someday you’ll thank me
the greasers breed like rats so they can go for the good life
so they can end up the way everybody wants to end up
as in a stellar sermon
TV and refrigerators and football stadiums and
white asses and things that work and hospitals
and cereals that snap crackle and pop and bread without flies
and American cars Akutagawas and Togos and Meijis and Kabuki 2002s
each one of your little brothers who stays here means one red-blooded
American home saved thanks to me!
Cardel Chachalacas Tajín Totonacas
Reverend Royall Payne looks at the vision of the Peak of Orizaba which is rapidly approaching his whitish-blue eyes reverberating looking at the frozen peak of the volcano an image of his own gaze as if the humble toiler in the Lord’s work could transform himself into nature
tall white eternal rock and ice: permanent
NO MORE DEFEATS! MORE DEFEATS MEAN MORE REVENGE!
NO MORE VIETNAMS! LETHAL FORCE IS AUTHORIZED!
NO MORE DEFEATS!
in the river crossing the river under the water masked by the fiery water imagining that his pantheistic anthropologist’s dream is finally going to resolve itself in the nightmare of dying and becoming hamburger repeats Will Gingerich under the slow and flaming river but the flames only consume the town of Cardel the river is a border and the professor of Dartmouth College crosses to the other side and falls face-down on the fertile mud of the river
the United States lost its innocence in Veracruz muttered Professor Gingerich when the hands of others (friendly? unfriendly?) grabbed him under the armpits and pulled him out of his mud bed on the banks of the slow river surrounded by tigers with golden eyes and backs of fire the butterflies crowning the waters the ghost of the moon in the eternal blue black night
in Veracruz
in Vietnam
in Korea
in Hiroshima
in Dresden
in Santo Domingo
in Bluefields
in Managua
in Port-au-Prince
in Santiago de Cuba
in Manila
in Andersonville
in the Little Bighorn
in Tripoli
in Chapultepec
in Chapultepec
in Chapultepec
and in El Tajín
the broken clay
bells of the moon
hummingbird magician
serpent skirts
stars of the south
the tiger said: fire in half of the night
the clay said: mirror of smoke
I said crisscrossed with voices:
17. The Other Bank of the River
After he’d been rescued from the mud on the floodplain, Professor Gingerich said all these things as he was eating some hamburgers cooked up by the albino trucker. My father and the girl dressed as a Discalced Carmelite listened to him.
The Yankee spoke to her, raising his voice slightly above the din behind us, endless said my father: Gingerich only stared at the girl, recognizing her, as he spoke near the low, hospitable fire in this forest clearing.
He stopped occasionally to chew the hamburger. Then he revealed, staring at Colasa Sánchez, that he was speaking and imagining at the same time; such was the scope of his gaze. When I am born, I may perhaps have a better opportunity to understand how people look at things and persons and to read in looks the names of desire. Although from this moment on I do know (my father looks for me, you understand, Reader) that if desire is only the imitation of another desire it’s because when we want something we want at the same time to be wanted. That’s the way Gingerich and Colasa look at each other. Both know what the Professor heard from the lips of his deceased friend D. C. Buckley. Be careful with that woman. Use a wooden penis. Penis du bois.
Tonight my father divines in the trembling of Gingerich’s features, a man just saved from death in the jungle, an availability in the face of another’s desire. An aperture. She needs no introduction: Colasa Sánchez, Matamoros Moreno’s bastard. He says simply, as she swallows a piece of hamburger, which she holds delicately between her fingers, the way one might pick up a host, that he came from the other bank. What did he want? Something huge, something very difficult, for him to have risked death by crossing over.
The other bank: my father was going to interrupt, by saying something banaclass="underline" he swam. He stopped just in time. The night, the light of the fire, the clamor behind us (I am my father! you are the reader!) transformed her; Colasa Sánchez was a necessary being, she revealed herself as a daughter of necessity, more even than her father Matamoros Moreno and her mother Anónima Sánchez. She needed; that was her supplication that night.
The other bank: Will Gingerich stretched out his hand and touched Colasa Sánchez’s fingers with his own. Cinnamon-colored skin, tea-colored, Carmelite-colored. Guess: where are the scapularies? Will closed his eyes and accepted the necessity of Colasa. Desire is necessary and it must run the risk of transformation. We desire what we desire not only in order to have it but also in order to change into the image of our desire: into our own image.
Would the object of desire resist?
Would it admit its own need, the need of the other, even at the cost of transformation?
When my father saw their fingers touch and when he imagined the cruel union of their sexes, he stood up trembling, masked his emotion in the frontier darkness, and said to himself what he would say to my mother and me, turbid and luminous in her bosom, when he found us once again:
“I saw this couple take that risk and I saw things clearly in the darkness of the jungle. I am not risking anything by returning to you, who are my love, Angeles, and to our about-to-be-born son. Accept my return. Let me explain why I love you and how much I desire you.”
Colasa and Will, holding hands, staring at each other with passion, conscious of the danger, laughing at the myth, at Matamoros dead, at the bitten Manhattanite’s wooden dildo, at the Mexican Ms., the mortal manuscript: Will Gingerich had no book, Matamoros’s words would not be eaten: he was the owner of a body,
“My body is yours,” said the girl Colasa, free at last.
9. The Discovery of America
… why do I have to find you if I never lost you …
1. Your Truth of Blessed Bread
Pay attention now, Reader: wait for me because I’m going to need you more than ever, don’t hide from me, don’t go away: you have to be there when I need you to lend me a hand so that I can recover everything I shall lose, I’m certain of it, when I abandon my mother; not yet: my mother is alive and I am inside her during these last days of my gestation, my mother is alive, sitting in the Church of San Felipe Neri in Oaxaca, surrounded by fleurons and looking (since she still can’t look at me!) at a Holy Child of Atocha dressed in brocade and rose-colored feathers and as she looks at the Holy Child our buddy Egg looks at her with a mixture of melancholy and unbounded passion but she and I know that something is going to happen, a tremulous premonition makes both of us see you, Dad, blazing along the highway on a broken-down Kurosawa motorcycle ripped away from the body of a Yankee sentinel, far from the temptations of sweet tropical Veracruz, far away and returned to the sacred highlands, rapidly along the road from Orizaba and Tierra Blanca and the Tuxtepec River, over hill over dale, through Cuicatlán toward Oaxaca. My father, who left Bubble Gómez and his refrigerated truck full of edible cadavers as well as Colasa Sánchez with Professor Will Gingerich united for better or for worse, while you, Dad, you have no reason to doubt it, it’s for better, for better it will be that you ride toward us, toward my mother and toward me, certain of the place where we’re all going to meet come on, where else could it be?