A river appears in the middle of the night it flows luminous and slow like a caress a distant guitar is heard and Will Gingerich wonders why all this makes him afraid Christopher don’t you ever feel terror amid the placental pleasures and protection of your mother Angeles’s womb?
She doesn’t move Nat told Macho Nacho the chink told you that she’s asleep go on open the curtain Nat one mosquito net after another sure so she can sleep in peace but if my black dingaling doesn’t wake her up I don’t know how yours will better measure mine why do you black guys always think that God gave you bigger bananas than anybody else? okay set her up so we can have some fun with you in front and me in back then we switch listen look at her lift up her legs and look at her she’s not very young see around here who cares if they’re young or old the important thing is a piece of ass forget if it’s young or old Macho it isn’t that her legs weigh a lot heavy sleep Nat try to turn her over I’m telling you she weighs a ton the equivalent of 250 tons of TNT
BACKPACK NUKE
FRONT-ROW DICK
NEVER LEAVE HOME WITHOUT THEM
and her arms are real stiff let’s see these marble tits frozen spread her legs and what about her ass? frozen too frozen and locked tighter than a safety-deposit box at Chase Manhattan Bank stick your finger in it doesn’t go in Nat this ass is a dry CAT BOX! no one’s gone through there in a hundred years and what about behind? BACK DOOR! something’s going on back here and the face what’s it like Harry made of porcelain it looks like a doll’s face made of Chinese porcelain it’s pretty but it’s old white real white with closed eyes powdered and with red hair touch her hair Nat do it for me I’m looking down here Nat it isn’t hair it’s a wig what the fuck it slipped off there’s a liquid running out her ears what’s she got in her nose cotton wads holy shit Harry what she’s got running down her ass stinks like hell like disinfectant it smells like formaldehyde holy shit she just now opened her eyes Macho Nacho but she isn’t moving them they’re made of glass holy papaya this bitch is sick Nat this bitch’s got something wrong with her this bitch is dead don’t be a moron this fucking bitch is spoiled cold cuts don’t shout like that Macho for the sake of Luis Rafael I beg you Sánchez don’t make such a racket that’s right be careful watch out what you’re doing don’t clench your teeth don’t clench fists don’t move your BACKPACK NUKE like that if you pull on that string shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit
someday you’ll thank me
the greasers breed like rats so they can go for the good life
so they can end up the way everybody wants to end up
as in a stellar sermon
TV and refrigerators and football stadiums and
white asses and things that work and hospitals
and cereals that snap crackle and pop and bread without flies
and American cars Akutagawas and Togos and Meijis and Kabuki 2002s
each one of your little brothers who stays here means one red-blooded
American home saved thanks to me!
Cardel Chachalacas Tajín Totonacas
Reverend Royall Payne looks at the vision of the Peak of Orizaba which is rapidly approaching his whitish-blue eyes reverberating looking at the frozen peak of the volcano an image of his own gaze as if the humble toiler in the Lord’s work could transform himself into nature
tall white eternal rock and ice: permanent
NO MORE DEFEATS! MORE DEFEATS MEAN MORE REVENGE!
NO MORE VIETNAMS! LETHAL FORCE IS AUTHORIZED!
NO MORE DEFEATS!
in the river crossing the river under the water masked by the fiery water imagining that his pantheistic anthropologist’s dream is finally going to resolve itself in the nightmare of dying and becoming hamburger repeats Will Gingerich under the slow and flaming river but the flames only consume the town of Cardel the river is a border and the professor of Dartmouth College crosses to the other side and falls face-down on the fertile mud of the river
the United States lost its innocence in Veracruz muttered Professor Gingerich when the hands of others (friendly? unfriendly?) grabbed him under the armpits and pulled him out of his mud bed on the banks of the slow river surrounded by tigers with golden eyes and backs of fire the butterflies crowning the waters the ghost of the moon in the eternal blue black night
in Veracruz
in Vietnam
in Korea
in Hiroshima
in Dresden
in Santo Domingo
in Bluefields
in Managua
in Port-au-Prince
in Santiago de Cuba
in Manila
in Andersonville
in the Little Bighorn
in Tripoli
in Chapultepec
in Chapultepec
in Chapultepec
and in El Tajín
the broken clay
bells of the moon
hummingbird magician
serpent skirts
stars of the south
the tiger said: fire in half of the night
the clay said: mirror of smoke
I said crisscrossed with voices:
17. The Other Bank of the River
After he’d been rescued from the mud on the floodplain, Professor Gingerich said all these things as he was eating some hamburgers cooked up by the albino trucker. My father and the girl dressed as a Discalced Carmelite listened to him.
The Yankee spoke to her, raising his voice slightly above the din behind us, endless said my father: Gingerich only stared at the girl, recognizing her, as he spoke near the low, hospitable fire in this forest clearing.
He stopped occasionally to chew the hamburger. Then he revealed, staring at Colasa Sánchez, that he was speaking and imagining at the same time; such was the scope of his gaze. When I am born, I may perhaps have a better opportunity to understand how people look at things and persons and to read in looks the names of desire. Although from this moment on I do know (my father looks for me, you understand, Reader) that if desire is only the imitation of another desire it’s because when we want something we want at the same time to be wanted. That’s the way Gingerich and Colasa look at each other. Both know what the Professor heard from the lips of his deceased friend D. C. Buckley. Be careful with that woman. Use a wooden penis. Penis du bois.
Tonight my father divines in the trembling of Gingerich’s features, a man just saved from death in the jungle, an availability in the face of another’s desire. An aperture. She needs no introduction: Colasa Sánchez, Matamoros Moreno’s bastard. He says simply, as she swallows a piece of hamburger, which she holds delicately between her fingers, the way one might pick up a host, that he came from the other bank. What did he want? Something huge, something very difficult, for him to have risked death by crossing over.
The other bank: my father was going to interrupt, by saying something banal: he swam. He stopped just in time. The night, the light of the fire, the clamor behind us (I am my father! you are the reader!) transformed her; Colasa Sánchez was a necessary being, she revealed herself as a daughter of necessity, more even than her father Matamoros Moreno and her mother Anónima Sánchez. She needed; that was her supplication that night.
The other bank: Will Gingerich stretched out his hand and touched Colasa Sánchez’s fingers with his own. Cinnamon-colored skin, tea-colored, Carmelite-colored. Guess: where are the scapularies? Will closed his eyes and accepted the necessity of Colasa. Desire is necessary and it must run the risk of transformation. We desire what we desire not only in order to have it but also in order to change into the image of our desire: into our own image.
Would the object of desire resist?
Would it admit its own need, the need of the other, even at the cost of transformation?
When my father saw their fingers touch and when he imagined the cruel union of their sexes, he stood up trembling, masked his emotion in the frontier darkness, and said to himself what he would say to my mother and me, turbid and luminous in her bosom, whe
n he found us once again:
“I saw this couple take that risk and I saw things clearly in the darkness of the jungle. I am not risking anything by returning to you, who are my love, Angeles, and to our about-to-be-born son. Accept my return. Let me explain why I love you and how much I desire you.”
Colasa and Will, holding hands, staring at each other with passion, conscious of the danger, laughing at the myth, at Matamoros dead, at the bitten Manhattanite’s wooden dildo, at the Mexican Ms., the mortal manuscript: Will Gingerich had no book, Matamoros’s words would not be eaten: he was the owner of a body,
“My body is yours,” said the girl Colasa, free at last.
9
The Discovery of America
… why do I have to find you if I never lost you …
Gabriel García Márquez
The Autumn of the Patriarch
1. Your Truth of Blessed Bread
Pay attention now, Reader: wait for me because I’m going to need you more than ever, don’t hide from me, don’t go away: you have to be there when I need you to lend me a hand so that I can recover everything I shall lose, I’m certain of it, when I abandon my mother; not yet: my mother is alive and I am inside her during these last days of my gestation, my mother is alive, sitting in the Church of San Felipe Neri in Oaxaca, surrounded by fleurons and looking (since she still can’t look at me!) at a Holy Child of Atocha dressed in brocade and rose-colored feathers and as she looks at the Holy Child our buddy Egg looks at her with a mixture of melancholy and unbounded passion but she and I know that something is going to happen, a tremulous premonition makes both of us see you, Dad, blazing along the highway on a broken-down Kurosawa motorcycle ripped away from the body of a Yankee sentinel, far from the temptations of sweet tropical Veracruz, far away and returned to the sacred highlands, rapidly along the road from Orizaba and Tierra Blanca and the Tuxtepec River, over hill over dale, through Cuicatlán toward Oaxaca. My father, who left Bubble Gómez and his refrigerated truck full of edible cadavers as well as Colasa Sánchez with Professor Will Gingerich united for better or for worse, while you, Dad, you have no reason to doubt it, it’s for better, for better it will be that you ride toward us, toward my mother and toward me, certain of the place where we’re all going to meet come on, where else could it be?
Oh, how I see you, Pop, tall and gypsy-colored and green-eyed and myopic and tense, every muscle on your angular face more sharply drawn than ever, the bad roads beating you and bouncing you on your balls, which is where you feel the physical danger of the highway, its violence, its potholes, and that I feel with you because that’s about where we relate, you and I, what the fuck, that’s where we begin: that’s where America was invented, that’s where it was desired, that’s where it was needed, and nowhere else: America is in my father’s balls!
* * *
He’s biking along toward Oaxaca on the Christopher Columbus Highway, a rioting sea of potholes, and my father says son don’t be born without me don’t be born halfway my son wait for your father I’m on my way to you I’m almost there wait just a little longer Christopher wait for me hope stop time I’m just about there Angeles don’t get all self-absorbed without me don’t give birth without me don’t close the circle yet without me don’t just be you two but we three always three don’t leave me out of your halo Angeles let me enter your light don’t finish your light without me don’t take your air away without me don’t have our son without me look I’m coming back forgive me and forgive me above all for not explaining to you that I left you for reasons I will never understand completely, but that I began to understand, know when? when I saw the gringo professor and Colasa Sánchez risk sharing everything even the fearsome myth even the painful past to transcend, in the dangerous love of a couple, the social stupidity of reputation appearances conventions. Because if two people really love each other Angeles that’s the most revolutionary thing in the world that changes the world just that there’s nothing more to do but live a love telling to go fuck themselves all those who will tell who told what happened before will be or will not be will do or will not do with those whom the middle class fills its days without imagination without love withoutwithout the substitution of possible quantities of love for equivalent quantities of things and I lost and disoriented never reached this but between my conservative revolution and your leftist revolution I inserted a passion called jealousy and a justification called machismo and because of them I was unable to imagine the worst thing that could happen to me: not that I would cheat on you, Angeles, but that you would no longer think about me, that killed me with jealousy, that is what pulled me out of my sensual justification: a world in which you could go on living with our son without loving me anymore without even thinking about me: I was no longer jealous of anyone but of myself Angeles in the instant in which I imagined not only your absence I confess it or that of the child but my absence from your world and that of our son: your light without me your air without me your body without me is what I cannot stand from now on and that’s why I’m returning so that you pardon me and admit me once again into your light your air your flesh: listen to me Angeles and Christopher: my words are a call for help! I put on the brakes, I skid, the dust covers me.
My father entered the church in Oaxaca: golden glory, intense perfume of flowers and the neighboring bakeries, incense and recently washed tile floors; he went to her, touched her shoulder. She did not look at him. She raised her veil and showed him the nape of her neck.
My mother dropped the volume of Plato published by the UNAM with green covers and the black shield THROUGH MY RACE THE SPIRIT WILL SPEAK.
She had to lift her long hair, which she promised not to cut until she finished reading the Cratylus.
Egg looked at them together and stood up from the pew.
Egg and the Baby Ba walked out, he with his flat feet and his bald head, she wearing her plaid schoolgirl’s smock, with her tresses and little round face.
And my saddened heart: don’t go away, little girl, don’t leave me alone, Baby Ba! Suppose that now, as it seems, everything is forgiven and the couple reunite and I’m left alone: who but you can be with me, little girl, Baby Ba: remember I’m the only one who sees you as you are! Don’t forget that! Don’t forget me!
Ah, the egoism of love. No one does anything to get me closer to the girl, who goes off, following Egg along the nave of the Church of San Felipe Neri in Oaxaca an October morning in 1992. She turns back, holding the hand of our buddy, and looks at me:
She waves goodbye to me with her little hand raised to the height of her cheek.
Bye-bye. Ciao. See you soon, sweetie pie!
The church is empty at this hour.
My father holds up my mother’s long hair. He brings his lips to my mother’s perfumed nape. He bares only her back, her shoulders her nape. My father kisses the incomparable softness of my mother Angeles’s body. Angeles gives him the ecstasy of the acid fragrance of her armpit; she gives him her shoulders, good for a copious, liquid cry; she gives him the wingèd virtue of her soft bosom and the sleepy quintessence of her light back: breathing all of her in, forever in love with what is soft about my mother, how I want to fall asleep in your arms, to forget everything, Penny, Lucha, and Ulises and the Ayatollah and Colasa and Bubble Gómez’s truck and the Veracruz war. I wanted to sleep in the crackling sheets and imagine her as I saw her, dressed in the radiant mourning of resonant starch, with her coppery eyes and her ruddy cheeks, and I wishing she would caress me as she caressed the beads on her rosary with her fine, agile fingers … the luxury of ivory and mother-of-pearl.
He told her again that he could not desire her and only desire her, that she had to give him whatever she had even if it were on the threshold of the cemetery. Her feet. He dreamed wide awake of her feet. He asked for her feet. But at that moment she said no. She then spoke for the first time to say no. Not this time. Everything will repeat itself except this.
“Why?” asked my father.
??
?I don’t want you ever to see me insane, dried out, or sick. That’s why.”
My father understood then (I understood, says my father) that this time he was not going to take off her shoes (I did not take off her shoes), nor was she going to offer (her feet) so that I wouldn’t get sick (because of absolutes) here in Oaxaca (where the best and worst of me began) (my mission, Angel my father now laughs): (your love, the best of me, says my father, and she repeats it with him).
She raised her thaumaturgical eyes and looked into my father’s green eyes.
My mother gave my father the water she held in the hollow of her hands to drink.
When we left the church, nevertheless, the unexpected was waiting for us: a white Shogun limousine right in the Oaxaca plaza, a uniformed Oriental chauffeur wearing a black cap, obsequiously opening the car door, next to which, on foot, leaning against the half-open window, one little Gucci-poochie foot coquettishly posed on the carpet of the limousine, the other posed unceremoniously on the cobbles of the Oaxaca plaza, dressed, all of him, in white as if for an extemporaneous First Communion, in his hand an elegant malacca cane which he twirled in his idle fingers before our astonished eyes, his jowly face perfectly polished, shiny, pulled tight, well shaven except for the tiny black spot of a mustache on his permanently sweaty upper lip: our Uncle Don Homero Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca, of the best etc.…