“No, Mr. President, thank you, but Don Benito Juárez would turn over in his grave if the Army were to take power again in Mexico, no, Mr. President. The respect for civilian authority in the Mexican Army is sacred.”
“This is a portent,” says President Paredes, quieted down somewhat, although he has always been terrified of earthquakes. “Just like the warnings to Moctezuma in the year Ce Acatl. What do we do if there’s a revolution?”
“Don’t worry, Mr. President. I’ll take charge of bringing you your daily quota of dead men. All contingencies have been planned for. Neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street, wherever we find them: your daily quota of dead men. The revolution will be stopped dead in its tracks.”
“Thank God!” Don Jesús sighs.
“He’s always on the side of those with power.”
He leaves the colonel, with the green saliva oozing out from between his parted lips.
* * *
Unknown to these men of power, far away, invisible to them, Mamadoc in person is looking directly into the Angel’s golden eyes, and she tries to read in them a warning that the fallen statue does not dare to communicate to her. Capitolina and Farnesia hug each other, full of anguish, thinking that death is coming for them, they have left so much undone, who will take care of the unborn child? They will perhaps die together and that makes Capitolina happy, but Farnesia weeps bitterly, thinking that everyone will come to go through her drawers and leaf through her secrets. Don Fernando Benítez is not daunted by earthquakes, and he bangs his fist against the door of Don Homero Fagoaga’s penthouse. The owner quickly, fearfully, and nervously opens the door, fleeing but wrapped in a towel, and Fernando rebukes him, you’ve gone back on your word, you fat faggot, you have not defended democracy, you have not protected your niece and nephew, you’ve besmirched your honor! Well, now you’ll go out with me, you miserable stewpot, to combat those who get rich from the toil of the masses, you will come, you filthy barnacle, to walk with me along the roads of Mexico, losing all your extra pounds and ready, with me, to give your life so that in Tepatepec Hidalgo the right of the peasants to organize is respected and so that in Pichátaro Michoacán the municipal election is not tampered with!
By the force of his insults and threats Fernando drives Homero back into the apartment, miserable lump, bloodsucker, fixture of waiting rooms, survivor of the United Front of Asslickers (UFA), with a good condom the world would have been spared your lamentable presence. He went on attacking the fat man and stripping him now that he had no Tomasito to defend him, although the lawyer screams, Tomasito! Au secours! and the implacable Don Fernando Benítez: you will have the faith in your fellow citizens no one has ever had and you will see that from below, my fat and greasy relative, if we allow them to, Mexicans will practice democracy without gunmen, without crime, without bribes, without orders and abuses. Don Homero Fagoaga cornered, shouting back to Benítez, sure, sure, this mass of lazy good-for-nothings, this irresponsible people, you’ll see what they’ll do if you leave them alone, what they’ll do to you, to us, just what they did on the Malinaltzin highway! they’ll beat us to a pulp because we’re the enlightened minority that for good or ill has made this poor country despite its flea-bitten, passive, asshole masses, stupefied by incest, liquor, genes, the hopeless race, the damned race, the ra …
Cornered now, Don Homero, who entered this story flying through the air under a parachute, now leaves it tumbling off his balcony over Mel O’Field Road and onto the vacant lot, across which on a distant day he chased Orphan Huerta with conflictive intentions, the Orphan (pears, lemons, an’ figs!) and now, with the threatening Fer Ben (Fer-de-lance!) in front of him, demanding all these horrors of him, the naked lawyer and academician falls, naked, from the tenth floor of this bouncing building down toward the trembling earth, clutching his immense Cannon towel, imported of course! He does seven flips in the air, his naked body just like mine inside Mamma Mia because the tremor does not stop and finally she is holding on tight to Egg, my father’s best friend, our buddy Egg, and he has an uncontrollable attack of the giggles, finally hugging my mother Angeles filled with me and I, Reader and Friend, ready to take over this text, if not the entire world then at least the novel, amid the noise of a golden Angel that falls and Egg who says to my mother: “Look. Your halo had gone out. Now it’s on again, and I Christopher, I with no weapons but my stubborn battle against the unknown, my irreverent mix of languages and my decision to put them all into play, the conflict and the cause: I tell myself that when the Mexican earth shakes and when the Angel of Independence falls and when the bats fly in search of the food that remains, that History is faster than Fiction (here, in Mexico, in the New World!) and that it’s time to get a move on, no more holdups, to the month of August and what awaits us in it, pushing forward, toward the conclusion, toward my Na-ti-vi-daddy! my Mother-Ni-Dad!
* * *
But sleep, which is memory set free from action, gets between reality and my desire, and this is the dream of the grandparents the night of the earthquake and the fall of the Angel and the visit of the Four Fuckups to the coach house, where my mother and I take refuge, and the dream is this:
11. Fatherland, Always Be Faithful to Yourself
Ayayay, Grandfather Rigoberto Palomar woke up screaming: a nightmare. It’s just a dream, Grandmother Susana Rentería lying at his side consoled him; it was nothing. An uprising? said Don Rigoberto, astounded. No, nothing but your balls, laughed his wife. Ay, my little innocent girl, said General Palomar, my great-grandfather, to his wife my great-grandmother, sixty-five years of age, merely because he was ninety-one, and do you remember, Susy?
“You’re not going to tell me you dreamed about me, are you, Rigo?”
The lady smiled, pausing, and caressed her husband’s silky-white mustache.
“Because remember you said it was a nightmare.”
He covered her with kisses — on her hair, on her cheeks, on her lips, until one of the sleeves of his brown-and-white pajamas tore open at the shoulder and the two of them laughed. She asked him to take off his pajama top and sat on the edge of the bed to sew it up, swinging her legs, which were too short to reach the floor, her ideal feet.
Don Rigoberto, a skinny old man, wrapped his arms around himself as he sat next to her on the edge of the bed. She sighed. “Tell me your dream, Rigo.”
Now, my innocent little girl, let me see. I was about twenty and I was in President Benito Juárez’s personal guard up in the northern part of the Republic. We were being chased by the French and the Mexican traitors who helped them. Two years of travel, Su, imagine what that was then, on worn-out coaches and carts pulled by oxen, all loaded with the national archives, and Mr. Juárez with a sort of portable desk in his black carriage, where he wrote and signed things.
Just imagine, my pure little girl, from Mapimí to Nazas to San Pedro del Gallo to La Zarca to Cerro Gordo to Chihuahua and from there across the desert to the far north. Every day fewer and fewer soldiers, less water, less food. Juárez put up with everything because when we began the journey he told us: “We’ll never have a chance like this again in our history,” and whenever we got tired, Susana, or whenever we started wondering what the devil we were doing there pushing carts loaded with old papers through mud holes and up mountains, we remembered his words and we understood them very, very well. The opportunity granted us was that of saving Mexico from a foreign invasion and an Empire imposed on us by force of arms.