Don Homero Fagoaga insisted on living in this uncomfortable building on Mel O’Field Road for a very simple reason: all the buildings around his had collapsed during the consecutive earthquakes of 1985, so that Uncle H.’s condo was surrounded by “fields of solitude, dejected downs”: flattened lots, ranches wiped out by the city’s acid rain, but his building was standing, saying to the world that where Homero lived, earthquakes were sparrow farts. This sublime and sublimated lesson did not go unnoticed, he was informed by his public-relations experts, for whom he acquired at astronomical prices the properties in the center of town that the government wanted to transform into gardens but which Ulises López sold through his front man, Dr. Fagoaga.
“I am twenty years older than you,” Uncle Fernando said to him, “but I’m still on the make.”
“Did you say quake? Again?” asked Uncle Homero, running to take his place in the nearest doorframe.
“Twenty years older than you, but harder in the phallus,” Uncle Fernando said.
“You like Niki de St. Phalle’s art? Terrific!”
“I still like to screw…”
“Stew? Only when the weather’s cool…”
“No, Jimmy Stewart, you old fool,” Uncle Fern exclaimed in despair. And he ordered his boys: “Chase him as if it were hunting season and he were big game, you’ve got to be hard-nosed and hard-assed with this old rhino! Keep an eye on him, my little Fuckups, make a fool of him. Drive the miserable old fart nuts.”
It all began when the shortest (but the oldest) of the Four Fuckups, the so-called Orphan Huerta, set up his stand of overripe fruit right at the well-guarded door of Uncle Homero’s condo on O’Field, singing out day and night in his soprano twang. Day and night in the shrill voice of a kid from the slums.
“Oranges, pears, an’ figs,” chanted Orphan Huerta in his intolerable voice whenever Uncle Homero walked through the building’s revolving door, a miraculous fact in itself, according to my dad, because Uncle Homero’s mass should not by rights have been able to pass through any door, revolving or stationary, open or closed, screened or screenless:
“Condomed door.”
“Cuntdemned door, did you say?”
“Like the Doors without Jim Morrison, sans issue.”
“I see, I see.”
“You see nothing, you old fart, so stop pretending.”
The fact is, they don’t make them (doors, that is) that huge anymore. Uncle Homero can only get through a revolving door the way jelly gets into a jar — adapting himself to the circumstances, in a word.
“I do so love belly dancers,” said Uncle Fernando.
“You love jelly doughnuts, at your age?” observed Uncle Homero incredulously.
“No, you fat slob, hegelly doughnuts,” retorted Uncle Fernando, getting up and knocking his chair over backwards.
Or perhaps Uncle Homero is rehearsing to get into heaven through the eye of a needle every time he enters or leaves his house, says my mom, floating in the sea just as I float inside her in the fetal sea.
“Through the needle of an eye?” Don Homero feigned surprise.
The Orphan Huerta never allowed himself to be intimidated by the contrast between the narrowness of the door and the generous dimensions of Don Homero Fagoaga, LL.D. As soon as he saw him, he burst into his hideous chant, which sounded like a rusty knife being dragged across a plate.
“Oranges, pears, an’ figs; oranges, pears, an’ figs.”
Uncle Homero begins to shake (like a bowlful of jelly) and offers the poor Orphan a five-cent coin from the times of Ruiz Cortines, at the same time that he corrects him:
“Oranges, pears, and figs, my boy.”
He was offering him something more than five cents from the fifties, inestimable era in which the Mexican Revolution was going to celebrate its Golden Anniversary and when the peso was devalued to twelve-fifty, and even so they went on loving each other for a little while longer (the Revolution and the peso). Uncle Homero is offering the poor Orphan something more than five cents, he is awarding him a verbal mother and father, he is offering him education, without which (Don Homero says to the Huerta boy) there is neither progress nor happiness but only stagnation, barbarism, and disgrace.
“Oranges, pears, and figs, my boy.”
Proper speech, that’s what he offers him, the Castilian tongue in all its pristine, puritan purity, the Gothic Virgin and her pudgy acolyte: the Castilian Tongue and Homero Fagoaga LL.D.: the Ideal Couple: Don Homero nothing more than a servant of the Spanish Language, Hispaniae Lingua. He hones it, he fixes it, he gives it splendor, and he offers to the future, to the potential, to the possible Don Orphan Huerta LL.D. the possibility of being, finally, in the following order, Mother’s Day Poet, Orator of National Holidays, Declaimer of the Sexagesimal Campaign, at worst a Congressman, people’s tribune and at the same time elitist Demosthenes, owner of the Language: Uncle Homero licks his lips imagining the destiny of the Orphan Huerta if the boy would only give his tongue to the old man, if he’d allow him to educate it, sentence it, diphthong it, vocalize it, hyperbatonize it.
Uncle drops the Classic Tongue like a golden pill on the savage tongue of the Orphan Huerta, who stood there astonished with his mouth as open as a mailbox, filthy, the poor devil, his face darker from the grime than from his infamous genes, the scum and the dust and the mud of the no-man’s-land from which the kid emanated with his head crowned with a helmet of gray felt, the ruin of a quondam borsalino, emblazoned with beer or soda bottle caps. The Orphan Huerta.
“Oranges, pears, an’ figs.”
Uncle Homero adjusted his balloon trousers, which were held up by yellow suspenders (one side bearing the image of the Holy Father repeated along its full length, thus holding in place the whitish softness of the lawyer’s right bosom; the other side bearing the image of Emiliano Zapata, alternately wearing expressions of shock and heart failure, on his left bosom); he buttoned the only button on his Barros Jarpas (as our Chilean lady friend enigmatically refers to these striped trousers) and dropped the coin of verbal gold on the bottle-capped head of the Orphan Huerta.
“Oranges, pears, and figs, son.”
He said it in the same voice God said let there be light, in the same voice His Son (oh Godoh!) said verily I say unto you suffer the children to come unto me. The Orphan Huerta regarded him with a suspicious eye.
But in that instant Uncle Homero was the pedagogue and not the pedophile. “Or, as the dazzling light of Spanish grammar that spoke incarnate in the voice of the illustrious Venezuelan, Don Andrés Bello, said on a great day, the tendency to drop the final d in the copulative and before a monosyllabic word beginning with a consonant is to be resisted at all costs.”
The Orphan Huerta ceased to be suspicious. Uncle Homero’s grammar lesson culminated in a gaze appropriate to a hanged donkey. That’s how tender were the eyes of this fatted calf. That’s how stretched his baggies were by his pedophilia.
“Resisted at all costs, son,” said Homero tenderly, caressing the bottle-capped head of the boy, and the Orphan Huerta tells even today how he extracted from the depths of his filthy soul all the revenge sunken into the bottom of Lake Texcoconut that each and every Makesickan carries in the mudbank of his guts, next to the treasures of Whatamock, father of the fatherland, which is to say toasted tootsies for the toast of the nation, said my daddy-o, the vacillating hero, washing off the shit, while I, pleased as punch, floated around in the ocean within my mother where I am not touched (oh, still not) by the shit of this world.