The life of the turkey vulture
is a wretched sort of life
All the year he flies and flies
his head as bald as a knife
insult me: slut! will you pull off my peplum, my chlamys, my fibula, strip me bare and help me with the homework? I’ve got such a pain right here, what could it be? I thought you might be sad—with nothing to do—screwing around as usual—as alienated as I am—jerking off, pig—on your way out, eating, sleeping, don’t you like me to visit you?—is it true that they told you that you told them to tell me?—I came over so you could tell me what you mean—got any dope?—could you introduce me into your sister?—I need bread, man—lend me a few rubbers—do you guys know of anyone who might need a fireworks expert for November 2? a paid insultant?—money, man? unless you have influence they won’t lend you any money at the bank, know any bank directors, Angelito?—lend me your comb—lend me your cock—wasn’t it you who had the recipe for those tamales wrapped in banana leaves?—lend me—lend me—could you call up—couldn’t you have an Equanil sent up from the pharmacy on the corner?—looks like the revolution starts tomorrow—the fascist coup—the military coup—the Communist coup—lay in lots of canned goods, Angel, let’s get to the state of siege right away—nail polish at the perfume counter, right?—where are those cold beers, bartender? what? are you turning cheapskate on us, what happened?—could you store my mint collection of Playboy for me: they just don’t understand at my place, ya know?—my collection of stuffed toys, Angelote, at my place, if my mom sees them, you know—could I leave my Toyota Super XXX here in your patio, Angel, at my place my dad is so strict, that stuff about moral renovation—capisc’—let me leave my valise here in case I take a trip—my collection of Almazán posters?—my Avelina Landín records?—my book of López Portillo’s favorite metaphors?—my collection of tops?
Between his sixteenth and his twentieth year the pests pestered him and the parachutists rained on him, as if the independence of his generation (which grew progressively more disciplined under paternal tutelage) depended on Angel in his house, from which it was possible to see the Angel of Independence on Paseo de la Reforma. It was as if that were the price of the unsettled, excited twenty years of death, repression, opening, reform, triumph, collapse, and austerity in which Angel and his friends had the good fortune to be born and grow up: they saw their own coming-of-age postponed again when they were between eighteen and twenty-two and the effective control of their parents extended and strengthened to a degree worthy of the most severe household of the prerevolutionary Porfirio Díaz era—until, thought my father Angel, privileged spectator that he was, the time for the inevitable reaction came, the helplessness, solitude, escape, and nomadism that began after the Disaster of 1990.
But one might also say that the very illusion of liberty depended on Angel’s isle of autonomy, on that and something else: as if the eventual resurrection (oh, vain illusion!) of the moribund city, where by now all the worst prophecies about it come true, without anyone’s ever having raised a finger to stop them, depended on the wobbly survival of Colonia Juárez, the only urban oasis that still maintained a certain veneer of civilization. In the ears of Angel, in the ears of his genes, and in the ears of his descendants in limbo, there rumbles the sound of filthy water, pumped in and out, pestilential, a gigantic parallel to the beats and vulnerabilities of his own heart.
In the coach house on Calle Génova, my father found himself alone with a mountain of garbage and the conviction that nothing—really nothing—of all that was piled up there was worthy of being saved: the magic of the marketplace, as President Ronald Ranger liked to say, at the outset of the odious eighties, saved nothing: it destroyed everything, while making people believe that the garbage deserved to remain. And the worst thing is that Angel could not or would not get rid of the mountain of detritus that threatened to bury him in his own cave. He wouldn’t deprive himself of that most eloquent testimony to the era he was honored to live through: the monument of scrap, vinyl, and old hair. Hitler’s evil genius consisted in offering to the times in which we lived its most truthful prognostication—the mountains of enslaved objects from Auschwitz. Who didn’t have his innocent Auschwitz in an attic, a coach house, a medicine chest, a trunk, or in his own back yard?
Thus it was that my father Angel, when he reached his twentieth birthday, one before by law what he had inherited from his deceased parents, the inventors, should be handed over to him, he came to the full realization that having grown up in a world that was proudly conservative in its economics, both in its principles and in their application, in reality he had grown up in a world of junk and economic anarchy. The truth had been a lie, and realizing it offended him greatly.
This afternoon of my creation, my genes and chromosomes begin to talk as if my life depended on language more than on the fortuitous meeting of semen and egg: listening to my father and mother speak immersed in the sea which is the cradle of life, the unique refrigerator in the burning world that incinerated all forms of life in the universe except those that took refuge and developed underwater and left, I tell you with perfect certainty, the primitive ocean inside every one of us, floating eternally in a certain sense in saltwater, because the problem, your mercy the reader should know, is not to dry out. Never, under no circumstance: if you dry out you die, like a fish without scales, a bird without feathers, or a pup without fur: pity the person who tends not the savage ocean he bears within him because it’s the only thing left to him from two overlapping creations: that of the world and that of the child. I say this because I feel that my parents are speaking one afternoon from within the Pacific Ocean, about another ocean of dust: a city they will, I suppose, bring me to someday, since they talk so much about it, think about it so much, predict so many things about it, and fear it so much. For example: “Look, Angelito,” his (mine, mighty, mymighty?) Grandpa General Rigoberto Palomar said to him, “the Drainage Sewer was built by Don Porfirio Díaz in around 1900 at a level lower than the city’s at that time. But now the city has sunken in its swampy bed and the sewer is higher than our shit. Now it costs millions to pump day in day out so that the shit rises to the level of the sewer and flows away. If they stopped pumping for two minutes, Mexico City would be flooded with poop.”
3
Angel put up with everything until the day when a pest of a different nature joined the crowd. A tall, robust, dark, mustachioed young man with the eyes of one of the guerrilleros photographed by Casasola drinking chocolate in Sanborn’s in the Year of Our Lord 1915. I see him now: I’d seen him in the halls of alma mater, HEROES OF 1982, walking as if he’d spent his life pushing the cannon in the Zacatecas campaign, with his gorilla-like shoulders: invisible cartridge belts crossed his chest, an invisible, blackened straw hat covered his big head: anyone who did not avert his eyes ran the risk of meeting him in person and getting demolished. His name was Matamoros Moreno.
“What can I do for you, bro’?” asked Angel, opening the door, his ability to be surprised having early on been eradicated. An ear of green corn in mole rolled from the inside of the house toward the street.
“Remember me?”
“Who could forget you?”
“Do you mean that?” He bared tremendous teeth as he gazed with unfeigned lust at the pile of deflated condoms and dried-out Kotex behind Angel. “Bet you can’t remember what my name is.”
“Petero Palots,” said my dad with insouciance, not so much out of irreverence but simply because he was unconscious of the danger.
“Whadya mean?” grunted Matamoros Moreno.
“Listen, man,” answered my pop, “it’s not good manners to knock on someone’s door and then ask the guy who answers if he remembers your name ten years after having been in the same class with you and two hundred other assholes, staring at the map of the country while the son of a bitch of a teacher spent most of the class calling the roll. The only thing I remember is that he took sixty minutes to get from Aguilar to
Zapata by way of your humble serviette Palomar y…”
“Moreno,” grunted the visitor, while my father, after a mnemo-technical shove like that, saw once again the map of the Republic before its current shrinkage (the country abbreviated during the disaster of 1990!), and the light bulb went on in his head.
“Tabasco Moreno.”
“Too far south.”
“Jalisco Moreno,” suggested my father timidly.
“Farther north,” said Moreno melancholically.
“Sonora Moreno.”
“O, it ends in o,” he said, this time almost begging for recognition. “Even by name I’m macho, Palomar.” He looked toward some false eyelashes someone had stuck on a mannequin head and forgotten there.
“Of course,” exclaimed my young father, “of course, who could forget that name: Matamoros Moreno. You just caught me off-guard. Now, what can I do…?”
Before he could finish the sentence, Matamoros managed to put one foot between the door and the jamb. “He won’t jamb me,” my father said to himself. “Enough is enough.” But this orangutan was scaring him.
“Don’t get all bent out of shape, Palomar,” said the big guy, now blinking one of his tiger eyes through the partially open door and speaking in a voice that was so sweet my father felt ashamed of himself.
“Don’t get upset, coward. Don’t try to evaporate on me,” he added quickly with a ferocity that convinced my father that his decision to make it difficult for Matamoros to get in was sound.
“Don’t get upset, chum,” Matamoros said after a bit, in a voice that shook my dad’s soul and confirmed his worst fears.
Later he said to himself that he had always feared the day someone would ask him for an opinion about a literary text. He was well known as a reader in HEROES OF 1982. He could recite Quevedo. He quoted Montaigne. He was a fan of López Velarde. He had access to the vast library that belonged to his scientist parents. His Quevedian motto was: Nothing surprises me. The world has bewitched me. But that it should turn out to be Matamoros Moreno who would turn over his first literary efforts to him, who would ask for his sincere opinion, who would assure him that he had admired him from a distance in HEROES OF 1982 as the most highly cultured boy in their class, the most avid of readers … My father sat down among his empty bottles, his bicycle wheels, his squashed cardboard boxes, and his collections of alien porn, to read the literary efforts of his fellow student Matamoros Moreno.
The reader is cordially invited to fill the virgin page following with his own version of Matamoros Moreno’s text, read by my father that afternoon when he was twenty years old. The only hints about it are some statistics: Matamoros says “heart” twenty times; “tumescent flesh” and “maculate flesh” appear eighteen times each; fifteen times he exclaims “Holy Mother,” attributing to this fertile lady eleven times the expression “white hair” and only ten “little mop of cotton”; there are fourteen “blazing shines,” thirteen lives scattered among rosebushes, and twelve mad passions; only four coral lips appear in this census.
Angel’s first reaction was to laugh. But three things stopped him.
The first was that in Chapter 2, as if to arouse obligatory applause, Matamoros said only:
THERE’S NO COUNTRY LIKE MEXICO, DON’T YOU AGREE?
This attempt at demagoguery was strengthened by Chapter 3, which proclaimed in lapidary tones:
SHE DID IT FOR NO OTHER NATION
The proclamation of the Virgin of Guadalupe added religious terrorism to patriotic terrorism, my dad had objected. The great thing about Matamoros was that his zenith was also his nadir, his alpha was also his omega: his peak was down below; there was no fall, just as there was no ascent; his sentences were the high point of a gorge, never the low point of a ridge.
But the third, the real problem was telling him all this.
Or letting him know indirectly.
Matamoros, of course, had given him no address: he said he’d be back next week. The mail didn’t work anymore, who didn’t know that? My father calculated that a week for Moreno would be exactly one week, and when the seventh day after the Matamoorish visit came around, he hung the manuscript in a manila envelope on the outside doorknob, along with a “Very interesting” note.
He heard Matamoros Moreno’s unmistakable footsteps at three o’clock in the afternoon, the precise hour at which the seventh day came to an end. He pressed his ear to the door without breathing. He heard the rustle of papers. Then the long, jailhouse footfalls going into the distance. He opened the door to see if the coast was clear. Not a trace of Matamoros, but the manuscript was still hanging from the doorknob. Matamoros had appended a note to my father’s note: “What’s very interesting? I’ll be back tomorrow at the same time. Do a better job. And don’t try to jerk me around.”
My father spent a restless night. To mock Matamoros would be to put himself in physical danger. So my father Angel spent his morning between fear and mockery, mockery and fear: Matamoros Moreno was laughable; he was also to be feared. What was to be done with this supreme invader of the impossible private life of Angel Palomar y Fagoaga?
He was on the verge of asking his Grandfather Rigoberto Palomar for advice. But he did that only on the most important occasions, when there was clearly no way out. His grandfather would expect more agility from him, a more fertile imagination. It was an unwritten agreement between them. Besides, what was Angel going to do at three that his grandfather would or would not do at two or four?
At exactly three, Matamoros materialized. “Well, what did you think of my work?”
“It provokes digressive flights.”
“Whadya mean?”
“I mean that the metaphysical transposition, taking control of the signifying practices, ultimately modifies all the prosodic and morphologic instances, eventually hastening the triumph of the linguistic eros, itself related to the fungous and fusive homophony of the homologous.”
Matamoros Moreno stared severely at my father. “Cantinflas couldn’t have put it better, bro’.”
He looked with paleolithic irony toward the interior of the coach house, as if he could read the stacks of love letters written by other people and take the rust off the abandoned motorcycles. “Tomorrow I’ll be back for a serious opinion, Palomar. Remember, three strikes and you’re out.”
Off he went, dragging his chain, pushing his cannon. My father leaned back, cursing all classmates, from the beginning of time. Because of fear and laughter he could not sleep: his nightmares about Matamoorish violence were interrupted by attacks of insane laughter as he remembered the most singular sentences penned by his classmate. Three strikes and you’re out, warned his old school chum (may God protect us from them!), so here we go. But if he didn’t have the guts to laugh right in his face and tell him, look, Matamoros, your prose is an exercise in involuntary humor; or the courage to say, look, Matamoros, your prose is shit, then at least he’d have the valor to confront this unforeseen nemesis a third and possibly last time. Neither scorn nor fear. Let’s see what happened.
Matamoros Moreno was right on time when Angel Palomar opened the front door for him. My father could imagine Matamoros from head to toe, but he didn’t imagine him with anyone else: no, Matamoros didn’t need protection; he was his own bodyguard, clearly. Nor did Angel imagine he’d be with a woman, even if the woman provided another kind of protection or blackmail—how could Matamoros do that to him! No, not that. But yes, yes that. Except that the woman was an eleven-year-old girl. Dark, plump, dressed in pink, with tresses, bangs, dimpled cheeks, and black little eyes—Shirley Temple translated into Mexican.
“My daughter. Illegitimate, of course. I couldn’t leave her alone. Thursdays the day care is closed. Sorry. Her name is Colasa. Short for Nicolasa. I don’t like Nicolasita. So it’s Colasa. Kiss the nice man, honey.”
Moist, sticky, chocolatey, bubble-gummy, aromatic kiss. My father confesses he collapses—yesterday, today, and tomorrow—in the presence of girls between three and thirt
een years of age. Defenseless. Victimized. Against Colasa Moreno he was nothing.