YOU WON’T LIVE LONGER, BUT YOU WILL LIVE BETTER
The saying that made Don Ulises López, Penny’s father, remember? famous. My mother threw the rebozo that had been covering her head over her shoulders, good old Penny sure does get around.
MIXTEC: ACT RESPONSIBLY!
VOTE DIALECTICALLY!
but my father says look at the farmers on horseback, riding at a controlled pace, wearing grimy straw hats, the bridles black with sweat, the red tulips, the blue sky through the leafy laurels, the burros laden with hay, the light rain, a three-minute sprinkle, the noise of the rivers hidden underground and the vast rose-colored fields, a valley of rolling heather and the sudden end of the rain.
No, says Uncle F., you don’t have to look so far away, just look over there at the gangrenous walls of Igualistlahuaca, Guerrero:
CITIZENS OF GUERRERO STATE
VOTE FOR A MAN WHO’S REALLY GREAT
VOTE FOR PRI, VOTE FOR HOMERO
HE’LL MAKE A FUTURE FOR GUERRERO!
and if any doubts remained
INSTITUTIONAL REVOLUTIONARY PARTY
Today at 2 P.M.
Igualistlahuaca Arena
DON’T MISS THE BIG WRESTLING MATCH
His Honor, Homero Fagoaga, Senatorial Candidate
Mass Meeting Outside Igualistlahuaca Church
ROBIN VERSUS BATMAN
Eight O’clock Sharp
A five-fall match
It all begins at 2:00, right in front of the church
Citizens Unite Behind Homero
Fagoaga, He’s Our Man
Bluedevils versus Ungrateful Pussy
FAGOAGA, HE’S OKAY!
HIT A HOMER WITH HOMERO!
CITIZENS OF IGUALISTLAHUACA: WAKE UP!
GET BEHIND THE INTERNATIONALIST SOCIALIST PARTY
LUXEMBURGIST FACTION OF
LIEBKNECHT TENDENCY
OAXACA PLEKHANOV CHAPTER
FIGHT FOR THE VICTORY OF THE DICTATORSHIP OF
THE PROLETARIAT!
ALL UNITE AGAINST HOMERO!
HOMERO: THE LANGUAGE CANDIDATE
Yes, I, Homero, am your homer, I win the game and save hometown honor for the forgotten masses of hometown Mexico, intoned His Honor Homero Fagoaga, from the bandstand set up in front of the Igualistlahuaca church. He insisted on it, my debut, my maiden speech, if you’ll allow me to play the coquette with you, brother Delegate of the PRI, maiden speech in the language of Shakespeare means a virgin speech, ha ha, see, just imagine for a moment, after all that this tongue, bequeathed to me by the glorious hand mutilated at the battle of Lepanto, has been through! By which I mean, metaphorically, you’ve got to understand the subtleties of our maiden-spain prosody, that is, you’ve got to understand the language of Spain, Mr. Delegate, made in pain, because Pain Is Spain, Mr. Delegate, the Spanish tongue taken as a perpetual and painful wedding night of proper discourse, and since the local Delegate, a bucktoothed, myopic lawyer from Cuajincuilapa, baptized, of all things, Elijo Raíz, was staring at him in incomprehension, Homero said to himself, humm, out in these boondocks there isn’t a single shyster, graduated from some music school or other, who doesn’t think he’s potential Benito Juárez: now they’re going to see what it means to use language to fascinate the multitudes, right now! He demanded and was granted permission by the local PRI to give his first speech, his virgin speech, his maidenspich made in Spain maiden’s pain Maiden Spain and Mad in Spain in the plaza outside the Igualistlahuaca church, with the street and the market in front of him and the altars behind, demonstrating in that way, candidate Fagoaga explained to his crosseyed interlocutor, that in the Party of Revolutionary Institutions all Mexicans should coexist, rich and poor, chauvinist and xenophile, reactionaries and progressives, after all Mr. Delegate, what was the meaning of our national political system if not to overcome, once and for all, the fratricidal confrontations between liberals and conservatives which in their nineteenth-century avatars condemned us, as they did our sister republics of Bolivaresque destiny, to swing back and forth between anarchy and dictatorship, self-perpetuating despotism and savage hatred, worthy of Shakespeare’s Verona: the Mexican Revolution, Mr. Delegate, reconciled the Masonic Montagues of the Scottish Rite with the Capulets of the Yorkish Rite, it overcame Mexico’s Sicilian weaknesses and the Balkanic lethargy of Latin America and only erred in its rhetorical opposition to the banners of Christ.
