Christopher Unborn (13 page)

“Oranges, pears, and figs, son.”

He said it in the same voice God said let there be light, in the same voice His Son (oh Godoh!) said verily I say unto you suffer the children to come unto me. The Orphan Huerta regarded him with a suspicious eye.

But in that instant Uncle Homero was the pedagogue and not the pedophile. “Or, as the dazzling light of Spanish grammar that spoke incarnate in the voice of the illustrious Venezuelan, Don Andrés Bello, said on a great day, the tendency to drop the final
d
in the copulative
and
before a monosyllabic word beginning with a consonant is to be resisted at all costs.”

The Orphan Huerta ceased to be suspicious. Uncle Homero's grammar lesson culminated in a gaze appropriate to a hanged donkey. That's how tender were the eyes of this fatted calf. That's how stretched his baggies were by his pedophilia.

“Resisted at all costs, son,” said Homero tenderly, caressing the bottle-capped head of the boy, and the Orphan Huerta tells even today how he extracted from the depths of his filthy soul all the revenge sunken into the bottom of Lake Texcoconut that each and every Makesickan carries in the mudbank of his guts, next to the treasures of Whatamock, father of the fatherland, which is to say toasted tootsies for the toast of the nation, said my daddy-o, the vacillating hero, washing off the shit, while I, pleased as punch, floated around in the ocean within my mother where I am not touched (oh, still not) by the shit of this world.

Resisted at all costs, son: Uncle Homero's skin could not resist the razor-sharp edges of the bottle caps on the boy's cap. He raised his wounded finger to his tongue (his tongue, the protagonist, the star of his prodigious body, now full of his own acrid blood spilt by a grimy gamin from Atlampa) and he looked deliberately at the Orphan, but finding no reaction to this dialectic of grammar and bottle caps and finger and blood and tongue, he ended up repeating:

“Oranges, pears, and figs.”

And the Orphan answered:

“Fat old fart
an
' motherfucker.”

That was only the beginning. The Orphan stuck out his tongue horribly at Uncle Homero and then fled. The supremely agile grammarian, who resembled nothing so much as a dancing hippopotamus, a balloon on a string, a sentimental elephant and the other fantasies of Waltdysneykov, that is, the Grimm Brother of our infancies, said my father while he washed the excrement from his hair, tried to chase him, but the Orphan dashed across a vacant lot next to Uncle H.'s condo and joined some other boys—his brothers, his doubles?—who also could run with blazing feet over the stones that had been burned by industrial detritus.

Lawyer Fagoaga knew that this was their style; the Cuauhtémoc cadets he called them, ancient children, unique heroes at the moment of their birth, he called them, secretly enraging my lopezvelardean father; they had blown their noses into the huge black handkerchief commemorative of Anahuac's ecocide. They were born wearing huaraches, in the words of Don Lucas Lizaur, the founder of the prestigious shoe emporium the Buskin (located at the corner formerly known as Bolívar and Carranza, today Bully Bar and Car Answer, where the drunks would call for cabs as they emerged from the bar-discotheque-boîte of our Chilean lady friend, as the reader will soon see): they were born with a layer of hide on their soles, making them able to walk the hot streets of the capital, conquered this time by her own sons, the industrial, commercial, official conquistadors.

“Oh, Mexico, favorite daughter of the Apocalypse!” Uncle Homero sighed as he watched the Orphan disappear in the burning mist of the vacant lot and join his pals. City dogs get bloody noses from sniffing the pavement, my mother says, and their paws are like shoe leather.

“What will my baby breathe when he's born?”

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

The pulverized shit of three million human beings who have no latrines.

The pulverized excrement of ten million animals that defecate wherever they happen to be.

Eleven thousand tons per day of chemical waste.

The mortal breath of three million motors endlessly vomiting puffs of pure poison, black halitosis, buses, taxis, trucks, and private cars, all contributing their flatulence to the extinction of trees, lungs, throats, and eyes.

“Pollution control?” Minister Robles Chacón exclaimed disdainfully. “Sure, when we're a great metropolis with centuries of experience. Right now we're growing, so we can't stop, this is only our debut as a great city. We'll regulate in the future.”

(
WILL THERE BE A FUTURE
? wonders the placard my proud father parades along Paseo de la Reforma)

(
WE HAVE BEEN A GREAT METROPOLIS SINCE
1325, says the second placard he proudly exhibits on the streets of the posh Zona Rosa)

“Anti-pollution devices on cars and trucks?” indignantly exclaims Minister-for-Life Ulises López. “And who's going to pay for it? The government? We'd go broke. The private sector? What would we have left to invest? Or would you prefer that the gringo investors pay for that, too? They'd be better off investing in Singapore or Colombia!”

(
INVEST IN SEOUL, SUFFOCATE REVEREND MOON
, says my tenacious father's eleventh placard as he pickets the Korean Embassy this time)

“What will my son breathe?”

Mashed shit.

Carbonic gas.

Metallic dust.

And all of it at an altitude of about one and a half miles, crushed under a layer of frozen air, and surrounded by a jail of circular mountains: garbage imprisoned.

Madam, your son's eyes may also contemplate another circle of garbage surrounding the city: all it would take would be a match tossed carelessly onto the circular mass of hair, cardboard, plastic, rags, paper, chicken feet, and hog guts, to create a chain reaction, a generalized combustion that would surround the city with the flames of sacrifice, setting loose the feathered Valkyries named jade and moon, who would, in a few minutes, consume all the available oxygen.

Vomited by the city, blind, dazzled by sudden light, by the accumulated goo on his eyes, by the threat of visual herpes, fed by the garbage, swollen by the sewage, his hairy head crowned by a brimless felt hat decorated with bottle caps, his skin discolored from disease, the Orphan Huerta. Like a badly digested turd, he flew out of the Insurgentes subway stop and headed for Calle Génova in the Zona Rosa, where my father, calm and sure of himself, was parading around with his
WILL THERE BE A FUTURE
? placard. The Orphan ran blindly, like a fetus thrown prematurely into the world, the uterus in his case a stairway, pint-sized and stoned, the umbilical cord in his case the
INSURGENTES
metro line, until he slammed into the back of a short man elegantly dressed in gray shantung, standing in the entrance to the El Estoril restaurant. The blind but instinctively predatory snotnose (literally dripping) stretched out his hand toward the pants pocket and then the stomach of the bald, shortsighted, and bearded character who shouted
Miserable punk!
grabbed the kid by the wrist, made him scream (Well done, Uncle Fernando!), and quickly twisted his thieving arm around his back.

Don Fernando Benítez wore a money belt to keep his money safe, as everyone who walks around Makesicko City does, but he never stopped showing off the watch and chain that hung from the middle of his vest. It had been a gift from his oldest to his youngest lover, who had bequeathed it to Benítez when she died, like all the others, before him, thereby subverting the rule of feminine survival. He considered the watch a legitimate part of his lifetime, lifelong harvest: at the age of eighty, the eminent creole journalist and historian believed that sex was art and history. His blue, penetrating eyes wanted to penetrate the veil of grime and suffocation that covered the face of this infant Cacus, or infant caca, and read there something, anything that would not condemn him without giving him beforehand
the right to a reading.
In the eyes of the boy, he read: “Love me, I want to be loved.”

That was all he needed to bring the lad to his house in Coyoacán, change his clothes (the Orphan Huerta clung to his bottle-capped borsalino, as if to remember where he came from and who he was), and no shoe could fit over his feet turned to stone by industrial detritus, his feet whose soles were made of natural rubber: foot toasties, Cuauhtémoc cadets!

“You actually look handsome, son of a bitch,” Benítez told the boy once he'd bathed him.

He knew his name. “I was always called Orphan Huerta.”

Where did he come from?

He shook his head. The lost cities of Mexico were anonymous cities: larger than Paris or Rome, six, seven, eight million inhabitants, but
no name.
The Orphan Huerta, he at least had a name, but about the nameless city he came from (in the
Cratylus
my mother reads, names are either intrinsic or conventional, or does an onomastic legislator give them out?), nothing was known.

Benítez understood that a language was hiding itself so as to be understood only by those initiated into a cabal, a social group, or a criminal caste, but it hid entire cities without even burying them, without hiding them in the liquid oblivion of a sewer—this could only happen in a city without a sewage system!

“We've got to give this kid an origin, he can't wander the face of the earth without a place of origin,” said Benítez's wife, in a display of good sense. So the two of them covered their eyes and pointed to a spot on the map of the city they had hanging in the kitchen: Atlampa. From that moment on, they said that Orphan Huerta was from Atlampa, that was his neighborhood, Atlampa this and Atlampa that. But one day Don Fernando took the Orphan for a walk through Lomas: first the boy became excited, then he became sad. Benítez asked him what was wrong, and the boy said, “I would have preferred to be from here.”

From here: he stared dreamily at the green lawns, the shutters, and the high walls, the trees and the flowers, but above all the walls, the protection. The sign of security and power in Mexico: a wall around the house.

This boy had a brother—Benítez managed to understand that after deciphering the Orphan's pidgin—but he'd gone away a year ago. When he left, he asked where the man who had done most damage to Mexico was. General Negro Durazo, chief of the police in charge of order and justice in the times of López Portillo, or Caro Quintero, himself an immoral thug who was a great success in drug trafficking, in seducing women, and who killed people with the same callous indifference as the chief of police. The difference between them was that the drug lord fooled no one, always worked outside the law, and didn't hide behind the law. The drug lord, concluded the Orphan's brother, did not do the nation the same kind of damage the police chief did by corrupting the justice system and discouraging the people. He said all that one afternoon after vomiting up that day's meager, rotten food: “I'm cutting out, bro', and I'm gonna see if I'm like Caro Quintero, who was a guy who'd try anything, who did himself a lot of good without fucking up the country in the process. Later on, I'll come back for you, little brother. I swear by this.”

He kissed the cross he made with his thumb and index finger. But the day of his return never came (the Orphan measures time in terms of diarrhea attacks, senseless beatings, blindside attacks, who beat you up, orphan boy? Neither the sun nor the night is any good as a way to tell time: the Orphan can only count on the orphaned hours of the day) and the brother who stayed referred to the absent brother as “the lost child” and what was he? One day he slipped like a rat into the recently opened metro—before, he could use only packed minibuses or go on foot, and then one day it became possible to get on a train redolent of clean, new things, enter through the dust of the anonymous city and pop out like a cork into the boutiques and restaurants and hotels of the Zona Rosa:

No, Benítez said to him, I don't want you to be a young corpse: one more in this land of sad men and happy children. You've got lots of energy, orphan boy, I mean, you feel strong, right? Yessir, Mr. Benítez. Then let me show you how to survive by using jokes, humor is better than crime, right? You (we) have the right to laugh, orphan boy, all of you have at least that right, the right to a giggle, even if your laughter is mortal: wear out your power in the joke and perhaps you will find your vocation there; I'm not going to force you, who knows what kind of mind all the kids like you develop in the hells of this world?

The boy asked if someday he would find his lost brother, and Benítez took off his brimless borsalino, patted his bristling head, and told him of course, don't worry about it, lost children always turn up sooner or later, of course.

Uncle Fern was a wise man: he showed him the way with humor, without Teutonic tyranny, waiting to see what this boy was made of who'd been spit into his hands by the subway, which had transformed the Zona Rosa from an elitist oasis into a lumpen court of miracles. With whom did he hang around, to what ends were his talents put? Bring your friends home, Uncle Fernando told him, I want them to feel welcome here, and so one day there appeared with the Orphan a fat white boy with flat feet and slicked-down black hair. He said he was an orphan, too, like the Orphan, a projectionist in a theater that specialized in classics, where they showed old films. He'd met the Orphan at the entrance to the Hotel Aristos, should I tell your godfather what you were doing, Orph'? The boy with the bristling hair nodded assent and the chubby lad said, “He was beating out a rhythm with the bottle caps on his hat, he beat out a tune on the caps, just imagine what kind of talent he has, sir.”

“And what about you?” asked Benítez.

“Well, I joined up with him, sir. Uh, I'm a little ashamed. I mean, I don't know if you … Darn, this long hair … I still wear mine that way, even though it's out of fashion, but I … Well, the fact is that I use pins to keep it in place, see? My black curls, ha ha, well, I could pick out a tune with a hairpin, and I joined up with your godson here…”