“Are you thinking that we could have been happy if we had stayed there?”
Ulises nodded his shiny head. “I always liked picking you up at your house. You lived, let’s see now, on…?”
“The street was called Heroínas del Sur. That’s what put the idea in your head to start producing drugs in Chilpancingo … The name of my street! The street your pure little girlfriend lived on, Ulises!”
“We’d walk along Avenida Juan Alvarez, under the pines, to the movie, holding hands. I’d bring you flowers.”
“It was in the national parks that you began to plant poppies, Ulises, remember?”
“You were so pretty, Lucha. All the boys were after you.”
“And now they all get me.”
“I took you out of Chilpancingo, I made you into a queen, I gave you a castle, all so no one would take you away from me. Just look. All the money in the world hasn’t kept me from having to share you with other men.”
“And I thank you for the favor, shorty. I really mean it. You don’t hear me complaining.”
“Lucha, wouldn’t we have been happier if we’d stayed in Chilpancingo all our lives?”
“You’ve wondered about that too, Uli?”
“Yes.”
“Well, keep thinking about it: your whole life in one of those flea-bitten towns. Your whole life. All of it. No change. Always the same, always the same. Always the same thing, what you call monotony, Ulises! I just don’t see you there. Can you see me there?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not the girl I used to be. And you’re not the same either.”
“Let me love you tonight.”
“Thanks, shorty. I feel real lonely tonight, I really mean it.”
Penny listened to them, poking her head through the half-open door of her bedroom, upset, doubtful, just as she was when they traveled and she never knew where they were, if it’s Monday it must be Andorra and if it’s Tuesday it must be Orchids, listening to them talk in voices that were not those she knew; now they were strange, melancholy voices, or could that be tenderness, or whatever you call it? Talking about pine trees and parks and secluded plazas and a church that was so white it blinded you just to look at it, that invited you in to relax in its shade: Mom and Dad holding hands. Penny almost began to cry, and wondered if a little white house surrounded by pines on Heroínas del Sur Street in Chilpancingo was worth more than this monstrosity, with its replica of Bloomingdale’s, its dog-racing track, and its pool in the shape of the U.S.A. Poor Penny; she let her head fall and felt affronted by something that had nothing to do with these places or with her. The way in which that boy saw her when he finally saw her as she was. No one had ever looked at her like that — not with desire, but with shock and disgust, with revulsion. She could really go for a boy like that. She could not say to him, “I’m not for you.” She heard her parents making love and realized that the boy was no longer there and that she could not imitate Lucha and Ulises.
9. As soon as they found out
As soon as they found out that Angel had abandoned Angeles, the Four Fuckups returned, one by one, like birds to the nest to be near her in the Tlalpan house: when the Orphan Huerta and Hipi Toltec, Egg, and the invisible Baby Ba got there, they found the door sealed by the district attorney’s office; there were no windows, but through the wrought-iron grating the friends could clearly see that no one was there.
Feeling abandoned themselves, they stood there in the middle of the street, the very image of bewilderment. Then Egg, who was a man (to his misfortune, he would say to himself) with a memory, put two and two together and told the others that when Angel had run away from the Fagoagas he had found sanctuary with his grandparents, Rigo and Susy. Angeles had no doubt done the same thing.
“Come along now, girl, don’t lag behind, honey, we’re going to look for our pal Angeles,” said our buddy Egg, and perhaps it’s time that I reappear after such a prolonged absence and take this opportunity to tell your lardships that in this my sixth month of gestation there begin to mount up pros and contras with regard to my making my sudden but expected appearance next October, adding my existence to the thirty million citizens (or the dirty million prolecats in the powwow, as the Orphan would say in his slang), and from now on I shall try to note down in two columns, like a bookkeeper—Debit and Credit—the reasons why I should be born and the reasons that discourage me right off the bat from doing so. Okay, Egg’s reference to Baby Ba is perhaps, I will admit this, the most powerful reason I’ve come across yet for someday appearing.
I have the feeling that she’s waiting for me, that she’ll look at me when I’m born and fall in love with me, and that I will be the only person able to see her, even if I can’t talk to her, not in the way the aforementioned Egg now feels able to declare to my mother: “At last I can say it, Angeles. I love you very much. Before I couldn’t, as you know, because Angel was my best friend. But I’ve loved you ever since I met you. I looked at you while I played the piano in the boîte in Acapulco, and you looked at your husband, and your husband looked at Penny López: I, your friend Egg, have loved you from that moment!”
Our buddy Egg’s soul is tormented (mildly) by love and by the fact that he doesn’t want to create any class differences between himself and the Orphan and Hipi, who have never been in the house of the Palomar grandparents and who don’t have the same sort of background as my father and his friend.
But when they finally reach the house on Calle Génova and are let in, they find Angeles and your Humble Cervix (invisible still) in the coach house, where my father grew up surrounded by useless mementos. What joy, what a quantity of hugs, how many tears, unusual in my mom, how many hand squeezes and kisses on the cheeks, what a lot of running around by Grandfather Rigoberto greeting everyone and what a lot of bustling around in the kitchen by Grandmother Susy, who promises to bring glasses of eggnog and quesadillas with sauce, and sopes in green sauce, and salted guazontles, Aztec ants dipped in egg like freshwater pearls, and maguey worms fried and crunchy wrapped in warm tortillas with guacamole, what a party, how happy everyone is, the best I’ve ever had, the hottest, the most loving, the most fraternal, after all that horrifying “fun” in Aca and Igualistlahuaca, and the streets of Mexico Shitty: Grandfather and Grandmother sing a few corridos, Hipi dances a dance dredged up from the beginning of time, as monotonous as the night or the rain, and the Orphan, forgetful as usual, has to invent a tune and hope the others join in, as in fact they do, Hipi and Egg (and Ba, invited by Egg to take part while I dream about her) make up lyrics for the Orphan Huerta’s song:
Old at twenty, no good, no plenty
Half are under ten
At thirty, one foot in the grave
Twenty years of age!
“Búfala!” says Hipi Toltec.
“What a fresh set!” comments Egg, worn out.
“Cool, coolísimo,” exults the Orphan Huerta.
“Animus!” says Angeles.
Then they all tell my mother she can count on them, that they are her buddies; no one mentions Angel or reproaches him for anything, what the hell, you know how complicated life is, man, and nobody’s going to cast the first adlaistevenstone; they kiss her, begin to leave, don’t want to, but
“What are you going to do now?”
“I’ll go in a while to the River Nile…”
“Have some fun…”
“Where’s fun in Mexicalpán, man?”
“Guwhere whasi’ B-4?”