my body
is the system
with which I am going to answer
the physical world, I shall answer the world
by creating the world, I shall be the author of what precedes me,
by answering it, no matter what they do, whether they love
each other, hate each other, separate, come together,
I shall have to answer with my body and my words,
answer the world they are creating for me
creating, careful! as soon as I appear
I shall create their world
for them
by answering that world they have created for me. They will not escape without paying the price, they shouldn’t even dream of getting away with it, their action, whether it’s fighting or being happy, maybe they think that as soon as I appear I will no longer intervene with
word and flesh
to create my world beginning with them, by thus changing their world which they still don’t imagine me affecting, their ridiculous squabbles, they don’t have a clue, poor jerks!
Here I come!
Careful!
There will be three of us in the world and you will never again be able to act or speak exactly as you did today! just be careful, I’m telling you!
—… nothing, Penny was saying as they went down the ramp, ’cause my mom is one tough bitch and she like says to me better learn now for when you grow up, like you give one of these parvenus an inch and he’ll like give you six back, don’t turn your back or your front on any of them, yesterday Mommy set fire to the shacks those squatters set up on her property and I think they all went up in smoke like a barbecue and today she like asked Daddy to have my chaperon Ms. Ponderosa shot at the garden wall because she was like the one who made the deal with your service, the gay old freak, the ya know reeall ahhshole, and had all those reeally yuucky mummies come as guests, well I mean, ya know, I mean ooooh, and then that cake made of shit, I mean that was uh like uh soooo grotty, ya know, but I like went down on my knees and begged them not to shoot her and my daddy decided it would be better just to send her back to Segovia, that’s worse than death, must be like Chilpancingo, where my poor daddy came from, and like here’s your bedroom, young man, sleep tight now, and don’t even think of trying anything with me, I’m out of your range, scuzzbag, buzz off.
Angel watched Penny López’s bouncing little head as if in a dream, as it gradually disappeared with its shiny carrot-colored curls, her tiny painted eyebrows and her eyelids coated with gold dust, her eyes of oneiric depths and her face alive with twitches that turned out to be its saving grace: it was, en fin, an isthmus of beauty and emotion, or, as my father punned to himself: her strawberry lips, her cute little perfumed ears, pierced by orchid-shaped earrings, her pneumatic gait—Michelin legs, Pirelli thighs, Goodrich (of course?) ass, pulling out of his life: he walked into the aforementioned Gloria Grahame bedroom, named thus, said my film-loving father to himself, because it looked like a set from a fifties film noir: anemic Art Deco, devoid of personality, conceived to rebuff any ideological identification either with President Eisenhower or with Senator McCarthy: a bed with a satin spread …
My father, say I in imaginary complicity with him, fell into a slough of frustration, incompetence, and reduced social, moral, and sexual scale: Penny communicated all this to him, but here he was, the conservative rebel, the window washer of the filthy building that was Mexico in ’92, the purifier of the once Sweet and now Debauched Fatherland, on his knees in front of this pretentious bonbon from Las Lomas del Sol, and what else: well, the old boy reacted—how could he not if he was going to supply himself with a measure of self-justification. Out loud he said:
“I am going to screw Penny! That’s why I’m here!”
“But, honey, why don’t you just screw me?” said a voice through the door while invisible but inflammatory fingernails scratched with a singular, invitational rhythm.
Angel put his face close to the door: he smelled a whiff of seafood mixed with Joy de Patou.
The door opened and his expected, unwelcome, but exciting neighbor appeared in all her glory, which she’d mail-ordered from Fredericks of Hollywood: a transparent black peignoir whose wide sleeves were trimmed with raven feathers, the neck idem, and underneath, a pastry-crust bra, just waiting to be ripped off, layer by layer as if it were a biscuit, and stiletto-heeled, black-velvet slippers, black stockings held up by a garter belt, beneath which the lace panties split right over the jackpot, where was embroidered:
FOND HOPES!
When my father gave the same explanation to my mother that he’d earlier given to Penny López on that corkscrew staircase, the words were the same, gentle Readers, but it all sounded different. For example, all that about leaving my mom because she was his ideal woman and he needed Penny to keep his rebelliousness alive, his hatred, seemed insanely funny to us, because where did he get off coming around telling us that he was leaving for ideological reasons when it was nothing but sex. It was like adding a tiny lie to the huge lie that he said he was struggling against. I don’t know how aware my father Angel was that his rebellion was merely a romantic pose, which is what my mother thinks; but she tells him his explanation doesn’t matter because for her he’s always been a different sort of man and that therefore she naturally sees him that way, a different sort of man, and she doesn’t have to come up with complicated explanations.
In all this, Angeles fears that Angel is using her own desires against her, without understanding that she shares them with him; this is what hurts us most in my dad’s betrayal (what else should we call it?)—setting yourself up in the Gloria Grahame bedroom in the López mansion and enjoying the favors of Doña Lucha without realizing that my mother’s words were not idle talk, that she was with him even in this business but that she couldn’t tell him for fear of humiliating him:
“I didn’t sleep all night I was so happy I met you”—hoping that he would answer her with her words, which he had picked up in order to make them belong to both of them:
“I was there too, remember?” and culminating with something like a chorus in which, poco fa, my own little voice chimed in:
“Let’s never hurt each other.”
But nothing like that happened. She was left alone with a great big belly (with me inside it), while we knew nothing about Mr. Angel Palomar y Fagoaga except what he told us the afternoon in which he put on his big sincerity act and sprayed us with his absurd pretexts, without realizing (the jerk) that my mother’s halo, which he said he was defending, was quite extinguished, battered, worn out. The worst thing my father said to us was that they had created me with the contest in mind but that she was certain the contest was nothing more than a fraud perpetrated by the government, and if the contest was in fact a farce, the superbastard went on, then it didn’t matter that he was abandoning my mom and me. Was the reason for getting pregnant the contest? This particular insult, which to me seemed unpardonable, my mother took quite serenely, and although he never became so rude as to tell her that Penny was nothing more than a passing fancy and that she should let the sickness run its course and he would be back by August or September, in any case, before she gave birth, she actually accepted both maternity and solitude, even though I shouted to her from the vast silent echo of my six months of conception: “When a woman’s left alone, a vacuum is created, and anything can fill it!” But perhaps she didn’t believe that I was filling it to the brim (I adore her!). She could understand the fear in a man who doesn’t dare abandon his wife because he feels unsure about conquering (not loving, merely conquering) another woman, and she preferred that he take a chance, that he not get frustrated—taking the risk that he might not return at all. But if he came back, she would accept him again, hoping that he would realize it was she who let him go. That was her way of loving him: letting him go.
To me this seemed like the dumbest thing in the world, a harebrained idea that was unworthy of my mother and me, so from that m
oment on I decided to work by means of the mysterious powers I might lose the moment I was born, so that my mother, belly and all, with me and all, would make an instant cuckold of my father Angel. Like a real Boy Scout, I started looking around, and quite soon, without my having to persuade him in any way, the correspondent turned up, although in a very peculiar way. You can’t have everything.
* * *
As I was saying, she was left alone with me swelling her belly while he lived the rebellious illusion of penetrating the sanctum sanctorum of the López family. What a blast! as Doña Lucha López would say. But, by the way, how do we know now what’s being said and in what way? Easy: the Lópezes sent Ms. Ponderosa off to Segovia on a fatal Iberia flight which naturally crashed when it reached Barajas Airport in Madrid: poof! and there goes the dream of a lifetime and the secret of the chaperon—to whit: to be possessed passionately by the chef de cuisine Médoc d’Aubuisson (during whose absence these tragedies took place), through force majeure that microchip-in-Ulises’s-papaya business was interrupted. To sum up: when Don Ulises told Doña Lucha that the sugar they sprinkled on his papaya gave him double his normal sexual strength, the lady stole the tube of granules and served them to my dad every day at breakfast; my errant progenitor’s internal information ended up in the Samurai computer of the disconcerted minister Don Federico Robles Chacón, who at first couldn’t understand what the fuck was going on with the truculent Don Ulises, why the functionary and financier’s mind was sending him bizarre messages such as:
• How long does passion last? How long does hatred last? I would like to carry on my rebellion to the edge of life, not to the edge of ideology
• I am afraid of going mad. I am afraid of going sane
• What’s harder: being free or dropping dead?
• I looked for a nation made to last, like the stones of the Indians or the Spaniards: was only Mexico’s past serious?
• I am a romantic, postpunk conservative.
• Does Mexico’s future have to be like its present, a vast comedy of theft and mediocrity perpetrated in the name of progress?
• My heart is filled with an intimate reactionary joy: as intimate as that of millions of Mexicans who want to conserve their poor country: conservatives.
• I WANT ORDER FULLY KNOWING THAT NO ORDER WILL EVER BE ENOUGH.
• I am going to reinvent myself romantically as a conservative rebel: am I betraying myself by screwing Mrs. López and desiring her daughter?
It was this last sentence that finally convinced Robles Chacón that his Samurai was not telling him Ulises’s thoughts, that he would not be betraying himself by screwing his wife, although it might be the case if he really desired his daughter.
INCEST IS BEST BUT ONLY AS LONG AS YOU KEEP IT IN THE FAMILY, flashed the Samurai in immediate dialogue with Federico Robles Chacón. He turned it off and said to himself: Who can be eating those microchips disguised as sugar which I had intended for my rival Ulises López?
5
Reader: Think about us. Don’t abandon us like that, just because your prurience has been tickled by my father’s adventures in the López household. Stop. Think. Remember that she and I are left here alone. She with her abdomen weighed down by an intense increase in blood circulation, in pain because of the expansion of her uterus, as heavy-breasted as a cow: look on her and sympathize with her irritated nipples and her colossal appetite, her weight increasing, hormone production in her placenta increasing, all her glands stimulated, tired, sleepy, ferociously nauseous, imagining banquets of foie gras and couscous, goulash and Aztec ants, and no one there to go out and get them for her, with this absence without leave of that bastard, pater meus, who has decided to drain his life to the bottom (the ass!) before becoming a pure and idealistic man. When? On October 12 next? And as if that weren’t enough, I’m here robbing the poor thing’s calcium, milk, almost half her iron (I want ostrich eggs with truffles!), and she threatened by the loss of all her teeth! Shit, gentle Readers, just think: why in the world did my mother have me? Why did hundreds of thousands of millions of mothers have all the sons of bitches born after Citizens Kane and Able? That’s the way it goes: no going backward: I’m in my fifth month since conception, and I can use my little feet to swim, tap out secret messages, dance in the water, and kick: until this month I paddled in the water without touching her; from now on, on top of Angel’s infidelity, the poor lady has to put up with kick after kick on the walls of this homeland of mine: my mother thinks she’s got Moby Dick in person inside her, the poor dear lives in the bathroom, tenser and tenser, with vaginal secretions, hemorrhoids, cramps, upset stomach (my father doesn’t give her love, so she uses Maalox instead), her hands, feet, and face all swell up, she gets hypertension, she has difficulty breathing, she’s bloated, thankful she has no wedding ring because she could never get it off, she feels hot at the oddest times, sweats, would like to eat but also to put on talcum powder, toilet water, smell fresh, she is constantly afraid she smells and doesn’t realize it, a secretion dries on her nipples, she’d would like to squeeze a tub of Suzy Chapultepecstick onto each of them, God help me! and there I sit or stand or float uselessly inside her, goddamn Olympic swimming champion, the poor man’s Mark Spitz, yippie, and tell me, your mercies benz, if all that wouldn’t make you think twice before trying it!
Which is why I ask you, Reader: now more than ever, don’t abandon us! Understand that your reading is our company, our only consolation! We can put up with everything so long as you hold our hand! Don’t be cruel! Go on reading!
6
What would my father remember, ultimately, of his stormy but forgettable affair with Mrs. Lucha Plancarte de López? Just this: how on the first night she told him it didn’t matter what her husband Ulises had said: take a good look at her now while she’s naked. She didn’t know if Ulises had actually said that, and she would never tell Angel if she’d seen them spying on her from the star’s water hole. She asked him to believe that she had surprised him ogling her, she made him her lover, but she didn’t demand that he kill her husband in exchange for her favors. The idea would never have occurred to Angel if she hadn’t repeated it a hundred times: I would never demand you kill my husband for having incited you to look at me while I was naked. But the truth is that at least half the ideas that feed a love affair belong to neither partner and come instead from the couple; the bad thing is that the same is true for destructive ideas. What was great about Doña Lucha was that her vagina had a life of its own, it was more self-propulsive than, say, a dog, its movements were like those of an open mouth (a banal comparison, I know), but also like a gloved hand, an undulating, down-filled duvet, a bowl of boiling hot fudge, a swirling Jacuzzi, Seabiscuit winning the Kentucky Derby, the emotion of the Quartetto Italiano playing Haydn’s Emperor, to say nothing of the peregrinations of the wind god Ehécatl when he met the sea goddess Amphitrite right in the middle of the Sargasso Sea and above sunken Atlantis: wow!
And the way they sat down, night after night, the Scheherazade of Las Lomas and her innocent Sultan, to tell each other stories about street violence, encounters with the police, armed robberies, ecocidal horror stories, the criminal drip-drip-drip of toxic waste, truck exhausts, water and air contamination: and how hot that made them, she hotter than he, but even he got really hot (Doña Lucha knew it perfectly well) when she brought out a blue-velvet album and showed him the outline of Penny’s foot when she was a baby, the list of the presents she got when she was baptized, who came to the baptism, and especially the lock of the little girl’s hair, pasted onto the blue page and decorated with a blue ribbon. Doña Lucha’s excitement grew:
“Look, Angel, here’s the proof that she had light hair when she was a little girl, look, it just isn’t true what those gossipy bitches say, I never bleached her little twat, I never straightened her hair down there, which is what my enemies say. Penny’s light, she doesn’t have kinky hair, she doesn’t have any of that half-breed blood from the Guerrero coast like her
daddy, she took after me, and my pa was an honest businessman who emigrated from Zapotlán in Jalisco, where the French left behind a ton of kids during the Empire, and they’re all fair-haired, don’t you believe me, Angel honey? And then she asked him to look at her mons veneris, with its thick bush, almost wavy it was, but he should screw her as if she were a black rumba dancer, what the hell, she knew how to move her hips like the best Afro dancer. Alas, but my father, no matter how much he tried, he could not ascend with her to the febrile climax that marked my conception nor attain the anticipated glory he would have with Penny. Finally he reached the point when, with Doña Lucha, it just wouldn’t get hard unless he had Penny’s childhood curl right before his eyes.
One night, when she received him sobbing and he didn’t even bother to ask why, she blurted out:
“Are you married?”
“No.”
“Your wife’ll like that news.”
That night, after Doña Lucha sucked him dry, wore him out, left him mere skin and bones, Angel became desperate because he realized his sacrifices were not bringing him any nearer to that eagerly desired night with Penny. So, toward the end of June, he set about making the lady feel old and decrepit, by reminding her every once in a while about how old she was (forty-eight, fifty?), by tricking her into betraying herself by recalling the remote past, setting traps for her so she’d admit having learned how to roll her hips studying the belly dancers at the Tivoli during the fifties, that she’d learned to sing boleros listening to Agustín Lara in the wee hours of the morning in the old Capri cabaret in the Regis Hotel. He tried to get Doña Lucha to hate him by forcing her to do hideous things like sitting her in front of a mirror and having her make faces, or no dickie ce soir, or making her take out her false teeth in front of him, or having her make herself up as a gargoyle by painting on thick, pointed eyebrows, emaciated lips, creases in her forehead, and hollows in her cheeks, forcing her to pull out chunks of hair so he could have it as a souvenir, to limp around the room and give herself diarrhea by forcing her to share huge amounts of papaya and granulated sugar, which she secretly served him, hoping that the aphrodisiac would bring about certain effects and unintentionally sending multiple incomprehensible and garbled messages to Robles Chacón’s computer, overloaded to the point of saturation because when Chef Médoc returned from his vacation, confirmed with a sardonic smile that the Sweet-Sixteen Party was a failure, did not weep over the premature disappearance of Ms. Ponderosa, but did anxiously hunt for the minicomputers in the shape of granulated sugar to start serving them again to Don Ulises, he had to ask for a new supply from his secret Maecenas, Robles Chacón, who in this way learned that Ulises was no longer using sugar on his papaya and that instead the not very secret lover of Mrs. López did and that he was a certain Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, the nephew of the newly resurrected senatorial candidate for Guerrero, Don Homero Fagoaga, and that there was something fishy about this whole deal, or as Don Bernardino Gutiérrez, first supporter of President Calles in the state of Guerrero would say, even the lame are high-wire walkers in this country.