He’d give them back as good as he got: “Stop! You don’t need a chain saw to cut butter! Everybody in Mexico has been through this office! They did me favors! I did them favors! What do you want from me? Everything’s possible when we have peace!”
He was babbling; but how was he going to respond when the door fell and Ulises López saw the detested faces. He could not dissemble, he hated them, hated them for being dark-skinned, filthy, smelly, toothless, their hair a mess, resentful, vengeful, slow on the uptake, thick-bodied, out of fashion, screwed from the time they were born, he hated them and was going to do nothing to get on their good side. Are you kidding? he was going to shout when they threw themselves on him after admiring him a second and seeing that it was really Ulises López, the one from the posters and the electoral photos, and the TV news: at the exact instant their lances nailed him to his bookcase, right between the complete works of Vilfredo Pareto and the campaign speeches of Homero Fagoaga, Don Ulises was about to shout these last words:
“I was a shark and I’ll be a shark again!”
* * *
Dragged along by the mob, forced to get out of the Van Gogh and join them, with Colasa hanging on to his shirttails, bewildered and tormented, and, ultimately, fascinated when he realized where he was, at the foot of the majestic, Guggenheimic staircase of the López family, my father watched her descend: the crowd with its lances and torches in hand stopped and Lucha Plancarte de López descended, for once as majestic as her staircase, wrapped in her rose-colored peignoir with matching boas at cuffs and neck and her stiletto-heeled shoes tipped in pink satin and with tassels on their toes and a gold orchid around her neck and her robe tightly fastened at the waist and with her breasts like a bull’s horns, proud, tauromachic, poised for the last corrida, and with her sulky cat in her arms, the cat that licked the hairs off her cunt: like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, that same crepuscular videocassette image is what my father saw in Lucha López’s insane dignity, Lucha, who had attacked the squatters’ camps on her properties on the Toluca road, setting them on fire, and now she dared to face retribution, the eye-for-an-eye, Asiatic revenge of Hammurabi right here in Las Lomas del Sol, in the high fortress of her security and comfort. For an instant her eyes met those of my father, who had screwed her so well for more than a month right here, and only then did Doña Lucha seem to lose her nerve, but in her eyes my father saw only a fleeting nostalgia for pleasure. What remained permanently, like a longing that became more and more real with each second, was a small-town street shaded by pines and lined with white houses, tranquil plazas and cool mountains: Chilpancingo, Chilpancingo bore Lucha Plancarte de López to her death with dignity, perhaps the only moment of dignity she had in her life, and Angel, my father, covered his eyes when they set fire to her boas and her satin and Colasa Sánchez next to him hugged his waist and began to cry. The spoiled cat screeched as well and jumped in flames away from his mistress.
The Ayatollah forbade nothing: it was forbidden to forbid, as it was in Paris in May ’68. Now the Ayatollah was going to prove it right here in the house of Superminister Ulises López and his wife Lucha Plancarte de … and their little girl the prom-queen Princess Penélope López. The crowd drew aside to let him pass, between the pincushion corpse of Ulises and the charred body of Lucha, and he ritually intoned sacred chants, having been trained and advised by the Pygmalionish Chilean Concha Toro:
“Liberated from time! Liberated from the body! What will happen, brothers and sisters, if they are set free? What will they do with their time? What will they do with their bodies?”
He didn’t see Angel, but in Ulises López’s devastated house everything was happening simultaneously, theater in the round, theater without footlights, theater and its double; then, on that same staircase of death, appeared the deluxe chef Médoc d’Aubuisson wearing a liberty cap and a ripped shirt, singing “La Carmagnole” as loud as he could, Ça ira, Ça ira, les aristocrates à la lanterne, but no one knew French or had ever heard of the Bastille, so they beat him up, and next to my father a familiar hand pulled on his sleeve, and my father twisted around in the crowd; it wasn’t Colasa anymore, she’d been displaced, disappeared, swallowed up by the tide: it was Homero Fagoaga! Homero Fagoaga alive, dressed strangely, wearing a hat with bells and a ruff that reminded my father for an instant of his favorite, forgotten poet Quevedo:
Into the water, swimmers,
Swimmers into the water.
A well-shaved shark
Is in these parts.
In addition he had on a Roman toga that wrapped his slightly thinner body, as if death itself could not take ten pounds off him, not even that, the phantasmagoric Uncle Homero. My scourge, my nemesis! My disaster! whimpered Angel Palomar, desperately seeking even the support of Colasa Sánchez amid the mob that was now completely out of hand. In the pool shaped like the U.S.A., scores of people were urinating, adding their tears to the sea. At the dog track, the racing hounds were first set free and admired, then compared with the mutts from the Mexican slums that dragged their teats around, castrated, tangled in their own filth and sickness, their eyes infinitely covered with grime, and, as a result, the greyhounds were abominated, damn hounds probably eat better than we do, throw gasoline on them, set them on fire, they lived better than we do, kill them! And in flames the greyhounds, following a strange instinct, kept on running around the track, will-o’-the-wisps, and smoking muzzles, barking until they died:
“Weeds never die, do they, illustrious nephew? As the Maiden of Orléans said or might have said on a rising occasion to the one who had a better time of it than your beloved Princess Penny, hahaha. Look at the Ayatollah! Remember him? Remember him from the Malinaltzin highway exit? Remember how he beat us up? Remember how he screwed your pregnant wife? Hahaha.” Homero was laughing in a new style, professionally, festively, as if this were his new role: to laugh. “The best is yet to come! It was I who put this idea into the head of Our Guide!”
The Ayatollah? Our Guide? His schoolmate Matamoros Moreno? Could a frustrated writer reach any height in Mexico? Hadn’t Uncle Homero died when he fell from the balcony of his penthouse as a result of Uncle Fernando’s efforts?
“Tell that nearsighted fool of a dwarf that it would take more than a second-string pseudo-Mazatec witch doctor to finish off Homero Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca!” said Homero, pointing to himself with an eternally sausage-thick finger, disabusing his nephew once and for all of the illusion that he was dealing with a ghost that resembled his deceased uncle. “Destiny is more unexpected than any logic, more of a bastard than luck itself, and wider than any individual life,” he proclaimed now, with the burning greyhounds as a backdrop. “Listen to me and just see if you can contradict me: under my balcony, a little circus had set up, and the circus had a tent that broke my fall and then tore, dropping me nervously but safely onto a flexible, playful safety net, and I bounced around in it for about a minute and a half, as naked as the day I was born, my distinguished if rather diminished nephew, and the audience laughed, applauded, and made so much of me that the owner of the circus, a certain Bubble Gómez, an albino ex-truck driver whose lifelong dream was to own a circus, signed me up right on the spot, as Lana Turner, the never-to-be-forgotten starlet, might have said when she was discovered at the marmoreal soda fountain where she was ingesting a cloying ice-cream soda—cherry—and wearing a very tight sweater; he introduced me to his patrons, the Ayatollah Matamoros and the singer Concha Toro, now transformed into Galvarina Donoso, of Chilean and aristocratic origin, as that mad geographer Don Benjamín Subercaseaux was apt to invoke on nitrate evenings of cuecas and lilacs, as in turn might have been said by…”
“And what about this getup?” said my father, recovering the floor. “You look like a fifth-rate Rigoletto.”
“Momus!” exclaimed Uncle Homero. “I am King Momus of this stupendous carnival!”
“Stupendous? They’ve emptied the supermarkets where you used to sell your poisonous baby foo
d! They’ve ruined you, you barrelassed old fart!”
“Careful with the insults now.” Homero Fagoaga laughed, pointing with his sausage finger in a superior gesture. “The oven’s not ready for cakes like that; now try to translate and export that proverb.” He laughed with even greater pleasure.
“My oven is no place for your muffins. How’s that?”
“I mean: all sacrifices are worthwhile! My protectors have proclaimed me king of laughter!”
“Mock-king, you fool.”
“As you wish, Angelito: but my scepter is real in a revolution that is, after all, carnivalesque, a revolution of mad laughter, finally, my anarchic but idiotic nephew, finally! A horizontal Mexican revolution, everything for everyone and everyone for everything, here in the land of the vertical Aztec Empire followed by the vertical Spanish Empire followed by the vertical, centralized, patrimonial, and pyramidal Republic, the inversion of the hierarchy.” Homero Fagoaga laughed loudly, pushing my father all the time toward the replica of the first floor of Bloomingdale’s, where the holy mob was touching everything without understanding what those things they’d never seen or even dreamed were, perfumes, and more perfumes, Estée Lauder, Givenchy, Togarama, dresses and more dresses, Saint Laurent, Valentino, Cio Cio Sanel, riding clothes, clothes for hunting in Africa, sailing off Cape Cod, mountain climbing in Tibet, vaginal spermicide with the color and taste of strawberry, grapes, carob, camellia, cherry. How do you use this, how, when, what for? They passed alongside the destructive fury that broke and burned everything in Penny’s personal sanctuary, where Penny stopped looking like a nun and started looking like a whore, but where was Penny in all this? “The inversion of the hierarchy!” Homero Fagoaga laughed, disguised as the King of Laughter, Prince of Comedy, Lord of Levity, Sultan of Smiles: Ah, what laughter, what crazy laughter! To think they began with me, you all begin with me, little nephew, you and your grimy proletarian friends and your pregnant, well-fornicated little wife—fornicated by my Luminous Guide—you began by making fun of me, oranges, pears, and figs, of course, hahaha, magnifying glass, Shogun limousine, remember? Jell-O baths, anything goes to make fun of Homero Fagoaga, sadistic Chinese and cow yokes and bottle caps in my dessert, why not, killing my Tomasito, even that, the destruction of my electoral campaign, my humiliation by that ragged bum Benítez, ha! my genes and not his Hegels are going to win, not your gelatines: laugh at me now, fools, laugh at the King of Laughter and the inversion of hierarchies and see what’s before your eyes, beloved nephew, look carefully and remember that
FAGOAGA NEVER LOSES
AND WHAT HE LOSES HE SNATCHES BACK!
5
Matamoros Moreno rehearsed his every gesture in front of Concha Toro’s dressing-room mirror; the singer showed him how to turn movement into ritual: she taught him how to look at his audience, raise one arm or both, take a step forward then stop dramatically, smile, throw his head back, get angry, speak, be silent. Matamoros went through the extremes of pride and trampled humility in front of that mirror, where Concha Toro purged herself of her own histrionic frustrations. Little by little, Matamoros Moreno, who in Concha’s company had discovered a surprising new kind of lovemaking, full of nuances and refinements (even secrets) he had never known before, transcended the gestures and the rituals and persuaded himself in his innermost being that what he was doing (outside the dressing room, for the public, for the people) was the external manifestation of what he was within: a solitary man who had stored up a power that was only now revealing itself. His gratefully accepted sexual encounters with Concha-Dolly-María Inez (for which she was thankful, now that she was fifty, or perhaps a bit older) revealed to Matamoros the dark and blind energy he had held in reserve, which only now burst forth. The only condition was that he believe what he said: the Ayatollah Matamoros had to speak, move, and be seen with a total faith in what he said, the way he moved, and in how he looked. He would tell the masses that followed him that “faith is faith. It can’t be proven, insulted, judged, or even jailed.” Let them think about this; just in case, he said during the weeks in which he had hastily, secretly gathered together those bands of official thugs—those falcons—who had been scattered after their last operation way back in 1972, a police corps disbanded ever since those remote days of moral renovation, bodyguards left unemployed in the wake of the exodus of the rich to Houston, Miami, and Los Angeles. But he had to convince even these swine that now they had to act out of faith, that the policeman or bodyguard who joined the movement had to do what he did for something greater than they had ever done before: like the thieves and fire-eaters, like the beggars and squatters, they all had to seek and feel the same thing:
“Why follow me? So you can become new again. So you can save yourselves. So you can have good or bad luck as long as you have a destiny. Don’t just sit there like a bump on a log!”
He had to believe it himself so that they would believe it: that’s what he learned in the amorous tricks of the Chilean big Moma who was so wise, so sexy, and such a mistress of sexual secrets the brutal Matamoros had never practiced. In her arms, he discovered the absolute realization of everything he had written and tried to publish through his double-dealing fellow student Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, whose doom Matamoros had already pronounced: it would be a slow death, by inches, in the Grand Inquisitorial tradition: he’d already screwed Palomar’s wife, he’d already beaten Palomar’s relatives, he’d already buggered Palomar himself, just so he’d learn something about length, thickness, and nightmares that become reality. Matamoros was sure that he could achieve his own destiny, but that destiny included two things: to achieve total revenge on Angel Palomar for having frustrated his literary ambitions, and to prove before the entire world that he, Matamoros Moreno, was worth more than Angel Palomar: the proof would be that the people would follow him and not Palomar, dream about him and not Palomar, would love and hate him, not Palomar. Matamoros Moreno did not shudder as he came in Concha Toro’s mouth because he had to be believed and followed, but in the instant when he was dropping his load between Concha’s teeth (thinking as he did so about his little daughter Colasa, as a black counterpoint to the act he was involved in, a dream of the act: father and daughter), in that instant he told himself that no one would believe in him or follow him if he didn’t believe in himself … Matamoros followed by Matamoros: the demon of hope could move the world, accompanied by its acolytes, passion and ambition, only if in that moment Matamoros Moreno realized (he gave himself: ceded) that “I have another man buried inside me, oh pretty Mama, there was another man with me and I didn’t know it; why didn’t you tell me, Mommy, don’t you love me?”
After that internal and external orgasm, Matamoros Moreno could say what he wanted and he convinced all the unemployed, the lumpen, the deformed, the mad, the bodyguards and cops, the rockaztec groupies, he convinced everyone, intellectuals, housewives, Hipi Toltec and Orphan Huerta, even Baby Ba, who left Egg in the company of my mother and went to follow the Ayatollah. And what about me, Baby, don’t you love me anymore?
“Don’t let your hatred rot inside you. Get cracking. Look over there. Look at the city. It belongs to you.”
“The Mexican hero is neither proletarian nor Communist. He belongs to Guadalupe, and in my hand, brother, I hold a power that is neither of the left nor of the right, but one that reveals my own nature, natch.”
“Stop living a life of anguish. Join us.”
“What do you get by slicing each other up? Get cracking.”