E PERICOLOSO SPORGERSI
NICHT HINAUSLEHNEN
INTERDIT DE PENCHER EN DEHORS
In the words of Eugenio d’Ors, Against the rules to pinch the whores, he inexplicably chanted, looking out the window at the full length of the coffee-colored stain on the bay, like the juncture of the Amazon and the Atlantic Ocean, he said to the Brazilian, but Decio Tudela was no longer moving, Decio Tudela was dead, suffocated, and Marianito cried out in horror and pleasure when he touched him, still warm, and decided to die hedonistically, that at least, seeing the dead and naked body of Decio in the bed. Marianito gently spread his legs and said he was going to give meaning to his life with an act of mortal pleasure, a gratuitous, erotic culmination, he left his whole vain and frivolous life behind him in that instant: he was going to affirm sex even in death, above and beyond death: there would be witnesses, yes sir, because they would be found this way, coupled like dogs, like this, in a perpetual ecstasy, oh, a huge dark-colored tub was invading the purity of the sea, a coffee-colored flow, a vomit of all the garbage from the hotels and restaurants in the half June moon between López Matthews Avenue and Witch Point. Jogging along the public beach of Little Sunday, where he would surely find the supreme justification for Lawrence & Lowry’s ultra-Mexican formulas, D. C. Buckley could not appreciate things in exactly the same way Marianito had in his death throes, but he was the first to see and suffer the worst.
The steady trot, controlled, not rapid but worse than rapid because it was so controlled, like an infernal drum, distant at first. D.C. stopped jogging, cocked his ruddy ear: the noise came down from the hills, crossed the street that ran along the coast, now it had become a trot over sand, horrid, eerie. Would D. C. Buckley survive thanks to his Yankee communion with savage nature, the landscape of evil, according to the precepts of Larry & Lowry? The long, blond, chromomacaronic Wasp asked himself this in a fleeting presentiment while thinking about the group of North American government functionaries and military men vacationing in the Last Breezes Hotel. As they were taking their preprandial dip in the saltwater pool of the Shell Beach Club, they discussed the current dearth of bad guys in the world: without reliable adversaries, we can’t know who we are. What would become of us without a Bad Guy — Nazi, Commie, Chinese, Korean, Bulgarian, Cuban, Vietnamese, Nicaraguan. The United States can’t survive without enemies, even though we have the source of all eviclass="underline" Russia, the Evil Empire. At the same time they played pat-a-cake with their little feet, noting that between pats there was not only a ludic will and a strange love but also little patties of shit. Then, above their heads, above the seawall, above the beach umbrellas, indifferent to everything that held it back, as ferocious as a Campuchean defoliation, as inexorable as a Chilean putsch, the grand wave of poop sent with unparalleled energy by the reversed currents of El Niño from the coasts of Chile and Peru buried Professor Vasilis Vóngoles, a Romanian expert in Mexican affairs in the State Department, General Phil O’Goreman, commander in chief of Panama Canal defenses, Ambassador Lon Biancoforte, North American representative in the neighboring republic of Costaguana, and Mrs. Tootsie Churchdean, North American Ambassador to the Ministry of Colonies in Washington. The wave surprised all of them, cocoloco in hand, gardenia-scented straws in their mouths: it buried them in the Suzukis, the Hondas, the Honduras, the Guatemalas, and the Nicaraguas they had forged: the tide swept away Professor Vóngoles’s glasses and D. C. Buckley saw them from afar, before anyone else, in that morning’s repentant fog, the derelict, diplomatic specks in the sea, while on the beach the disciplined trot, the dark eyes, the wet muzzles, the copper-colored skin: all the dogs of Acapulco fell silent: they were going to hear their masters, their atavistic fathers: D. C. Buckley thought quickly: in California he’d been told never look a coyote straight in the eye, they hypnotize you, feign indifference, walk slowly, go into the water, perhaps they won’t dare follow you.
