“Moreno,” grunted the visitor, while my father, after a mnemo-technical shove like that, saw once again the map of the Republic before its current shrinkage (the country abbreviated during the disaster of 1990!), and the light bulb went on in his head.
“Tabasco Moreno.”
“Too far south.”
“Jalisco Moreno,” suggested my father timidly.
“Farther north,” said Moreno melancholically.
“Sonora Moreno.”
“O, it ends in o,” he said, this time almost begging for recognition. “Even by name I’m macho, Palomar.” He looked toward some false eyelashes someone had stuck on a mannequin head and forgotten there.
“Of course,” exclaimed my young father, “of course, who could forget that name: Matamoros Moreno. You just caught me off-guard. Now, what can I do…?”
Before he could finish the sentence, Matamoros managed to put one foot between the door and the jamb. “He won’t jamb me,” my father said to himself. “Enough is enough.” But this orangutan was scaring him.
“Don’t get all bent out of shape, Palomar,” said the big guy, now blinking one of his tiger eyes through the partially open door and speaking in a voice that was so sweet my father felt ashamed of himself.
“Don’t get upset, coward. Don’t try to evaporate on me,” he added quickly with a ferocity that convinced my father that his decision to make it difficult for Matamoros to get in was sound.
“Don’t get upset, chum,” Matamoros said after a bit, in a voice that shook my dad’s soul and confirmed his worst fears.
Later he said to himself that he had always feared the day someone would ask him for an opinion about a literary text. He was well known as a reader in HEROES OF 1982. He could recite Quevedo. He quoted Montaigne. He was a fan of López Velarde. He had access to the vast library that belonged to his scientist parents. His Quevedian motto was: Nothing surprises me. The world has bewitched me. But that it should turn out to be Matamoros Moreno who would turn over his first literary efforts to him, who would ask for his sincere opinion, who would assure him that he had admired him from a distance in HEROES OF 1982 as the most highly cultured boy in their class, the most avid of readers … My father sat down among his empty bottles, his bicycle wheels, his squashed cardboard boxes, and his collections of alien porn, to read the literary efforts of his fellow student Matamoros Moreno.
The reader is cordially invited to fill the virgin page following with his own version of Matamoros Moreno’s text, read by my father that afternoon when he was twenty years old. The only hints about it are some statistics: Matamoros says “heart” twenty times; “tumescent flesh” and “maculate flesh” appear eighteen times each; fifteen times he exclaims “Holy Mother,” attributing to this fertile lady eleven times the expression “white hair” and only ten “little mop of cotton”; there are fourteen “blazing shines,” thirteen lives scattered among rosebushes, and twelve mad passions; only four coral lips appear in this census.
Angel’s first reaction was to laugh. But three things stopped him.
The first was that in Chapter 2, as if to arouse obligatory applause, Matamoros said only:
THERE’S NO COUNTRY LIKE MEXICO, DON’T YOU AGREE?
This attempt at demagoguery was strengthened by Chapter 3, which proclaimed in lapidary tones:
SHE DID IT FOR NO OTHER NATION
The proclamation of the Virgin of Guadalupe added religious terrorism to patriotic terrorism, my dad had objected. The great thing about Matamoros was that his zenith was also his nadir, his alpha was also his omega: his peak was down below; there was no fall, just as there was no ascent; his sentences were the high point of a gorge, never the low point of a ridge.
But the third, the real problem was telling him all this.
Or letting him know indirectly.
Matamoros, of course, had given him no address: he said he’d be back next week. The mail didn’t work anymore, who didn’t know that? My father calculated that a week for Moreno would be exactly one week, and when the seventh day after the Matamoorish visit came around, he hung the manuscript in a manila envelope on the outside doorknob, along with a “Very interesting” note.
He heard Matamoros Moreno’s unmistakable footsteps at three o’clock in the afternoon, the precise hour at which the seventh day came to an end. He pressed his ear to the door without breathing. He heard the rustle of papers. Then the long, jailhouse footfalls going into the distance. He opened the door to see if the coast was clear. Not a trace of Matamoros, but the manuscript was still hanging from the doorknob. Matamoros had appended a note to my father’s note: “What’s very interesting? I’ll be back tomorrow at the same time. Do a better job. And don’t try to jerk me around.”
My father spent a restless night. To mock Matamoros would be to put himself in physical danger. So my father Angel spent his morning between fear and mockery, mockery and fear: Matamoros Moreno was laughable; he was also to be feared. What was to be done with this supreme invader of the impossible private life of Angel Palomar y Fagoaga?
He was on the verge of asking his Grandfather Rigoberto Palomar for advice. But he did that only on the most important occasions, when there was clearly no way out. His grandfather would expect more agility from him, a more fertile imagination. It was an unwritten agreement between them. Besides, what was Angel going to do at three that his grandfather would or would not do at two or four?
At exactly three, Matamoros materialized. “Well, what did you think of my work?”
“It provokes digressive flights.”
“Whadya mean?”
“I mean that the metaphysical transposition, taking control of the signifying practices, ultimately modifies all the prosodic and morphologic instances, eventually hastening the triumph of the linguistic eros, itself related to the fungous and fusive homophony of the homologous.”
Matamoros Moreno stared severely at my father. “Cantinflas couldn’t have put it better, bro’.”
He looked with paleolithic irony toward the interior of the coach house, as if he could read the stacks of love letters written by other people and take the rust off the abandoned motorcycles. “Tomorrow I’ll be back for a serious opinion, Palomar. Remember, three strikes and you’re out.”
Off he went, dragging his chain, pushing his cannon. My father leaned back, cursing all classmates, from the beginning of time. Because of fear and laughter he could not sleep: his nightmares about Matamoorish violence were interrupted by attacks of insane laughter as he remembered the most singular sentences penned by his classmate. Three strikes and you’re out, warned his old school chum (may God protect us from them!), so here we go. But if he didn’t have the guts to laugh right in his face and tell him, look, Matamoros, your prose is an exercise in involuntary humor; or the courage to say, look, Matamoros, your prose is shit, then at least he’d have the valor to confront this unforeseen nemesis a third and possibly last time. Neither scorn nor fear. Let’s see what happened.
Matamoros Moreno was right on time when Angel Palomar opened the front door for him. My father could imagine Matamoros from head to toe, but he didn’t imagine him with anyone else: no, Matamoros didn’t need protection; he was his own bodyguard, clearly. Nor did Angel imagine he’d be with a woman, even if the woman provided another kind of protection or blackmail — how could Matamoros do that to him! No, not that. But yes, yes that. Except that the woman was an eleven-year-old girl. Dark, plump, dressed in pink, with tresses, bangs, dimpled cheeks, and black little eyes — Shirley Temple translated into Mexican.