Christopher Unborn (60 page)

“Help me get my halo back, buddy. Don't you see it went out on me?”

That's how August began: the step toward the eighth month of my gestation.

13

Dear Reader, you may remember that in the month of March Angel and Angeles saw the Chilean bolero singer Concha Toro on one of the National Television Contests, presenting herself as the Last Playboy Centerfold, and that in June Egg went to interview her at the Simon Bully Bar to request the services of her Home-Delivery Theater, which participated—with what disastrous results, we all know—in Penny López's Sweet-Sixteen Party. The reader may also recall that Angel refused to do that chore because Concha had taken his virginity sometime during the mid-eighties at the solemn insistence of Grandfather Rigoberto Palomar (a revolutionary general at age fifteen), who could not tolerate the idea of having a virginal fifteen-year-old grandson in his house.

Since the Four Fuckups did not want personal matters interfering in their apocalyptic projects (perennially frustrated, as your lordships fully realize), Egg went to see the dear lady, but Concha Toro's appearance, her fame, and her life story impressed him so much that he blurted out that he'd been sent by Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, did she remember him?

“Of course I remember him, such a well-hung kid, remembered his name just like that, step right in, son, place's a mess, I know, but last night we, uhh, had a little fight with the cops, you know, and the police almost locked us up. But there's wine, and avocados, and peaches and white jam left over, so just help yourself. No one ever called Concha Toro a cheapskate, especially when a hungry poor boy like you turns up. The question is, what are you hungry for, son?”

She asked that last question with a lowering of her eyes that had driven several (though, it must be admitted, recent) generations of senior citizens wild in the velvet basement of the Simon Bully Bar, the entrance to which, a long, smooth red tunnel, was like a velvety, deep vagina—not unlike that of Concha herself.

Egg looked her up and down: she wasn't what she used to be, and if she was never really a knockout—her real charm was her coquettish Chilean savvy, not her beauty—she was not really faded either: she was a strange palimpsest in which all the stages of her life coexisted in a kind of transparent simultaneity: Concha Toro! Née María Inez Aldunate Larraín y Cruchaga Errázuriz in Chillán, Chile, the night of the terrible earthquake of 1939, which destroyed the city and sank half the coast, from Concepción to Puerto Montt, into the Pacific. She grew up in the shadow of Siqueiros's murals in the school the Mexican government donated to Chile after the disaster: the powerful white and black punches delivered by the native heroes Cuauhtémoc and Galvarino made a profound impression on her tender aristocratic mind. At school she saw revolution and melodrama, while on her father's estate she saw reaction and drama: agriculture in southern Chile was the last refuge of her family, which had prospered early on, in the days when Chile was exporting nitrates, a business that covered late-nineteenth-century Santiago with mansions and the resort cities of Viña and Zapallar with chalets; nitrates paid for trips to Europe and wild spending sprees. The bubble burst in 1918, when the Germans invented synthetic nitrates, but the family managed to save the estate from the general economic collapse. So off they went, to do to the peasants what they'd already done to the nitrates: exploit them. The difference was that they couldn't export peasants. How María Inez laughed when the ineffable President Wrinkle Wrecker requested that the United States export farmers and keep the harvests at home! That's exactly what the Aldunate Larraín y Cruchaga Errázuriz family would have wanted to do, but who would have wanted to buy these flea-bitten scum, shitasses, drunks, thieving rats, with no balls whatsoever! Don't make me laugh!

María Inez resolved her conflicts by giving herself at the age of fourteen to a well-hung peasant boy—as well hung as my father Angel Palomar, I suppose—with the improbable name Randolph Pope. She immediately crossed the Andes at Puente del Inca, went to Mendoza, and from there to Buenos Aires, where this highly intelligent Chilean girl quickly got the lay of the land, changed her name to Dolly Lama and won a tango contest singing with Aníbal (“Dicky”) Troilo; she read Borges's
Other Inquisitions,
disguised herself as Miriam Hopkins in
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde:
perfumed and platinum-haired, she was able, one night in the Armemonville pavilion, to seduce Jorge Borges, the blind guardian of the fragrant clove that a young Patagonian maiden stole from Magellan's circumnavigating ship in 1521 and instantly hid in what elegant Buenos Aires gentlemen used to call “la leure de sa nature”: María Inez, alias Dolly, obtained the famous fragrant clove of Magellan in exchange for a sensational screw with Borges, and armed with the Illustrious Clove and the Illustrious Blind Man, she was proclaimed Priestess of Sexual Ultraism in a ceremony held in the Ateneo Bookstore. Immediately afterwards she accompanied the writer to Memphis, Tennessee, where the author of
The Universal History of Infamy
asked the poet Ossing (probably a descendant of Ossian) to lead him into the waters of the Mississippi—up to the ankles—and then give him a drink of Mark Twain's river. Dolly felt she'd done her duty as far as Latin American literature was concerned when she overcame the stupefaction of the citizens of Memphis, who were astonished to see a river of industrial waste and wet garbage pass by, by offering old Georgie a glass of Coca-Cola, which the Illustrious Blind Man drank slowly, interjecting from time to time: “Ambrosia, ambrosia!”

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:

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.