— Private property is okay, pal, but only if it’s shared!
They passed like wisps in the breeze, on their pogo sticks, so nubile, ah, as I, turning fifty, saw them bound by as if in a dream, all of them under twenty, assuming the right to enter all the houses, rich or poor, and to talk, to talk, nothing else, with everyone, saying: Get with it, get with what’s happening, now!
If you’re still listening to me, you might conclude that my destiny was to end up with a woman who would combine the qualities (and the defects, there’s no way around it!) of the five generations of ladies I had seduced. You see: the essence of Don Juan is to move, to travel, to scoff at boundaries, whether between countries, gardens, balconies, or beds. For Don Juan there are no doors, or, rather, there is always an unforeseen door for his escape. Now my merry bands of girls on pogo sticks were the Doña Juanitas (damned if they don’t smell of pot!) and I, as you know by now, tied to the phone, doing everything by phone, meetings, business deals, love affairs …
And servants. I needed them, and very good ones, to throw my famous parties, to receive equally a woman in intimate and attentive circumstances and a crowd of five hundred guests for an epochal bash — the frosting on my house of meringue! But eventually they went out of style, those offensive shows of extravagance, as the richest politicians in Mexico called them, and although I never made a public display of crying over the poverty of my countrymen, at least I always tried to give them honest work. Honest but temporary: what I never could stand was a servant staying with me too long. He would gain power from my past. He would remember the previous women. He couldn’t help making comparisons. He would treat the new ones the way he treated the old ones, as if he were trying to serve me well and perform satisfactorily, when the sly fellow would know perfectly well that he was performing poorly and making me look bad: Here’s your hot-water bottle, madam, the way you like it. Listen, dog, who are you confusing me with? The diuretic morning grapefruit for the pudgy lady who prefers cheese and tortillas. The confusion becomes an allusion, and no Mexican woman was ever born who can’t see, smell, and catch those subtle little innuendos. (Except one from Chiapas who was so out of it that I had to clap like crazy to wake her up when she fell asleep in the middle of the action, and then the cunt would pop up and start doing her regional dance. It must be something in the genes. Send them all back to Guatemala!)
Besides denying them the power that cumulative memory gave them over me, I refused to retain my servants, to keep them from intriguing with each other. A servant who stayed more than two years would end up conspiring with other servants against me. The first year, they idolize me and compete with each other; the second, they hate the one they see as my favorite; the third, they join together to throw me out on my ear. All right, then! Here no one passes more than two Christmases in a row. Before the Wise Men make their third trip through the desert on their camels, let the Star of Bethlehem be put out: my butcher and baker and candlestick maker, hey diddle diddle, out on your asses! Cook, upstairs maid, boy, gardener, and a chauffeur who only runs errands because, tied to my telephones and computers, I hardly ever leave my colonial house. That’s all I need.
Since I inherited the house, I’ve kept an exact list of lovers and servants. The first is already rather long, though not like Don Juan’s; besides, it’s pretty personalized. The servants’ list, on the other hand, I try to do seriously, with statistics. Into the computer I put their birthplace, previous occupation. In that way, I have on hand a most interesting sort of sociological profile, since the regions that provide me servants have come down, over the years, to Querétaro, Puebla, the state of Mexico, and Morelos. Next, within each of these, come the cities (Toluca wins by a long shot), the towns, the villages, the old haciendas. Thanks to the relative speed with which I change servants, I think I’ll end up covering every square inch of those four federal states. It will be highly entertaining to see what sorts of coincidences, exceptions, and convergences, among them and in relation to my own life, the detailed memories of my computers will provide. How many instances will there be of servants coming from Zacatlán de las Manzanas, state of Puebla? Or, how many members of the same family will end up in my service? How many will know each other and will gossip about me and my house? The possible combinations of their employment and my accounting are obvious: both are infinite, but the calculation of probabilities is, by definition, finite — repetition is not dispersion but, finally, unity. We all end up looking at ourselves in the mirror of the world and seeing our own foolish faces and nothing more.
The world comes to me and the proof is that here you are, listening to me and hanging on my wise and statistical words. Ahem, as they say in the funnies, and also: How fickle is fate, and how often it manages to give a kick in the pants to the best-laid plans!
The present revolving odalisque was, in a certain sense, my ideal lover. We met by telephone. Tell me if there could be a more perfect class action, as we Mexican legal types say; or serendipity (what a word!), as the gringo yuppies, who keep on looking for it, say; or birds of a feather flocking together, as the prole Indian types around here whom we call nacos say. (Naco hero on a train: Nacozari. Jealous naco in an inn: Nacothello. Corsican naco imprisoned on a remote island: Nacoleon. Anarchist nacos executed in the electric chair: Naco and Vanzetti.)
— Nacolás Sarmiento.
So she addressed me, mocking me, my last conquest, my latest love, my last girlfriend, how could she fail to conquer me if she entered my game list in this way? Nacolás Sarmiento, she called me, putting me down and tickling me at the same time; her name was Lala and she possessed characteristics of each of the generations that preceded her. She was polyglot like my first round of women (although I suspect that Lala didn’t learn languages in an ancestral castle surrounded by governesses, but by the Berlitz method here in the Avenida Chapultepec, or serving meals to the gringo tourists in Ixtapa — Zihuatanejo). Her melancholy was the genuine article, not put in her skull by a decadent prof of philosophy and letters; she didn’t know Proust, not even by the book covers — her melancholy was more in the style of the mariachi singer José Alfredo Jiménez: