TUGUEDER
A Service That Brings People Together
and Organizes Brilliant Parties
Get Yourself Out of the Labyrinth of Solitude!
“Do you know any lonely proletarians?” asked Egg, explaining why the project was a sure thing. “You don’t, right? Only the rich are going to need this service, mark my word.”
Baking Services Under the Direct Supervision of: Baby Ba
Service Director: Angel Palomar y Fagoaga
Meanwhile, Angel went on translating sayings, Angeles translated classics into street talk. Orphan Huerta hired himself out to the various newfangled political parties that had sprung up in the wake of President Paredes’s free-will reform: he became a political cream-pie thrower, an essential figure at all political rallies. Hipi Toltec, because he looked like a magician, sold pills that let you dream your favorite TV program, and Egg along with Baby Ba devoted themselves exclusively to TUGUEDER.
“Bet you can’t guess,” said Egg one June afternoon to Angel. “I just got a call from the house of Ulises López. They want us to organize a birthday party for their daughter, Penny.”
Egg paused as he was writing down a list and looked knowingly at Angeclass="underline" “Remember her dancing at Divan the Terrible down in Aca?”
How could he forget her? Egg watched the reverie pass through the gypsy (if myopic) eyes, streaked with Moor and Aztec, of his friend Angeclass="underline" even if Penelope’s golden butterfly eyes had merely fluttered over him that New Year’s Eve, his own were fixed on his memory of her that night: he’d only seen her once, and for that reason his visual memory was charged with nostalgia; she was more beautiful, more brilliant than if he’d seen her every day and, above all, more beautiful than if she had noticed him even once: ah, the golden girl, who abandoned the sun to come down here and console the stars, said Ada Ching that night (rightly, for a change), and it was then Penny’s eyes had settled like two dark butterflies on my father, only to move on, never to return. She danced, lifted her leg, showed her thigh under her sequined skirt, and a down-covered crease, a slice of quince, a tiny, moist copper coin which suddenly, tonight, my father desires more than anything in the world, as he spontaneously rejects my mother, the contest, and me, desiring more than anything else a night with Penny, his penis in Penny, penetrating Penny, forcing Penny to look at him with her butterfly eyes as they come at the same moment, all for the promise which in that instant passed through his mind, filling his with color fugues, red and blue circles that light up and go out, futuristic, energetic murals shot into the void, all in the name of his resurrected passion for Penny López, the daughter of the minister, and all because feeling nostalgia, living on nostalgia, on the unreachable becomes intolerable for my father, a kind of death in reverse, a waiting for the past in order to die in it, an impotent dissatisfaction with what is already dead and gone. A catatonic nostalgia for the films of Constance Bennett or the records of Rudy Vallee or Schiaparelli’s dresses or fin-de-siècle postcards from Baden-Baden was possible, but so was a violent nostalgia to recover Fiume, annex the Sudetenland, or manifest your destiny to Texas and California: my father didn’t want nostalgia, he wanted Penny and he wanted Penny to want penis, and when he desired all this, we (the contest, Mommy, and Baby Meme) faded into the background, although my father did feel enough remorse to admit the faults in his stable character, which was conservative, traditionalist; damn, man, he dared to say aloud to Egg, everything conspires against what I want to be; and that’s how it would be if you wanted to be just the opposite, our buddy Egg said with a smile in his eyes; I can’t stop playing the lover boy, even though it means putting my balls on the line, said my father in silence (I know he said it because later on he said it aloud to my mother):
“This is my worst contradiction, babe. I want to be a conservative without retiring as a lover boy.”
“What contradiction are you talking about?” my mother answered him. “Don’t fool yourself. You’re right smack in the tradition. Don’t think that playing around is some kind of progress.”
In any case, Angel cut out a color photo of Penny López from Nicolás Sánchez Osorio’s society page in Novedades and pasted it over an article by Philip Roth in a copy of The New York Review of Books that Angeles refused to read for fear of contracting even more ideas. My father trembled with the thrill of the risk he was taking.
* * *
But the rift occurred later on. Now it was time to organize for Penny López’s June 15 Sweet-Sixteen Party in the house of the magnate and ex-minister, Don Ulises, and his wife, Doña Lucha: five hundred guests of the highest quality was what the lady had requested; there weren’t that many, said Egg seriously. High society had either collapsed or run away a long time ago; only the ones who are really in love with power are still here because there’s no way they can exercise it from a Jacuzzi in Malibu, and besides, my mother reminded them, this Ulises guy is really a pariah and no one is going to want to become one too by going to his house. Then Pater Meus had a luminous idea: Concha Toro! The Chilean singer still existed. She’d appeared on TV for having won one of the Last Playboy Centerfold Contests, how long ago was it? They sent Orphan and Hipi out to wander the streets for the entire day, and twenty-four hours later they produced her c.v., which Egg translated from Anglatl slang with his renowned mental agility:
Concha Toro
(née) María Inez Aldunate y Larraín
in Chilián, Chile,
on January 6, [year blotted out]
aka Dolly Lama
Aristocratic family
Family ruined by the collapse of the
nitrate market
Education: Santiago College
Emigrates to Argentina as a young
woman
Proclaimed High Priestess of Sexual
Ultraism
Emigrates to the U.S.A.
Enters conga line with Xavier Cugat’s
orchestra
Sings celestial choruses for M-G-M
movies
Dancer, chorus line of 42nd Street road
company
Backup girl in Las Vegas Dionne
Warwicke and Boy George show
Success in Mexico singing boleros
Hostess at SIMON BULLY BAR
Supervises Home-Delivery Theater
services
“Perfect!” shouted Egg. “Who wants to interview her?”
“She took my virginity,” said Angel, my father.
“That lets you out. We want this deal to be totally professional, no personality factors, I’ll talk to her,” said our buddy with totally uncensored enthusiasm.
And my father reasoned that he already had enough on his mind with his soul divided between the presence of Angeles and the potentialities of Penny to allow himself the luxury of nostalgia for a woman who had to be in her sixties by now: let Egg arrange the Home-Delivery Theater in the López house to help Penny celebrate, while my father attempted to work out — though he knew he’d fail — the two anguishes he was feeling that June:
Could he rely on the contest as an avenue to the future?
Could he be faithful to Angeles without letting Penny get away this time?
* * *
The first anguish (and how rapidly you run, dear Dad, from disorder to despair!) got even more serious when, on his eleventh visit to the Palace of the Citizenry, he found all the employees abandoning the place: feverishly shredding documents, packing up books and typewriters, taking down the official photographs of President Paredes and Mamadoc, sweeping up the dry leaves that had invaded the corridors with a preternatural taste of autumn. The man with the visor was no longer in his window, nor was the crippled doorman in his place, Dr. Menges and his companion, the lady with the Goering cameo, were being taken out, quite stiff, on stretchers: their blue faces and their necktie-length tongues suggested a sinister end; and the operation was being directed by a face that Angel fearfully recognized as that of the implacable Colonel Inclán, chief of the metropolitan police. Who could ever forget his black glasses, his skull-like face, his greenish complexion, the green spittle running out the corners of his mouth, his hoarse voice giving rapid, precise orders: