Christopher Unborn (19 page)

One February day, my father Angel attended a session of the Academy of the Language presided over by my Uncle Homero Fagoaga. He was dressed up like Francisco de Quevedo (it was the first time he wore the disguise in public). He listened politely to Don Homero's speech in honor of the newest member of the Academy, the gongorhythmic poet J. Mambo de Alba, listened to Mr. Mambo's sublime nonsense—he praised the crisis because it enclosed Mexico within itself and kept out foreign books, movies, art, and ideas. Now we were to scratch ourselves with our own nails! To read Proust is to proustitute oneself! To read Joyce is to make a poor choice! Reading Gide is doing a bad deed! Valéry is the valley of the shadow of evil! Mallarmé is marmalade! E. E. Cummings—well! He should be condomed! Let's hear it for Tlaquepaque, coffee with cinnamon, serapes from Saltillo, Michoacán pottery, let's head structuralism off at the pass, forget nouvelle cuisine and postpunkrock, let's be like Ramón López Velarde, who, nourishing himself exclusively on the Revolution, with no foreign readings or fashions, found the essence of the Sweet Fatherland. It was the reference to López Velarde that aroused my father Angel's rage. He'd always imagined his favorite poet wearing out his eyes looking for and finding and reading Baudelaire and Laforgue, while the colorless (but not odorless) poet and academician celebrated the dearth of imported books, the closing of the cultural borders, all so we could scratch ourselves with our own nails! Impetuously, Angel leapt up from his seat, went to the podium, and grabbed both his uncle and the poet by their noses. While he twisted one nose with each hand, he declared to the stupefied audience the things he'd just said here:

I SEEK A NATION IDENTICAL TO ITSELF

I SEEK A NATION MADE TO LAST

NOTHING THAT DOESN'T LAST FIVE CENTURIES

FATHERLAND, ALWAYS REMAIN THE SAME

FAITHFUL TO YOUR OWN REFLECTION:

LONG LIVE ALFONSO REYES! MEXICAN LITERATURE WILL BE GREAT

BECAUSE IT'S LITERATURE NOT BECAUSE IT'S MEXICAN!

and my father forced everyone there, beginning with the uncle and the poet, to breathe onto a mirror:

“I knew it. You're all dead. I will not bestow the conservative tradition on a gaggle of exquisite corpses.”

He was very young. He mixed his metaphors. He was sincere. He didn't know if his anarchic whims, outlandish jokes, and premeditated disorder would give him the key to happiness: Sweet Fatherland!

6

In these annals of a wonderful life prior to my conception (which makes me wonder if I'll be lucky enough to find something amusing in my intrauterine life and—and even this I don't dare hope for—later on), my father returned in February 1991 from Oaxaca, transformed, even though he still didn't know it.

He went on leading his bachelor's life, protected by his Grandparents Rigoberto and Susana. He still hadn't found my mother and took up again with an old girlfriend named Brunilda, a great big sexy girl, lively and sentimental, with eyes like limpid pools and the mouth of a clown.

He was not faithful to her, nor she to him. And they both knew it. But he had never asked her to have a drink in the Royal Road Hotel bar along with one of his other girlfriends. She, on the other hand, enjoyed those collisions between rivals, allowing the two gallants to stare each other down like two polite basilisks while she chewed on the fringe of her ash-blond hair and observed them from the depths of her twin pools.

“So you think you're terribly liberated, eh?” she would say, making catty faces from time to time. “So you think you're terribly civilized, eh? A pair of little English gentlemen, is that it?”

Photos and letters from the rival accidentally left on Angel's bed.

Now they were all together in the VIPS in San Angel, the afternoon of Thursday, February 28, 1991, neutral territory where they could explain all these things. Angel yawned. He shouldn't have done it: life in Mexico City contains more surprises than any yawn imaginable deserves.

In the ecumenical and inexhaustible taxonomy of Mexican pests, Angel gave a high place to professional wives: these women feel it's their job to promote their husbands twenty-four hours a day, to see to it that they are invited to elegant dinners, to castigate verbally any misguided critics of their divine consorts, and to imagine cataclysmic snubs provoked by the envy of others. But above all, the professional wife feels authorized to cash checks, an activity without which anything else she did would be meaningless.

Among the members of this subspecies for whom Angel felt special revulsion was Luminosa Larios, wife of the millionaire magazine impresario Pedrarias Larios, and it was not without a tremor of fatal anticipation that he saw her sit down at two in the afternoon on that same day at one of the tables in the VIPS.

No sooner did Luminosa Larios lay eyes on my father Angel than she obliterated any imaginable possibility for the couple sitting there to air out their problems. Luminosa always acted as if there were two people in the world: she, the quasi-ecclesiastical representative of her Genial Husband, and the person privileged to hear her revelations. She now began to enumerate these glories, stretching her hand with its voracious green nails toward Angel's shoulder: her husband Pedrarias had just opened—simultaneously—twenty-four gas stations in the Nations of North America,
The New York Times
had published an article by Tom Wicker in which he compared Pedrarias with early Hearst or late Luce or murky Murdoch, she didn't remember quite the way it went now (she scratched the air with her green claws so that the gold charms on her bracelets would tinkle more musically). Pedrarias had a cameo in the new Pia Zadora film, Pedrarias was received by President Donald Danger, Pedrarias may have earned seven hundred million pesos last year, but he still has a social conscience, and emblazoned across the cover of his magazine
Lumière:
SOLIDARITY WITH THE SUBJUGATED PEOPLES OF THE FOURTH WORLD VICTIMS OF THE OIL IMPERIALISM OF THE THIRD WORLD.

“What a whirlwind! What publicity!” exclaimed Luminosa in satisfied tones. “But even my husband has his limits: even though they've asked him repeatedly, he would never do the ads for those Cuban heels made by Rising Star Shoes. I mean, really! Where do they get off, making up stuff like that? It came out in some two-bit paper published in Mexamerica that nobody reads; here's the article and some other interesting clippings. Next year my husband's book comes out, an exciting, stupendous confession entitled
Epic of a Paranoid Hick in Paris.
We deny completely that we've been evicted from seven different apartments for not paying the rent, the telephone bill, or for fixing the broken furniture. And it was our enemies who made up that lie about our using towels to wipe our asses. Nothing but lies!” shouted Luminosa, bright red and cross-eyed.

With growing excitement, the lady began to pass around catalogues, posters, press clippings, photocopies of checks, magazine covers on which she appeared wearing a bikini, as if the fame and merits of her husband depended now and forever on them. The printed matter flew over Brunilda's head, messing her hair and annoying her, as her cat-like eyes showed. Then the words settled in the tortilla soup the couple were eating. And amid this avalanche of luminous publicity, Luminosa took the opportunity to mention, as if in passing, this bit of news, which changed my father's life:

“Oh yes, Angelito, I just found out that your Uncle Don Homero has disinherited you or something like that.”

My father Angel did not know what to take care of first: Tom Wicker's article floating in his tortilla soup, Brunilda's horribly fulminating and disappointed stare, or Doña Luminosa Larios's infinitely hypocritical smile, fixed on her face as she cocked her little head to one side as an invitation to middle-class approval. Her Gorgon eyes were bulging because no quantity of scalpels doing any quantity of plastic surgery could erase those crow's-feet that looked like quotation marks between which she eternally recited her husband's deeds. She dripped joy at the sight of someone suffering.

The lady resolved my father's dilemmas by sensually stretching her arm, wrapped in an atrocious blouse of violet crepe, and resting her sympathetic face on one of her wrists ablaze with jewels. “Don't forget to come over at the usual time, now,” she said, withdrawing her hand just before Angel could touch it, and then proceeding to play peekaboo with her napkin.

Brunilda gave my father a look of double warning that he could read easily because she said everything with looks: “You're not only ruined financially, but you publicly two-time me with this parrot who seems to have escaped from the Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

Angel got up with his bowl of soup in his hands and emptied all of it—checks, clippings, and catalogues—over Doña Luminosa Larios's head. Brunilda got up impetuously, her mouth wide open.

“It's a frame-up! This lady is making up a romance!”

“Don't you dare follow me,” she said to Angel. “I've got lots of options. This one just died.”

For two weeks he didn't see her. Of course, he was not deprived of female companionship, since there were lots of girls eager for pleasure, especially the pleasure of escaping from the plague of their families.

“I'll tell you what's goin' on with this 'flation,” one of these bonbons summarized. “There's no jobs and no megabucks, so we all gotta stay home, Angel baby, the power elite is takin' it out on us women, man, ya'oughtta see, they've got us back in their Tyrone Power.”

“Who's got the power?” asked my dad at the door, as always inventing useless passwords to protect his chaste and pure dwelling, knowing full well that pirating music and videotapes was the hottest business in town, especially because the city lacked both entertainment and contact with the outside world. Seeing old movies on videocassettes was the supreme form of entertainment in the Mexico of the nineties.

“Who's got the power?”

“Mischa Auer,” answered a cinephilic teenybopper's voice. There was nothing left to do but open the door and fall into the Felliniesque arms of María de Lourdes, María Cristina, Rosa María, María Concepción, Maricarmen, or María Engracia.”

“Who's got the air?”

“Fred Astaire, baby.”

“Who's got the marbles?”

“Greta Garbles.”

“Who set the table?”

“Esther Fernández.”

He didn't open the door.

Brunilda didn't know this new set of passwords, so she never got Behind the Green Door to Deep Trope. She telephoned, but the mythomaniacal yet astute Grandmother Susana happily sent Angel on a hypothetical one-way trip to Chile. Next came letters, some love letters, some despair letters, but all unanswered letters. Brunilda was torn apart by the anxieties of sex and vanity, emotions both linked and compulsive, to say nothing of her horrible suspicion about a future devoid of inheritance.

Because one fine morning Grandfather Rigoberto Palomar appeared in my father Angel's coach house with a ream of documents, turned a blind eye to the naked piece of ass who squealed as she went to get dressed (later she complained to Angel that Grandpa had caressed her ass), and confirmed to him that Uncle Homero Fagoaga, as the documents stated it, had brought suit against his nephew Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, accusing him of being a spendthrift, irresponsible, and incapable of administering the estate of forty million gold pesos which, according to the last will and testament of his deceased parents, he was to have inherited on his twenty-second birthday—the new age for adulthood, according to the law, which Angel would reach on July 14, 1991.

Angel understood the shrug and the challenging expression on his grandfather's face: one meant fatalism, the other meant freedom, a mixture appropriate to an old man as wise as this one, who was always saying to his grandson that even though he could help him—although now there was little he could do, true enough—Angel ought to use his imagination and his own resources.

“But you know so much, Grandfather.”

“No matter how much I know, I am not your age and I can't sniff out everything you can. Your intuition is definitely better than my knowledge.”

Freedom is everything, everything, Angelillo, said the old man, handing him the documents. Even fatalism, he said, is a way of being free. Sometimes our will is not enough, see? if we don't know that things can go wrong for no good reason. Then we aren't free. We're deluded. You can count on my support, but manage your affairs freely, with imagination, and without fear, Angelillo.

Angel had been going out with Brunilda for quite a while and preferred ending a relationship which had no more to it than a pleasure which, if solid, was always the same. The additives Brunilda used to try to diversify normal sexuality—unilateral jealousy, inopportune encounters with other occasional lovers, letters from one boyfriend left for no good reason in the bed of another—wore Angel out: a romantic relationship was nothing if it wasn't a means whereby one man could be set aside from all the rest. Brunilda imbued all her relationships with analogies in order to avoid the harmony of tedium; her diversions frustrated Angel's romantic intentions.

Three weeks after the break with Brunilda, my father, on a whim, decided to go out on the town in disguise. He put on a toga and a Quevedesque mustache and walked unnoticed by anyone from Calle Génova to Río Mississippi, where traffic was heavier. There a boy of unusual whiteness (accentuated by his shiny pitch-black hair) was putting on a spectacular performance of bullfighting with cars and trucks; his agility momentarily disguised his thick, soft body and the fact that he resembled nothing so much as a pear.

Angel, for his part, watched with openmouthed admiration as the boy executed a twirl around a bloody-minded taxi, a left feint in front of an irate heavy truck driven by an albino in black glasses, a rapid-fire series of veronicas in the face of a ferocious squad of motorcyclists. But when the fat young man posed on his knees in the path of a Shogun limousine without license plates but with darkened windows—which accelerated down the wide street as soon as it saw the boy on his knees—Angel leapt to rescue the erstwhile torero and dragged him to safety.