But this same man, his father, as our buddy again remembers, mocked authority all day. He said he would take nothing from no one, let’s see someone try to give him an order, he was a serious professional, independent, an engineer, to be more precise: he’d like to see someone try: he refused to do his military service or to pay income tax (which, according to him, ended up in the Swiss accounts of government officials); he refused to join with the neighbors to create a neighborhood patrol; he refused to get on line for movies or bread (lines? me? I’d like to see the guy …); he never stopped for a red light; and he never ever (it redounds to his honor) paid off any cop or meter maid: he hated all uniforms, even those of street sweepers or ushers: he would urge them to be individuals, to dress as they pleased, they weren’t nuts and bolts in a machine, they were individuals, damn it, INDIVIDUALS! not rags, not doormats; he never signed petitions of any kind, never bought a lottery ticket, never lent candles to the neighbors when the power went out, never depended on anyone so that no one would depend on him, never helped anyone, never asked for help; but he never got rid of that hideous sculpture down in the entryway: he would say, what if the boss comes?; then bye-bye three squares per diem; but more than that, he never dared to touch the symbols: his individualism became abjection in the face of those domineering symbols; just as he always refused to go to a political meeting or obey a traffic light, he refused to act against any abstract abuse by the powers that be, even an abuse that condemned him and his family to walk in front of that sculptural monstrosity every day of their lives: individualist to the end, but abject to the end as welclass="underline" my poor old man, our pudgy little pal would sigh, anarchist and synarchist, and that’s the way we are in these parts: rebels in our private lives and slaves in our civic lives.
This is the dilemma my father Angel expressly tried to avoid. It was easy to distinguish and decide, but very difficult to do things. No sooner would he act than he would fear falling into total disorder and ending up not in a bower of bliss but in the slough of despond. He denied that being conservative meant being an “hidalgo,” because hidalgos only try to prove themselves in love and war and end up with no roof over their heads and no brains left, and what turns out to be the ultimate test of hidalgos is doing absolutely nothing. And what my young father began to fear was that if he didn’t watch out, he too would disappear, chewed up by the jaws of Mexico and her Institutions: he tried to imagine himself in a trashy Iwo Jima, a mock Laocoön, which the father of his future pal Egg installed in the vestibule over in Colonia Nápoles. In any case, the Canaima Option, the grand Latin American solution, was best: remain immobile in a jungle landscape, with no more company than an araguato monkey and slowly but surely let the vines cover you up. The jungle swallowed him up!
Neither was he going to carry on like a creole aristocrat with old-fashioned expatriate nostalgia for Spain, because he knew that in Mexico there have traditionally been two ways of being Spanish: being the gachupín with the grocery store, the frugal Don Venancio who sleeps on the counter and keeps an exact inventory of how many cans of sardines have been sold every day, or being the anti-Don Venancio, the creole gachupín who, in order to get a taste of what it’s like not to run a grocery store, keeps blissfully chaotic account books, goes into debt up to his sideburns, and in doing so puts the nation into debt: all to show he’s no shopkeeper, but an hidalgo: not Don Venancio the Sober but the spendthrift conquistador, the Very Magnificent Don Nuño de Guzmán, to bankruptcy and collapse, full speed ahead. My father had read Emilio Prados, Luis Cernuda, and León Felipe, the Spaniards who were exiled by Franco and who came to live in Mexico in 1939. These were the real Spaniards: not Venancio or Nuño, neither a Spaniard returned with his pockets full of New World gold nor a conquistador. He never wanted a Creole Camelot.
How would he be? He romantically reinvented himself as a rebellious conservative, in the same way that he would be an assassin if he could get away with it: but he was much more concerned that no one dare judge him, banking on his dishonesty, as was normal in Mexico, but banking instead on his virtue. He believed that in order to achieve his goal he would always have to do not the “right” thing but whatever he wanted to do and that would be the “right” thing. He tossed a veil over his personal failing: sensuality.
“Now tell me, buddy, what finally happened with that statue or monstrosity or whatever it was?”
“Well, what happened was that one night some thieves broke into our house — because, of course, my father refused to join the neighborhood patrol. Dad and Mom went downstairs in their pajamas, and the thieves threatened them with a knife. I saw it all from the stairs.”
“Who threatened them?”
“A great big guy wearing a mask. He seemed to be dragging a ball and chain and had what looked like a dwarf with him who was also wearing a mask. My mother saw her chance, Angelito, the heavens opened up to her. She ran to where the sculpture was so she could hand it over to the thief. But the truth is that she hugged the thing as if it were her dearest possession. At least that’s how the crook saw it, ’cause he apparently couldn’t stand for whatyacallit in psychology, a resistance, and right then and there he cut my mom’s throat … Christ! shouts my old man, forgetting everything he’d ever said about the Director General over at Public Works, and then screams at the thief: ‘Asshole! What she wanted was for you to take the thing! She wanted to get rid of…!’ He never got a chance to finish. Who knows what the crook was thinking, because he cut my old man’s throat, too. Then he took the damn statue, helped by the dwarf. He must’ve thought it was made of gold or had secret drawers stuffed with dollars, God knows…”
One February day, my father Angel attended a session of the Academy of the Language presided over by my Uncle Homero Fagoaga. He was dressed up like Francisco de Quevedo (it was the first time he wore the disguise in public). He listened politely to Don Homero’s speech in honor of the newest member of the Academy, the gongorhythmic poet J. Mambo de Alba, listened to Mr. Mambo’s sublime nonsense — he praised the crisis because it enclosed Mexico within itself and kept out foreign books, movies, art, and ideas. Now we were to scratch ourselves with our own nails! To read Proust is to proustitute oneself! To read Joyce is to make a poor choice! Reading Gide is doing a bad deed! Valéry is the valley of the shadow of evil! Mallarmé is marmalade! E. E. Cummings — well! He should be condomed! Let’s hear it for Tlaquepaque, coffee with cinnamon, serapes from Saltillo, Michoacán pottery, let’s head structuralism off at the pass, forget nouvelle cuisine and postpunkrock, let’s be like Ramón López Velarde, who, nourishing himself exclusively on the Revolution, with no foreign readings or fashions, found the essence of the Sweet Fatherland. It was the reference to López Velarde that aroused my father Angel’s rage. He’d always imagined his favorite poet wearing out his eyes looking for and finding and reading Baudelaire and Laforgue, while the colorless (but not odorless) poet and academician celebrated the dearth of imported books, the closing of the cultural borders, all so we could scratch ourselves with our own nails! Impetuously, Angel leapt up from his seat, went to the podium, and grabbed both his uncle and the poet by their noses. While he twisted one nose with each hand, he declared to the stupefied audience the things he’d just said here: