“That’s your opinion,” said Robles. He bowed before her and gestured to the toady at the door to show the lady out.
Concha Toro walked down the staircase of honor in the ancient viceregal palace of New Spain, which had been built on the ruins of the Emperor Moctezuma’s palace: the rulers in that palace now were the de facto triumvirate: President Paredes, Colonel Inclán, and Federico Robles Chacón, who stared blindly at Diego Rivera’s murals celebrating Mexico’s national glory. Tonight the epic was coming to a close, and in its place, for Concha Toro, there was only a broken heart and some coral lips singing to an absent man I swear to you enchanter love, little love, lost love, that I shall never forget you …
No more epics, the last epic: Rivera’s murals would be sold a few days later to the Chase Manhattan Bank in partial payment for interest due, and then transported, yard by epic yard, to Rockefeller Center, where they’d been expected for more than half a century.
Galvarina, Concha, Dolly, María Inez put on her lipstick, took off her uncomfortable stiletto-heel shoes, and walked out barefoot between two files of soldiers, thinking (it’s you who communicate this news to me, Reader) about her reopening debut at the Simon Bully Bar, timed so that this faggot Giuseppe Birthday in the Guadala Harry’s Bar wouldn’t beat her to the punch, mentally choosing her numbers and telling herself how that frog Ada Ching would really turn green if she could see me now, alive and kicking and getting ready for a new season! Life is a cabaret!
10. Like the plague entering the village
Like the plague entering the village mounted on the bony spine of a serpent: that’s how I felt in my eighth month of gestation, carried away, tossed in the air, victimized by this original and intolerable fact: for the first time, Reader, I feel I’m being taken somewhere I don’t want to go, and this feeling opens my eyes to another fact which until now I was unaware of: I am afraid of not being what my genetic plan has determined for me and instead being determined by outside forces, all those phenomena that my intelligence (private, interior) has been observing (with the urge to communicate them to your worship the reader; even though you, too, are outside, you lack, perhaps for that very reason, the perspective I give you) and taking note of (out of the pants-wetting fear that I have that I am going to forget all this the moment I am born and that I’ll have to spend the rest of my life remembering and relearning what I once knew), all these exterior details separate from my own self (I count on you to remember what I’ll forget on being born, please, Reader, course and recourse with me!), all that circumstance (that famous pair: Ortega und Gasset), all that setting, take me over, nullify my will and my intelligence. Here inside, tell me things that gratify me immensely: for example, that the only source of my innate structure is my genetic information; that no matter how far back I go, I shall never find another source of what I am except that information; that my genes configure me:
100yes, but within, always from within, always thanks to the previous genetic constellation: no, I say to myself now that I’m bouncing around in these boondocks, the garbage (I smell it, by God, that’s all there is here: rubbish, decomposition, mountains of garbage, an implacable circle of garbage, a chain of garbage, linked by a network of plastic and rags), only today, only here, I swear to your mercedes that this horrifying doubt has presented itself to me:
If I’m not the son of my genes, then must I be the (bastard) son of the environment? my heritage, instead of being the one I know within, might not my heritage be the one I do not know, outside? What a hungry fear!
Eight months after my conception, my little body is a model of
equi …………………………………. librium
ex ………………………………………. libris
I feel how my body responds, adapts itself to the changes out there: from the waters of the Pacific Ocean that washed us when I had barely been conceived and baptized in shit to the sweet tranquillity of my great-grandparents’ home, I’ve adapted to everything, even to the worst: the journey through the Guerrero mountains, the carnal attack of that scoundrel Matamoros, even the murky whirlwind of El Niño wasn’t able to interfere decisively with my slow but certain development!
But now, Reader, now I feel for the first time that I’m being deprived of everything necessary for life; now the air, water, earth, voices (corrupted sound) have conspired in an alliance of insults, and I cannot adapt myself to that. Something’s going on here that seems to have been preestablished so that I can’t breathe, digest, see, hear, or speak: the insult is way out of proportion! My genes have determined (I know it for a fact!) that I will have chestnut eyes and that I will walk upright, but now that we’ve reached the place they’ve brought us to (you see that I include you in my story, Mom), I think that can change, too: we’re surrounded by a death sentence, or at the very least an accident sentence, or a defect sentence, sentences so implacable, so fearsome that I would like to scream from the solar center of my gestation: CUT ME LOOSE FROM THE D. F.! I’m going to walk upright and have brown eyes! I’m going to breathe and drink and shit and screw and hear like a normal person!
The environment is not going to kill me, my genes are going to be more powerful than this vile concatenation of garbage!
I think my mother must be having the same thoughts, except that her fear is greater than mine: we’ve been taken from the grandparents’ house, supposedly because of the days of violence, by this so-called Hipi Toltec, who has promised to bring us to a safe place where my father Angel — conciliatory, loving, and, above all, alive — is waiting for us; but as we make our way, we are surrounded by everything but security, and if I can identify and tolerate the violence of the times we’re living through, I already know that all history is ephemeral.
FLYING DOWN TO VICO!
(A mental flash from Mamma Mia’s roof: even the passage of History is a passing thing: there is more time without time and more history without history than avec: time before time: not time, time that doesn’t know it’s time, time incapable of imagining itself, history that isn’t even prehistory because it doesn’t conceive history: death of what precedes us in the absolute origin; why not then, thinks Angel, the death of a future without us; she rebels and desires my father, desires his company, his being with her, my padre mío.)
Hipi, on the other hand, brings us to a place of violence (of permanent history: is this hell? So burning hot, dry, stinking, beyond redemption, eternal, as eternal as paradise?). (My God, sighs my mother Angeles, when will you forgive the devil so that all this can come to an end. Let Lucifer ascend to your place so that your authentic grace shines forth: God has forgiven the Fallen Angel! Hallelujah, hallelujah: there is no more temptation, fear, or doubt about divine goodness; we all know it now because Lucifer appears seated at the right hand of the Lord; so don’t we all believe because seeing is believing? Is it the case that we don’t have faith because we have certitude? Is there faith only when we know it is true because it is impossible?)
FARE FEAR STARVING STRIVING
I was saying that even she, Angeles my mother, with her bare feet sunk in a corrupt mud (she’d abandoned her black low-heeled pregnant woman’s sandals in a puddle of dying grass and liquid shit), is beginning to wonder, here, in the misery belt, whether the environment can force the genes to change me into another individual unforeseen in my DNA: something innate and even comforting tells me I shouldn’t regard my genetic inheritance and my environment as enemies but as allies that divide up the work and that mutually support each other: the nature of nature consists in never working alone; nature and all things that nurture it act within previously established limits; but this nature of the Mexican city, this città dolente, has gone way out of proportion: