Christopher Unborn (65 page)

“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.”

“Don't hate yourself. There are better things to hate. Look at that house. Look at that store. Look at that car. Why don't they belong to you? It's up to you. Take them!”

“Blessed are those that walk the face of the earth in its dangerous moments!”

“Mexico should drown herself in the ocean of confusion in order that it be reborn on the beach of hope.”

“I want a world in which prayers come true! Come with me, old woman, pray as you walk, pray.”

They believed everything because he believed it: in bed with Concha, he let the other penetrate him while he penetrated the woman. His body resists. His body tells him that it is going to go mad just so that the other man inhabiting him can come out of him. He resists: his skin has always been his own, there was nothing behind it, nothing more inside. Yes: another man is emerging from within him, but his body resists and his mind resists even more: you will not be a saint, you will be a criminal and a madman. But the other man is already his spirit. He didn't realize that the spirit within him also had a body. This didn't matter to the body of the other man: he fed on the environment, on tension, on fear, on the frustration, self-loathing, disillusion: all this fed the spirit of the other within him, and the funniest thing is that it transformed bad tensions into good tensions. During the long nights of cabaret and sex with Concha Toro, when, after the pleasure of music and sex, they prepared the cassettes that Colasa—terribly diligent, animated (perhaps more so than her father) by a desire for vengeance against that fop Angel Palomar (an object of terrible hatred, you've turned out, oh, padre mío!)—brought early every morning to the Trucking Center, whence they were scattered all over what remained of the Honorable Republic of Mexico, the tension of resentment, frustration, the colossal screwing that was Mexico and Mexicans humiliated and handed over to disgrace from birth until death, became passion, dream, hope, movement. Only one thing remained the same; the spirit moves because of the tension surrounding it: it yearns for catastrophe.

Matamoros Moreno let the other come out to fuse with him in body and soul. That's how the Ayatollah Matamoros was born.

He was born to impress and defeat my defeated and insignificant father, Angel Palomar. Dear Dad, what's happened to you? Why don't we share our imagination any longer, you and I? When are we going to get together again, dear old Dad?

Thus he dragged all of us into his passionhope.

*   *   *

That same man, whatever he might be and however he might be, was now in a brilliant space of lights and reflections from silver and crystal, holding down a girl on the perfume counter in a replica of Bloomingdale's seeing herself reflected in the thousand mirrors and the thousand eyes of that night. This ritual was expected of him, the spiritual guide was the carnal guide, the revolution did not exalt the spirit at the expense of the flesh: sex was part of the passion and the hope of the revolution for all, in which the perennially frustrated desires of Mexicans would be gloriously brought to fruition: Screw the boss's daughter! Fuck the unreachable princess! Nail Don Ulises López's daughter! Bring the impossible close to the possible in one ferocious and vibrant blow! Matamoros Moreno owed it to himself and owed
this
to all those who stared at him that August night in Las Lomas del Sol: to take off his cape, unbutton his fly, take out his rod, and bring it closer to the open legs of the valley-girl princess, who managed to murmur at the edge of the deaf-mute idiocy that would afflict her from then on:

“You can look but you can't touch. You're ugly, poor, and a prole. I'm not for you.”

That
I'm not for you
was the code murmured and repeated by everyone, which made everyone participate vicariously in Matamoros's pleasure taken on Penny, who began to scream more, more, more, don't take it out, don't come, wait for me, more, more, more, she staring and the luminous guide looking at my father, the terrible joke jabbing him like a spear is the stare of my father hugged, naturally, by Uncle Homero Fagoaga, giggling: “A penis for Penny!”

6

Colonel Inclán raised his fingers, knotty as mesquite roots, to his eyes, threatening everyone with something no one had ever seen: the eyes he always hid behind those pitch-black glasses. Neither Secretary Federico Robles Chacón nor President Jesús María y José Paredes had ever seen Colonel Inclán's eyes and the two of them trembled slightly at the prospect. The mere idea of facing his gaze frightened them, and the colonel knew it. With a smile like a death's-head, he dropped his clenched hand:
If not now, when?
Hadn't he told the President that the time still hadn't come? Well, now it had! The damn bodyguards weren't worth a shit, they'd all either run away or joined up with the Coca-Cola or aymapepper or whatever that faith healer was calling himself, but they'd been killing the colonel's best people, there were cops hanging off the lampposts, goddamn it! How far were they willing to let this thing go before they started shooting, how far, Mr. President, how far?

Colonel Inclán and Federico Robles Chacón exchanged ugly looks: Robles Chacón quietly stated that his generation had grown up in a flood of unpunished crimes that undermined the very thing they were attempting to strengthen: the Mexican State, the Party of the Revolution, and the controlled working class. The public image of the president, the PRI, the CTM, turned to dust just as their power was turned to mush by the memory of October 2, 1968, when the students were killed in the Tlateloco massacre, or by Corpus Christi in 1972, when they were again slaughtered on the Alvarado Bridge, or by May 10, 1990, when the strike by Mexican mothers was broken up when the Perisur mall was turned into a free fire zone. All that had to be paid for, said Robles, because the system no longer knew how to do with the opposition what it had always done, namely, to coopt it and to incorporate it into the system. These failures were very costly because they were debilitating both internally and externally: the mutilated fatherland was the price they paid for internal political inability and was not the result of external diplomatic ability.

“You're a fast talker and you think a lot,” said the colonel, “but I want to know what to do with my machine guns now that the time is ripe to use them.”

“You go out and get hold of that Matamoros guy,” said Robles Chacón.

“What are you going to do, son?” exclaimed the President, who saw in Federico Junior the resurrection of Federico Senior, the man who had launched Paredes's political and financial career back in the forties.

Inclán answered for him: “I'll bring you your nut, and then I'm going to go to bed, hugging the pillow where my mom—may she rest in peace—laid her head down for the last time before she died. All right: calm down, gentlemen, there's light at the end of the tunnel. Let me sleep on it. But…”