My M’s Muddy Murdered Miraculous Monks they sing, they answer, they shout, the boys and girls mixed, mestizos, mixed, all together não
Mixing bowl Mesalina Monk Mortification Mortar Mamá, Máaaaamá, Mammary, Mamado …
Penny’s bodyguards have their hands on their holsters, an instant of terror flew over one and all like a foamy angel soaring over the bobbing heads in the disco Divan the Terrible, Penny herself did not seem to understand what was happening as she danced the rockaztec called MEXICAN M’S with Decio
the pop style of the nineties, Penny López choruses the new series Mesa, Maraca, Martyrdom, Mixtec, Matamoros Matamoros. When he heard that name shouted and sung by the band and the dancers, my father Angel stopped, thought something (what it was, Reader, I don’t know; I’m not omniscient, all I know is what my genes have set aside for me since the days of Mock the Summa), I say that he got an idea, this was the night of the loose ends, the unfinished suggestions, the unkept promises: it was his fault, his and only his, he wanted to be free and available for the great event set for Epiphany, and everything unrelated to that day made no impression on him, his mind was an opaque veil For whom the veils soil except for What’s Going to Happen on Epiphany:
He looked at Penny: the audience was urging Penny to take off her shoes; she was the only woman who hadn’t done it, and now she did, no hands, lifting her leg, her thigh, showing her thigh under her sequined skirt, along with a downy crease, a nosegay of quince, a tiny coin made of moist copper. My father looked at her but she took no notice of him. The tea-dipped girl did look at my father, but he took no notice of her. My mother Angeles looked at my father; he wanted to take notice of her but he thought something, an idea occurred to him, Matamoros, a seed of concern, hostility, enervation. He felt the arm and the iron hand seize his own.
He looked down. Deng, impassively sad, observed him. My handsome father, my tall father who could not be a poet because he was too handsome (says my mother, forgetting Lord B, the young Percy B. S. and John K., the divine Alfred de M. and old Ezra P.), had the delicacy to bend down while Deng Chopin stood on tiptoe. All he said to my father was this, but this was all my father heard under the waves of music and happy shouting:
“Have you ever been in Pacífica?”
The tide of people separated my father from the fine, long, extended hands of Deng Chopin.
It’s my mother who only has eyes for the dialectic of eyes. She looks at my father Angel and says to herself (she says to my genes) that for him there must be three kinds of woman. First, the ones like Penny who look elsewhere and don’t take any notice of you. Second, the ones like my mother who do take notice of you and look at you. And third, the women like this dark little girl dressed as a Discalced Carmelite who look at you but who actually look through you at someone behind you: the demon, the angel. She was not jealous of Penny. She was not sad. The dark little tea-dipped girl scared her. Her little breasts were bouncing under her scapularies.
2. I declare that my mother’s black eyes are a beach
I declare that my mother’s black eyes are a beach that changes only so that it will look even more like itself.
I declare that my father’s nearsighted yellow-green eyes are a sea devoid of progress or being: my father changes constantly but always remains the same.
I declare that my father and mother meet in the dance, but that they know this is just one more ceremony for postponing death.
I declare that she, silent and astonished, suddenly feels light, elsewhere, running through a garden of modest statues and walkways of smoke, my mother laughing, delicately treading on the grass with her silk slippers, my mother discreetly raising her crinoline, my mother feeling the thumping of her skirt hoop on her pubis and the starched brushing of her ruff under her chin. My mother is blind: a green handkerchief covers her eyes, and she laughs, not knowing if she is being chased or if she is chasing someone: ballads, gallantries, old-fashioned games.
I declare that she does not know how she came to be in this garden or why she glides with such agility through the past, she who remembers no past at alclass="underline" my mother appears and disappears among the cypresses, distanced from the boomboomboom of her heart in the Acapulco night and the rockaztec and the barrockanroll but the handsome gentlemen with forbidden faces listen to her more closely than she listens to them: they hear the rustle of her green taffeta, the game of the blind doubles is brought to conclusion awkwardly, rapidly, head over heels: forehead to forehead, he and she, without seeing each other: both blindfolded, they embrace, they kiss under a sky of green flashes in an old-fashioned garden of smoke and symmetry:
I declare that he tears off her blindfold, and she looks at him and screams: dressed completely in black, my father with his ruff and his white cuffs brings the round, the game, to a successful conclusion with the capture, but she looks into my father’s eyes, and in them she sees a man she knows and doesn’t know, she knows him in the past and doesn’t know him in the present, a man simultaneously young and old, innocent and corrupt, barely a novice in matters of love and at the brink of satiety, one foot in the bedroom and the other in the cemetery. A caddish gentleman, he embraces her, tears off her blindfold (it’s the San Silvestre dance at a tropical port; it’s the San Silvestre in a Fragonard landscape; it’s the San Silvestre dance in an Andalusian patio), and she, horrified, stares at a man with forbidden eyes, covered by another blindfold: it doesn’t matter, by the mere mute movement of his lips she knows what he is saying: I love myself through you, and I could only love you if in touching you I would touch all the women in the world: Can you offer me that? Can you swear to me that you are all the women I desire? Can you convince me you are Eve restored for me? Can you swear to me that your love will send me where I want to go: to hell?
I declare that she tears off his blindfold, and he screams in horror: she’s been branded on the forehead with a hot iron. It’s possible to read her forehead. Her forehead says: SLAVE OF GOD.
I declare that she has not existed in the past. But she has been in the game.
I declare that he takes her by her perfumed nape, bares her shoulders, picks her up by the hips so the crinoline opens like a rustling bud. He takes her by the feet, he raises her by the feet, he shows her to all those dancing, holding her up like a candy statue.
I declare she is dressed in green and he in black.
I declare they are on a barge floating on the Thames and on a floating discotheque in Acapulco. The fireworks go off.
I declare that she is annihilated by this violent manifestation of a past she does not remember.
I declare that he is frightened because he sees the burning seal on my mother’s forehead.
I declare that he asks her, Did you see, Angeles? and each time he does it he swears he sees my mother’s eyes change: they change color or place or perhaps they only change intention, which is like changing color or place: each time he embraces her, an icy, blue, clear, foamy splinter of ice passes through my mother’s eyes.
I declare that my father takes my mother’s hand in order to resist the temptation to kiss her perfumed nape, the acidity of her underarms, the oven of her tiny feet.