The Revolutionaries Try Again (28 page)

Why are you telling me all this?

I don't want you to think I don't . . . I wouldn't have minded if you had asked me to be part of your administration even though I know we would've failed or one of you would've succumbed to backdoor deals with El Loco or León. No one we know has done anything to change anything. Can we still call Antonio the son of El Loco?

His monster zits are gone.

Terrible timing now that El Loco's finally our . . .

El Loco messing with you at the Polytechnic?

Watch it. I think Marta voted for El Loco. I don't anticipate it. El Loco's too busy recording his rock album and ransacking the country.

El Loco Who Loves.

I wonder if Facundo applied to be his backup singer.

I bet you have to bribe your way to even that position. Listen, Bastidas, I wanted to ask you . . .

Anything for you, professor.

You know those scholarships in . . .

Indiana University?

Doctorate in economics, yes.

Certainly.

Any chance you might . . .

I know the pool of applicants is daunting and the selection process problematic.

Wondering if you . . .

–Those scholarships are for students without means!

She's back.

Don't tell her you work for León.

I don't work for León anymore. He fired me after hearing that I was thinking of running for office. You know I'm qualified for those scholarships so I'm not asking for . . .

Of course, Leo.

Thought maybe you knew someone who could . . .

I'll definitely look into it.

—

El Loco, Facundo says into his tape recorder, aha, I see my fans have decided to forfend their spirits from steep malaise and show up today, let me guess, fellows, early this morning, before or after the roosters you don't have hornswoggled you with their squalls, before or after you dreamed of onion crowns and lycanthropists, you wambled out of your indurated mattress, folding your mosquito net equidistantly, without toothpicking it, because your net feels more alive with those sibilant insects embrangled in it, and after you equipped your daughter with the free school backpack she never received, courtesy of El Loco, a free school backpack that contained, as announced in the announcements, one fresh towel, one bar of soap, one translucent soap container, one pocketsized comb, one toothbrush, one tube of mentholated toothpaste, a box of crayons, one pen, one pencil, one eraser, one pencil sharpener, one ruler, and five notebooks of fifty pages each, hey, whosoever brings me one of those collectable bars of soap with El Loco's initials engraved on it wins another round of songs about la de la / mochila azul / la de ojitos dormilones, and after your daughter swallowed a bowl of free milk that wasn't fit for human consumption, courtesy of El Loco, and after you proudly stepped out of the free house you never received and hauled the bus your daughter couldn't take because the latest Paquetazo quintupled the bus fares and quadrupled the price of lentils, courtesy of El Loco, you stumbled upon an immense national protest against the leader of the poor, and although you had nothing to protest against, especially after all the toys your daughter never received during El Loco's Christmas Telethon, you joined the protest anyway,
because who doesn't need the occasional singalong to Down with El Loco, or rather, Down with All of Them, banging on the casserole you didn't bring, thousands of pots and pans entuning Down with Everything, and after everyone silenced their farrago of cataclysmic tunes to intake the news that congress had ousted El Loco because of his excessive heteroclitude, no lewd free associations, folks, respect for the deranged man, please, and after you heard we, at last, had scored one luxury, the luxury to choose between three presidents, and by choose I of course mean not choose between the vice president, an elegant lady from Cuenca who does not sip tea from a tea bag, the president of congress, an encultured crapulence from Quito, and El Loco, our brand new leader of the poor, and after you heard your choices were narrowed by one because El Loco had escaped from the presidential palace through the window of the presidential kitchen, rucksack of discretionary funds in tow, you thought to yourself, hey, let's stop by La Ratonera and ask the fat one to sing us a happy song for a change, let's demand that he sing us a happy song for a change and you know what, compatriotas, despite the sign here that says today I don't take requests but tomorrow I will, I will comply and, for you, tonight, on our first Loco Less Night, before the interim president bombards us with more packages of encultured economics, I will sing you a happy song for a change.

XVII / ANTONIO EDITS HIS BABY CHRIST MEMOIR

And if all our actions, from breathing to the founding of empires or metaphysical systems, derive from an illusion as to our importance, the same is true a fortiori of the prophetic instinct. Who, with the exact vision of his nullity, would try to be effective and turn himself into a savior?

—
CIORAN

The baby christ wept soon after we reached my Uncle Fernando's house. I had never seen his house before, but I had advocated it as a Christmas location because I knew it had been built in the newest and most exclusive neighborhood in Guayaquil, L'Hermitage, which was not far from San Javier and Ciudadela Los Ceibos. Since no one came to open the gates immediately, my grandmother aired her frustration about how hard it was to find good service. From a narrow cement booth the guard rushed out, desperately trying to tuck his uniform shirt in and appear less asleep. He waved at my uncle, bowing repeatedly, then pulled the gates open. My grandmother rolled her eyes, just as she had done earlier with Maria. After finishing the kitchen, Maria had reported that she was done and had asked for permission to leave. My grandmother had rebuffed her, clinically explaining that there were still the floors to mop, the bathrooms to disinfect, and plenty of garbage to take out. But señora, Maria had pleaded, it's Christmas Eve.

—

What does it matter if his memoir about the night the baby christ cried lacks a singular style, Antonio thinks (and here Antonio searches online for Proust's notion of style as quality of vision — the revelation of the particular universe that each of us sees, Proust wrote, and that other people don't see —), or rather what does it matter if he's so dispirited about his lack of a singular style in the one short story that's really a memoir that seemed to him salvageable from the morass of overwrought sarcasm he'd written before rushing back to
Ecuador so he could fail to save the natives or, as it's becoming apparent to him, not that salvageable because if what remains of the night the baby christ cried is mostly an impulse to revisit that night, then what shouldn't remain of that night in text is these drab sentences and their cargo of fabrications, because years from now he will have forgotten even more about that night so he's likely to return to this text about that night and what will remain for him will be these drab sentences in English, and so perhaps this whole text about the baby christ should be crossed out and he should start again, or he should not start again until he figures out how to perform in text his impulse to revisit what he has mostly forgotten instead of trying to fill in with narrative fabrications what he has forgotten (a performance of an impulse meaning an exhaustion of an impulse as a way to dramatize that impulse?), in any case what does it matter if he feels compelled to revisit the night the baby christ cried if on the patio of the Belgian café in the Hayes Valley district of San Francisco, where he's editing this memoir about the baby christ, three tall women in sundresses are asking him where's he from, what's he writing about, what's his name, and perhaps he's writing about crying figurines so he can impress tall, hot women in sundresses like these — I write so I can impress hot young boys, Foucault said — but the less cynical side of him, which he hasn't been able to transcribe into text yet, knows that he's revisiting what he's revisiting because that's where he still exists, where he finds solace despite the disheartening contents, although one day he will have lived among the sundresses long enough that perhaps he'll also find solace in revisiting his life among the sundresses (and here Antonio searches for a passage from Faulkner contradicting what he's been thinking — the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, Faulkner wrote, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided for the old by the narrow bottle neck of the most recent decade of years —), but before he revisits his life among the sundresses he's likely to revisit his short stint failing to run for office with Leopoldo, which will allow him to feel useful without having done anything to be useful, or perhaps revisiting his short stint failing to run for office with Leopoldo will be his lamb's blood, forcing
him to confront his uselessness on a daily basis and ask himself how are we to be humans in a world of destitution and injustice, and yet if his eighteen years in Ecuador are his huge meadow that no winter can touch, Antonio thinks, if San Javier and Leopoldo and the baby christ and Cajas and the hospice Luis Plaza Dañín will never vanish from him completely, can he at least attempt to reinterpret those years so that he isn't so susceptible to run off with whatever caravan of change reminds him of the intensity he felt during those years, no, forget reinterpretation, Drool, encumber yourself with enough comforts and you'll never leave San Francisco again.

—

L'Hermitage is one of the many gated communities in Ecuador, which I was to see again many years later in the moneyed areas of Venezuela, Colombia, and Bolivia. The neighborhood was so new that the lampposts were still headless, illuminating nothing. The houses on this hill must have been as long and wide as their pools and tennis courts, but because it was dark and because these houses were probably fortresses surrounded by white concrete walls it was difficult to tell how big they really were. There must have been no more than twenty houses total. Some of them, the dark ones without flickering Christmas lights, were obviously empty. Others, mounted with cane and rope structures, were still under construction. Three years later, Stephan Bohorquez, a classmate at San Javier, was to move from the other side of town into one of these houses soon after his father had been appointed to an important government post, and when his parents were out on official business, Stephan would splurge on prostitutes and whiskey and throw parties for us and eventually, when his allowance ran out, he would steal his mother's dresses and use them to barter with his favorite prostitutes. None of us brought up the obvious question of where the money came from. Stephan's pool was refreshing and the Chivas was free and we knew where the money came from in any case.

—

To search for the source of his impulse to return to Ecuador by revisiting the night the baby christ cried was pointless, Antonio thinks, just as it's pointless for him to teach English to immigrant women at El Centro Legal for one measly hour a week, photocopying pages from an
ESL
book at the last minute and hoping they would smile at him in gratitude, knowing he was fooling himself into believing he was being useful — if all the
NGO
s and nonprofits of the world ceased their activities, Antonio had asked a British art critic during their first date, would anyone notice? — just as it was pointless and childish for him to imagine the possibility of deforming American English as revenge for Americans deforming Latin America with their interventionist policies, and if he continued in this vein there would be nothing left, everything's pointless, congratulations, Antonio, now what?

—

As soon as we entered his house, my Uncle Fernando said so very sorry. I should've mentioned it before. Most of our furniture is still in transit, on some ship in the Atlantic, I suppose. My sincere apologies. He nonetheless gave us a proud tour of his house, which looked like a vacant museum of modern art. We gathered in his living room. My grandmother placed the baby christ by the cemented chimney. Before Christmas, she would always arrange a nativity scene for us at her house. On top of wooden fruit boxes, she would place a grass green blanket, reserving the topmost spot for the baby christ, which was not to take its place until after Mass, and then she would populate the rest of her valley with Mary, Joseph, the three magi, and below them bushes and trees and the earless donkey I used to play with when I was five years old. But my grandmother did not bring any of it to my uncle's house, so by the fake chimney the baby christ looked out of place. My Uncle Fernando brought two garbage bags bloated with gifts wrapped in jingles. I do not remember what happened next, or how much time passed between my grandfather bringing us kitchen chairs so we could all sit in the living room and then someone yelling the baby christ! The scream had the authority of panic. Everyone congregated around the
baby christ, several steps removed. Tears were materializing beneath both eyes, falling in urgent succession, as if an actual child were trying to burst out from the immobility he had been condemned to. His eyes stared at us, or past us, and the urgency of his tears, combined with the indifference of the clay, consigned him to an eerie sadness.

My grandfather stepped forward. It seemed so natural for him to be there, alone with his baby christ, that none of us followed. I can still see the back of his ample suit jacket, light brown and checkered, as he bowed a bit. To me, at that moment, or perhaps later, my grandfather looked like an apostle humbly accepting his gift, the gift of revelation.

My grandmother shrieked and sobbed. He's crying for my Antonio's return to the faith, she said. This was to become the official version.

My grandfather turned and glared at my grandmother with a disdain I did not think him capable of. Maruja, he yelled, and as he realized his disdain had staked a place in his words he stopped and calmed himself by raising his left hand as if about to dictate silence to himself. He then softened his voice and said come. Let us kneel. He guided my grandmother to the front by putting his arms around her, and as they knelt my aunts knelt, too.

My Uncle Fernando did not look surprised by what the baby christ was doing. He must have felt entitled to witness this sort of thing. Soon he, too, would have to flee.

I waited for my father to kneel, but since he didn't I eventually knelt and joined the others in hymns and prayers. I turned and glanced back at him, although sometimes I think I did so not then but later, in memory, trying to remember what he looked like by turning and glancing back at him across the years. He was still standing, red eyed and stiff, a mixture of terror and shame in his face. I wanted to make him kneel with the same force he had used to thrust his stiff drinks at me. If he saw me staring at him, he did not acknowledge me. He tightened and untightened his hands as if trying to shake them off his arms. Then he walked away.

—

The double bill on Sundays at the Cine Maya, Antonio thinks, watching Rambo I and II, or Rambo III and Conan the Barbarian, one man against the world, carajo, his father picking him up at the apartment on Bálsamos Street and taking him to the Cine Maya every Sunday for the double bill, Antonio visiting the Cine Maya by his house before returning to San Francisco and finding it shuttered, longing to feel strong emotions like nostalgia instead of just the plain passing of time, the houses in his old neighborhood wrapped in high voltage fences and angry warning skulls: and this nothing, Cioran writes, this everything, cannot give life a meaning, but it nonetheless makes life persevere in what it is: a state of nonsuicide, okay, sure, Cioran, I don't disagree with you, and yet too much would have to be expunged from my life in Ecuador for me to ever consider exiting this state of nonsuicide, all these impulses to return again and again, to change something for someone, to become the one who could've changed Ecuador.

—

After a solemn hour or two, the tears did not ebb. We must have expected that the end of our prayers would coincide with the end of the baby christ's tears, so the continuing torrent started making us uncomfortable. Finally my grandmother announced she had to go to the bathroom, and then everyone stood up and scattered.

Alone with the baby christ, I did not make any promises of faith or love or anything. I was not Lucia or Francisco, promising the Virgin of Fátima to endure all suffering as an act of reparation for the sins of the world. Perhaps I was paralyzed by the knowledge that as this moment passed its veracity passed, too. Or perhaps I was already steeped in desolation, the kind left behind by a miracle that changes nothing. Even so, when I see myself there, still lanky at thirteen and quite sweaty, I am always surprised at my coldness. Seeking explanations, I inspected the baby christ as if it were a malfunctioning toy. I picked up the wicker basket and checked underneath. I lifted its purple and gold shawl, checking the white ceiling for leaks. With my fingertips I prodded the figurine's cheeks, trying to unearth a hidden mechanism. I did not find one.

Sometimes, when I revisit that Christmas night, I wish it were all true. I wish that the baby christ had not been crying for the corruption being perpetuated back then — the same corruption that continues to sink my country further — but was really crying for my father. I like to think that, while he was alive, someone was able to cry for him.