The perfumed partiality of Agueda’s body in the church infected me with the absolute. Clenching my teeth, I told her I could not desire her and only desire her, that she should give me what she had even if it were on the threshold of the cemetery, “like perfume,” I whispered in her ear, “and bread and poison and cauterization.”
The statue of the Virgin in the church, dressed in mourning like Agueda, was also a somber triangle presiding over the lucid mist: Mexican Virgins have feminine sex and shape, and then Agueda, who felt me kissing her back and shoulders and nape but who felt me within as well as near her underskirts, raised her feet and offered them, sliding on the pew, to my insatiable curiosity.
I took off her shoes, I kissed her feet, and I remembered verses about feet that fascinated me enormously. It is not I who return but my enslaved feet, said Alfonso Reyes the exile among us. I love your feet because they walked on the earth until they found me, said Pablo Neruda the immortal lover. Luis Buñuel in enraged tenderness washed the feet of the poor and of some young Mexican ladies in the most exciting scene of Christian eroticism on a certain Good Friday. Now Agueda’s feet seek my sex, which is opportunely free of its prison of shorts and zippers, and Agueda kisses me only with her feet, Agueda makes me tremble and I imagine her in the role of Veronica, granting me the gift of her patience while her now tranquil, thaumaturgic eyes watch my pleasure: for you, Christopher my son, not yet: that time it was for her and for me because unless the father experiences pleasure the son never will.
She gave me water to drink from her cupped hands.
She was no longer there when I woke up in the morning when the first of the faithful entered the church.
I searched for her in the market, in the plaza, in old Elpidia’s patio, in the churches through which I’d followed her that November Sunday. I asked Doña Elpidia, the girl who sold me the crickets and led me to San Cosme and San Damián. I even asked the parrot, who only said: “He who eats a locust will never leave this place…”
I tried to answer him again with Quevedo, almost bringing myself down to the damn parrot’s leveclass="underline"
Fowl of the wasteland, who, all alone,
Leads a carefree life …
The parrot was never going to learn that poem, and I was never going to find Agueda.
I realized it that night as I strolled around the plaza:
Now the Oaxaca girls did look at me, flirt with me. As if they knew I was their own; that I belonged to them; that I shared a perfumed and black secret with them. As if before they hadn’t looked at me so as to force me to look for Agueda.
And the parrot’s verse? And the looks and notes and instructions of Doña Elpidia? And the girl who sold locusts in the market? Wasn’t it perhaps a perfect and logical chain that had led me to Agueda in the shadowy Church of San Cosme and San Damián? I stared intensely into the eyes of one of the girls in the plaza: she stopped, proud and fearful, as if I had insulted her; she hid her face in her hands and left the circle of love, accompanied by another girl, who looked at me reproachfully.
Dried out, crazy, or dead: that’s what I told them without speaking; the only thing I thought as I looked at them.
They fled as if condemned by my words to the clean injury of virginity: a resignation full of thorns.
The enchantment was broken.
5. Fatherland: Always Remain the Same, Faithful to Your Own Reflection
Renewed, happy, and retrograde, my heart spent many more weeks in Oaxaca. I let Oaxaca penetrate and possess me, just as I had wanted to penetrate and possess the vanished Agueda. Slowly but surely, I purged myself of the need to hurry. I wisely reconquered the softness of Agueda’s back, sitting alone on a bench in an anonymous park. I won it all little by little, my boy: the willowy bodies of the girls, their sugar lips, their loving provincial modesty, my nostalgia for the feet of my beloved, the clear Sundays, the cruel sky and the red earth, the chronic sadness, the miraculous illusions, the wells and the windows, the dinners and the sheets, the prolonged funeral rites, the prophecy of the turtle …
I made everything mine. Even the source of Matamoros Moreno’s prose: I recognized it, I shared it; we were brothers, doubles, barely separated by the lines on an open hand: courtesy and camp. Brothers, doubles, because López Velarde transformed the commonplaces of our small-town kitsch into poetry and mystery, and that’s something Matamoros knew better than I.
In Oaxaca, I even acquired the insanely heroic habit of talking to myself.
I returned to Mexico City when I thought the danger of Matamoros and Colasa had succumbed to my prolonged absence, by which time they would have avidly sought new, more promising opinions, backing, and recommendations for Matamoros’s efforts.
I returned by bus, alone, repeating, repeating to myself the verses of López Velarde’s Sweet Fatherland
surface: maize
oil wells: devil
clay: silver
tolling bells: pennies
smelclass="underline" bakery
fowclass="underline" language
breathing: incense
happiness: mirror
I looked for Agueda and I did not find her
I looked for the Sweet Fatherland and didn’t find it
Three months later, I found your mother.
I searched for a nation identical to itself. I searched for a nation built to last. My heart filled with an intimate, reactionary joy: as intimate as the joy felt by millions of Mexicans who wanted to conserve at least the borders of their poor country: conservatives. I said I learned to love true conservatives. Bishop Vasco de Quiroga, who constructed a utopia in Michoacán in 1535 so that the Indians could conserve their lives and traditions and not die of despair. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, the Franciscan scribe who saved the memory of the Indian past. The Indian and Spanish builders whose structures were meant to last. Resistant stone, faithful countries: was only Mexico’s past serious? asked my father Angel after his return from Oaxaca, his loss of Agueda, his meeting my mother. Does Mexico’s future have to be like its present: a vast comedy of graft and mediocrity perpetrated in the name of Revolution and Progress? Thus, I want the Sweet Fatherland, my father Angel ordered us to say, ordered, that is, my mother, whom he had still not met, and me, still in the most perfect of limbos: a country identical to itself: hardworking, modest, productive, concerned in the first instance with feeding its people, a country opposed to gigantism and madness: I refuse to do anything, plant anything, say anything, erect anything that will not last five centuries, Christopher, my son, created to celebrate the five centuries: beloved Angeles.
This was his resolution, mulled over in the few instants of solitude he enjoyed in his coach-house merry-go-round over in Colonia Juárez. But putting the resolution into practice presented him with a mass of contradictions. He would understand these contradictions later in February when he met his friend the fat little guy, the projectionist and lyricist for rockaztec, who explained to him that the tragedy of his life and the source of his artistic inspiration was his father, a living (when he was alive) contradiction. When he married, his father was given a horrible gift, nothing less than a vast, hideous bronze sculpture, dominating and inexorable, that contained images of Father Hidalgo, Don Benito Juárez, and Pancho Villa, together raising the national flag (executed in tricolor silk) above the Basilica of Guadalupe, on whose portals (executed in polychromed wood) hung the tricolor shields of the PRI. This gift was sent to the fat guy’s father, who was an engineer specializing in public works, by his principal client, the head man at the Secretariat of Public Works, and even though our buddy’s dad detested the sculpture and huffed and puffed about it the whole day, and even though its presence in the entryway of the family house in Colonia Nápoles almost caused his divorce and was certainly the source of a conjugal irritation that lasted throughout his parents’ life, our buddy would tell us all that his dad would never take it away from there: suppose the Director General of the Secretariat comes around and doesn’t see his present? Suppose people think that in our house we don’t respect the symbols of the nation? Our national heroes? The flag? The Virgin? I’ll tell you what could happen: bye-bye contracts, bye-bye three squares per diem!