“Is it true or not?”
And Angeles: if you accuse me of something which I think but don’t do, I cannot deny it. That isn’t guilt. But desiring even if it isn’t carried out, is that blameworthy for you? Don’t just sit there without speaking, say something. Angeles dreamed she urinated and urinated until she refilled Texcoco Lake, and refloated the damned dried-out city, restored its canals, its water traffic, its liquid death. Angeles dreamed that they returned to Mexico City and lived again in the house of bright colors and I asked them, please:
Give time and tenderness to your little Christopher.
What a lack of imagination! They don’t listen to me.
6. Hollow-Eyed and Made Up
I don’t know if I’m going to sleep or waking up.
But my big old ears grow and listen.
I hear someone say that the domestic situation has become impossible. My parents have never been examples of Calvinist parsimony; no matter how postmodern, post-industrial, enlightened, conservative, Freudian, Marxist, or ecologist they declare or have declared themselves to be over the course of their brief and disturbed existences, Angel and Angeles are Catholic — Hispanic — baroque prodigals, spendthrifts, anachronisms: it’s impossible to be modern without being Protestant, even if you happen to be Catholic, Angel muses again as he watches Uncle Homero devour the groceries of the young married couple in the house of bright colors: he wouldn’t dream of asking permission or saying thank you or offering to raise a finger, that is, until my mother says to my father Angel one April morning:
“I’ve just smashed the last piggy bank, honey. What a pain. What do we do now?”
In a certain sense they exempted Uncle Homero because, after all, he did say that he would withdraw the suit against Angel, and, in this world of great expectations and perpetual illusions which is Mexico ’92, that means that the kids (my parents) had in their possession forty million in gold pesos. Just like that. The fact is that the cupboard was bare, and they, looking seriously into one another’s eyes, declared the primary truth: we’ve got to get jobs. The secondary truth was that, without the help of the Four Fuckups, they didn’t stand a chance in the job market.
Their logical conclusion, after hearing what Uncle Homero said in Malinaltzin, was that their buddies, Egg, Orphan Huerta, Hipi Toltec, and the Baby Ba (despite the fact that she was invisible) had perished in the hecatomb arranged by the government in Acapulco and blamed on the victims.
My parents were vegetating as they watched the alternative reality offered on television, when suddenly two things happened. The Last Playboy Centerfold Contest, a hard one to win because that enterprising Chicago-based magazine hadn’t yet given up the ghost, not even in the face of the puritanical reaction of the eighties (monogamy, condoms, herpes, and AIDS), not even in the face of the change of generations, not even in the face of geographical distances — statistics proved they’d photographed more than 80 percent of the cunts on the planet. No: the magazine had defied age and, some suspected, would defy death itself. But the file of dead beauties in the safes facing windy Lake Michigan, in the iron-steel axis that ran from Chicago to Philadelphia, was closed to public scrutiny, even as the photos of naked crones began to be peddled around in a very discreet fashion. Who would win? The postmortem centerfold of the divine Swede, Lola-Lola, sitting astride a gravestone, or the venerable grandma of the bobbing breasts, Doña Sara García, posing naked as a jaybird?
Neither. This hot April night, a woman barely fifty years of age, well preserved, pretty, although with thick Andalusian ankles and without a jolly Cuban ass, square in the waist and with a cinched-in bosom, her hair tightly curled, red — a grownup version of Little Orphan Annie — a plunging neckline that went nowhere and revealed nothing, forcing the viewer (in this case, my parents and my uncle) to concentrate on the strange glimmer of her teeth, inlaid, overlaid, and plated with silver and gold even if they may have been rotten, turns out to claim the title of Last Playboy Centerfold.
“Clown of a whore,” she said. “It’s not that I haven’t had anything to eat, but there’s going to be some hair pulling if my rights are not recognized, you bunch of stinking ragpickers. I won’t move from here, even if the cops come to cart us off to jail. Shit! Long live Chile!”
“Concha Toro!” exclaimed my father. “The woman who took my virginity! The Chilean bolero singer!”
But the picture, which really did not seem posed, quickly disappeared, and in another television studio someone was handing the prize for the Last Flower Child to none other than Hipi Toltec, while the announcer explained that they had first intended to award the prize to the oldest hippie (there were lots, since someone who was twenty in 1962 was fifty in 1992: no matter how fragile he looks, Mick Jagger is going to reach his fiftieth birthday, and Paul McCartney can indeed ask in a trembling voice “Will you still need me / Will you still feed me / When I’m sixty-four,” which is how old Shirley Temple will be this year, along with Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes). So, since there is really no one more out of it than someone who was a flower child in the sixties, they chose instead to give a prize to the youngest, the person who personified the prolongation and not the extinction of a nostalgic tradition