Oh, how I see you, Pop, tall and gypsy-colored and green-eyed and myopic and tense, every muscle on your angular face more sharply drawn than ever, the bad roads beating you and bouncing you on your balls, which is where you feel the physical danger of the highway, its violence, its potholes, and that I feel with you because that’s about where we relate, you and I, what the fuck, that’s where we begin: that’s where America was invented, that’s where it was desired, that’s where it was needed, and nowhere else: America is in my father’s balls!
* * *
He’s biking along toward Oaxaca on the Christopher Columbus Highway, a rioting sea of potholes, and my father says son don’t be born without me don’t be born halfway my son wait for your father I’m on my way to you I’m almost there wait just a little longer Christopher wait for me hope stop time I’m just about there Angeles don’t get all self-absorbed without me don’t give birth without me don’t close the circle yet without me don’t just be you two but we three always three don’t leave me out of your halo Angeles let me enter your light don’t finish your light without me don’t take your air away without me don’t have our son without me look I’m coming back forgive me and forgive me above all for not explaining to you that I left you for reasons I will never understand completely, but that I began to understand, know when? when I saw the gringo professor and Colasa Sánchez risk sharing everything even the fearsome myth even the painful past to transcend, in the dangerous love of a couple, the social stupidity of reputation appearances conventions. Because if two people really love each other Angeles that’s the most revolutionary thing in the world that changes the world just that there’s nothing more to do but live a love telling to go fuck themselves all those who will tell who told what happened before will be or will not be will do or will not do with those whom the middle class fills its days without imagination without love withoutwithout the substitution of possible quantities of love for equivalent quantities of things and I lost and disoriented never reached this but between my conservative revolution and your leftist revolution I inserted a passion called jealousy and a justification called machismo and because of them I was unable to imagine the worst thing that could happen to me: not that I would cheat on you, Angeles, but that you would no longer think about me, that killed me with jealousy, that is what pulled me out of my sensual justification: a world in which you could go on living with our son without loving me anymore without even thinking about me: I was no longer jealous of anyone but of myself Angeles in the instant in which I imagined not only your absence I confess it or that of the child but my absence from your world and that of our son: your light without me your air without me your body without me is what I cannot stand from now on and that’s why I’m returning so that you pardon me and admit me once again into your light your air your flesh: listen to me Angeles and Christopher: my words are a call for help! I put on the brakes, I skid, the dust covers me.
My father entered the church in Oaxaca: golden glory, intense perfume of flowers and the neighboring bakeries, incense and recently washed tile floors; he went to her, touched her shoulder. She did not look at him. She raised her veil and showed him the nape of her neck.
My mother dropped the volume of Plato published by the UNAM with green covers and the black shield THROUGH MY RACE THE SPIRIT WILL SPEAK.
She had to lift her long hair, which she promised not to cut until she finished reading the Cratylus.
Egg looked at them together and stood up from the pew.
Egg and the Baby Ba walked out, he with his flat feet and his bald head, she wearing her plaid schoolgirl’s smock, with her tresses and little round face.
And my saddened heart: don’t go away, little girl, don’t leave me alone, Baby Ba! Suppose that now, as it seems, everything is forgiven and the couple reunite and I’m left alone: who but you can be with me, little girl, Baby Ba: remember I’m the only one who sees you as you are! Don’t forget that! Don’t forget me!
Ah, the egoism of love. No one does anything to get me closer to the girl, who goes off, following Egg along the nave of the Church of San Felipe Neri in Oaxaca an October morning in 1992. She turns back, holding the hand of our buddy, and looks at me:
She waves goodbye to me with her little hand raised to the height of her cheek.
Bye-bye. Ciao. See you soon, sweetie pie!
The church is empty at this hour.
My father holds up my mother’s long hair. He brings his lips to my mother’s perfumed nape. He bares only her back, her shoulders her nape. My father kisses the incomparable softness of my mother Angeles’s body. Angeles gives him the ecstasy of the acid fragrance of her armpit; she gives him her shoulders, good for a copious, liquid cry; she gives him the wingèd virtue of her soft bosom and the sleepy quintessence of her light back: breathing all of her in, forever in love with what is soft about my mother, how I want to fall asleep in your arms, to forget everything, Penny, Lucha, and Ulises and the Ayatollah and Colasa and Bubble Gómez’s truck and the Veracruz war. I wanted to sleep in the crackling sheets and imagine her as I saw her, dressed in the radiant mourning of resonant starch, with her coppery eyes and her ruddy cheeks, and I wishing she would caress me as she caressed the beads on her rosary with her fine, agile fingers … the luxury of ivory and mother-of-pearl.
He told her again that he could not desire her and only desire her, that she had to give him whatever she had even if it were on the threshold of the cemetery. Her feet. He dreamed wide awake of her feet. He asked for her feet. But at that moment she said no. She then spoke for the first time to say no. Not this time. Everything will repeat itself except this.
“Why?” asked my father.
“I don’t want you ever to see me insane, dried out, or sick. That’s why.”
My father understood then (I understood, says my father) that this time he was not going to take off her shoes (I did not take off her shoes), nor was she going to offer (her feet) so that I wouldn’t get sick (because of absolutes) here in Oaxaca (where the best and worst of me began) (my mission, Angel my father now laughs): (your love, the best of me, says my father, and she repeats it with him).
She raised her thaumaturgical eyes and looked into my father’s green eyes.
My mother gave my father the water she held in the hollow of her hands to drink.
When we left the church, nevertheless, the unexpected was waiting for us: a white Shogun limousine right in the Oaxaca plaza, a uniformed Oriental chauffeur wearing a black cap, obsequiously opening the car door, next to which, on foot, leaning against the half-open window, one little Gucci-poochie foot coquettishly posed on the carpet of the limousine, the other posed unceremoniously on the cobbles of the Oaxaca plaza, dressed, all of him, in white as if for an extemporaneous First Communion, in his hand an elegant malacca cane which he twirled in his idle fingers before our astonished eyes, his jowly face perfectly polished, shiny, pulled tight, well shaven except for the tiny black spot of a mustache on his permanently sweaty upper lip: our Uncle Don Homero Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca, of the best etc.…