My parents go down to the beach where I was conceived, staring at the smoke and dead fury that was Acapulco, the Babylon of the poor, chosen to exemplify in the mind of the nation ALL THAT IS NOT THE SWEET FATHERLAND: standing on the hilltops, they hear the melancholy sirens, and my father reminds my mother that one day he returned from Oaxaca transformed — a different man, disconcerted by the melancholy of having lost what he’d just won.
On the beach where they created me and over which Uncle Homero flew, my father writes on the sand:
Fatherland, your surface is a pothole, I mean
Your sky is stagnant smog
The Baby Jesus granted you a palace in Las Lomas and a ski lodge in Vail
And your oil deposits were a gift from a devil who lives on the spot market in Rotterdam, I mean
A little wave came and washed it all away.
Angel and Angeles found Tomasito’s body in an advanced state of decomposition in a canoe that had lodged between two rocks on Pichilinque beach.
Piercing his back was a black spear, fantastically wrapped in green feathers: a jungle spear.
Angeles: “Just a minute. Homero and Tomasito weren’t enemies: they were allies.”
Angeclass="underline" “Homero thought Tomasito was his enemy, so he killed him when he fled.”
Angeles: “The Four Fuckups found out about Tomasito’s betrayal and they killed him.”
Angeclass="underline" “Tomasito was just one more victim of the slaughter that went on in Acapulco.”
Angeles: “What Tomasito died of was his death.”
Angeclass="underline" “Everything happened simultaneously. One event happened neither before nor after but right next to or between another two events:
TOMASITO AND HOMERO
FRIENDS
TOMASITO AND HOMERO
ACCIDENTS
TOMASITO AND HOMERO
ENEMIES
Angeles: “Nobody died; they all went to the beach…”
Angeclass="underline" “You and I are walking arm-in-arm along Peachy Tongue Beach.”
Angeles: “Animus intelligence!”
They freed the canoe, set fire to it, and launched it on the tide, where it floated toward Manila, the Pacific, Tomasito’s home …
Then it happened that out of the seas of smoke and blood and arsenic and mustard, enveloped in the distant fog of panting coyotes and mist the obscene color of pureed cockroaches, there emerged a body that swam and panted like a coyote but which was tenacious in its decision not to sink in those waters polluted in saecula saeculorum: the smoke rose from the burst cupolas, ashes rained down like grotesque green and yellow chewing gum over the sea from the floating disco Divan the Terrible: and the diminutive figure of a tiny man’s tiny yellow hand seized the prow of the black canoe where the cadaver of the Filipino servant Tomasito was lying, and emerged from the seas of smoke and blood and arsenic and mustard, falling prostrate like a Pekinese puppy at the feet of the Filipino.
4. All Citizens Have the Right to Information
INFOREADER: They haven’t spoken, they haven’t done anything beyond what they’ve already said and done, they haven’t lived beyond what they’ve already lived, and what about me? When they started imagining probabilities, alternatives for the story, without remembering, first of all, that they’ve already made me and, second, that I myself possess a thousand alternatives, they drive me nuts and make me want to cut out, to leave my mother’s ovary without returning to my father’s testicle:
They say I will be a boy and be named Christopher, they’ve gone so far as to decide that for me, the assholes, but suppose I turn out to be a girl? Are they going to Herodize me the way Imelda did with Tomasito? They realize that the probabilities of my being a Mexican boy named Christopher are about one in 183,675, 900, 453, 248 and that all it would have taken was a turn of the genetic screw for me to be an armadillo, and you know, I like that idea. It sounds good, a lost, friendless armadillo with no obligations on one of those misty hilltops down which we tumble, or a jolly dolphin, making love at ten miles per hour over the blue Pacific?
“Have you ever been in Pacífica?”
Why does my dad always ask himself that same question? He’d be much better off thinking that, thanks to me, lost unity will be reconstituted, lost time found once more, all because of little old me, my respected progenitors, your information divided, get it? understand what I’m telling you?
“Is information really power?” asks my dad, and I start trotting along like a burro, wishing I could tell him that his sperm only had half of my vital information, and my mother’s reproductive cells only had the other half, and then
I ARRIVE
and just for being myself I gather together all the NEW information, oh what a glory, to know it now, from this moment on, I combine the total number of chromosomes that my father and mother can give to a new being so he will be new and will not be they, even if they have engendered him, and so that one day I can return them what they lost, their memory, their prophecy, their complete being: so why are they mistreating me like this, bouncing me along a ridge on top of a burro in a rainstorm, with night coming on? What did I ever do to them? We barely know each other and already they start fucking me over!
What do they know?
INFOTEL: Someone called Uncle Homero’s house in Acapulco, saying he has a radiogram from my Uncle Fernando Benítez transmitted from an NII helicopter to the presidential antenna in Mexico City and from there to the private telephone of Dr. Fagoaga, LL.D., in the Pearl of the Pacific, the Mecca of Tourism, the Oriental Port of the New World, the Bay of the China Galleon and the Manila Galleon:
“Have you ever been in Pacífica?”
This is what the message says to my nephew and niece Angel and Angeles Palomar: I expect you on the 22nd of February, the anniversary of the day President Madero, the Apostle of democracy, was murdered, in Cuajincuilapa, all communication between the D.F. and Aca inexplicably cut did you know Homero is a candidate question mark yours Benítez.
What do any of us know?
Wake up, children, wake up, said Grandpa Rigoberto Palomar in an alarmed but serious voice, wake up, today is Saturday, the 22nd of February, and they pulled the blanket off the still-sleeping President Francisco Madero, they took him, surrounded by bayonets, out of his cell, they put him in an automobile along with Mr. Pino Suárez, they stopped the car at the gates of the penitentiary, they made them both get out, they shot each one, a bullet in the head, at 11 o’clock p.m.: Wake up, children, we have to go to the Revolution.
What do I know?
The day of the great uproar, the blind young Indian, wild from the intensity of the invisible noises and smells, took the virgin girl he’d been sniffing after for over a week with a dizzy delicacy: it was after the girl’s first visit from the sticky sorceress, and the smell of blood both repelled and attracted him. She said nothing, she allowed herself to be touched, and she herself touched the man’s smooth hot cheek with pleasure.
INFOGENES: This only I know: That in the vertigo of my Uncle Fernando Benítez’s visit to the people up on the plateau, a blind boy was created at the same time that I was created in Acapulco.