and supersecret Mothers all the gringas of our masturbatory dreams, Lana, Marilyn, and Ava, but, above all others, the tits of the town, teatanic Mae West from the Big Apple, when she was good she was good but when she was bad she was better, Occidental Mother, your splendid tinsel lost inside your white flesh, your secret depths: to screw you, Stepmother of the West, is to avenge our entire history of insecurity and submission, White Ass, come on your Black Prick, go on, fart so I can orient, Occident, accident, crank it up blondie, your short, Daddy says so
(those lips like a scarlet satin sofa, yes, señora, that you will show — they stopped calling her girl just at the end, only señora: step out onto the balcony, señora, go down the white acrylic ladder without looking at your feet, wave without seeing anyone, señora)
superimposed on all women, gentlemen, we are finally free from the cloying sweetness of some, the nocturnal terror of others, the inaccessible distance of these, the familiar and intimate disdain of those, here is our final legitimation, our permanent prize, the fountain of all power in Mexico, the supreme edifice of machista supremacy, boys,
the perfect mix of Mae West, Coatlicue, and the Virgin of Guadalupe. A symbol,
The greatest human symbol ever invented:
THE MOTHER,
The sweet name where biology acquires a soul,
where nature becomes transcendent
and where sex becomes history:
OUR HOLY MOTHER!!!
And the minister offered his hand to the incredible apparition as she reached the last step:
GENTLEMEN: I PRESENT TO YOU OUR LADY MAMADOC.
He released her hand, fatigued, Jupiter without glory, devalued Pygmalion, observing in his most tranquil voice that the bureaucracy ends up creating what it conceives. Mamadoc will prove that the secret of the system is its secret. The important thing now is to keep up the momentum, gentlemen, of what we have set into motion.
“She is my gift to you, gentlemen.”
She never saw him again. At one point, she actually thought she was falling in love with him. Folly, folly. They sat her in her silver Mercedes with darkened windows; and with a motorcycle escort they brought her to the National Palace, they brought her up in an elevator, they led her out to the balcony, she knew what she had to do, weep, thank, wave, pretend the people were cheering her and weeping with her and then they, the multitudes of Mexico City, in this night of castles of fire and bands and fireworks and dead stars and showers of gold, would associate their national holiday, their September 15, not with a president or liberator, all devalued now, but with her, she-who-cannot-be-devalued, the mother who returned with her slave feet, her feet searching for her children, her ideal feet …
What Mexican alive in the Year of Our Lady 1992, when this story of the polyphonic gestation of the child Christopher Palomar and his imminent travels around an oceanic egg takes place, could forget the supreme instant of the national destinies that my father and mother remember while they plan out my birth for October 12 next so they will win the Christopher Contest, since without Her there would be no contest: Who, I repeat, who could forget the instant in which the spotlight focused on the central balcony of the Palace on the night of flying gold, the night of September 15, 1991, when the unique cornucopia of Mexico was a castle of light and the sparkle of a fleeting rocket when the spotlight moved away from President Jesús María y José Paredes, away from his family, from his cabinet, from his bodyguards, to tremble for an instant, indecisively, and then quickly stop, white and whitewashed like the object of their desire, on Her?
She with her mountain of platinum curls and her face whiter than the moon (the same moon Robles Chacón was staring at, but he had created this one; how they stared at her now, the children of Our Lady the Mother Doctor of All Mexicans!) and her spangled skirt shining with green reptile scales and her chubby little feet, white, naked, now that She, like an apparition, simulated, made people believe she levitated, rising above the copper railing and showing naked little tootsies, Our Lady, her bare little tootsies posed delicately over the horns of a bull; who was going to pay any attention to the President, who had resigned himself to this for the sake of the continuity of the system; who was going to pay any attention to the tight-lipped rage of Robles Chacón’s rival, Superminister Ulises López, ready, after so many defeats, to exchange wheels for deals; who was going to pay any attention to the sullen chief of police, Colonel Nemesio Inclán, so tenacious about remaining true to his archetype with his dark glasses at 11 p.m., and that stream of green spit running out of the corner of his mouth, when this celestial apparition, the subtle summa of all our mothers and lovers, shook the national flag over the heads of a million Mexicans and cried out. Gentlemen, can’t you see? she made no speeches, recalled no heroes, condemned no Spaniards, none of that! If the business at hand was to give the Cry of Dolores, Mamadoc, right here, gave her first Cry, as if she were giving birth to the mob that was staring at her in rapture, a shout that cracked the bells in the Cathedral, that knocked a pair of stone putti off the Sagrario Metropolitano, a Cry that made each and every one of the million souls down below with their tiny tricolor flags and their sugar candy and their lollipops shaped like oil derricks, believe that She was giving birth to all of them, that now this ceremony did make sense, that finally they understood what this Cry of Dolores was: it’s that our little mother is giving painful birth to us, sons of a whore! And yet that shout which was so loud was also so melodic, so tender, so sweet that it seemed like a bolero intoned on a velvety afternoon by Adelina Landín, by Amparo Montes, by the Aguila sisters …
My father and mother went together. My father, oh so lopezvelardian, shouted with impassioned and repugnant love to that figure who from now on would be at the center of our history:
“Prisoner of the Valley of Mexico! You don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into!”
Robles Chacón stared at his creation from a balcony at some distance from the system’s central nervous center. He looked at Mamadoc and then at the people — his plural enemy. He thought about his own parents. He’d never seen his father, Federico Robles, a ruined banker who died before his son was born. And his mother, Hortensia Chacón, had never seen him: she was blind. And now he was giving to all Mexico a mother that everyone could see and who could see them. Now he was the father of the mother of all.
She would be forgiven everything, that was the point. The triumph of the people would be to see in her what they didn’t have: she would have the right to have what the rich had, because she came from the secretarial pool of the SEPAVRE and was the girlfriend of a mortician and she had memorized all the boleros Manzanero and Agustín Lara had ever written, to the point that she could win one of her own contests, those famous (from now on) National Contests of Mamadoc.