He paused, perhaps to show himself under the light of another bulb that deepened the shadows on a face that was threatening in its immobile simplicity. That face, D. C. Buckley said to himself, merely announces the danger of his body: anyone who doesn’t avoid those eyes runs the risk of not avoiding the body and of being demolished by it. Buckley decided to avoid both.
“The text and the illustration I possess”—now he looked only and terribly at Gingerich—“are the only ones on the vaginal myth saved from the estate of Don Fernando de Alva Ixtilxóchitl, the Indian prince transformed into a writer in the Spanish language, even though he descended from Prince Nezahualpilli of Texcoco.”
Like a cobra about to strike, Matamoros stared fixedly at Will Gingerich. The professor made a face of the kind he only remembered making at muggers in obscure residential streets in Cambridge, Mass., where he was assaulted sometime around 1985. Matamoros’s face simply expressed one thing: that payment was required for his information. But Gingerich said nothing—even a fish wouldn’t get into trouble if he learned to keep his mouth shut. Buckley, too, remained silent. His eyes had wandered a few minutes before from Mr. Moreno and were seeking the swift, hidden eyes lurking in the darkness of the Acapulco Institute.
“I make two conditions for showing you the documents, Professor,” said the president of the aforementioned institute in very grand, very Mexican style.
Gingerich did not ask; he merely waited.
“The first is that you try to publish what I’ve written in some prestigious magazine in the neighboring republics to the north.”
Matamoros’s eyes were nothing compared with his tremendous teeth, which he was now showing. Buckley did not see them because he was looking at the doe-like eyes of a woman in the darkness, behind a door with opaque glass panels, a door that led to…?
“I will certainly try to do that, Mr. Moreno.”
The professor cleared his throat and then went on in the face of Don Matamoros’s obstinate silence, “Of course, the publishing crisis in North America even affects the most powerful publishers, as you no doubt know. It will be very difficult…”
“I don’t give a fuck about any crisis,” said the fearsome Matamoros. “You figure out how to publish my stuff—with a powerful publisher or a weak one, I don’t care. You swear you’ll get me published, my dear professor, or you will never find out about the myth of the vagina dentata in Fernando Ixtilxóchitl.”
“In that case, I swear,” said Gingerich serenely.
“And if you don’t”—Matamoros Moreno smiled through his knife-sharp teeth—“may the fatherland call you to account.”
He blew his nose noisily, then looked at Gingerich, his handkerchief still covering his nose and mouth.
“And if the fatherland doesn’t call you to account, rest assured, my professorial friend, that your humble servant will.”
Gingerich swallowed hard in order to be able to say, “And the second point, Mr. Matamoros?”
“No, pal, it’s not a point, it’s a condition.”
Gingerich could not withstand Matamoros Moreno’s stare. He concentrated on the mustache of the director of the Acapulco Institute: it was not merely a bushy mustache; it was a bush. Matamoros soaked his mustache and covered his ears—it was the only way (said the professor) he could free himself from the din out on the terrace. Was he blind as well? Gingerich then realized that Buckley was no longer in the room.
The citizen of New York and Adjacent Islands was not looking at or listening to this supposed exchange between mythographers. Buckley had stealthily followed the doe’s eyes, which slowly but surely had withdrawn from behind the door with glass panels.
“Condition, of course, Mr. Moreno,” Gingerich agreed, swallowing again.
“This is it: once my work has been published in North America, you personally will take a copy, with the cover, The Myth of the Notched Cunt by Matamoros Moreno, clearly visible, and you will seek out, wherever he may be, a certain Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, Mexican citizen, resident of the capital. You will find him, Professor, somehow and you will force him, in your presence, to eat the paper on which my ideas are printed.”
“Page by page?”
“Ground up like confetti,” answered Matamoros with a truculent gesture.
“But I don’t know this Angel Palomar person.”
“You’ll find him.”
“May I delegate this function? Umm, to my assistant, for example? (Where are you when I need you, you Gothamite bastard?!)”
“You have to do it yourself. You have to be there.”
“What if I’m not.”
“There are other professors willing to accept my conditions. Here’s a letter from the University of El Paso, for instance…”
“I accept,” said Professor Gingerich hurriedly, his mind on the honor of Dartmouth College.
D. C. Buckley followed the little doe in the darkness, smelling her, stepping on the coffee-colored clothing she tossed onto the tiles, while Will Gingerich avidly read the document Matamoros Moreno set before him like some special treat. Despite his impatience, Matamoros’s eyes never left the professor. Buckley touched the girl’s shoulder. It was as smooth as a glass of eggnog with cinnamon. He touched her face. He dared to bring his finger to her mouth. She nipped Buckley’s finger and laughed. The New Yorker got used to the darkness. The naked girl got into a barrel, and invited him to join her. She opened her mouth until it was incredibly wide and cleansed the sky of storm clouds. Buckley lowered himself into the barrel next to her.
“And you are like the bored maguey; you are like the maguey; soon you will have no juices,” Gingerich read hastily. “You men have impetuously ruined yourselves; you are empty. In us, the women, there is a cave, a canyon, whose only function is to wait for what is given us. We only receive. You, what will you give us?”
“That’s enough,” interrupted Matamoros. “This is only a taste. Now read my things. But you must think I’m a boor. Colasa! Pour the gentleman a cup of coffee!”
But Colasa did not answer, and Matamoros laughed and said that the girl had suddenly taken up star counting as a hobby. Gingerich looked around for D. C. Buckley, but said nothing about his absence; Matamoros Moreno had forgotten about the assistant. Had he really forgotten about him, wondered the professor as he walked back down to Christopher Columbus Street with the sample of the myth in one back pocket and Matamoros Moreno’s manuscript in the other. D. C. Buckley’s Akutagawa was still there.
“I saw you dancing last night at the Divan,” whispered Buckley into the girl’s ear. “You looked as if you’d been dipped in tea.”
Colasa Sánchez brought her warm dark body closer to the gringo’s white cold body.
“Why don’t you say anything?” asked D.C.
The girl sang, My heart’s delight’s this little ranch/ Where I live content/ Hidden among the mountains blue/ With rainbows heaven sent, and stared at D.C. for a long time. Finally she told him that there was a boy at the disco, tall with green eyes, dressed Hippieteca style. His wife was in Tehuana costume and they were with their fat uncle. Didn’t he see them?
“I have the vague impression that there were lots of people there.”
Oh, she thought that place was like a club; the owners, the frog and the chink, were giving out free tickets to poor boys and girls to promote class confrontation, that’s how they explained it to her so she would go. It was terrific that the gringo had noticed her, now he was on top of her, it was terrific that she could count the stars, he couldn’t, he had his back to the sky down at the bottom of this barrel: couldn’t they both go find that boy she was talking about?
“What do you want to tell him? What do you want to give him?”
Just what I’m giving you, said Colasa Sánchez seriously, come on now, gringo, I’m moist and ready for you, come inside your sweet little girl, I’ve just had my thirteenth tropical birthday and all for you.
D. C. Buckley unbuttoned his fly, and Colasa opened her legs as
if they were tea leaves and stared at him with the eyes of an anxious deer. D. C. Buckley’s member slowly felt around the entrance to Colasa Sánchez’s body, took aim like a bullfighter’s sword about to make the kill, and pushed its way in with strength and a single, brutal motion. The white teeth in Colasa Sánchez’s vagina shattered on D. C. Buckley’s infinitely hard phallus. The gringo laughed with pleasure, while Colasa wept for the same reason.
Later he took her brusquely by the nape of the neck, twisted her black hair, and said all right now count all the stars, and don’t leave out a single one.
6
This is the novel I am imagining inside my mother’s egg. I was certainly not going to be put in the shade by my parents’s buddy Egg. Of course, little Christopher: if the earth is round, why shouldn’t a narrative also be round? A straight line is the longest distance between two words. But I know that I am calling in the desert and that the voice of history is always about to silence my voice. But that’s all over with, and anyone might think I’m telling all this twenty years after my birth. But if the reader is my friend and collaborator, as I wish and am sure that … he will not stop to figure out whether this novel is narrated by me ab ovo or twenty years after (either in Horace’s fashion or à la Dumas). Whatever his premise, he will contribute something of his own, he will be an auxiliary, an external, respectful chronicler of the conscientious inquiry into my internal gestation and of what happened before it, because no event comes without its accompaniment of memories: in this you and I, Reader, resemble each other; we both remember, I with the syntony of my genetic chain, in the world exterior to my own: what I don’t know how to remember, you can remember for me; you know what happened, you will not let me lie, you remember and tell me that …
7
Gingerich returned to the Sightseer on foot and found a small group from his flock still drinking at the bar decorated with ship helms and dolphins next to the sea cliff. The tourists looked even more faded than they had before; as they age, North Americans lose color, even those with Mediterranean blood turn as white as talcum powder, their faces white as sheets until they die.
“Where are you from?”
“How much do you make a year?”
“When’s the last time you moved?”
He was tired, sweaty, and unwilling to answer the indiscreet questions asked by these happy, drunk, and old farts. No, philanthropy had not come to the rescue of higher education, Gingerich told them. President Ronald Ranger should have been sentenced to spend the rest of his life watching Robert Bresson movies or listening to someone read him select passages from the Quixote. The tourists could not understand what he was talking about, and behind his back one gestured that Gingerich must be mad.
Buckley saved him. He walked in, saying, “Hi there, Pastor Gingerich, what news from your lambs?” and ordering a double Scotch in the same breath. He then dropped into the sofa-rocker next to the professor. In his hand, he carried a wooden device in the shape of a phallus—it was battered, bitten, bristling with splinters, but still erect.
“The myth is alive, Mr. Shaman. Take it. It’s a souvenir. And now let’s get some sleep. Tomorrow I want to go to the beach.”
8
At 9 a.m. on Monday, January 6, 1992, complaining about the duties entailed in this kind of meeting—comparable in ways to military training or obligatory sugarcane harvesting—the Antillean critic Emilio Domíngez del Tamal, known as the Sergeant because of his long record of denunciations, detective-like snooping, and thundering excommunications, carefully wiped the green sauce off his thin lips and caught sight of his pale reflection in the bluish windows of the tropical dining room, an imitation aquarium made of thick smoked-glass panels.
The Sergeant, the colors of passion dripping out of his mouth (ancient hope, eternal envy), grimaced and straightened his guayabera over his body, which was so thin he could only be seen from the front. He was getting ready to give his celebrated lecture on the responsibility of the writer in Latin America, a rhetorical jewel that had been his bureaucratic launch pad and in which he first enunciated abstract, philanthropic, and utopian goals, linked, naturally, to concrete historical-material realities and to prophetic warnings aimed at those who did not write for the people and who, therefore, were not comprehensible to the Party, and who, therefore, were ridiculing the representatives of the people incarnate in its leadership elite more than in its artistic elite: How could such things be allowed? the Sergeant would ask with rhetorical astonishment, standing before the crowds at the First Congress of the Newest and Most Recent Literature. Since when has the artistic elite paid the salaries of bureaucrats, since when!? This is a realistic question, an honest question; left adrift on the literary market, artists like him, who sacrificed their poetic inspiration to the Revolution, would not survive, so they stopped writing in order to advise, influence, perhaps govern, no, long live the governing elite because it pays the poet a salary, and not the public or people, which is incapable of understanding him. What am I saying!? But the Party and the state understand his silence, they appreciate it, they pay him for it, they reward him for it: because, although Domínguez del Tamal never writes a word, he is perfectly capable of demanding in no uncertain terms that everyone else write in such a way that the Party and the governing elite understand them: to demonstrate my sense of responsibility with regard to the people and my fidelity to the Revolution, I now read my list of art-for-art’s-sake snobs, CIA agents disguised as lyric poets, ingrate formalists who have turned their backs on the nation, francophiles!, structuralists!, aaaaah, the pleasure of denunciation replaces the pleasures of fame, sex, or money: I shall sacrifice myself for truth and let no one accuse me of having an impoverished imagination: in nine months, the exact time nature grants for human gestation, Sergeant del Tamal went from Vademecum of the Opus Dei looking to heaven, to Falangist looking to Madrid, to Christian Democrat looking to Rome, to Social Democrat looking to Bonn, to being unaligned and looking to Delhi, to Directed Democrat looking to Jakarta, to Tito Communist looking to Belgrade, to Marxist-Leninist looking to Moscow: all in nine months, I tell you! Imagination! Imagination! and Protection! Protection!: the Sergeant paused for an instant, looking at the roll with which he was about to dip into his huevos rancheros, and in that piece of bread he found the moving memory of his Latin American Catholic origins: oh, indivisible sacrament, how I need you, he confessed to his roll that morning, oh divine prostitution, possession of the body of truth and the word in my mouth that hungers for dogmatic security, oh Latin American with five centuries of Catholic Church, Inquisition, and dogma behind me, how can I abandon you in order to be modern, how can I deny you without setting myself adrift in the storm, oh Holy Trinity, oh Holy Dialectic, oh Papal Infallibility, oh Directive from the Politburo, oh Immaculate Conception, oh Proletariat, Fountain of History, oh Path to Holiness, oh Class Struggle, oh Vicar of Christ, oh Supreme Leader, oh Holy Inquisition, oh Union of Writers, oh schismatic heretics: Arians, Gnostics, Manichaeans, oh heretical Trots, Maoists, petit bourgeois, Luxemburgists, oh mystic ladder, oh democratic centralism, oh protecting cupola, oh Thomistic scholasticism, oh socialist realism, oh bread of my soul, oh matter of my bread, oh oh oh
Sitting across the room from the Sergeant, finishing his breakfast of waffles with pecans, the eminent South American critic Egberto Jiménez-Chicharra, fat and olive-complexioned, all beard, oil, and melancholy eyes. He looked toward the Acapulco beach and mentally reviewed the structuralist darts he would hurl with deadly accuracy that morning against Domínguez del Tamal: but despite the lecture on synchrony that was pouring between his cerebral hemispheres just as the Log Cabin syrup was pouring over his frozen, hard waffles smeared with unmeltable margarine, he could not erase the sense of delightful nocturnal obligation which would force him to choose between the handsome Jamaican poet and the rough Argentine novelist who had seduced him, literally, with a lecture whose referent was, d’ailleurs, ailleurs, the otherness of a literature that was being produc
ed, metonymically, at the level of syntagmatic structure, but which also, semantically, in successive preteritions constituted substantive constellations without any sacrifice of the aforementioned preterition. Using his fork, he sketched out a tiny diagram in the syrup he’d poured on his waffles; it faded, only to be replaced by palindromes and palpitations that raced through his feverish mind.
Emilio and Egberto caught sight of each other. Emilio was the first to look away and move toward the exit that led to the hall where the First Congress of the Newest and Most Recent Spanish-American Literature that Never Grows Old and Always Astonishes, only to find, to his disgust, on the other side of the bluish windows a line of caryatids out in the open air, women as svelte as Sergeant Censor, with long white necks, twist the neck of the swan of sex, there is no socialism with sex, said Emilio to himself: it was as an article of faith. There is no capitalism without decadence, smiled the flabby Egberto, uncomfortable because he insisted on wearing his corset in the tropics. Deo Gratias both, both finally Catholic, both believers, frightened of being bereft of their Church, of their sins, the spice of their life, both of them staring at the gringa models with swan-like necks, in a phalanx on the sand, in the water, draped with blue, red, lilac, pistachio organdy, posing with their arms raised and their armpits shaved as smooth as ivory, wearing straw hats, the Acapulco touch, they who had not the slightest trace of heavy religious traditions, holding on to their hats with one hand while the wind, what wind? both literary critics asked themselves, when this January heat lowers your blood pressure and sentences you to drink cups of coffee (Emilio) or to stay in a tub of cold water with the door open and one of Madame Kristeva’s old books leaning against the bar of Palmolive just in case (Egberto), but those girls were fluttered by a wind that made the patresfamilias walking on the beach with their kids toward the playground tremble until naughty little Pepito, who was snapping his towel at a tropical parrot, said look, they’re blowing air onto those gringas, hahaha, they should have hired me to fart at them, shut up you little bastard, is that why we brought you on vacation here where the peak season never peaks, oh come on now honey, stop complaining, we’ll have a good time and look how nicely they make the wind blow on the pretty gringas with those breeze machines that flutter their clothes, when you gonna buy me some rags like that, hon, why do I always have to go around with Salinas y Rocha clothes when all the other ladies in the neighborhood take their little trips to Mexamerica to buy outfits in the Laredos and Juarazo. Because they’re smugglers and bitches, said her husband. What pisses me off, sweetie, is seeing these models surrounded by beggars, cripples, blind people, and hawkers trying to sell decorated gourds and embroidered blouses, as if there were only Indians in this country, look at them photographed for Vogue, holding serapes and things made of onyx: little burros, ashtrays, and bookends of Mexicans asleep with big sombreros over their eyes, the whole world’s gonna see that, Matildona, they’re gonna think that’s what we’re like here, so where do you get off with wanting to make a trip to Mexamerica to buy clothes, that’s why when you get there they look you up and down as if they were doing you a big favor to sell you their shit, because they think you just that minute walked away from your corn grinder, that you’re married to some slob who sleeps off his siestas under a big hat on a street full of lost burros and nopal cactuses, just like that, is that what we’ve progressed for? is that why we became dignified, clean members of the middle class? well, what about it?