Even though he was just a kid, my father took careful note of the man who had taken charge of the rescue operation at the hospital. He was nervous, dark, he never stopped adjusting his aviator glasses on the bridge of his nose, his dark curly hair was white with dust from the dead buildings, his face, his arm, his index finger were like a compass needle indicating decisions, orders, and changes in the rescue operation: doctors arrived along with lawyers, engineers, and businessmen, men who abandoned their offices and shops to form human chains to the tops of the cement mountains, the wounded chain of hospitals, hotels, and apartment buildings devoid of breath, never to breathe again. A line of soldiers formed around the hospital. Desperate people clawed the ruins, isolated cries for help (from inside and outside as well) reached the soldiers, like a chain of voices identical to the chain of arms that passed pieces of cement, twisted wire, the body of a little girl in a basket from the top of the ruin down: some pieces of cement flew against the troops and struck their helmets, wounded their hands tensely gripping their weapons: bloody fists, the world like a vast bloody fist, soldiers, victims, rescue equipment. This is what my father remembers and tells my mother. A stone hit the helmet of a sergeant in charge of a squad. Even today, my father remembers the man’s greenish face, his black glasses, the stream of green saliva running out of the corners of his mouth: his invisible stare, his grimace of patient revenge.
He looked more closely at the eyes of the young man who had organized the rescue.
“Where is your mom?” a buddy asked him.
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter now.”
But Federico Robles Chacón would count every minute, every hour that passed until the end of this story; he accepted the idea that he would never see his mother again. Hortensia Chacón had been hospitalized the night before the earthquake. On the other hand, as the days passed, he would not accept the idea of abandoning the newborn babies who were saved one by one over the course of a week, two weeks, little girls born an hour or a night before the quake, who survived in the ruins seven or nine days after being born: terrible images of the survival of the city, of the entire nation: a baby girl crushed by a steel beam, she lived; another baby girl suckled by her dying mother, she lived; a baby boy, stuck fast, with no food but his fetal fluids, with no air but that in his fetal hemoglobin, he lived — equipped to fight, equipped to survive; I listen to all this in the womb of my liquid, prenatal tides, and I want to weep in surprise, joy, and fear: I shall also manage to survive the catastrophes that await me. My God, will I also manage to survive, like these miraculous children who survived the Mexico City earthquake?
My sixteen-year-old father marches with his homemade sign DELENDA EST ACAPULCO in front of the offices of Don Ulises López on River Nylon Street, and the short, astute functionary and financier laughs to see such a bizarre sight. The city has filled up with outlandish lunatics, religious fanatics, charlatans. Look at that loon demanding the destruction of Acapulco! he said to the meeting of the administrative council of construction and real estate, his back to the window: of course, of course, what we’re going to do in Acapulco is just what we’re going to do here in Mexico City: we’re going to give full value to property, not sell it off cheap. Where did these nuts get this idea of hauling off the debris from the earthquake to construct miniparks and libraries? Kids and books on lots that are going to be worth five times more than before just because the buildings next to them didn’t fall down, and we — we, gentlemen, we, partners — are going to construct the best, the most solid and secure buildings, government offices first — we’ve got to take care of Big Brother first — then, frankly, buildings with commercial value, after all the government doesn’t know how to keep books, identify property, or find out where anything is. We do. Ulises López stood up, we are going to evaluate — right away — every square inch of property hit by the catastrophe, with a view to taking advantage of its value and rebuilding on it, if not today then tomorrow; in Mexico, sooner or later, you can do anything because sooner or later someone who thinks like us, partners! will have more power than those who oppose us.
The homeless — thirty thousand, fifty, a hundred thousand? — demonstrated a few times, demanding housing, some got it, most spent time in flophouses, hangars, schools which they then had to leave, they went back where they came from or stayed on with relatives or scattered among the traffic islands in the city streets where they set up their tents and huts: immovable. Others returned to the empty places where they once had a place to live, a job, a little shop, they settled down in vacant lots, and Ulises López just laughed at them, looking forward to the day when the public authorities would agree with him in kicking them out; the financier-functionary snapped his fingers and said, a good day’s work, an earthquake Mexican-style, classist, racist, xenophobic, and what’s that young economist doing there, Robles what’s-his-name, what? digging? he’s looking for his mother, ha ha, I didn’t know he had one! The eyes of Ulises López in his Shogun model limousine, of Federico Robles Chacón with a smashed piece of Sheetrock in his hands, and those of my father with his ridiculous poster against Acapulco, all met.
6. And where was I?
And where was I? Tell me right away before I forget, O mighty Breeder: my parents have just conceived me, surrounded by blazing beaches and crumbling towers and peaks as white as bones and the miserable hillsides, where, says my father, the human ivy of Acapulchritude used to live, hanging on like ticks to the sumptuous body, he says, although by now gone soft, wormy, of old Acapulcra, O my nubile fisher-girl whose limp hair once hung down to her waist (he says in the name of all the children of the past who went to spend happy, prepollution vacations in Acapulco), in yesteryear busy with your nets and your brightly painted boats, now betrothed to death, a courtesan in exhausted sands: Look, Angeles, look at your Acapulco like a Cleopatra about to nest the scorpion in your breasts, a Messalina ready to drink the cup of sewage, a Pompadour bewigged to camouflage the cancers on her hairy skin, ugh …
The Army kicked their asses out of the mountains around the bay, even out of the mountains not visible from the white half-moon of hotels, restaurants, and McDonald’s (which, the upstanding citizens claimed, the guerrillas wanted, horror of horrors, to rename Marxdonald’s and force to sell chalupas filled with caviar instead of that classic Mexican dish cheeseburgers and catsup). All a matter of aesthetics, said a television talk-show host, because (though he didn’t say this) no one meddled with the invisible, squat neighborhoods of repair shops, dust, food stands, and tents behind the barrier of skyscrapers that came, more and more, to resemble sand: but, since they’d kicked their asses out of the visible and invisible mountains, everyone said that it wasn’t a matter of public health or aesthetics but self-interest: the mountains were to be parceled off, the Icacos Navy base was sold to a consortium of Japanese hotel owners, and the inhabitants of the mountains resisted for months and months, squatting there challenging, refusing with the swollen stomachs of their children, their trichinosis, their water filled with revenge, their eyes so clouded over with grief and glaucoma that they couldn’t see the magic carpet at their feet, the Acapulco diamonds over a velvety night, an aquamarine day, a blond sunset, the opulent asphyxia of toasted bodies and pink jeeps and pale condominia, and gangrenous lunch counters, and cadaveric discotheques and crab-infested motels, and neon signs turned on at midday because