Angel got up with his bowl of soup in his hands and emptied all of it — checks, clippings, and catalogues — over Doña Luminosa Larios’s head. Brunilda got up impetuously, her mouth wide open.
“It’s a frame-up! This lady is making up a romance!”
“Don’t you dare follow me,” she said to Angel. “I’ve got lots of options. This one just died.”
For two weeks he didn’t see her. Of course, he was not deprived of female companionship, since there were lots of girls eager for pleasure, especially the pleasure of escaping from the plague of their families.
“I’ll tell you what’s goin’ on with this ’flation,” one of these bonbons summarized. “There’s no jobs and no megabucks, so we all gotta stay home, Angel baby, the power elite is takin’ it out on us women, man, ya’oughtta see, they’ve got us back in their Tyrone Power.”
“Who’s got the power?” asked my dad at the door, as always inventing useless passwords to protect his chaste and pure dwelling, knowing full well that pirating music and videotapes was the hottest business in town, especially because the city lacked both entertainment and contact with the outside world. Seeing old movies on videocassettes was the supreme form of entertainment in the Mexico of the nineties.
“Who’s got the power?”
“Mischa Auer,” answered a cinephilic teenybopper’s voice. There was nothing left to do but open the door and fall into the Felliniesque arms of María de Lourdes, María Cristina, Rosa María, María Concepción, Maricarmen, or María Engracia.”
“Who’s got the air?”
“Fred Astaire, baby.”
“Who’s got the marbles?”
“Greta Garbles.”
“Who set the table?”
“Esther Fernández.”
He didn’t open the door.
Brunilda didn’t know this new set of passwords, so she never got Behind the Green Door to Deep Trope. She telephoned, but the mythomaniacal yet astute Grandmother Susana happily sent Angel on a hypothetical one-way trip to Chile. Next came letters, some love letters, some despair letters, but all unanswered letters. Brunilda was torn apart by the anxieties of sex and vanity, emotions both linked and compulsive, to say nothing of her horrible suspicion about a future devoid of inheritance.
Because one fine morning Grandfather Rigoberto Palomar appeared in my father Angel’s coach house with a ream of documents, turned a blind eye to the naked piece of ass who squealed as she went to get dressed (later she complained to Angel that Grandpa had caressed her ass), and confirmed to him that Uncle Homero Fagoaga, as the documents stated it, had brought suit against his nephew Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, accusing him of being a spendthrift, irresponsible, and incapable of administering the estate of forty million gold pesos which, according to the last will and testament of his deceased parents, he was to have inherited on his twenty-second birthday — the new age for adulthood, according to the law, which Angel would reach on July 14, 1991.
Angel understood the shrug and the challenging expression on his grandfather’s face: one meant fatalism, the other meant freedom, a mixture appropriate to an old man as wise as this one, who was always saying to his grandson that even though he could help him — although now there was little he could do, true enough — Angel ought to use his imagination and his own resources.
“But you know so much, Grandfather.”
“No matter how much I know, I am not your age and I can’t sniff out everything you can. Your intuition is definitely better than my knowledge.”
Freedom is everything, everything, Angelillo, said the old man, handing him the documents. Even fatalism, he said, is a way of being free. Sometimes our will is not enough, see? if we don’t know that things can go wrong for no good reason. Then we aren’t free. We’re deluded. You can count on my support, but manage your affairs freely, with imagination, and without fear, Angelillo.
Angel had been going out with Brunilda for quite a while and preferred ending a relationship which had no more to it than a pleasure which, if solid, was always the same. The additives Brunilda used to try to diversify normal sexuality — unilateral jealousy, inopportune encounters with other occasional lovers, letters from one boyfriend left for no good reason in the bed of another — wore Angel out: a romantic relationship was nothing if it wasn’t a means whereby one man could be set aside from all the rest. Brunilda imbued all her relationships with analogies in order to avoid the harmony of tedium; her diversions frustrated Angel’s romantic intentions.
Three weeks after the break with Brunilda, my father, on a whim, decided to go out on the town in disguise. He put on a toga and a Quevedesque mustache and walked unnoticed by anyone from Calle Génova to Río Mississippi, where traffic was heavier. There a boy of unusual whiteness (accentuated by his shiny pitch-black hair) was putting on a spectacular performance of bullfighting with cars and trucks; his agility momentarily disguised his thick, soft body and the fact that he resembled nothing so much as a pear.
Angel, for his part, watched with openmouthed admiration as the boy executed a twirl around a bloody-minded taxi, a left feint in front of an irate heavy truck driven by an albino in black glasses, a rapid-fire series of veronicas in the face of a ferocious squad of motorcyclists. But when the fat young man posed on his knees in the path of a Shogun limousine without license plates but with darkened windows — which accelerated down the wide street as soon as it saw the boy on his knees — Angel leapt to rescue the erstwhile torero and dragged him to safety.
“You nuts, man?” asked Angel.
“What about you, goin’ around dressed like the Masked Avenger!?” panted the pudgy lad.
“If it bothers you, I’ll take it off.”
“Who said you should take off?”
“No, not me, it. My disguise, I’ll take it off.”
My father pulled the cape off his shoulders and the huge glasses off his nose.
“Actually, I did all that to get your attention,” panted the fatty. “Brunilda told me to tell you that if you don’t call her this afternoon, tonight she’ll kill herself. Swear to God.”
They walked along Paseo de la Reforma to the flower market at the entrance to Chapultepec Park. Fatso explained that he was a composer; perhaps Angel knew his last hit, “Come Back, Captain Blood”?; well, he wrote that number along with the new group he was putting together, because the group he’d belonged to before, Immanuel Can’t, did not respect the individual personality of its artists, required everything to be group experience, collective expression; that was their categorical imperative, laughed the overweight conversationalist as he raised the dust on the Reforma sidewalks with his big feet. He was not in agreement, he said, with that philosophy, which was too sixties; he wanted to be conservative, romantic post-punk conservative, and his motto was REWARD YOURSELF!
“Reward yourself, that’s what I say. You never know what tomorrow may bring.”
They reached the flower market. As Angel placed an order, Fatty recited a few stanzas of his rockaztec hit:
Wontcha come back, Captain Blood?
You’re a great big iron stud,
And we all need what you’ve got
Adventure, honor: HOT!
You gave it to our dads:
Now what about the lads?
They liked each other and agreed to meet the next day for coffee. Fatty then told him that the funeral wreaths had begun to arrive at Brunilda’s apartment in Polanco at four in the afternoon, one after another, purple and white, violets and tuberoses, some shaped like horseshoes, others plain wreaths, still others artistic diaphragms; suffocating, perfumed, permutated, indefatigable dead man’s flowers to celebrate her announced suicide, truckloads of flowers that invaded the apartment of the girl with immense eyes and clown mouth: she wept. She tore apart her sky-blue satin robe, she threw herself on the bed, she tried to keep any more wreaths from entering the house, she dramatically fainted off the bed and onto the floor, revealing one exuberant breast, all of which only convinced the messengers they should bring her more flowers than those Angel had ordered, so they tossed a whole cartload of flowers on her, only looking for a glimpse of that trembling antenna of Brunilda’s pleasures.