“You are an incorrigible romantic,” Capitolina said, dropping the curtains and walking toward Farnesia. “You still have that ridiculous handkerchief with your lover’s initials on it.”
“That’s why I don’t want anyone poking around in our drawers when we die,” she said in her highest voice.
“That’s not what I’m talking about!” Capitolina shouted this time. “That’s all over and done! He never renounced the child, he begged you that if you didn’t want it, to give it to him, it was you who made it disappear, don’t you remember? What did you do with your son, blockhead?”
“Don’t scream at me, Capitita. I forgot! I swear that I forgot … I mean, we forgot, no, no … I mean that you must have known … it’s my way of speaking … no, I didn’t kill him, I swear, I gave him to, I don’t know who it was, I don’t remember, all I remember is that I put a silver chain around his ankle, one that could expand and grow with him, and our names, Farnesia and Fernando, there’s the key in a jewel box over there, that’s why I don’t want … we don’t want, isn’t that so?… anyone poking around in our…”
“Don’t be a fool and don’t take me for one. You must have given the child to Servilia.”
“To whom?”
“To whoever was the maid then. Don’t you remember?”
“How can I when they all have the same name? Who was Servilia in 1964? In any case, it’s our secret…”
“You wanted to share it with Angel.”
“Yes. You know why.” Now it was Farnesia’s turn to stare directly and maliciously at her sister. “You know what we were going to ask him for in exchange for our secret. You know very well.”
“That’s not what matters here. What matters is something infinitely more important.” Capitolina rose majestically. “What matters is that we get all we ever wanted — in one fell swoop.”
“A child to share our secrets,” said Farnesia, stretching out her hand to touch her sister’s. “A child to replace my own, sister, and to replace Angelito, who abandoned us…”
“Especially a child of our own blood, who should not grow up on the street, whose mother is unmarried and whose father abandoned him. In a word, a Fagoaga!”
“Yes, yes, we should educate him ourselves,” exclaimed Farnesia.
“Don’t give me any of that Commie propaganda,” her sister answered her haughtily. “You don’t give education. Education’s something you drink in your mother’s milk. Our religion is all we need!”
“Excuse my lack of ignorance,” said Farnesia humbly. “How silly, I must be falling asleep … you know.”
“All right now. Try to understand our plan: we are going to get custody of that child. I’ve found out he’ll be born in October. We’re three months away from the delivery date. We have time.”
8. The reader ought to know
The reader ought to know that in point of fact my father did attempt to escape the vicious circle of love that locked him in Lady Lucha’s arms, promising that one day he would obtain Penny’s favors. He accosted her at various times throughout the day — while she was playing roulette in her private casino, or sitting in her red velvet movie theater watching the complete films of Shirley Temple, or swimming in the heated pool in the shape of the United States. But the girl had a gift for never looking at him and thus fanned the flames of his almost medieval desire, as if he were a knight frustrated by the inviolable distance between himself and this maiden imprisoned behind drawbridges, chastity belts, and within the improbable purity she had constructed around herself.
One desperate day, he entered her room only to find she was not there (she always seemed to be elsewhere). He rubbed his cheek with a towel she had tossed aside, smelled her hairbrush; his unsatisfied passion was so strong he even wished to find one of Penny’s used tampons so he could put it under his pillow, just as he’d once left a condom filled with his semen under Penny’s pillow only to see it later floating in the garden pool, blown up and with Superman painted on it.
One night when he hid behind the curtains in Penny’s bedroom to watch her sleep, he discovered some of the small secrets of this princess who would not allow herself to be touched by princes, plebes, or anyone else: Penny smelled herself! He saw her in bed amorously, slowly smelling first her armpits, then the hand which she’d held between her legs for such a long time, then her pinkie, which she’d hidden in her anus, and then came her farts. These tiny peals of thunder, fully audible, were jealously swept up in her little fist and instantly brought to her nostrils and absorbed there in a spasm, her eyes closing delightedly, her mouth agonizing in ecstasy; she gave her farts more than she gave him, her unknown lover! A gas got more affection than he did!
This discovery drove my father Angel right out of his foreseeable — monotonous but promising — game plan. And so he arrived, not in a bad mood, but distracted and ill-humored at the dinner table around which, perversely, the three members of the López family and my father gathered to enjoy Médoc d’Aubuisson’s opulent cuisine.
“Perhaps at the end of summer we’ll go someplace nice for a vacation,” said Don Ulises without conviction, trying to initiate a trivial conversation.
“Where?” His wife arched her plucked and painted eyebrow. “To your native Chilpancingo? to the floating gardens of Xochimilco? Or might we venture to the far reaches of Pachuca, Hidalgo?”
“Patience, sweetheart,” said Ulises to Lucha, patting her hand. “Things will straighten themselves out, I promise.”
“Bah,” grunted the lady. “Things will only straighten themselves out if Mexico is annexed by the United States. How I wish it would happen! Then I wouldn’t have to go abroad just to go shopping.”
“Don’t be frivolous,” Ulises sweetly chided her. “The reason you say that is because they are organized and we are disorganized. In the long run, we’ll only be saved if we’re governed from Washington. All the rest is nothing but outmoded patriotism.”
“Well, I’d be happy with being Puerto Rico,” said the lady. “It’s better than nothing.”
“Oooooh, I get so mixed up,” said Penny. “I don’t, ya know, like to traaavel, no way, because I never know where I aaam, or, like, what the name of the place is. I’m reeelly dumb in, like, geography, even though I went to the Ibero-American School.”
“Well, where haven’t you been, Penny?” asked my poor father, as innocent as a lamb.
“Oooooh, even I can answer that one. Almost nobody’s been there, like, what’s that place with the reeely funny name,
Pacífica,
is that, like, what they call it? How come we never go there, huh?”
A frozen silence from Doña Lucha, a kick under the table from her father’s short leg, a sudden curiosity in my father, who, in that instant, felt tired of this passion, this comedy …
“Have you ever been in
Pacífica?”
he asked with the same innocent expression on his face, repeating the question put to him by Deng Chopin in the defunct Acapulco boîte, Divan the Terrible.
No one answered, and my father will swear that something happened there that he could not explain but which did explain Don Ulises’s invitation to visit him in the Salon of the Stars (Marlene! Rhonda! Greta!), where, with no preambles, forgoing all etiquette, not even asking him to sit down, with not a hint of political caviling or philosophic evocation, the millionaire said to my father:
“Let’s see now, Palomar. You’ve been here over a month now. You must be wondering why I brought you here and why I’ve kept you on.”