But it wouldn’t be tonight: the helicopter takes off and the pilot radios an urgent call to Mazzo Balls, listen, shithead, did your detector break down on you? What made you think there weren’t any Spies? I put on my night-vision glasses, the ones activated by moonlight, and I hope you realize that it’s a clear, starry night, and I’m following two, a man and a woman, I’ll describe them to you since your fucked-up screen can’t pick them up: the two of them are wearing straw hats, white outfits, all ragged, both barefoot, the miserable rats, they’re carrying something that looks like a supermarket bag, or it might be a shoulder bag, hanging down on one side, they’re staggering as if they’re drunk, scratched up by the wires, as if they don’t see them, do you hear me, Mazzo? It’s the first time in my life that I turned these searchlights on greasers and they don’t automatically look up or get scared shitless when they see me with my black mask on and my robot eyes, they think I’m Darth Vader, hahaha, dazzled or covering their eyes with one arm, listen, fat man, this time we’re going to arrest them, right? What do you say, jerk-off? And Mazzo Balls flushed with rage and shame and said into the microphone no, you know that it isn’t worth the trouble to arrest them, and we don’t have the funds to pay for the gas to send them to Norman, but we do have funds to pay for the gas in this stupid chopper? asked the pilot. That’s right, answered Mazzo, that’s the way the funds are distributed, you have gas, you get the good part, stop complaining, the highway patrol doesn’t have a cent. Well, I’m a son of a bitch if I don’t feel like giving away my gasoline so we can capture this pair of savages, you should see them, Mazzo, they look like Powhatan and Pocahontas or something like that, we would have wiped them out around here years ago, savages, barefoot, they don’t seem to see me, Mazzo, but they sure do hear me, she’s got her hands over her ears, and he’s waving his arms around as if he were scaring off a horsefly or a swarm of bees, listen, Mazzo, check it out, he thinks I’m a bee, hahaha, buzzbuzzbuzz, how did that song about the flight of the bumblebee go? an old radio program used it as its theme song, buzzbuzzybuzz, hahaha, I’m gonna drop down and really scare ’em, they don’t seem to see me, these stupid Indians, but they know I’m here, uh-oh, her ripped skirt’s blowing up, Jesus, she’s knocked up, the slut, they can’t stop screwing and having kids, these pigs, the woman’s disgusting, she must be eight months gone, her gut’s almost as big as yours, Mazzo Balls, hahaha, that swollen, Christ, but not from Miller Lite, like you, but with one more little brown greaser, another shitass who’s here to take the food out of our mouths and steal another American’s job, walkin’ in here like it was their own home, Jesus, the woman’s stuffed with another little easy-livin’ fucker! they’re takin’ rocks out of their bag, rocks, haha, they’re gonna chase me away with rocks, Mazzo! rocks against the chopper! Who do they think they are, Sitting Bull? Viva technology! Listen, Mazzo, this is getting cute, I wish you were here, I swear this is the best battle I ever saw since they cut off General Custer’s balls at the battle of the Little Bighorn, did you ever see Ronald Reagan in Santa Fe Trail on the Late Show? haha, well I’m gonna get even for Custer, I’m gonna blow away this pair of Indians, I’ve been asking for a license to kill for over a year now, but I’m takin’ matters into my own hands here, haha … Mazzo, they hit me on the head, Mazzo, can ya see me? Mazzo, the rock’s blinded me, what an eye that guy’s got, can’t ya see me, Mazzo? If only the Congress had bought you an infrared ’scope like the one they have at Sandy Ego so you could see at night, track down the illegals, see them under the midnight sun, Mazzo, Mazzo, I’m comin’ down, they’re … Mazzo, do ya read me?… Mazzo…?
Sitting on his splendid backside, Mazzo Balls looked through his window at the desolate frontier and saw the helicopter drop swiftly, then spin madly, and crash in a ball of fire.
Just before the crash, Mazzo looked at his screen for any sign of the couple: they produced no heat whatsoever. But the helicopter certainly did—the needles were jumping off the scale, and the screen filled with an orange glow.
