“Charge, O Horde of Gold!” Uncle Homero closed his eyes as his faithful Filipino obeyed and cut a swath through the curious bystanders — the spectacle looked like a Posadas engraving of Death on Horseback massacring the innocent. More than one nosy body was summarily dumped on his backside (“Fools!” exulted Don Homero), but in fact our uncle only had eyes for that boy with the ferociously grimy mien, the one wearing the bottle caps on his chapeau and running with his two companions … Nevertheless, as it usually turns out with even the obsessions truly worthy of the name, he eventually stopped thinking about them and the crowd scene he’d just endured. He was exhausted. When he got home, he went up to his apartment and asked to have a bath drawn. Tomasito ran to carry out the order and then returned, delight written all over his face: “Ready, master.”
Homero tweaked his cheek. “Just for that, I forgive you all your sins, because when you’re efficient, you’re a wizard, my little Fu Manchu.” He undressed in his black marble bathroom, coquettishly imagining in the mirrors another form for his body, one that while being the same would drive the obscure objects of his desire mad, he, Homero, a Ronald Colman with a Paramount mustache. He sighed, thankful for the liquid verdancy of the water in his Poppaeaish tub fit for a Roman empress. Deliberately, but fleetingly, he thought that in Mexico, D.F. (aka DOA), only private comfort — not only exclusive but actually secret — existed because anything shared with others had become ugly — streets, parks, buildings, public transportation, stores, movies — everything, but inside, in the corners left to wealth, it was possible to live luxuriously, secretly, because it did not involve a violation of national solidarity — like having to give back hard but illegally earned bucks, or giving up $5 million co-ops on Park Avenue, or selling off condos in Vail at bargain rates, it did not involve offending those less fortunate than he who … He gazed with a sense of marvel at the intense green color, at the same time liquidly transparent and beautifully solid (like marble, one might say), of the water in his bath and gave himself up to it completely.
He let himself drop, with a jolly, carefree plop, into the tub, but instead of being enveloped by the delightful and warm fluidity of the green water, he was embraced by a cold, sticky squid: a thousand tentacles seized his buttocks, his back, his knees, his elbows, his privates, his neck: Lawyer Fagoaga sank into something worse than quicksand, mud, or a tank full of sharks: unable to move a finger, a leg, his head bobbing like that of a marionette, Homero was sucked in by a tub full of green gelatine, a sweet pool of viscous lime Jell-O in which Uncle H. looked like a gigantic strawberry.
“What have we here, a barrister in aspic?” guffawed Uncle Don Fernando Benítez from the door, wearing a starched butterfly collar, bow tie, and a light, double-breasted shantung suit.
“Tomasito!” Homero Fagoaga managed to scream, seconds before sinking into horror, surprise, and rage, which were even stickier than the gallons of gelatine put there by the Fuckups: “Tomasito! Au secours! Au secours!”
“Does your boss really know French, or is he just a disgusting snob?” asked Uncle Fernando, taking the stick and hat that Tomasito, the perfect though perplexed servant, handed him before he went to help his master, who was shouting, “Benítez, you Russophile! You café Marxist! You salon Commie!” His extravagant list went on, my mother noted, and every item pointed to the exact moment in which his political education had taken place and dated him.
Tomasito, after saving his master with vacuum cleaners, massage, and even corkscrews, withdrew to pray to a potted palm he carried around with him. He begged the gods of his country that he never again confuse his master with the relatives, confidants, or friends of his master, that he never again allow them to enter the domicile of his master, or that he ever serve more than one master at any one time.
Then, sobbing, he went back to Don Homero Fagoaga, prostrate in his canopied bed, to squeeze him out a bit more and beg his forgiveness.
“I think there’s still some gelatine in his ears and nose,” said my father Angel, but my mother merely repeated these words:
“What will my son breathe when he is born?”
“Perhaps I’d better answer your question about which language the boy will speak first. Didn’t you ask about that, too?”
“Okay. Which language will he speak? That was my third question.”
3. It’s a Wonderful Life
Child, girl, woman, hag, sorceress, witch, and hypocrite, the devil takes her.
1. My circumstance consists of certainties and uncertainties
My circumstance consists of certainties and uncertainties. One certainty: the boy has been conceived under the sign of Aquarius. One uncertainty: his chances of becoming a Mexican fetus are one in one hundred and eighty-three trillion six hundred and seventy-five billion nine hundred million four hundred thousand fifty-three hundred and forty-eight, according to my father’s calculations, which he made as he waded into the Pacific Ocean with my mom to wash away the shit that rained on them from the sky that midday of my cuntception. First day of the c(o)untdown they called it. I call it my first swing in the cemetery, as I moved toward the ovarian reading lesson, because even though they remember now what happened that day, I knew it absolutely and totally from the moment in which my dad’s microserpent knocked over my mom’s corona radiata (no, not a corona corona, Dad’s was an exploding cigar, a MIRV, come to think of it) as if it were made of rose petals, while the survivors I’ve already mentioned of the great battle of Hairy Gulch invaded the gelatinous membrane, de profundis clamavimus — but nobody was home: which of us will have the honor to fertilize Doña Angeles (no last name), wife of Don Angel Palomar y Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca, descendant of the most exclusive families of Puebla, Veracruz, Guadalajara, and Mexico City?; one in a million, the lucky little guy, the fortunate hunchback. All madly trying to penetrate, break the barrier, perforate the shell, and overcome the fidelity of this Penelope who will not invite just any old dick to dinner, only one, the champ, the Ulyssex returned from the wars, the greatest, the Muhammad Ali of the chromosomes, número uno:
YOU MEAN LITTLE OLD ME?
I, admirable and full of portents, I allowed in, bombarded by voices and memories, oh dear me, places and times, names and songs, dinners and fucks, speeches and stutterings, rememberings and forgettings, this unique I CHRISTOPHER and what they call genes.
“Hey, genes are to blame for everything,” said Uncle Fernando.
“Of course,” agreed Uncle Homero Fagoaga, “Hegels are to blame for everything.”
Why did two men who hated each other, who were so unalike in everything, my Uncles Fernando and Homero, have to be together, colliding, interrupting each other? What impels us to do what we don’t want to do, to self-destruction? Is it that we prefer an insult, a humiliation, even a crime — murder — to being alone?