Christopher Unborn (22 page)

As contradictory as our famous Uncle Homero?

Yes, but able to use language like a great poet. I think your father did that intentionally. It was his first attempt to overwhelm Uncle Homero and his world, and the way he did it was by refusing to concede Homero a monopoly on language, by using Quevedo—no less—to taunt Homero, Quevedo, who was just as opportunistic as Homero but who was saved by his poetic genius. Of course, your father's voice was not Quevedo's.

No, it was the voice of the world remembering Quevedo, and Quevedo remembering himself, immortalized and self-immortalizing a hundred, two hundred, a thousand years after his death. It was Ramón Gómez de la Serna calling him
the great Spaniard, the most absolutely Spanish Spaniard, the immortal bestower of tone—he who gave tone to the soul of our race,
it was César Vallejo calling him
Quevedo, that instantaneous grandfather of all dynamiters,
and it was Quevedo himself requesting a place in an academy of laughter and disorder, and calling himself
the child of his works and stepfather of other people's works, as short of sight as he was of luck, given to the devil, on loan to the world, and recommended to the flesh: with slit eyes and a slit conscience, black hair and black luck, long in the forehead and rather long-winded as well!
: the portrait of the poet Quevedo was identical to that of my father Angel disguised as Quevedo, when he finally revealed himself to my mother, but my father already had an answer, a suggestion, before she could say a word:

I looked at him for the first time, and he looked at me.

“You've got a halo, baby,” he said, touching my cheek.

“No, I never had a halo before.”

“I think you were born that way but that you never really saw yourself.”

“Maybe no one ever saw me that way before.”

Then a guy carrying a glass tower on his back bumped into us; then two playful kids came along. I didn't know if his disguise was in fact Quevedo's ghost. In the ugly bustle of Mexico City, who would know about such things. And yet they exist. Even though you've got to be a poet to know about them. Know about them? To
see
them even, because, as everybody knows, that's the beautiful thing about your father, Christopher. So of course I didn't sleep all that night, out of pure happiness. The devil took me away from Plato. Or maybe he put me more deeply into Plato. “We say it was or it is or it shall be, when in truth all we can say about things is that they are.”

The first thing I thought when I saw Angel disguised: he's Quevedo, if Quevedo had been handsome. Then I said to myself: Quevedo is handsome.

His name is Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, he lives with his grandparents, but now he has met me, and I am a woman who can't sleep because she's so happy she met him. But that night we went to the Café de Tacuba to eat
pambazos
and
chalupas,
as if we wanted to sink our roots deep in the earth because we were both flying like kites we were so excited at having seen our faces, saying to ourselves in secret:
This is how he looks; this is how she looks; this is he; this is she.

We left the café and in the freshly poured cement in front of the old Chamber of Deputies on Donceles Street, next to the house where the ancient widow of General Llorente and her niece Aura lived such a long time ago, we wrote out these words with our fingers. At the time, I had no idea they were your father's answer to the Fagoaga coat of arms, how the Fagoagas attack Goths and Moors, how Fagoagas never lose. Quevedo hovers over us. He's our poet.

It is burning ice, frozen fire,

a wound that pains but is not felt,

a dream of good, an evil right at hand,

a brief but tiring rest

.….

an imprisoned freedom

Then we heard the shouting, the whistles, the ratatatat, and the bombs, the boots running over the oldest cobblestones in Mexico, along that street now called Virgin Knights to the infinite confusion of Uncle H., who never did for the Castilian tongue what my Angel and I did to celebrate our meeting, leaving the signature of our love which cannot go beyond imprisoned freedom, and why bother deluding ourselves: we ran far away from the noise of the police, who could have been chasing us for having written a poem in the wet cement on Donceles, or perhaps they were chasing someone else for some other reason, but if they'd found us they would have grabbed us along with the rest (the rest? who are
the rest
in the Mexico of '92?), spreading their persecution without asking questions.

The supreme law was once again Shoot first, ask questions later.

How could I forget the first thing Angeles told me over our Benito Juárez telephone circuit?

“Let's never hurt each other. We're all here together.”

“We're invincible, baby.”

“I couldn't say anything more spontaneous or truthful. I could only tell you because I don't intend to be hurt by you. The others don't matter to me.”

We ran fleeing from a threat that was all too real and yet absent at the same time, the worst kind, the threat that can both be and not be, strike or not strike, ask questions or not: we certainly did not have to be born, she and I, in the sixties to know that in Mexico the law remains, nunc et semper, the whim of whoever happens to be holding power. We ran to Fat St. Mary, far from the solitude of Virgin Knights, where we were saved by homeless squatters, by kids asleep on top of the hot grilles covering the subway vents next to the brotherly pelts of dogs with bloody noses. So, who told you, Ixcuintli, to go around sniffing the pavement? Around here the stones burn, but you and I, Angeles, left a sonnet by Quevedo written on the hot palm of the cement, and repression, immutable, stopped at the frontier of darkness and silence.

“Tell me, what language will the child speak?

9

Things didn't just happen all by themselves: they met several times, they talked about why they were going to do what they were going to do, was it was only to try to fuck up Uncle Homero, who had sued Angel, confiscated his house and fortune, and had in all likelihood tried to suffocate Egg in his namesake in a botched attempt to suffocate his nephew? My mother Angeles asked all this when she met the group in order to find out what she was getting herself into. Then she added: “Would you be doing this if you didn't know Uncle Homero, if you didn't hate him?” Yes! And that was Angeles's first impression of the Four Fuckups:

She thought Hipi Toltec was disturbed, his eyes weepy because he had so much trouble falling asleep, which he did by counting Aztec gods instead of sheep, and because he lived within himself and his historical confusion: “La serpent-à-plumes, c'est moi,” but he had a strange notion of justice, clear and swift. At first she feared him, but eventually felt a tenderness for his mystery. She saw the Orphan Huerta pass from an unfocused resentment to a sensual enjoyment of the things that success brought when the Four Fs got famous for their renditions of Egg's ballads. The first thing she heard him say was: “I don't remember anything. I never knew my father or my mother.” The second thing she heard him say was: “We've only seen milk and meat in newspaper photos.” But after the success of “Come Back, Captain Blood,” the single was later reissued with the songs in the album
Take Control
and another single “That Was the Year,” and Orphan Huerta began to buy himself (wholesale) china-doll shoes, Guess jackets, and Fiorucci sweaters, calling them
my
china dolls,
my
Guess jackets … Angeles noted that Egg was observing his two comrades with compassion and understanding, although he reserved his glances of real tenderness for the invisible Baby Ba, to whom he dedicated his most loving expressions: precious girl, chubby girl, my lollipop with curls, how's my little birthday cake today? and other cute expressions Angeles caught him making up in flagrante. Embarrassed, Egg would say things to her such as: “Children should be sin but not hurt.” Or, blushing furiously: “I'm not crazy, miss; every once in a while my mind wanders, see?” But she began to realize that he was looking at her more and more as he made his cute remarks to the absent Baby Ba, that the more he looked, the more quickly he would avert his eyes or look in another direction if my mother caught him in the act. Or he'd start talking to Angel, the Orphan, and Hipi in English:

“Where you going?”

“I'll go in a while to the River Nile…”

“Have some fun…”

“Where's fun in Makesicko '91?”

“Madness is in the mind of the beholder”

“Madness is only a state of mind”

“Don't let your feelings show”

“Reward yourself!”

The band's first great hits emerged from this daily banter, and they went on to put together the thirty-million-copy-selling album
That Was the Year
in the same way. The Four Fuckups intended to debut the songs in that album at New Year's in Acapulco, where, to lay the groundwork for their apocalyptic disorder plans, they had allowed themselves to be hired by the famous French Marxist chanteuse Ada Ching for her floating discotheque, Divan the Terrible. My mother noticed that things gestate in the same way I'm going to gestate: art or a child, drop by drop, the only hair on opportunity's head is that long forelock we're supposed to grab, and to think that this hit song began when Uncle Homero F. (?) locked the fat boy in the egg, and then it gestated to the rhythm of these conversations and the band's comings and goings through the deteriorated city where only Angel had his own place but never invited his pals over so he wouldn't make them feel bad about it or so that he wouldn't bother his grandparents, who were by now quite old. The buddies had no place to live and no relatives, but Uncle Fernando lent them the living room in his house in Coyoacán and that's why they ended up involving him in their intrigue against Uncle Homero (Don Fernando didn't have to be begged, even though his mind was on the Indians up in the mountains and not on the tourists on the beaches) and with Benítez they planned their escape from Aca when … and with the Four Fs all the details of the destruction of the Babylon of Garbage. Angeles said nothing, Angeles only looked and tried to understand without compromising her language in the underground, carnivalized, cannibalized noise buzzing around her feminine mystery: like the Orphan, she had no past; like Hipi, she imagined herself unknown; like the Baby Ba, she thought she was invisible; like Egg, she feared she was mad; like Uncle Fernando, she aspired to be an instrument of justice, and, in her indignation at what she saw in Mexico, she felt like a composite of all of them, her comrades and friends (did she have others before? she didn't remember). At the same time, she felt strangely alienated from the man she came to love and with whom she slept in a sexual uproar; my mother tried to guess the reasons behind the terrible act they were preparing to commit at year's end in Aca. She listened to my father talk about the Sweet Fatherland, about the need for an exemplary act of cleansing, complete with biblical fury: Bye-bye Babylon, So long Sodom, Go, go Gomorrah, only a ninny could like Nineveh, So ciao to Baby, So, go, Ninny:

Babylon? You mean Baby Loan, since we've mortgaged our children's future. Of Babylon nothing remains: she looked at Angel and understood that the entire situation prior to her arrival, the crisis, the impotence, the rage, the corruption, the past, the youth—all of it was forcing Angel (explicitly), Egg (a bit less), Hipi and the Orphan (intuitively), to exorcise the demons, to upset the order, to humiliate the king, sweep out the garbage, find (Angel!) the Sweet Fatherland: Angel the postpunk, romantic, conservative who went from disorder to anarchy to the sadism of underdevelopment in order to find the utopia of the spotless fatherland: she would see him plunge into horror in order to destroy it; or would they be destroyed, he, she, all of them, by the horror which was indifferent to them?

These thoughts transformed my mother during the Acapulco ape-pick (simian and marine) into the most cautious and taciturn woman in the world; at times she thought she was going to win the Johnny Belinda deaf-mute contest, and, frankly, she could not foresee that her participation in the extraordinary events of the month of January would prove to be so tranquil. She would participate from now on in a silent dialogue in the hope that all of them (the band of buddies) would be able to speak together afterwards, and that triangular dialogue would go something like this:

ANGEL: I WANT ORDER

(FULLY KNOWING THAT NO ORDER WILL EVER BE SUFFICIENT)

EGG: I WANT FREEDOM

(FULLY KNOWING THAT I SHALL FAIL)

ANGELES: I WANT LOVE

(FULLY KNOWING THAT LOVE IS ONLY THE SEARCH FOR LOVE)

and that's why Angel marched toward disorder, Egg sought the commitment of the invisible by singing songs to the world, overcoming his inability to express himself fluently, and my mother Angeles kept silent in order not to reveal that perhaps she hated what she was doing.

“Besides,” my dad said to her, “if we succeed in fooling Uncle H., we might get the house of bright colors back. That's where I spent my childhood. I love the place. I'm sick of having to see you just now and again in your Uncle Fernando's house or in my coach house. I have to live with you all the time.”

He dressed her as Annie Hall (tweed jacket, man's tie, blue jeans), while he wore faded chinos, a Hopi shirt, and love beads. Both put on wigs of long, thick hair for their visit to Don Homero Fagoaga's penthouse on Mel O'Field Road. They were going to ask him if they could make peace and spend New Year's together in Acapulco.

My father had no real reason to be there, and Uncle Homero smelled a rat: he did, however, receive them. Just looking at them, he could see they were harmless. But just looking at my mother was all he had to do to suffer a shock: Don Homero Fagoaga's sexual fantasies were infinite, and my mother put him into such a state of erotic excitement that he became a stuttering teenager: