Meanwhile, the secretary of the SEPAFU calmed down, carefully put his papers away in a schoolboy’s botany portfolio, and neatly tied the ribbons with bows.
Smiling, he received the apparition, as serene, certainly, as she, who came to ask him for God knows what, one of those little caprices of women in power, send the presidential jet to carry my angora sweater from Mexico to Rome, fire those three functionaries for having taken me to a fifth-rate restaurant, and get rid of these other five for having made jokes about me over the telephone, build me a swimming pool in the center of the Zócalo, burn the writings of my predecessors, their hospitals, movies, schools, there can be nothing before or after LITTLE OLD ME!
But now it was nothing like that, and he would have expected anything but this: the Holy Lady, wearing a riding cape of orange suede and chaps decorated with silver, and underneath a Mexican riding outfit, in the Jesusita in Chihuahua mode, suede, silver, short jacket, Andalusian riding skirt, and a riding crop in her hand, with which she instantly slapped Robles Chacón’s face. Now he was astonished; she then dropped to her knees before him, weeping, damn it, with almost the same words as Concha Toro begging for the body of the Ayatollah, oh, my love, my little love, turn around and look at me at least, my little lovey-dovey, be nice, it’s your honey talking to you, don’t make me suffer, do it to me pretty, sweetie pie, give your honey what she wants, don’t make me stay here on my knees like this, don’t you see I’m dying for love of you?
No one had ever said anything like this to the vibrant but austere Robles Chacón: My honey man, give me some honey. (Mamadoc hugging the knees of the minister, who felt he was living through the worst nightmare of his life, but for that very reason he kept hoping that this one, like all the others, would end: this was merely an unpublished chapter in the Ayatollah saga. He closed his eyes and said: I am living through something that man I had the obligation to have killed should have lived through, this must be my punishment, these things don’t happen to me, this is a scene from the theater of the incomplete, the incomplete that accompanies each and every one of our acts, this is the shortened apocalypse, only I had to live it because I killed that witch doctor. We have not gathered the One Hundred and Forty-Four Thousand Just Men. Forgive me, oh Lord—jabbered Robles Chacón, with Mamadoc still hugging his knees—nor have we left the Babylon that dizzies nor has the seventh cup been filled—I’ll drink the others in Guanajuato!—with the wine of God’s vengeance, and I did not find the number 666 on Matamoros Moreno’s hirsute body when I carefully examined it, and I don’t know if there is a woman in the jungle, but the harlot in purple did appear. Here is this great whore, hugging me, squeezing her cheek against my fly, God help me! and it’s getting hard against my will, and she, give me your rod give me your son give me your come don’t deny to me what you have given to all Mexican women, the right to a son on October 12.)
“There’s no time!” the minister stupidly exclaimed.
“We can extend the contest a year or even ten years, we have the power to change dates, and if we don’t, what good does it do to be us? Ten years, why not? it doesn’t matter as long as our little boy wins the contest and the dynasty is ours, honey man! yours and mine, my little lovey-dovey, you and I can play with time, set the clocks back, put them ahead, whatever we want, I’ve been thinking a lot while I’ve been all alone, why do we have power if we can’t change time? What good is power if you can’t stop time and even tell death to get lost, tell me, boss man?”
She opened her eyes wide and looked at him, her mascara running because of her tears, potholes in her plastered-over face where she’d been rubbing against his fly, her original dark skin showing through here and there.
“We can’t do that,” the cornered minister whimpered meekly, convinced that the Lady had gone mad. “It’s a law, we have to obey it, laws are meant to be obeyed…”
“But not carried out!” She gave vent to her emotion, spattering her viscous saliva over the functionary’s trousers.
He looked at her as if she were some apparition fabricated by Maybelline: he realized that this woman had been born expressly to play this scene; her whole life had been a preparation for this moment she was now living out. For that reason, Robles Chacón concentrated his intelligence and said the best thing he could:
“Dear Lady: laws are terrible, but customs are even worse.”
With that sentence, which he felt was worthy of him, Federico Robles Chacón began to reconstitute his shattered aplomb. He realized where he was, but the outrageous woman at his feet was whimpering, either you make me yours or I don’t give the Cry, either you give me a son or I go on strike, either you extend the time for the contest or I kill myself, I swear I will! I was living very happily with my boyfriend Leoncito and my job as a stenographer, you came and transformed me, now pay up, I’ll kill myself, I swear, and the chaps whipped against the ministerial carpeting like slaps.
Federico Robles Chacón painfully pulled himself back together again. He was in the SEPAFU Secretariat Building on Avenida Insurgentes, almost at the intersection with Viaducto, at the ill-named Insurgentes Bridge, fifteenth floor, private telephone number 515-1521, the place from which the Ayatollah Matamoros had observed the most terrible action in the life of FRCH (as the press called him), his having ordered the death of several thousand rioters (innocent? guilty? the system doesn’t judge, it concludes: you can’t fight the system, it is all of us, but it is more than all of us, not better, all of us with power, said Robles Chacón, trembling, he who considered himself a liberal man, on the left, humanitarian, enlightened, sensitive), and at his feet his creature, the Mother and Doctor of all Mexicans, who negated everything he thought about himself, kneeling, weeping, threatening to ruin all the symbolic ceremonies of the nation: FRCH thought of himself as a little Christopher (just like me!): in looking for the Orient, he fails and finds America; his success derives from his failure, his perception tells him the world is flat, but his intention tells him the world is round: someone else’s perception negates his visionary intention, but it is intention that triumphs.
Could that be true once again, here, tonight, with this serpent woman, this Cihuacóatl hugging his knees?
He stretched out his arms, tried to stand her up, rejected the vision that succeeded the one about Columbus: now the Minister of State’s perception told him that the country was flat and repetitive and that hell must be the same, everything repeats itself eternally in Mexico, the same cruelties and injustices, the same useless jokes that exorcise each other, the same stupidities, so it’s ultimately in stupidity repeated eternally where injustice and jokes blend and dissipate and become eternal.
Now all of it (the fatal perception of the country) was getting mixed up, the effect of the cause, the cause of the effect, with national planning: economics = fatalism. And a woman at his feet asking him for something that wasn’t economics and wasn’t fatality either …
FRCH felt overcome by the kneeling embrace that Mamadoc was bestowing on him, screw me or there’s no Cry: fornicate with me or there will be no contest, give me a son or give me death, come on, don’t be a fag:
What was better, to succumb to economics or to succumb to fatality? And suddenly my direct line was disconnected, my vision of that scene faded, and I was left without knowing what Federico Robles Chacón decided or what the ex-stenographer from the SEPAFU secretarial pool decided. But in this I shall from now on resemble you out there. Enjoy yourselves, your mercies, and remember that whatever you do, Minister Federico Robles Chacón and the Mother and Doctor of all Mexicans are going to be short of breath because the oxygen in the city is disappearing, consumed by the flames from the garbage …
You give them their destinies, svp! This novel belongs to you, dear Readers!
15
“I’m hungry!” Colasa Sánchez shouted again at dawn; my father opened his eyes and woke up from a long dream in which my mother appeared to him, always close and always (reach for her!) untouchable! no matter how
far my father stretched out his hands and repeated to himself: “I’m not worthy of her. Not yet. I have to deserve her.”
He’s a romantic, a knight errant. Colasa is hungry. Bubble Gómez pays no attention to Dad’s reasons. On the other hand, he does share with a trace of cruelty, her reasons. He knows that the reasons belong to all three of them, and that the dawn has overtaken them in a new landscape, as different from the uplands all consumed in fires and asphyxia as heaven is different from hell: here a rolling plain announced in the glare of the morning light its descent to the sea. The mists were lifting along the wide rivers, and the coconut palms, the lemon and orange trees, charmingly shook off the dew, indifferent to their fate at the hands of the Tropicana juice company; the warm breeze shakes the clothes left to dry on the red stone and the roof tiles shine as if varnished; the whitewashed façades of the houses, the smell of the early-morning coffee and papaya opened by machete, the pineapple and tamarind reach the most secret corners of the tongue and palate.
This is the albino driver’s supreme cruelty. Like Lucifer in the desert, he shows the pilgrims this temptation of sweet, tropical Veracruz, with its hint of the nearby Gulf and the Caribbean, where all the sweetness of life in the New World given by Columbus to Castile and Aragon is concentrated, between Cartagena de Indias and New Orleans, Havana and Campeche, Barbados and Jamaica: the prodigious cornucopia of red snapper, lobster, oysters, and swordfish; dyes, baroque pearls, and huge turtles.
And once he’s tempted them, Bubble Gómez says: “We’ll eat raw meat.”
He opens the rear doors of the trailer. A polar exhalation paralyzes their facial muscles. Bubble Gómez, used to it, does not flinch; he jumps into the icebox, similar to a bank vault, where the steers become visible, hallucinations dreamed, Uncle Fernando Benítez once said, by Soutine, red and skinned, their blood and fat congealed, decapitated, their hooves cut off, swinging on the black hooks: a red, white, and black world where the albino driver is totally at ease, choosing the steer he likes best, bored, whistling that old song about the old milch cow, and how, and how, until he raises an arm as white as the frost surrounding it, rose-colored like the dry blood of the beasts, and unhooks a peculiarly shaped steer, long and narrow, small in comparison to the others, but tasty, very tasty, says Bubble Gómez when the three of them kneel down around the skinned, decapitated animal, which has a metal band encrusted with frozen blood on its rear leg. That’s how they hang up this animal: the leg bracelet is connected to the frozen hook.
Bubble Gómez cuts off slices of raw meat, and Colasa looks interested in the metal bracelet, and Angel tries to be friendly, saying that all they need are these slices and some chiles, and nosy Colasa lifts the beast’s leg and reads the inscription on the bracelet
and she stops a second, closes her eyes, and eats quickly, while the driver comments as he devours the steer that it’s like eating steak tartar or beef sushi, or deer stew, or beef broiled creole-style, he knows about these things, tricks of the trade, and then goes back to singing: she ambles through the meadow, killing flies with her tail, tail, tail.
16. Why Are We in Veracruz?
The belly of the jungle is like my mother’s belly, mud and water, but why am I so happy where I am while this ghostly man runs flees wishes he could scream surrounded by the night and the luminous eyes shine as if they were imagining themselves seeing because they do not see in the dark seeing what they should imagine: running out of the jungle and occasionally looking back desperate running and always seeing how close the pyramid is in the jungle like a back projection gigantic in the distance.
Villa Cardel on the banks of the Chachalacas River has everything you could want for your vacation: Pepsi-Cola and Raleigh (ralley-rattle-railing) cigarette signs, mud streets and equally attractive mud-holes, an astonishing variety of insects an entire zoo walking around the streets freely amusing groups of black, ravenous pigs with raspberry-colored markings among the tightly packed antennas of TV CANTINAS, from which only half the citizens who enter ever leave alive abundant discotheques with tin roofs where you can dance to the latest hits of the Four Fuckups the best bordellos on the Gulf an everlasting unparalleled offering of pretty girls who came down from the mountains to give pleasure to the motley crew of white and black gringos in perpetual rotation never more than 179 days in Cardel troops from the Central American Army made up of Salvadorans and Hondurans trained by the gringos and also dark-skinned gringos Chicanos Puerto Ricans who aren’t noticed here in Veracruz and don’t have to be rotated in accordance with the law since they are identical to the little boys who show their swollen bellies and tiny penises among the shacks and alleys of Villa Cardel but the little boys don’t screw and the troops do with the sad whores down from the highlands in search of dollars whores up from Honduras when Operation Big Pine moved to Veracruz women from Panama Colombia Venezuela known as Contadora widows when the peace collapsed whores who came from the halls of Moctezuma and the shores of Tripoli suffering from IRS (Illnesses Related to Sex) who came here to give them to the gringos and their collaborators from Honduras and Salvador and saddest of all the Señoritas Butterfly from Veracruz the local ingenues seduced and abandoned with their children as green as the jungle blond like the golden eyes of the fallen Angel of Independence which my mother saw from close up the day of the earthquake always crying these hated, hateful children: at the entrance to Villa Cardel a hand-lettered, badly painted wooden sign that says in red letters: Now Entering Little Saigon, and beyond, a horizon made up of tents stained with oil and field-kitchen smoke, tortuous mud paths and mudholes abandoned jeeps helicopters that fell down for lack of fuel or screws dogs and on the promontory where the officers live the CAT HUTS with mosquito netting at the doors to let the rancid breeze in and to keep the insects, the bat shit, and the wild pig snouts out he never stops running while the back projection of the El Tajín pyramid grows and grows. The man shouts call me Will in order to get out of the jungle and enter a novel because he has forgotten that this jungle is in a novel in the same way that I, Christopher, am inside my mother’s belly OUCH! an extremely tall man bald but with a long mass of yellow ash cascading down the shoulders of his black leather jacket he plays bowls in a jungle clearing he has in his hand a wooden ball he throws it down an improvised path and the ball is going to smash against the pins set up on a platform of rough boards the ball does smash against the pins, which don’t fall but break into pieces under the impact of the wooden ball painted with white stars on a blue background call me Will. Will Gingerich running with no force left out of the jungle wanting to abandon forever the pyramid surprised by the permanently navy-blue sky of this night which is really day but he doesn’t know it under the shadow of the pyramid and the foliage woven like a wet overcoat over the jungle of Veracruz: Will Gingerich feels trapped inside the pyramid he cannot distinguish between open air and trapped air makes no distinction between stone and foliage.
NOW ENTERING LITTLE SAIGON: at the door of a one-story house painted indigo blue with a sign that says THE CELESTIAL EMPIRE a diminutive Oriental man with shaven temples an aroma of opium dressed in an anachronistic, suffocating Mao uniform is sitting in his straw rocker and fanning himself (his feet never touch the ground) while he shouts to and solicits the blond, dark, black soldiers from Detroit Mongoloids from Vermont Chicanos from Chicago Neoricans from Amsterdam Avenue disturbed violent homeless people recruited from the cities of the North Entel the most bootifull gills of the two seas, the Pacific and the Atrantic, await you he says fanning himself unhurriedly with no apparent sadness only his long yellow fingers clutching the fan as if it were a life preserver his eyes more veiled than ever as if once the light had disguised itself as fire because that day the sun just imagine that day the sun came up in the west … I Little Christopher in my mother’s belly
You, Reader
My enormous superhuman effort (I swear it) to listen to the OTHER in order to know myself to be UNIQUE
That day the sun rose in the west:
like an angel made of yellow ash and black leather, the tall man with watery eyes and square jaw, which he shaved every six hours so it would shine with a chrome-plated luster, his face is bluish and his cheeks metallic, a shiny gray: he wears a black shirt with a clerical collar and a black leather jacket and blue chinos combat boots two cartridge belts cross over his flat stomach and are held up by his hook-like hips, which are obscenely narrow, and from the cartridge belts hang hand grenades and from the man’s hand flies a ball decorated with the Stars and Bars and on the back of his jacket he wears his title: THE PRIEST OF DEATH The frightened eyes of a tiger in the jungle night two yellow medallions set in the foliage that covers the pyramid CAT HUTS is an acronym for Central American Tropical Habitat created for the War of the Isthmus and the invasion of Nicaragua during the eighties: their peculiarity is that they last only six months in the Central American climate and then they disintegrate: a cute way of suggesting that we get our job done in six months and get out no Vietnams a limit of six months to the campaign before the Nervous Nellies of Nebraska and the Anxious Aunties of Alabama go crazy seeing so much blood spilled right out of their TV sets onto the floors of their living rooms furnished by J. C. Penney’s seeing so many boys come home dead in black plastic body bags dead in the jungles of Veracruz all of it planned as a lightning campaign no need even to take into account troop movements governed by law number——which mandates giving official notice of troop movements only when those troops have remained more than 180 days in a single place and around here no one stays a minute more than 179 days so no one knows anything and nevertheless the number-one bestseller during the year 1992 in the United States is called Why Are We in Veracruz? by Norman Mailer the always energetic (sixty-nine years of age) Brooklyn-born author: Why does Norman Mailer dare to write this book? Why is he trying to dishearten the national effort to eradicate the Communist threat on our frontiers? Doesn’t Mailer believe in the domino theory? Doesn’t national security matter to Mailer? Or is he only interested in fame? Doesn’t he see the red tide rolling toward Harlingen, Texas, bringing with it the destruction of American youth by the Managua-controlled drug traffic? asked President Dumble Danger from his hospital room, where he was surrounded by plastic flowers and TelePrompTers. (The President was wearing a World War II paratrooper’s uniform, ready, as he said, for the final jump, and had a quilt over his legs, on which pious hands had embroidered his motto: GOD IS MY CO-PILOT.