Christopher Unborn (40 page)

Who, in person, got up, put on the glasses broken during the skirmish with Matamoros and his men, looked at Uncle Homero in a neutral fashion, and declared before exiting the sacred space: travel is broadening but constipating.

Homero's eyes filled with pious sweetness and he knelt down at the altar, where he buried his face in his hands, as if in profound prayer. The light in the church changed. An intense perfume spread from the stucco flowers; a mist of incense drove away the kneeling figure of Uncle Homero and pushed Angel's body closer to Angeles's, both covered by this sacred fog—a ceremonious mourning—which did not prevent my father from kissing my mother's nape and feeling a desire to weep on her shoulder: a copious, liquid weeping. She took my father's hand and told him just what she said the first time they'd touched, I couldn't sleep all night, because I was so happy I'd met you.

It all happened in a flash; Homero approached my parents and lowered his voice to a whisper; now they, who had lived under his protection in Acapulco, had to know the whole truth—he said—before they returned to the capital and protected him.

“It's a very serious matter,” said Uncle Fagoaga, playing the part, so natural to all Mexicans, of political conspirator. “It is imperative,” he went on after a hiatus punctuated by penetrating looks and pregnant pauses, “that
the three of us,
relatives after all and all well-born, that we all come to an understanding.”

He took a deep breath and let the cat out of the bag: the federal government wanted to kill off Acapulco in order to clean it out; if it didn't, it could never touch its vested interests, drugs, alcohol, the peasants pushed off the communal lands, the squatters expelled from the peaks, the unlicensed condominia, the graft involved in contracts arranged with foreign companies that excluded members of the federal government, and all of it flowing into the pockets and building the power of Don Ulises López.

That was the first thing.

Second, the federal government was at odds with the mayor of Acapulco and the governor of the state of Guerrero, who were rabid separatists. The myth of Acapulco, the tide of dollars that rolled into it, our most important source of foreign exchange since we lost our oil, the value of land, all of it: the federal government was not going to allow all that to go on slipping through its fingers just so it would finance a separatist stunt. The only problem was that even though the mayor and the governor wanted to separate from the Republic of Mexico (or what remained of it) they had nothing to join.

The third—Uncle Homero was now going full tilt—is that it was the police, who took orders only from their chief, Colonel Inclán, who had put Operation Knockapulco into action. They let the revolutionaries out in the hills and, according to what they've told me, a gang from the capital set a pack of hungry coyotes on the city and poisoned a few tourists. Which was of no importance. The troublemakers and the gang, whoever they may have been, unwittingly did the job of the federal police. On their own, the poor jerks wouldn't have been capable of poisoning a parrot. The important thing is that, under the pretext of reestablishing order, the Armed Forces entered the city and saw to it that both the rebels and the local authorities were taken care of.

“A brilliant maneuver!” snorted the ineffable Uncle Homero. “No one knows for whom he works, as the intrepid labor leader Don Fidel Velázquez once said in the marble halls of the IOO in Geneva. The central government, once again, liquidated the local leaders, and Minister Robles Chacón, to whom I tip my hat, practically eliminated his rival, Minister Ulises López, who until now I esteemed highly. But as Don Bernardino Gutiérrez, first supporter of President Calles in the state of Guerrero, says, every once in a while you've got to wet your thumb and stick it out the window to see which way the wind's blowing!”

But the last straw was this: our government is such a benevolently back-stabbing government that it never told a soul about anything.

Acapulco has disappeared from the face of the earth, and there is no information available. Or, as Minister Ulises López said in better times: Information Is Power. No Information Is More Power.

That's the whole story: anyone who tries to find out anything gets stonewalled.

CBS could air a program in New York called “Whatever Happened to Beautiful Acapulco?” and it would never be seen in Mexico.

In these parts, anyone who has questions knows he'll never get answers. And no one's going to dig too deeply: after all, there's something comforting (even though we might not want to admit it) about knowing that something no longer exists or no longer is where it was or where it existed. The same thing happens in our collective conscience: unexplained disappearances weigh lightly on our individual consciences. Ruperto the canary, our sickly Aunt Doloritas, or, for that matter, the sunny port of Acapulco. Bravo!

