Angel and Angeles exclaimed in one voice: “But Uncle H. is strictly from Mexico, D.F. He’s never set foot in Guerrero, what did Guerrero do to the boys in the capital to deserve this punishment, etc., as we’ve been saying for decades: Angel and Angeles got over their spontaneous indignation and awaited the next newscast with bated breath.
Angel closed his eyes and said to my mother that they must be totally befuddled by the success of the operation, the failure of the operation, by all of the above = he shook her by the shoulders in order to shake himself.
“It’s all make-believe. We forget that from time to time. I get carried away.”
“Let go of me, Angel.”
“The idea of passing from chaos to despair with no transition scares the hell out of me.”
“Being a conservative anarchist is a little stupid, honey…”
“Nihilist. What I am is a nihilist. And I’m afraid of what I am, I swear. I want to restore certain values, not to be left with no values at all.”
“Calm down. That’s not what you are.”
“Well? What are we going to end up being — unintentionally?”
“There will be many obstacles, what you want won’t be easily achieved, all that stuff about the Sweet Fatherland, your…”
“I’m afraid of ending up as what you’re saying, the opposite of what I’m trying to achieve. Everything always ends up like that, the opposite of what we set out to do.”
“Terrorists. My Uncle Fernando, who lived through that era, would call us terrorists — if he knew.”
“He doesn’t know a thing. He thinks it’s a joke. Better a joke than a crime.”
“Was all that a crime? Tell me. I have no past. I learn everything from you. Everything I get from you sticks to me, even my need not to be like you!”
“Angeles, it’s taken for granted that in the nineties we young people all have the right to an adventure of this kind, it isn’t a statute in any constitution, it’s like what going to a whorehouse or getting drunk used to be; terrorism is a rite of passage, nothing more, it has no importance … Everybody does it. Remember when the Spanish kid García poisoned all the people in his father’s restaurant? Or when Baby Fernández put dynamite under the altar of the Infant of Prague and set it off during twelve o’clock Mass?”
“Sure I do. I like what you’re saying. I don’t see any problems in it.”
“I hope you see some problems in this damned news blackout!!”
“There’s something that worries me even more. Everything turned out too perfectly. There wasn’t even a blink between cause and effect. It’s as if we started gambling with ten pesos and the possibility of winning a hundred and instead we came home with a million.”
“We’re some mean fuckers.” My father laughed unwillingly. Then, genuinely afflicted, he hung his head — not without first kicking the Sony, which fell onto the marble floor, shattering and scattering gray glass, sorry, Angeles, those are just words — terrorist, nihilist, conservative, left-winger, sorry: I’m a guy who’s always pissed off, understand? pissed off that I’ve spent my whole life, since I was born back in 1969 until now in 1992, desperate because I’m so mad and so impotent, I never had the slightest optimism about “openings” or “booms” or “renewals,” guys my age just felt hemmed in, desperate, pissed off: at least being pissed off is something, right? Better than trading in your pesos for dollars, making jokes about the president, blaming the gringos for everything we don’t do, sitting down to wait for the next president to announce his successor, transferring hope every six years despite all the evidence to the contrary, demanding that others do what we can’t, saying the people lack all confidence, that there’s no leadership, that there’s no this, there’s no that … Shit, Angeles, at least I get pissed off and only much later will I ask myself your horrible question, which is breaking my balls, as if it were a good kick: does justice justify murder? Ask me again some other day, don’t forget about it, don’t throw it out with the trash, please. Think the worst of my moral sense.”
“What do we know, Angel?” asked my mother, stroking my father’s hand. He hesitated, then answered:
“About what we did, nothing. They’re not going to say a word. At least not until it suits them. And if they’re not saying anything now it’s because it suits them to keep quiet. Remember the President’s favorite motto: ‘In Mexico you can do anything, as long as you can blame it on someone.’”
A half-opaque light passed through my mother’s eyes.
“You say you’re conservative, and I say I’m left-wing. But we both know that labels don’t matter. What does matter are concrete acts, okay? But did we really do what we did, Angel of love? Are you sure? Are we both sure? Did we really do it?”
Ever since their first night in seclusion, she was answered by the wailing voices of the professional mourning women, who were always hired to come down from the town of Treinta up in the mountains to lament the daily but sporadic deaths that occurred in Acapulco.
These new dusks belonged to their most dolorous, their longest choral chanting: it seemed to be born at the bottom of the sea, and my parents heard it every night without speaking, because it reminded them that not only tourists, literary critics, government functionaries, and millionaires died that day in Aca, but waiters and chambermaids, taxi drivers, and cashiers: but Homero Fagoaga did not die, and now he’s a senatorial candidate, we’re fucked …
These bastards are not thinking about me in the slightest.
They know nothing about my shock: expelled by my father, rejected by my mother, against both of them I’ve set myself up in the womb and I myself am creating the placenta, sucking blood and food through the sponge that I’m weaving onto my mother, who has been invaded now by my new being: I, the accepted parasite, the guest who devours his mother to stay alive, taking refuge there for nine months, thinking now that this pair of nuts is following the noise of the hired mourners, which has supplanted that of the coyotes, that I’m already a disk about one one-hundredth of an inch across which is rapidly growing from button shape to tiny needle shape with head, trunk, and umbilical cord. What else matters? I’d like to ask them noisily about all this that happens without anyone’s knowing it. Or about everything that you endlessly discuss, what’s happening with everyone’s knowing about it.
Beginning in the third week, when the nice lady who returned the wallet belonging to Don Wigberto Garza Toledano (native of etc.) was given a national prize, I was already a well-established embryo beneath the surface of Mom’s uterus, I eat away at things and grow in search of food, I expand the very cavity that received me, I fill the empty spaces, creating my own head and my own tail.
But then they endanger this entire enterprise by hiking up to the highest peak on Uncle Homero’s property, a crag that dominates Acapulco’s two fronts, Puerto Marqués and Revolcadero Beach on one side, and the entire bay on the other, in order to make sure that Acapretty was destroyed over a month ago, on Epiphany, and that even if the newspapers and television do not reveal it, the Professional Mourners from Treinta certainly do, as do my parents’ eyes (the remains of the discotheque float like a gigantic condom; the crepe worn by the models trapped on the rocks at La Countess beach flutters in the air), and their long strides to the top of the crag make me fear a Christophalypse consisting of hormonal deserts, hunger, thirst, the prelude to a rain of blood that kills me and washes out the cloaca which I will have become, dissolved, unformed, again: inform.