“That’s how to do it, son.”
“Gelded like a hog.”
“And the young Tezozómoc Cuervo, pristine orator, formed like a jug and of coffeeish hue?”
“That boy, as Don Bernardino would say: now he’s a busted jug.”
“Good God, what have I set into motion?” whined Homero Fagoaga.
“The beginning of the end, you miserable swine,” interjected our guide, Don Fernando, without bothering to turn around to look at him as he drove the mules back the way we came.
“The end of the PRI?” asked Homero, about to fall off again.
“You look pale.”
“Deflated.”
“Oh! Ah!” The burro bucked, sending the not so future Senator flying through the air.
Homero hung on my father’s neck, who later said it was like being hugged by a gigantic vanilla ice-cream cone with chocolate sauce on the verge of melting.
“Hide me,” said this would-be Senator Fagoaga, desperately but alertly: “Don’t let them take their revenge on me, I’ll do anything you ask, but don’t abandon me to the revenge of the PRI!”
He stretched out his arm. “Fernando, my friend.”
“Will you be quiet, you miserable swine?” Our Uncle Fernando turned to face him. “You are going down in history as the man who destroyed the PRI! Damned if that isn’t historical irony! You, Homero Fagoaga, illustrious member of the PRI…”
“At your service!” exclaimed Homero, almost standing up, like one listening to the national anthem, but then fell instantly on his knees and begged to be hidden in the old house in Tlalpan that had belonged to my father’s parents, the house of bright colors near the Church of St. Peter the Apostle, the house the wicked fat man had ordered seized and sealed in his lawsuit against his nephew’s prodigality, but which was, said the finicky creep, the last place anyone would think to look for him. Hide me there, no one would ever think to look for me there, the enmity between him and his relatives was well known, and thus he could respect the devout modesty of his sisters, Capitolina and Farnesia, the last two certified virgins in Mexico. Sure, and put up with Uncle H. in the house in Tlalpan, which would remain sealed, cut off from profane eyes, where no one would look for him, in such proclaimed modesty, within such a frugal space …
“And what do we get out of it?”
Uncle Homero, on his knees, spread his arms like a penitent.
“I’ll stop the suit that would declare you, my nephew, Don Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, prodigal and irresponsible, I’ll pay all court costs and damages, I will return the Tlalpan property to you, I will free up the gold pesos legitimately inherited by my aforesaid nephew after the perfectly legitimate, sudden, and undeniably accidental death of his parents, Don Diego Palomar and Doña Isabella Fagoaga de Palomar, my sister, the couple who came to be known as the Mexican Curies before the accursed taco crossed their scientific path. What else do you want? More?”
“You are going to resign publicly from the PRI, Homero.”
From then on, my mommy is going to tell to anyone who might care to listen that the shock of our Uncle Homero Fagoaga was eclipsed and simultaneously magnified by the afternoon glow in the mountains, that shock of the earth as it looked at the clouds, the shock of the clouds as they looked at the cut stone, and the shock of the stone as it contemplated itself in the light, and the shock of the light as it found the flashing expanse of the field of heather. Nothing in all that could match the historical shock painted on our uncle’s face.
In the oleaginous eyes of the man kneeling before his detested saviors, in his equally oily syllables, in the very posture of his defeudalized abjection, which contrasted with the indifferent splendor of invisible nature, my mother managed to distinguish a plea for compassion, destroyed, of course, in the act by Homero’s words:
“But, Fernando … Fernando … I was born with the PRI, it’s the source of my national pride and my personal destiny, Fernando: I can’t conceive of life without the PRI, I am oriented, synchronized, plugged into the Party, I owe my language, my thoughts, my ideals, my deals, my schemes, my opportunities, my excuses, my acts of daring, Fernando: my entire existence, right down to my most intimate fibers, I swear to you, to the PRI and its system, I am Catholic because I believe in the hierarchy and the sweet dogmas of my political church; but I am a revolutionary because I believe in its slogans and its most archaic proofs of legitimacy; I am conservative because without the PRI we head directly to communism; I am liberal because without the PRI we head directly to fascism, and I am a Catholic, revolutionary, progressive, and reactionary millionaire all at the same time and for the same reasons: the PRI authorizes it. Without the PRI I wouldn’t know what to say, think, even how to act. Just think: when I was born, the Party was only three years old; it’s my brother! We grew up together; I don’t know anything else! Without the PRI I’d be an orphan of history! Can you really ask me to give that up? Have mercy! Without the PRI I don’t exist! The PRI is my cradle, my roof, my soup, my language, the nose I smell with, the palate I taste with, my eardrum, the pupil of my eyes!”
Homeric pause.
“Can you really ask me to give that up? What else?”
Don Fernando Benítez, wrapped in his corn-husk mantle, with his head bare and his old, muddy, scuffed boot resting on the lowered nape of this conquered Gaul, our Uncle Don Homero Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca, LL.D.
“Yes, you filthy barnacle bloodsucker, there is something more.”
“More, more?” whined Homero.
“This you will have to do and confess, Homero, to pay for your sins. You shall believe in liberty and democracy, Homero. You will go forth to fight for them whenever I order you to do so, Homero. You will have faith in your fellow citizens, the faith no one has ever wanted to have in them. You will give this disdained land the chance to be democratic, Homero.”
“But it has never been democratic!” exclaimed the hollow-eyed Don Homero as Don Fernando ground his cheek into the mud with his boot.
“You will have to do it despite all evidence to the contrary, you coward. The important thing is that you believe it without proving it, that you confess it, admire it, and defend it: Mexico can be a democratic country! With your powerful arm on our side, Homero, we shall undo all the wrongs of our history in order to proclaim to all, blessed age and blessèd century.”
I’m inside my mother, but my mother can’t know it yet, and nevertheless one day I’ll know that she doesn’t say anything out loud that afternoon because in a strange way she feels that she’s trying to confer an impossible dignity on things with her silence, my mother says in secret, staring at Uncle Homero, submissive to the insane demands of Uncle Fernando, who stands, as small and nervous as a prancing fighting cock, bald and pink, with his handlebar mustache and his blue eyes, his tiny glasses in a creolized Franz Schubert style, expert on Indians, and author.
“Get down off that burro, Homero, and do me the honor of leading me to Malinaltzin!”
7. Don Fernando paused triumphantly
Don Fernando paused triumphantly and told the humiliated Don Homero and my parents (and me, hanging on as best I could, unrecognized by them just as they are not recognized by Nature) that in memory of this victorious campaign for democracy we would all take refuge in the baroque beauty of the Malinaltzin church, which the Indians had built, and thus unite — this was our Uncle Fernando’s permanent intention — tradition and modernization, culture and democracy. He turned his steps and his trots toward the church, but soon they discovered that the sacristan wasn’t there, that he’d gone to the state capital (Chilpancingo) to drink up a good tip given him by a tourist who’d come yesterday, and so who had the keys? Don Fernando asked one of the locals, So-and-so, and where might this person be? well, working on the highway, breaking rock and laying asphalt, why didn’t they get someone to stand in for the sacristan? who knows, go ask him yourself, and they walked and trotted toward the highway under construction on the outskirts of the village, this miserable hamlet, which is a vast brown hole dotted with puddles, which were its only amenity and distraction. Its walls were made of sad mud, a lament of dry adobe, and on them the opposition had plastered slogans denouncing Don Homero and his party.