Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

“But who says I don’t hate him, too?”

“Why would you?”

“Take a good look at me, my love, just look: I’m totally screwed. He didn’t give me anything I need to get married: no dowry: no plane tickets, no toothpaste, no parabolic antenna, nothing! An outcast bride, that’s me!”

“Castrating, too.”

“There have been other devouring women,” she said in falsetto, the poor, bored girl. “They called other women that and they made a big deal of them!”

“That was metaphoric devouring.”

“Well, look here, my boy. I see you’re all alone. You don’t have to put a thing in me, I promise, no inserts, no deserts. There are other ways of making each other happy. Let me be your barnacle. Let me hang around with you. I swear I won’t be a bother. I know people. I know the country. You know my little defect. We’ll need each other. We don’t have anyone else!”

My father admitted the validity of these arguments, and against his better judgment, he accepted Colasa Sánchez’s company during the revolution taking place that night and in the days to come. It was a way of resigning himself, without being alone.

Without asking permission, the Toluca road parachutists — the homeless who had “parachuted” into vacant lots or abandoned buildings — took a detour through Las Lomas del Sol and hurled themselves against the fence around Ulises López’s mansion: We want the slut! they shouted, We want the slut! and Ulises’s bodyguards started shooting, surprised when the fence fell, but when all is said and done, the philosophy of the good bodyguard is “Do you really think I’m going to give my life to save the boss?” And away they ran, while the squatters shouted, Burn the bitch who burned us, death to the murderess, and inside the house astonishment and confusion scattered one and all: the smell of flames wafted into the nostrils of the superminister in his office, and he said to himself, well, here it is, what we always feared, and he tried to prepare a convincing statement, assume a dignified pose. What would he say to them? What would he do, he couldn’t hide, he couldn’t be a coward, but could he be brave and clever simultaneously? Ulises López was profoundly confused; he was the master of doing what he shouldn’t do and his political success consisted of doing nothing but disguising it as action in order to conceal his only real activity, which was piling up cash: what was he going to say to these deadbeats who were coming up the Guggenheim-style staircase shouting and waving their torches: Listen, I only appropriated what was superfluous, not what was necessary. I left that to you. Listen, I was once poor like you and now just look at me; no, not that; and not the stuff about being a self-made man, no one ever gave me a free tortilla. No: how would he explain to them that in reality he, Ulises López, the nice millionaire from Chilpancingo, in reality had done nothing, that everything they saw here was, well, like winning the lottery, something undeserved, something as unexpected as a miracle, an answered prayer; no, that wouldn’t work (the noise got closer) and they would never understand that his passivity was more subtle, exemplary, and refined: Ulises got to be a millionaire and got to be a minister knowing how not to do things and by not doing them, but who would forgive that? Who would answer his most secret question now that their fists were beating on his mahogany door, those questions that followed him wherever he went, hanging over his head like the sword of Damocles: Do I deserve to be admired by others? Do I deserve to be loved? Do I perhaps love and admire those who love and admire me? And the admirable mahogany door (thanks to my architect, Diego Villaseñor!) did not break under their fists, so Don Ulises had time, he was going to tell them, Look now, there is no contradiction between public and private interests, my interests are the interests of the people, of the nation, of the fatherland! Then he was shocked to see the spears piercing his door, the pointy pickets of the fence around his house, and now they were splintering his fine door, with an oceanic roar succeeding every thrust.

He’d give them back as good as he got: “Stop! You don’t need a chain saw to cut butter! Everybody in Mexico has been through this office! They did me favors! I did them favors! What do you want from me? Everything’s possible when we have peace!”

He was babbling; but how was he going to respond when the door fell and Ulises López saw the detested faces. He could not dissemble, he hated them, hated them for being dark-skinned, filthy, smelly, toothless, their hair a mess, resentful, vengeful, slow on the uptake, thick-bodied, out of fashion, screwed from the time they were born, he hated them and was going to do nothing to get on their good side. Are you kidding? he was going to shout when they threw themselves on him after admiring him a second and seeing that it was really Ulises López, the one from the posters and the electoral photos, and the TV news: at the exact instant their lances nailed him to his bookcase, right between the complete works of Vilfredo Pareto and the campaign speeches of Homero Fagoaga, Don Ulises was about to shout these last words:

“I was a shark and I’ll be a shark again!”

* * *

Dragged along by the mob, forced to get out of the Van Gogh and join them, with Colasa hanging on to his shirttails, bewildered and tormented, and, ultimately, fascinated when he realized where he was, at the foot of the majestic, Guggenheimic staircase of the López family, my father watched her descend: the crowd with its lances and torches in hand stopped and Lucha Plancarte de López descended, for once as majestic as her staircase, wrapped in her rose-colored peignoir with matching boas at cuffs and neck and her stiletto-heeled shoes tipped in pink satin and with tassels on their toes and a gold orchid around her neck and her robe tightly fastened at the waist and with her breasts like a bull’s horns, proud, tauromachic, poised for the last corrida, and with her sulky cat in her arms, the cat that licked the hairs off her cunt: like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, that same crepuscular videocassette image is what my father saw in Lucha López’s insane dignity, Lucha, who had attacked the squatters’ camps on her properties on the Toluca road, setting them on fire, and now she dared to face retribution, the eye-for-an-eye, Asiatic revenge of Hammurabi right here in Las Lomas del Sol, in the high fortress of her security and comfort. For an instant her eyes met those of my father, who had screwed her so well for more than a month right here, and only then did Doña Lucha seem to lose her nerve, but in her eyes my father saw only a fleeting nostalgia for pleasure. What remained permanently, like a longing that became more and more real with each second, was a small-town street shaded by pines and lined with white houses, tranquil plazas and cool mountains: Chilpancingo, Chilpancingo bore Lucha Plancarte de López to her death with dignity, perhaps the only moment of dignity she had in her life, and Angel, my father, covered his eyes when they set fire to her boas and her satin and Colasa Sánchez next to him hugged his waist and began to cry. The spoiled cat screeched as well and jumped in flames away from his mistress.

The Ayatollah forbade nothing: it was forbidden to forbid, as it was in Paris in May ’68. Now the Ayatollah was going to prove it right here in the house of Superminister Ulises López and his wife Lucha Plancarte de … and their little girl the prom-queen Princess Penélope López. The crowd drew aside to let him pass, between the pincushion corpse of Ulises and the charred body of Lucha, and he ritually intoned sacred chants, having been trained and advised by the Pygmalionish Chilean Concha Toro: