“Describe me today.”
A green flame I would have wanted to touch when she was a girl, before and before and before, a green flame is what she looks like now, liquid emerald, daughter of the dawn (well, of this dawn: the one we managed to get): well, you’re better than nothing. Tall and slender, fair but trying hard to get a tan. Black hair, cut short, shaved at the neck, raven wing and kissmequick over one eye: very twenties. Both of us dress very twenties. Hippie style’s out of fashion. Today to be a rebel in fashion means to be seriously retro: I wear dark suits, gaiters, hats, scarf pins, ties, starched collars. She wears black bandeaux, gray silk stockings, shoes for dancing the Charleston. Now I’ve made her dress Tehuana-style to fool Uncle Homero: she in Tehuana clothes, me hippie-style; folklore and revolution, things that don’t shock our relative or anyone else.
Angeles: your expression is so hard sometimes, while your flesh is so smooth and soft. I love your perfumed nape, your acid axillas, your naked feet. Angeles, my Angeles: give me things to think about at night. My Engelschen with long legs and breasts that seem immobile they’re so small and so well fixed. Pale, limp, and white (now tanning under the January sun of Acapulco). She commemorated her lack of a past as well as her arrival in Mexico City by going alone one afternoon to the Monument of the Revolution to make wee-wee on the eternal flame and by declaring later in the police station when they arrested her for disrespect:
“That flame doesn’t cost the government a dime. That’s why I put it out.”
Later she confessed to Angel that she only did it to get even, to show that a woman not only can urinate standing up if she so chooses but can even put out the sacred flame of the Mexican Revolution that way. Uncle Fernando Benítez took Angeles in when the girl turned up on his doorstep out of the blue one day in the year ’91, after the national disasters in ’90 that left us bereft of half the territory remaining to us, and many people from the provinces decided to flee from Chitacam, the Yucatán, Mexamerica, from the coast north of Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo, in order to go on being Mexicans. Angeles appeared before Benítez with no suitcase, without even a change of clothes, which Don Fernando liked because he didn’t want to know any more about her; he said he liked to decide things once and for all right on the spot, decide about love or friendship or justice without proof or explanation. She said she’d seen him from a distance in the plaza of her hometown and she liked the way he came right up to people, he spoke to people to whom no one else ever spoke: she liked that and that’s why she’d come. And she’d read his books.
He told the authorities she was his niece and defended her with all the sophistry of a good Mexican lawyer — even if he had no degree, Fernando Benítez, like all literate Mexicans, had a jurist locked in his bosom, just dying to get out into the world. While Angeles was being held, Don Fernando Benítez sent his agile young ally, the Orphan Huerta, to reignite the flame; by the time Angeles appeared before the magistrate, it was impossible to prove that the flame had ever been extinguished, and Benítez could declare the following: Are you saying, your honor, that the flame of the Mexican Revolution can be put out just like that — as declared by these two exemplars of the best police force money can buy, even if they were in all probability a bit tipsy at the time and for all practical purposes merely concupiscent, the miserable nobodies! The truth of the matter is that my niece did feel an urge, that’s so, was seen and chased by these fleet-footed minions of justice, which heightened her nervousness and its effects on her bladder, so she eliminated where she could — but to put out the flame of our permanent revolution? With a mere squirt of wee-wee? Who could do it? Not her, not me, not even you, your honor!
And Angel? Will you describe him, Mom?
Also green, very much a gypsy. Tall, a boy from this new generation of skinny, tall Mexicans. Both of us are dark and green, me with black eyes and he with lime-green eyes. We looked at each other: he’s shortsighted, knows how to whistle all of Don Giovanni, and says that I would have been a perfect courtesan in an opera if I’d been born a hundred years ago, and if I hadn’t begun reading the complete works of Plato. The set with green covers. Vasconcelos. The National Autonomous University of Mexico. God, it’s the only thing that lets me look at myself in the mirror and say to myself: There you are. Your name is Angeles. You love Angel. You are going to have a baby. What makes you think I won’t read the whole Cratylus, which is a book about names: Angel, Angeles, Christopher: Are they the names that really belong to us (my love, my man, my name, my son)? Or are the names ourselves, are we the names? Do we name or are we named? Are our names a pure convention? Did the gods give us our names, but by saying them (our own and the others) do we wear them out and pervert them? When we name ourselves, do we burn ourselves? None of this matters to me: I intuit that if I have a name and I name you (Angel/Angeles) it’s so I can discover little by little your nature and my own. Isn’t that what’s most important? What does it matter then that I have no past or that I don’t remember it, which is the same thing. Take me as I am, Angel, and don’t ask me any more questions. This is our pact. Name me. Discover me. I am going to have a son and I’m going to read Plato. What makes you think I won’t, despite all the accidents that in Mexico make intellectual endeavor impossible, all the distractions, the pleasant climate, the deteriorating environment, let’s take a walk, the coffee klatches, the gossip, the parties, there isn’t a real summer, the winter is invisible, politics are taken care of for us every six years, nothing works but everything survives, you was born, you dies, you don’ reads, you don’ write nothin’. What makes you think I won’t? Do you understand why I’m memorizing Plato? Those books are those men, Angel, the others, the people, the ones who did something, read, spoke, listened: Angel, I have no other connection with the others, not even with a past, not even with a family or anyone else. I have no past, Angel my love, that’s why everything that falls on me sticks to me, all causes, all ideas, feminism, the left, third world, ecology, ban-the-bomb, Karl and Sigi, liberation theology, even traditional Catholicism as long as it goes against conformity, everything sticks to me and whatever sticks to me has to be good, my love, because the only thing that doesn’t stick to me is respect for authority, faith in the chief, superior races, the murder or oppression of anyone in the name of an idea, history, the nation, or the leader, none of the above. I am a good receptacle, Angel, a white wall without memories or my own past, my love, but a place where only pretty things can be written and ugliness has no place. Now I leave it to you to write there with me, but don’t force me into anything, my love; I need you, but don’t chain me up; I follow you, but don’t order me to follow you; let me make the life I never had or don’t remember with you, Angel, and one day we can remember together, but I’ll have no memory of anything but my life with you: please, let’s share everything. Pardon my habitual silence. I’m not absent. I observe and absorb, my love. This is our pact.
Your father Angel says I feel superior to him because since I have no past I’ve had to enter today’s universality in a flash, the universality of violence, haste, cruelty, and death. But his parents died comically, eating tacos.
What did Grandpa and Grandma do, Dad?
Your grandparents, Diego and Isabella Palomar, were inventors, Chris: in the tabloids of the period they were called the Curies of Tlalpan. I’m telling you this so you know right from the start that in this country anything you do will be pardoned as long as it serves in one way or another to justify and legitimize the status quo. Your uncles, Homero and Fernando, who detest each other, have at least that in common. Don Homero’s illegal trafficking is pardoned because he does his job as Defender of the Castilian Tongue. Don Fernando’s critical gibes are forgiven because he is the Defender of the Indians. My grandpa General Rigoberto Palomar’s eccentricities are forgiven because he is the only person who believes body and soul that the Mexican Revolution triumphed. And my parents were given official protection for their inventions because they were the Curies of Tlalpan: two inventive and daring scientists during the period, my boy, when Mexico thought it could be technologically independent. One illusion less! For thirty years we were buying obsolete technology at high prices; every five or six years we had to turn our decrepit machinery in for new obsolete machinery, and so on and so on and so on … And thus the techniques for robotics and cryogenics, biomedicine, fiber optics, interactive computers, and the entire aerospace industry passed us by. One day, when you’ve grown up, I’ll take you to see the ruins of the investments in the oil boom, son, when we spent forty billion dollars to buy junk. I’ll take you to see the ruins of the nuclear plant in Palo Verde, next to which Chichén-Itzá looks like a brand-new Coca-Cola and hot-dog stand. I’ll take you, my dear son, to see expensive, rusting machinery sitting in the useless industrial Gulf ports. And if you want to take a ride on an ultramodern Japanese bullet train, well, maybe it would be better for you to take a ride on the kiddy train in Chapultepec Park instead of trying the paralyzed inter-ocean train that according to its Mexican designers was going to knock the crap out of the Panama Canal. Seek in vain, my boy, the rapid shipment of barrels of oil from Coatzacoalcos to Salina Cruz, the shortest route from Abu Dhabi to San Francisco and Yokohama: seek it, sonny, and all you’ll see are the cold rails and the hot illusions of insane Mexican oil-grandeur: no immortal spring, only these, Fabio, oh grief: the blasted heath between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. Mountains of sand and the cadaver of a spider monkey. Long live the Opepsicoatl Generation!