Because he owes his renown, above all, to his dominion over language, to an exquisite use of the forms of courtesy (“I do not offend through those with which I sit down, Marquise, if I say that your ladyship’s next flatulence will figure on my bill; you just go on eating this sublime dish from our national cuisine, refried beans, slices of onion, Manchego cheese, and peas, who could want more?”) and to his marvelous use of the subjunctive (“If I were to like or were not to like, I might not doubt, exquisite friend, to proceed perhaps if to do so you would have or might not have some problem alluding to your female progenitor, but only if to do it, there were incontrovertible proofs of your being bastards”), without forgetting his incomparable use of the national political language (“After the proclamation of Independence by Father Hidalgo and the expropriation of oil by General Cárdenas, the inauguration of the Road Dividers of Chilpancingo is the most transcendent act of National History, Mr. Governor”) and even of international political language (“From the cosmic balcony of Tepeyac may be heard, vicars, Holy Father, the hallelujahs of the deaf genius of Bonn!”). To any word Don Homero Fagoaga ascribes some twelve syllables even if it only happens to have three: gold on his lips is transmuted into go-oo-aah-ll-dd and Góngora comes out sounding like gonorrhea.
“Learn, my boy, the Fagoagas never lose, and what they do lose they yank right back!”
Pillars of the Government, of the Church, and of Commerce, lost in the immensity of His-panic time:
Who defeated the Moor in Granada?
Fagoaga!
Who defended the cross in Castile?
Fagoaga!
From those faggots, Fagoagas.
From those powers, Homers!
exactly as it is written on the family coat of arms. Angel stared at the final product of that line — his Uncle Homero — and said no.
“If I squeeze, as if they were lemons, all the Fagoagas who have existed over thirteen centuries, Angeles, I swear I wouldn’t get more than a bubble of bitter bile and another of flatulence, to use his term. Sorry, baby; I except my dead mom the inventor who showed her intelligence by marrying a blundering scientist who was a man of few words, like my dad.”
2. My father bade farewell to the house of his childhood
My father bade farewell to the house of his childhood — the house of the bright colors — by silently walking through the gallery of pearlescent light, as if there were two different kinds of light in that one space, the light of the new world and the light of the other, which if not old world, grew further and further away for the Americas of the nineties, where the carefully framed portraits of my grandparents’ heroes were hanging.
There was Ernest Rutherford, looking rather like a sea lion, tall and with a shaggy mustache, gray, as if he had just come from the depths of his cave, dazzled as he left the darkness behind, seeing in the heavens a duplication of the world of the atom.
There was Max Planck, with his high forehead right out of a Flemish painting and his narrow shoulders and drooping mustache, and Niels Bohr, with thick, protuberant lips, looking like the good-natured captain of a whaling ship, forever pacing the deck of a universe on the verge of rioting and throwing the savant into the open sea in a rowboat without oars, and Wolfgang Pauli looking like the perfect Viennese bourgeois, stuffed with pastry and the music of violins.
Perhaps Wolfgang Pauli, in his constant coming and going on the Copenhagen ferries, revived the dialogue between men and forgotten words. Like Rimbaud, said my father (as my genes tell me), like Pound, like Paz: resurrection of language.
“What language will my son speak?”
“In what world will my son live?”
“Which world is this?”
“Who is the Mother and Doctor of All Mexicans?”
“Why did they first run off and then kill the inhabitants of the mountains around Acapulco?”
“What’s Hipi Toltec doing surrounded by friendly coyotes in the middle of a dried-out palm grove?”
Nevertheless, the eyes of my child-father, educated by my scientific grandparents in the brightly colored house in Tlalpan, reserved their greatest interest, their greatest affection for the photograph of a young, blond, smiling savant on the verge of launching himself down the toughest slopes of the grand slalom of science. My father always thought that if someone had an answer for all the riddles of the day of my conception, it was this boy: his name, inscribed on a tiny copper plaque at the bottom of the photo, was Werner Heisenberg, and nothing affected my father’s young imagination so much as the certainty of his uncertainty: the logic of the symbol does not express the experiment; it is the experiment. Language is the phenomenon, and the observation of the phenomenon changes its nature.