“Ueuetiliztli!” (Old folks!)
“Xocoyotizin!” (Young pup!)
“Aic nel toxaxahacayan.” (We shall never be obliterated)
“On tlacemichtia.” (There everything was stolen)
“Olloliuhqui, olloliuhqui!” (How the wheel of fortune spins!) and with enormous satisfaction they look at my pregnant mother, they look at the center of my mom, where I launch into an Olympic dive, but when we get back to Tlalpan I still cannot understand Hipi’s world as a past (I want everyone to have a conscious past so I can be born a bit better) but as something very different: he has a secret family and in it there is only a memory of silence.
Something similar is going on with the Orphan Huerta (with all of them in fact, these are their pasts, barely what passes by, nothing more, my tranquil genes tell me, the past is only the past), but the Orphan at least talks about a brother who disappeared, the Lost Boy, he calls him, and about a grandmother who lives in Chicago, where she forgot her Spanish and never learned English: so she became a mute: a memory of silence, I tell them again, this time captured between the successive infernos of wind and ice and a suffocating purgatory: Chicago, City of the Big Shoulders, says my mother, reciting something or other, and the light of reverie goes on in the eyes of all present — Egg, Orphan, Hipi, the invisible Baby Ba (who suddenly I want to see more than anything in the world, convinced suddenly that only I will be able to see her: but in order to do that, I’ll have to be born, to be born and see her, it’s not true she’s invisible, I convince myself because no one sees me either, nor do they pay me the slightest attention, unless I kick or jump around or take swan dives in the stomach of Chicago and Lake Michigan).
There was lots of talk about Chicago in those May days because that’s where the Orphan’s grandma lived, condemned to silence. But there was another reason as welclass="underline" Uncle Fernando passed by the San Pedro Apóstol house with two Indians, a couple he said he’d met during his excursion in February to a land of blind people, and we saw this strange couple with light eyes and dark skin, standing like two flexible statues in the doorway of the house of bright colors, I don’t know if they were blind (I’ve already said it: they don’t see me, so how can I judge those who are also not seen and who just accumulate, if your mercies would care to do the arithmetic: Baby Ba, Hipi’s smoking family, now this couple my parents tell me are handsome, strong, with a strange determination in their clouded-over eyes).
Uncle Fernando speaks for them, but my parents say the couple’s silence is even more eloquent: there is no one better, no one more intelligent in this country than this couple and people like them, no one, not the financier Don Ulises López, not the minister Don Federico Robles Chacón, not the academician Don Homero Fagoaga, not my father, the sensitive and tormented conservative rebel, not the serene and (she tries to be reasonable!) reasonable mamma mia on the left, who is so silent at times in order not to interfere in the obvious results of everything that’s happening, all of them together are not as intelligent, as determined as this pair of Indians who got married the day of the great noise and the night of her first moon, creating another child at the same time I was created, giving me an invisible brother who would never be seen by his parents, created (remember, Reader) in the final moment of an incomprehensible, noisy, incomparable day in which all times went mad and no one could tell whether he was awake or dreaming.
Uncle Fernando returned to the sierra of the blind people, and this couple, who had used his earlier visit as reason for marrying and making a child, recognized the smell (unmistakable, that odor of creole historian) of his return, they stuck to him like glue, repeating again and again a word they’d learned only the gods know where (Chicago, Chicago), and Benítez said to them, “Not Chicago, Chicago, no, you stay here, this is your homeland, you’re needed here, you’d get lost in the world, and two months later here they are, she pregnant, both of them blind, Indians, monolingual, idol worshippers, mythomaniacs, shamanic, syncretic, and, all in all, screwed up, how does that sound for a collection of handicaps, eh? What more can I say? And by saying Chi-ca-go, full of determination, magically willful, here they are and no one’s going to stop them: they are going to escape from the vicious circle of their rural, age-old poverty, they are the most valiant, most stubborn, craziest people in the world: and they have created my brother, the child who was conceived with me! They are going to break with their fate. Will it be worth the trouble?
I don’t really understand what’s going on, I admit it. Don Fernando reasons and fights; they say “Chicago”; it’s cold; that’s where the Orphan Huerta’s grandmother is; if they insist, well here’s her address; but they’re asking for trouble.
In bed, my father says to my mother:
“Quetzalcoatl went east.”
“Cortés came from the west.”
“Wetbacks go north.”
“The dead go south.”
“Those are the cardinal points of Mexico, and no one can escape them!”
9. My father needs a compass
My father needs a compass to find his way through the city: he’s like a navigator in the Unknown Sea. The group has decided that if they’re going to survive, all of them will have to find work in a city overflowing with the unemployed; suspiciously, no one knows anything about Uncle Homero, and Uncle Fernando, who lives off a modest university pension and the success of his books in Poland and Yugoslavia (he’s piled up millions of zlotys and dinars he never expects to see, but he does consume the income in pesos of thirteen Polish and Yugoslav writers in Mexico), has dedicated himself to sowing panic in D.F. parking lots.
Example: he materializes and announces he’s the parking-lot inspector. People think it’s Jupiter turning up at the Last Judgment: they all run, hide, pour water on the heroin, flush the grass down the drain, pretend they know nothing about the smell of marijuana in the air, and even though everyone knows that in parking lots, in trunks, motors, and under seats is where drug trafficking takes place, only Don Fernando takes the bull by its moralizing horns and tells people he’s an incorruptible inspector. No one ever saw such shock, and sowing moral terror is all our Uncle Fernando desires: the point is not to accept any bribe, so that his activity benefits neither himself nor us.
“In any case, with us bribes have become very exclusive. Before, there was a certainty and a democracy to them — they were available to all. In fact, the only human right won by the Mexican Revolution was the right to corruption, which in El Salvador or Paraguay is the privilege of a minority, but which in Mexico belongs to all, from the president to newspapermen, to the cop on the beat — and anyone who isn’t corrupt is an asshole. In any case, in Mexico bribery used to be natural, as it had been since the Aztecs and the colonial period: why, in the court of Carlos III of Spain, bribes were called “Mexican grease.” But nowadays, dear niece and nephew and you FUBARS here present, functionaries refuse the first bribe and play to see who’ll give more, they make scenes — How dare you, sir! International Baby Foods offered me double that, the Emirates Baksheesh Corporation triple that, what an idea! Come now, you can do better than that, sir. They even use an international vocabulary nowadays: the pure and simple bribe is called the perquisite or baksheesh, kickbacks are called pot-de-vin. Even the bribers have begun to put on airs; now they choose those they want to bribe and don’t try to buy off just anyone. There are categories, what did you think, eh? Anyone who bribes a transit cop is committing a serious breach of Mexican etiquette. Bribing a customs agent brings a total loss of face. Bribing, real bribing, takes place only if you bribe the Cardinal Primate, the President, Minister Robles Chacón, Mamadoc, or, extraterritorially, the North American President, Ronald Ranger (if in fact he really exists and isn’t merely what he always was: a photo opportunity, a fleeting TV image no one could hear because his voice was drowned out by the roar of the helicopter whisking him away for a weekend at Camp Goliath, just one more decal on vans with Colorado oasis windows, a hologram!). Okay, let’s see you bribe the Iron Lady, Emperor Akihito, Bishop Tutu, or Mother Teresa. Now that’s bribery, not some flea-bitten congressman, the cop on the corner, or the customs officer, forget it!”