“I don’t know if there’s love in eternity, but there, as here, on your lips you will have my taste.”
My father, staring at Concha Toro, whispers under soft, diffused lights (they, too, like dying doves, enchanting butterflies, torches quenched by destiny, burning kisses) the immortal words: Hypocrite, nothing but a hypocrite, queen of perversity, you made a fool of me.
* * *
Something unforeseeable began when old people started pouring out of old-age homes to hear Concha sing boleros. Time put her on its cover under the rubric The Darling of the Senior Citizens, and night after night the entire overaged populace of Mundet, Actors Guild, Gray Power, and the Adolfo Ruiz Cortines Gerontoclub, all on the wings of the purest nostalgia, set impossible rendezvous in the velvet-lined basement of the Simon Bully Bar: a tide of little white heads, bald heads, freckled heads, and, at times, the very coquettish little blue heads, would flow in and out, sentimentally nodding, nodding approvingly when they heard lines like:
When silver threads appear while you’re still young
Like the moon reflected in a blue lagoon
The bad aspect of this gerontocratic emigration was that the enchanted old folks refused to go back to the home; they got a second wind in Concha’s bar, and there was no way they were going to cut themselves off from their refound youth; they stood their ground on the dance floor and in the aisles, overflowing all the way to Car Answer, and just when the police, following the inveterate habit and Pavlovian reflexes of Colonel Inclán, were on the point of dispersing them with clubs and gas, Federico Robles Chacón, having at that time joined the cabinet as an answer to the Crisis of 1990, decided to end repression as a solution and to use symbolism as euphemism. His suggestion was to set up the old folks in their own neighborhood, on some lots along the Toluca road, where they’d build their dwellings and their lives, and he would promise to bus them in every night to hear Concha. The lots, by the way, were supposedly the property of the wife of Superminister Ulises López, assumed to be the cause of the crisis because of his friedmaniac monetary remedies. When Minister Robles Chacón was asked if he knew whose property those lots were, his only comment was:
“I know. What about it?”
He forgot to say, “All the better,” but his subordinates understood him. It turns out that this maneuver was the model for others with even more important consequences: the federal disbursement office pointed out that the closing of old-age homes meant a saving of such-and-such millions of pesos, and Ulises López, grasping this particular proof, turned it, as happens so often in politics, into a general principle: Ulises put the ball right back into Federico’s court by ordering the closing down of insane asylums; thousands of patients in psychiatric clinics and mental hospitals were deinstitutionalized between 1990 and 1992, under the pretext that they were costing the government too much money. But the insane had no Concha Toro to entertain them and no Bully Bar where they could congregate.
Artist that she was, Concha Toro regarded all these disturbances as matters of political corruption that were of little concern to her. But her great success hid a profound emptiness in her life: Concha Toro didn’t have a man, and looking at herself in her dressing-room mirror—there she was, in her fifties, and with only her Pekingese Fango Dango for company—she said to herself here I am, a good old Chilean girl, a wanderer worse than a Jew, who’s been around the world, who’s got all the success in the world, but who’s far away from home and without a man to love her!
She looked into the mirror and she liked what she saw, she saw herself in her red sequins, a long dress to cover up her fat Chilean calves, makeup to emphasize her Chilean sea-green eyes, radical décolleté, lots of powder, snow white, a few well-placed beauty marks, her lipstick heavy in order to cover up her bad Chilean teeth, the result of drinking water from the mountains that flowed swiftly to the sea without calcium: bad teeth, but only a traitorous dentist could tell the world María Inez’s real age: María Inez!
She spoke her own first name near the mirror, her hot breath misting up the glass: Chile, she chanted, asylum against oppression, embroidered field of flowers; pure, oh Chile, is your blue sky: far away, with no return, Pinochet in La Moneda palace forever. Bah, Concha Toro reacted. She forgot her aristocratic childhood, the estate, the Aldunates y Cruchagas in her genealogical tree, and repeated:
“I look at myself in the mirror. I see myself dressed this way, with my red sequins and my satin pumps, gold dust in my hair and my lips in Joan Crawford style: that’s what my oldies come to admire, that’s what I give them, that’s what I grab on to, even if the others stand head and shoulders above me: they need my
sincere vulgarity and sentimentality as much as they need a shopping trip to Houston.
She looked at herself, she liked what she saw, she sighed, Concha Toro, she walked out on the stage near the bar and sang:
You walked past me with cruel indifference
Your eyes didn’t even turn toward me …
They loved her, she loved herself. She told a famous joke:
“When sex is good, it’s good. But when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.”
The old folks laughed and elbowed each other: Maybe tonight…? Singing that night under the submarine lights, blue and shimmering, and afterwards back in her dressing room, alone with Fango Dango, once again before her mirror, she analyzed her personality, her success. What had gone into it? Her success was loving to love, loving to be loved, but making clear with the cruel lyrics of the bolero that her tenderness was merely a crack in her indifference: loving but without giving herself up,
You walked past me with cruel indifference
Your eyes didn’t even turn toward me …
What she wanted was what her frozen, banal, pedantic family with aquiline noses and pink skin and cruel gray watery eyes disdained the most: a Latin friendship, complete, abusive, sticky, immortal, cliquish, noisy. She gave Fango Dango a vicious kick and his howling filled the empty cabaret, but then she hugged him, petted him, begged him to forgive her, and, as she did on all other nights before turning out the light and getting into her nineteenth-century, canopied, red damask curtained bed, she wrote with lipstick on the mirror:
SHIT, LONG LIVE CHILE!
14
Concha Toro’s life of wandering and change suffered a new transformation—perhaps the most important of all—the night of May 10, 1992, Mother’s Day of the Year of the Quincentennial, which for her evoked her beloved southern seas.
She was singing sweetly, her eyes closed:
Through the palms that peacefully sleep
The silver moon cuddles in the tropical sea
And just when she opened her arms to her audience of senior citizens and opened her eyes to say:
… my arms open hungrily, looking for you …
her eyes met those of that young man, much younger than she, eyes that from that moment on she could never escape, not even to save herself, because, as Concha knew, anyone who looked away from those eyes ran the risk of being demolished by them. Concha Toro trembled, stopped feeling nostalgic about Chile, felt for the first time she was in Mexico: that face, that mustache, those teeth that came directly from the movies she’d seen as a girl in the Cine Santiago: Pedro Armendáriz, Jorge Negrete, Marlon Brando as Zapata…!
In the night the scent of flowers evokes your perfumed breath
sang Concha with her eyes closed, but when she opened them the wandering light of the bar fell on the woman sitting next to that mexaphysical guerrillero, and no, he had not brought his white-haired mom to celebrate Mother’s Day; he’d brought a strange girl, strange but very young, dressed as a Carmelite, her bosom covered with scapularies, her complexion the color of cinnamon tea.
I feel that you are near to me,
but it’s a lie, an illusion
sang Concha Toro, née María Inez Aldunate Larraín y Cruchaga Errázuriz, alias Dolly Lama, full of despair and bitterness. Then she fainted, right onstage.
When she was a kid in Chillán she’d always wanted to play hooky, cut class, fool around, and now she was being carried piggyback, as if she were on vacation, by the only person in the cabaret strong enough to do it. A man was carrying her from the stage to her dressing room, but in her dreams the cowboy Randolph Pope was once again carrying her in his arms to a spot behind the wheat field on the riverbank where he was going to deprive her of what he wanted most and she needed least: now a tall, powerful, dark, ultramustachioed man was carrying her as if he were pushing a cannon up a hill: she clung to the man’s neck passionately, and when he deposited her in her nineteenth-century bed, she, instead of singing a bolero, recited the most beautiful love poem, the most memorable love poem, and, she said to herself, the most Chilean love poem as well:
I loved her, and she, at times, loved me as well …
The tall powerful, dark, ultramustachioed man said:
“I, too, wanted to be a writer.”
“What happened?” whimpered Concha.
“The envious frustrated me.”
“You don’t look frustrated to me,” said Concha coquettishly, as she looked at the girl dressed as a nun.
“This is my daughter Colasa.”
“Ah!” sighed Concha, with no frustration whatsoever.
“I had her when I was very young.”
“Colasa Sánchez, at your service, ma’am.”
Ma’am stared with an intensity worthy of the bolero “Think About Me” at the girl’s father. “And what’s your name?”
“Matamoros Moreno, putting both of us at your service,” said the man. Concha Toro fainted again.
* * *
Don’t forget now, dear Readers, that in the meanwhile, no matter how many things go on out there, inside here we aren’t exactly sitting around killing time: add up all the things that have gone on outside: love, disasters, jokes, trips, politics, economics, language, fashion, myths, customs, and laws, and compare all that with my simple and essential activity: my hands, for example, have grown more rapidly than the arms they’re attached to, they first appear with the fingers looking like buds; the last phalanx has emerged from the palms of my hands, my fingertips have formed, little tiny nails have appeared on all my fingers and toes, and the transparent and cartilaginous skeleton I had in my first four months is now bone and I move my arms and legs energetically: I have little accidents, I scratch my face with my nails unintentionally; I have pleasures: I suck my thumb incessantly; I make discoveries: I can touch my face.
Ah, my face: there is no greater accomplishment in my small organism! I couldn’t envisage a greater visage! First, I have a cranium, which is the refuge of my brain. It was made of transparent skin; in the seventh week a huge vascular tide spread toward the crown to protect and feed my little, recently born brain, which is now floating in a fluid bath (never let it dry out, your lordships!) and absorbs all the catastrophes outside my delicate mechanism (and you tell me if there haven’t been lots of them in these first seven months of mine!). How strong my subcutaneous tissue is getting! How the bones of my skull grow, moving toward the crown, but without fusing with it, in order to maintain the exquisite flexibility of my shell, granting me a malleable head which will permit my brain to keep growing: when I’m born, my noggin will not be as large as it will be someday—if I live that long!
But I was talking about my face: I can touch it with my hands! Do you realize what that means, your mercies? I have a face and I can touch it with my hands! My face, which at the beginning was only a bulging brow above my future mouth, soon was focused over the window to my dark soul, my eyes: a retina appeared which became dark, pigmented; a lens and a cornea. The eyelid formed little by little. My ears were very low. My brain shone under my translucent skin. My eyes closed. But they were enormous, and there was a long distance between them. Thick lids covered them. I am blind, ladies and gentlemen! My closed eyes are awaiting eternity! But they are not closed because I am asleep. Just think: I close them but I’m not asleep. My closed lids are merely protecting my eyes, which have not yet finished forming yet. I’ve taken the veil. I grasp even more firmly on to my umbilical lasso, just as Quasimodo clung to the bell rope at Notre Dame. I never get tangled up no matter how much I swim, no matter how many times I ring the bell: can you hear me, Mom? I can hear you! I hear the world better than ever! I hear your heart, Mother, boomboomboom, it’s my turn and my dance, and when I hear your pals’ band play rockaztec, believe me, Mom, I only hear, redoubled, intense, the rhythm of your own heart and that of my gestation in your womb: boomboomboom.
8
No Man’s Fatherland
We return to nationality out of lo
ve … and poverty. Prodigal sons of a fatherland we don’t even know how to define, we begin to observe it. Castilian and Moor, shot through with Aztec …
Ramón López Velarde,
“The Fatherland as Something New”
1. Thunderclap
In August the highways of the Republic of Mexico began to echo with rumors that were both expected and unusual: the federal turnpikes, the toll roads, the frigüeys as the jeunesse dorée of the Ibero-American School called them, had been maintained in (Egg is telling my mother, educating both of us in the process) a sort of autonomy with respect to the other realities of the nation. To drive on one of these highways, the Pan-American to Mexamerica, the Christopher Columbus to Oaxaca, the Transistémica to the Chitacam Trusteeship, was like heading into a country that belonged to all and to none, a free territory. The highways of the nineties are buffer zones in which all the weight of the newly mutilated Sweet Fatherland resolves itself in a kind of rapid, fleeting freedom—a swift and ephemeral freedom, but a freedom nonetheless. The highway knows no obstacles, like an arrow piercing the air.