“It’s made of shit! This cake is make of shit!”
And the girl with sharpened teeth and transparent clothes shouted — in English: “I’m a lollipop!” Then she fainted.
* * *
Don Ulises offered my father Angel a brandy snifter of Ixtabentún-on-the-rocks while my elegant pater, the shit having been kicked out of him by the López family thugs, was drying the blood on his forehead with pink Kleenex. López confessed that the color scheme of the salon had been chosen by his wife, Doña Lucha, to replicate certain of their common associations from the time they were courting and would go to the movies together — you know, with little sisters, popcorn, and everything.
“Ha,” laughed the illustrious politician and financier, currently in the Republic’s reserve forces. “She calls those chairs Blue Angel Marlene, the upholstery is Rhonda Red, and carpeting is Garbo Beige. Isn’t she sweet? Isn’t she incomprehensible?”
Angel accepted the drink: he needed it after the beating he took (“So you run the TUGUEDER service? you muddahfuckah! yer gonna need that shiteatin’ grin!”), and when Angel touched Ulises’s hand he compared it with Inclán’s: What? Had everyone with power in Mexico stopped sweating? Did they ever go to the bathroom? How could they spend nine consecutive hours going from place to place, giving speeches, and constantly attending meetings of the PRI without having to pee or sweating? He looked at his host’s amiably cold eyes and filtered them through the edge of the glass so Ulises’s features would melt in the sickly-sweet tide of the liquor; it didn’t work; Ulises emerged the winner.
“But I love her deeply, young man. Do you understand me? I’m being honest with you because even though you offended me seriously I admire your nerve and your initiative, even if it all goes into dirty tricks. But, going back to Lucha: as long as I’m with her I can be generous, even magnanimous. Want to know something? Every day, in the penthouse above my offices on River Nylon Street, there’s a banquet all prepared for a hundred people, with galantines of turkey, pâté de foie gras, Gulf shrimp, carré d’agneau, cakes (real ones, ha ha ha, what a card you are!), whatever you could want, ready for a hundred people, whether anyone comes or not, and at five o’clock in the afternoon, whatever is left over is distributed to the neighborhood beggars. You see, when I’m with her I can be generous…” repeated Don Ulises, dreamily. “I’m afraid that without her I’ll get stingy and that’s why I love her, keep her, and worry about her dying.”
Ulises made a peculiar face — coyness, modesty, or some combination thereof.
“For me, my wife is still the girl I tried to seduce with flowers and chocolates when I got to Chilpancingo from the coast.”
He affectionately patted Angel Palomar’s knee with his open hand, and said that my father in all likelihood knew lots about him; most of what he knew was true, and he would admit it proudly. What in fact did people say about him? The worst things! requested Ulises. And Angel told him: “That you are an out-and-out thief.” Ulises López said with equanimity that he would prefer a great statesman who was a thief but who would make Mexico into a great nation to an honest statesman who would lead it to ruin: unfortunately, what we’ve gotten over the past few years have been thieves who ruin us as much or more than the honest ones, but I’m not talking about trying to balance the honest ones off against the thieves or throwing out the baby with the bathwater, Ulises went on, and that’s why mediocrity, envy, and resentment had conspired to freeze him out. But he was biding his time; a great politician, he said that night to Angel, has to be an abstract, immoral con man who manipulates the passions of others while he puts his own on ice.
“I like your initiative,” he repeated, concentrating his tiny, mandarin eyes on Angel. “Too bad you don’t know how to focus it. Take a lesson from me tonight, kid. Listen to my rules for getting to the top in Mexico. First: remember that your ruling passion has to be money. The others are private passions and whatever you do in private is your own business. Make use of the best and the brightest. But never tell them what use you’re making of them. Don’t talk much. Think a great deal. Remember that he who has power is great only when he wants power. But if that interferes with the possibility of being rich, it’s better to be rich than to be great. The problem is to have both dough and power, although it’s always better to have money without power than power without money because money is power: you don’t really need more. Understand, then, that it’s not a bad thing in Mexico to be a crook: what’s bad is not being a big enough crook. Always keep that in the back of your mind as you’re stating for the record that immorality in the management of public funds will in no way be tolerated any longer and then toss a couple of jerks from the previous administration into jail. Remember that in this country you can make hay for half your time in office on the sins of your predecessors. During the other half, make sure you get ready to be accused, asshole. Ha, ha!”
Don Ulises guffawed over his own witticism, and once again patting Angel’s knee, he concluded: “See, kid? I put all my cards on the table. Now it’s your turn. I noticed you like my little Penny.”
“I go where my peenie takes me,” said my father cynically. “If you really want me to be frank with you…”
“I’ll tell you again: I like the fact that you’re a wise guy, but you’ve got to focus your energy. Just imagine if you were my son-in-law…”
Angel’s eyes clouded over with emotion, not because of Ulises but because of Penny.
“See what I mean? I’m putting all my cards on the table.”
My father understood perfectly. This was a second invitation for him to come across with something, but he refused to give in to the temptation to fall into Don Ulises’s most obvious trap. The old master still had a couple of cards up his sleeve. He repeated that he was sincere but he could be cold and calculating. He had just repeated that his maxim in terms of political action was “Don’t talk about anything, but think things over again and again.” His conversational style was a chess game in which Ulises, in all sincerity, could always say afterwards: “I knew it all along. You can’t surprise me.”
Even so, Angel sighed as he looked at this Machiavellian figure. I’m me, my young friend, in Ulises López there exists a sentimental, generous man, a man in love. He pushed a button and one wall took on a glassy opacity.
“How could I not be in love with my wife?” Ulises asked uselessly. “She’s much better-looking than my daughter. Just look at her.”
He pushed several buttons and the lights went down in the salon, but those near the screen (or was it a whorehouse mirror so he could look in from this side without being seen from the other?) brightened. On the other side appeared Lucha Plancarte de López yawning. She was wearing a pink silk robe with white feathers fluttering at her cuffs and collar. She brushed her teeth. Then she took off her robe and stood there in a scarlet lace monokini, her big bouncy breasts decorated with enormous black nipples that looked like black plums. Doña Lucha rinsed off a tiny razor and began very carefully to shave her right armpit, which was covered by a black stubble. She did the same with her left armpit, but this time she cut herself. She winced and then used spit to close the cut. Angel was fascinated by the trickle of blood that ran out of the decidedly gray underarm. Then Lucha studied her extensive bush, which rose in baroque curls almost to her navel and spread out on both sides like a golf course, as Don Fernando Benítez would have said. Doña Lucha swiftly soaped up the perimeter of her pubic lawn: with one hand she shaved herself, while with the other she gently caressed her labia. Her husband said to my father, “She isn’t alone, ha ha, look,” as she stuck her finger into a jar of (wine-flavored) Celaya jelly and then spread it over her clitoris, “she isn’t alone”: a Siamese cat impatiently watched the lady’s every movement and in a flash, as if trained to do so, jumped into its mistress’s lap and began to lick her recently shaved skin, cleaning it of any traces of leftover hair.