Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

This last stipulation frenetically frustrated Doña Lucha’s ambitions; after all, if the lady wanted to have the best chef in Mexico (excuse me: the world), she also wanted to offer the most lavish and well-attended parties.

“Order sandwiches from a hotel,” Médoc told her when Doña Lucha weepingly explained that the imminent celebration of her daughter’s Sweet-Sixteen Party — her daughter Penelope López, the celebrated Epic Princess of Mexico-in-Crisis, the Debutante of Fashion in a Society with Nothing to Debut and Fashion Like No Other in the World — would require at least five hundred guests, well chosen to be sure, but five hundred nonetheless.

Having pronounced the statement recorded above, Médoc went on vacation in the Club Med’s Cancún barony, abandoning the López family to its own devices not only as to the creation of a suitable menu but also as to the composition of a guest list of five hundred young boys and girls who would celebrate Penny’s birthday with her. Yet another problem: the political plague that surrounded Minister López after the meteoric rise of Federico Robles Chacón and his creature, Mamadoc, made it improbable that what was left of the jeunesse dorée of 1992 would attend a celebration in the ghetto (also golden) of Las Lomas del Sol. The result would be a serious loss of prestige for both mother and daughter.

Enter Ms. Ponderosa, dried-out and galvanic, the purest Castilian stock, skinny as a rail but with the thickest of ankles, a Portuguese mustache to complete her Iberian physiognomy, and a whiff of garlic to give the lie to her appearance of implacable, Inquisitorial, Counter-Reformation austerity. Ms. Ponderosa pointed out, first, that for a real Castilian any goat will do for roasting and, second, that both the twelve-thousand-odd newspapers and the innumerable television stations in the city were constantly announcing a new public service called TUGUEDER, whose spokesperson, a charming boy with an egg-shaped head, was offering to those who desired to leave the labyrinth of solitude a matchmaking service (Ms. Ponderosa blushed), and that, third, his service would eliminate the possibility of party failure during the current crisis by guaranteeing that the number of guests required by the hosts would be there.

“We don’t even have a cake; I don’t know how to make cakes,” mooed Doña Lucha. “Do you, miss?”

Ponderosa triumphantly said she did not: “But here in the fine print it says: Birthday cakes specially made by Baby Ba. ”

“But who runs this organization? Does it belong to anyone we know?”

“It says here the president of the company is named Angel Palomar y Fagoaga…”

“Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca!” exclaimed Doña Lucha, who knew the Mexican Gotha by heart: “The best families of D.F., Puebla, and Guadalajara!”

“If you say so,” Ponderosa commented dryly. She withdrew — without turning her back on the mistress.

Like a ghost, Ulises López wandered through his darkened house in Las Lomas del Sol. During the day, ablaze with mercury vapor lamps, incandescent spots, and multicolored strobes, the mansion looked like the Duty-Free Shop in any international airport. Every one of the mementos of petroseventies opulence was piled up there for all the world to see: French perfumes, German cameras, Japanese computers, Yankee recorders, Swiss watches, Italian shoes. All of it, felt Doña Lucha, should be on display, because, as she never tired of saying:

“My money is my money and I have absolutely no reason to hide it from envious eyes. I do as I please!”

But at four in the morning the owner of the house flitted like a phantom from his severe mahogany-furnished bedroom with velveteen-covered walls to the preposterous Guggenheim staircase, to the cement garden, to the pool in the shape of the map of the U.S.A., with the stars and stripes painted on its bottom, from there into the private casino and to the cockfighting pit, muttering to himself about his career and his fortune, without knowing that Federico Robles Chacón, his archrival, had given the cook Médoc d’Aubuisson a farm with fruit orchards and a shooting range in Yautepec in exchange for which Médoc would put a tiny grain of sugar into Don Ulises’s breakfast papaya every day. The grain of sugar was actually the last word in computers invented in

— — — — — — ((Pacífica)) — — — — — —

Once ingested, it registers a person’s murmurs and most secret thoughts for twenty-four hours, transmitting them to a data bank in the office of Robles Chacón, where they are deciphered and processed by a Samurai computer, providing Minister Robles Chacón with infinite delight and inside information. However: since the microchip enters with the papaya, it also leaves with the papaya, so it must be replaced every day. Médoc will not scant his duties just because he’s going on vacation in order not to have to feed five hundred parvenus. Into the ear of Ms. Ponderosa, Médoc has whispered his promise that she will abandon, if not her virginity (of which she was deprived a long time ago by a powerful Spanish Civil Guard), then at least her current solitude as soon as he (Médoc) returns

TUGUEDER (flashes the neon sign in the Ponderosa noggin)

if she will slip the daily grain of sugar into the master’s papaya.

In a solitary cockpit at four in the morning, we find a sleepless Ulises López, who can only vent his rage against Federico Robles Chacón through a sentimental review of his own career: he was born a poor boy on the Pacific coast of Guerrero, but even then he was thrifty, a pack rat of a boy who saved everything, who found a use for everything, and that’s how he made his way: When no one else had toothbrushes — call Ulises! When someone needed a top — call Ulises! When a bus needed a nut — call Ulises! When a nicely stuffed box of votes for the PRI would win an election for the Party — call Ulises! And when Ulises requested admission to high school in Acapulco, law school at Chilpancingo, the doctoral program at the National University, and postgraduate study at USC, he got what he wanted because Ulises López always had something someone else needed: that was his secret, and that was his way to the top:

“I made my money following the national rules of the game,” he would say, and no one ever doubted the truth of that statement. From low-level jobs he rose to high-level jobs, but in all, low or high, he maintained or solidified his power base. Guerrero, where he achieved favorite-son status, was indispensable to him; then national private enterprise; foreign relations — U.S. finance and business; then national government and the PRI. All this was well known and fairly normal. The difference was that Ulises embodied this pattern at a unique moment in Mexican history — between 1977 and 1982, when more foreign money entered the country than had come in during the previous 155 years of our independence. During the oil boom, everything was expensive in Mexico except the dollar. Ulises realized that before anyone else. He founded the famous Theta Group (of which he was the only member) and took over banks in order to lend himself cheap money he used to import the torrent of consumer goods he sold at inflated prices in the status-conscious middle-class market; he deposited hundreds of millions in rival banks and then abruptly withdrew the money, causing his competition to collapse; he created financial empires within Mexico and abroad, vast labyrinths of paper within pyramids of noninsured credits and companies backed only by documents based on the country’s oil promise, taking advantage of low interest rates, petrodollar loans, and the rise in the cost of raw materials; he deposited carloads of profits in European and U.S. banks, but he was the first to stand up and cheer when López Portillo nationalized the banks and denounced the money exporters in 1982. What the hell: the people he denounced were standing right there with him, wildly applauding a denunciation the President — in a theatrical act unprecedented since Santa Anna staged a coup d’état against himself — directed toward other people and himself. Eventually, Ulises said to himself, and he said it with full confidence, I’ll be paid back for the loss of my banks and then I’ll send my money safe and sound to Grand Cayman; and that’s just how it happened. Now a cayman is a crocodile, but even a crocodile (like Don Ulises) can suffer the odd setback: he took a nasty hit because of his paper speculations, but by 1989 his 1982 losses had been paid back. Smack in the middle of the crisis, he realized that the foreign shareholders in his Mexico Black Gold Mutual Fund (a dummy subsidiary of the Theta Group) had bought ten million shares at twelve dollars per share in 1978; now they were worth two dollars each. To compensate for that loss, he became the first Latin American to enter into the greenmail racket — green, green: how I love you green, green cells, green stocks, green dollars, and green dolors: the loans that broke us were asshole loans made by asshole banks to asshole governments, said Ulises; we could have broken the international banking system by suspending payments, but we didn’t dare; they screwed us because we were honorable men and we forgot that the United States never paid its astronomical debt to English banks in the nineteenth century. I’m delighted — Ulises jumped for joy, clicking his heels (I’m faithful to capital, not to the fatherland!). Transformed into a greenmailer, Don Ulises was the star of a kind of financial fraud that worked like this: he’d buy a huge amount of stock in a famous transnational corporation, announce that he was about to take it over, thus sending its value into the multinational stratosphere and thereby forcing the company to buy — at a very high price — the stocks belonging to Ulises López in order to retain control over the corporation and to silence speculation. Using this method, our astute Guerrero magnate earned $40 million free and clear in one shot and could thus repair his fortune, damaged by the collapse of the paper empires — well, not damaged all that much, muttered the squatty, rapidly pacing Napoleon of the business world, after all, as Don Juan Tenorio was heard to say, time does eventually run out on you, and therefore there is no debt that can’t be negotiated so that you don’t have to pay in propeller-driven pesos what you contracted to buy in supersonic dollars; we’ve got lots of things to sell in Mexico, beginning with twelve hundred miles of elastic and continuous frontier, then moving on to revalued earthquaked property expropriated by the government in 1985 and renegotiated by Ulises in 1989.