3
The fact is they didn’t have faces: they had numbers, mass, vague labels; they were the insane released from sanatoria, bands of eunuchs from Jalisco, desperadoes from Hidalgo, clowns from Nuevo León, rogues originally from Puebla; but now they were not attracted by the mirage of the city, consumerism, jobs: now they were called by that macho voice that told them through the thousands of cassettes carried by the truckers to every corner of the country:
THERE IS A NATION! WE ARE ALL HERE!
WE ARE THE NEW NATION!
LET’S BE GLORIOUS!
REAL MEN AREN’T ASHAMED TO PRAY
FOR THE FATHERLAND!
Know something? Matamoros Moreno said right at the beginning to Concha, now rebaptized for the sake of the grand campaign with the sonorous Chilean name of Galvarina Donoso: Did you know that for the first time in my life I’ve discovered that there’s a huge number of poor people, a freaking mountain of screwed-over jerks who hate themselves?
“Better late than never,” answered Galvarina. “If I didn’t know that, I’d be a damned fool, but they’ve stopped believing that the blonde in the beer ads would be waiting for them when they got to the city: one blonde coming up, son! These boys ain’t so stupid!”
“You took the words right out of my mouth, ma’am. You always know everything, and that’s why I adore and respect you: just what I was thinking, and now put it in a song. I swear you’re terrific!”
Which is what Concha Toro did: “One song coming up,” as she would say, and she transformed the driest political ideas into bolero lyrics, songs people could hum all over the roads of Mexico: “The sky on this earth may be ever so high / The sea may be ever so deep / But nothing can keep our love from the Virgin / who watches over our sleep…” Or: Save us! Save us, Ayatollah: we ask you now as before / we wandered full of anguish and suffering: no more, Ayatollah, no more! / beautiful Ayatollah, you’re our heart’s delight / thanks to your message, we’ll make it through the night!
No one knew exactly where these jingles came from, the scattered drivers could not have invented them, but they were everywhere, they upset some people, excited others, angered still others, and made everyone stop and think. Egg told my mommy all this when he visited her. He never gave up: he was bald, and they never paint hope bald. Egg himself was fed up with his new job, which was as a salesman for Souvenir Portraits, which is to say, tapes which the customer could have made of himself while alive which could then be put in the coffin so he could speak to his descendants. All you had to do was push a button.
“A terrific idea, but nobody wants to leave even a memory of himself anymore. Neither the deceased-to-be nor his heirs-to-be want to survive in any way. They hate themselves too much.”
“So turn it around and offer them total oblivion when they die. Nothing, néant,” said my mother.
“Oblivion insurance!” exclaimed Egg: “People hate themselves.”
* * *
(A lie, I’ll never be like that handsome devil in the ad driving his Meiji-Maserati, I’ll never wear that Bill Blass blazer made in Hong Kong, I’ll never fly to Tokyo on the Concorde, the chicks will never be all over me because I put Yojimbo in my armpits, I’ll never be accepted by the Diners Club, the Blonde of My Dreams will not be waiting for me at Indios Verdes when I roll in from Pachuca in overalls looking for love, fortune, and glory in the city: it’s not true, exclaimed Orphan Huerta as he painted election ads on the walls for the election of August 31, which came before the President’s address to Congress on the first of September.) (President Paredes had reduced the year’s electoral calendar to two days: on the first you voted, on the second you applauded, and in the meantime we had lots and lots of National Contests to amuse us, and the Orphan worked painting walls for President Parades):1
CANDIDATEIZE YOURSELF
FEEL LIKE A CANDIDATE!
slogans that summarized the President’s obsessive philosophy: there should be no former presidents, only candidates; the most important obligation of a president in 1992 is to choose his successor and then die: did he really believe it? Is that why he walks around so slowly, so desperate at times, so taciturn, so given to playing ball-and-cup and delegating decisions to Minister Robles or Colonel Inclán?
People hate themselves because they can never be what they’ve been told they can be, my father Angel had said when he fled from the threat of Colasa Sánchez’s vagina dentata and realized, sadly, mediocrely, with no glory whatever, that he’d been left without either dark or light meat: poor Daddy—no Colasa, no Penny, not even my poor knocked-up mommy! The Orphan Huerta paints slogans on walls and it bores him so much that he succumbs to the amusing vice of memory and wonders about his brother, the Lost Boy. What a laugh! He starts playing with words as if he were writing a song, a song no one will ever sing: Lost Boy, Copper Field, Twisted Oliver, Little Lord Fartalot, Eddy Piss, Eddy Poe, Eddy Feets, and he looks at his own torn-up feet, feet burned up since he was a kid because of having to walk, with no memories, through the garbage dumps of the city: Where ma brudder at? Suddenly, painting walls and elsewhere with English names: Little Dorrit, Copperfield, Oliver Twist Again Like We Did Last Summer, said the Orphan Huerta tapping his toe as he painted walls.
He has the sensation he’s surrounded by phantoms and he does this work mechanically as he dreams. The Orphan Huerta has the overwhelming sensation he’s surrounded by water, that he’s falling, brush in hand, into a vast liquid dream: the city once again floats over its lake, the placid skiffs ply the canals laden with flowers—geraniums and zempazúchiles and wild roses, the ahuehuetes, grandfather trees, lend their shade to those on foot and the weeping willows moisten their branches like green handkerchiefs in the clean river waters: the Orphan Huerta opens his eyes and looks at the white wall devoid of destiny before his abandoned eyes: the dead lakes he sees, the canals transformed into industrial burial grounds, the roasted rivers, a burning shield of cement and black wax devouring what it was going to protect: the heart of Mexico.
The Orphan Huerta, full of the rage and bitterness accumulated in his twenty years, scratches the white wall, leaving in it a wounded trace, his fingernails bleed, his signature is blood: a sign on the clean wall, a destiny for me and mine, a scratch on the clean wall of destiny, damn it to hell!
The old tree falls, fulminated by old age, and my father raises his eyes from his sad job. Now he has neither wife nor home. (“I know how to give fags the whipping they deserve,” his grandfather had him told by the Orphan Huerta, he’d better not turn up on Calle Génova, Angeles would have his son, me, the great-grandson of General Palomar, the grandson of the scientists Diego and Isabella; my Great-grandmother Susy would take care of me, my father’d better not turn up around there, let the faggot go live with the Fagoaga sisters, go ahead.) (I’d take you in with pleasure, and you know it, his Uncle Fernando Benítez told him, I’m not a pharisee, I’m telling you this with a grief that keeps me up at night and that perhaps someday you will understand and I may be able to explain to you: not yet, patience is an art and you, my little friend, are a talker, a poseur, a kid with a lot of gravy and no meat, in sum, a miserable rat; take stock of your life before you go on, and you’ll see that nothing of what you have done has much weight; it doesn’t glow with talent or move us with its sincerity. Come see me when you decide what you are going to do. For the time being you’re nothing but a poor fool: all your nonsense did not get you to revolutionary happiness, only to reactionary despair. Look: the only thing I can do for you is lend you the van the people in Malinaltzin gave us, the one you called the Van Gogh. You can live in it and get around in it: it’s roomy and fully equipped—after all, it was acquired for the PRI political boss in the Guerrero mountains. You can pick it up tomorrow at my house on Lerdo de Tejada. I’m leaving. There is no salvation in this city: people hate themselves too much here. Ask my wife Georgina for the van; she has the keys; she’s just come back from her commune in China and she’ll give them to you. I wish only pur
e, good things for you, Angelito. I hope we all come out of this imitation apocalypse in good shape: I’m going to spend a month with the Huichole Indians, because I’d rather see what happens when the sacred moves, I’d rather see it at its origin than in its final phase. After all, boy, the sacred, before anything else, is a celebration of origins. Here the only thing we’re going to see is force disguised as religion. We shall start out in the realm of the sacred and we shall end up with a government of priests. The only constant in all this, Angel, is the sacralization of violence. I shall watch it all from the mountains, so I don’t lose my perspective the day this apocalypse wears itself out. Farewell, nephew!)
* * *
Discouraged, my father wondered what he was doing in this tourist business in which he was now working, located in the ruins of the Zona Rosa, itself infested with muggers, addicts, CIA agents who specialized in neutralizing Central American leftists, and waiters without jobs standing in long lines outside of restaurants. What was he doing, he, Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, a young man people used to say had ideas, imagination, daring, a sense of humor, erotic talents, even tenderness, even love, what was he doing here now sitting in a dark and dilapidated attic on Niza Street at the corner of Hamburgo, spending his time making up lying slogans to make national and foreign tourists think it was possible to get anything in Mexico, that Mexico was a cosmopolitan center, that Mexico was a constellation of international attractions: my father inventing things all day long, solitary, bored, and scornful even of himself:
SINATRA!
FAREWELL CONCERT IN THE
ACAPULCO CONVENTION CENTER
SEPTEMBER 15, 1992
(BALONEY)
THIS IS IT, THE TOWER IS HERE!
TOUR D’ARGENT IS OPENING ITS ONLY FOREIGN
BRANCH RIGHT HERE IN MEXICO!
GUESS ITS LOCATION AND WIN
A FREE ESCARGOT PROVENÇAL!
(LIE)
FINALLY: ZIPPERS THAT ACTUALLY WORK!
FOR YOUR LUXURY BAGS!
DON’T PUT UP WITH MEXICAN ZIPPERS ANYMORE!
VISIT THE MARK CROSS STORE ON POLANCO STREET:
ZIPPITY-DOODAH-ZIPPITYAY!
(FALSE)
while in the streets of the shocked city the thing he’d vaguely foreseen was happening, the thing he’d wanted to start was now in full swing, not like that carnival in Acapulco organized by the government that made Angel and his buddies think that they, the puppets, were pulling their own strings.
Now Angel heard that noise, riding alone in the Van Gogh through the strangely awed city, as if it were on the eve of an eclipse, hunkered down like dogs who smell the nearness of death, which only they can see—and which they see before anyone—in black and white, the only colors dogs can see; a city beaten and angry: Angel saw rise up among all its things (just as Angeles said, my Angeles, what a fool I’ve been, and then the silly ass choked up) that were lost out of haste, poverty, and indifference, he saw rise up the signs of ancient newness; and suddenly the invisible enveloped him. Everything that had always been there and the new as well, all gathered together at last: the roar of tens of thousands of long-haul trucks entering the city at night from all directions, all driven by those men convinced they’d been born to drive and that today at last their work was their destiny: chosen to move an entire country and to enter the city this way at the vanguard of the desperate, the disinherited from all the slums: all moving at last toward the heart of the city, millions and millions of faceless people, people with no future, with nothing to lose, the misery of all the nameless slums mixed with the despair of those who had lost everything, the newly unemployed, those permanently displaced by earthquakes, police fired for corruption, bodyguards out of work, warriors and condottieri of the future in search of their chance, all behind the brightly lighted trucks, their loudspeakers blaring:
COME TO ME!
WITH FAITH!
TO CONQUER MEXICO!
FOR THE FAITH!
FOR THE VIRGIN!
YOU IN DESPAIR!
YOU OUT OF A JOB!
YOU WHO ARE HUMILIATED!
YOU WITH NO ROOF OVER YOUR HEAD!
COME TO ME!
WITH THE HOLY MOTHER!
TAKE YOUR FIRST STEPS!
TO THE NATIONAL PALACE!
TO POWER!
NO ONE CAN OVERCOME THE NATION OF GUADALUPE!
ALL TOGETHER!
COME TO ME!
YOU WITH NO JOB!
YOU WITH NO JUSTICE!
YOU WITH NO HOPE!
COME TO ME!
The truckers gathered in the Zoquiapan bus depot, on Río Frío, distributing torches from their trucks, a river of flames flooding down Santa Fe to Paseo de la Reforma and from Contreras to the Pedregal and from Peñon de los Baños to the Zócalo and then scattering confusedly, unforeseeably, in all directions in the city, the city as vast as an inexhaustibly curious spiderweb, sweeping everything in its path, devouring everything, creating an enormous, unexpressed doubt: was this mob creating or destroying? was it cleaning up or swallowing up? or had the time come when the two functions were indistinguishable? The supermarkets were the instinctive objective of the mob. My mob of Guadalupe! shouted the Ayatollah Matamoros from the roof of his black truck, his head tied up in the scarf evocative of martyr priests, headaches, beggar thieves. Saintliness and death, torture and violence all shone at the same time in the Mexican Ayatollah’s black eyes and white teeth, and his mob invaded all the supermarkets in the city. The immediate recompense: Kellogg’s gave them cornflakes and Chocokrispis, Heinz its ketchup, Campbell’s its soups, Lipton its tea, Nestlé its coffee, Hardeez’s its sauces, Coronado its jams, Adams its Chiclets, Del Monte its peas, Clemente its pickled chiles, Ibarra its tuna, Bimbo its bread, Mundet its Sidral, French its mustard, and Buitoni its raviolis. Like a liquid painting by Andy Warhol the supermarkets emptied through the hands of Matamoros’s mobs: IT ALL BELONGS TO YOU, IT’S ALL YOURS, IT WAS ALL TAKEN AWAY FROM YOU, TAKE IT BACK! THE VIRGIN BLESSES YOU! the voice of the cassette rang out, the voice of the truth, a voice that was real even if it was on tape, a persuasive voice, there among the stolen chickens and the steaks laid over the eyes of the poor the way Veronica laid her cloth over Christ’s eyes and the eggs snatched up with passion, then bobbled, and then smashed on the floor. Matamoros’s voice splits the air, the light, the corrupt velocity of the night lighted up with mercury in the galleries: Aurrerá, SUMESA, Commercial Mexicana; like an animated Warhol picture (and my father in the middle of this fiesta of plunder, driving the van without knowing if what was happening was good or bad, was able to think of my mother, wish she were sitting next to him, confess that he would have wanted to have her there with him, how could I sacrifice you to my vanity, to the conquest of Penny López, and end up sucked dry by her mom, Mrs. Dracula! Man, are you an asshole, Angel Palomar y Fagoaga: alone in the multitude, he wished he could take my mother Angeles’s hand and ask her forgiveness), and instead the cold hand that seized his belonged to a very young but very emaciated face under the funerary lights of the supermarket, the shadows of fear under those eyes, the sunken cheeks, the deep creases at the corner of her eyes and mouth: and she was only thirteen years old! Colasa Sánchez grabbed my father’s hand in the middle of the chaos in the invaded supermarket and implored him:
“Let me be your girl again.”
