Christopher Unborn (56 page)

“You seem upset this morning,” said Capitolina inquisitorially. “What's wrong? Tell me!”

“Oh dear!” Farnesia sighed. “It's something you already know about.”

She swiftly got up out of the love seat, threw herself at the feet of her sister, and rested her head on those knees Julien Sorel might have envied.

“Swear,” said Farnesia, forgetting for once her habitual use of the first-person plural, “swear, Capitita, that when I'm dying you won't let the old ladies into the house to go through all my boxes and chests.”

“Is that what's bothering you today?”

“Yes.” Farnesia sobbed, with her head nestled in Capitolina's lap. “Today and always.”

“Are you still afraid that someone will discover your secret?”

“Yes, yes, that's what we're afraid of!” Lapsing into her usual form of address, Farnesia wept.

“Aren't you even more afraid of dying without sharing it?”

“Oh dear, wouldn't that be a gift! We don't have any right to hope for so much: to have a secret and nevertheless be able to find someone worthy of sharing it with!”

“We almost had it with little Angel when he was a boy.”

“Almost, little sister, almost. But there you have it … In the first place…”

“Of course, of course,” interrupted Capitolina, taking her sister's head in her hands and forcing her to raise her face. “And what if I were to tell you that we can achieve that desire?”

Farnesia's huge, round, dark Kewpie-doll eyes opened questioningly.

“Now I'm going to tell you what should be upsetting you most this morning, little sister. Our nephew Angel is going to have a child.”

“With whom, with whom? Do we know her? Are they married? Tell me, tell me … I'm fainting from curiosity, in the second place and finally, I'm fainting!”

“Don't faint, Farnecita. Her name is Angeles. We don't know her. They aren't married. Now get a hold of yourself: he's abandoned her to chase after that nouveau-riche Penelope López who lives in one of those brand-new developments where they just put in the septic tank yesterday.”

“But tell us more!” said Farnesia breathlessly.

Miss Capitolina Fagoaga had never had such an opportunity for drama before, so she played it for all it was worth, standing up (so suddenly that Farnesia's head bounced off the Récamier armrest), walking toward the high French window in the house on Durango Street, and playing with the curtain strings, closing the curtains bit by bit until the boudoir lay in darkness.

“More, more…” (The shadows were swallowing Farnesia's voice.)

Capitolina paused majestically, her silhouette barely visible in a thin line of light.

“Sister: we have managed to defend this home against all the horrors of the past fifty years.”

“And we're still young and vigorous, we can…” said Farnesia without finishing, jumping back into her love seat.

“That's not the problem. We have to ask ourselves who is going to get custody of the child when he's born.”

“Well, of course it would be his mother…”

“And did you bring up your baby when it was born?” said Capitolina ferociously, snapping open the curtains so that the light would blind Farnesia, who covered her eyes, burst into tears, and said, “Things were different in those days, I was a Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Monies de Oca, with a name, a position, a family. How was I going to raise an illegitimate child, how…?”

“But our nephew's trollop can?”

“We're living in different times, with different people,” whimpered the younger sister, her face entirely covered by an organdy handkerchief with raised embroidery pierced by an arrow and with the initials FB.

“You are an incorrigible romantic,” Capitolina said, dropping the curtains and walking toward Farnesia. “You still have that ridiculous handkerchief with your lover's initials on it.”

“That's why I don't want anyone poking around in our drawers when we die,” she said in her highest voice.

“That's not what I'm talking about!” Capitolina shouted this time. “That's all over and done! He never renounced the child, he begged you that if you didn't want it, to give it to him, it was you who made it disappear, don't you remember? What did you do with your son, blockhead?”

“Don't scream at me, Capitita. I forgot! I swear that I forgot … I mean, we forgot, no, no … I mean that you must have known … it's my way of speaking … no, I didn't kill him, I swear, I gave him to, I don't know who it was, I don't remember, all I remember is that I put a silver chain around his ankle, one that could expand and grow with him, and our names, Farnesia and Fernando, there's the key in a jewel box over there, that's why I don't want … we don't want, isn't that so?… anyone poking around in our…”

“Don't be a fool and don't take me for one. You must have given the child to Servilia.”

“To whom?”

“To whoever was the maid then. Don't you remember?”

“How can I when they all have the same name? Who was Servilia in 1964? In any case, it's our secret…”

“You wanted to share it with Angel.”

“Yes. You know why.” Now it was Farnesia's turn to stare directly and maliciously at her sister. “You know what we were going to ask him for in exchange for our secret. You know very well.”

“That's not what matters here. What matters is something infinitely more important.” Capitolina rose majestically. “What matters is that we get all we ever wanted—in one fell swoop.”

“A child to share our secrets,” said Farnesia, stretching out her hand to touch her sister's. “A child to replace my own, sister, and to replace Angelito, who abandoned us…”

“Especially a child of our own blood, who should not grow up on the street, whose mother is unmarried and whose father abandoned him. In a word, a Fagoaga!”

“Yes, yes, we should educate him ourselves,” exclaimed Farnesia.

“Don't give me any of that Commie propaganda,” her sister answered her haughtily. “You don't give education. Education's something you drink in your mother's milk. Our religion is all we need!”

“Excuse my lack of ignorance,” said Farnesia humbly. “How silly, I must be falling asleep … you know.”

“All right now. Try to understand our plan: we are going to get custody of that child. I've found out he'll be born in October. We're three months away from the delivery date. We have time.”

8

The reader ought to know that in point of fact my father did attempt to escape the vicious circle of love that locked him in Lady Lucha's arms, promising that one day he would obtain Penny's favors. He accosted her at various times throughout the day—while she was playing roulette in her private casino, or sitting in her red velvet movie theater watching the complete films of Shirley Temple, or swimming in the heated pool in the shape of the United States. But the girl had a gift for never looking at him and thus fanned the flames of his almost medieval desire, as if he were a knight frustrated by the inviolable distance between himself and this maiden imprisoned behind drawbridges, chastity belts, and within the improbable purity she had constructed around herself.

One desperate day, he entered her room only to find she was not there (she always seemed to be
elsewhere
). He rubbed his cheek with a towel she had tossed aside, smelled her hairbrush; his unsatisfied passion was so strong he even wished to find one of Penny's used tampons so he could put it under his pillow, just as he'd once left a condom filled with his semen under Penny's pillow only to see it later floating in the garden pool, blown up and with Superman painted on it.

One night when he hid behind the curtains in Penny's bedroom to watch her sleep, he discovered some of the small secrets of this princess who would not allow herself to be touched by princes, plebes, or anyone else: Penny smelled herself! He saw her in bed amorously, slowly smelling first her armpits, then the hand which she'd held between her legs for such a long time, then her pinkie, which she'd hidden in her anus, and then came her farts. These tiny peals of thunder, fully audible, were jealously swept up in her little fist and instantly brought to her nostrils and absorbed there in a spasm, her eyes closing delightedly, her mouth agonizing in ecstasy; she gave her farts more than she gave him, her unknown lover! A gas got more affection than he did!

This discovery drove my father Angel right out of his foreseeable—monotonous but promising—game plan. And so he arrived, not in a bad mood, but distracted and ill-humored at the dinner table around which, perversely, the three members of the López family and my father gathered to enjoy Médoc d'Aubuisson's opulent cuisine.

“Perhaps at the end of summer we'll go someplace nice for a vacation,” said Don Ulises without conviction, trying to initiate a trivial conversation.

“Where?” His wife arched her plucked and painted eyebrow. “To your native Chilpancingo? to the floating gardens of Xochimilco? Or might we venture to the far reaches of Pachuca, Hidalgo?”

“Patience, sweetheart,” said Ulises to Lucha, patting her hand. “Things will straighten themselves out, I promise.”

“Bah,” grunted the lady. “Things will only straighten themselves out if Mexico is annexed by the United States. How I wish it would happen! Then I wouldn't have to go abroad just to go shopping.”

“Don't be frivolous,” Ulises sweetly chided her. “The reason you say that is because they are organized and we are disorganized. In the long run, we'll only be saved if we're governed from Washington. All the rest is nothing but outmoded patriotism.”

“Well, I'd be happy with being Puerto Rico,” said the lady. “It's better than nothing.”

“Oooooh, I get so mixed up,” said Penny. “I don't, ya know, like to traaavel, no way, because I never know where I aaam, or, like, what the name of the place is. I'm reeelly dumb in, like, geography, even though I went to the Ibero-American School.”

“Well, where
haven't
you been, Penny?” asked my poor father, as innocent as a lamb.

“Oooooh, even I can answer that one. Almost nobody's been there, like, what's that place with the reeely funny name,

Pacífica,

is that, like, what they call it? How come we never go there, huh?”

A frozen silence from Doña Lucha, a kick under the table from her father's short leg, a sudden curiosity in my father, who, in that instant, felt tired of this passion, this comedy …

“Have you ever been in

Pacífica?”

he asked with the same innocent expression on his face, repeating the question put to him by Deng Chopin in the defunct Acapulco boîte, Divan the Terrible.

No one answered, and my father will swear that something happened there that he could not explain but which did explain Don Ulises's invitation to visit him in the Salon of the Stars (Marlene! Rhonda! Greta!), where, with no preambles, forgoing all etiquette, not even asking him to sit down, with not a hint of political caviling or philosophic evocation, the millionaire said to my father:

“Let's see now, Palomar. You've been here over a month now. You must be wondering why I brought you here and why I've kept you on.”

“Don Ulises: I came here to get your daughter, not your wife.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said López impatiently, “I confess I need sexual collaborators for my wife. Her nymphomania wears me out and you're certainly not the first stud to dirty her sheets. But let's get to the point: you haven't been able to seduce my daughter. Want me to hand her to you?”

My father didn't know if the polite thing was to say yes or no. In the confusion that overpowered him, he could only say emphatically: “A pleasure.”

This non sequitur, like a lapse in synchronization between the actor's lips and the sound of the words, did not correct itself over the course of the dialogue between my father and Ulises:

“You'll be able to take a break from my wife and all her demands.”

“An honor to meet you.”

“But you will not even be able to touch Penny with a rose petal.”

“My name is Angel Palomar y Fagoaga.”

“Unless you do for me exactly what I'm going to tell you to do.”

“After you.”

“I need a seraph to do my dirty work for me.”

“Hello.”

“What you did so well with my wife, I want you to do with my rivals.”

“Happy to meet you.”

“My business rivals. My rivals in the government. I want you to take advantage of your good looks, your social connections, your aristocratic pedigree, all of that, to open doors that will not open for me or my family, I want you to seduce wives and daughters, discover secrets, communicate them to me, and when necessary, to humiliate all these people and lead them to bankruptcy, and—why not?—get rid of them if necessary.”

Don Ulises jumped up, almost did a flip, clicked his heels noisily in the air, and landed on his feet, while Angel said, as if talking in his sleep:

“No, I don't believe I've had the pleasure.”

“See, Angelito, I've always had something that someone else has needed, and today that someone is you.”

“Would you mind passing the salt?”

“Depending on how well you perform for me, little by little I'll get you into my saintly daughter's good graces. What do you say?”

“How nice! It's been such a long time. Really, it's been ages!” exclaimed my stunned father as he withdrew from the presence of Don Ulises and instinctively stepped into the garden for a breath of air. In the distance he spied something shining in the darkness. He allowed himself to be led to that light. It emanated from the Bloomingdale's replica. He approached the revolving doors, pushed them, then mounted the half-flight escalator. As he regained his composure, he thought nostalgically about the days when he felt free to intertwine his fingers with a woman's forbidden hand going up or down an escalator. He loved women he didn't know, longed for those he hadn't yet discovered, wondered if he'd used up my mother, if he knew her completely by now, if she thought he was an imbecile, wondered if he'd perhaps worn out Doña Lucha as well, although he was sure she'd worn him out, but that he still had to know if Penny could be worn out or could wear him out and why not ask her directly since there she was, in the facsimile of this Cathedral of López Delights, the first floor of Bloomingdale's. Penny was seated at Bloomie's perfume-and-makeup counter, her back to him, hiding that brilliant face illuminated by two butterflies on her eyes, gold dust on her eyelids, strawberry hearts on her lips, her nostrils fluttering, her little ears perfumed by Miss Dior, her insinuatingly cleft chin, that slightly sluttish beauty he had admired, desired, been obsessed by ever since New Year's at the Aca disco. Now she was sitting there, presenting him with her bare shoulders, wearing a striped T-shirt, her waist and ass covered by a tweed miniskirt, a whore, yes indeed, that's how he wanted her, a little half-breed from the Guerrero coast, fed for generations on rice and beans and fried plantains, squid in its ink, and Larín chocolates. Everything her mother had revealed, the farthest thing from Palomar y Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca and the best Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Puebla families: Penny López with her back to him, a pencil in one hand and a tissue in the other, and he, gawking at her, awkwardly crashes into the Estée Lauder counter, knocking down a row of bottles, and she, surprised, drops the pencil and raises the tissue to her mouth as she spins on her seat and allows herself to be seen without makeup, clean-faced, devoid of her tropical bordello glitter: Penelope López Plancarte without makeup, her face washed clean, was (my father almost fainted) the very image of a nice little prim-and-proper Mexican girl, with centuries of Creoles behind her, early Masses, and lonely nights, late suppers of eggs and beans and vermicelli soup, corn-flour porridge for breakfast, centuries of church candles strained through her blood, and he knew how to tell all of them apart genetically: Penny López without gold dust and butterflies on her eyes was a pale, clean-faced nun, barely distinguishable from the nuns that the high-bourgeois girls of Mexico imitate so they won't look like the whores who are the other alternative in their reality: Penny López was one of them, like them, barely inclined to erase her resemblance to them. She, too, derives from the legion of ghosts with bloodless lips and suspicious eyes, rice-powder skin, holy-water-rinsed hands, rosaried fingers, scapulary breasts: devout bourgeois flesh hidden for five centuries of colonialism in convents, far from the sun, in somber houses with humid patios and masturbatory bedrooms: women with dead cells and the scar of a hair shirt on every freckle: he saw her like that, bloodless, pale, traditional, and in a dark flash he saw Agueda in the Oaxaca church, the mad Agueda's dried-up or dead friends in the Oaxaca plaza, saw my mother Angeles materialized among the balloons and trees in the Alameda, the woman he desired or deserved or fatally loved in a kind of desperate lottery in which his real wife, the one he should have loved madly, had still not been born or had died four centuries earlier, in a bordello in Seville or a convent in Quito: what would he say to an ideal woman that wouldn't be this absurd phrase that he repeated to the terrified Penny, poor little Penny surprised in flagrante in her monastic, colonial, genetic nakedness: