Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

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:

“It’s made of shit! This cake is make of shit!”

And the girl with sharpened teeth and transparent clothes shouted — in English: “I’m a lollipop!” Then she fainted.

* * *

Don Ulises offered my father Angel a brandy snifter of Ixtabentún-on-the-rocks while my elegant pater, the shit having been kicked out of him by the López family thugs, was drying the blood on his forehead with pink Kleenex. López confessed that the color scheme of the salon had been chosen by his wife, Doña Lucha, to replicate certain of their common associations from the time they were courting and would go to the movies together — you know, with little sisters, popcorn, and everything.

“Ha,” laughed the illustrious politician and financier, currently in the Republic’s reserve forces. “She calls those chairs Blue Angel Marlene, the upholstery is Rhonda Red, and carpeting is Garbo Beige. Isn’t she sweet? Isn’t she incomprehensible?”

Angel accepted the drink: he needed it after the beating he took (“So you run the TUGUEDER service? you muddahfuckah! yer gonna need that shiteatin’ grin!”), and when Angel touched Ulises’s hand he compared it with Inclán’s: What? Had everyone with power in Mexico stopped sweating? Did they ever go to the bathroom? How could they spend nine consecutive hours going from place to place, giving speeches, and constantly attending meetings of the PRI without having to pee or sweating? He looked at his host’s amiably cold eyes and filtered them through the edge of the glass so Ulises’s features would melt in the sickly-sweet tide of the liquor; it didn’t work; Ulises emerged the winner.

“But I love her deeply, young man. Do you understand me? I’m being honest with you because even though you offended me seriously I admire your nerve and your initiative, even if it all goes into dirty tricks. But, going back to Lucha: as long as I’m with her I can be generous, even magnanimous. Want to know something? Every day, in the penthouse above my offices on River Nylon Street, there’s a banquet all prepared for a hundred people, with galantines of turkey, pâté de foie gras, Gulf shrimp, carré d’agneau, cakes (real ones, ha ha ha, what a card you are!), whatever you could want, ready for a hundred people, whether anyone comes or not, and at five o’clock in the afternoon, whatever is left over is distributed to the neighborhood beggars. You see, when I’m with her I can be generous…” repeated Don Ulises, dreamily. “I’m afraid that without her I’ll get stingy and that’s why I love her, keep her, and worry about her dying.”

Ulises made a peculiar face — coyness, modesty, or some combination thereof.

“For me, my wife is still the girl I tried to seduce with flowers and chocolates when I got to Chilpancingo from the coast.”

He affectionately patted Angel Palomar’s knee with his open hand, and said that my father in all likelihood knew lots about him; most of what he knew was true, and he would admit it proudly. What in fact did people say about him? The worst things! requested Ulises. And Angel told him: “That you are an out-and-out thief.” Ulises López said with equanimity that he would prefer a great statesman who was a thief but who would make Mexico into a great nation to an honest statesman who would lead it to ruin: unfortunately, what we’ve gotten over the past few years have been thieves who ruin us as much or more than the honest ones, but I’m not talking about trying to balance the honest ones off against the thieves or throwing out the baby with the bathwater, Ulises went on, and that’s why mediocrity, envy, and resentment had conspired to freeze him out. But he was biding his time; a great politician, he said that night to Angel, has to be an abstract, immoral con man who manipulates the passions of others while he puts his own on ice.

“I like your initiative,” he repeated, concentrating his tiny, mandarin eyes on Angel. “Too bad you don’t know how to focus it. Take a lesson from me tonight, kid. Listen to my rules for getting to the top in Mexico. First: remember that your ruling passion has to be money. The others are private passions and whatever you do in private is your own business. Make use of the best and the brightest. But never tell them what use you’re making of them. Don’t talk much. Think a great deal. Remember that he who has power is great only when he wants power. But if that interferes with the possibility of being rich, it’s better to be rich than to be great. The problem is to have both dough and power, although it’s always better to have money without power than power without money because money is power: you don’t really need more. Understand, then, that it’s not a bad thing in Mexico to be a crook: what’s bad is not being a big enough crook. Always keep that in the back of your mind as you’re stating for the record that immorality in the management of public funds will in no way be tolerated any longer and then toss a couple of jerks from the previous administration into jail. Remember that in this country you can make hay for half your time in office on the sins of your predecessors. During the other half, make sure you get ready to be accused, asshole. Ha, ha!”