One day, Uncle Fernando Benítez will tell us that on the Baja Oklahoma frontier a strange man received the blind Indian couple, doffed his bowler (although they could not see that courteous gesture), and with his other hand straightened his starched butterfly collar. With a gesture of his gloved hand and an innocent sparkle in his big black insomniac and persecuted eyes, he said: Welcome to the Grand Theater of Oklahoma.
Then this tall, thin dark man, who resembled a question mark, pointed to a place far away on the plain where a mirage appeared, that is, it had to be a mirage: a circus tent, a papier-mâché Arc de Triomphe, a circle of flags fluttered by the wind blowing over the prairie. The tall, sleepless man called the two Baltic poets, the extremely pale man and woman, so that they could help the blind Indians. Take them to live in the round house and then bring them to the Grand Theater so they can tell their dreams there, said the man with the bowler and walking stick, who had ears like Nosferatu, trembling as if he already knew that the two Indians from the plateau of the blind tribe dreamed everything they could not see:
“I hope you get your heart’s desire, that you reach your goal, that your dreams become reality!” said the man in the bowler.
“Let’s go to the round house,” said the Baltic poet in Nahuatl to the Indian.
“Let’s go,” answered the Indian. “Let’s go with my wife and my unborn son.”
“Let’s go,” said the woman poet, taking the new arrivals by the hand in the Baja Oklahoma night, the mirages dissipated by now. “We’re going to your house. My name is Astrid. My husband’s is Ivar. But that’s another story. Let’s go.”
And the Indian couple: We have nothing, we’ve come home, this land was always ours, we passed through here on our way south, one day a long time ago when we first walked on this land, do you remember, woman? We’ve brought our son to be born on our land, not strange land, not the frontier: our land, the North, the place of meetings.
13
It turns out that I, Christopher, am capable of finding relationships and analogies (I don’t divine things: I relate things, make things similar!) others don’t see because they have forgotten them. For example, all I have to do is establish the relationship between a couple on the run, two blind Indians from the mesa visited one day by my Uncle Fernando, she pregnant like my mother, he in search of something better like my father (see how I keep my faith in you, pro-gen-i-tor!), and the Indian fetus perhaps imagining my parents just as I imagine his. Accordingly, I establish the relationship between that couple in flight and the disunited couple constituted by my dad and mom: looking at the two Indians on the frontier between Mexamerica and Baja Oklahoma, I see my parents crossing other frontiers, and thus I conclude, in the first place, that we are always in frontier situations, either exiting or entering, as in stage directions—enter Hamlet and Ophelia—exeunt Quijote and Dulcinea, etc. But, the reader exclaims indignantly, your parents aren’t even together, each one is in a different corner of the woods, one in Montesinos’s cave, the other in El Toboso, we left your mother a hostage in the bosom of Hipi Toltec’s Nahuatl-speaking family, with you (inevitably) in her belly, sharing with them (with Them) a dinner of cactus salad and orange slices (Plato’s banquet in a somber thieves’ den: by the way, what page are you on, Mom?), while your father climbed up into the truck of the albino driver, Bubble Gómez, which Colasa Sánchez had flagged down with tricks worthy of Claudette Colbert, of enchanting memory: your father in the company of the Discalced Carmelite dazzled by the jukebox lights and the pictures of Guadalupe, Virgin, Thatcher, Margaret, and of Doctor and Mother, so where’s the comparison, Christopher (finally you wake up, Reader, and you ask me something!)? Only this one, I note, I newt:
We’re all different, but it’s good that we resemble one another as well. In this world, everything is different, but only if everything is related to everything else. Readers, I don’t know another secret to be truer after my eight months of gestation: we’ve always got to be in the situati
on where difference is in tension with sameness. We are recognized because we are different, but also because we are similar I, Christopher, am likely to be recognized because of the form in which I share and admit the sameness of my gestures and my words with those of others. We human beings are not the only animals who need and recognize the scattered members of our species: the lamb, ladies and gentlemen, can always recognize his mother (who happens to be a female) in an anonymous flock of one hundred animals.
In the same way, I recognize, from my solar center, which orders establishes hierarchies, yet is most free, my distant father and my infinitely close mother and I join them in my vision as one with the pair of illegal Indians, and I’ll stake my reputation on it:
My mother Angeles is sitting in the cave of tin water tubs and cardboard that belongs to Hipi & Family, bereft of hope, when suddenly an unusual disturbance resounds in the jailed night and the fires of the circular wall of garbage join together and run like the proverbial scalded cat. (Do proverbial cats have nine lives?) (Or should those who keep proverbial cats as pets be tickled with a cat-o’-nine-tales?) Don’t forget, dear Readers, that the vast Cittá del Messico is totally surrounded by garbage dumps, its genetic chain is a circular mountain of trash dumps all linked together as if to announce to the city: Garbage is Your Destiny. And now it seems that the foreseeable is happening:
The fire burst into life at the very door of Hipi’s family’s house, and everyone ran to put it out, all of them (the old, the babies, the huehuetiliztli and the xocoyotzin grab what they can); the suffocating smoke billows, asphyxia is imminent, there is no water, so one man quickly makes some orange juice and throws it on the blaze, another man shouts, laughs, and urinates powerfully on the fire (my mother remembers the day she reached the city and peed on the flame in the monument to the Revolution, remembers her dream about urinating until she refills the Lake Texcoconut; she remembers and I dream about the lost city of lakes! the place where the air is clear!), but it isn’t enough, they all scatter through the thief-ridden slum (dolorous city, lost city, city without a name), all except one old man as stubborn as a stone. He remains seated in the cave when our buddy Egg rushes nervously in and pulls my mother to her feet (and me along with her, horrified—it goes without saying!), telling her, Angeles, get a move on, if this fire really catches, it’ll consume all the oxygen in the city, the city will suffocate, and then they see the old veteran sitting there, immobile, waiting for the catastrophe, immutable, his face fixed, the inexpressive screen of the play of lights and shadows, and the philanthropic Egg tries to pull him to his feet as well, he warns him about the danger, but the old man is wrapped in his serape, and with his immobile face he says something in Nahuatl and our buddy Egg abandons him and swiftly guides my mother (and me, Readers, and me!) out of the dark shack to an Army jeep, where the grandparents, Rigoberto and Susana, wait and hug my mother and the general does the driving, throws it into reverse, gets stuck for an instant in the garbage. Hipi Toltec fighting the fire, but when he sees us, he becomes disconsolate. He picks up a long stick, sets it on fire, raises it as if to threaten us, then acts as if he were going to toss it on the garbage pyre, but instead he smiles in an ugly way, blows out the burning point of his javelin, and throws it at us. It looks like he’s let us get away, let us save ourselves, my mother and I, Egg, and the grandparents, in an Army jeep, vintage 1944, about which General Palomar says: “This relic has finally come in handy! You drive, Mr. Egg, all right? I’m getting too old, and get us out of here, head for Oaxaca! Aaaaah, the city is burning! Let’s head for the pure air, Susy, don’t be afraid of anything. I’ve been in worse situations! Don’t be afraid, Miss Angeles! Or your unborn baby!”
General Rigoberto Palomar falls forward, his face smashing against the windshield, then back, into the arms of his wife Doña Susana Rentería. In his back is the spear thrown by Hipi Toltec. My mother screams. It’s the same lance that killed Tomasito down in Acapulco. Exactly the same. Doña Susana smiles and caresses the shaved head of her dead husband.
Hipi sheds his skin before the incredulous eyes of Egg and Angeles, and it’s our fat friend, accelerating in horror, who shouts out a description of him, they were real tight, they played in the same group, he was tying up his trousers with a belt made of snakes, and he was shedding, he always was, but now in the light of the fire all his skin was vanishing. Hipi is peeling, right down to the muscle, his skin is coming off in huge chunks, like a peeled banana, right down to the white but corrupt, worm-eaten bone: in the distance, Hipi’s skull shines after a while, smiling, amid the red night, and they can no longer see, no longer know, no longer imagine that new skin grows on him instantaneously, only the skull smiles, and we flee, and Doña Susy Rentería caresses the shaven head of her old husband, and Egg drives the jeep like a soul who is carrying the very devil who brought us here.
At the same time, my father is traveling next to Colasa, who sits alongside the albino driver, and no one can talk because of this man’s constant chatter, this man the radio calls Bubble Gómez. He gives instructions nonstop, avoid the curve at mile 8, there’s been a landslide, there’s an unnoticed Smokey at the Atlixco exit, slow down with the Manila provisions at the intersection of Highway 2 and the Christopher Columbus Highway, Inclán knows about your load, use your radar detector so they don’t pick you up on Huamantla, the Tijuana Taxis at Teziutlán look funny to me, this is Bubble Gómez, do you read me, Bubble Gómez here, I’m protected, I’m carrying a little girl dressed like a religious nut (watch those personal comments now, son), accompanied by a guy who looks like a fag (come on now, son, you’re charging a lot for this ride!), and it seems to me they could be like camouflage to screw up the cops if I have close encounters of the worst kind, okay? Okay, Bubble Gómez, you’re the man of the hour, you know your mission, but stay out of the way of the gringo Marines headed toward the Chachalacas River, and our own soldier boys, too, because some haven’t been notified by Inclán, remember the situation is confused, a huge fire has broken out in the slums, it’s hard to breathe here, go south young man, stay out of trouble, good buddy, roger, Bubble Gómez effectivesuffragenoreelesion, no more lesions, CB radio signing off, good night.
“I’m hungry!” exclaimed Colasa Sánchez when Bubble Gómez turned off his CB. “Don’t you have anything to eat?” she asked, and he just laughed. “What are you carrying in back?” A big old refrigerator, said the albino. “Is it empty?” asked the girl. No, no way, answered Gómez, my job is to bring food back and forth to D.F. “So can we take a little to eat?” If you like, baby, but why don’t you tell your main man here to take a nap and to stop looking at me like that, I don’t like people to look at me like that, tell him it’s dangerous to look at me like that, tell him later we’ll stop and have some salt pork for breakfast! The driver laughed, and my father has no desire whatsoever to think or act, he prefers to tell himself you’re an idiot, Angelito, you don’t hear or understand anything, take Colasa’s hand, it’s there so you don’t feel so alone and so fucked up so suddenly, go ahead, better than nothing, go ahead, pimp, aren’t you hungry, too?
14
I’m an honest guy: the reader should know that a third situation is interpolating itself between these two, involving the circumstances of my mother and father; it’s as if the citizens band the truckers use had squeezed between the AM and FM bands on the radio, so that if on the first band Colasa says I’m hungry, on the second Egg translates they’ve been tricked, they take shadows for reality, but on the third, the intruder band, Minister Federico Robles Chacón laughs and, like a child kept after school, writes one hundred times: You can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the
system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system. He suddenly forgot which number he was on and bucked like a bad-tempered horse when the flow of his inspiration was cut off by the buzz of the telephone.
Robles picked up the presidential hot line with a stratospheric storm of curses; he felt, suddenly, full of self-pity. In the simple act of picking up the receiver of that green apparatus, he proved once again that he was sacrificing his time and his talent to the common good, to the highest goals of the state. And what did the community, personified in the voice of President Jesús María y José Paredes’s private secretary, say to him? What? Whatwhat? Whatwhatwhat?
The secretary had left his temporary office in the National Palace to return to his regular office on Avenida Insurgentes, the one decorated with Roche-Bobois furniture. It was a sign that the crisis had passed. And now—whatwhat?—were they saying that Mamadoc was refusing to give the Cry this year? What the fuck was all that about? Say that again, Mr. Private Secretary? She refuses…? But what the hell … what the fuck does that old slut think she’s here for anyway? Does she think we brought her here to knit booties and watch soap operas? You get her over here now! Whatwhat? She’s already in my waiting room? That that’s what she wants, to see me to speak to me, or she won’t give the Cry? The President says to go easy with her, that this monster is more useful to us than ever, that after all, she’s your Frankenstein, you invented her, Mr. Secretary, you imposed her on us. Of course, of course …
He hung up in a rage and ordered his toady to be sure that the Mother and Doctor of Mexicans was in his waiting room.