He saw a narrow, skeletal, and decapitated nation, its chest in the deserts of the north, its infarcted heart in the exit point of the Gulf at Tampico, its belly in Mexico City, its suppurating, venereal anus in Acapulco, its cut-off knees in Guerrero and Oaxaca … That’s what was left. That was what the federal government, its PANist president, its PRIist apparatus, its financial bourgeoisie now totally addicted to the public sector (or was it the other way around? It was all the same now), its police imposed on an army that had disbanded out of discontent and demoralization, its new symbols of legitimization, its August Founding Mothers and its National Contests, and its thousands of unreadable newspapers …
Don Fernando Benítez was on the point of vomiting out the helicopter window when he hesitated, secretly fearing the horror of symmetry: how to vomit on vomit?
“Do you believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe?” he asked the pilot.
“The what?” the pilot said (the noise, his earphones).
“I’m saying that only a miracle like the reappearance of the Virgin can save Mexico…”
“No, we’re not going to Mexico City,” shouted the pilot. “We’re going to Frontera…”
Fernando Benítez closed his eyes and squeezed the young pilot’s shoulder. “Only a miracle.”
Although for him that miracle, behind his clouded vision, consisted in being able to remember a mountain, a village, a river, and to repeat under his breath now, the noise of the motor of no importance: Nevado de Colima, Tepoztlán, Usumacinta …
Sweet Fatherland, impeccable and adamantine: the forest of silk-cotton trees, the silvered velocity of the river, the crocodile and the ocelot, the monkeys and the toucans under the vegetable vault. And a column of smoke that rose from the heart of the jungle: the forests cut down, the new highways, the drilling of the Five Sisters, the changed course of the river, the traces of the past wiped away forever by mud slides and oil spills: Yaxchilán, Planchón de las Figuras, the forest of the Lacandons … The Invisible Sweet Fatherland.
3. Take a break
Take a break, You Mercedesful Readers, and listen to the story my father is telling my mother on Epiphany as they clean off the shit that rained down from heaven, and the two of them (I think) prepare to fill me in on everything that led to this instant, my most immediate postcuntly, but which doubtless I shall only remember at the moment in which my little head begins to function within my mother but outside of her, if I can put it that way, independent of her. At what moment am I worthy of respect and consideration? At what moment am I more important than she is, with as much right to life as she has, at what point? I ask. They are not wondering about any of this; they are on the beach where they have just conceived me without being certain of the success of their labors, remembering what happened days before, then years before, adding layer upon layer to the where and the when that I got right away. They are and will always be something like the simultaneous captivity and freedom of my “person.”
“Where are we?”
“In Acapulco.”
“What’s going on?”
“Well, you and I are going for a swim so we can wash off Uncle Homero Fagoaga’s shit.”
“No, I’m not asking you about us but the circumstances outside ourselves.”
The President of the Republic will address the nation with his message for the New Year 1992, year of the five hundredth anniversary of the disco …
What are the people of Acapulco doing?
They are gathered in the cement town square (decorated with sculptural hummocks) in order to hear by way of loudspeakers the words of the President of the Repu …
But it’s impossible to understand what’s coming out of the loudspeakers, so the townspeople did not hear the core of the presidential message of Don Jesús María y José Paredes, in which he ruffled the feathers of the nation’s political deadwood by solemnly announcing that the most important obligation of a president of Mexico in the nineties was to choose his successor and then die. “There should be no former presidents; there should only be candidates,” he said cryptically, thus opening the door to every speculation: Is our national Chuchema going to die when he leaves office? Is he going to commit suicide? Will he be a candidate for something????? These were questions that kept the nation busy for the entire First Month of the Quincentennial by adding their complicated symbology to the other new items in the country after the election that followed the events of the year ’90. Item: the first victory by a candidate from the clerical, right-wing PAN (National Action Party) over the monolithic power of PRI (Revolutionary Institutional Party), deforcer of all the governments and all the Senates since 1929 and author of directed democracy, national unity, industrialization, agrarian reform, the rise of the bourgeoisie, the Mexican miracle, the opening, the reform, the bonanza, the collapse, the austerity, the moral renovation, the eternal debt, the earthquake of the Fifth Sun, the revenge of the oligarchy, and, finally, the bust of the year ’90, was in the last analysis a Pyrrhic victory (says Uncle Don Homero Fagoaga, looking down on the corrupt Bay of Acapulco) since the first PAN president found himself obliged to govern with the cadres, organizations, and structures of the PRI, with the Confederation of Workers of Mexico, with the National Peasant Confederation, with the National Confederation of the People’s Organizations, with the bureaucracy, with the technocracy, administrators, and officers of PRI. It turns out there were no others, said Colonel Nemesio Inclán (an undefinable number of years old), chief of the Mexico City police force, as the green slime dripped off his chin, while he tossed back a shot of root liquor on the deck of the floating discotheque, Divan the Terrible, anchored in front of Califurnace Beach in Aca, forever hugging the pillow on which his mommy had died. We must create new civic powers, a real civil society, the young and fiery secretary of SEPAVRE (Secretariat of Patrimony and Vehiculation of Resources), Federico Robles Chacón (thirty-nine years old), said to himself, from the balcony of the palace in the center of the Mexican capital, but first we’ve got to blow up all the terrible symbols of Mexico as if they were last year’s fireworks. Plus ça change, murmured his rival Don Ulises López (sixty-four years old), the head of SEPAFU (Secretariat of Patriotism and Foreign Undertakings), observing the full length and breadth of his Guerrero fiefdom from the heights of his ranch in the Los Breezes subdivision. Named Permanent Minister so he would never give up either his position at the apex of the political bureaucracy or his well-earned seat as captain of (private) industry, Don Ulises contemplates the emblematic phrase that all of you can see on all the bare ridges of the country and which he has ordered installed in neon lights on top of the Roqueta Lighthouse:
CITIZENS OF MEXICO: INDUSTRIALIZE YOU WON’T LIVE LONGER BUT YOU WILL LIVE BETTER
And then there is the no less lapidary, embroidered motto that adorns the headboard of his bed: CRIME DOES PAY.
The child has to know what country this is and who governs it, right, Angeles?
“Right, Angeles,” she said in a mocking imitation of my father even as she gave in to his arguments: self-evident, as the South Americans who sent us El Niño say, this wind that tumbles me, barely conceived, around in my mother’s womb.
The net result is that I’m obliged to admit, from the egg on, that I am Christopher plus my Circumstance.