“When I left her, she was crying with rage. She said she’d get even by marrying your rival tomorrow. They’ll be on their honeymoon starting tomorrow night in the Hotel Party Palace and they’ll drink to your death.”
Now my dad Angel ordered a piñata delivered the next night to the bridal suite at the Party Palace. He added a note addressed to Brunilda’s brand-new husband: “At least you’ll have one thing to break, asshole.”
Along with the fat boy, Angel set about making the preparations for the coming-of-age party his grandparents had insisted on throwing for him in the very room where his deceased parents had been married, the traditional Clair-de-Lune Salon on Avenida Insurgentes, where thousands and thousands of sweet-sixteen-party piñatas had done service ever since the forties. The grandparents say that aside from the sentimental value of the place, Uncle Homero will be looking for evidence of Angel’s spendthrift ways (for example: his recent flower purchases at Chapultepec, his numerous girlfriends, his dinners in posh restaurants, his cassette business, or the rumors of his shacking up, according to Aunts Capitolina and Farnesia, in boardinghouses, and, Holy Mother! even in Oaxaca churches after hours), but the whole idea of celebrating his coming-of-age in the Clair-de-Lune is such a cheap idea, so I-wish-I-could-afford-better that it will give you a humble air, Grandson. No, you can’t hold it here in the house because anything private has to be exclusive, luxurious, and criminal.
7. Angel and his new buddy the fat boy
Angel and his new buddy the fat boy (whose original name no one remembered or chose to remember) spent a nervous week preparing the July 14 party. Angel convinced him not to rejoin the snobs in the Immanuel Can’t group while at the same time admonishing him not to fall into the horrible vulgarity of those plebes the Babosos Boys. Instead, the two of them should use their imagination to create a new group that would synthesize those two extremes. Fatty said no problem, that he knew a fabulous guitarist/singer, a protégé of the eminent polymath Don Fernando Benítez, a guy named Orphan Huerta. In his urban rambles, he’d also come upon a grotesque named Hipi Toltec, who walked the broad avenues of the city, his long, greasy locks hanging down, his face thin and long-nosed, like a plumed coyote, wearing rags and a luxurious snakeskin belt that announced in French: “La serpent-à-plumes, c’est moi.”
“He thinks he’s always right in the middle of the conquest of Mexico, that he’s come back and that no one recognizes him; he’s a harmless nut, until he screws up the signifiers.”
“Well then, fat boy, we’ve got to keep his signifiers straight for him.”
“It’s worth the trouble. He’s the best drummer around. But you’ve got to convince him the drums are tom-toms. He sort of disintegrates as he plays. He drives the girls crazy.”
“What do you do, pudgy?”
He played the piano, the maracas, and the piccolo, and — he blushed — he had to include in the group a ten-year-old girl who played the flute, any problem with that?
“It’s your band,” said my dad Angel with a no-problem wave, imagining the girl in that privileged age, between three and thirteen.
“We’re all set, then,” said Fatty. “The four of us are friends and we even have a name, the Four Fuckups. All we needed was someone to get us moving, to provide moral support. Thanks, Angel.”
“You’re welcome. If you like, I could even be your business manager.”
On the afternoon of the birthday party, the fat boy arrived first at the Clair-de-Lune, so he could set things up, arrange the tables, put flowers in vases, clear a space for the musicians, and check out the marvelous metal egg put there by the constantly recharged imagination of the salon’s directors as a spectacular device for introducing the guest of honor: they raised the egg to the ceiling, which was decked out with Styrofoam stars and half-moons, and then, once all the guests were present, lowered the egg with a trumpet fanfare to announce the arrival of the new citizen, the sweet-sixteener, or the daring society debutante.
Fatty’s intention was to make sure things would go well and that my father Angel would be comfortable during the hour or so he’d have to spend in the ovoid prison where he’d wait for all the guests until the moment—11 p.m. — when the signal would be given, the egg would descend, and my dad would pop out of it in the bloom of health.
My dad’s pal was deeply involved in poking a needle through the ventilation holes to make sure nothing was blocking them (not an easy task in the half light of afternoon) when suddenly two hands, not powerful but having the advantage of surprise, pushed him into the improvised sarcophagus, locked him in, and sent him up to the ceiling. It didn’t take Fatty long to understand his situation: no one would get him out of there before eleven. But even that hope faded when through the ventilation holes he heard a pomaded voice say:
“Do not concern yourselves with this ovoid artifact, workers of the manual sort. My nephew has decided not to use such a worn-out symbol. I have convinced him to abandon this ceremony in exchange for a tasty and much to be preferred gift of a million pesos. To you, for acceding to my desires and withdrawing from this locale tonight, I grant a similar sum. Besides, as the Admiral of the Ocean Sea might have said to his mutinous crew: Why should I worry about one ovoid ball, when I need two?”
Then, when the workers left, dividing up those devalued pesos, the same voice shouted to Fatty, locked within the metal egg: “May you rot in there, you irresponsible spendthrift! A Fagoaga never loses, and what he does lose, he snatches back!”
This was followed by the kind of laugh a mad monk makes in his catacomb. Afterwards, hours and hours of silence in which Angel’s chum, feeling rather like one of Dickens’s poor heroes taking the place of his friend at the guillotine, decided to while away his time writing a novel in his head. He said to himself that the principal problem in such a project is knowing how to begin, so, since he’d thought of Dickens first, he began his mental novel with the words “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…” But he shook his head. He felt something was superfluous there and tossed those pages written in the ovoid darkness into the trash heap of his mind before taking up his imaginary pen and making a fresh start. “For a long time I used to go to bed late. Sometimes, my candle still burning, my eyes so firmly open that I had no time, not even for counting burros and cursing my insomnia…” No, no. He began again: “In a place in La Mancha which I remember perfectly, and which is located barely twelve miles to the east of Ciudad Real, in the foothills of the Valdeña Mountains and right on the bank of the Jubalón River…”
No, that wasn’t right either. He tried another beginning: “All unfortunate families resemble each other; happy families are such each in its own manner.” Bah! He thought about the stupid death of his own family or that of his buddy Angel Palomar and wondered if with that story he could at least start a novel. But he left it for another day, because the hours were going by and he was in total darkness. Happy families: “When his father brought him to see ice, Aureliano Buendía thought that one day he would be shot.” Unhappy families: “When he woke up that morning after a restless night, the insect found he’d been transformed into Franz Kafka.”