But our uncle, a journalist after all, never let up in his investigation of Orphan Huerta — where did he come from? did he escape from his lost city only because the new subway line had opened? how much was this kid going to reveal about himself?
With a kind of fortunate parallelism — Don Fernando commented — the detestable Homero Fagoaga also had a young boy, Philippine in origin, named Tomasito, only where Benítez gave the Orphan and his buddies the courage and freedom to be independent, Fagoaga incorporated the Filipino into his service as his valet and chauffeur.
At that time, a story was going around, and one night Benítez repeated it to my father and mother, so they would see that he was man enough to give the devil his due. Homero had saved the young Tomasito from a farewell slaughter ordered by the Philippine dictators, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, before they fell. Homero left him, so it seems, at the mercy of a U.S. officer in the Subic Bay naval base, and now he brought him to serve as his houseboy in Mexico City.
“But don’t go soft on Homero,” warned Benítez insistently, waving a severe finger. “You should all know that Homero owes his relationship with the Philippines to the fact that he acts as Ulises López’s front man there, exporting wheat which cannot be sold in the U.S. because it’s been poisoned with a chemical agent. It’s exported to Mexico, where Ulises López stores it and then, through Homero, exports it to the Philippines. There it’s received, hoarded up, and distributed by a monopoly that belongs to Marcos’s buddies, who still can’t be dislodged. It sounds very complicated, but given Ulises López’s global economic thinking, it’s not.”
When he heard that name, the Orphan Huerta jumped up from behind a green velvet chair where he’d been hiding and with an audacious fury he repeated: López, López, Ulises López, Lucha López, as if they were the names of the devil himself and his henchman. They burned our houses, they said the land was theirs, they murdered my folks. Because of them, my lost brother and I fled!
My mother instinctively embraced the Orphan, and my father recited one of his favorite verses by López Velarde — the Christ Child left you a stable — and Benítez agreed that the city’s image is its destiny, but Ulises López did not, there was no destiny, there was will and action, nothing more, he would repeat to his wife Lucha Plancarte de López: wherever a band of squatters would set up on their lands, they would get them out with blood and fire, showing no mercy. After all, they only lived in miserable cardboard shacks, like animals in stables.
6. Fatherland, Your Surface Is Pure Corn
Uncle Fernando’s second revenge was to order the Four Fuckups to stand in front of lawyer Fagoaga’s Shogun limousine at the moment he was to leave for dinner.
Don Homero had spent an extremely active morning at his office, which provided him a perfect front for his activities: old-fashioned, supremely modest, on a fourth floor on Frank Wood Avenue, with old, fat-assed, half-blind secretaries who’d heard their last compliment during the presidency of López Mateos, folio upon folio of dusty legal documents, and hidden behind them a notary from Oaxaca wearing a green visor and sleeve garters. Don Homero had spoken on the telephone with his gringo partner Mr. Kirkpatrick, agreeing (Homero) to import from his partner (Kirkpatrick) all the pesticides prohibited by law in North America, to send them from Mexico to the Philippines as a Mexican export (our exports are highly applauded because they bring in revenue, ha ha), even though I pay you more than any Filipino could pay me, ha ha, don’t be a joker, Mr. Kirkpatrick, I’ll never eat a tortilla made from a kernel of corn sprayed with your pesticide. I have my baguettes flown in by Air France from that chic bakery on Rue du Cherche-Midi. Luckily there are no consumer protection laws here! It’s better to have investments and a job, even if they bring cancer and emphysema!
Now our esteemed LL.D. descended from his traditional offices on Frank Wood Avenue, putting on his kidskin gloves and his dove-colored fedora and making his way through the masses that at three in the afternoon were filing along this central street, which in other eras had been known as San Francisco, then as Plateros, and lately Francisco Madero, got into his wide-bodied car through the door obsequiously opened by his Filipino chauffeur Tomasito. At the time, Tomasito was very young but sinister-looking because of his Oriental features. As Don Homero was making himself comfortable on the soft seats, he saw that the street mob had gathered around his car, their eyes popping out of their heads, staring at him, Don Homero Fagoaga, lawyer and linguist, as if he were a two-headed calf or a millionaire who followed the President’s orders and brought back the dollars he’d exported in 1982.
Uncle Homero ordered the Filipino chauffeur to go on, to get out of here now, but Tomasito said in English No can do, master, and the multitude grew, rubbing its collective nose on the windows of Mr. Fagoaga’s Japanese limo, sullying the windshield, the windows, and the doors with their saliva, snot, fingerprints, and blinding breath. Such was the massive and to him incomprehensible curiosity Counselor Fagoaga provoked. He sat, fearful and besieged, in all his obesity within this Turkish bath which his automobile had become with its windows closed to fend off a death which the illustrious member of the Academy of the Language didn’t know whether to ascribe to excessive hatred, like the deaths of Moctezuma or Mussolini, or to excessive love, like that of any rockaztec idol of our times, stripped and dismembered by his groupies.
“Open the windows, my Manila-bred charioteer!” shouted Uncle H. to his chauffeur.
“Is danger master, me no likey lookey!” (En Anglais dans le texte.)
“Well, you’re starting to annoy me, you bastard son of Quezón,” exclaimed Uncle H., who valiantly opened his window onto the excited mob, in order, as it were, to pick out the kid with the bottle-capped head, shouting orbi et urbi, gather round, free show, the kid with the vulcanized feet held aloft by his disciples, a fat guy with limp black hair and a skinny kid who had a coyote’s snout and tangled hair, shouting look at this car, the windows are magnifying lenses, hoisted right off the ground by the horrible skinned kid with the huge snout and that soft fatty with long hair who could have been, ay! Homero himself at sweet sixteen, shouting look at the Japanese car, latest model with magnifying windows, and look at the fat man inside magnified, now or never, ladies and gentlemen.
“Take off, yellow peril!” said Uncle Homero furiously to Tomasito, who was rapidly closing the window. “Take off, don’t worry, run them over if you have to, I’ve told you already, you know the official opinion of the Federal District police force: If You Run Over a Pedestrian, Do Not Stop. Get moving, Tomasito, they’re using inquest reports as wallpaper in all the law offices and courts, get moving, even if you run them over and kill them. It’s legal, because it costs more to stop traffic, make police reports, and sue people. Kill these downtrodden masses, Tomasito, for the good of the City and the Republic. Kill them, Homero said, but in his crazed eyes desire trembled. He loved them and he hated them, he saw them running across vacant lots, barefoot, unarmed, but by now used to the wounds caused by dioxides, phosphates, and monoxides; he peeked out the closed, dripping window of the Nipponese limo, and stared angrily at them, as they ran along Frank Wood behind him; in front of the curious crowd: the bottle caps, the skinned one, and the pudgy little one; he observed their three pairs of legs, let’s see which ones he liked best, and their six feet which ran behind his automobile were deformed in some way, eddypusses, or Eddy Poes, says my dad now, punster supreme, feet deformed by that protective layer of human rubber which has been forming on the feet of the city kids and which is sure evidence that they spent their un-fancies in the streets, lots, in this place we call Mexico, DOA: eddypusses of lost children, running behind Uncle Homero Fagoaga’s limo: the Lost Boys, Orphan Huerta, Orphan Annie, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit, the gaseous exhalations of Mexico, DOA: