Christopher Unborn (55 page)

• 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.

*   *   *

“Come on now, ma'am, hate me a little!”

“The worse you treat me, the more I love you. And if you were to treat me nicely I would love you even more. There's no escape for you, Angel, my cherub!”

“All right, all right. I think about your daughter when I'm inside you, like that idea?”

“I just love the thought of it, my little cherub! The mere idea gets me hot! Come over here!”

“Your husband let me look at you naked, ma'am, should I remind him of the fact? Don't you hate him?”

“I love him more than ever. I owe having you to him!”

“I hate you, ma'am, you disgust me, you're like Miss Piggy with all that cellulite, terminal halitosis, your ass looks like a dish of cottage cheese, you've got dandruff, and you've always got little pieces of tortilla stuck in your teeth!”

“And, despite all that, you still get hard! You love me, you love me, don't deny it!”

In effect, that was my priapic father's problem: his masculine vanity was stronger than his disgust in potentia, and even if he didn't want to, precisely because he didn't like Mrs. López, he would think about other things, about the unreachable Penny, about my mother when she excited him, and all that got him ready for Doña Lucha, who, as she said, didn't give a damn about what made it hard just as long as it stayed hard.

“Look! It's hard as a rock! Again! Don't you ever get tired?”

“It's not hard because of you, I swear.”

“Well, I don't see anyone else in this bedroom, do you? There's only me, your worn-out but loving old pelican!”

“I think about other women.”

“Let 'em eat cake! You're locked in with me.”

“I am not. I can leave whenever I please.”

“There's the door, cherub!”

“You know very well that my passion for your daughter won't let me leave.”

“Well then, why don't you go conquer her?”

“You know very well she won't give me the time of day.”

“She doesn't give anybody the time of day.”

“I know it, and that's why I'm going to keep on screwing her through you.”

“Well, charity begins at home, lover boy!”

“Mein Kampf!”

“I do as I please!”

7

The current Servilia served tea (was it a Lapsang Suchong smuggled in by their little brother Homero from Mexamerica and/or

Pacífica?)

to Capitolina and Farnesia, who were dressed in robes that made them look like cocottes in a Feydeau farce: all silk, wide sleeves, feather boas at neck and cuffs, velvet slippers. Both said that at least during breakfast in their shared boudoir they could dress with a certain frivolity (man does not live by religion alone; nor do women). Their multiple social obligations forced them to be ready for last rites, wakes, and funerals, so they wore black almost all the time, because, as Capitolina was in the habit of declaring:

“Mourning is what you wear on the outside.”

Morning was also the time in which they exchanged their most intimate confidences, but this particular morning in July of 1992, ten years after the catastrophes of the López Portillo era (the greatest of which, for the two sisters, had been the flight of their nephew Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, on whom they'd set their fondest hopes), there was malice in the eyes of the decisive Capitolina, which, if not unusual, was more energetic and, at the same time, more restrained, hungrier to show itself and implacably astonish the younger sister, who was usually plagued by vagueness:

“Besides…” was the first word either uttered that morning, and naturally it was Farnesia who said it, but Capitolina simply cast that penetrating and intelligent look on her that seriously upset the younger sibling.

“How silly, I'm falling asleep,” Farnesia suddenly said in order to cover up her lapse as she sat in her favorite love seat and covered her eyes with a dark hand, which resembled nothing so much as a dark swan. Capitolina slowly sipped her tea (reclining in very very Madame Récamier style in her favorite chaise longue, her chubby little feet crossed) and stared with indecipherable intentions at Farnesia.