General Rigoberto Palomar falls forward, his face smashing against the windshield, then back, into the arms of his wife Doña Susana Rentería. In his back is the spear thrown by Hipi Toltec. My mother screams. It’s the same lance that killed Tomasito down in Acapulco. Exactly the same. Doña Susana smiles and caresses the shaved head of her dead husband.
Hipi sheds his skin before the incredulous eyes of Egg and Angeles, and it’s our fat friend, accelerating in horror, who shouts out a description of him, they were real tight, they played in the same group, he was tying up his trousers with a belt made of snakes, and he was shedding, he always was, but now in the light of the fire all his skin was vanishing. Hipi is peeling, right down to the muscle, his skin is coming off in huge chunks, like a peeled banana, right down to the white but corrupt, worm-eaten bone: in the distance, Hipi’s skull shines after a while, smiling, amid the red night, and they can no longer see, no longer know, no longer imagine that new skin grows on him instantaneously, only the skull smiles, and we flee, and Doña Susy Rentería caresses the shaven head of her old husband, and Egg drives the jeep like a soul who is carrying the very devil who brought us here.
At the same time, my father is traveling next to Colasa, who sits alongside the albino driver, and no one can talk because of this man’s constant chatter, this man the radio calls Bubble Gómez. He gives instructions nonstop, avoid the curve at mile 8, there’s been a landslide, there’s an unnoticed Smokey at the Atlixco exit, slow down with the Manila provisions at the intersection of Highway 2 and the Christopher Columbus Highway, Inclán knows about your load, use your radar detector so they don’t pick you up on Huamantla, the Tijuana Taxis at Teziutlán look funny to me, this is Bubble Gómez, do you read me, Bubble Gómez here, I’m protected, I’m carrying a little girl dressed like a religious nut (watch those personal comments now, son), accompanied by a guy who looks like a fag (come on now, son, you’re charging a lot for this ride!), and it seems to me they could be like camouflage to screw up the cops if I have close encounters of the worst kind, okay? Okay, Bubble Gómez, you’re the man of the hour, you know your mission, but stay out of the way of the gringo Marines headed toward the Chachalacas River, and our own soldier boys, too, because some haven’t been notified by Inclán, remember the situation is confused, a huge fire has broken out in the slums, it’s hard to breathe here, go south young man, stay out of trouble, good buddy, roger, Bubble Gómez effectivesuffragenoreelesion, no more lesions, CB radio signing off, good night.
“I’m hungry!” exclaimed Colasa Sánchez when Bubble Gómez turned off his CB. “Don’t you have anything to eat?” she asked, and he just laughed. “What are you carrying in back?” A big old refrigerator, said the albino. “Is it empty?” asked the girl. No, no way, answered Gómez, my job is to bring food back and forth to D.F. “So can we take a little to eat?” If you like, baby, but why don’t you tell your main man here to take a nap and to stop looking at me like that, I don’t like people to look at me like that, tell him it’s dangerous to look at me like that, tell him later we’ll stop and have some salt pork for breakfast! The driver laughed, and my father has no desire whatsoever to think or act, he prefers to tell himself you’re an idiot, Angelito, you don’t hear or understand anything, take Colasa’s hand, it’s there so you don’t feel so alone and so fucked up so suddenly, go ahead, better than nothing, go ahead, pimp, aren’t you hungry, too?
14. I’m an honest guy
I’m an honest guy: the reader should know that a third situation is interpolating itself between these two, involving the circumstances of my mother and father; it’s as if the citizens band the truckers use had squeezed between the AM and FM bands on the radio, so that if on the first band Colasa says I’m hungry, on the second Egg translates they’ve been tricked, they take shadows for reality, but on the third, the intruder band, Minister Federico Robles Chacón laughs and, like a child kept after school, writes one hundred times: You can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system, you can’t beat the system. He suddenly forgot which number he was on and bucked like a bad-tempered horse when the flow of his inspiration was cut off by the buzz of the telephone.
Robles picked up the presidential hot line with a stratospheric storm of curses; he felt, suddenly, full of self-pity. In the simple act of picking up the receiver of that green apparatus, he proved once again that he was sacrificing his time and his talent to the common good, to the highest goals of the state. And what did the community, personified in the voice of President Jesús María y José Paredes’s private secretary, say to him? What? Whatwhat? Whatwhatwhat?
The secretary had left his temporary office in the National Palace to return to his regular office on Avenida Insurgentes, the one decorated with Roche-Bobois furniture. It was a sign that the crisis had passed. And now — whatwhat? — were they saying that Mamadoc was refusing to give the Cry this year? What the fuck was all that about? Say that again, Mr. Private Secretary? She refuses…? But what the hell … what the fuck does that old slut think she’s here for anyway? Does she think we brought her here to knit booties and watch soap operas? You get her over here now! Whatwhat? She’s already in my waiting room? That that’s what she wants, to see me to speak to me, or she won’t give the Cry? The President says to go easy with her, that this monster is more useful to us than ever, that after all, she’s your Frankenstein, you invented her, Mr. Secretary, you imposed her on us. Of course, of course …
He hung up in a rage and ordered his toady to be sure that the Mother and Doctor of Mexicans was in his waiting room.
Meanwhile, the secretary of the SEPAFU calmed down, carefully put his papers away in a schoolboy’s botany portfolio, and neatly tied the ribbons with bows.
Smiling, he received the apparition, as serene, certainly, as she, who came to ask him for God knows what, one of those little caprices of women in power, send the presidential jet to carry my angora sweater from Mexico to Rome, fire those three functionaries for having taken me to a fifth-rate restaurant, and get rid of these other five for having made jokes about me over the telephone, build me a swimming pool in the center of the Zócalo, burn the writings of my predecessors, their hospitals, movies, schools, there can be nothing before or after LITTLE OLD ME!
But now it was nothing like that, and he would have expected anything but this: the Holy Lady, wearing a riding cape of orange suede and chaps decorated with silver, and underneath a Mexican riding outfit, in the Jesusita in Chihuahua mode, suede, silver, short jacket, Andalusian riding skirt, and a riding crop in her hand, with which she instantly slapped Robles Chacón’s face. Now he was astonished; she then dropped to her knees before him, weeping, damn it, with almost the same words as Concha Toro begging for the body of the Ayatollah, oh, my love, my little love, turn around and look at me at least, my little lovey-dovey, be nice, it’s your honey talking to you, don’t make me suffer, do it to me pretty, sweetie pie, give your honey what she wants, don’t make me stay here on my knees like this, don’t you see I’m dying for love of you?