[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Then the first walls painted on the shores of the desert:IS GOD PROGRESSING?The mutilated van rolled along like just one more tumbleweed past the agaves and the yuccas in the high desert, all of them hoarding water, as if they knew what was waiting for them as soon as the car dove into the sudden black hole that seemed to swallow everything around it—in this case, the backed-up line of cars and the multitude on foot, some barefoot, others wearing huaraches, all poor and fine, with the aristocratic bones of misery piercing the skin of their faces, arms, and ankles: the jammed-up cars and pilgrims who wanted to enter Mexico City through the eye of a needle, a genuine and not even slightly metaphoric Taco Curtain, said Uncle Fernando Benítez, one that completely surrounded the capital, with strategically located entrance points at Texmelucan, Zumpango, Angangueo, and Malinalco: but the Malinalco entry is closed because the son of a governor or mayor—no one bothers to remember—seized by force of arms all the land adjacent to the new highway from Yautepec to Cuernavaca and no one knows if the complaint lodged by the people from the communal land, who haven’t seen a miserable endomorphic peso, has been taken up by the authorities, or if the highway is being built, or if the son of the governor or mayor ordered it closed forever, let’s see anyone try to get through: who knows? who knows? who knows? and what about us, how are we going to get through the inspection held at the Taco Curtain, especially now that a powerful fourteen-feet-high Leyland eighteen-wheeler is getting in front of us.its driver staring ferociously out the window at my father, still driving the Van Gogh, challenging him to pass the long line of vehicles ahead on the curve, not caring that there is an armada of wheezing buses coming from the other direction.My mother wakes up instinctively at that moment and, along with my father, stares back at the truck driver, a cut-off albino about twenty-five years of age, dressed in leather, wearing gloves decorated with chrome-plated studs, clearly visible because the albino grasps the truck’s gigantic steering wheel so ferociously.The albino stares at us ferociously (they say) through his black wraparound glasses, the kind worn by blind singers (felicianos we could call them, charley rays, wonderglasses): what’s ferocious about him are his white, high, curving, mephistophelian brows.My parents see the pictures of the Virgin, Mrs.Thatcher, and Mamadoc as well as the portrait of an unknown Lady, all surrounded by votive lamps inside the cab, while, outside, the truck’s jukebox-style lights go on and off, and on the roof a light spins around, throwing out even more multicolored lights.“Let him pass,” my mother says.“Truck drivers don’t care who you are or whether you live or die.In my town…”She stops talking; the noisily insolent truck went ahead of us.The truck had the right (or wrong) of way and showed it in its open back door, which revealed its refrigerated interior, where the cadavers of steers swung back and forth on bloody hooks; fresh cow and calf carrion, fresh pig heads and trotters, shimmying gelatines, brains and liver, kidneys and lamb heads, testicles, sausages, loins, breasts, the albino’s armada gets ahead of our van, drowning out the joyous exclamation of Uncle Fernando: “A Soutine!” drowning out everything with the prepotency of its mission: all of that was going to feed the monstrous city of thirty million people: we, if we were lucky, were going to be fed too, and if we were on the highway, it was because there was no other way to get to the city: first the roads were left to rot when it only cost ten pesos to go from Mexico City to Acapulco by plane, but then the creaking planes stopped working because there were no spare parts and inspection was totally inadequate, airports without radar, colonial backwardness, less than what you find in Botswana, whined Don Homero!The truck armada passed us laughing, giving us the finger, all of them with their doors open and their hacked-up wares hanging out so we could see what they were carrying and why they had the right to pass us, put our lives at risk, and enter Mug Sicko City before we did, they were carrying the red, chilled death just to bring life to the pale, suffocated life of the capital; they were the long-haul drivers, a race apart, a nation within the nation, who possessed the power to starve people and link the remotest parts of the squalid, disconnected territory of the Sweet Fatherland.A decal on a fender proclaimed:TRUCK DRIVERS WITH THE VIRGINTheir cargo would be our lives: we let them pass by and just miss smashing head-on into the Red Arrow that was coming from the opposite direction, and we waited our turn, exhausted, paralyzed, inching along just to have the privilege of reentering the Federal District by means of the highway, without having Uncle Homero—which would have been the easy way to do it—take out his PRI identification, which he cannot do because he has to keep a low profile for a bit, and Uncle Fernando can’t appeal to President Jesús María y José Paredes without bringing Uncle H.to grief, and as for us, well, it’s better no one knows where we’re coming from or what we did in Kafkapulco in what seems a century ago now—time flies, time flees, time fleas, time flies, tempus fugit!“Eheu, eheu, fugaces!” sighed our fecund Don Homero Fagoaga, as if he were reading my intrauterine thoughts.My parents turned around to see both uncles: Don Fernando had his head in his hands and was muttering, his eyes turned upward: “Oh, Lord, please, please free us from our relatives, Lord.What a nightmare! This is the last straw.”Homero Fagoaga was decked out with two lustrous pitch-black tresses tied up with tricolor ribbons; he’d shaved off the tuft of hair he wore under his lip, rouged his cheeks, powdered his brow, smeared his lips scarlet, and restored the sparkle to his dying eyes with the help of some Maybelline; naturally, he had no need to powder the milky whiteness of his bosoms and his bare arms, given the rather small size of the blouse embroidered with carnations and roses he’d managed to squeeze into, although it was true he did have to tighten the red rebozo around his waist and, finally, work his way into the tiny red velvet slippers and shake out the beads on the wide skirt of the china poblana outfit he’d tricked himself out in.Dear niece and nephew, please don’t look at me that way.You know how curious I am: well, this morning I was poking through the chests and armoires in the Malinaltzin sacristy.I found no white vestments, no stoles, no bodices, but I did find this proudly national costume.Think what you like, imagine what you please.I’ll simply repeat the famous words of the onetime chronicler of this magnificent city—which, it seems, is keeping us at arm’s length for the nonce—Don Salvador Novo, when a press photographer discovered him sitting at his dressing table: “I feel pretty, and witty, and gay.”He hummed a tune from West Side Story and delicately stepped out of the Van Gogh to deal with the ill-featured but well-armed cop who was about to question us.He swirled his beaded skirt even more: Uncle Homero needed no crinolines to stand out in a crowd
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]