“No, Colasa.”
“Pretty please?”
“Frankly I appreciate my John Thomas too much. I didn’t know how much I loved it until it came up against your nether teeth, baby.”
“Let me be your rug.”
“Sure, a bear rug with nice sharp teeth.”
“Your dog. Let me be your dog.”
“Right, my little pit bull.”
“Just a shadow between your life and mine.”
“But you bite! Your bite is definitely worse than your bark!”
“All I want is to adore you. Let me.”
“What happened? I thought you hated me.”
>
“I did, because you killed my gringo.”
“I killed your gringo?”
“That tall, really handsome blond. You set the coyotes on him. He really knew how to screw me, even if he had to use a stick so I wouldn’t bite him. All I did was splinter the stick.”
“So that’s how it works?”
“We all work things out the best we can.”
“But even if you don’t hate me anymore, your daddy sure does. But it’s okay, any port in a storm!”
“But who says I don’t hate him, too?”
“Why would you?”
“Take a good look at me, my love, just look: I’m totally screwed. He didn’t give me anything I need to get married: no dowry: no plane tickets, no toothpaste, no parabolic antenna, nothing! An outcast bride, that’s me!”
“Castrating, too.”
“There have been other devouring women,” she said in falsetto, the poor, bored girl. “They called other women that and they made a big deal of them!”
“That was metaphoric devouring.”
“Well, look here, my boy. I see you’re all alone. You don’t have to put a thing in me, I promise, no inserts, no deserts. There are other ways of making each other happy. Let me be your barnacle. Let me hang around with you. I swear I won’t be a bother. I know people. I know the country. You know my little defect. We’ll need each other. We don’t have anyone else!”
My father admitted the validity of these arguments, and against his better judgment, he accepted Colasa Sánchez’s company during the revolution taking place that night and in the days to come. It was a way of resigning himself, without being alone.
4
Without asking permission, the Toluca road parachutists—the homeless who had “parachuted” into vacant lots or abandoned buildings—took a detour through Las Lomas del Sol and hurled themselves against the fence around Ulises López’s mansion: We want the slut! they shouted, We want the slut! and Ulises’s bodyguards started shooting, surprised when the fence fell, but when all is said and done, the philosophy of the good bodyguard is “Do you really think I’m going to give my life to save the boss?” And away they ran, while the squatters shouted, Burn the bitch who burned us, death to the murderess, and inside the house astonishment and confusion scattered one and all: the smell of flames wafted into the nostrils of the superminister in his office, and he said to himself, well, here it is, what we always feared, and he tried to prepare a convincing statement, assume a dignified pose. What would he say to them? What would he do, he couldn’t hide, he couldn’t be a coward, but could he be brave and clever simultaneously? Ulises López was profoundly confused; he was the master of doing what he shouldn’t do and his political success consisted of doing nothing but disguising it as action in order to conceal his only real activity, which was piling up cash: what was he going to say to these deadbeats who were coming up the Guggenheim-style staircase shouting and waving their torches: Listen, I only appropriated what was superfluous, not what was necessary. I left that to you. Listen, I was once poor like you and now just look at me; no, not that; and not the stuff about being a self-made man, no one ever gave me a free tortilla. No: how would he explain to them that in reality he, Ulises López, the nice millionaire from Chilpancingo, in reality had done nothing, that everything they saw here was, well, like winning the lottery, something undeserved, something as unexpected as a miracle, an answered prayer; no, that wouldn’t work (the noise got closer) and they would never understand that his passivity was more subtle, exemplary, and refined: Ulises got to be a millionaire and got to be a minister knowing how not to do things and by not doing them, but who would forgive that? Who would answer his most secret question now that their fists were beating on his mahogany door, those questions that followed him wherever he went, hanging over his head like the sword of Damocles: Do I deserve to be admired by others? Do I deserve to be loved? Do I perhaps love and admire those who love and admire me? And the admirable mahogany door (thanks to my architect, Diego Villaseñor!) did not break under their fists, so Don Ulises had time, he was going to tell them, Look now, there is no contradiction between public and private interests, my interests are the interests of the people, of the nation, of the fatherland! Then he was shocked to see the spears piercing his door, the pointy pickets of the fence around his house, and now they were splintering his fine door, with an oceanic roar succeeding every thrust.