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Having said that, Uncle Homero finally stuck his spoon into the pineapple sorbet, as if it were a mound of frozen gold: even his desserts were Klondikes over which he assumed he could exercise a patrimonial right of conquest: he sucked and slavered noisily, belching, until he actually seemed likable, after all, doesn’t all the world love a fat man?

Nevertheless, the noises Don Homero made drowned out the lovable innocence of the archetypal glutton because they sounded like erotic provocations, with all kinds of uncontrollable squints and lip-licking directed either toward my mother Angeles or toward the sullen boy with tangled hair and golden legs, legs now adored by Uncle Homerosexual. But damn it all to hell, where the devil had he seen that boy before? How beautiful his niece was! Angeles, bah! There was nothing angelic about her, and she only went by that name because Angel decided they would both have the same name, because Angel and Angeles sound good together, but our fat uncle knew something better: at night he’d crept to the window of the bungalow where the two slept and he heard them screwing, so, as far as being angelic was concerned, well, for him she was a devil and that was that.

Diabolical Angeles, he whimpered hopelessly, seriously attacking the ice cream, and how deliciously the velvety sorbet stood in for other pleasures, other tongues!

Only in the instant in which he finished the ice, eating mechanically but with his eyes fixed on his dreams, did Don Homero look down. It was then he realized that the dessert was resting on an artifact which was not a pineapple hollowed out to receive the cold joy of his palate, nor was it a crystal vessel cut with elegant, starry facets in imitation of a pineapple made of ice; no, it wasn’t even a vulgar tub of the kind used for the washing of plates (oh, how Don Homero wished he could be excused from the disaster he felt to be so imminent by exercising his oratorical skills, by using language, divine language, his reason for being). No, it was what now shone metallically and tasted acridly, and sagged soddenly: he had eaten pineapple sorbet ladled into the brimless, bottle-cap-encrusted hat of, of, of this waiter! Of that bastard boy who befouled his life night and day! The Orphan Huerta emerged triumphantly from the drawer of forgotten things where Uncle H. stored every disagreeable event that had occurred during his exceptional life, oranges, limes, and lemons, or was it apples, figs, and pears? Don H. stood up trembling with rage, but the waiter with porcupine hair had already scampered out of range, while Tomasito reproached him, “Say ‘yes, master,’” and Orphan Huerta shouted from a safe distance ‘Yes, Mother, yes, Mother,’ and lawyer Fagoaga clutched his hands to his throat, shouting for help, poisoned, his windpipe blocked, old Coca-Culo caps, rusty metal Orange Crotch, Cerveza XX — like my potential genes — rows of lances like those I have on my beach to defend me from intruders, especially mounted cavalry, especially surly servants, nouveaus who think they have the right to be there, Indians in revolt, HOLY JESUS, oh, my poor tongue pierced by bottle caps, my reason for being and the being of my reason: my tongue cut to ribbons! my palate cleft by base metals which will cause me to speak in a high-pitched nasal twang like that odious runt, oh my good taste, my savoir faire, ruined forever!

Tomasito fanned his master with his usual tenacious patience; Deng Chopin, immutable, appeared through a hatch to see what was going on; Uncle Homero slipped off the curule seat to the deck and the owner Ada Ching approached to calm, to thank him — it was an honor for the floating discotheque Divan the Terrible to receive the President of the Academy of the Language as well as Angel and Angeles, whom she counted among her most favored guests. This was no time for anger, because in a few minutes it would be time to celebrate the New Year of 1992, perhaps the year chosen for the renewal of alliances, the Third Rome and the Middle Kingdom, culture wresting control from ideology, ha! only culture would survive the ups and downs of politics, and culture was dancing, carnival, Saturnalia, it was the moment to celebrate. Uncle Homero only wanted to throw himself on the Orphan Huerta, to embrace him, to kiss him, to kill him, to fuck him, to beat him, Orphan Huerta once again on the bandstand with Egg and Hipi Toltec. Suddenly, a drunken D. C. Buckley but sat down on Uncle Homero’s lap, Buckley arguing in a high-toned Massachusetts accent, Let us hang on foah deah lahf to the planks left aftah the sinking of the Anglo-Saxon Pequod, which has dragged us with its bloody hahpoons into a hunt foah all the illusions of the twentieth century: it is impossible to save ouahselves in this rush to disastah, impossible to be modahn without participating in Annglo-Sexon populah cultcha. Uncle Homero, despite the weight of the ultratall gringo, groped for a napkin wide enough for his belly and resigned himself in despair to using the edge of the tablecloth: thrust now between the African white hunter’s stained blue tunic and his smoked Hamingwegg stomach.

“Be ernest about that,” said D. C. Buckley … or about a cetacean implacably hunted down by the furious Ahab …

“Oh, you movie dick,” said Buckley, tickling Don Homero’s sleeping little dicky bird, whose proclivities lay in another direction …

“W. C. Fields forever,” sand the rockaztec band of the Four Fuckups.

“Bathroom Campos!” giggled the drunken Buckley, inebriated with English and Spanish calambours, punnish the spinning spunning Spanish language! while Don Homero sighed in resignation, telling his niece and nephew that he in no way opposed the myriad puns they might create because he hoped that the Castilian language would digest them all and emerge triumphant from this test, that it would reach the beach of the twenty-first century alive, overcoming, digesting, excreting the Anglo-Saxon universe, and he remained there staring, embracing the unknown D. C. Buckley, staring at the bikinis of the musical waiters and the white buttocks of Ada Ching.

They would never remember in which moment the sad year 1991 ended and slipped away unnoticed, undesired like a thief in the night as Don Homero would say, the certainly fateful 1992 of our five Christophercolonized centuries:

My mother Angeles looked uneasily at my father Angel looking at the cinnamon-colored little girl who was dancing between Decio and Marianito made into brothers in their desire for classist intermingling and racist risk and partying with the people, the Acapulco Slumming Party, desperately seeking ménage à trois with innocent and telluric Mexican girly bathed in tea,

who only had eyes, nevertheless, for my dad,

who looked with a desire my mother wished to deflect (which she could not) to the sweet-sixteen dancer Penny López,

who looked at no one: she was dancing.

4. And that first dawn of the New Year

And that first dawn of the New Year, which arrived amid a premonitory silence, while the diminutive Sino-Pole delicately licked the foyer of her vagina while with tiny, equally delicate nibbles he removed the odd pubic hair and then dug in like a playful kitten to sniff her clitoris, Ada Ching said yes, Shorty, time for fucky-fucky, who knows, it could happen any time, the world may change forever, and we’ll be celebrating Russian Easter and Chinese New Year again. I don’t want to miss my chance if it comes around, my naughty little chinky, yes, my little golden nugget, yes my little yellow pearil, I’ve been waiting for it for twenty-three years, just imagine, when I was a girl of twenty-three and we got the terrible news that Moscow and Beijing had broken off relations, that’s right, make love to your Ada, your Sada, Bada, attaboy, that was a long time ago, I’ll make myself a beauty for the soirees to come, but now you see: no one even remembered to celebrate the New Year, it came and no one noticed, but come on now, make me remember my tongue with your tongue, goose tongue, your Ada of Provence the sea the sun, your final flower of the Albigensian tree, your heretical survivor of the criminal crusades of Gaston de Foix Gras, lick my culo you dirty little coolie, stick your tongue up my anus, you polack peking piggy, you and I we sure are going to celebrate the Year Four Twenties and Twelve, so that I am cleansed of all mortal desires, so that I am empty of all lust and so that there remains nothing of my body drained by your yellow tongue except my spirit, my words, my purified ideology, and a body white at last, clean at last, washed spotless, my dengchowprick, all my garbage swept away by the broom of your tongue, my chinaboy, and I finally free of the sin of the evil God who gave me guts and tubes and blood and excrement and the lewd buttocks that I show up onstage every night to that mob des cons, but without ever renouncing my political principles, all that in order thanks to you and your immense sex — as big as you are small, my putto — to reach the good God of justice, name of a name of a Lenin, name of a name of a Chou, Albigensian of a Marx who are waiting for me at the end of the long tunnel of my impatient, bored flesh, century after blasted century that finally join together in the telescope of pleasure, in the telescunt of history, yesterday’s millennia and today’s millionaires, apocalypse in the tenth century and pocky lips in the twentieth, you and I the last of the Albigensians, long-fingered dwarf, yes, try to screw me so you can be pure and we two can reconstruct the last chance for the proletariat, who’ve been dragging themselves from millennium to millennium, through the mud of history, that’s the way, just with your hands and tongue, I’m coming, I’m coming …