The flower, finally, is the immortal face of what we will all soon be: nascent vegetal man-eaters in a perpetual and pestilential state of putrefaction. As sclerosis overtakes them, mature somnambulists search with what lingering remnant of instinct they possess for a place to drop (un)dead. Although I’ve occasionally seen solitary carnivorous plants, they are almost always found in clusters, as if the urge toward gregariousness is the last human trait to disappear. I once saw one of those corpses standing upright. But normally they are horizontal, lying in the street or on the floors of their houses, on benches, the roofs of cars, in planters, fountains … Rather than actually move, they spasm, and in this way crawl over one another, biting anything that comes within range, including their fellow flowers, constantly opening and closing their jaws (clack, clack, clack, clack, clack), producing a kind of manic teletype sound that used to keep me awake in the early days, and later gave me dreadful nightmares. Now it’s a lullaby.
The largest flesh-flower garden in existence grew up around the Catedral Metropolitana, on the side of the Zócalo that the terrace of my hotel overlooks. How could it be otherwise in a Catholic country? Since new terminal cases of the epidemic arrive there around the clock, the amount of food they need also increases. Each morning, buses park in the Zócalo and disgorge groups of devout pilgrims, who pray to God for the salvation of the world and, as proof of their faith, attempt to cross the vegetable patch of teeth that separates them from the doors of the cathedral. Not a single one of them gets even halfway: they are devoured in a matter of minutes, thus keeping the garden well irrigated with blood. It would be the weirdest of tourist attractions if all of Mexico were not already a cemetery.
At the end of our session, Tadeo asks:
“Are you going to come around to do the installation? I’m in Condesa, just off Amsterdam, a block and a half from Insurgentes and Iztaccíhuatl. The nearest metro station is Chilpancingo. I’m on the sixth floor. It’s easy to find.”
I briefly think it over.
“We don’t have to be in the same room,” he insists. “We can do it through the intercom.”
“It’s not you that’s the problem. I’ve just never been that far.”
“Come on, man. You’ll be fine. I’m on the street every day and nothing happens to me.”
“Yes, but you have a car.”
“Think of it as a therapeutic exercise in socialization: one way or another, you have to go on living in our world.”
He finally convinces me and we agree that I’ll come to his home next Monday (today is Friday) to rig up a satellite TV connection.
“But there’s one condition,” I say. “Forget about doing it over the intercom. I want to see you. I want to see your home. And, of course, I want to see Delfina.”
“Why?” he asks suspiciously.
“I dunno … To find out what kind of beauty it takes to make a man convert himself into a beefsteak.”
Now it’s Tadeo who hesitates. But a hundred and forty television channels and fifty music stations, plus ten hard-porn signals and a universal pay-per-view password, all free, is the sort of bribe that no one, not even a cannibalistic Lacanian psychoanalyst, can resist.
“OK,” he says, and hangs up.
I consider myself the overlord of this territory, but once, up there in the North, I was master of another: regional maintenance for the largest satellite TV company in the world. For years, I hoarded every imaginable pin, serial number, chip, card, and code in a safe in my desk. I migrated to Mexico City with these tools and toys after the first outbreaks of the epidemic. These small lucky charms represent the multipurpose treasure chest that I sometimes use as coinage: for example, I wager with them in the skateboarders’ club on Eugenia, where young punks have invented a version of the old monster truck jumps, this time over rows of the recumbent bodies of cannibalistic flowers. We lay bets on who can jump farthest on his skateboard. The most skillful make it all the way across. The majority return with their calves looking like ground meat due to virus-laden bites.
Things could be worse. Sometimes, in that racetrack of corpses and imbeciles, I win enough for a reinforced rubber and a toothless hooker to suck my dick. And when I’m on a losing streak, I pay my debts by installing a satellite television connection in some residential building in the neighborhood. On a bad day I might have to climb sixty feet above decomposing flesh without a safety harness.
They all want to go on zapping: surfing on a wave of a hundred and forty channels while the love of their life takes slices out of their flesh. All of them. Even the dead ones.
Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino
For Luis Humberto Crosthwaite
I was making coffee when they came for me. Rosendo stood across the street and blew out the door of my house with a bazooka.
(I’m not switching the POV: I saw it all from the window.)
Gildardo made his way through the rubble, went to the kitchen (OK: maybe I am switching the POV), and pointed an AK-47 at me. I was sprawled over the sink, half-deafened, with my face and upper body covered in a dusting of freshly ground Starbucks Sumatra.
“Montaña wants to see you,” said Gildardo, grabbing the collar of my pajamas and throwing me onto the freezing tiled floor.
“What about my aunt?” I responded.
My aunt Rosa Gloria Chagoyán lives with me. Or rather, I live in her house. She’s eighty-three. While the sicario was dragging me toward the door, I managed to catch a glimpse of her through a smoking hole that the explosion had left in the partition wall. My aunt was in bed, unfazed. She was wearing her yellow terry cloth bathrobe and, as usual, was watching TV with no sound or picture.
Practically on all fours, I passed my bedroom and had a momentary view of the most woeful aspect of the destruction: hundreds of silver disks of my DVD collection littered the floor, and a broken pipe was leaking water onto the metal bookshelves where, until that morning, I’d kept my two thousand porn mags.
“This isn’t fair,” I said, still being dragged by the collar over the remains of the furniture, the splinters sticking into my ass. “She’s a vulnerable old woman.”
Outside, Rosendo was stowing the bazooka in the trunk of a Bronco.
“Montaña wants to see you.”
“And was it necessary to completely wreck the house for that? A clip on the ear would have done the job, you moron!” I was hysterical.
Rosendo leaned over me with a very stern expression and slapped me hard. I stopped screaming.
They blindfolded me, tied my hands behind my back, and loaded me into what I suppose was the back seat. A couple of minutes passed as they discussed whether I was correctly positioned and if the bonds were tight enough to prevent any attempt to escape.
“Tape his ankles,” said one of them.
“Do it yourself,” said the other.
Someone passed close to the car.
“Good morning,” mumbled Rosendo.
It was my aunt Rosa Gloria Chagoyán, who goes out every morning for bread while I strain the coffee; I recognized the rhythmic clank of her aluminum walker.
“Good morning,” Gildardo repeated.
My aunt didn’t reply. Good for her.
I heard the click of the car doors locking and then the engine turning over. We crossed Laredo, I guessed heading east. Then, to judge by the steady speed of the Bronco, we got on the Ribereña highway. As far as I could tell, we were making for the Frontera Chica. I passed the time reviewing that morning’s events. What I regretted most was having said “to completely wreck the house”: split infinitive.
We turned onto a dirt road, the Bronco bucking and swerving. I started feeling nauseated but the motion gradually lulled me into a long, heavy stupor, like a nicotine-induced trance. The SUV came to a stop. They pulled me out, removed the blindfold, and cut the packing tape binding my wrists and ankles. I blinked. Little by little my pupils acclimated to the light. I saw myself barefoot, wearing pajamas, standing in a desert landscape: creos
ote bushes, yuccas, sweet acacias … This had to be Coahuila. My initial instincts had been incorrect; we’d been traveling west the whole time, away from the Frontera Chica. I’m frequently beset by this sort of confusion, and my days in Montaña’s territory were no exception. There’s an inherent contradiction in my profession: I’m a film critic and the main function of criticism is to misread everything. To imagine it all incorrectly in order to highlight its absurdity.
A few yards from us was an adobe shack, toward which Rosendo pushed me with no concern for the sharp stones cutting into the soles of my feet. Inside the shack was another man, very young, very short, his face covered in tattoos. He was holding a revolver in his left hand and with the right unsuccessfully attempting to tune a portable TV set to some channel.
“Open up,” ordered Gildardo.
The kid pressed a switch screwed onto a wooden pole and connected to a long strip of LEDs strung along the back wall. Then he crossed the room and folded up a cot. Underneath was a steel trapdoor with a heavy ring pull. Gildardo propped his AK-47 against the wall.
“Give me a hand.”
