No one had ever said anything like this to the vibrant but austere Robles Chacón: My honey man, give me some honey. (Mamadoc hugging the knees of the minister, who felt he was living through the worst nightmare of his life, but for that very reason he kept hoping that this one, like all the others, would end: this was merely an unpublished chapter in the Ayatollah saga. He closed his eyes and said: I am living through something that man I had the obligation to have killed should have lived through, this must be my punishment, these things don’t happen to me, this is a scene from the theater of the incomplete, the incomplete that accompanies each and every one of our acts, this is the shortened apocalypse, only I had to live it because I killed that witch doctor. We have not gathered the One Hundred and Forty-Four Thousand Just Men. Forgive me, oh Lord — jabbered Robles Chacón, with Mamadoc still hugging his knees — nor have we left the Babylon that dizzies nor has the seventh cup been filled — I’ll drink the others in Guanajuato! — with the wine of God’s vengeance, and I did not find the number 666 on Matamoros Moreno’s hirsute body when I carefully examined it, and I don’t know if there is a woman in the jungle, but the harlot in purple did appear. Here is this great whore, hugging me, squeezing her cheek against my fly, God help me! and it’s getting hard against my will, and she, give me your rod give me your son give me your come don’t deny to me what you have given to all Mexican women, the right to a son on October 12.)
“There’s no time!” the minister stupidly exclaimed.
“We can extend the contest a year or even ten years, we have the power to change dates, and if we don’t, what good does it do to be us? Ten years, why not? it doesn’t matter as long as our little boy wins the contest and the dynasty is ours, honey man! yours and mine, my little lovey-dovey, you and I can play with time, set the clocks back, put them ahead, whatever we want, I’ve been thinking a lot while I’ve been all alone, why do we have power if we can’t change time? What good is power if you can’t stop time and even tell death to get lost, tell me, boss man?”
She opened her eyes wide and looked at him, her mascara running because of her tears, potholes in her plastered-over face where she’d been rubbing against his fly, her original dark skin showing through here and there.
“We can’t do that,” the cornered minister whimpered meekly, convinced that the Lady had gone mad. “It’s a law, we have to obey it, laws are meant to be obeyed…”
“But not carried out!” She gave vent to her emotion, spattering her viscous saliva over the functionary’s trousers.
He looked at her as if she were some apparition fabricated by Maybelline: he realized that this woman had been born expressly to play this scene; her whole life had been a preparation for this moment she was now living out. For that reason, Robles Chacón concentrated his intelligence and said the best thing he could:
“Dear Lady: laws are terrible, but customs are even worse.”
With that sentence, which he felt was worthy of him, Federico Robles Chacón began to reconstitute his shattered aplomb. He realized where he was, but the outrageous woman at his feet was whimpering, either you make me yours or I don’t give the Cry, either you give me a son or I go on strike, either you extend the time for the contest or I kill myself, I swear I will! I was living very happily with my boyfriend Leoncito and my job as a stenographer, you came and transformed me, now pay up, I’ll kill myself, I swear, and the chaps whipped against the ministerial carpeting like slaps.
Federico Robles Chacón painfully pulled himself back together again. He was in the SEPAFU Secretariat Building on Avenida Insurgentes, almost at the intersection with Viaducto, at the ill-named Insurgentes Bridge, fifteenth floor, private telephone number 515-1521, the place from which the Ayatollah Matamoros had observed the most terrible action in the life of FRCH (as the press called him), his having ordered the death of several thousand rioters (innocent? guilty? the system doesn’t judge, it concludes: you can’t fight the system, it is all of us, but it is more than all of us, not better, all of us with power, said Robles Chacón, trembling, he who considered himself a liberal man, on the left, humanitarian, enlightened, sensitive), and at his feet his creature, the Mother and Doctor of all Mexicans, who negated everything he thought about himself, kneeling, weeping, threatening to ruin all the symbolic ceremonies of the nation: FRCH thought of himself as a little Christopher (just like me!): in looking for the Orient, he fails and finds America; his success derives from his failure, his perception tells him the world is flat, but his intention tells him the world is round: someone else’s perception negates his visionary intention, but it is intention that triumphs.
Could that be true once again, here, tonight, with this serpent woman, this Cihuacóatl hugging his knees?
He stretched out his arms, tried to stand her up, rejected the vision that succeeded the one about Columbus: now the Minister of State’s perception told him that the country was flat and repetitive and that hell must be the same, everything repeats itself eternally in Mexico, the same cruelties and injustices, the same useless jokes that exorcise each other, the same stupidities, so it’s ultimately in stupidity repeated eternally where injustice and jokes blend and dissipate and become eternal.
Now all of it (the fatal perception of the country) was getting mixed up, the effect of the cause, the cause of the effect, with national planning: economics = fatalism. And a woman at his feet asking him for something that wasn’t economics and wasn’t fatality either …
FRCH felt overcome by the kneeling embrace that Mamadoc was bestowing on him, screw me or there’s no Cry: fornicate with me or there will be no contest, give me a son or give me death, come on, don’t be a fag:
What was better, to succumb to economics or to succumb to fatality? And suddenly my direct line was disconnected, my vision of that scene faded, and I was left without knowing what Federico Robles Chacón decided or what the ex-stenographer from the SEPAFU secretarial pool decided. But in this I shall from now on resemble you out there. Enjoy yourselves, your mercies, and remember that whatever you do, Minister Federico Robles Chacón and the Mother and Doctor of all Mexicans are going to be short of breath because the oxygen in the city is disappearing, consumed by the flames from the garbage …
You give them their destinies, svp! This novel belongs to you, dear Readers!
15. “I’m hungry!” Colasa Sánchez shouted
“I’m hungry!” Colasa Sánchez shouted again at dawn; my father opened his eyes and woke up from a long dream in which my mother appeared to him, always close and always (reach for her!) untouchable! no matter how far my father stretched out his hands and repeated to himself: “I’m not worthy of her. Not yet. I have to deserve her.”
He’s a romantic, a knight errant. Colasa is hungry. Bubble Gómez pays no attention to Dad’s reasons. On the other hand, he does share with a trace of cruelty, her reasons. He knows that the reasons belong to all three of them, and that the dawn has overtaken them in a new landscape, as different from the uplands all consumed in fires and asphyxia as heaven is different from helclass="underline" here a rolling plain announced in the glare of the morning light its descent to the sea. The mists were lifting along the wide rivers, and the coconut palms, the lemon and orange trees, charmingly shook off the dew, indifferent to their fate at the hands of the Tropicana juice company; the warm breeze shakes the clothes left to dry on the red stone and the roof tiles shine as if varnished; the whitewashed façades of the houses, the smell of the early-morning coffee and papaya opened by machete, the pineapple and tamarind reach the most secret corners of the tongue and palate.