And since no one except you and me—alas! not even faithful Tomasito, who died doing his duty, fighting against that lowlife mob—no one, not to mention the canary or poor Aunty, survived the Acapulco catastrophe, on this radiant Mixtec morning, as the Colombian bard León de Grieff said during a fleeting visit, I am authorized to tell you that if you keep your mouths shut about what you know or have guessed about this matter, you may return in peace to Mexico City with me, all three of us, it goes without saying, keeping a low profile in terms of our activities, our notoriety, our very presence, as Senator Patrick Moynihan said when—Ireland in the clutches of Luther—he stood in as social coordinator at the White House during the term of President Dickson Danger, before the Watergate Waterloo!”

He took a breath of air and gazed in puzzled joy at his niece and nephew. Then, sighing, he lit a candle to St. Anthony.

“But why are you so down in the mouth, children?” he asked, turning his back to them. “You look as though you'd seen a ghost! Come on now, let's forget our little differences, remember your promise to put me up until sufficient time passes for my merits again to outshine my possible defects, just think that the tropical paradise of our dreams, Acapulco, where we had such a wonderful time, has not disappeared and that it will return in all its former splendor in such a way that it will benefit the federal government and not a mafia of local bosses and that, as you know full well after having spent almost two months there, my tropical Fort Zinderneuf was not and will not be affected by mobs of soldiers, or gangs of chain-swinging delinquents from Mexico City; and so, up, up, and away, as the ebony-hued singer Dionne Warwicke, with her opulent figure and her silky voice, said as she boarded a TWA L1011. Don't lose your serenity!”

At that moment, Don Fernando Benítez rejoined them, zipping his fly, catching Don Homero Fagoaga's last word, and noting Angel's and Angeles's gray faces:

“I don't know what this mound of flesh told you, but don't let yourselves be taken in by his siren song.”

“La Serena,” responded Homero with equanimity, “is the capital of the province of Coquimbo, as Don Miguel Cruchaga y Tocornal moderately asserted.”

“The Siren!”

“La Sirena”

“Lazaretto!”

“Lazarillo!”

“The chippy!”

“The cherry!”

“The cheerio?”

“The cherry-nose!”

“Santa Claus?”

“Satan's Claws!”

“An insanity clause?”

“An Oedipus rex!”

“An Eddy Poe nose?”

“No Goody Two-shoes!”

“Las Sirenas!”

“Las Serenas!”

In these and other delightful torts and retorts Uncle Homero and Uncle Fernando whiled away the hours as our Van Gogh rattled out of Guerrero toward (you guessed it) what was once the place where the air was clear, city of palaces, and the marvel dreamed of in the stories of Amadis of Gaul.

But that will be the matter of my next chapter.

6

Columbus's Egg

All is perpetual flux. The spectacle of the universe merely presents a fleeting geometry, a momentary order.

Denis Diderot

 

1. Potemkin City

The city is the poetry of passion and movement; quietude is part of that poetry; it is rare; it is definitive; in fearing it we fear disguised death.

My father composed these sentences in his head as he realized he was returning for the second time in his life to the capital he had only left on two occasions: when he found his country in Oaxaca and when he lost it in Acapulco. On the first occasion, he'd left the provinces bearing two fears: that of not finding anything in its place when he went back to look for it; that of having too easy a time finding another woman instead of Agueda or those shadows of Agueda, her cousins with invisible shoulders and enigmatic hair: the “governesses of his heart” whom he exiled from his life when he exchanged glances with them, glances in which he imagined them all dried out, mad, or dead.

My mother Angeles has fallen asleep leaning on my father's shoulder as he negotiates one curve after another on the old abandoned road from Apango to Mexico City. But I do not sleep: my eyes, you know, are open all the time; my eyes are transparent within the opacity of the maternal womb; my eyes still devoid of veils read my father's words: this is something only we recently conceived types know; later on, even we forget it; but now we are too close to the origin: the pleasure and pain of that first expulsion flooding down the long chain of genetic information. What are my father's thoughts as he takes heed of the faded signs
DANGEROUS CURVE
600
FEET AHEAD
compared to my DNA as it loses itself in the night of Aztec and Andalusian centuries crisscrossed by Moorish and Hebrew flashes! Well, it's like Uncle Homero's tongue as he sleeps there in the back of the PRI propaganda van!

For which reason I am well positioned to inform you, Reader dear, that as he drives, my father looks at the signs but he also looks at my mother's nodding head, her hair parted down the middle, and the hint of spectral whiteness to be seen in the part itself, and he knows that, despite everything, he was not mistaken about the resolution of his second fear; there are women we see just once and see completely and others we only discover little by little; Angeles was one of the latter: he never fully discovered her; she was not the López Velarde-style woman, nor Agueda or her mourning-clad cousins: Angeles was modern, intellectual, independent, and left-wing: but as with those numinous cousins, he never fully found her, and in this movement in which he knew where things were (Agueda in the San Cosme and San Damián Church, Angeles in the Alameda Park) but things were transformed, they ran away, they reappeared enriched, they turned over their golden fruit and fled once more with the hope but not the certainty of a return. He wanted to find the harmony of the contradiction that nibbled at the apple of his life: to be a modern Mexican conservative. Thus, to find Angeles without finding her completely was never like returning to a place, experiencing the comfort of recovering it there, but knowing that he would never completely know it or understand it. This, said Angel Palomar, my father, to himself, was the secret of his soul.

And she, asleep, loving, raped, both of them raped by Matamoros Moreno, physically raped, immediately abused, not from a distance by money and power, not emblematically, as by poor Uncle Homero, who was now awake and arguing interminably with Uncle Fernando in the rear of the van. And what about her? Did she know all his secrets, understand them, keep mum about them in order not to break the harmony? The idyll of their meeting, the secret surprise:

“I couldn't sleep all night, I was so excited after I met you…”

“And what about me, babe? I was there too, remember…”

And what about her? Before her, before Agueda, women always came to my father, sought him out, he didn't look for them: but they were an urban nuisance: spongers, droppers-in, pests: the problem, ultimately, was always how to get rid of them; he only tracked down two women in his life. Angeles, asleep now on his right shoulder, smelling of resin and earth; Agueda, asleep on his left shoulder, as if she'd flown in through the open window smelling of dust and incense. He wondered if they knew that the ferocious promiscuity of this man who tracked them down so monogamously was only taking time out, that it was like a latent infection, a moral herpes that made him confuse the economic and political disorder of Mexico with amorous chaos: how long could the contradiction between social disorder and erotic fidelity last?

Placing his life at risk, he closed his eyes for an instant in order the better to smell my mother's hair, and prayed that he would never fully understand her; that there would never be a third desire in his life: that he would never again be tempted to include his erotic life in the collective disorder of which he was a victim and which he wanted to judge and damage for that very reason. But my mother Angeles had her own dream, unknown to my father. He had met her in a garden in the heart of Mexico City. On the highway, she dreamed that she had never left that garden; as in some ancient book illustrated with the romanticized image of nineteenth-century childhood she'd seen in Angel's grandparents' house, the curious little girl opened the window of her cabin to see the forest and venture out into it, but the forest had another door to a garden and that garden yet another door to a park and the park led to a jungle and the jungle to the sea, which was the most mutable garden of all. He thought he found her in a park. But he didn't know that she had always lived in parks. And that it was an illusion to think he could find her anywhere else. My mother has not just been found by my father because the garden she lives in has not been completely explored by him; but he doesn't know it yet. The doors of that storybook might be the lock on the door to Aunt Capitolina and Aunt Farnesia's bedroom.

She woke up when they were on the bridge over the Atoyac River in Acatlán and a barrier forced them to detour uselessly to Puebla and avoid—for what reason no one could tell—passing through Cuernavaca. She opened her eyes and saw the ineluctable and elemental signs of human life: women on their knees washing clothes at the river (women on their knees to enter the church, to make tortillas, to prepare to give birth), a boy happily urinating off the bridge, an angry man tugging at a mocking burro (patience is the burro's irony), another boy's white funerary procession: a distracted potter spinning his wheel just as God idly gave a single spin to the universal top.