Q. What is a miracle?
A. Something that takes place very rarely.
Because, by the time the day came when he let himself be seen by me, we’d already spoken through the ears of Benito Juárez and gone on doing it for more than four months, meeting again and again without fixing a time or day, without even saying “See you here next month, baby”; of course, it happened that one would get there before the other, but we’d wait: how could I not wait when I didn’t sleep a wink the night after I met him because I was so happy? And that was without seeing him!
My father Angel, is he a poet?
He would be if he were ugly. The day he finally let me see him he turned up disguised as Quevedo, his glasses as curlicued as his mustachios and goatee, wearing a ruff, and limping. But he forgot one thing: he didn’t change his voice: “My voice was not that of the poet Quevedo, who died in September of 1645 in Villanueva de los Infantes because he couldn’t stand the idea of one more winter sitting next to the fireplace where each chill convinced him that he was only living to see himself dead. Quevedo died from the cold and the humidity that came from the river that flowed directly behind his bed, denounced to the Inquisition, a courtier who remained independent, humorous and funereal, imperialist and libertarian, medievalizing and progressive, moralist and cynic — like Love “who is in all things contrary to itself.” That’s the disguise your father turned up in the first time he let me see him.
As contradictory as our famous Uncle Homero?
Yes, but able to use language like a great poet. I think your father did that intentionally. It was his first attempt to overwhelm Uncle Homero and his world, and the way he did it was by refusing to concede Homero a monopoly on language, by using Quevedo — no less — to taunt Homero, Quevedo, who was just as opportunistic as Homero but who was saved by his poetic genius. Of course, your father’s voice was not Quevedo’s.
No, it was the voice of the world remembering Quevedo, and Quevedo remembering himself, immortalized and self-immortalizing a hundred, two hundred, a thousand years after his death. It was Ramón Gómez de la Serna calling him the great Spaniard, the most absolutely Spanish Spaniard, the immortal bestower of tone — he who gave tone to the soul of our race, it was César Vallejo calling him Quevedo, that instantaneous grandfather of all dynamiters, and it was Quevedo himself requesting a place in an academy of laughter and disorder, and calling himself the child of his works and stepfather of other people’s works, as short of sight as he was of luck, given to the devil, on loan to the world, and recommended to the flesh: with slit eyes and a slit conscience, black hair and black luck, long in the forehead and rather long-winded as well!: the portrait of the poet Quevedo was identical to that of my father Angel disguised as Quevedo, when he finally revealed himself to my mother, but my father already had an answer, a suggestion, before she could say a word:
I looked at him for the first time, and he looked at me.
“You’ve got a halo, baby,” he said, touching my cheek.
“No, I never had a halo before.”
“I think you were born that way but that you never really saw yourself.”
“Maybe no one ever saw me that way before.”
Then a guy carrying a glass tower on his back bumped into us; then two playful kids came along. I didn’t know if his disguise was in fact Quevedo’s ghost. In the ugly bustle of Mexico City, who would know about such things. And yet they exist. Even though you’ve got to be a poet to know about them. Know about them? To see them even, because, as everybody knows, that’s the beautiful thing about your father, Christopher. So of course I didn’t sleep all that night, out of pure happiness. The devil took me away from Plato. Or maybe he put me more deeply into Plato. “We say it was or it is or it shall be, when in truth all we can say about things is that they are.”
The first thing I thought when I saw Angel disguised: he’s Quevedo, if Quevedo had been handsome. Then I said to myself: Quevedo is handsome.
His name is Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, he lives with his grandparents, but now he has met me, and I am a woman who can’t sleep because she’s so happy she met him. But that night we went to the Café de Tacuba to eat pambazos and chalupas, as if we wanted to sink our roots deep in the earth because we were both flying like kites we were so excited at having seen our faces, saying to ourselves in secret: This is how he looks; this is how she looks; this is he; this is she.
We left the café and in the freshly poured cement in front of the old Chamber of Deputies on Donceles Street, next to the house where the ancient widow of General Llorente and her niece Aura lived such a long time ago, we wrote out these words with our fingers. At the time, I had no idea they were your father’s answer to the Fagoaga coat of arms, how the Fagoagas attack Goths and Moors, how Fagoagas never lose. Quevedo hovers over us. He’s our poet.
It is burning ice, frozen fire,
a wound that pains but is not felt,
a dream of good, an evil right at hand,
a brief but tiring rest
.….
an imprisoned freedom
Then we heard the shouting, the whistles, the ratatatat, and the bombs, the boots running over the oldest cobblestones in Mexico, along that street now called Virgin Knights to the infinite confusion of Uncle H., who never did for the Castilian tongue what my Angel and I did to celebrate our meeting, leaving the signature of our love which cannot go beyond imprisoned freedom, and why bother deluding ourselves: we ran far away from the noise of the police, who could have been chasing us for having written a poem in the wet cement on Donceles, or perhaps they were chasing someone else for some other reason, but if they’d found us they would have grabbed us along with the rest (the rest? who are the rest in the Mexico of ’92?), spreading their persecution without asking questions.
The supreme law was once again Shoot first, ask questions later.
How could I forget the first thing Angeles told me over our Benito Juárez telephone circuit?
“Let’s never hurt each other. We’re all here together.”
“We’re invincible, baby.”
“I couldn’t say anything more spontaneous or truthful. I could only tell you because I don’t intend to be hurt by you. The others don’t matter to me.”
We ran fleeing from a threat that was all too real and yet absent at the same time, the worst kind, the threat that can both be and not be, strike or not strike, ask questions or not: we certainly did not have to be born, she and I, in the sixties to know that in Mexico the law remains, nunc et semper, the whim of whoever happens to be holding power. We ran to Fat St. Mary, far from the solitude of Virgin Knights, where we were saved by homeless squatters, by kids asleep on top of the hot grilles covering the subway vents next to the brotherly pelts of dogs with bloody noses. So, who told you, Ixcuintli, to go around sniffing the pavement? Around here the stones burn, but you and I, Angeles, left a sonnet by Quevedo written on the hot palm of the cement, and repression, immutable, stopped at the frontier of darkness and silence.
“Tell me, what language will the child speak?