“My daughter. Illegitimate, of course. I couldn’t leave her alone. Thursdays the day care is closed. Sorry. Her name is Colasa. Short for Nicolasa. I don’t like Nicolasita. So it’s Colasa. Kiss the nice man, honey.”
Moist, sticky, chocolatey, bubble-gummy, aromatic kiss. My father confesses he collapses — yesterday, today, and tomorrow — in the presence of girls between three and thirteen years of age. Defenseless. Victimized. Against Colasa Moreno he was nothing.
“Colasa Sánchez, sorry, after her mother. I’m not sexist. Why should she have to carry around a man’s name all her life, first her father’s and then her husband’s? Let her have her own name, her mother’s name, right?”
Angel my father was about to say that a woman always has a man’s name, whether it’s her mother’s maiden name (a father’s name, after all) or her father’s name, so that the name of Colasa’s mother was her grandfather’s name, but …
“So what’s the story with my stuff, buddy?”
Vanquished, my father was obliged to say that it was an unusual example of poetic prose: the pitfalls of sentimentality had been avoided with skill and intelligence; it was difficult to communicate more beautifully a feeling of so much filial goodness. Wasn’t it Dostoevsky who said when he outlined the theme of The Idiot, WHAT?; no, that’s the title of a Russian novel, okay? OKAY, get on with it man, I like what you’re telling me, like it a lot, Colasa likes it too, doncha honey: yes Daddy, the nice man really is nice and very intelligent, right Daddy?: groan of agony from Angel Palomar: “It wouldn’t be unworthy of an anthology of this kind of writing.”
“Well, see about getting it done.”
“Getting what done, Matamoros?”
“Getting it published, man. I’ll be back tomorrow at the same time. Come on now, Colasa. Say thank you to the nice man. Thanks to his help, we’re going to get rich and famous, kid. And something better: we’re going to be happy. You’re a good guy, Palomar.”
As if her father were a prompter, Colasa Sánchez started to sing:
My heart’s delight’s this little ranch
Where I live content
Hidden among the mountains blue
With rainbows heaven sent.
It was difficult to get him out without actually shoving him through the door, without seeming impolite, assuring him that tomorrow was another day, they’d see for sure, of course, the famous anthology, yes, ha ha ha, the girl singing happy ranch, my little nest, with honeysuckle scent …
He didn’t flee from Matamoros Moreno and his daughter Colasa Sánchez out of physical fear of such fearsome characters or because of any moral fear of telling them the truth or out of psychic fear of his desire to laugh at them: my father took the bus to Oaxaca that afternoon of his twentieth year in the month of November out of the purest compassion: so they wouldn’t suffer. How could he have imagined that that damned Matamoros had left his daughter Nicolasita (it was an annoying nickname!) standing guard on the corner near his grandparents’ house?
Night and day, obviously, since the snot-nose was sitting on her haunches in front of a country-style ministore, as if she were on strike, with a lantern for night work, a black and red flag, and a pot of smoking beans. The simple child was hugging an ancient, moth-eaten doll of the charro Mamerto, a character my father recognized from a collection of comics someone had left in his coach house.
No sooner did she see my father than Colasa let out a shout, threw the charro with his huge black mustaches aside, and pointed her finger at my dad:
“Stop him! Stop him! The shameless rascal is fleeing! The scoundrel is going back on his word! Stop him! In the name of heaven and justice, I implore you not to abandon a poor girl! Stop him! The coward is fleeing, stop the knave!”
Horrified, my father ran like the devil toward Paseo de la Reforma, not even stopping to greet the statue of Don Valentín Gómez Farias, as was his custom, not even blowing a kiss to the Angel of Independence. He boarded a taxi and left poor Colasa behind, weeping, her tresses standing on end. When he reached Oaxaca thirty hours later, my father was so nervous that he walked into the Church of San Felipe Neri to take Communion for the first time since he abandoned the house of the Fagoagas. He looked with the sweetest serenity at the church made — my genes swear it to me — of golden smoke. Of course, how was he to know that, expelled by the language of Matamoros Moreno, he would find in Oaxaca his own language, as a kind of faith, as a quasi-madness, and above all as an act of conscience.
He realized in that moment of peace that never in his life had he left the boundaries of the Federal District: his horizon had always been that of the valley trapped among mountains, among the steepest slopes of the tropics, and under a sheet of cold air: the least intelligent, least provident city, the most masochistic, and suicidal, most stupidly stupid city in the history of the world. He left it thinking about the insult of the pests and its mountains of garbage.
Now a pure and unforeseen thundershower in November, the sky washed clean, the earth resurrected: he was in Oaxaca.
4. Your Breath the Blue of Incense
“Then I fled to Oaxaca,” my father told my mother, “far from Matamoorish fury. For the first time in my life, I was leaving the D.F. Searching through my knapsack for some gum, I found a letter from my Grandma Susana telling me that when I got to Oaxaca I should look up a Mrs. Elpidia, who, although she did not advertise, took in recommended guests and made food fit for a king. Also: her house was located a short distance from the plaza.
My grandmother had also included an envelope with two hundred thousand pesos in it — to cover expenses — and the complete works of López Velarde in one volume. How she knew that I was leaving when I hadn’t said a word about it is something I jealously guarded in my unmentionable hoard of family witchcraft, where she held the place of honor.
I’ll get bored here, I thought, but I was mistaken because the patio of Doña Elpidia’s house was shaded by cool trees and contained a cage with a joking parrot in it. The old lady gave me a room with a view of the mountains and served me the best yellow mole in the world. I acquired a relaxed rhythm, that of my own body, my own heart: I realized that I had been living inside a Mixmaster my entire life; I learned again how to walk, stop, rest, look, and smell.
I began to live with light, not against light; with my digestion, not in doubtful combat with my own guts; sleeping and waking up at the proper times. It happened little by little: a dawn sculpting itself; an abrupt afternoon; a city of greens and blacks and golds. There was time for me to sit in the plaza and listen to the band play overtures to Italian operas. There was time for me to eat prickly-pear ice in the atrium of Santa Rita. Time to walk into churches alone. Oaxaca gave me only itself. It was something new: I was in the world and not a refugee from the world. This was Oaxaca’s first gift.
About a week later I began to get nervous. I was at the peak of my sexual powers and I must confess that, in exchange for psychiatric care and furniture warehousing, I enjoyed the favors of all the broads who passed through my cave on Calle Génova. (Of this, more later. I always associate sex with December, when the chicks in the Distrito Federal do more screwing in a month than they do in the rest of the year. Before they make their New Year’s resolutions, which should be “Start screwing in January.”) In Oaxaca I was afraid of losing what I’d already won, out of pure sexual distress. I strolled around the plaza, in the opposite direction from the way the local girls would walk each Saturday and Sunday. It was useless. They seemed to look away from me on purpose. I started to get bored with ices, the overture to William Tell, leafy laurels, and clean, trim mountains.