The old tree falls, fulminated by old age, and my father raises his eyes from his sad job. Now he has neither wife nor home. (“I know how to give fags the whipping they deserve,” his grandfather had him told by the Orphan Huerta, he’d better not turn up on Calle Génova, Angeles would have his son, me, the great-grandson of General Palomar, the grandson of the scientists Diego and Isabella; my Great-grandmother Susy would take care of me, my father’d better not turn up around there, let the faggot go live with the Fagoaga sisters, go ahead.) (I’d take you in with pleasure, and you know it, his Uncle Fernando Benítez told him, I’m not a pharisee, I’m telling you this with a grief that keeps me up at night and that perhaps someday you will understand and I may be able to explain to you: not yet, patience is an art and you, my little friend, are a talker, a poseur, a kid with a lot of gravy and no meat, in sum, a miserable rat; take stock of your life before you go on, and you’ll see that nothing of what you have done has much weight; it doesn’t glow with talent or move us with its sincerity. Come see me when you decide what you are going to do. For the time being you’re nothing but a poor fooclass="underline" all your nonsense did not get you to revolutionary happiness, only to reactionary despair. Look: the only thing I can do for you is lend you the van the people in Malinaltzin gave us, the one you called the Van Gogh. You can live in it and get around in it: it’s roomy and fully equipped — after all, it was acquired for the PRI political boss in the Guerrero mountains. You can pick it up tomorrow at my house on Lerdo de Tejada. I’m leaving. There is no salvation in this city: people hate themselves too much here. Ask my wife Georgina for the van; she has the keys; she’s just come back from her commune in China and she’ll give them to you. I wish only pure, good things for you, Angelito. I hope we all come out of this imitation apocalypse in good shape: I’m going to spend a month with the Huichole Indians, because I’d rather see what happens when the sacred moves, I’d rather see it at its origin than in its final phase. After all, boy, the sacred, before anything else, is a celebration of origins. Here the only thing we’re going to see is force disguised as religion. We shall start out in the realm of the sacred and we shall end up with a government of priests. The only constant in all this, Angel, is the sacralization of violence. I shall watch it all from the mountains, so I don’t lose my perspective the day this apocalypse wears itself out. Farewell, nephew!)
* * *
Discouraged, my father wondered what he was doing in this tourist business in which he was now working, located in the ruins of the Zona Rosa, itself infested with muggers, addicts, CIA agents who specialized in neutralizing Central American leftists, and waiters without jobs standing in long lines outside of restaurants. What was he doing, he, Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, a young man people used to say had ideas, imagination, daring, a sense of humor, erotic talents, even tenderness, even love, what was he doing here now sitting in a dark and dilapidated attic on Niza Street at the corner of Hamburgo, spending his time making up lying slogans to make national and foreign tourists think it was possible to get anything in Mexico, that Mexico was a cosmopolitan center, that Mexico was a constellation of international attractions: my father inventing things all day long, solitary, bored, and scornful even of himself:
SINATRA!
FAREWELL CONCERT IN THE
ACAPULCO CONVENTION CENTER
SEPTEMBER 15, 1992
(BALONEY)
THIS IS IT, THE TOWER IS HERE!
TOUR D’ARGENT IS OPENING ITS ONLY FOREIGN
BRANCH RIGHT HERE IN MEXICO!
GUESS ITS LOCATION AND WIN
A FREE ESCARGOT PROVENÇAL!
(LIE)
FINALLY: ZIPPERS THAT ACTUALLY WORK!
FOR YOUR LUXURY BAGS!
DON’T PUT UP WITH MEXICAN ZIPPERS ANYMORE!
VISIT THE MARK CROSS STORE ON POLANCO STREET:
ZIPPITY-DOODAH-ZIPPITYAY!
(FALSE)
while in the streets of the shocked city the thing he’d vaguely foreseen was happening, the thing he’d wanted to start was now in full swing, not like that carnival in Acapulco organized by the government that made Angel and his buddies think that they, the puppets, were pulling their own strings.
Now Angel heard that noise, riding alone in the Van Gogh through the strangely awed city, as if it were on the eve of an eclipse, hunkered down like dogs who smell the nearness of death, which only they can see — and which they see before anyone — in black and white, the only colors dogs can see; a city beaten and angry: Angel saw rise up among all its things (just as Angeles said, my Angeles, what a fool I’ve been, and then the silly ass choked up) that were lost out of haste, poverty, and indifference, he saw rise up the signs of ancient newness; and suddenly the invisible enveloped him. Everything that had always been there and the new as well, all gathered together at last: the roar of tens of thousands of long-haul trucks entering the city at night from all directions, all driven by those men convinced they’d been born to drive and that today at last their work was their destiny: chosen to move an entire country and to enter the city this way at the vanguard of the desperate, the disinherited from all the slums: all moving at last toward the heart of the city, millions and millions of faceless people, people with no future, with nothing to lose, the misery of all the nameless slums mixed with the despair of those who had lost everything, the newly unemployed, those permanently displaced by earthquakes, police fired for corruption, bodyguards out of work, warriors and condottieri of the future in search of their chance, all behind the brightly lighted trucks, their loudspeakers blaring:
COME TO ME!
WITH FAITH!
TO CONQUER MEXICO!
FOR THE FAITH!
FOR THE VIRGIN!
YOU IN DESPAIR!
YOU OUT OF A JOB!
YOU WHO ARE HUMILIATED!
YOU WITH NO ROOF OVER YOUR HEAD!
COME TO ME!
WITH THE HOLY MOTHER!
TAKE YOUR FIRST STEPS!
TO THE NATIONAL PALACE!
TO POWER!
NO ONE CAN OVERCOME THE NATION OF GUADALUPE!
ALL TOGETHER!
COME TO ME!
YOU WITH NO JOB!
YOU WITH NO JUSTICE!
YOU WITH NO HOPE!
COME TO ME!
The truckers gathered in the Zoquiapan bus depot, on Río Frío, distributing torches from their trucks, a river of flames flooding down Santa Fe to Paseo de la Reforma and from Contreras to the Pedregal and from Peñon de los Baños to the Zócalo and then scattering confusedly, unforeseeably, in all directions in the city, the city as vast as an inexhaustibly curious spiderweb, sweeping everything in its path, devouring everything, creating an enormous, unexpressed doubt: was this mob creating or destroying? was it cleaning up or swallowing up? or had the time come when the two functions were indistinguishable? The supermarkets were the instinctive objective of the mob. My mob of Guadalupe! shouted the Ayatollah Matamoros from the roof of his black truck, his head tied up in the scarf evocative of martyr priests, headaches, beggar thieves. Saintliness and death, torture and violence all shone at the same time in the Mexican Ayatollah’s black eyes and white teeth, and his mob invaded all the supermarkets in the city. The immediate recompense: Kellogg’s gave them cornflakes and Chocokrispis, Heinz its ketchup, Campbell’s its soups, Lipton its tea, Nestlé its coffee, Hardeez’s its sauces, Coronado its jams, Adams its Chiclets, Del Monte its peas, Clemente its pickled chiles, Ibarra its tuna, Bimbo its bread, Mundet its Sidral, French its mustard, and Buitoni its raviolis. Like a liquid painting by Andy Warhol the supermarkets emptied through the hands of Matamoros’s mobs: IT ALL BELONGS TO YOU, IT’S ALL YOURS, IT WAS ALL TAKEN AWAY FROM YOU, TAKE IT BACK! THE VIRGIN BLESSES YOU! the voice of the cassette rang out, the voice of the truth, a voice that was real even if it was on tape, a persuasive voice, there among the stolen chickens and the steaks laid over the eyes of the poor the way Veronica laid her cloth over Christ’s eyes and the eggs snatched up with passion, then bobbled, and then smashed on the floor. Matamoros’s voice splits the air, the light, the corrupt velocity of the night lighted up with mercury in the galleries: Aurrerá, SUMESA, Commercial Mexicana; like an animated Warhol picture (and my father in the middle of this fiesta of plunder, driving the van without knowing if what was happening was good or bad, was able to think of my mother, wish she were sitting next to him, confess that he would have wanted to have her there with him, how could I sacrifice you to my vanity, to the conquest of Penny López, and end up sucked dry by her mom, Mrs. Dracula! Man, are you an asshole, Angel Palomar y Fagoaga: alone in the multitude, he wished he could take my mother Angeles’s hand and ask her forgiveness), and instead the cold hand that seized his belonged to a very young but very emaciated face under the funerary lights of the supermarket, the shadows of fear under those eyes, the sunken cheeks, the deep creases at the corner of her eyes and mouth: and she was only thirteen years old! Colasa Sánchez grabbed my father’s hand in the middle of the chaos in the invaded supermarket and implored him: