Christopher Unborn Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Acknowledgment

  Dedication

  Prologue: I Am Created

  1. The Sweet Fatherland

  1. El Niño comes running up from Easter Island

  2. Fatherland, Your Mutilated Territories

  3. Take a break

  4. Mother and Doctor of All Mexicans

  5. On Streets like Mirrors

  6. And where was I?

  2. The Holy Family

  1. Later my father and mother emerge from the sea

  2. My father bade farewell to the house of his childhood

  3. And so, when his parents died

  4. “Don’t go yet, Mommy

  5. What Will My Baby Breathe When He’s Born?

  6. Fatherland, Your Surface Is Pure Corn

  3. It’s a Wonderful Life

  1. My circumstance consists of certainties and uncertainties

  2. At any hour of the day

  3. Angel put up with everything

  4. Your Breath the Blue of Incense

  5. Fatherland: Always Remain the Same, Faithful to Your Own Reflection

  6. In these annals of a wonderful life prior to my conception

  7. Angel and his new buddy the fat boy

  8. But before we get to the New Year’s party

  9. Things didn’t just happen all by themselves

  10. Let’s see now

  4. Festive Intermezzo

  1. I Don’t Want to Serve Anymore

  2. I declare that my mother’s black eyes are a beach

  3. Behind Deng Chopin he emerged

  4. And that first dawn of the New Year

  5. Well now, we were saying that sexual cells enter the sea

  6. This is the novel I am imagining inside my mother’s egg

  7. Gingerich returned to the Sightseer on foot

  8. At 9 a.m. on Monday, January 6, 1992

  9. The coyotes run along all the beaches

  5. Christopher in Limbo

  1. Your House Is Still So Very Big

  2. There are two movements, my mother says

  3. While these portentous events were transpiring here inside

  4. All Citizens Have the Right to Information

  5. And so it was that at midday Don Homero Fagoaga

  6. Curiously enough, the first things we feel

  7. Don Fernando paused triumphantly

  8. What? What, indeed?

  9. Uncle Fernando Benítez, a Catholic in his youth

  10. As rubicund as a rose

  6. Columbus’s Egg

  1. Potemkin City

  2. Taking Wing with the Crippled Devil

  3. Time

  4. The Devil’s Wells

  5. Ballad of the Cruellest Month

  6. Hollow-Eyed and Made Up

  7. You Live Day to Day, Miracle to Miracle, a Lottery Life

  8. They decided to look for jobs

  9. My father needs a compass

  10. More Rumors Than Pennies in a Piggy Bank

  11. I’ll Believe in You as Long as a Mexican Girl

  7. Accidents of the Tribe

  1. Médoc d’Aubuisson, the López family’s cook

  2. Like a ghost

  3. “Life,” Samuel Butler once wrote

  4. Emotion clouded my father’s eyes

  5. Reader: Think about us

  6. What would my father remember

  7. The current Servilia served tea

  8. The reader ought to know

  9. As soon as they found out

  10. Only Egg stayed behind

  11. Fatherland, Always Be Faithful to Yourself

  12. When the earth calmed down

  13. Dear Reader, you may remember

  14. Concha Toro’s life

  8. No Man’s Fatherland

  1. Thunderclap

  2. The Ayatollah Matamoros’s first order

  3. The fact is they didn’t have faces

  4. Without asking permission

  5. Matamoros Moreno rehearsed his every gesture

  6. Colonel Inclán raised his fingers

  7. This … is what Minister Federico Robles Chacón said

  8. On the night of the Ayatollah

  9. The din of the loudspeakers

  10. Like the plague entering the village

  11. No sooner had Grandfather Rigoberto Palomar

  12. Inside the border checkpoint

  13. It turns out that I, Christopher

  14. I’m an honest guy

  15. “I’m hungry!” Colasa Sánchez shouted

  16. Why Are We in Veracruz?

  17. The Other Bank of the River

  9. The Discovery of America

  1. Your Truth of Blessed Bread

  2. I Love You Not As a Myth

  3. Fatherland, unto You I Give the Key of Your Good Fortune

  4. Land!

  Books by Carlos Fuentes

  Copyright

  The author is grateful for the help—both creative and critical—of his friends

  JUAN GOYTISOLO and PROFESSOR ROALD HOFFMAN

  Naturally, to my mother and my children

  Prologue

  I Am Created

  The body is the part of our representation that is continuously being born.

  Henri Bergson

  “Mexico is a country of sad men and happy children,” said my father, Angel (twenty-four years old), at the instant of my creation.

  Before that, my mother, Angeles (under thirty), had sighed: “Ocean, origin of the gods.”

  “But soon there shall be no time for happiness, and we shall all be sad, old and young alike,” my father went on, taking off his glasses—tinted violet, gold-framed, utterly John Lennonish.

  “Why do you want a child, then?” my mother said, sighing again.

  “Because soon there will be no time for happiness.”

  “Was there ever such a time?”

  “What did you say? Things turn out badly in Mexico.”

  “Don’t be redundant. Mexico was made so things could turn out badly.”

  So she insisted: “Why do you want a child, then?”

  “Because I am happy,” my father bellowed. “I am happy!” he shouted even louder, turning to face the Pacific Ocean. “I am possessed of the most intimate, reactionary happiness!”

  Ocean, origin of the gods! And she took her copy of Plato’s Dialogues, the edition published in the twenties by Don José Vasconcelos, when he was rector of the University of Mexico, and put it over her face. The green covers bearing the black seal of the university and its motto, THROUGH MY RACE SHALL SPEAK THE SPIRIT, were stained with Coppertonic sweat.

  But my father said he wanted to sire a son (me, zero years), right here while they were vacationing in Acapulco, “in front of the ocean, origin of the gods?” quoth Homerica Vespussy. So my naked father crawled across the beach, feeling the hot sand drifting between his legs but saying that sex is not between the legs but inside the coconut grove, around the svelte, naked, innocent body of my mother, crawling toward my mother with the volume of Plato draped over her face, Mom and Dad naked under the blazing and drunken sun of Acapulque on the day they invented me. Gracias, gracias, Mom and Dad.

  “What shall we name the boy?”

  My mother does not answer; she merely removes the tome from her face and looks at my father ironically, reprovingly, even
disdainfully—not to say compassionately—although she doesn’t dare call him a disgusting male chauvinist pig. What if it’s a girl? Nevertheless, she prefers to overlook the matter; he knows that something’s wrong and can’t allow things to stay like that at this point in time and circumstance and so he solves the problem by nibbling at her nipples as if they were cherry-flavored gumdrops, cumdrops—postprandial but prepriapic jelly beans, puns my dad, in whose prostatic sack I still lie in waiting, innocent and philadelphic, with my sleepy chromosomatic and spermatic little brothers (and sisters).

  “What shall we name the boy?”

  “Things exist without anyone’s having to name them,” she says, trying not to reactivate their old argument about the sex of the angels.

  “Of course, but right now I’d like a taste of that pear in heavy syrup of yours.”

  “You and I don’t need names to exist, right?”

  “All I need right now is that sweet thing of yours.”

  “Just what I mean. Sometimes you call it the Hydra and other things.”

  “An’ figs, sometimes.”

  “And figs, sometimes”—my mother laughs—“as your Uncle Homero would say.”

  “Our Uncle Homero,” my father jokingly corrects her. “Ay!” Even he didn’t know if he was complaining about that undesired family tie or roaring because of the precipitate pleasure he did not want to see lost in the sterile sand, even if he knows, stretched out on his belly, that both good and evil are merely violent pleasures, and thus they resemble and cancel each other out in their infrequent eruption. As for the rest: kill time and kick ass.

  “Yeah, yeah, go ahead and howl, or laugh at the old guy,” said Angeles, my mother, “but here we are on vacation in Kafkapulco, in front of the ocean origin of the gods, guests in his home.”

  “His home, bull,” blurts out my father, Angel. “It belongs by rights to the peasants from the communal lands he stripped it away from, damn the old moneybags and damn his granny, too.”

  “Who happens also to be your granny,” my mother says, “because you and I say ‘sea’ to refer to the ‘sea,’ but who knows what its real name is, the name the gods utter when they want to stir it up and say to themselves ‘Thalassa. Thalassa. We come from the sea.’”

  Blessèd mother of mine: thank you for your multitrack mind—on one track you explain Plato; on another you fondle my father, while on a third you wonder why the baby must necessarily be a boy, why not a girl? And you say Thalassa, thalassa, well named was Astyanax, the son of Hector, well named (Angeles my mother, Angeles my wife looks toward the wrathful sea); well named was Agamemnon, whose name means admirable in his resistance (and what about my resistance, moans Angel my father, if you could only see how my Faulknerian chili pepper resists, it not only survives, it endures, it perdures, it’s durable stuff). Well named are all the heroes, my mother murmurs, reading at her vasconcelosite tome with its elegant Art Deco typography, to postpone with her first mental track the unrepeatable pleasure playing on the second: heroes who share the root of their identity with Eros: Eros, heroes. What shall we name the baby? What are we going to do today, January 6, 1992, Epiphany, and the anniversary of the very day of the First Agrarian Law of the Revolution, so that he’s conceived on ancient lands belonging to the community improperly appropriated by our uncle and lawyer Don Homero Fagoaga, and so that he will win the Discovery of America Contest on October 12 next? In which of my mama’s multitrack mind’s circuits and systems am I going to be onomastically inserted? I shudder to think. The paternal genes send horrible messages: Sóstenes Rocha, Genovevo de la O., Caraciollo Parra Pérez, Guadalupe Victoria, Pánfilo Natera, Natalicio González, Marmaduke Grove, Assis de Chateaubriand, Archibald Leach, Montgomery Ward Swopes, Mark Funderbuck, and my mother repeats the question:

  “Then why do you want a son?”

  “Because I am happy,” bawls my dad. She throws away the green volume published in 1921 by the rector of the University of Mexico, Don José Vasconcelos, with its thick Platonic pages that survived, look now your mercies, the murders at La Bombilla and Huitzilac, the massacre of the students in Tlateloco Plaza in 1968, the principal cadavers and the subordinate cadavers, the dead with mausoleums and the dead in potter’s fields, those dead on marble legs and those dead without a leg to stand on: what shall we name the child? Why the fuck does it have to be a boy? Because the contest rules state:

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: The male child born precisely at the stroke of midnight on October 12, and whose family name, not including his first name (it goes without saying the boy will be named Christopher), most resembles that of the Illustrious Navigator, shall be proclaimed PRODIGAL SON OF THE NATION. His education shall be provided by the Republic and on his eighteenth birthday he will receive the KEYS TO THE REPUBLIC, prelude to his assuming the position, at age twenty-one, of REGENT OF THE NATION, with practically unlimited powers of election, succession, and selection. Therefore, CITIZENS, if your family name happens to be Colonia, Colombia, Columbario, Colombo, Colombiano, or Columbus, not to say Colón, Colomba, or Palomo, Palomares, Palomar, or Santospirito, even—why not?—Genovese (who knows? perhaps none of the aforementioned will win, and in that case THE PRIZE IS YOURS), pay close attention: MEXICAN MACHOS, IMPREGNATE YOUR WIVES—RIGHT AWAY!

  TOMORROW MAY BE TOO LATE

  WHEN THE FROST IS ON THE PUNKIN

  THAT’S THE TIME FOR DICKIE DUNKIN

  THE MOMENT IS AT HAND

  THESE NINE MONTHS WILL NEVER COME BACK AGAIN

  So, ladies and gentlemen, let’s get procreating! Your pleasure is your duty and your duty is your freedom! In Mexico we are all free and anyone who does not want to be free should be punished! You can count on your judges, after all: have we ever let you down?

  And she, at least on the track given over to her consciousness, no longer puts up any resistance, no longer says: What if it’s a girl? What shall we name the girl, huh? She only said it’s beautiful making love like this at noon on the beach my love, ever since you said don’t take care of yourself anymore, Angeles, I want to give you a child right next to the sea, I started getting hot, for the first time in a year I shaved my armpits and also the hair that peeks through the slots in my chair asada in this Acapulcoesque incandescence, the sun, not the sun, no my love, but your cherry jubilee in my hungry mouth, your scherezada from Tampique with its chilis and little beans which I’m digging up with my long finger, your cunt, your raccunto, your ass chérie, your cherry ass, Chère Sade, flagellated by my furious whip here on the beach of Kafkapulco, but a private beach my love, sometimes private property does have its virtues, right Prudhon? Pardon?

  Shhh, my love, let me imagine your chers rassés, your ché arrasado, let me live, Chère Sade, in the feverish calendar of your opec-and-one nights, let me swim in the colors you sweat, your chromohydrosis, I yearn for your yen, if only for only thirty seconds over Tokyo, I pokey-you now your ass which is all the asses that bore you my love, the waves carry grass to your ass, my Arabian mare, my divine Angeles, I drink the wine of your nalglass, I hear the toll of your knelglass, I bury my nose in your knolgrass, Oh your Mexican ass my Angeles mía, the color of sweet quince, the smell of rotten mango and fresh red snapper, your historical ass, Angeles, febrile and Phoenician, dancing the Roman rumba, Spanish and spunning, Turkissable, Castilian and Moorish, tinged with Aztec, nahuátl nalgas, Cordobuzzable buttocks, Arab pillow of the almohades, ass on horseback and ass on camelback, second face-double cheeks—what is your name? What shall we name the baby? What says the Plutonic part of your Platonic book? Have you run out of words, darling?

  My father dared to look at her. She had an illuminated halo over her head, which is to say (she was saying) more illuminated than ever when she said what she had to feel or felt what she had to say or listened to what she had to hear, but her halo dimmed, saddened, when the idiots, the jerks, the dimwits, the flatfeet wore it down: my mother, her halo very brilliant on this brilliant afternoon, was complaining about it, with her el
bows jammed into the sand, exiling her questions:

  “And what if it’s a girl, contest or not?”

  “And what if it’s twins?”

  My father stares at my mother’s elbows and desires them almost more than her snatch: nubile, sensual, exciting elbows, buried in the sand. The dry smell of the palm-leaf roof: a dry coolness. Coconut and mango and scallops with Tabasco sauce. The sea is the Pacific. The farther out you look, the more the water seems to burn. Thalassa. Thalassa.

  And my father once more sucks her nipples as if they were Sucrets, with the very rhythm of respiration: Air, Hera, Air, Eros, Air, Heroes, Angeles, Scheherazade, Certified Pubic Accounter, First Novelist, drown yourself in the waters of time, wet your syllables my love, ass of my angelic amour (my mother is loved, in case you missed it, by my father on the beach and I am about to be created) in Acapulco. I am happy at noon and I want to have a son in a country of happy children and sad men before the time for happiness ceases to exist, and even if Mexico exists so things turn out badly for us, in front of the ocean origin of the gods.

  “Isabella,” if it’s a girl we’ll name her Isabella, whimpered my mother, hanging on to the mainmast of my father’s caravel, suddenly shifted into her unconscious track, it may be a girl. My queen. What shall we name the girl? Well! Does it have to be a boy? Well! We’ll call her Isabella, Isabella the Catholic, Isabella the Chaotic.

  My Queen: give me America, give a little America to your little Angel. Let me come near your Guahananí, Angeles, caress your Gulf of Mexico, tickle the delta of your Mississippi, excite your Cuba, get engulfed in your Gulf of Darien.

  Give me America, Angel: come on, my Martín Fierro, here is your pampa mía, give me your Veragua, come close with your Maracaibo, take my Honduras, snuggle up with your Tabasco, kiss my Key West, Vene, Vene, Venezuela, anchor in my Puerto, Rico, just leave your Grand Cayman right there, let me feel in the Hispaniola, ay Santiago, ay Jardines la Reyna ayayay! Nombre de Dios:

  May God Give You Your Name, my son, Name him, name him, he’s coming, he’s out! The only one among millions, silvery and quick, the gay bandolero, the swashbuckler, the matador, escaping from the myriad company of the chromosomatic legions. Name him, he’s out, nothing can stop him now, with all his genes on his back, bearing, oh my God, bearing all that we are.