“Colasa Sánchez, sorry, after her mother. I’m not sexist. Why should she have to carry around a man’s name all her life, first her father’s and then her husband’s? Let her have her own name, her mother’s name, right?”
Angel my father was about to say that a woman always has a man’s name, whether it’s her mother’s maiden name (a father’s name, after all) or her father’s name, so that the name of Colasa’s mother was her grandfather’s name, but …
“So what’s the story with my stuff, buddy?”
Vanquished, my father was obliged to say that it was an unusual example of poetic prose: the pitfalls of sentimentality had been avoided with skill and intelligence; it was difficult to communicate more beautifully a feeling of so much filial goodness. Wasn’t it Dostoevsky who said when he outlined the theme of The Idiot, WHAT?; no, that’s the title of a Russian novel, okay? OKAY, get on with it man, I like what you’re telling me, like it a lot, Colasa likes it too, doncha honey: yes Daddy, the nice man really is nice and very intelligent, right Daddy?: groan of agony from Angel Palomar: “It wouldn’t be unworthy of an anthology of this kind of writing.”
“Well, see about getting it done.”
“Getting what done, Matamoros?”
“Getting it published, man. I’ll be back tomorrow at the same time. Come on now, Colasa. Say thank you to the nice man. Thanks to his help, we’re going to get rich and famous, kid. And something better: we’re going to be happy. You’re a good guy, Palomar.”
As if her father were a prompter, Colasa Sánchez started to sing:
My heart’s delight’s this little ranch
Where I live content
Hidden among the mountains blue
With rainbows heaven sent.
It was difficult to get him out without actually shoving him through the door, without seeming impolite, assuring him that tomorrow was another day, they’d see for sure, of course, the famous anthology, yes, ha ha ha, the girl singing happy ranch, my little nest, with honeysuckle scent …
He didn’t flee from Matamoros Moreno and his daughter Colasa Sánchez out of physical fear of such fearsome characters or because of any moral fear of telling them the truth or out of psychic fear of his desire to laugh at them: my father took the bus to Oaxaca that afternoon of his twentieth year in the month of November out of the purest compassion: so they wouldn’t suffer. How could he have imagined that that damned Matamoros had left his daughter Nicolasita (it was an annoying nickname!) standing guard on the corner near his grandparents’ house?
Night and day, obviously, since the snot-nose was sitting on her haunches in front of a country-style ministore, as if she were on strike, with a lantern for night work, a black and red flag, and a pot of smoking beans. The simple child was hugging an ancient, moth-eaten doll of the charro Mamerto, a character my father recognized from a collection of comics someone had left in his coach house.
No sooner did she see my father than Colasa let out a shout, threw the charro with his huge black mustaches aside, and pointed her finger at my dad:
“Stop him! Stop him! The shameless rascal is fleeing! The scoundrel is going back on his word! Stop him! In the name of heaven and justice, I implore you not to abandon a poor girl! Stop him! The coward is fleeing, stop the knave!”
Horrified, my father ran like the devil toward Paseo de la Reforma, not even stopping to greet the statue of Don Valentín Gómez Farias, as was his custom, not even blowing a kiss to the Angel of Independence. He boarded a taxi and left poor Colasa behind, weeping, her tresses standing on end. When he reached Oaxaca thirty hours later, my father was so nervous that he walked into the Church of San Felipe Neri to take Communion for the first time since he abandoned the house of the Fagoagas. He looked with the sweetest serenity at the church made—my genes swear it to me—of golden smoke. Of course, how was he to know that, expelled by the language of Matamoros Moreno, he would find in Oaxaca his own language, as a kind of faith, as a quasi-madness, and above all as an act of conscience.
He realized in that moment of peace that never in his life had he left the boundaries of the Federal District: his horizon had always been that of the valley trapped among mountains, among the steepest slopes of the tropics, and under a sheet of cold air: the least intelligent, least provident city, the most masochistic, and suicidal, most stupidly stupid city in the history of the world. He left it thinking about the insult of the pests and its mountains of garbage.
Now a pure and unforeseen thundershower in November, the sky washed clean, the earth resurrected: he was in Oaxaca.
4. Your Breath the Blue of Incense
“Then I fled to Oaxaca,” my father told my mother, “far from Matamoorish fury. For the first time in my life, I was leaving the D.F. Searching through my knapsack for some gum, I found a letter from my Grandma Susana telling me that when I got to Oaxaca I should look up a Mrs. Elpidia, who, although she did not advertise, took in recommended guests and made food fit for a king. Also: her house was located a short distance from the plaza.
My grandmother had also included an envelope with two hundred thousand pesos in it—to cover expenses—and the complete works of López Velarde in one volume. How she knew that I was leaving when I hadn’t said a word about it is something I jealously guarded in my unmentionable hoard of family witchcraft, where she held the place of honor.
I’ll get bored here, I thought, but I was mistaken because the patio of Doña Elpidia’s house was shaded by cool trees and contained a cage with a joking parrot in it. The old lady gave me a room with a view of the mountains and served me the best yellow mole in the world. I acquired a relaxed rhythm, that of my own body, my own heart: I realized that I had been living inside a Mixmaster my entire life; I learned again how to walk, stop, rest, look, and smell.
I began to live with light, not against light; with my digestion, not in doubtful combat with my own guts; sleeping and waking up at the proper times. It happened little by little: a dawn sculpting itself; an abrupt afternoon; a city of greens and blacks and golds. There was time for me to sit in the plaza and listen to the band play overtures to Italian operas. There was time for me to eat prickly-pear ice in the atrium of Santa Rita. Time to walk into churches alone. Oaxaca gave me only itself. It was something new: I was in the world and not a refugee from the world. This was Oaxaca’s first gift.
About a week later I began to get nervous. I was at the peak of my sexual powers and I must confess that, in exchange for psychiatric care and furniture warehousing, I enjoyed the favors of all the broads who passed through my cave on Calle Génova. (Of this, more later. I always associate sex with December, when the chicks in the Distrito Federal do more screwing in a month than they do in the rest of the year. Before they make their New Year’s resolutions, which should be “Start screwing in January.”) In Oaxaca I was afraid of losing what I’d already won, out of pure sexual distress. I strolled around the plaza, in the opposite direction from the way the local girls would walk each Saturday and Sunday. It was useless. They seemed to look away from me on purpose. I started to get bored with ices, the overture to William Tell, leafy laurels, and clean, trim mountains.
Even Doña Elpidia’s mole started to annoy me … The only thing I could do was talk to the parrot, which I did with determination one boring, calm Sunday morning, trying to teach him some bawdy verses by Quevedo:
He who trusts whores is a gelding.
But Doña Elpidia’s parrot, indifferent to my classical instruction, went on repeating the same stuff—like a parrot:
He who eats a locust will never leave this place …
And Doña Elpidia, who was about to celebrate her ninety-ninth birthday behind the door of her kitchen, was chanting, as if I didn’t understand the parrot, “He who eats locust never more shall leave this place…”
“Does he need some locusts, Doña Elpidia?” I said ever so obligingly—and besides, I know how to take a hint.
“Yes, he does, son, and the market isn’t even f
our blocks away…” she said, showing me her vacant gums.
I walked down the cobblestone street from Elpidia’s house, and in the Sunday market I found lots of stands selling red crickets powdered with chili powder, and in one place I found a girl who looked like Colasa Sánchez, Matamoros Moreno’s illegitimate daughter—was it the same girl? was it her sister?—who flashed an irresistible smile at me (let me remind you, Christa Balilla, that I cannot resist any girl between three and thirteen years of age). She offered me a little plastic bag filled with locusts. But when I went to take them, the girl refused to give them to me, hugged them to her breast, and wiggled her finger at me to follow her.
She led me to a tiny church that looked more like a passageway, with windows open onto the street, and only there did she hand me the bag of locusts. Then she ran off, covering her mouth with her hand.
I ate those delicious insects that crackle between your teeth before releasing into your palate the airy burn of dawn (Matamoros dixit). Then I walked into the Church of San Cosme and San Damián, perhaps the simplest I’d seen in this city of baroque frills.
It was crowded.
But there was only one Agueda.
How could I not recognize her? Normally I wouldn’t have noticed a woman there praying before the Christ of the Way of Calvary, but in this Sunday crowd I believed anything and everything when I saw her there kneeling in contradictorily prestigious starched skirts and fearsome full mourning.
Of course I bit my tongue as I recognized I was quoting the poem by López Velarde I’d read the night before in my solitary bed, resisting the temptation to masturbate, imagining Cousin Agueda’s fingers weaving “gently and perseveringly in the sonorous corridor.” How could I not recognize her this morning if just last night, sadly, I ended up offering up to her that small, jumping, nervous sacrifice, I myself a cricket with chili on it, imagining her as I saw her now, dressed in mourning, but resonant with starch, with her coppery eyes, and her ruddy cheeks, and I wishing she would caress me as she was caressing the beads on her rosary with her fine, agile fingers.
Oh my chaste and pure soul! Agueda turned her head covered with veils of black lace just at the moment when I decided to give in to the seductions of the language appropriate to the woman and the place: to stop resisting and become that language. She turned her head and looked at me—just for an instant (telling makes it seem longer, but it all happened in an instant)—with her unusual copper sulphate eyes.
“I had, inland, an impoverished sweetheart”: in those eyes that rhymed with each other I detected an infinitely modest happiness, oh my unborn son, and all my sour tedium drained from me. In Agueda’s eyes I discovered not conformity but peace.
She looked at me for an instant and again wrapped her mourning in her shawl the color of ivory and mother-of-pearl. I followed her to the exit. She didn’t try to avoid me. She didn’t stop to say, “Do not compromise me further, sir.”
To the contrary. She turned to look at me from time to time; and I stopped each time she turned, telling her that I would follow wherever she led: Agueda. Well, she went from the flagstone floor of San Cosme and San Damián to the golden glory of Santo Domingo, and from there to the temple of Our Lord of Health, which smelled intensely of flowers and the bakeries next door, and finally to the art-nouveau Church of San Felipe Neri, where she settled down for a long stay. It was now five in the afternoon and she wasn’t moving, surrounded by those fleurons that seemed invented by Gaudí in Barcelona but which in fact were the work of Zapotec craftsmen from Oaxaca in the seventeenth century. I began to think of the gaze of the Holy Child of Atocha dressed in brocade and red feathers more as that of a rival than as a gaze of reproach.
“Young man, we are closing now,” a bald sacristan dressed in a filthy brown suit informed me I don’t know how much later.
On the other hand, he said nothing to Agueda, who was still wrapped in her radiant mourning.
Since I saw she wasn’t about to move, it occurred to me to hide in one of the confessionals, on the priest’s side. The doors were locked and the lights were extinguished, but when I left my hiding place, I saw Agueda still kneeling there, Christopher my boy, and I didn’t want to watch her become an old maid.
I approached her; I touched her shoulder; she turned toward me. All her symbols depended on her eyes: the apostolic spider, the nocturnal hieroglyphic, the enigmatic Edens of her hair, the cruel scorpions of sex; the vacuous intrigue of erotic chess.
She, too, remained silent; she left everything to my immediate memory of López Velarde’s verses, names and musicality, a poet dead at the age of thirty-three, my unborn Christopher, all because he strayed from the old park of his heart in Jerez de Zacatecas to go to die in the noisy thoroughfare of the decadent, rouged, and lipsticked capital; in 1921, on a June morning, the poet Ramón died with his pockets full of papers without adjectives.
Oh, my retrograde heart: Agueda looked at me and I feared she would think all this about me: this dark, tall, green-eyed boy with the brand-new mustache is my sweetheart, my cousin, my poet Ramón López Velarde. But it didn’t happen that way—that was only my imagination seeking to explain the sudden solitude of the Church of San Felipe on a Sunday night in November in 1990, when the poet from Jerez had enjoyed barely sixty-nine years of immortality.
She said nothing; but she did raise her veil over the comb she wore in her hair, thus revealing the rustic novelty of her perfumed nape. The nape was both annunciation and invitation. I had no idea that a nape, the beginning of her hair and the nakedness of her neck, could be as exciting as the meeting ground between pubic hair and belly skin. I kissed her as her clothes slid off her back and she abandoned the starched mourning shawl on her shoulders.
She knew me (or rather knew the poet): she bared only her back, shoulders, and nape; she invited me to monopolize with my kisses the incomparable smoothness of her body, she gave me the ecstasy of the chaste, acid fragrance of her armpits; of her shoulders, perfect for a copious and liquid cry; of the wingèd virtue of her soft breast; in the sleepy quintessence of her soft back: I breathing it all in, I forever in love with the smoothness and softness of provincial women, fair-skinned and light on their feet, pretty faces that never miss a Mass, young ladies with apple-shaped faces, prisoners of the glacial abandon of their beds, who so quickly turn from being intact virgins to Matres dolorosas: I would like to fall asleep in your beatific arms, Agueda, as if on the breasts of a saint.
The perfumed partiality of Agueda’s body in the church infected me with the absolute. Clenching my teeth, I told her I could not desire her and only desire her, that she should give me what she had even if it were on the threshold of the cemetery, “like perfume,” I whispered in her ear, “and bread and poison and cauterization.”
The statue of the Virgin in the church, dressed in mourning like Agueda, was also a somber triangle presiding over the lucid mist: Mexican Virgins have feminine sex and shape, and then Agueda, who felt me kissing her back and shoulders and nape but who felt me within as well as near her underskirts, raised her feet and offered them, sliding on the pew, to my insatiable curiosity.
I took off her shoes, I kissed her feet, and I remembered verses about feet that fascinated me enormously. It is not I who return but my enslaved feet, said Alfonso Reyes the exile among us. I love your feet because they walked on the earth until they found me, said Pablo Neruda the immortal lover. Luis Buñuel in enraged tenderness washed the feet of the poor and of some young Mexican ladies in the most exciting scene of Christian eroticism on a certain Good Friday. Now Agueda’s feet seek my sex, which is opportunely free of its prison of shorts and zippers, and Agueda kisses me only with her feet, Agueda makes me tremble and I imagine her in the role of Veronica, granting me the gift of her patience while her now tranquil, thaumaturgic eyes watch my pleasure: for you, Christopher my son, not yet: that time it was for her and for me because unless the father experiences pleasure the son never will.
She gave me water to drin
k from her cupped hands.
She was no longer there when I woke up in the morning when the first of the faithful entered the church.
I searched for her in the market, in the plaza, in old Elpidia’s patio, in the churches through which I’d followed her that November Sunday. I asked Doña Elpidia, the girl who sold me the crickets and led me to San Cosme and San Damián. I even asked the parrot, who only said: “He who eats a locust will never leave this place…”
I tried to answer him again with Quevedo, almost bringing myself down to the damn parrot’s level:
Fowl of the wasteland, who, all alone,
Leads a carefree life …
The parrot was never going to learn that poem, and I was never going to find Agueda.
I realized it that night as I strolled around the plaza:
Now the Oaxaca girls did look at me, flirt with me. As if they knew I was their own; that I belonged to them; that I shared a perfumed and black secret with them. As if before they hadn’t looked at me so as to force me to look for Agueda.
And the parrot’s verse? And the looks and notes and instructions of Doña Elpidia? And the girl who sold locusts in the market? Wasn’t it perhaps a perfect and logical chain that had led me to Agueda in the shadowy Church of San Cosme and San Damián? I stared intensely into the eyes of one of the girls in the plaza: she stopped, proud and fearful, as if I had insulted her; she hid her face in her hands and left the circle of love, accompanied by another girl, who looked at me reproachfully.
Dried out, crazy, or dead: that’s what I told them without speaking; the only thing I thought as I looked at them.
They fled as if condemned by my words to the clean injury of virginity: a resignation full of thorns.
The enchantment was broken.
5. Fatherland: Always Remain the Same, Faithful to Your Own Reflection