Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

“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.

“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.