The two of them cuddle in Uncle Homero’s grand, uninhabited, and silent mansion on Peachy Tongue Beach, and each one agreed with the other, never again would so many significant occasions come together at one time, New Year’s Eve parties, the beginning of the year of the Quincentennial, the Literature Congress, Uncle Homero’s vacation, the vacation of the military and diplomatic high command in Washington — a break before masterminding the destabilization of the new enemy, Colombia — and Penny López’s vacation, eh? My mother winked and my father feigned ignorance, self-confidently adding Ada and Deng’s disco. It’s better to prepare things with a will, is what I say (said my mom), than to leave them to that Mexican, weeeelll, let’s see how it falls and if it does happen, good thing (she said, interpreting my father’s will). She decided to contradict him only in order to maintain a modicum of independence within her willing acceptance of her tight union with my father. Which is why she said:
“I want to enjoy the supreme availability. I don’t want to earn money, organize a trip, or even plan what we do in a single day. I’ll bet you someone will do it for me.”
My father laughed and asked himself if everything that had taken place in Aca a month ago had been merely gratuitous. We can always imagine what could have happened if everything had gone well, but we always had to be sure that chance would get an oar in now and again; that’s why she would like to understand better what she still doesn’t know and not to think that it was only a joke, but by the same token that it was not just an act of perfect wilclass="underline" not even a getting even, she says to him, not even an act of meting out justice, which someday may separate you from me, and deprive us of our love, my love.
Angeclass="underline" “Why? I really wish jokes or gratuitous acts could be a way to get justice, why not, Angeles?”
Angeles: “Because the twentieth century is soon going to die on us, and I refuse, whatever the justifications, to equate justice with death, what about you?”
Angeclass="underline" “All I know is that what we had to do here is either all done or should be all done.” My father spoke in muffled tones: he’d put his head between my mother’s legs, as if he were looking for me.
Angeles: “As Tomasito would say, till no see, no berieve.”
Angeclass="underline" “Unfortunately, everybody in these parts thinks just the opposite. They say that if you want to believe you’re better off not seeing.” My father raises his head. “Why didn’t the Filipino carry out the final part of the plan?”
Angeles: “I have no idea. What was supposed to happen?”
Angeclass="underline" “At 15:49, Hipi and the Orphan enter Uncle Homero’s house.”
Angeles: “You mean here, where we are right now the day after Candlemas, February 3, 1992.”
Angeclass="underline" “It was a Tuesday. Tomasito opens the gate for them, knowing that at that time Uncle Homero is always in his sauna next to the pool.”
Angeles: “Then the guys from the band and Tomasito burst in on him, so that Uncle Homero realizes he’s been betrayed.”
Angeclass="underline" “Homero shouts, ‘You Judas, I never should have confided my security to a scion of that damned colony named after my King Don Felipe, as the universal Argentine genius Don Manuel Mujica Lainez might have said!’”
Angeles: “And perhaps he remembered what Uncle Fernando said to him when Homero offered him a lot here twenty-four years ago: ‘And how do I defend it from guerrillas?’”
Angeclass="underline" “Perhaps he did. Why not? But perhaps Tomasito had an attack of conscience.”
Angeles: “What do you mean? What are you getting at?”
Angeclass="underline" “What I mean, Angelucha, is that after all, Tomasito owes his life to Uncle Homero.”
Angeles: “You knew that and you went ahead anyway?”
Angeclass="underline" “How can there be risk if nothing’s left to chance? Uncle Homero, to prove his humanitarian, philanthropic, and liberal credentials, took in Tomasito when he was a boy, when UNICEF put him up for adoption after Marcos’s last massacre in Manila. Would you like to tell the rest? Please do.”
Angeles: “It was when Ferdinand and Imelda were desperately trying to wipe out the opposition. They couldn’t sleep because they were making up crueler and crueler repressions. Now you pick it up, silver tray. Up and at ’em, oh genius!”
Angeclass="underline" “Then Lady Imelda goes bananas and announces to Ferdinand: ‘Last night I dreamed that fifteen years ago a boy was born who was going to plocraim himself King of the Luzons: you were Herod and I was Herodias and we went out to kill all the boys born yesterday fifteen years ago to rid ourselves of these redeemers, using the slogan “Better Deads Than Reds.”’ The Mindanao death squads went out to hit all fifteen-year-olds.”
Angeles: “And Tomasito was saved from that death thanks to Uncle Homero, who just happened to be in Manila … Are you kidding?”
Angeclass="underline" “He just happened to be in Manila because he was funneling a few hundred million Mexican pesos through the Philippine stock market. The money he’d kept from the tax man he’d picked up from the sale of a subsidiary of the International Baby Foods Company that was supposed to bring foreign investment to Mexico and did just the opposite — but it still had to have a Mexican as the majority shareholder. That patriot just happened to be our trusty uncle, who, to be sure, is hard to imagine as a straw man, but he turned up one day with a check from the Mexican branch of INBAFOO, payable to the Philippine branch. The price paid for the Mexican subsidiary was minuscule, but no one in Mexico or the Philippines ever saw a centavo, not the public treasury, not the consumers, not even the brats who eat that shit, but, you guessed it, the Board of Directors and Preferred Stockholders of INBAFOO in the Republic of the Sun Belt, in the capital of the said republic, Dallas, did indeed see some centavos. How’m I doin’, babe?”
Angeles: “Super, Angel. Your uncle’s your major theme.”
Angeclass="underline" “And that’s how Homero appropriated all that humanitarian publicity and ducked all the attacks on him for being a go-between, but the fact is that Tomasito hates him, too, but he must also love him, because if, on the one hand, Homero did save him from the Herodian fury of the Marcoses, on the other he knows that the kids who didn’t die in the massacre did die of gastric hemorrhages after eating the little bottles of slime distributed in the Philippines by the Mexican branch of the conglomerate.”
Angeles: “So when he heard Hipi and the Orphan knocking on the gate outside Homero’s house, Tomasito began to have doubts.”
Angeclass="underline" “Just imagine that his fate could have been this one: having his head cut off by a machete in the pay of Imelda.”
Angeles: “And, instead of that, here he is living like a captive prince in a golden tropical cage, so how could his heart not start beating double-time and he not begin to have his doubts?”
Angeclass="underline" “But it may be that Tomasito, paralyzed by doubts, mulling over his own salvation compared to the death of his little brothers, consumers of the baby food made by Homero, just went back to his room to let things run their own course, just as you say: the supreme availability, someone else will do it for him…”
Angeles: “Or maybe Tomasito, letting his gratitude get the better of his doubts, instead of admitting the Four Fuckups, cuts them off and then the Orphan Huerta gets mad and shoots Tomasito…”
Angeclass="underline" “I’m telling you we’ve got to calm that boy down. Sometimes he goes too far.”
Angeles: “Aroused by the noise, Homero leaves the sauna naked, puts on his guayabera just when the Orphan was overcoming the resistance of the doubtful Tomasito, overcome this time by an aberrant fidelity…”