Christopher Unborn (52 page)

“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 Angel: “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 Angel: 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:

“Quickly, or you're all dead.”

I suppose that my father's anguish resolved itself into a single desperate action: to speak to Inclán, to ask him about the contest, about what was going on with it; but when the colonel saw him running up and shouting What about the contest? he started to draw his pistol, as did his squad of bodyguards. Angel trembled, but he didn't know if Inclán could see him through his black glasses. Show me your ID, my father was about to say, shitting in his pants, where's your badge! his exquisite cinematic memory demanded of this Indio Bedoya of
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
fame for the nineties who was foaming yellow at the mouth as he repeated incessantly, his hand resting on his gun, caressing the grip:

“Only shoot when it's really necessary. Count to ten. Remember how you were taught. We don't want any more Tlateloco Massacres. Count to twenty. Don't call this asshole an asshole. He dares mention the Mamadoc contest to me! He dares to mention Robles Chacón's symbols to me! But don't kill this asshole. Not yet. Offer him a friendly hand. A friendly hand. The paraffin test for my friendly hand. Take my friendly hand. Take it! Take it!”

Angel grabbed the hand of the Supreme Policeman, ominously backed up by his coterie of green-uniformed Janissaries, the cold of that superdry palm burned him, the gray, steel-sharp fingernails scratched him slightly. He sought in vain heat, sweat, or hair: like the skin of a crocodile, Colonel Inclán's hand had no temperature. It wasn't even cold, Angel said to himself, as he released it and withdrew like Ponderosa before her mistress—not daring to turn his back on Inclán in the half light of this cement Tenochtitlán where the colonel, immobile, devoid of temperature, surrounded by his assassins, muttered No violence, friendly hand, friendly hand, with a voice that grew more and more horrifying and thick. He was swallowed up by the Aztec night and the living eagle perched on the cactus outside began to fly against a red sky, but a few yards up he was stopped by the chain around his leg and after a bit he roosted on a parabolic antenna. But he never released the serpent he was carrying in his beak. Angel turned and ran.

3

“Life,” Samuel Butler once wrote, “is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.” Our buddy Egg, dressed in his morning coat and striped trousers, cravat, and pearl tie pin, remembered that quotation as he tried to rehearse the seven-piece orchestra hired for Penny López's Sweet-Sixteen Party by the amalgamated forces of the TUGUEDER service and the Home-Delivery Theater service of Concha Toro, alias María Inez Aldunate y Larraín, alias Dolly Lama. This combo, which crawled out from under God knows what rock, couldn't understand Egg even with the sheet music our buddy composed right under their noses, and the musicians whiled away their time tuning their instruments. Although the five hundred low-caliber guests constituted a crowd, they certainly didn't make a party: their costumes were depressing, folkloric or cosmopolitan, following the standards set in Mexican movies during the forties. There were people in
tehuana
and
chinaco
costume, society ladies with concrete beehive hairdos wearing gowns cut Greek-goddess style from the Eisenhower era, gentlemen wearing tuxedos and white vests that were too long or dinner jackets with white, very wide piqué ties, gentlemen wearing golf trousers and ladies wearing white foxes and pillbox hats inspired by the Maginot Line: the entire wardrobe supply of Churubusco Studios, the storage bins and inheritance of Virginia Zury and Andrés Soler made their phantasmal appearance chez Ulises López, his wife Lucha, and their daughter Penny, the day she turned sixteen. The ballroom in the mansion in Las Lomas del Sol turned out to be too small to hold—that's how Doña Lucha began a society column she was writing in her head—the darling couples from our jeunesse dorée, accompanied by their distinguished chaperons, who looked like (Ulises held back his disgust) extras in some film starring María Antonieta Pons and, as it turned out, that and only that is what they were: Concha Toro's Home-Delivery Theater gave work to thousands of old extras from Mexican movies. None of this seemed to bother my dad Angel in the slightest, because that night he only had eyes for the guest of honor, the adorable ingenue, Penelope López, who appeared wearing a miniskirt and a gilt breastplate, long golden legs, and high, stiletto heels. She was a bit dazed by the mob, and stared through the guests as if they were made of glass. The truth is that all they were doing was occupying space, adding to the body count, filling the ballroom that was enlivened by a combo that never managed to play a single number, tuning up endlessly, led by our truly desperate buddy Egg: what did these guys have against his music? why didn't they play it? and with Penny on her cloud and Angel unable to make eye contact with her.

Mrs. Lucha Plancarte de López was instantly attracted to my dad Angel (descendant of the best families); she stalked up to him like a panther, led him to the punch bowl, and spoke to him about people like us, you know what I mean, young man, aristocratic Mexicans of means. She then gave him a detailed description of her first visit to Bloomingdale's, an event of transcendent importance in her life, and she gave another detailed description of the suite she usually took at the Parker Meridien in New York in, alas, other times, the bubble having burst, but she (after taking my father's arm, little Lucha's hand hidden in my father's armpit) could survive any crisis with a little tenderness and understanding. Mrs. López's verborrhea enveloped my father Angel: she never stopped talking about trips abroad, and when she'd exhausted that theme she went on to relatives, illness, servants, and priests—in that order.

“I can't stand any more of this idle chitchat,” my father said to her brutally.

“Last night I went to see a property of mine which had been illegally occupied by squatters,” Mrs. L. P. de López said suddenly by way of response. “I brought along my gunmen, and we set the whole place on fire. No one got out of there alive, son. Who is your confessor? Like to see some photos of Penny when she was a baby?”

She scratched my father's hand. With a cigar in his mouth, Ulises López watched the crowd moving through the hall. From a distance, saw how his wife approached my father Angel, saw the anxiety with which Angel tried to penetrate Penny's vacant stare, when the circle his extremely active mind was about to draw was broken by an apparition: a Chaplinesque boy, his eyebrows raised in astonishment, was helping another boy, this one dressed in snakeskin, to carry the stupendous birthday cake to the round table which had been set up in the center of the hall. They set it down, put in the sixteen candles, asked Penny to make a wish and blow them out, which our Valley (Anáhuac) Girl did, blasting away with an unexpectedly bullish snort. The candles went out without a whimper, everyone sang Jappy Burtay Two Jews (without musical accompaniment; the combo was still tuning its instruments), Orphan Huerta and Hipi Toltec cut the cake and served slices to the guests, first, of course, to the guest of honor and her proud parents. Out of the corner of his eye, as he was raising his first forkful of chocolate cake with vanilla sugar icing and strawberry filling to his mouth, Don Ulises saw a cinnamon-tea-colored girl, her dark skin visible through her transparent raincoat and clear-plastic gloves, enter the hall with the expression of a lost shepherdess on her face, dripping the acid rain of the June night at exactly the moment in which Ulises, Penny, Lucha, and everyone else bit the cake and spit it out, shouting, vomiting: