Egg looked her up and down: she wasn’t what she used to be, and if she was never really a knockout — her real charm was her coquettish Chilean savvy, not her beauty — she was not really faded either: she was a strange palimpsest in which all the stages of her life coexisted in a kind of transparent simultaneity: Concha Toro! Née María Inez Aldunate Larraín y Cruchaga Errázuriz in Chillán, Chile, the night of the terrible earthquake of 1939, which destroyed the city and sank half the coast, from Concepción to Puerto Montt, into the Pacific. She grew up in the shadow of Siqueiros’s murals in the school the Mexican government donated to Chile after the disaster: the powerful white and black punches delivered by the native heroes Cuauhtémoc and Galvarino made a profound impression on her tender aristocratic mind. At school she saw revolution and melodrama, while on her father’s estate she saw reaction and drama: agriculture in southern Chile was the last refuge of her family, which had prospered early on, in the days when Chile was exporting nitrates, a business that covered late-nineteenth-century Santiago with mansions and the resort cities of Viña and Zapallar with chalets; nitrates paid for trips to Europe and wild spending sprees. The bubble burst in 1918, when the Germans invented synthetic nitrates, but the family managed to save the estate from the general economic collapse. So off they went, to do to the peasants what they’d already done to the nitrates: exploit them. The difference was that they couldn’t export peasants. How María Inez laughed when the ineffable President Wrinkle Wrecker requested that the United States export farmers and keep the harvests at home! That’s exactly what the Aldunate Larraín y Cruchaga Errázuriz family would have wanted to do, but who would have wanted to buy these flea-bitten scum, shitasses, drunks, thieving rats, with no balls whatsoever! Don’t make me laugh!
María Inez resolved her conflicts by giving herself at the age of fourteen to a well-hung peasant boy — as well hung as my father Angel Palomar, I suppose — with the improbable name Randolph Pope. She immediately crossed the Andes at Puente del Inca, went to Mendoza, and from there to Buenos Aires, where this highly intelligent Chilean girl quickly got the lay of the land, changed her name to Dolly Lama and won a tango contest singing with Aníbal (“Dicky”) Troilo; she read Borges’s Other Inquisitions, disguised herself as Miriam Hopkins in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: perfumed and platinum-haired, she was able, one night in the Armemonville pavilion, to seduce Jorge Borges, the blind guardian of the fragrant clove that a young Patagonian maiden stole from Magellan’s circumnavigating ship in 1521 and instantly hid in what elegant Buenos Aires gentlemen used to call “la leure de sa nature”: María Inez, alias Dolly, obtained the famous fragrant clove of Magellan in exchange for a sensational screw with Borges, and armed with the Illustrious Clove and the Illustrious Blind Man, she was proclaimed Priestess of Sexual Ultraism in a ceremony held in the Ateneo Bookstore. Immediately afterwards she accompanied the writer to Memphis, Tennessee, where the author of The Universal History of Infamy asked the poet Ossing (probably a descendant of Ossian) to lead him into the waters of the Mississippi — up to the ankles — and then give him a drink of Mark Twain’s river. Dolly felt she’d done her duty as far as Latin American literature was concerned when she overcame the stupefaction of the citizens of Memphis, who were astonished to see a river of industrial waste and wet garbage pass by, by offering old Georgie a glass of Coca-Cola, which the Illustrious Blind Man drank slowly, interjecting from time to time: “Ambrosia, ambrosia!”
With her clove but without her poet, Dolly Lama emigrated to Hollywood, joined Xavier Cugat’s Catalonian — Cuban orchestra, and began a successful career as a backup singer, which enabled her to sing booboopidoop behind Dionne Warwicke in Las Vegas, to whine ohohohuhm-huhm narcotically and orgasmically behind Diana Ross in Atlantic City, to shake spasmodically and masculinely despite having put on a few too many pounds and years in order to establish a contrast with triumphant androgyny behind Boy George and the Culture Club in Radio City Music Hall and Madison Square Garden. At age forty-five, she decided that she’d closed a circle by traveling from Old George to Boy George without ever having left the Culture Club and with more metamorphoses than a Kafkameleon. Fearing that a closed circle could become a vicious circle, she traveled to Mexico, invested her savings in the bar on the corner of Bull Bar and Car Answer, changed her name to Concha Toro, and finally found her true genius, her destiny, the synthesis of her life in the resurrected bolero, the bolero disdained by Mexican modernity, by the youth of the postpunk rockaztec of the early nineties, conserved by Saldaña and Monsiváis as a museum piece, a musical Tezozómoc wrapped in moth-eaten cotton: she came on the scene in one of those unexpected, genial, unsuspected, and purifying conjunctures and restored to the bolero what Homero Fagoaga could never restore to the Spanish language: brilliance, fame, emotion, incalculable splendor. The impoverished, abandoned middle class, its men nostalgic, its women longing for certitude, filled the agora of the Simon Bully Bar to listen to Concha Toro’s boleros, because boleros are music to listen to while holding hands, reviewing the vocabulary and the sentiments of our intimate Latin American kitschiness, the yeast in our melodramatic optimism — my father is listening to the bolero “Tropical Path”:
With her night after night I strolled to the sea
To kiss her lips so fresh and so free
And she swore to love me evermore
Never to forget as we kissed on the shore
Those nights of our love by the sea
Disguised as Quevedo, alone in Concha Toro’s cabaret, suspended between the vertices (or vortices) of my pregnant mother, demythified Penny, and resigned Colasa, my father is listening to boleros a certain night in the year of the Quincentennial of the Discovery of America: and he rediscovers the New World of the bolero, the degraded but never renounced utopia sprinkled with water that falls from heaven: the utopia of the islands, of Eldorado, of the Indian monarchy. My father looks around him, as he listens to Concha (whom he does not recognize) sing, at the captivated ruins of the once-upon-a-time prosperous middle class as they collectively regain paradise — the tropical path — by means of the operations of the heart: that is the bolero’s impossible project: the precious language of the fin de siècle adapted to the sentimental necessities of the bedroom, the beach, and the bordello:
It was a captive kiss of love on a hand that had the look of a lily in a book the flutter of a dying dove
I was the enchanting butterfly in the garden of your life I was the princess from on high who relieved you of your strife
by Luis G. Urbina
by Agustín Lara
“Metamorphosis” (Poem)
“Captive” (Bolero)
recites my father and defines:
sings Concha Toro and evokes:
“Melodrama is comedy without humor.”
“I don’t know if there’s love in eternity, but there, as here, on your lips you will have my taste.”