Angeclass="underline" “Then Homero puts on the parachute, gives rapid orders to the man driving the motorboat, and escapes by flying, he passes over our heads, shits on us, and disappears into the thick air of Acapulco.”
Angeles: “If that’s so, then where is Tomasito?”
Angeclass="underline" “I don’t know. Where are the Orphan, Hipi, and Egg?”
Angeles: “And the Baby. Don’t ever forget the Baby. I don’t know where she is, either.”
In this and in other sparkling repartee, my mother and father spent the first month after my conception in Uncle Homero Fagoaga’s silent, abandoned house. That adipose Icarus left them, devoting himself to an avian life and, of course, adding his own small contribution to the epidemic in Cacapulco.
Angel and Angeles did not open the doors of the fort. No one, by the by, ever knocked. Tomasito decamped, leaving a full pantry; Uncle Homero had prepared his mansion, since 1968, for a prolonged guerrilla siege.
Thus it was that my father tried to transform the besieged house (in their imagination, of course, nothing beyond that) into a phalanstery = he said to my mother that without discipline they would not survive and that his own conservative revolutionary plans would be frustrated. Punctuality and discipline: my mother made no objection when, at seven o’clock in the morning, they prolonged the postures of their pleasure by going down on all fours and mopping down the tropical terraces of the mansion that belonged to the fugitive Don Homero.
This news was only lived by me and with pleasure during this long month. I communicate them to the readers. You should know that during the first week I floated freely in the secretions of the oviduct until I set up camp permanently in my mother’s uterine cavity. At that time, I, Christopher, was a cluster of well-organized cells, with defined functions, learning the classic lesson, innocent that I was, about the unity of my person — confirmed by the diversity of my functions. Well, if each and every one of the cells that emerged from the fertilized egg has the same genetic structure and therefore each and every one preserves, latent, what my hair color will be, the color of my eyes, not all give these factors equal importance: only the eye- and hair-pigmentation cells concern themselves with a function that is, nevertheless, inscribed in all the other cells.
But after the second week of waiting for the nonexistent news about what transpired on Twelfth Night, when the Three Wise Men are supposed to come, I already thought myself the Wisest Man on Earth (a melodic gene informs me), then bang, my situation becomes so precarious that I almost, dear Reader, never got to tell this intriguing story which has no set ending (because it had no set beginning) because, between being pissed off and pissed on, I began to show myself for what I was, or rather for what purpose I was:
I was a foreign body within my mother’s body, a splinter that would normally be rejected by the wounded skin: a button, a ring, a watch, swallowed by mistake: I forgot, Reader, about national contests, Mamadoc, and Uncle Homero, and I defended myself as best I could, I scrambled up into my spaceship and I launched myself into intrauterine star wars: I ate my mother’s mucous membrane, I penetrated my mother’s circulatory system, devouring her oxygen and food like a desert rat, I excavated, Reader, a hole within my mother’s hole, until my oh so poor, fragile, and frugal existence became, through my will to survive, part of her body and life: I buried myself in my mother, Reader, I caused myself to be swallowed by my mother’s matrix against the rejecting will of my mother herself (an unconscious will, but a will nevertheless) until I felt the surface of this recondite cunt close over my head like a beneficent roof (just like the Cupola that the government, says Uncle Homero, is building over Mexico City to purify the air and then distribute it equitably among the thirty million inhabitants), until I felt that I was expanding, that I was triumphing by cannibalizing my mother, who was unaware that a tiny Saturn was inhabiting her guts, taking up all the free space of that dear curlicue, until I felt, oh benign Reader, that the maternal, generous, flowing blood was drowning me …
(My father, feeling the need for the constant company of my mother and surprised by it, he who had always lived on a sexual merry-go-round since he had escaped the nets of Capitolina and Farnesia until he abandoned the flashy Brunilda, wanders Uncle Homero’s house during the afternoon, melodically shouting Angeles, Angeles, I’m back from the beach: he enters a long gallery that faces the sea and at the end of it he sees her, on her knees, her shoulders bare, wrapped in a towel from the waist down, her head hanging before her and in front of her, on a white towel, arranged as if they were a surgeon’s tools, a whip and a crucifix, a high, pointy, penitent’s cap and a sign painted with red letters which she hangs around her neck and which hangs over her glacially unprotected breasts: I AM THE WORST WOMAN IN THE WORLD. Angel is about to shout something, but even the name “Angeles” freezes on his lips. Was it really she? The afternoon light is uncertain and treacherous. He thinks she has seen him in comparable situations hundreds of times and has never made him feel vulnerable: she, who has accompanied him in everything he’s decided to do from the time they first met, does not deserve to be interrupted by him. He stares intently so that he will never forget the scene.)
3. While these portentous events were transpiring here inside
While these portentous events were transpiring here inside, just think, your mercies benz, that outside in the cosmos my parents spent the four, five, now the six weeks that separated them from Twelfth Night waiting for news that never came.
What did people know?
What were people saying?
What did they think the Acapulco catastrophe meant?
Mom and Dad had begged the Four Fuckups: inform us by Arabian telephone (what in Englatl you call smokesignatl or popocatele), smoke signals, or anything else, of any news you have: nothing.
They asked Don Fernando Benítez: tell us where we can rendezvous with you in the mountains: nothing.
My folks spent long hours contemplating the crackling, gray, striped blackboard of the Sony television set: nothing.
Nothing about the Acapulcalypse. Nothing that would precipitate, which was my parents’ secret intention, a national crisis which would shake up the predictable, pleasant normality of Mamadoc’s contests, which during the days of our confinement followed one on the other with all joy and inexpressible collective enthusiasm:
First Week: National Prize for the Best Oral Description of the Fifty-Centavo Silver Coins Quality 0720 [no longer in existence (neither the coin nor the quality)], nicknamed El Tostón;
Second Week: National Prize for the Inhabitant of the Central Plateau Who, Overcoming His Natural and Genetic Disgust, Eats the Most Fish in a Week;
Third Week: National Prize to the Lady Who Returned the Lost Wallet of Don Wigberto Garza Toledano (Native of Monterrey), While Traveling on the Niños Heroes Subway Line;
Fourth Week: National Prize to the Citizens Who Confess in an Act of Civic Courage without Precedents to Having Been Supporters of Benito Coquet, Donato Miranda Fonseca, Esequiel Padilla, Emilio Martínez Manautou, Javier García Paniagua, Aarón Sáenz, Angel Carvajal, or Francisco Múgica in Past Internal Conflicts within the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
It was as a function of this last contest, held during the first few days of February, that my parents (and I along with them) became most upset — when we least expected it — by the announcement that, in the first few days of March, Dr. Don Homero Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca, after a month of reflexive reclusion in his beach home and careful preparation in his offices on Frank Wood Avenue, had announced his candidacy for the office of Senator from the state of Guerrero. His campaign would kick off with a mass meeting in the town of Igualistlahuaca. The citizens of Guerrero were cordially invited to view the event on television and to express their support for the PRI candidate. Dr. Fagoaga is a distinguished son of Guerrero, as irrefutable documents clearly prove, and in order not to put off for twenty years the democratic opportunity of today, and in order not to be excluded by main force, as were Benito, Donato, Emilio, and …