Christopher Unborn (27 page)

“Be ernest about that,” said D. C. Buckley … or about a cetacean implacably hunted down by the furious Ahab …

“Oh, you movie dick,” said Buckley, tickling Don Homero's sleeping little dicky bird, whose proclivities lay in another direction …

“W. C. Fields forever,” sand the rockaztec band of the Four Fuckups.

“Bathroom Campos!” giggled the drunken Buckley, inebriated with English and Spanish calambours, punnish the spinning spunning Spanish language! while Don Homero sighed in resignation, telling his niece and nephew that he in no way opposed the myriad puns they might create because he hoped that the Castilian language would digest them all and emerge triumphant from this test, that it would reach the beach of the twenty-first century alive, overcoming, digesting, excreting the Anglo-Saxon universe, and he remained there staring, embracing the unknown D. C. Buckley, staring at the bikinis of the musical waiters and the white buttocks of Ada Ching.

They would never remember in which moment the sad year 1991 ended and slipped away unnoticed, undesired like a thief in the night as Don Homero would say, the certainly fateful 1992 of our five Christophercolonized centuries:

My mother Angeles looked uneasily at my father Angel looking at the cinnamon-colored little girl who was dancing between Decio and Marianito made into brothers in their desire for classist intermingling and racist risk and partying with the people, the Acapulco Slumming Party, desperately seeking ménage à trois with innocent and telluric Mexican girly bathed in tea,

who only had eyes, nevertheless, for my dad,

who looked with a desire my mother wished to deflect (which she could not) to the sweet-sixteen dancer Penny López,

who looked at no one: she was dancing.

4

And that first dawn of the New Year, which arrived amid a premonitory silence, while the diminutive Sino-Pole delicately licked the foyer of her vagina while with tiny, equally delicate nibbles he removed the odd pubic hair and then dug in like a playful kitten to sniff her clitoris, Ada Ching said yes, Shorty, time for fucky-fucky, who knows, it could happen any time, the world may change forever, and we'll be celebrating Russian Easter and Chinese New Year again. I don't want to miss my chance if it comes around, my naughty little chinky, yes, my little golden nugget, yes my little yellow pearil, I've been waiting for it for twenty-three years, just imagine, when I was a girl of twenty-three and we got the terrible news that Moscow and Beijing had broken off relations, that's right, make love to your Ada, your Sada, Bada, attaboy, that was a long time ago, I'll make myself a beauty for the soirees to come, but now you see: no one even remembered to celebrate the New Year, it came and no one noticed, but come on now, make me remember my tongue with your tongue, goose tongue, your Ada of Provence the sea the sun, your final flower of the Albigensian tree, your heretical survivor of the criminal crusades of Gaston de Foix Gras, lick my culo you dirty little coolie, stick your tongue up my anus, you polack peking piggy, you and I we sure are going to celebrate the Year Four Twenties and Twelve, so that I am cleansed of all mortal desires, so that I am empty of all lust and so that there remains nothing of my body drained by your yellow tongue except my spirit, my words, my purified ideology, and a body white at last, clean at last, washed spotless, my dengchowprick, all my garbage swept away by the broom of your tongue, my chinaboy, and I finally free of the sin of the evil God who gave me guts and tubes and blood and excrement and the lewd buttocks that I show up onstage every night to that mob des cons, but without ever renouncing my political principles, all that in order thanks to you and your immense sex—as big as you are small, my putto—to reach the good God of justice, name of a name of a Lenin, name of a name of a Chou, Albigensian of a Marx who are waiting for me at the end of the long tunnel of my impatient, bored flesh, century after blasted century that finally join together in the telescope of pleasure, in the telescunt of history, yesterday's millennia and today's millionaires, apocalypse in the tenth century and pocky lips in the twentieth, you and I the last of the Albigensians, long-fingered dwarf, yes, try to screw me so you can be pure and we two can reconstruct the last chance for the proletariat, who've been dragging themselves from millennium to millennium, through the mud of history, that's the way, just with your hands and tongue, I'm coming, I'm coming …

“What did you say to the fat old man, my little cabbage?”

“That it possible we all inside nightmare of bat.”

“And to Angeles?”

“Brind man no flaind snakes.”

“And to the garçon Angel?”

“You know where is Pacífica?”

“Do you think that it was enough for them to see the fat uncle humiliated?”

“No, no. They want kir him, not him suicide serf.”

“Well then, my little Papa-God, we won't get out of this one alive.”

“Wolk of priest to save humanity, not save humble skin.”

Ada Ching looked at herself in the cabin mirror with a sense of misgiving and of having lost her way.

“I was really beautiful. When no one loved me. Not this painted-up, fiftyish old monster. Ooooh, they called me La Fellini when I was young. Until they finally understood the task I'd taken on and respected me.”

Deng Chopin looked at her with supplicating eyes. She caught the reflection of that glance and began a vigorous brushing of her red hair—almost burned to a crisp, Was it by Breton hot combs? Norman ones? Or Provençal?

“Don't look at me that way. Throughout my childhood I had to put up with the humiliation my parents suffered after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Then in the sixties I myself had to say that it just wasn't so. Beijing and Moscow have not had a fight, they are the bastions of the proletarian revolution. If Beijing and Moscow separate, there will be no revolution, no proletariat. No one could sacrifice that power, Sacred Blue!”

She put down the brush. Deng stared at her intensely.

“Well, what do you say, chinaboy?”

He shook his head in the negative and sadly looked at the sheets.

“And to the world then, what do you say to the world, my sublime dwarf?”

“When people talk you about it, paladise, when you living there, it hell. I tell it to you, World. But you undersand it, Universe.”

“And to me what do you recount, my adored rekeket?”

“With one hair from woman possible to lift elephant.”

“Papa-God!”

“Papa-papa, papagoda!”

“Ayy, now my little yellow pearil, wouldn't you like me to take you inside, my dove, my dive, my divinity?”

“Yes, Ada Ching.”

“Well, how does it feel to want? Put your glasses back on and read something from the Palace of Pleasure and stop screwing around because you know very well that you don't get into my pussycat until the Sino-Soviet alliance is reestablished. That's that.”

“Tomollow maybe we dead.”

“That's no reason to throw out one's principles.”

“Nothing glow 'less seed planted, even death.”

“Alors, a fallen bud never returns to its branch. Bon soir, mon Chou.”

5

Well now, we were saying that sexual cells enter the sea to meet, to fertilize each other, without all the complications (my genes have been warning me about them for eons) that surround the simple conception of a human being and the philosophicomoralhistoricoreligious ceremony of copulation (I know all about whole eras of genes but only a little about gentlemen and ladies, after all): coral and jellyfish enter the sea to fertilize themselves and to peer through the corrupt water of the hotel drain and the turbulence caused by El Niño at the mountains where the people can no longer live, available now only to tourists and unsleeping advertisements: All the neon lights in Aca are lit, wasted during daylight hours:

WE HAVE ENERGY TO BURN
!

Nobody else. Never again. Around here, yes, the coral and the jellyfish reproduce by external fertilization (listen, Reader, I'm going to talk about something your honor knows nothing about: about what I am: a sperm that left its ancestors behind and defeated his little brothers in the race of the charros of ire and who now has found the hot egg and is distributing his X's and Z's) and the sexual cells (I'm talking about my family history, living now and certainly external, which for me is a short, secret history unless your mercies deign to inform me starting now and from the outside, to which purpose I concede exactly one page to add whatever you might want, now or never, before I take up my discourse again, recapitulating, as follows):

Reader's List

on seeing her from a dark balcony, without even daring to think of her as a human being: his statue, his bronze Galatea with wig and tricolor skyrocket

* (Ulises López nervously choosing between consulting his Hindustani guru at Oxford University or defending himself against the plots of Secretary Robles Chacón, his political rival, plots which will keep him from becoming president. He finally opts for forgetting economics and politics and thinks only about squash)

* (In the old El Mirador hotel: its shape

Christopher's List

* (the two of them on Pichipichi beach washing themselves off in the sea after creating me)

* (Uncle Homero flying diarrheically through the skies of Acapulco, fleeing from the guerrillas)

* (Uncle Fernando flying through the skies of the Chiticam Trusteeship in a helicopter toward the Lacandon forest)

* (Mamadoc foaming at the mouth and spitting at the mirrors because she has understood the reason for the Christophers Contest: to deprive her of children and to invent an artificial dynasty for Mexico)

* (Federico Robles Chacón remembers how he saw his creation, the Mother and Doctor, conquer the people and

* (My parents on the beach remembering what happened days before during the New Year's celebration that led to my conception)

* (I demanding from my new existence, which they don't even suspect, that they explain to me how and when, the place and the time in which all this takes place, what space is, what happens within the within and outside the outside and within outside and outside within)

* (They answering my demands before I make them by pure intuition. I already adore them!)

* The first thing Professor Will Gingerich noted when he arrived at the New Year's cocktail party on the terrace of the Hotel Sightseer (originally El Mirador) was that all the guests were made of glass.

that of layered terraces:

He didn't blame his headache for this illusion. Aspirin should be delivered with the Acapulco sun. But now the sun was not shining. Night had fallen. His herd of gringos had met to get to know each other before before beginning tomorrow's Fun & Sun Toltec Tour.

Each one had stuck a badge on his chest with his name and address on it. Damn! So why weren't they looking at each other? He observed each of them looking at the badge of the person standing next to him just as that person looked at his, smiling in a happy but absent way and avidly seeking the badge of the next guest. Their eyes pierced the badges as if they were panes of glass framed so they could see the Vermont landscape in winter. But here, behind the glass, there was only more glass. All of them wanted desperately to leave behind the next traveling companion and meet another one, who was also made of glass, all of them waiting, innocent and crystalline.

An Acapulco waiter offered him a Scarlet O'Hara. Will Gingerich took the glass with its brittle stem and felt nauseous as he tasted the cloying liquor flowing around drunken strawberries. He looked into the thick, bovine, impenetrable eyes of the Mexican waiter: his body was as square as a black die, so thick that no glass gaze could ever penetrate it. Professor Gingerich breathed deep and remembered that he ought to be introducing himself and looking after his flock. He slowly strolled across the terrace balanced high over the rocky, sonorous sea that night.

“Hi, I'm your professional guide.”

He didn't have to tell them his name because he, too, had it written on the chest of his faded windbreaker, which also had Dartmouth College Vox Clamantis in Deserto 1769 inscribed on it. The inscription was too light for anyone to decipher. He would bet on it. No one looked him directly in the eye. No one in fact did read the faded inscription. And he was not going to tell anyone that he had set himself up as a tour guide in Acapulco because Ronald Ranger had destroyed higher education in the United States with the speed of the fastest gun in the West. Among the items the President had certainly read on the hit list for budget cuts were two exotic subjects, Spanish-American Literature and Comparative Mythology. The President had wondered what earthly use they could have and marked them as definite cuts from the federal aid package. Gingerich consoled himself thinking that it was worse for the insane because the President had also eliminated federal aid for mental health: he had appeared on television with a statistical chart which showed beyond the shadow of a doubt that cases of mental imbalance had diminished sharply in the United States during the previous twenty years. Aid for an illness in decline was no longer necessary.

Will Gingerich did not want to think of himself as a victim of America in the eighties or announce it to his heterogeneous flock. Besides, the sixty-year-old couples who comprised it were not looking at him, even if they did squawk their appreciation, Oh, how exciting! as they read his badge. If only they were as excited about the age and prestige of Dartmouth College. But they neither read the inscription nor asked Will to translate the Latin.

“A voice crying out in the desert”—an index finger accompanied by a modulated, serious voice stopped him smoothly.

Will Gingerich stopped his wandering eyes in order to match his interlocutor with a body. Certainly it was something more than a finger and a voice. Gingerich shook his prematurely balding head. He was afraid of falling into the same malaise that possessed his flock. In front of him he saw a person who was not invisible. Will was on the point of introducing himself in a positive fashion: “Yes, I am a professor of mythology and literature at Dartmouth College.” But it seemed an insult to the institution.