“But now,” said Uncle H. as he swallowed an armadillo in green mole sauce in one of the incomparable culinary retreats lining the Igualistlahuaca plaza, “it falls to us to reconcile secular faith with divine faith, the sacred with the profane.”
Who could forget the visit of the Polish Pope to Mexico fourteen years before, the most spectacular entrance into the capital since that of Hernán Cortés, when, sotto voce, the most prudent strategists in national politics said to themselves, as they peeked out from behind the thick brocade curtains at the Seat of Executive Power at the seven million souls who awaited, who followed, and who surrounded the Vicar of Christ in the Zócalo and the Cathedraclass="underline"
“All the Holy Father would have to do is order them to seize the National Palace. They would do it, your honor, and nothing could stop them. Am I right?”
“Well,” Uncle Homero directed his beautifully enunciated prose against the difficulties of a bit of crackling (overcoming that recalcitrant tidbit, of course), “the time has come for us to reconquer the sacred for the Revolution. Let us stop, Mr. Delegate, being fools and playing at anticlericalism. We’ve recaptured everything in order to achieve our heart’s desire, National Unity: left and right, bankers and field hands, now also, thanks to our August National Guide, even our Ancestral Matriarchy. I warn you, let us capture the world of the sacred before it captures us. I warn you, Mr. Delegate from the state of Guerrero, Coreligionist in PRI, Don Elijo Raíz: there is an Ayatollah in our Future. Now let’s finish up this crackling!”
A parrot squawked on the shadowed portal of the plaza, and Homero, flying on metaphoric wings, swallowed his plum dessert in one gulp, eagerly thinking about the Mixtec-Zapotec homeland.
5. And so it was that at midday Don Homero Fagoaga
5
And so it was that at midday Don Homero Fagoaga ascended the bandstand erected in front of the old rose-colored church in Igualistlahuaca, equidistant, our budding national figure, from the two towers and from the bell towers worked in pale cut stone and watered-down marble. Uncle H. standing before his microphone, surrounded by sixty-three local PRI hierarchs, the tribunal festooned with banners that repeated the slogans of the day, Don Homero surrounded by small-town orators eager to be seen with the future Senator but also with the sixty-three hierarchs, one for each year the Party had been in power, to think there are men sixty-three years old who have never seen any other party in power, murmured Uncle Fernando indignantly as he led my parents Angel and Angeles (and, as a bonus, me as well, though none of them knew about it at the time, they’ll only remember me retroactively, retroattractively — really acting retro is what I understand it to be), who were now entering the crowded square, she on the burro, he wrapped in his poncho, heading toward the tribunal where Uncle H., saved from the Acapulco furies right under the noses of my impotent parents Angel and Angeles, lets himself be loved by the PRI ephebocracy, the young men who make sure his microphone is set at the proper angle, who smile at him by smiling at the sun, and who seek their own rapid, not to say meteoric, rise through the hierarchy of our civil church, the P — R–I, their black eyes already shining with the dream of being Pope, cardinal at least, what about archbishop? okay, bishop would be enough, deacon if there’s nothing better to be had, sacristan sounds good, altar boy’s better than nothing, Swiss Guard, whatever, whatever your mercies say as long as they’re not left out in the cold, and his honor Homero Fagoaga glowing amid the ambition of the young men and the fatigue of the old ones, ayyy the survivors of heighty campaigns like this one, height million height hundred heighty-height glasses of Hi-C, mountains of black mole, horse meat, barbecued pork with everything on it, skin and hair, civic parades and social nights dancing polkas with fat ladies, in town after town, village after village, survivors of phantasmagoric campaigns — the sexennial Mexican presidential nonrace — for president and senator, the triennial races for the Congress, biennial races for local legislators and municipal presidents, all of them bewitched by this need to campaign, to become president, as if they were going up against the Italian Communists, the English Tories, and the French Gaullists: bah! exclaims Uncle Fernando, whose speech my mom is recording amid the Mixtec Mass this morning for the future reference of my collective unconsciousness, only the gringos beat us out with a single party that pretends to be two parties. The only truly authentic slogan should be: