FAGOAGA NEVER LOSES
AND WHAT HE LOSES HE SNATCHES BACK!
5. Matamoros Moreno rehearsed his every gesture
Matamoros Moreno rehearsed his every gesture in front of Concha Toro’s dressing-room mirror; the singer showed him how to turn movement into rituaclass="underline" she taught him how to look at his audience, raise one arm or both, take a step forward then stop dramatically, smile, throw his head back, get angry, speak, be silent. Matamoros went through the extremes of pride and trampled humility in front of that mirror, where Concha Toro purged herself of her own histrionic frustrations. Little by little, Matamoros Moreno, who in Concha’s company had discovered a surprising new kind of lovemaking, full of nuances and refinements (even secrets) he had never known before, transcended the gestures and the rituals and persuaded himself in his innermost being that what he was doing (outside the dressing room, for the public, for the people) was the external manifestation of what he was within: a solitary man who had stored up a power that was only now revealing itself. His gratefully accepted sexual encounters with Concha-Dolly-María Inez (for which she was thankful, now that she was fifty, or perhaps a bit older) revealed to Matamoros the dark and blind energy he had held in reserve, which only now burst forth. The only condition was that he believe what he said: the Ayatollah Matamoros had to speak, move, and be seen with a total faith in what he said, the way he moved, and in how he looked. He would tell the masses that followed him that “faith is faith. It can’t be proven, insulted, judged, or even jailed.” Let them think about this; just in case, he said during the weeks in which he had hastily, secretly gathered together those bands of official thugs — those falcons — who had been scattered after their last operation way back in 1972, a police corps disbanded ever since those remote days of moral renovation, bodyguards left unemployed in the wake of the exodus of the rich to Houston, Miami, and Los Angeles. But he had to convince even these swine that now they had to act out of faith, that the policeman or bodyguard who joined the movement had to do what he did for something greater than they had ever done before: like the thieves and fire-eaters, like the beggars and squatters, they all had to seek and feel the same thing:
“Why follow me? So you can become new again. So you can save yourselves. So you can have good or bad luck as long as you have a destiny. Don’t just sit there like a bump on a log!”
He had to believe it himself so that they would believe it: that’s what he learned in the amorous tricks of the Chilean big Moma who was so wise, so sexy, and such a mistress of sexual secrets the brutal Matamoros had never practiced. In her arms, he discovered the absolute realization of everything he had written and tried to publish through his double-dealing fellow student Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, whose doom Matamoros had already pronounced: it would be a slow death, by inches, in the Grand Inquisitorial tradition: he’d already screwed Palomar’s wife, he’d already beaten Palomar’s relatives, he’d already buggered Palomar himself, just so he’d learn something about length, thickness, and nightmares that become reality. Matamoros was sure that he could achieve his own destiny, but that destiny included two things: to achieve total revenge on Angel Palomar for having frustrated his literary ambitions, and to prove before the entire world that he, Matamoros Moreno, was worth more than Angel Palomar: the proof would be that the people would follow him and not Palomar, dream about him and not Palomar, would love and hate him, not Palomar. Matamoros Moreno did not shudder as he came in Concha Toro’s mouth because he had to be believed and followed, but in the instant when he was dropping his load between Concha’s teeth (thinking as he did so about his little daughter Colasa, as a black counterpoint to the act he was involved in, a dream of the act: father and daughter), in that instant he told himself that no one would believe in him or follow him if he didn’t believe in himself … Matamoros followed by Matamoros: the demon of hope could move the world, accompanied by its acolytes, passion and ambition, only if in that moment Matamoros Moreno realized (he gave himself: ceded) that “I have another man buried inside me, oh pretty Mama, there was another man with me and I didn’t know it; why didn’t you tell me, Mommy, don’t you love me?”
After that internal and external orgasm, Matamoros Moreno could say what he wanted and he convinced all the unemployed, the lumpen, the deformed, the mad, the bodyguards and cops, the rockaztec groupies, he convinced everyone, intellectuals, housewives, Hipi Toltec and Orphan Huerta, even Baby Ba, who left Egg in the company of my mother and went to follow the Ayatollah. And what about me, Baby, don’t you love me anymore?
“Don’t let your hatred rot inside you. Get cracking. Look over there. Look at the city. It belongs to you.”
“The Mexican hero is neither proletarian nor Communist. He belongs to Guadalupe, and in my hand, brother, I hold a power that is neither of the left nor of the right, but one that reveals my own nature, natch.”
“Stop living a life of anguish. Join us.”
“What do you get by slicing each other up? Get cracking.”
“Don’t hate yourself. There are better things to hate. Look at that house. Look at that store. Look at that car. Why don’t they belong to you? It’s up to you. Take them!”
“Blessed are those that walk the face of the earth in its dangerous moments!”
“Mexico should drown herself in the ocean of confusion in order that it be reborn on the beach of hope.”
“I want a world in which prayers come true! Come with me, old woman, pray as you walk, pray.”
They believed everything because he believed it: in bed with Concha, he let the other penetrate him while he penetrated the woman. His body resists. His body tells him that it is going to go mad just so that the other man inhabiting him can come out of him. He resists: his skin has always been his own, there was nothing behind it, nothing more inside. Yes: another man is emerging from within him, but his body resists and his mind resists even more: you will not be a saint, you will be a criminal and a madman. But the other man is already his spirit. He didn’t realize that the spirit within him also had a body. This didn’t matter to the body of the other man: he fed on the environment, on tension, on fear, on the frustration, self-loathing, disillusion: all this fed the spirit of the other within him, and the funniest thing is that it transformed bad tensions into good tensions. During the long nights of cabaret and sex with Concha Toro, when, after the pleasure of music and sex, they prepared the cassettes that Colasa — terribly diligent, animated (perhaps more so than her father) by a desire for vengeance against that fop Angel Palomar (an object of terrible hatred, you’ve turned out, oh, padre mío!) — brought early every morning to the Trucking Center, whence they were scattered all over what remained of the Honorable Republic of Mexico, the tension of resentment, frustration, the colossal screwing that was Mexico and Mexicans humiliated and handed over to disgrace from birth until death, became passion, dream, hope, movement. Only one thing remained the same; the spirit moves because of the tension surrounding it: it yearns for catastrophe.