My mother asks three questions:
In which country will the child be born?
What will the child’s name be?
What language will the child speak?
But I have my own questions, selective Readers.
Will I be that child?
How can I know it unless I know three things:
What is my time? What is my space? And last but not least, what is my circumstance that they tell about as if they were heeding my prayers without listening to a noise coming from deep down, so persistent that it was a brother to silence, similar to the purring of a pack of cats, who recall in their every movement, in their every noise, their savage origin, but disguise it with their silent gliding about the house, which is itself a fearful memory of the movement of a panther about to spring: that’s how the faint noise of the trailer trucks sounded as they headed in and out of Acapulco, loaded with the products that the sterile resort needed but didn’t produce: from New York cut steaks to toilet paper, from cases of Taittinger to hairpins; paper, pens, and pickles; mustard, muscadet, and melons; bikes, bricks, and billy clubs: everything had to be brought from far away and the noise of the trucks that brought it all was the most pervasive noise of all; who would ever turn to stare at an eighteen-wheel truck, its refrigerated trailer, its smoking jaws, its vulcanized extremities, its poisonous exhaust pipes, its inevitable dashboard Virgins?
No one. Except today.
Leading the truck armada, the albino boy wearing a black leather jacket stopped, jumped out of the truck, raised his rose-colored hand, looked from behind his wraparound sunglasses toward the port from the heights of the seized communal lands of Santa Cruz and said: “We’re not going in today; today we stop right here. Something’s going on today. Let’s not get involved, okay, guys? Today we stay out of Aca.”
He looked with disgust and surprise at the discolored hand he’d raised and instantly concealed it. He desperately looked for his black glove. He saw it on the seat in the truck cab, climbed up, grabbed it, sat down on the driver’s throne, and as he put it on he glanced at the icons on his dashboard: votive lamps, the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, his swarthy little mother, and a photo of the Lady, the Mother and Doctor of all Mexicans. The union bosses ordered him to add that picture to those of the Virgin, his Mother, and the PM. First Bubble Gómez balked at the idea and was on the point of spitting out his eternal chewing gum: at least his holy little shrine was his, just his and not the property of the PRI or the union! But he’d grown fond of the photo of the Lady, word of honor, it even went well with the other three, and the proof of his fondness is that every so often, to pass the long hours he spent on the highway, the driver blew bubbles with his chewing gum until they burst; this was his maximum tribute to life: Bubble Gómez, bringing to the sterile resort indispensable provisions, transporting from one place to another the wealth produced elsewhere, totally unaware of the irony of Hispanic wealth, imported, unproductive Road to Santiago, gold of the Indies, treasures of the Hapsburgs, electric gadgets from Texas, treasures that escape like water through our fingers, only the symbols remain, only the continuity of the symbols is ours.
Now SHE IS THE SYMBOL.
I saw her — he told the huge man with the bushy mustache sitting next to him with a tiny thirteen-year-old girl dressed as a Carmelite nun sitting on his lap — like, well, one of us, a woman of the people, despite the jewels and feathers, like a real pal. Didn’t he think so, too?
The mustachioed man stepped down from the truck. “Come on, Colasa. The truck isn’t going in. We’ll go on foot.”
He slammed the door shut and said to the albino: “Don’t let her fool you, man. That bitch is the whore of Babylon. This is the Ayatollah Matamoros giving you the true facts.”
He raised two fingers in benediction, rested his other hand on the tea-colored girl, and told the driver he could quote him if he liked.
Bubble Gómez started his truck and popped a bubble right in front of the Lady’s photograph.
4. Mother and Doctor of All Mexicans
She was seated before the mirror: she looked at herself, surrounded by powerful, pore-perforating spotlights. She had no time to remember herself. She hadn’t been allowed to look at herself in a mirror for more than a year.
The squad of makeup artists and hairdressers fell on her. First they erased her face, the one she was wearing, the one she had when she’d walked into the makeup room. She did her best to see and remember that face, but they didn’t give her the time. To remember her earlier face, the real one, the original — that was certainly impossible. She had even come to doubt she ever had an original face.
She shut her eyes while they marcelled her hair and refused to accept what she’d just thought. She wrinkled her brow to cling to the shred of memory and the makeup girl said, señora, please don’t frown like that.
She decided that this morning, before they put her on exhibit again, she would remember herself; soon there would be no time. She would be taken away from the mirror. A year after her enthronement, they allowed her to look into the mirror when they made her up. But she preferred to try the impossible: to remember herself as she was before all this. And she couldn’t. The present was too strong, it washed away her memory and left her abandoned on the isle of the present moment, as if her present could be her salvation and not, as her soul warned her, her prison. She even came to think that memory was her worst enemy, the shark in a blind and opulent wave that kept her on its crest but without ever moving her, fixed forever in the terror of the past.
For that reason it was such a valiant act on her part to yawn in front of the mirror and decide, against, despite the fact that this morning, before they put her on exhibit, she would remember the girl who worked for two years in the secretarial pool of the Secretariat of Patrimony and Vehiculation of Resources (SEPARVE) on Avenida de los Insurgentes.
What was she like?
That was the problem: the last two years seemed an age to her and how was she going to recognize herself in a thin, tall shorthand-typist, well stacked, or so they said, with chestnut-mousy lank hair, pale makeup that was a bit too much for her because she had very pretty cinnamon skin, and wearing a pants suit bought in the Iron Palace with the savings from her previous job, one she indeed did not remember.
Her job at SEPARVE she certainly did remember, it’s when she was the girlfriend of Leoncito, the mortician from San Luis Potosí Street, not very far from the Secretariat. They would meet in the Vienna Café in Parque Hipódromo, because that garden was the only oasis in these neighborhoods, where the diesel buses and dump trucks raced with their exhausts wide open (in Mexico, Nader is Nadir; this is where the Nothing with Nader Society was founded, Nader Enemy of National Development), vomiting clouds of poison onto the dead trees: they would drink cappuccino and eat chocolate pastries with German names and he offered her, so she could dress up a bit, so she would not appear so simple, well, so that he could feel proud of her, some ribbons, which were always left over after the national holidays in September, tricolor ribbons, green, white, and red, with the mortician’s favorite letters printed right on the knot: RIP.
“Even when we celebrate the Day of the Cry of Dolores, people die, you know,” he told her in pedagogical tones.
Of course someone laughed at her for turning up at the office decked out that way, but so long as she pleased her boyfriend Leoncito, their sneers rolled right off her back; actually, she rather liked the fact that they took more notice of her, even if it was just to take their minds off the flood of national disasters and all the other secretaries. Before, all they did was fool around or gossip about romance, movies, and soap operas, but now, suddenly, they gossiped about foreign debt and devaluation and seizing savings, my God, and she had nothing, nothing, nothing except her coquettish ribbons, the tricolor flag and the RIP, and a few wilted flowers left over from old wakes that Leoncito gave her.