“And what would you accuse me of?”
“Me? Nothing. I’m merely alienated by the means of reproduction.”
“Is that a fact? Well, just think about this baby that seems to be weighing so heavily on your mind…”
“I never said anything like that!”
“You did!” she shouted, pulling out her rollers, sitting there against the headboard while Einstein sadly stared from the wall, sticking his tongue out at her.
She throws the rollers at my father, and they go crack, crack, crack against the open pages of The New York Review of Books and drop down onto my father’s lap, piling up on the fly of his pajamas.
“Just think that I could have had this baby by myself, that I could have gone to a sperm bank for famous people and had my baby without your famous contest!”
“The contest!” my highly distracted father suddenly remembered. All he’d been thinking about was conquering Penny López during my mother’s pregnancy.
“That’s right, I could have gotten sperm from Don Ulises López, your little Penny’s daddy, or Minister Robles Chacón, or Julio Iglesias, or Duran Duran, or from Pope John Paul himself, or maybe even from Einstein, sticking his tongue out at me there on the wall. He must have left a little come behind in the refrigerator! Ozom!”
“You wouldn’t win the contest, big mouth, because the rules say the baby has to be the child of the parents that enter…”
“The mother always knows the child is hers, the father never knows: voilà!”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I’m not trying to say anything: I’m saying and I repeat and I reiterate and I proclaim: I had the child without you. I don’t need you for anything, and besides, the child belongs only to me, no one can prove that it isn’t mine, but no one can prove who the father is, and it isn’t you, bastard, it isn’t you,” said my mother, kneeling on the bed and beginning to throw whatever came to hand at my father’s bobbing head, the six volumes of The Indians of Mexico by Fernando Benítez, Luis Echeverría’s Charter of the Rights and Obligations of States, a souvenir ashtray from Tlaquepaque, Fernando del Paso’s Palinurus of Mexico, and Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra, finally revealing the color photo of Penny from Novedades glued to the page of the New York Review article by Philip Roth = jealousy finally made visible, jealousy focused on the palpable object of desire, the blind stare of hatred, all her tenderness and understanding now forgotten, the chalk scattered all over this house filled with blackboards, the photo of Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue, the chamber pot with flowers painted on it left behind by Uncle Homero, my mother shouting I could have had it alone! only the mother knows that the baby is hers! consummating the break with my father that perhaps he wants even more than she, showing to me at this early stage of life how delicate dreams are and how easily images are destroyed: leaving me unsheltered, an orphan of the storm, just when I need them most because, as I listen to them, I realize that the world is always an act with two performers, equally determined by the one who moves and speaks and the one who hears and receives: my body.
my body
is the system
with which I am going to answer
the physical world, I shall answer the world
by creating the world, I shall be the author of what precedes me,
by answering it, no matter what they do, whether they love
each other, hate each other, separate, come together,
I shall have to answer with my body and my words,
answer the world they are creating for me
creating, careful! as soon as I appear
I shall create their world
for them
by answering that world they have created for me. They will not escape without paying the price, they shouldn’t even dream of getting away with it, their action, whether it’s fighting or being happy, maybe they think that as soon as I appear I will no longer intervene with
word and flesh
to create my world beginning with them, by thus changing their world which they still don’t imagine me affecting, their ridiculous squabbles, they don’t have a clue, poor jerks!
Here I come!
Careful!
There will be three of us in the world and you will never again be able to act or speak exactly as you did today! just be careful, I’m telling you!
—… nothing, Penny was saying as they went down the ramp, ’cause my mom is one tough bitch and she like says to me better learn now for when you grow up, like you give one of these parvenus an inch and he’ll like give you six back, don’t turn your back or your front on any of them, yesterday Mommy set fire to the shacks those squatters set up on her property and I think they all went up in smoke like a barbecue and today she like asked Daddy to have my chaperon Ms. Ponderosa shot at the garden wall because she was like the one who made the deal with your service, the gay old freak, the ya know reeall ahhshole, and had all those reeally yuucky mummies come as guests, well I mean, ya know, I mean ooooh, and then that cake made of shit, I mean that was uh like uh soooo grotty, ya know, but I like went down on my knees and begged them not to shoot her and my daddy decided it would be better just to send her back to Segovia, that’s worse than death, must be like Chilpancingo, where my poor daddy came from, and like here’s your bedroom, young man, sleep tight now, and don’t even think of trying anything with me, I’m out of your range, scuzzbag, buzz off.
Angel watched Penny López’s bouncing little head as if in a dream, as it gradually disappeared with its shiny carrot-colored curls, her tiny painted eyebrows and her eyelids coated with gold dust, her eyes of oneiric depths and her face alive with twitches that turned out to be its saving grace: it was, en fin, an isthmus of beauty and emotion, or, as my father punned to himself: her strawberry lips, her cute little perfumed ears, pierced by orchid-shaped earrings, her pneumatic gait — Michelin legs, Pirelli thighs, Goodrich (of course?) ass, pulling out of his life: he walked into the aforementioned Gloria Grahame bedroom, named thus, said my film-loving father to himself, because it looked like a set from a fifties film noir: anemic Art Deco, devoid of personality, conceived to rebuff any ideological identification either with President Eisenhower or with Senator McCarthy: a bed with a satin spread …
My father, say I in imaginary complicity with him, fell into a slough of frustration, incompetence, and reduced social, moral, and sexual scale: Penny communicated all this to him, but here he was, the conservative rebel, the window washer of the filthy building that was Mexico in ’92, the purifier of the once Sweet and now Debauched Fatherland, on his knees in front of this pretentious bonbon from Las Lomas del Sol, and what else: well, the old boy reacted — how could he not if he was going to supply himself with a measure of self-justification. Out loud he said:
“I am going to screw Penny! That’s why I’m here!”
“But, honey, why don’t you just screw me?” said a voice through the door while invisible but inflammatory fingernails scratched with a singular, invitational rhythm.
Angel put his face close to the door: he smelled a whiff of seafood mixed with Joy de Patou.
The door opened and his expected, unwelcome, but exciting neighbor appeared in all her glory, which she’d mail-ordered from Fredericks of Hollywood: a transparent black peignoir whose wide sleeves were trimmed with raven feathers, the neck idem, and underneath, a pastry-crust bra, just waiting to be ripped off, layer by layer as if it were a biscuit, and stiletto-heeled, black-velvet slippers, black stockings held up by a garter belt, beneath which the lace panties split right over the jackpot, where was embroidered: