I SEEK A NATION IDENTICAL TO ITSELF
I SEEK A NATION MADE TO LAST
NOTHING THAT DOESN’T LAST FIVE CENTURIES
FATHERLAND, ALWAYS REMAIN THE SAME
FAITHFUL TO YOUR OWN REFLECTION:
LONG LIVE ALFONSO REYES! MEXICAN LITERATURE WILL BE GREAT
BECAUSE IT’S LITERATURE NOT BECAUSE IT’S MEXICAN!
and my father forced everyone there, beginning with the uncle and the poet, to breathe onto a mirror:
“I knew it. You’re all dead. I will not bestow the conservative tradition on a gaggle of exquisite corpses.”
He was very young. He mixed his metaphors. He was sincere. He didn’t know if his anarchic whims, outlandish jokes, and premeditated disorder would give him the key to happiness: Sweet Fatherland!
6. In these annals of a wonderful life prior to my conception
In these annals of a wonderful life prior to my conception (which makes me wonder if I’ll be lucky enough to find something amusing in my intrauterine life and — and even this I don’t dare hope for — later on), my father returned in February 1991 from Oaxaca, transformed, even though he still didn’t know it.
He went on leading his bachelor’s life, protected by his Grandparents Rigoberto and Susana. He still hadn’t found my mother and took up again with an old girlfriend named Brunilda, a great big sexy girl, lively and sentimental, with eyes like limpid pools and the mouth of a clown.
He was not faithful to her, nor she to him. And they both knew it. But he had never asked her to have a drink in the Royal Road Hotel bar along with one of his other girlfriends. She, on the other hand, enjoyed those collisions between rivals, allowing the two gallants to stare each other down like two polite basilisks while she chewed on the fringe of her ash-blond hair and observed them from the depths of her twin pools.
“So you think you’re terribly liberated, eh?” she would say, making catty faces from time to time. “So you think you’re terribly civilized, eh? A pair of little English gentlemen, is that it?”
Photos and letters from the rival accidentally left on Angel’s bed.
Now they were all together in the VIPS in San Angel, the afternoon of Thursday, February 28, 1991, neutral territory where they could explain all these things. Angel yawned. He shouldn’t have done it: life in Mexico City contains more surprises than any yawn imaginable deserves.
In the ecumenical and inexhaustible taxonomy of Mexican pests, Angel gave a high place to professional wives: these women feel it’s their job to promote their husbands twenty-four hours a day, to see to it that they are invited to elegant dinners, to castigate verbally any misguided critics of their divine consorts, and to imagine cataclysmic snubs provoked by the envy of others. But above all, the professional wife feels authorized to cash checks, an activity without which anything else she did would be meaningless.
Among the members of this subspecies for whom Angel felt special revulsion was Luminosa Larios, wife of the millionaire magazine impresario Pedrarias Larios, and it was not without a tremor of fatal anticipation that he saw her sit down at two in the afternoon on that same day at one of the tables in the VIPS.
No sooner did Luminosa Larios lay eyes on my father Angel than she obliterated any imaginable possibility for the couple sitting there to air out their problems. Luminosa always acted as if there were two people in the world: she, the quasi-ecclesiastical representative of her Genial Husband, and the person privileged to hear her revelations. She now began to enumerate these glories, stretching her hand with its voracious green nails toward Angel’s shoulder: her husband Pedrarias had just opened — simultaneously — twenty-four gas stations in the Nations of North America, The New York Times had published an article by Tom Wicker in which he compared Pedrarias with early Hearst or late Luce or murky Murdoch, she didn’t remember quite the way it went now (she scratched the air with her green claws so that the gold charms on her bracelets would tinkle more musically). Pedrarias had a cameo in the new Pia Zadora film, Pedrarias was received by President Donald Danger, Pedrarias may have earned seven hundred million pesos last year, but he still has a social conscience, and emblazoned across the cover of his magazine Lumière: SOLIDARITY WITH THE SUBJUGATED PEOPLES OF THE FOURTH WORLD VICTIMS OF THE OIL IMPERIALISM OF THE THIRD WORLD.
“What a whirlwind! What publicity!” exclaimed Luminosa in satisfied tones. “But even my husband has his limits: even though they’ve asked him repeatedly, he would never do the ads for those Cuban heels made by Rising Star Shoes. I mean, really! Where do they get off, making up stuff like that? It came out in some two-bit paper published in Mexamerica that nobody reads; here’s the article and some other interesting clippings. Next year my husband’s book comes out, an exciting, stupendous confession entitled Epic of a Paranoid Hick in Paris. We deny completely that we’ve been evicted from seven different apartments for not paying the rent, the telephone bill, or for fixing the broken furniture. And it was our enemies who made up that lie about our using towels to wipe our asses. Nothing but lies!” shouted Luminosa, bright red and cross-eyed.
With growing excitement, the lady began to pass around catalogues, posters, press clippings, photocopies of checks, magazine covers on which she appeared wearing a bikini, as if the fame and merits of her husband depended now and forever on them. The printed matter flew over Brunilda’s head, messing her hair and annoying her, as her cat-like eyes showed. Then the words settled in the tortilla soup the couple were eating. And amid this avalanche of luminous publicity, Luminosa took the opportunity to mention, as if in passing, this bit of news, which changed my father’s life:
“Oh yes, Angelito, I just found out that your Uncle Don Homero has disinherited you or something like that.”
My father Angel did not know what to take care of first: Tom Wicker’s article floating in his tortilla soup, Brunilda’s horribly fulminating and disappointed stare, or Doña Luminosa Larios’s infinitely hypocritical smile, fixed on her face as she cocked her little head to one side as an invitation to middle-class approval. Her Gorgon eyes were bulging because no quantity of scalpels doing any quantity of plastic surgery could erase those crow’s-feet that looked like quotation marks between which she eternally recited her husband’s deeds. She dripped joy at the sight of someone suffering.
The lady resolved my father’s dilemmas by sensually stretching her arm, wrapped in an atrocious blouse of violet crepe, and resting her sympathetic face on one of her wrists ablaze with jewels. “Don’t forget to come over at the usual time, now,” she said, withdrawing her hand just before Angel could touch it, and then proceeding to play peekaboo with her napkin.
Brunilda gave my father a look of double warning that he could read easily because she said everything with looks: “You’re not only ruined financially, but you publicly two-time me with this parrot who seems to have escaped from the Rocky Horror Picture Show.”