Suddenly, Doña Lucha stopped touching herself, stood stock-still, and stared at them, stared at my father (at least that’s what he thought), stared at them through the mirror with all the emotions in the world crossing her face, rage at being discovered in an intimate situation, surprise that her husband was accompanied by that young man, desire for that young man, envy for anyone in the world who was not alone, jealousy toward herself, and the solitude of her own lasciviousness, invitation (But for whom? Ulises? Angel? Was she looking at both of them? Was she looking only at Ulises because she was used to putting on this little pantomime for him and found him standing there with a strange man next to him? Was she looking at Angel, expecting to find him alone as she had promised Ulises and instead finding the two of them there united against her? Or were the two of them — she smiled for an instant — desiring her? Or were they laughing at her, and she tossed the ill-favored cat off her lap). Perhaps she wasn’t looking at anything, didn’t know anything, and her stares were only a solitary, ruinous deception? Every passion in the world had flitted across Doña Lucha’s face except one: shame. She raised a finger dripping clit jam to her lips as she looked at them. Ulises turned off the screen. The reader is free to choose.
Someone knocked at the door of the Dietrich-Garbo-Fleming salon.
“Come in, Penny,” said her father.
The girl walked in without looking at Angel.
“Show this young man to the Gloria Grahame bedroom,” said Don Ulises, without giving Penny, who wanted to interrupt to say, “But Mommy sleeps next door,” or Angel, who perhaps might have wanted to say, “But I have a pregnant wife at home waiting up for me,” any opportunity to protest.
Ulises’s eyes said: “I already knew it. I guessed it. You don’t surprise me. But obey me.”
4. Emotion clouded my father’s eyes
Emotion clouded my father’s eyes, his reflexes, his very equilibrium as he walked ahead of Penny López down the spiral staircase in the Guggenheimic house in Las Lomas del Sol. He never turned his back on her, turning it instead toward the steep staircase that led to the bedrooms. She never looked at him, disdainful to the end, the bitch, he walking bowlegged, backward so he wouldn’t lose sight of her for an instant, so he could explain to her, tell her what he’d been thinking since New Year’s Eve in Aca, now that her sweet-sixteenish presence was within range, touchable, perfumed, so near and yet so far. She stared past him, and when he stopped right in front of her to force her to see him, she said something he took, to soften the blow, to be what Penny must have said to every man in her life, to him too, okay, but not only to him:
“You can look, but you can’t touch. You’re poor, ugly, and a boor. You’re not for me.”
She went on ahead, but he thought that if he didn’t do something right at that moment, he might never see her again, he might never be able to tell her what he was bearing inside, never mind that she wouldn’t understand a word. Angeles, my mother, now she would certainly understand, and I inside her, but of course! And if I know all this, Reader, it’s because the same thing my father Angel hastily told Penny López that night when the Valley (Anáhuac) Princess led him to her guest bedroom, he repeated on his knees and quite slowly to my mother some days later, when Angeles and I within her went to live in the house of Dad’s grandparents Rigoberto and Susana, leaving my father to his freedom, and he didn’t even have that because Uncle Homero, once again in favor with the Powers That Be (when he discovered that he’d never been hated by them and that they’d been anxiously searching for him everywhere, oh where oh where has our little Homero gone? which is what the PRI delegate asked who met him at the door of his house when the quondam candidate for Senator appeared and threw a tantrum when he realized they always waited for him there and that he’d spent all that lost time with his insane and unappreciative niece and nephew), returned with a squad of blue-uniformed thugs, agents of the district attorney’s office, and a team of lawyers to sue for the return of the house of bright colors in Tlalpan. But before that there occurred the following, which I faithfully reproduce for your lordships, more precisely, look at the dangers a fetus runs when everyone forgets he exists and, if they do remember, merely add it to a list of errors. So I exist and I exist as an error! A gigantic error, gigantic luck, an ephemeral and fleeting apparition in the infinity of a bubble — I—who managed to squeeze his drop of liquid out of creation at the exact moment that it coincided with the strange, improbable temperature of some moist drops in the improbable warmth of love, and what the fuck do all these accidents matter to the great prestellar cloud that is immutable, eternal, infinite, and I tell you parents of mine and universe what I, hidden here, know all on my own:
ONLY ERRORS MAKE MIRACLES POSSIBLE
I am already another, Christopher or Christine, it doesn’t matter, I am as different as if I had been created a dolphin or an armadillo, I am already different and already unique and even if I come from you I am no longer you, I am myself and I am different and I am everyone. You forgot that, right? I am another, I am everyone, my poor little life pierced with pins is the triumph of life, as triumphant in my own environment as stone mountains, obstinate cacti, or the coyotes that came down to eat gringos and literary critics. I am Myself. I rest, breathe, sigh. And you? Go right on fighting:
* * *
“Penny López,” my mom repeated that night, quickly adding with anger and sadness: “Why do your eyes shine like that when I mention her name?”
“What? Oh, I thought she was dead — so did you. That’s all.”
“Listen to me and stop reading that newspaper.”
“It’s not a newspaper. It’s The New York Review of Books. I get it sent by contraband from Sandy Ego. What do you think of that?”
“Cut it out. Don’t change the subject on me. Remember: we went to Aca to finish off people like her.”
“Her? Who do you mean?”
“Penny! People like her! Symbols, man! But what are you so interested in…?”
“I’m reading an article by Philip Roth, that’s all. Writers of Newark, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your baseball gloves…!”
“Bull. Listen to me now: why are you getting so nervous?”
“It’s what I was saying: what women love to do is make men feel guilty. It’s your mission in life.”
“The mission of all women?”
“Right.”
“But not of all men?”
“No. Not us. Men are loyal and sincere with each other. We never say bad things about our friends.”
“Know something? I wish I had a notebook to write down all these things we say to each other, but only if it could be in ancient Chichimeca. What bull!”
“Not at all. What you want is for people to know what you accuse us of. Don’t kid yourself.”