“Don’ le’ yur filins chouenlai!”
“Abyssinia.”
“Humongous…”
“Awzom!”
“Serbus!”
“In ixtli!”
“In yóllotl!”
A gigantic error, gigantic luck, a fleeting apparition: I rest, I breathe, I sigh.
10. Only Egg stayed behind
Only Egg stayed behind with my mother that night of our happy reunion in the grandparents’ house, and he smilingly told her that his usual verbal come-on with women was to talk to them about ecology or about the effects of television on children, but that he suspected that this time it wouldn’t work.
My mother only smiled at him as she had so many times over the course of their relationship: Egg, my father Angel’s best friend. That’s what I am, he said, reading the situation, or whatever I take it upon myself to be tonight now that we’re all alone, right? (And me, bastard, what am I? air? a streamer?) It’s that friendship is perhaps the first true form of eroticism, I mean that you see a friend’s body and you love it because you love your friend even though it would never occur to you to go to bed with him, his body becomes erotic for you because not only does it not occur to you to have sex with him, but above all it would never occur to you to have a child with him, and you see a body that is useful for something more than reproduction and that’s the most erotic thing in the world: imagining a body, desiring a body, without its being useful for reproduction. Egg said that was how he loved my father Angel — well, he’d let the cat out of the bag, the name, to see what might happen — and now suddenly he wasn’t there and it was as if a wall or a screen had disappeared and now he could see Angeles for the first time, without the separation that had always stood between them.
She was in the process of reproducing, my mother said silently. (Thanks, oh protectress; hip, hip, hurray!)
But he desired her for something other than reproduction, he told her. And he insisted: “Angel is my friend and will always be my friend. I want you to understand that.”
“You mean you love me now for what he did?” asked my mom; note by the way that she didn’t say “what he did to me” or (even better) “did to us.”
“No,” answered Egg, “I love you so that I can be with you. Not because I’m sorry for you. Not at all. But I don’t want you to be alone. I don’t want you to have to give birth alone. I want to guarantee that the child wins the contest. And that no one takes it away from you.” This last he added out of pure intuition, irrationally.
She simply looked at him, caressed her belly, and said: “There’s going to be an earthquake tonight. I know it for a fact. The Angel on the Independence monument is going to fall off its column. I don’t know what kind of premonition this is, Egg, or if we should wait. Last night I dreamed about bats, lots of bats filling the sky, and that I did understand. I said it was a premonition about the world to come. In my dream I followed the bats — they were squeaking, blind, with big ears, and only they knew where to find food. Only they knew.”
I give an intrauterine jump out of pure shock. Surprised in flagrante labore! My job is to send nightmares to people! I confess that ever since I began this sixth month I’ve been doggedly sticking people with nightmares! I had to start at the beginning, so I hit Mom first. A direct hit! I just found out now! How should I react? Should I be happy? sorry? Must I test my power by turning these words into realities? I’m getting French waves: cauchemar! I hear the clattering hooves of that old English night-mare! And the Spanish word for it hits me like a plumbeous plumb, its brows knitted, its jaw fixed, muttering Castilian obscenities, and in a perennial fit of pique: pesadilla! What shall I do with this language of mine but bring it up-to-date, as I just did; Mom: dream about bats — they’ll come squeaking back to you; Mom: dream about an earthquake and a fallen Angeclass="underline" it’ll all happen, I swear to you.
But she is already saying, not caring that I have just acquired this power by realizing that I have it: “I feel surrounded by all the things not used up by haste, poverty, or indifference.”
“All the things Angel left here?”
“No, no, only that. The parks. The past. The ugliness of the city, it doesn’t matter. The real ugliness is oblivion.”
“You may be right.”
“I’m sorry, Egg. Thanks, but I just can’t.”
“Friends?”
“Forever.”
“Nothing more?”
* * *
Yes, WORDS, she said, she who believed in words and didn’t waste them, who had a terrible fear of these verbal carnivals in which all of us have put her, but with good intentions, you do see that, don’t you, Mom? We want to attack all official, finished, used-up languages, all the phrases that try to pass for good taste, every classical verbal image, right in the nuts, I say, laughing my head off, totally gross, implacably clownish, so that all those present who hear this know that nothing is stable anymore, nothing is perennial, not even Spanish pique, that everything’s mutable, mutating, imperfect, unfinished. Mom, listen to me, no prohibition, no norm, life turned upside down, life in drag, wearing only a crown made of gold paper, let me be born laughing, Mommy, let me live my unborn novel, which is like a vast sacred parody, a scandalous liturgy, a eucharistic diablerie, a banquet, an Easter festival, the union of body and soul, head and ass, word and shit, ghost and fornication, Mom, and now it’s beginning to shake around here, and I do a delightful front one-and-a-half because the earth in these parts trembles as if it were floating on water, oscillating, and I sway, I swing and sway with Sammy Kaye — or without! And my oh so astute mom grabs on to Egg, who says thank you God for your telluric decisions and we’re on our way through sette e mezzo on the Jaroslav Richter Scale, wailing away on the geological Steinway with Ludwig van’s Emperor and the tremor does not stop and the open-beaked eagle drops its serpent out of its mouth and tries unsuccessfully to get loose from its chain to set out on an impossible flight, and Hipi gets the snake leftovers to make himself a belt avec and Julio Iglesias deigns to give an autograph to the Orphan without having to be asked twice in the trembling suite of Hotel President Grasshopper Hill, Josú, since the world is falling down once again and it’s more important to die signing your own name and Colasa Sánchez’s cunt incontinently and infinitely opens in front of the astounded eyes of my father Angel who was getting ready to eat pussy but who instead sees shark teeth lining the sweet treasure of Miss Colasa, daughter of the ineffable Matamoros Moreno, while the golden Angel noisily falls onto Paseo de la Reforma, its gigantic metal wings smashing the shops and stands on the traffic circle where Tíber intersects with Florencia, finally ending up such that its head — blind eyes and sensual lips — faces directly toward Chapultepec Castle, quietly but repressively taken back that very afternoon by the forces of order under Colonel Inclán, who at this very minute is inviting President Jesús María y José Paredes to stroll through the castle’s belvedere, where he thinks what he always thinks, namely, that what this country needs is a dictator-for-life, that the drama of Mexico is that it has gone too long without a traditional, recognizable tyrant who would attract adherents and concentrate hatred and who would end, once and for all, this damn symbolic dispersion. Then the tremor begins, and from Chapultepec it is easy to see how the Angel of Independence falls and the colonel wonders if he should take it as a sign, almost a command: he looks at the ex-PAN president, who in that shocking instant loses all sense of ideological relationships and, in the face of this visible portent, falls quickly to his knees. But the colonel makes him stand, pulling him up by his lapels, no one should see you that way, Mr. President, no one, and the President says to the coloneclass="underline" “I don’t want power anymore! I can’t carry the burden! You take it!” And the colonel, with his green beard and his dark glasses, craftily and slyly says: