“Don Ulises: I came here to get your daughter, not your wife.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said López impatiently, “I confess I need sexual collaborators for my wife. Her nymphomania wears me out and you’re certainly not the first stud to dirty her sheets. But let’s get to the point: you haven’t been able to seduce my daughter. Want me to hand her to you?”
My father didn’t know if the polite thing was to say yes or no. In the confusion that overpowered him, he could only say emphatically: “A pleasure.”
This non sequitur, like a lapse in synchronization between the actor’s lips and the sound of the words, did not correct itself over the course of the dialogue between my father and Ulises:
“You’ll be able to take a break from my wife and all her demands.”
“An honor to meet you.”
“But you will not even be able to touch Penny with a rose petal.”
“My name is Angel Palomar y Fagoaga.”
“Unless you do for me exactly what I’m going to tell you to do.”
“After you.”
“I need a seraph to do my dirty work for me.”
“Hello.”
“What you did so well with my wife, I want you to do with my rivals.”
“Happy to meet you.”
“My business rivals. My rivals in the government. I want you to take advantage of your good looks, your social connections, your aristocratic pedigree, all of that, to open doors that will not open for me or my family, I want you to seduce wives and daughters, discover secrets, communicate them to me, and when necessary, to humiliate all these people and lead them to bankruptcy, and — why not? — get rid of them if necessary.”
Don Ulises jumped up, almost did a flip, clicked his heels noisily in the air, and landed on his feet, while Angel said, as if talking in his sleep:
“No, I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”
“See, Angelito, I’ve always had something that someone else has needed, and today that someone is you.”
“Would you mind passing the salt?”
“Depending on how well you perform for me, little by little I’ll get you into my saintly daughter’s good graces. What do you say?”
“How nice! It’s been such a long time. Really, it’s been ages!” exclaimed my stunned father as he withdrew from the presence of Don Ulises and instinctively stepped into the garden for a breath of air. In the distance he spied something shining in the darkness. He allowed himself to be led to that light. It emanated from the Bloomingdale’s replica. He approached the revolving doors, pushed them, then mounted the half-flight escalator. As he regained his composure, he thought nostalgically about the days when he felt free to intertwine his fingers with a woman’s forbidden hand going up or down an escalator. He loved women he didn’t know, longed for those he hadn’t yet discovered, wondered if he’d used up my mother, if he knew her completely by now, if she thought he was an imbecile, wondered if he’d perhaps worn out Doña Lucha as well, although he was sure she’d worn him out, but that he still had to know if Penny could be worn out or could wear him out and why not ask her directly since there she was, in the facsimile of this Cathedral of López Delights, the first floor of Bloomingdale’s. Penny was seated at Bloomie’s perfume-and-makeup counter, her back to him, hiding that brilliant face illuminated by two butterflies on her eyes, gold dust on her eyelids, strawberry hearts on her lips, her nostrils fluttering, her little ears perfumed by Miss Dior, her insinuatingly cleft chin, that slightly sluttish beauty he had admired, desired, been obsessed by ever since New Year’s at the Aca disco. Now she was sitting there, presenting him with her bare shoulders, wearing a striped T-shirt, her waist and ass covered by a tweed miniskirt, a whore, yes indeed, that’s how he wanted her, a little half-breed from the Guerrero coast, fed for generations on rice and beans and fried plantains, squid in its ink, and Larín chocolates. Everything her mother had revealed, the farthest thing from Palomar y Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca and the best Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Puebla families: Penny López with her back to him, a pencil in one hand and a tissue in the other, and he, gawking at her, awkwardly crashes into the Estée Lauder counter, knocking down a row of bottles, and she, surprised, drops the pencil and raises the tissue to her mouth as she spins on her seat and allows herself to be seen without makeup, clean-faced, devoid of her tropical bordello glitter: Penelope López Plancarte without makeup, her face washed clean, was (my father almost fainted) the very image of a nice little prim-and-proper Mexican girl, with centuries of Creoles behind her, early Masses, and lonely nights, late suppers of eggs and beans and vermicelli soup, corn-flour porridge for breakfast, centuries of church candles strained through her blood, and he knew how to tell all of them apart genetically: Penny López without gold dust and butterflies on her eyes was a pale, clean-faced nun, barely distinguishable from the nuns that the high-bourgeois girls of Mexico imitate so they won’t look like the whores who are the other alternative in their reality: Penny López was one of them, like them, barely inclined to erase her resemblance to them. She, too, derives from the legion of ghosts with bloodless lips and suspicious eyes, rice-powder skin, holy-water-rinsed hands, rosaried fingers, scapulary breasts: devout bourgeois flesh hidden for five centuries of colonialism in convents, far from the sun, in somber houses with humid patios and masturbatory bedrooms: women with dead cells and the scar of a hair shirt on every freckle: he saw her like that, bloodless, pale, traditional, and in a dark flash he saw Agueda in the Oaxaca church, the mad Agueda’s dried-up or dead friends in the Oaxaca plaza, saw my mother Angeles materialized among the balloons and trees in the Alameda, the woman he desired or deserved or fatally loved in a kind of desperate lottery in which his real wife, the one he should have loved madly, had still not been born or had died four centuries earlier, in a bordello in Seville or a convent in Quito: what would he say to an ideal woman that wouldn’t be this absurd phrase that he repeated to the terrified Penny, poor little Penny surprised in flagrante in her monastic, colonial, genetic nakedness:
“I dreamed about words,” my father said to her.
She covered her face with the tissue, like a Veronica, and told him through the paper: “My daddy gave me uh like permission for you to uh kiss my ass. But nothing else, right? Careful, prole, just the cheeks, okay?”
She stood there saying over and over “Just the cheeks, okay?” while my father slowly exited the brilliant sphere of Bloomingdale’s and walked into the cold night of the high-altitude tropics, toward the gate to Don Ulises López’s mansion, toward the chilled and hunched-over figure waiting for him there, on the other side, always in the street, always patient, protecting herself from the acid drizzle with her tiny clear-plastic parasol, her boots, her gloves, her see-through raincoat. Colasa Sánchez shook hands with my father through the gargoyled gate, and she told him I’ve been waiting for you, I knew that someday you’d come out, I waited and I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.
Ulises and Lucha felt something the night Angel my father abandoned the house in Las Lomas del Sol in the company of Colasa Sánchez; they felt something when they heard Penny sobbing in her bedroom, something they hadn’t felt, neither together nor separately, for a long time, something that led them like sleepwalkers out of their respective rooms and up the serpentine staircase into each other’s arms, to an embrace they hadn’t shared in years, since …
“Chilpancingo,” said Don Ulises with his Lucha in his arms.
“What are you thinking about?” she whispered, trembling, in his ear.
“I don’t know. Unimportant things. It wasn’t an ugly town. On the contrary. It was a pretty town, with pine trees along the streets and pure mountain air.”