He never had a chance: the coyotes went right for him, all intent on attacking a single part of his body, carefully protected but also exhibited in its sleeping eloquence, exhibited to the admiration of the beaches and the savage dark girls on the beaches: the pack of coyotes assaulted Buckley’s sex behind the curtain of a blue Speedo bathing suit, they devoured the carefully folded Kleenex Buckley used to augment his admirable priapic dimensions, they dined on the nervous, shrunken flesh, they tore it off in one piece, and Buckley fell flat on his face in the sea at Little Sunday Beach, thinking that a few days before he had escaped Colasa Sánchez’s vagina dentata and that her tight, skinny little ass had been a whirlwind of foam and blood.
9. The coyotes run along all the beaches
The coyotes run along all the beaches, from Little Sunday to Tamarind, to Califurnace, to El Ledge, to La Countess, but they do not always attack. Nor do they even stop every time, as if they know where they are going. They all follow the oldest, and he follows the ragged boy who nurtured and trained them so tenderly during all those months. Like a banderilla of tattered skin planted in the center of a red coconut grove at the heights of the communal lands of Holy Cross, the boy, his eyes closed, invokes the most secret genealogies, the most perverse atavism: the children of wolves, river of wolves, Guadalupe — where the wolves ford the river — Matamoros Moreno mutters silently, as if he were pushing an entire artillery train, followed by the blossoming Colasa Sánchez, seeking out his enemy: my father, Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, seen in the disco the previous night by Colasa. But the coyotes are faster than Matamoros, faster than the cars, they turn away from the beach and head for the street in order to avoid the gigantic tidal wave that bites the very nails of the beach to the quick, and the bald fat kid at the municipal pumping station gives the order to all the allies of the Four Fuckups, those who had been run off the hills, their relatives and friends: Pump the sewage back to the bathrooms, give it back to the places from whence it came, the toilet bowls and hotel kitchens, block up the pipes, let shit return to shit.
Faster than the cars, the coyotes: panic seized those in traffic-bound cars when they understood that they were cut off, surrounded by ferocious beasts, windows closed tightly, horns silent out of fear, like the dogs that silently watched the return of their savage ancestors. The pack poured in through the service entrance of El Grizzly Hotel in the same way that the papayas injected with prussic acid, the pineapples spiked with copper sulphate, and the Mirinda lemonade blended with santonin had poured in from delivery trucks earlier that same morning. The Mayor of Acapulco Town Council, Don Noel Guiridí, pauses in the heat to have a lemonade, reaches his arm through the window of his navy-blue Ford LTD, and receives the opened bottle without even looking at the Mirinda. Delighted, he drinks, checking over the keynote address he is about to give at the Literary Symposium. Our Don Noel is not only the standard-bearer of the PRI’s revolutionary revindication in the port of Acapulco, but also a qualified literary critic, thus demonstrating that belles lettres are not estranged from the political fray, a man who is transported in a luxurious limousine wearing (the reason why he is so fatally thirsty!) a scarf, earmuffs, and a camel-hair overcoat, because of his mania for trying to convince people that Acapulco is not in the tropics but is actually a spa with a wintry climate where the human mind comes alive and ready for literary creation: the figure he cuts, even more than his speech, constitutes an attempt to add an unpublished chapter to the history of Ice at the Equator (such was the monomania of the monograph he was prepared to read that morning: the Venezuelan novelist, and quondam president, Rómulo Gallegos sent an Indian downriver along the Orinoco to Ciudad Bolívar to eat ice cream for the first time in his life; Gabriel García Márquez took a child to experience ice in Macondo; Sergio Ramírez Mercado causes it to snow in a fictional Managua just so the pro-Somoza ladies could show off their fur coats; and cotton snowflakes fall on the spectators during the production number “Flying Down to Vigo” in Carlos Diéguez’s film Bye-Bye Brazil), but instead of all that, he begins to shout ay, I’m seeing everything green; he loses control and urinates a purple liquid; he becomes delirious, trembling, he falls unconscious, then dies. His horrified chauffeur rapidly raises the car’s pitch-black windows. Then the coyotes attack the armored car and for once are frustrated.