“Tell this bunch of jerks to knock it off. All we came to ask you to do is form a union if you haven’t already done so, so you can better defend the rights you should enjoy under a democracy.”
“We don’t need any union,” said the man slowly.
“You work by subcontract and for a lump sum, so don’t let yourselves be exploited.”
“Now listen up, you old jerk,” said the chief impatiently, “get off our backs.”
Barely had he spoken these fierce words to my bantam-rooster Uncle Fernando when Fernando was all over him with two punches that were so well delivered to the aforementioned leader that the surprise of the attack knocked off his hat and revealed his face, which looked like a photo of a guerrillero. Surprised and angry, my father instantly recognized the face as that of his literary pursuer, the frustrated author Matamoros, father of Colasa Sánchez. However, that discovery was itself obliterated by a rapid series of events: first, the plums were replaced by stones and Uncle Homero did a belly flop into the freshly poured tar; this was followed by an outcry from the twelve workers, who cursed Homero up and down for ruining their day’s work; then some of them picked up sticks to defend their leader Matamoros and beat Uncle Fernando; still others were busy kicking Uncle Homero out of the mud pond the tar they had poured and leveled that morning had become, which tar was to have been the road President Jesús María y José Paredes would have driven over two days later, thinking that a highway had been built linking Chilpancingo to Malinaltzin, even though the President knew full well that the funds allotted to the project had been divided in not precisely even lots among the state governor (50 %), Minister Ulises López (20 %), the contractor (another 20 %), and a few other local officials (5 %), leaving only 5 % for actually building the national highway. So the President will certainly be the most surprised of all to see, when they point it out to him from the governor’s swift Fujiyama limousine, that a highway really does exist, but these poor workers, what do they know about all this; all they know is that their job won’t be finished on time and all because of this miserable, fat, progressive or synarchist or sonofabitchist tub of shit, and others are looking at my father, who has rushed to defend the octogenarian Don Fernando, who is shouting to Matamoros and his gang:
“Calm down, boys, I swear I never slept with your sisters.”
“It’s only because you’re an old asshole that I don’t beat you to death,” said Matamoros Moreno truculently. “I wouldn’t care even if you were my father, damned old fool.”
“I could have been your father, but I didn’t choose to be,” said Don Fernando Benítez, at the crest of a wave of sarcastic dignity, all of which only made the men beat him all the harder, while the others were tugging Uncle Homero out of his lake of pitch and then tossing him, all three hundred pounds of him, until they let him fall in a death cry that blended with Uncle Fernando’s peremptory threats, just as my father arrived to rescue them like a knight in shining armor. He and Matamoros glared at each other, eyeball to eyeball, as they used to say about nuclear confrontations, and Don Fernando blared out:
“Unions! Democracy! Justice!”
To which the workers, laughing their heads off, responded:
“Food, Clothing, Shelter, wherever they come from, wherever they are, a place to sleep, a girl to sleep with!
All eyes turned toward my mother sitting on her burro; then they saw Don Fernando stumbling blindly along the highway looking for his glasses and shouting, Miserable rats, all we did was bring you a democratic message, left-wing pep talk, poor lost people, degraded people, foul mongrels, scarecrow beggars, and poor Homero was lying black and sticky in the tar.
The eyes of the work team turned toward their leader and Matamoros gave them permission with his eyes. Four of the workers pinioned my father, the rest grabbed my mother. A red, foreign light, unrecognizable, alien, belligerent, so strong and so horrible, so without even a by-your-leave, so long and oiled and without ears like a garrotted worm, as ruddy as someone totally drunk, that only I could shout to my own inner self, I don’t know you, I don’t know you, you are not the same one who approached Guanahaní, who upset Fernandina, who took Veragua, who took Honduras, who collared Tabasco, who landed in Puerto Rico and tossed me into my first voyage of discovery, into my infinite sailing in the uterine sea, twinkle, twinkle little star / how I wonder what you are, but she didn’t care whether I felt like a foreigner in the bosom of my own gestation, I exiled within the womb of my own mother, my golden age: kaput, my noble savage: ciao, ciao! my happy age all fucked up: this is where the age of iron took its toll, and the bubble of my conception was burst by these detestable times of ours and the enclosure law closed up throughout my refuge, pushing me inside, until I hit my head against a walclass="underline" this was a refuge no longer; it was a desert; no longer a cloister; it was an avenue passed first by a strong man who seemed to push me, my mother, and the world as if we were cannonballs; then the rest, less strong but more avid, each one taking his turn to visit little Chris: my debut in society, 1992 style, the reminder that we are not alone, see? the bastard solidarity of my destiny if by chance I still believed in the illustrious solitude of my destiny: welcome to Christopher’s egg, afflicted working masses of Mexico!
Matamoros Moreno released my father Angel Palomar and buttoned his fly.
“To make up for what you did to me, bastard. For having laughed at my literary first steps. For having refused to help me get published. For having snubbed my precious little girl Colasa. You didn’t give a shit about me, right? Well, let’s see if you forget me now! All that’s left now is for the gringo to make you eat my book on the vagina dentata, that’s the last detail, stuck-up bastard shitass!”
Then he made a gesture that my father be beaten until he stopped moving, until he lay there in the middle of the highway that would never be finished because tomorrow the President would see the paved strip from a distance and appearances are enough because in Mexico appearances are not deceiving: my father stretched out there with his trousers tangled around his knees, a burning pain, and the feeling that he was talking by himself, dreaming by himself, walking by himself.
Matamoros and his gang tramped noisily away along the road to Malinaltzin. One of the workers took the time to throw the church keys to Don Fernando: “So you can cleanse yourself of your sins, you shitassed redeemers!”
My father remained lost in his own thoughts, his eyes closed, not daring to look at his Angeles. Don Fernando, on the other hand, still searching the field for his glasses, could still shout: “Miserable bastards! Save yourselves, then!” and Don Homero could only groan, making an obscene gesture with his finger: “Take your democracy.”
It began to get dark and I suppose that everything calmed down. I held on with something like a desperate fatigue to my mother’s flesh, she watched Angel get up in silence and pull up his trousers. But without knowing that I inside her, more than ever intimately bound to her, listened to her, she wondered what Angel would or could say out loud. What could anyone say out loud now, in this year, in this land?
It was nighttime in Malinaltzin and the village seemed asleep; but a presence that could not be silenced, more eternal than the Creator himself, continued to dominate the air: the loudspeaker in the plaza in front of the church, a copied tape that copied itself over day and night without stopping filling the infinite silence of the town with noise. The loudspeaker became the second nature of the abandoned villages of Mexico. Angeles my mother wondered if someone heard it or if it were by now as natural as breathing. Who tries to hear the beat of his own heart?