Palinuro of Mexico by Fernando del Paso

Author:Fernando del Paso
Language: eng
Format: epub

15

Love ys labours lost

Everything started when, soon after Mamma Clementina’s death - and sooner after her burial - Molkas and Walter tried to console me and started talking about the transmigration of souls, reincarnation and metempsychosis, Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return, the Gnostics and of the birth of a butterfly every time somebody dies. What kind of butterfly would you like Mamma Clementina to be? asked Cousin Walter who, however, hated butterflies and remembered with glee the night he had been driving with friends along the coast road of Acapulco and the car engine over-heated and when they went to open the bonnet, he told Palinuro, they found that the radiator was plastered with black butterflies. They decided to cool the engine with iced beer and while they listened to the sound of the mantarays attacked by their enemies the goldfish and the poor mantarays tried to fly, raising themselves almost a metre above the surface of the water to fall with fins spread like open wings: splash, splat, splash, splat, we cooled the engine with iced beer and the foam washed away the black butterflies. There are butterflies, Walter told me, like the Vanessa antiopa which is the kind that returns to life when the winds die down and the sun comes out again; there are silver Hesperidae which wage incredible aerial combats with their winged confreres; there are butterflies with cocoons which break at the merest touch of the fingers; there are others which, rising from their nymphalid slough and spreading their wings, eject from their anus a red liquid like a shower of blood. There are diurnal butterflies which, he added, are said to die with their wings raised and joined. There are others which are nocturnal and die with their wings spread and drooping, like the mantarays. But I told Walter that I didn’t want Mamma Clementina to be reincarnated as anything other than herself.

‘As herself? Her self-same self, with all her wrinkles?’

‘Every one of them,’ I told him.

‘One for every day she lived?’ he asked me.

‘One for every day she did not live,’ I answered him.

‘And all her grey hairs?’

‘Every one of them.’

‘And her unfulfilled desires?’

‘And her shattered dreams.’

‘And her fake suicides?’

‘And her Papa Francisco.’

‘And her milkless breasts?’

‘And her narrow womb.’

‘Mamma Witch?’

‘Mamma Death.’

‘Mamma Melon?’

‘Mamma Fox.’

‘Mamma Frog?’

‘Mamma herself, Mamma herself and nobody else,’ I insisted, ‘no animal, no fruit, no other person, because then she would no longer be the same.’ And Walter said to me: ‘Quite impossible: Aunt Clementina could not be reincarnated as herself at the age she has reached; or rather, that she had reached, or rather, that she would have reached if she had lived another day; impossible, she could not have died yesterday, and if a person doesn’t die there’s no way they can be reincarnated.’ And I answered him: ‘You know what I mean: that she be reincarnated as herself being reborn, reliving her life.’ And Walter stated that such reincarnation was not only possible but exists and has always

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