The tattooed kid once again did as he was told. They grasped the ring and, straining, tugged until they had lifted the hatch. Rosendo pushed me down. Feeling my way blindly, I descended the steep stairway. Rosendo and Gildardo followed. At first the darkness was impenetrable, but once we were four or five yards underground, I began to notice a glow that grew increasingly bright. And a current of fresh air. At the bottom of the stairway I found myself on the mosaic floor of a corridor with a black metal grille at the far end, behind which gleamed an almost natural blue-veined light. The barrier was screened by a couple of climbing plants whose scent I recognized: gardenia and Arabian jasmine. I stopped to breathe in the strange subterranean perfume. Gildardo nudged me forward. As we passed through the gate, I touched one of the plants. The leaves were plastic.
We crossed a polymer garden that smelled of real flora and came to a mahogany door. Rosendo rang a childishly simple code on the bell—two long peals and one short—and we waited. A man opened the door. He was wearing black boxers, a white cotton T-shirt, and, over all that, a yellow terry cloth bathrobe identical to my aunt Rosa Gloria Chagoyán’s. He was unshaven, his hair was tangled, and his eyes were red and inflamed, possibly from lack of sleep and the consumption of an incredible amount of whisky on the rocks, a tumbler of which he was holding in his left hand. He looked dirty and smelled of rancid sorghum, but there was something likable, even adorable, about his features despite the protruding jaw visible beneath his beard in the light from the artificial garden.
He looked me in the eyes without blinking or even glancing at my captors.
“Who’s this?”
“He was recommended,” replied Rosendo warily.
The man in the boxers nodded and allowed us to pass.
During the time it took to enter a cinnamon-colored living room, for the man in the bathrobe to point the remote at a giant plasma screen transmitting a reality show about car chases, for Rosendo to push me toward a sofa and Gildardo to place a bottle of mineral water in my hand, I noted that the bunker was extremely comfortable: spacious, high-ceilinged, airy, with a wide variety of precious objects— ceramics, paintings, bibelots, a Gobelin tapestry—scattered around a suite of what looked like, from the number of doors I could see, five or six rooms. In the background I could hear the whispers and laughter of invisible women, servants, and perhaps children.
The guy in the Rosa Gloria Chagoyán bathrobe stood before me and introduced himself.
“My name is Jacobo Montaña, head of the Sierra Madre cartel, on the lam from the Loma Larga maximum-security prison: the most wanted man in Mexico. Make yourself at home.”
Without waiting for me to reply, he pressed a button on the remote for the plasma screen and asked:
“Do you know who this is?”
I recognized the scene: it was from the final sequence of Django Unchained, when the protagonist manages to escape from his enforced journey to the mines and returns to Candie’s plantation to exact revenge. The editing shows a complete lack of taste. Quentin Tarantino appears on the screen (a little plumper than usual in his cowboy costume) and, when he’s in midsentence, the dynamite that is strapped to his torso explodes, blowing him to smithereens.
Montaña paused the movie.
“Are you familiar with him?”
“Naturally.”
“Have you met him in person?”
I was about to laugh, but Montaña’s seriousness stopped me in my tracks. I shook my head.
“I wrote my master’s thesis on his work.”
“But you know where he lives, right?”
“Not precisely. Or, well, yes, in L.A., but …”
Montaña turned to Rosendo and Gildardo. He cracked his knuckles.
“You heard him, bloodhounds: you’re going to L.A. Bring me the head of that fucking bastard. Ask Dante for funds. He’ll give you whatever you need.”
“Yes, sir.”
Rosendo and Gildardo retraced their steps to the grille.
“And what about me?” I screeched in panic.
“You stay here with me, champ,” said Montaña with nauseating obsequiousness: he sat down beside me and put an arm around my shoulders. “You’re going to teach me everything there is to know about that sonofabitch.”
With his face close to mine, when I could make out, beneath the hair and in the depths of his blurry eyes, the weariness and fury of his voluntary imprisonment (I didn’t know it at the time, but that specter had spent fifteen months coordinating the largest narcotics operation in the history of the world from his underground residence), I realized why Jacobo Montaña had seemed so handsome to me: his features were identical to those of the man whose decapitation he had just ordered. His face was the face of Quentin Tarantino.
The title of my master’s thesis is “Parody and the Sublime: The Character Overhears Himself in the Work of Quentin Tarantino.” Thanks to that document, I was awarded a couple of academic prizes, gained a certain level of celebrity among low-life geeks, and was offered paid employment: writing a column on cinema, published three times a week in a dozen newspapers. That, on top of the modest fortune I administer in the name of my aunt Rosa Gloria Chagoyán, allowed me to return from what used to be known as D.F. and is now CDMX to a comfortable life in Laredo.
(I’m sorry, I can’t stand Chilangos, I detest them, there’s no getting away from it: they might be cosmopolitan when considered as a whole, but block by block they are more provincial and class-conscious than I am.)
What is meant by parody and by the sublime? There is an unforgettable text that addresses the latter: the brief treatise On the Sublime by Pseudo-Longinus (that is to say, by an unknown author whom we now recognize by that attribution), written sometime in the first century BCE. The epistle—Greek in the original—speaks of “heights,” “grandeur,” “elevation”; voices that coincide with what in Latin is called sublimis: raised from the ground or suspended in the air. From that it can be inferred that the art of the sublime is that realm in which beauty, grandeur, and profundity reign. It is, nevertheless, of utmost importance not to confuse elevation with haughtiness, pedantry, or solemnity. From the first pages of his work, Pseudo-Longinus himself warns that there are pretentious forms that cloud, or “sully,” Beauty. He instructs us against “swelling” (a commonplace in cinema; cases in point: the works of Michael Bay and Mel Gibson), a vice that results in grandiloquence rather than heightening. He also suggests that artists should avoid puerility at all costs (all Mexican cinema seems puerile to me, but in my thesis I illustrate this point with reference to Carlos Reygadas): “Men slip into this kind of error because, while they aim at the uncommon and elaborate and most of all at the attractive, they drift unawares into the tawdry and affected.” Pseudo-Longinus then speaks of “mad enthusiasm” (an “unseasonable and empty passion,” which reminds me of Roland Emmerich) and “frigidity”—something Lars Von
Trier and the whole Dogme #95 movement fall victim to at their worst—and of authors who “sometimes forget themselves for the sake of such paltry pleasantries.”
Yet, in my judgment, the most interesting thing about the short text On the Sublime is not the skill with which it informs us about the rhetorical traps that chip away at greatness but its emphasis on the notion that profound beauty, the beauty that truly moves us, arises not from natural conditions (that is, from the individual genius of each author) but from the systematic daily practice of technique that is the basis of all aesthetic work. According to this precept, the sublime is learned; it is not epiphany, much less entelechy. This notion, which is clearly common sense, contradicts almost the entire history of Western art.
Let me put it another way. In the second paragraph of his work, Pseudo-Longinus states:
First of all, we must raise the question whether there is such a thing as an art of the sublime or lofty. Some hold that those are entirely in error who would bring such matters under the precepts of art. A lofty tone, says one, is innate, and does not come by teaching; nature is the only art that can compass it. Works of nature are, they think, made worse and altogether feebler when wizened by the rules of art. But I maintain that this will be found to be otherwise if it be observed that, while nature as a rule is free and independent in matters of passion and elevation, yet is she wont not to act at random and utterly without system. Further, nature is the original and vital underlying principle in all cases, but system can define limits and fitting seasons, and can also contribute the safest rules for use and practice.
What Pseudo-Longinus is explaining, pace Rilke, is that not every angel is terrifying. From his POV, Beauty is not simply that state of terror that calmly disdains to destroy us. Beauty, he thinks, cannot be an irrational force of Nature; rather, it is Nature in a classical and harmonious state: a periodic table, something humans are capable of studying and learning. Is that opinion important for our spiritual conception of art? It is extremely important. To begin with, because it posits the existence of tradition, that is to say, of a cultural genealogy: every present aesthetic object carries the metaphorical genes (and memes) of an aesthetic object that existed in the past. Every text is the result of an architext (as Gérard Genette calls it; and as I feel about it as I write this story and think, for example, about how deeply I have been influenced by Hermann Broch—and how few of his books have ever been sold). Nothing is original, originality is an illusion: each and every narrative—however much it might appeal to us or move us—has its origins in an earlier one. And that narrative comes from another, and so on, at least until Homer. This is to say— and I return to Genette here—that every narrative is, in the etymological sense, a parody, a parallel ode.
Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino Page 9
