My father had no real reason to be there, and Uncle Homero smelled a rat: he did, however, receive them. Just looking at them, he could see they were harmless. But just looking at my mother was all he had to do to suffer a shock: Don Homero Fagoaga’s sexual fantasies were infinite, and my mother put him into such a state of erotic excitement that he became a stuttering teenager:
“Well … indeed … so we have a little couple here, huh? I mean, are you thinking of getting married…? Excuse me, I didn’t mean to imply … Well!”
Angeles realized that the success of the expedition depended on her, so she coquettishly lowered her eyes and touched the hand of the invincible Don Homero.
“Ah,” groaned Don Homero, wagging his sausage-like finger, “aaaah, my innocent niece, I may call you niece, may I not? thank you: out of pure honesty, sacred temple, as the bard from Córdoba, Don Luis de Góngora y Argote, wrote on an amorous occasion…”
He carefully looked Angeles over, adding pure alabaster, small door of precious coral …
“Uncle,” my mother interrupted him sweetly but decisively, “in the first place, don’t change the subject on me: may we come to your house in Acapulco? In the second place, don’t let that lemonade go to your head, and in the third, if you go on in that way, comparing my body to hard alabaster and my cunt to a small coral door, my husband here, your nephew, is liable to take matters into his own hands. Isn’t that right, Angel?”
“Angeles! Good gracious! You’ve mistaken me, niece! That Gongoristic metaphor refers to your mouth, not to your, your…”
Don Homero dropped the spoon he used to stir his martinis: “Tomasito, fan me.”
“Yes, master.”
“My wife is right. Don’t get out of line, Uncle Homero.”
“How dreadful! For God’s sake, I hope you accept my invitation to spend New Year’s with me in Acapulco. You did receive my invitation, didn’t you? No? How awful the mails are these days, as our invincible sovereign Philip II said when he received the news about the Armada! The rest of Europe was right to say: ‘I hope my death comes by way of Spain so it gets to me late!’”
That’s why all of them except for Angeles and the Baby Ba are there stretched out on the Countess Beach listening to three chicks chatter relentlessly about if it wasn’t a bit much that each one went with two hunks to the Divan last night or if the vibes were good but right then they started in, ya know: Ya can take the boy outta Brooklyn but ya can’t take Brooklyn outta the boy; they got all hot and bothered and tried to start necking. But the girls said enough was too much now that they’d showed what grotty chauvinist pigs they really were. Situations like that were sticky, ’cause when these nouveaus get going they don’t ever wanna stop, and they chanted:
I don’t want to live forever
But I’m afraid to die
and when they saw my dad, Egg, the Orphan, and Hipi stretched out there sunning themselves in their bulging bikinis, the three chicks said, oh sorry about that, we’re not letting you rest with all our gossiping, and my father the provocateur said no, I didn’t hear you, I was thinking, and they, hmm, he didn’t even hear us, we seem so uninteresting to these nouveaus, and Egg, just to be nice, said yes, yes we did hear you, how could we not, everything you said was instructive, while the girls were putting on sun cream, ah, so these nosy nouveaus are real pests, always sticking in their noses where they shouldn’t, to which the boys: a one and a two and a three, they began to throw sand at the bonbons, who at first laughed, then enough already, then they coughed, then they screamed; finally they were buried in the sand, and Hipi danced the deer dance over them to flatten them out and make sure they were good and dead and in complete privacy, and the most curious thing is that no one turned around to look at the scene, much less to interrupt them. A lesson that did not escape the attention of Pappy & Company.
Out of all these elements, as usually happens in artistic affairs, was born the great hit broadcast by the Four Fuckups for the New Year’s parties: and with what pleasure do I transcribe them for you, from their Dickensian inspiration (a tail of two cities; hysteria of two cities; the color of Aca and Defé) up until the time they released it officially in the discotheque run by Ada Ching and her lover Deng Chopin: Here it is, all together now:
It was the worst of times
It was the worst of times
The year was the jeer
The day was the die
The hour was the whore
The month was the mouse
The week was the weak
It doesn’t get better than this!
and my folks make love in the bridal suite Uncle Homero reserved for them, and she feels opulent, sensual, rich, new things, delicious things, she’s afraid to feel things she’s never felt before, she feels more modern than ever when luxury surrounds her and she doesn’t understand why she’s never been in a place like this, air-conditioned, piped-in music, unknown smells that expel the usual olfactory experiences (markets? churches? damp patios? leafy jungles? carved stones? quince, mango, laurel and silk-cotton trees?: now what is not there begins to come back to her): she is afraid to remember everything that happened before, now that she’s in something that could never happen there, in a there she says to my father after having an orgasm, where I see myself moving, light, suddenly I saw myself a minute ago, moving and light in the past. What does that mean?
Neither one could answer. For the first time, she was terrified of her openness, her willingness to be everything that fell upon her and stuck to her in her newness or innocence. She’d never seen towels marked His and Hers, or sheets with Mickey and Minnie Mouse, or personal hair dryers, or peach-flavored vaginal ointments. She missed her history, and said to my father:
“Of what interest could these sordid provincial tales be to you: bastard children, runaway father, new lover for mother, exile with relatives who live far away? Of what possible interest could my past be?”
10. Let’s see now
Let’s see now: six years after Uncle Homero’s green Jell-O bath, the Four Fuckups are playing rockaztec in the floating disco moored off Califurnace Beach down old Acapulkey way, and my parents take advantage of the circuntstance (as you might say) to ask Uncle Homero to bury the hatchet and invite them to spend New Year’s of 1991–92 in his castellated house on Peachy Tongue Beach, where their fat relative has constructed a kind of Foreign Legion fort right out of Beau Geste to protect himself from whatever might happen. He gave his niece and nephew the complete guided tour this end-of-December morning, marching them past towers and battlements that shot up out of the sand, blockhouses and casemates, parapets and escarpments, and even fearsome concertina rolls of razor wire, ranks of poised, pointy lances — excellent defense against cavalry charges!
In the center of his fortress, Uncle Homero built a pool in the shape of a tongue, with a secret tunnel disguised as a drain which would allow him to escape in a minisub (How would he fit? Like a pig in a sausage, said my father; like a rabbit in a pâté, like Christ in the host, host! said my mother) into the sea, shot out like a cork, in case of emergency.
“I’m making you a gift of some beach property,” Uncle Homero said one day in a tone of magnificent condescension to Uncle Fernando, some twenty or so years earlier, after the Tlateloco riots. He compounded this felonious friendliness by clapping Uncle Fernando, a small, high-strung, but sturdy little gent, on the back. “You can build a house there for your declining years.” To which Don Fernando said no thanks, how would I ever defend it against the guerrilleros who’ll be coming along in twenty years?