FOND HOPES!
When my father gave the same explanation to my mother that he’d earlier given to Penny López on that corkscrew staircase, the words were the same, gentle Readers, but it all sounded different. For example, all that about leaving my mom because she was his ideal woman and he needed Penny to keep his rebelliousness alive, his hatred, seemed insanely funny to us, because where did he get off coming around telling us that he was leaving for ideological reasons when it was nothing but sex. It was like adding a tiny lie to the huge lie that he said he was struggling against. I don’t know how aware my father Angel was that his rebellion was merely a romantic pose, which is what my mother thinks; but she tells him his explanation doesn’t matter because for her he’s always been a different sort of man and that therefore she naturally sees him that way, a different sort of man, and she doesn’t have to come up with complicated explanations.
In all this, Angeles fears that Angel is using her own desires against her, without understanding that she shares them with him; this is what hurts us most in my dad’s betrayal (what else should we call it?) — setting yourself up in the Gloria Grahame bedroom in the López mansion and enjoying the favors of Doña Lucha without realizing that my mother’s words were not idle talk, that she was with him even in this business but that she couldn’t tell him for fear of humiliating him:
“I didn’t sleep all night I was so happy I met you”—hoping that he would answer her with her words, which he had picked up in order to make them belong to both of them:
“I was there too, remember?” and culminating with something like a chorus in which, poco fa, my own little voice chimed in:
“Let’s never hurt each other.”
But nothing like that happened. She was left alone with a great big belly (with me inside it), while we knew nothing about Mr. Angel Palomar y Fagoaga except what he told us the afternoon in which he put on his big sincerity act and sprayed us with his absurd pretexts, without realizing (the jerk) that my mother’s halo, which he said he was defending, was quite extinguished, battered, worn out. The worst thing my father said to us was that they had created me with the contest in mind but that she was certain the contest was nothing more than a fraud perpetrated by the government, and if the contest was in fact a farce, the superbastard went on, then it didn’t matter that he was abandoning my mom and me. Was the reason for getting pregnant the contest? This particular insult, which to me seemed unpardonable, my mother took quite serenely, and although he never became so rude as to tell her that Penny was nothing more than a passing fancy and that she should let the sickness run its course and he would be back by August or September, in any case, before she gave birth, she actually accepted both maternity and solitude, even though I shouted to her from the vast silent echo of my six months of conception: “When a woman’s left alone, a vacuum is created, and anything can fill it!” But perhaps she didn’t believe that I was filling it to the brim (I adore her!). She could understand the fear in a man who doesn’t dare abandon his wife because he feels unsure about conquering (not loving, merely conquering) another woman, and she preferred that he take a chance, that he not get frustrated — taking the risk that he might not return at all. But if he came back, she would accept him again, hoping that he would realize it was she who let him go. That was her way of loving him: letting him go.
To me this seemed like the dumbest thing in the world, a harebrained idea that was unworthy of my mother and me, so from that moment on I decided to work by means of the mysterious powers I might lose the moment I was born, so that my mother, belly and all, with me and all, would make an instant cuckold of my father Angel. Like a real Boy Scout, I started looking around, and quite soon, without my having to persuade him in any way, the correspondent turned up, although in a very peculiar way. You can’t have everything.
* * *
As I was saying, she was left alone with me swelling her belly while he lived the rebellious illusion of penetrating the sanctum sanctorum of the López family. What a blast! as Doña Lucha López would say. But, by the way, how do we know now what’s being said and in what way? Easy: the Lópezes sent Ms. Ponderosa off to Segovia on a fatal Iberia flight which naturally crashed when it reached Barajas Airport in Madrid: poof! and there goes the dream of a lifetime and the secret of the chaperon — to whit: to be possessed passionately by the chef de cuisine Médoc d’Aubuisson (during whose absence these tragedies took place), through force majeure that microchip-in-Ulises’s-papaya business was interrupted. To sum up: when Don Ulises told Doña Lucha that the sugar they sprinkled on his papaya gave him double his normal sexual strength, the lady stole the tube of granules and served them to my dad every day at breakfast; my errant progenitor’s internal information ended up in the Samurai computer of the disconcerted minister Don Federico Robles Chacón, who at first couldn’t understand what the fuck was going on with the truculent Don Ulises, why the functionary and financier’s mind was sending him bizarre messages such as:
• How long does passion last? How long does hatred last? I would like to carry on my rebellion to the edge of life, not to the edge of ideology
• I am afraid of going mad. I am afraid of going sane
• What’s harder: being free or dropping dead?
• I looked for a nation made to last, like the stones of the Indians or the Spaniards: was only Mexico’s past serious?
• I am a romantic, postpunk conservative.
• Does Mexico’s future have to be like its present, a vast comedy of theft and mediocrity perpetrated in the name of progress?
• My heart is filled with an intimate reactionary joy: as intimate as that of millions of Mexicans who want to conserve their poor country: conservatives.
• I WANT ORDER FULLY KNOWING THAT NO ORDER WILL EVER BE ENOUGH.
• I am going to reinvent myself romantically as a conservative rebeclass="underline" am I betraying myself by screwing Mrs. López and desiring her daughter?
It was this last sentence that finally convinced Robles Chacón that his Samurai was not telling him Ulises’s thoughts, that he would not be betraying himself by screwing his wife, although it might be the case if he really desired his daughter.
INCEST IS BEST BUT ONLY AS LONG AS YOU KEEP IT IN THE FAMILY, flashed the Samurai in immediate dialogue with Federico Robles Chacón. He turned it off and said to himself: Who can be eating those microchips disguised as sugar which I had intended for my rival Ulises López?
5. Reader: Think about us
Reader: Think about us. Don’t abandon us like that, just because your prurience has been tickled by my father’s adventures in the López household. Stop. Think. Remember that she and I are left here alone. She with her abdomen weighed down by an intense increase in blood circulation, in pain because of the expansion of her uterus, as heavy-breasted as a cow: look on her and sympathize with her irritated nipples and her colossal appetite, her weight increasing, hormone production in her placenta increasing, all her glands stimulated, tired, sleepy, ferociously nauseous, imagining banquets of foie gras and couscous, goulash and Aztec ants, and no one there to go out and get them for her, with this absence without leave of that bastard, pater meus, who has decided to drain his life to the bottom (the ass!) before becoming a pure and idealistic man. When? On October 12 next? And as if that weren’t enough, I’m here robbing the poor thing’s calcium, milk, almost half her iron (I want ostrich eggs with truffles!), and she threatened by the loss of all her teeth! Shit, gentle Readers, just think: why in the world did my mother have me? Why did hundreds of thousands of millions of mothers have all the sons of bitches born after Citizens Kane and Able? That’s the way it goes: no going backward: I’m in my fifth month since conception, and I can use my little feet to swim, tap out secret messages, dance in the water, and kick: until this month I paddled in the water without touching her; from now on, on top of Angel’s infidelity, the poor lady has to put up with kick after kick on the walls of this homeland of mine: my mother thinks she’s got Moby Dick in person inside her, the poor dear lives in the bathroom, tenser and tenser, with vaginal secretions, hemorrhoids, cramps, upset stomach (my father doesn’t give her love, so she uses Maalox instead), her hands, feet, and face all swell up, she gets hypertension, she has difficulty breathing, she’s bloated, thankful she has no wedding ring because she could never get it off, she feels hot at the oddest times, sweats, would like to eat but also to put on talcum powder, toilet water, smell fresh, she is constantly afraid she smells and doesn’t realize it, a secretion dries on her nipples, she’d would like to squeeze a tub of Suzy Chapultepecstick onto each of them, God help me! and there I sit or stand or float uselessly inside her, goddamn Olympic swimming champion, the poor man’s Mark Spitz, yippie, and tell me, your mercies benz, if all that wouldn’t make you think twice before trying it!