Christopher Unborn (41 page)

Then the first walls painted on the shores of the desert:

IS GOD PROGRESSING
?

The mutilated van rolled along like just one more tumbleweed past the agaves and the yuccas in the high desert, all of them hoarding water, as if they knew what was waiting for them as soon as the car dove into the sudden black hole that seemed to swallow everything around it—in this case, the backed-up line of cars and the multitude on foot, some barefoot, others wearing huaraches, all poor and fine, with the aristocratic bones of misery piercing the skin of their faces, arms, and ankles: the jammed-up cars and pilgrims who wanted to enter Mexico City through the eye of a needle, a genuine and not even slightly metaphoric Taco Curtain, said Uncle Fernando Benítez, one that completely surrounded the capital, with strategically located entrance points at Texmelucan, Zumpango, Angangueo, and Malinalco: but the Malinalco entry is closed because the son of a governor or mayor—no one bothers to remember—seized by force of arms all the land adjacent to the new highway from Yautepec to Cuernavaca and no one knows if the complaint lodged by the people from the communal land, who haven't seen a miserable endomorphic peso, has been taken up by the authorities, or if the highway is being built, or if the son of the governor or mayor ordered it closed forever, let's see anyone try to get through: who knows? who knows? who knows? and what about us, how are we going to get through the inspection held at the Taco Curtain, especially now that a powerful fourteen-feet-high Leyland eighteen-wheeler is getting in front of us. its driver staring ferociously out the window at my father, still driving the Van Gogh, challenging him to pass the long line of vehicles ahead on the curve, not caring that there is an armada of wheezing buses coming from the other direction. My mother wakes up instinctively at that moment and, along with my father, stares back at the truck driver, a cut-off albino about twenty-five years of age, dressed in leather, wearing gloves decorated with chrome-plated studs, clearly visible because the albino grasps the truck's gigantic steering wheel so ferociously. The albino stares at us ferociously (they say) through his black wraparound glasses, the kind worn by blind singers (felicianos we could call them, charley rays, wonderglasses): what's ferocious about him are his white, high, curving, mephistophelian brows. My parents see the pictures of the Virgin, Mrs. Thatcher, and Mamadoc as well as the portrait of an unknown Lady, all surrounded by votive lamps inside the cab, while, outside, the truck's jukebox-style lights go on and off, and on the roof a light spins around, throwing out even more multicolored lights.

“Let him pass,” my mother says. “Truck drivers don't care who you are or whether you live or die. In my town…”

She stops talking; the noisily insolent truck went ahead of us. The truck had the right (or wrong) of way and showed it in its open back door, which revealed its refrigerated interior, where the cadavers of steers swung back and forth on bloody hooks; fresh cow and calf carrion, fresh pig heads and trotters, shimmying gelatines, brains and liver, kidneys and lamb heads, testicles, sausages, loins, breasts, the albino's armada gets ahead of our van, drowning out the joyous exclamation of Uncle Fernando: “A Soutine!” drowning out everything with the prepotency of its mission: all of that was going to feed the monstrous city of thirty million people: we, if we were lucky, were going to be fed too, and if we were on the highway, it was because there was no other way to get to the city: first the roads were left to rot when it only cost ten pesos to go from Mexico City to Acapulco by plane, but then the creaking planes stopped working because there were no spare parts and inspection was totally inadequate, airports without radar, colonial backwardness, less than what you find in Botswana, whined Don Homero!

The truck armada passed us laughing, giving us the finger, all of them with their doors open and their hacked-up wares hanging out so we could see what they were carrying and why they had the right to pass us, put our lives at risk, and enter Mug Sicko City before we did, they were carrying the red, chilled death just to bring life to the pale, suffocated life of the capital; they were the long-haul drivers, a race apart, a nation within the nation, who possessed the power to starve people and link the remotest parts of the squalid, disconnected territory of the Sweet Fatherland. A decal on a fender proclaimed:

TRUCK DRIVERS WITH THE VIRGIN

Their cargo would be our lives: we let them pass by and just miss smashing head-on into the Red Arrow that was coming from the opposite direction, and we waited our turn, exhausted, paralyzed, inching along just to have the privilege of reentering the Federal District by means of the highway, without having Uncle Homero—which would have been the easy way to do it—take out his PRI identification, which he cannot do because he has to keep a low profile for a bit, and Uncle Fernando can't appeal to President Jesús María y José Paredes without bringing Uncle H. to grief, and as for us, well, it's better no one knows where we're coming from or what we did in Kafkapulco in what seems a century ago now—time flies, time flees, time fleas, time flies, tempus fugit!

“Eheu, eheu, fugaces!” sighed our fecund Don Homero Fagoaga, as if he were reading my intrauterine thoughts. My parents turned around to see both uncles: Don Fernando had his head in his hands and was muttering, his eyes turned upward: “Oh, Lord, please, please free us from our relatives, Lord. What a nightmare! This is the last straw.”

Homero Fagoaga was decked out with two lustrous pitch-black tresses tied up with tricolor ribbons; he'd shaved off the tuft of hair he wore under his lip, rouged his cheeks, powdered his brow, smeared his lips scarlet, and restored the sparkle to his dying eyes with the help of some Maybelline; naturally, he had no need to powder the milky whiteness of his bosoms and his bare arms, given the rather small size of the blouse embroidered with carnations and roses he'd managed to squeeze into, although it was true he did have to tighten the red rebozo around his waist and, finally, work his way into the tiny red velvet slippers and shake out the beads on the wide skirt of the
china poblana
outfit he'd tricked himself out in.

Dear niece and nephew, please don't look at me that way. You know how curious I am: well, this morning I was poking through the chests and armoires in the Malinaltzin sacristy. I found no white vestments, no stoles, no bodices, but I did find this proudly national costume. Think what you like, imagine what you please. I'll simply repeat the famous words of the onetime chronicler of this magnificent city—which, it seems, is keeping us at arm's length for the nonce—Don Salvador Novo, when a press photographer discovered him sitting at his dressing table: “I feel pretty, and witty, and gay.”

He hummed a tune from
West Side Story
and delicately stepped out of the Van Gogh to deal with the ill-featured but well-armed cop who was about to question us. He swirled his beaded skirt even more: Uncle Homero needed no crinolines to stand out in a crowd. The width of those homeric hips was such that the design of the eagle perched on the nopal devouring the serpent did not flaccidly hang down from his waist to the ground but virtually flew, proudly unfurled over Uncle Homero's ass.

“I'm coming, I'm coming, if I don't that eagle's gonna lay an egg!” exclaimed the policeman. With a graceful gesture, Homero pushed aside the cop's submachine gun and, with his eyes as bright as streetlights, said, “I can see you're happy to see me, Mr. Policeman, but let's not get carried away; come on now, put your little gun away!”

“Got a pass?”

“A pass?” swaggered Homero, his hands resting on his hips. “A pass for the queen of the bullring, the empress of the arena, Cuca Lucas, who's needed no pass to get into Buckingham Palace or the White House?”

“But it's that…”

“Don't say a word. Our national honor has been carried through the world on my songs, young fellow. Neither the world nor love has ever closed its doors to me—so do you think you'll be the first?”

“But it's that we've got to know where you're coming from.”

“Where
do
my songs come from,” said Homero in a singsong voice, “and where
do
they go: to praise the singularity and the beauty of the fatherland!”

“We've got our orders, miss.”

“Madam, if you please.”

“Okay. Madam.”

“Don't bully me now, young man. Put that gun away. So you want to know where I'm coming from, do you now, dearie? From my little farm just beyond the wheatfield there.”

“And what about your friends here, ma'am?”

“Friends? You could treat me with more respect, handsome.”

“Ma'am, the law…”

“The law, the law, handsome! Papers, license plates, influence, friends, isn't that what you mean?”

The representative of the law looked sadly and apprehensively at Uncle Fernando's handlebar mustache and his broken glasses. “I'm her agent,” said the loyal Benítez as the cop closed his eyes. Then he opened them in curiosity at the resort shirts and blue jeans my parents were wearing: “We're the lady's musical accompanists,” said my father. “I play the guitar and she plays the violin.”

“Okay…”

“You can believe me, Mr. Policeman,” said Homero, climbing back into the van. “Thanks to me, the glories of Mexico are known throughout the world. Why, because of me, people know that only Veracruz is beautiful, how pretty Michoacán is, that there is no other place like Mexico, how pretty the morning in which I come to greet you is, that I'm a guy from the borderland, hurray for Ciudad Juárez, hurray for Chihuahua, and my pretty country! and Granada, a land I've dreamed of…”

“Okay, okay…”

The cop closed the door behind Don Homero's ass—including the eagle in repose—just barely resisting the temptation to stretch out his hand, resisting the reflex action of firing his machine gun.

“My, how pretty Taxco is, that cute little town with a saintly face! Toledo, the shining star of the world is what you are! Matamorelos the handsome, with your superb orange groves, and Puebla is just the frosting on the cake, that's what Puebla is!”

“Enough, ma'am…”

“Din-din-din go the bells of Medellín; ay, Jalisco don't give up; Querétaro, rétaro, rétaro, don't hold me back, 'cause here I come!”

“All I'm gonna say now is get the fuck out of my sight, ma'am, get going 'cause you're blocking the way…”

“The way to Corralejo, my beautiful Pénjamo, you shine like a diamond…”

“Stop, ma'am!” shouted the cop in a flood of tears.

“Don't stop, nephew, step on it now!”

“Ma'am,” sang out the cop, “I want to hear more about Pénjamo, that's where I come from…”

“Step on it and don't lose your nerve, Angelito! Just what I was afraid would happen…!”

“Oh, honey, don't do this to me, it's breaking my heart!”

“Will you get going, you idiot!”

He could hear the weepy voice of the trooper—“a girl from Cuerámaro told me I looked as though I came from Pénjamo”—and then he entered the gray-skied world, near to where Hernán Cortés had his private hunting preserve on Peñón de los Baños, plastered up with signs advertising beer, lubricants, and cockroach poison, while Angel stuck his head out the window trying to find a way through the wheezing jalopies and Angeles began to cough: her eyes vainly sought the birds of Moctezuma's aviary, the quetzals with their green plumage, the royal eagles, the parrots, and the fine-feathered ducks, the flower gardens and fragrant trees, the pools and cisterns of fresh water, all of it built in cut stone and stuccoed over, and instead they found the monumental series of one-dimensional façades of famous buildings and statues and bodies of water all lined up at the entrance to the city to raise the spirit of traveler you have reached the place where the air is etc.: the Arc de Triomphe and the Statue of Liberty, the Bosphorus, and the Colosseum, St. Basil's, the Giralda, the Great Wall and the Taj Mahal, the Empire State Building and Big Ben, the Galleria in Houston (Texas) and the Holiday Inn in Disneyland, the Seine, and Lake Geneva, all lined up in a row, in hallucinatory succession, like a vast Potemkin Village erected in the very porticos of Mexico City in order to facilitate self-delusion and so we could say to ourselves, “We aren't so badly off; we're at least at the level of; well, who knows, we're as good as; well, who said we didn't have our very own Galleria Shopping Mall and our own Arc de Triomphe: who says this is the only great metropolis without a river or a lake; who would dare say it; only a bad Mexican, a sell-out, someone green with envy…”

But as they stared at this hallucination, Angel and Angeles knew (Don Homero was rubbing off his makeup, removing his wig; Don Fernando refused to believe what he was seeing through his glasses broken by Matamoros Moreno's thugs) that this one-dimensional cardboard prologue to the city was identical to the city itself, that it wasn't a caricature but a warning: Potemkin City, Potemkin Land in which President Jesús María y José Paredes heads a government in which nothing that is said is done, was done, or will ever be done: dams, power stations, highways, agricultural cooperatives: nothing, only announcements and promises, pure façades and the President goes through a series of ritualized actions devoid of content which are the content of TV news programs: the President of the Republic ritualistically distributes land that doesn't exist; he inaugurates monuments as ephemeral as these painted backdrops, he pays homage to nonexistent heroes: have you ever heard of Don Nazario Narano, hero of the Battle of the Coatzacoalcos Meat Packing Plant? About the child heroine Malvina Gardel, who gave her life for our sister republic wrapped in a true-blue sky-blue Argentine flag? About Alfredo Mangino, who donated his entire bank account—in dollars—to the tune of $1,492, to the nation during the 1982 crisis? About the oil worker Ramiro Roldán, who ripped off his wife's ears and cut off her fingers so he could donate her earrings and rings to the National Solidarity Fund to pay our foreign debt? About the Unknown Giggler, who died laughing sitting in front of his television set and seeing all the aforementioned acts of heroism and seeing functionaries in mansions surrounded by stone walls in Connecticut and condos next door to the Prince of Wales and Lady Di in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, and in Parthenons over the sea in Zihuatanejo, receive the life savings of Mexico's poor?