General Rigoberto Palomar, sunk in his soft but rumpled bed, was taking his last breaths when the Fagoaga sisters walked in with the priest and the boy. His wild, bloodshot eyes, his emaciated, tremulous nose, his palpitating throat, his half-open mouth, his entire face as purple as an aubergine, were not softened by his liberty cap with its tricolor (green, white, and red) cockade that he wore as a nightcap to cover his shaved head.
All the general had to do was see the sisters, the priest waving the sacrament on high, and the boy tossing the censer around like a ball-and-cup toy and he instantly recovered from his attack. He jumped up on the bed, cocked his cap coquettishly over one eye, raised his nightshirt to his waist, and waved a nicely stiffened phallus at the Misses Fagoaga, the boy, and the priest.
“This is the sacrament I’m going to give you if you come one step closer!”
Stunned, Farnesia walked toward Grandfather’s bed, murmuring vague phrases and holding her hands in front of her, as if she were expecting a ripe fruit to fall into them or a sacrament administered to her.
“Besides … In the first place … After all … In the second place … We…”
But her domineering sister stretched out her parasol and with the hooked handle caught her straying sister at the same time she declared: “To hell, that’s where you’re going, Rigoberto Palomar, but before that you shall suffer the torments of death. I’m telling you here and now! Now cover yourself, you’ve got nothing to brag about!”
The old man looked at the boy, winked, and said to him: “Learn, kid. What this pair of witches needs is to feel the whole rigor of the penis. I know who you are. When you can’t put up with these old bags, you have a place to live right here.”
“You are going to die, you scoundrel!” shouted Capitolina.
“And in the third place,” Farnesia managed to say.
General Rigoberto Palomar never had another sick day. Balancing out the shock of John Paul II’s visit, he renewed his vows in the permanent revolution — there was so much more to be done!
After this experience, my father Angel was never the same. He began to realize things, some of them quite small. For example, when he kissed Aunt Capitolina’s hand every morning, he discovered that she always had flour and jalapeño pepper on the tips of her fingers and under her nails, while Aunt Farnesia’s hand smelled strongly of fish. The Misses Fagoaga ordered their domestic life according to purposes my father did not understand very well. He began to notice their manias. Their household staff changed constantly and for reasons Angel could not fathom. But they always called the maids by the same name: Servilia; Servilia do this, Servilia do that, Servilia on your knees svp, Servilia I want my corn-flour soup at 3 a.m., Servilia don’t use rags to clean out my chamber pot, which is very delicate and might break, use your smooth Indian hands. They were more particular in this than their brother Don Homero, although they all shared that creole vice. They needed someone to humiliate every day. The sisters sometimes accomplished this by organizing intimate suppers in which they did their utmost to confuse, annoy, or insult their guests. It wouldn’t have mattered to them if their guests ever returned, but the fact was, they observed, that the majority were delighted to return for more, eager for more punishment.
Miss Capitolina would fire off her irrefutable arguments:
“So you doubted the probity of Viceroy Revillagigedo? Ingrate!”
These arguments were received with stupefaction by the guests, who had never said a word about the viceroy, but Capitolina was once again on the attack:
“They make jam in Celaya and sugar candy in Puebla. Are you going to deny it! I dare you!”
The shock of the guests was not assuaged by Farnesia, who interrupted her sister’s conversation with verbal inconsequentialities of all sorts:
“It doesn’t matter. We shall never accept an invitation from you, sir, but we will give you the pleasure of receiving you in our salon. We are not cruel.”
“Now that you mention tacos,” Capitolina pronounced, “I can’t talk about tacos without thinking of tortillas.”
“But I…” the guest would say.
“Never mind, never mind, you are a Jew and a Bulgarian, judging by your appearance, don’t try to deny it,” Capitolina would assert, one of her manias being to attribute to others whatever religion and nationality came into her head.
“No, the truth is that…”
“Ah!” Farnesia sighed, on the verge of fainting on the shoulder of the man sitting next to her. “We understand the pleasure it must give you just to have met us.”
“Who is that ugly old dumb woman you brought, sir?” Capitolina went on.
“Miss Fagoaga! She’s my wife.”
“Damn the parvenu. Who invited her to my house?”
“You did, miss.”
“A strumpet, I tell you, and I’ll say it to her face, strumpet, gatecrasher, vulgarian, how could you ever marry her!”
“Ah, Mauricio, take me home…”
“Incidentally,” Farnesia commented, “and in the third place, we never…”
“Miss: your attitude is highly rude.”
“Isn’t it, though?” Doña Capitolina would say, opening her tremendous eyes.
“Mauricio, I’m going to faint…”
“And you just can’t imagine what happened yesterday,” Farnesia would immediately say, one of her other specialties being to accumulate inconsequential information and breathlessly communicate it. “It was just six o’clock in the afternoon and we naturally were getting ready to take care of our obligations because you should never leave for today what you can do tomorrow, the doorbell was ringing so insistently and we remembered the open window and we went running upstairs to find out if from the roof we could see what was going on and our cat walked right in front of us and from the kitchen came a smell of cabbage that, my God, you know we’re getting too old for these surprises and after all either you drink in manners with your mother’s milk or your mother learns manners, we never know and we’re about to go mad!”
These suppers were discussed by the sisters with great satisfaction. One of their ideas was that only people of their social class should live in Mexico. They cherished the idea that the poor should be run out of the country and the rest of the lower orders be thrown into jail.
“Oh, Farnecita, je veux un Mexique plus cossu,” Capitolina would say in the French she reserved for grand moments.
“Cozy, cozy, a cozy little country,” her sister complemented her in English, and when they said these little things, the two of them felt comforted, warm, sure of themselves, just like their quilted tea cozy.
These enjoyable intermezzi, nevertheless, gave way more and more to tensions my father discovered as he advanced into adolescence: the aunts looked at him in a different way, whispered to each other, and instead of kneeling alone, grabbed him, each one taking an arm at the most unexpected moments, forcing him to kneel with them and strike his chest.
One night, some horrifying shouts woke him up, and my father ran around in confusion, looking for the source of the noise. He tripped over innumerable bibelots and display cases, knocking them down and breaking things, and then he stopped at the locked door of Capitolina’s room. He tried to look through the keyhole but it was blocked by a handkerchief redolent of cloves. All he could hear were the terrible shouts of the two sisters: