Don Fernando Benítez was on the point of vomiting out the helicopter window when he hesitated, secretly fearing the horror of symmetry: how to vomit on vomit?
“Do you believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe?” he asked the pilot.
“The what?” the pilot said (the noise, his earphones).
“I’m saying that only a miracle like the reappearance of the Virgin can save Mexico…”
“No, we’re not going to Mexico City,” shouted the pilot. “We’re going to Frontera…”
Fernando Benítez closed his eyes and squeezed the young pilot’s shoulder. “Only a miracle.”
Although for him that miracle, behind his clouded vision, consisted in being able to remember a mountain, a village, a river, and to repeat under his breath now, the noise of the motor of no importance: Nevado de Colima, Tepoztlán, Usumacinta …
Sweet Fatherland, impeccable and adamantine: the forest of silk-cotton trees, the silvered velocity of the river, the crocodile and the ocelot, the monkeys and the toucans under the vegetable vault. And a column of smoke that rose from the heart of the jungle: the forests cut down, the new highways, the drilling of the Five Sisters, the changed course of the river, the traces of the past wiped away forever by mud slides and oil spills: Yaxchilán, Planchón de las Figuras, the forest of the Lacandons … The Invisible Sweet Fatherland.
3
Take a break, You Mercedesful Readers, and listen to the story my father is telling my mother on Epiphany as they clean off the shit that rained down from heaven, and the two of them (I think) prepare to fill me in on everything that led to this instant, my most immediate postcuntly, but which doubtless I shall only remember at the moment in which my little head begins to function within my mother but outside of her, if I can put it that way, independent of her. At what moment am I worthy of respect and consideration? At what moment am I more important than she is, with as much right to life as she has, at what point? I ask. They are not wondering about any of this; they are on the beach where they have just conceived me without being certain of the success of their labors, remembering what happened days before, then years before, adding layer upon layer to the where and the when that I got right away. They are and will always be something like the simultaneous captivity and freedom of my “person.”
“Where are we?”
“In Acapulco.”
“What’s going on?”
“Well, you and I are going for a swim so we can wash off Uncle Homero Fagoaga’s shit.”
“No, I’m not asking you about us but the circumstances outside ourselves.”
The President of the Republic will address the nation with his message for the New Year 1992, year of the five hundredth anniversary of the disco …
What are the people of Acapulco doing?
They are gathered in the cement town square (decorated with sculptural hummocks) in order to hear by way of loudspeakers the words of the President of the Repu …
But it’s impossible to understand what’s coming out of the loudspeakers, so the townspeople did not hear the core of the presidential message of Don Jesús María y José Paredes, in which he ruffled the feathers of the nation’s political deadwood by solemnly announcing that the most important obligation of a president of Mexico in the nineties was to choose his successor and then die. “There should be no former presidents; there should only be candidates,” he said cryptically, thus opening the door to every speculation: Is our national Chuchema going to die when he leaves office? Is he going to commit suicide? Will he be a candidate for something????? These were questions that kept the nation busy for the entire First Month of the Quincentennial by adding their complicated symbology to the other new items in the country after the election that followed the events of the year ’90. Item: the first victory by a candidate from the clerical, right-wing PAN (National Action Party) over the monolithic power of PRI (Revolutionary Institutional Party), deforcer of all the governments and all the Senates since 1929 and author of directed democracy, national unity, industrialization, agrarian reform, the rise of the bourgeoisie, the Mexican miracle, the opening, the reform, the bonanza, the collapse, the austerity, the moral renovation, the eternal debt, the earthquake of the Fifth Sun, the revenge of the oligarchy, and, finally, the bust of the year ’90, was in the last analysis a Pyrrhic victory (says Uncle Don Homero Fagoaga, looking down on the corrupt Bay of Acapulco) since the first PAN president found himself obliged to govern with the cadres, organizations, and structures of the PRI, with the Confederation of Workers of Mexico, with the National Peasant Confederation, with the National Confederation of the People’s Organizations, with the bureaucracy, with the technocracy, administrators, and officers of PRI. It turns out there were no others, said Colonel Nemesio Inclán (an undefinable number of years old), chief of the Mexico City police force, as the green slime dripped off his chin, while he tossed back a shot of root liquor on the deck of the floating discotheque, Divan the Terrible, anchored in front of Califurnace Beach in Aca, forever hugging the pillow on which his mommy had died. We must create new civic powers, a real civil society, the young and fiery secretary of SEPAVRE (Secretariat of Patrimony and Vehiculation of Resources), Federico Robles Chacón (thirty-nine years old), said to himself, from the balcony of the palace in the center of the Mexican capital, but first we’ve got to blow up all the terrible symbols of Mexico as if they were last year’s fireworks. Plus ça change, murmured his rival Don Ulises López (sixty-four years old), the head of SEPAFU (Secretariat of Patriotism and Foreign Undertakings), observing the full length and breadth of his Guerrero fiefdom from the heights of his ranch in the Los Breezes subdivision. Named Permanent Minister so he would never give up either his position at the apex of the political bureaucracy or his well-earned seat as captain of (private) industry, Don Ulises contemplates the emblematic phrase that all of you can see on all the bare ridges of the country and which he has ordered installed in neon lights on top of the Roqueta Lighthouse:
CITIZENS OF MEXICO: INDUSTRIALIZE YOU WON’T LIVE LONGER BUT YOU WILL LIVE BETTER
And then there is the no less lapidary, embroidered motto that adorns the headboard of his bed: CRIME DOES PAY.
The child has to know what country this is and who governs it, right, Angeles?
“Right, Angeles,” she said in a mocking imitation of my father even as she gave in to his arguments: self-evident, as the South Americans who sent us El Niño say, this wind that tumbles me, barely conceived, around in my mother’s womb.
The net result is that I’m obliged to admit, from the egg on, that I am Christopher plus my Circumstance.
My mother asks three questions:
In which country will the child be born?
What will the child’s name be?
What language will the child speak?
But I have my own questions, selective Readers.
Will I be that child?
How can I know it unless I know three things:
What is my time? What is my space? And last but not least, what is my circumstance that they tell about as if they were heeding my prayers without listening to a noise coming from deep down, so persistent that it was a brother to silence, similar to the purring of a pack of cats, who recall in their every movement, in their every noise, their savage origin, but disguise it with their silent gliding about the house, which is itself a fearful memory of the movement of a panther about to spring: that’s how the faint noise of the trailer trucks sounded as they headed in and out of Acapulco, loaded with the products that the sterile resort needed but didn’t produce: from New York cut steaks to toilet paper, from cases of Taittinger to hairpins; paper, pens, and pickles; mustard, muscadet, and melons; bikes, bricks, and billy clubs: everything had to be brought from far away and the noise of the trucks that brought it all was the most pervasive noise of all; who would ever turn to stare at an eighteen-wheel truck, its refrigerated trailer, its smoking jaws, its vulcanized extremities, its poisonous exhaust pipes, its inevitable das
hboard Virgins?
No one. Except today.
Leading the truck armada, the albino boy wearing a black leather jacket stopped, jumped out of the truck, raised his rose-colored hand, looked from behind his wraparound sunglasses toward the port from the heights of the seized communal lands of Santa Cruz and said: “We’re not going in today; today we stop right here. Something’s going on today. Let’s not get involved, okay, guys? Today we stay out of Aca.”
He looked with disgust and surprise at the discolored hand he’d raised and instantly concealed it. He desperately looked for his black glove. He saw it on the seat in the truck cab, climbed up, grabbed it, sat down on the driver’s throne, and as he put it on he glanced at the icons on his dashboard: votive lamps, the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, his swarthy little mother, and a photo of the Lady, the Mother and Doctor of all Mexicans. The union bosses ordered him to add that picture to those of the Virgin, his Mother, and the PM. First Bubble Gómez balked at the idea and was on the point of spitting out his eternal chewing gum: at least his holy little shrine was his, just his and not the property of the PRI or the union! But he’d grown fond of the photo of the Lady, word of honor, it even went well with the other three, and the proof of his fondness is that every so often, to pass the long hours he spent on the highway, the driver blew bubbles with his chewing gum until they burst; this was his maximum tribute to life: Bubble Gómez, bringing to the sterile resort indispensable provisions, transporting from one place to another the wealth produced elsewhere, totally unaware of the irony of Hispanic wealth, imported, unproductive Road to Santiago, gold of the Indies, treasures of the Hapsburgs, electric gadgets from Texas, treasures that escape like water through our fingers, only the symbols remain, only the continuity of the symbols is ours.
Now SHE IS THE SYMBOL.
I saw her—he told the huge man with the bushy mustache sitting next to him with a tiny thirteen-year-old girl dressed as a Carmelite nun sitting on his lap—like, well, one of us, a woman of the people, despite the jewels and feathers, like a real pal. Didn’t he think so, too?
The mustachioed man stepped down from the truck. “Come on, Colasa. The truck isn’t going in. We’ll go on foot.”
He slammed the door shut and said to the albino: “Don’t let her fool you, man. That bitch is the whore of Babylon. This is the Ayatollah Matamoros giving you the true facts.”
He raised two fingers in benediction, rested his other hand on the tea-colored girl, and told the driver he could quote him if he liked.
Bubble Gómez started his truck and popped a bubble right in front of the Lady’s photograph.
4. Mother and Doctor of All Mexicans
She was seated before the mirror: she looked at herself, surrounded by powerful, pore-perforating spotlights. She had no time to remember herself. She hadn’t been allowed to look at herself in a mirror for more than a year.
The squad of makeup artists and hairdressers fell on her. First they erased her face, the one she was wearing, the one she had when she’d walked into the makeup room. She did her best to see and remember that face, but they didn’t give her the time. To remember her earlier face, the real one, the original—that was certainly impossible. She had even come to doubt she ever had an original face.
She shut her eyes while they marcelled her hair and refused to accept what she’d just thought. She wrinkled her brow to cling to the shred of memory and the makeup girl said, señora, please don’t frown like that.
She decided that this morning, before they put her on exhibit again, she would remember herself; soon there would be no time. She would be taken away from the mirror. A year after her enthronement, they allowed her to look into the mirror when they made her up. But she preferred to try the impossible: to remember herself as she was before all this. And she couldn’t. The present was too strong, it washed away her memory and left her abandoned on the isle of the present moment, as if her present could be her salvation and not, as her soul warned her, her prison. She even came to think that memory was her worst enemy, the shark in a blind and opulent wave that kept her on its crest but without ever moving her, fixed forever in the terror of the past.
For that reason it was such a valiant act on her part to yawn in front of the mirror and decide, against, despite the fact that this morning, before they put her on exhibit, she would remember the girl who worked for two years in the secretarial pool of the Secretariat of Patrimony and Vehiculation of Resources (SEPARVE) on Avenida de los Insurgentes.
What was she like?
That was the problem: the last two years seemed an age to her and how was she going to recognize herself in a thin, tall shorthand-typist, well stacked, or so they said, with chestnut-mousy lank hair, pale makeup that was a bit too much for her because she had very pretty cinnamon skin, and wearing a pants suit bought in the Iron Palace with the savings from her previous job, one she indeed did not remember.
Her job at SEPARVE she certainly did remember, it’s when she was the girlfriend of Leoncito, the mortician from San Luis Potosí Street, not very far from the Secretariat. They would meet in the Vienna Café in Parque Hipódromo, because that garden was the only oasis in these neighborhoods, where the diesel buses and dump trucks raced with their exhausts wide open (in Mexico, Nader is Nadir; this is where the Nothing with Nader Society was founded, Nader Enemy of National Development), vomiting clouds of poison onto the dead trees: they would drink cappuccino and eat chocolate pastries with German names and he offered her, so she could dress up a bit, so she would not appear so simple, well, so that he could feel proud of her, some ribbons, which were always left over after the national holidays in September, tricolor ribbons, green, white, and red, with the mortician’s favorite letters printed right on the knot: RIP.
“Even when we celebrate the Day of the Cry of Dolores, people die, you know,” he told her in pedagogical tones.
Of course someone laughed at her for turning up at the office decked out that way, but so long as she pleased her boyfriend Leoncito, their sneers rolled right off her back; actually, she rather liked the fact that they took more notice of her, even if it was just to take their minds off the flood of national disasters and all the other secretaries. Before, all they did was fool around or gossip about romance, movies, and soap operas, but now, suddenly, they gossiped about foreign debt and devaluation and seizing savings, my God, and she had nothing, nothing, nothing except her coquettish ribbons, the tricolor flag and the RIP, and a few wilted flowers left over from old wakes that Leoncito gave her.
Not that she was blind and deaf, no way. When she went in to take dictation (from the old-fashioned functionaries who still didn’t use dictaphones or who were afraid to have their voices on tape or leave any evidence that might be directly attributed to them) or went from office to office with letters to sign (there were no executive secretaries higher up than she was to give her the listen here don’t you think that you or anyone else around here is going over my head to get to the boss), she would pick up a word here, a word there. Of course, she understood nothing. And when she walked out of conference rooms where a pool of secretaries labored to immortalize each parenthesis, each comma, each subordinate clause created by the teams of economists who replaced each other at roller-coaster speed even though their verbal chorus was always the same (the economists, unlike the politicians, aspired to have all their words immortalized), she wondered if someone somewhere could really understand the prose of the ten thousandth National Development Plan.
But then two things happened, one after the other. Dr. Federico Robles Chacón came to the ministry cursing right and left about the language of economists, saying, to think that in the eighteenth century Montesquieu called economics the science of human happiness, thank you, Carlyle, for correcting him and calling it an abysmal science, a grim science. And the day she became the handmaiden of the interministerial committee, tricolor ribbons, dictation notebook, and all, Robles Chacón happened to say: “Mae West doesn’t wear
feathers and beads and she doesn’t put on her diamonds just to take a walk through Central Park at midnight.”
Then (an event that changed the course of Mexican history forever) Robles Chacón, doubtless because he happened to be talking about a woman, intuitively looked for a woman in the interministerial meeting room. He looked at her and his words died right in his mouth.
This … is … what we did … with … our … oil
He stared at her intensely, stared at her wilted flowers, her tricolor ribbons, and their funerary letters; he snapped his fingers as if he were about to start dancing flamenco, and out of a nearby closet came a tiny little man, who sprang to attention like a soldier, wearing a tuxedo and patent-leather pumps with black bows on them.
“Okay,” said Robles Chacón, “give me the gross national product figures per capita…”
“Well now,” the man replied in a faint voice, “if we observe the parameters of the increase in the GNP in global terms of 300 billion pesos, in relation to consumables imported at the rate of 75 percent of exports, but without overlooking the increase in salaries at the rate of 49 percent and prices adjusted according to the indices of real inflation, which occurred at the rate of 150.7 percent, and if…”
“Okay,” interrupted the minister, “now describe the same situation in Guinea-Bissau…”
“… at the rate of 296.8 percent, we come to the conclusion,” said the man from the closet without stopping, “that the foreseeable increase in the demand for work will be on the order of approximately two million new jobs, while their incidence in the demand for goods and services will fluctuate sharply, as long as it does not necessarily coincide with the need of infrastructures valued according to classic parameters with a public expenditure deficit on the order of…”