Christopher Unborn (36 page)

“But now,” said Uncle H. as he swallowed an armadillo in green
mole
sauce in one of the incomparable culinary retreats lining the Igualistlahuaca plaza, “it falls to us to reconcile secular faith with divine faith, the sacred with the profane.”

Who could forget the visit of the Polish Pope to Mexico fourteen years before, the most spectacular entrance into the capital since that of Hernán Cortés, when, sotto voce, the most prudent strategists in national politics said to themselves, as they peeked out from behind the thick brocade curtains at the Seat of Executive Power at the seven million souls who awaited, who followed, and who surrounded the Vicar of Christ in the Zócalo and the Cathedral:

“All the Holy Father would have to do is order them to seize the National Palace. They would do it, your honor, and nothing could stop them. Am I right?”

“Well,” Uncle Homero directed his beautifully enunciated prose against the difficulties of a bit of crackling (overcoming that recalcitrant tidbit, of course), “the time has come for us to reconquer the sacred for the Revolution. Let us stop, Mr. Delegate, being fools and playing at anticlericalism. We've recaptured everything in order to achieve our heart's desire, National Unity: left and right, bankers and field hands, now also, thanks to our August National Guide, even our Ancestral Matriarchy. I warn you, let us capture the world of the sacred before it captures us. I warn you, Mr. Delegate from the state of Guerrero, Coreligionist in PRI, Don Elijo Raíz: there is an Ayatollah in our Future. Now let's finish up this crackling!”

A parrot squawked on the shadowed portal of the plaza, and Homero, flying on metaphoric wings, swallowed his plum dessert in one gulp, eagerly thinking about the Mixtec-Zapotec homeland.

5

And so it was that at midday Don Homero Fagoaga ascended the bandstand erected in front of the old rose-colored church in Igualistlahuaca, equidistant, our budding national figure, from the two towers and from the bell towers worked in pale cut stone and watered-down marble. Uncle H. standing before his microphone, surrounded by sixty-three local PRI hierarchs, the tribunal festooned with banners that repeated the slogans of the day, Don Homero surrounded by small-town orators eager to be seen with the future Senator but also with the sixty-three hierarchs, one for each year the Party had been in power, to think there are men sixty-three years old who have never seen any other party in power, murmured Uncle Fernando indignantly as he led my parents Angel and Angeles (and, as a bonus, me as well, though none of them knew about it at the time, they'll only remember me retroactively, retroattractively—really acting retro is what I understand it to be), who were now entering the crowded square, she on the burro, he wrapped in his poncho, heading toward the tribunal where Uncle H., saved from the Acapulco furies right under the noses of my impotent parents Angel and Angeles, lets himself be loved by the PRI ephebocracy, the young men who make sure his microphone is set at the proper angle, who smile at him by smiling at the sun, and who seek their own rapid, not to say meteoric, rise through the hierarchy of our civil church, the P–R–I, their black eyes already shining with the dream of being Pope, cardinal at least, what about archbishop? okay, bishop would be enough, deacon if there's nothing better to be had, sacristan sounds good, altar boy's better than nothing, Swiss Guard, whatever, whatever your mercies say as long as they're not left out in the cold, and his honor Homero Fagoaga glowing amid the ambition of the young men and the fatigue of the old ones, ayyy the survivors of heighty campaigns like this one, height million height hundred heighty-height glasses of Hi-C, mountains of black
mole,
horse meat, barbecued pork with everything on it, skin and hair, civic parades and social nights dancing polkas with fat ladies, in town after town, village after village, survivors of phantasmagoric campaigns—the sexennial Mexican presidential nonrace—for president and senator, the triennial races for the Congress, biennial races for local legislators and municipal presidents, all of them bewitched by this need to campaign, to become president, as if they were going up against the Italian Communists, the English Tories, and the French Gaullists: bah! exclaims Uncle Fernando, whose speech my mom is recording amid the Mixtec Mass this morning for the future reference of my collective unconsciousness, only the gringos beat us out with a single party that pretends to be two parties. The only truly authentic slogan should be:

ELECTIONS COME EVERY SIX YEARS
,

BUT MISFORTUNE IS ALWAYS WITH US

Sixty-three years, my dear niece and nephew, what do you think of that, and no end in sight, said Uncle Fernando: not Hitler, not Perón, not even Franco, only the U.S.S.R. beats us and now not even them because now we have a PAN president, which allows the PRI to blame the opposition for everything and to govern with more power than ever, and for that very reason Don Homero Fagoaga adjusts the microphone to the height of his multiple chins, warms up his delivery, the crowds gather, curious, trucked in, bribed, a hundred pesos, a taco, lemonade, a beer, a brass band, you name it, things might get screwed up if you don't come, let's see now about your property-line suit, let's see, let's sue, let's sewer: with a great sense of satisfaction, Homero scanned the multitude of Mixtec citizens spread out in front of him, standing there on the pavement stones next to the sickly pines and laurels near the church and beyond the gates out to the unpaved street and the market tents of opulent misery. He looked at the heads of the multitude of varnished straw hats, the heads of the women crowned with green, blue, and scarlet silk, their tresses tied up with orange and lilac wool, four thousand, five thousand heads carrying traditional offerings, with earthenware pots balanced on their heads, heads offering tomatoes and herbs, grasshoppers and onions, and the nervous little heads of the children, first running like porcupines but finally they too, the happy children in the land of sad grownups, captured by the sinuous words of Don Homero Fagoaga, who was comparing the Guerrero sierra “to Italic Latium and Hellenic Attica, glorious sites of humanistic honor, cradles of democracy, crucibles of society where a metaphysical tremor made men and mountains, children and stones all speak in one voice to repeat with the immortal tribune, quaestor, and consul, my model in action and speech, Don Marcus Tullius Cicero, of Arpino, mens cuisque is est quisque, which in the glorious language we speak thanks to the Hispanic Motherland, to, of course, no discredit to the Autochthonous Motherland, which I see here exemplified in its roots of impassioned telluric tremor, means the spirit is the true being and where, oh citizens of Guerrero, would that truth be more profoundly true and scientifically rational and precise than here in the Mixtec homeland, ever fertile cradle of the glorious motherland—
MEEXXXIIICCCOOO
: Civis Romanum sum, the glorious tribune exclaimed with pride but without arrogance and here we can repeat, Civis Guerrerensis sum, because if indeed the uncle of Augustus declared his modest and for being modest moving preference to be first a son of his village and second a son of Rome, it was not merely for that reason that he stood a model for legions of his admirers then and now, but above all looking forward to, anticipating, the Mexican meritocracy that our Revolutionary Institutional Party offers with equal opportunities for all, for each and every one of you, to rise, as the Well-Deserving Don Benito Juárez rose, from illiterate shepherd to the Presidential Throne, from being first in place of honor in Rome and saying to his people: You have Caesar and his fortune with you!”

He cleared his throat, was offered a turbid glass of
tepache,
his microphone, which the vibrations of his mighty word and the pulsation of his potbelly had pushed far away, was readjusted, a little old drunk raised his bottle of Corona Extra and shouted out Long Live Don Porfirio Díaz and Homero: oh, fellow sons and daughters of Guerrero, let it at least be said of Homero Fagoaga that he serves both you and Our Lord in Heaven (pregnant pause): there is, fellow voters, fellow citizens, friends, brothers in the Lord (significant pause), and coreligionists of the Revolution (hasty conclusion: con brio),
no corner of the world that smiles on us more than this one,
as the ancient bard Horace said of his native Venosa.

Uncle Homero paused with a distant but fierce blaze in his eyes: irritated at the stupidity of the people hired to plaster the walls of Igualistlahuaca with posters and how they'd confused the hour, the name, the theme, and the message of his sacrorevolutionary oratory with a vulgar wrestling match between Batman and Robin, and what, by the way, could be further from his five thousand listeners, Homero suddenly said to himself, the Match or Cicero? No matter, he sighed: a Mexican can make do with anything because he can be anything: the PRI not only allows it but makes certain he can. But in that briefest of instants in which the local Party hierarchs thought some things and the candidate thought others and Uncle Fernando, my dad, and my mom, and I inside her (a mere figment of the collective unconscious inside the spirals of history, the vicious circle) felt ourselves pushed, first pressured secretly, then little by little pressed by a human, incomprehensible power that could not be located in any one individual and even less attributable to that grand no one which is everyone, finally trampled, tossed by the multitude of Mixtecs who moved forward with impassive faces, devoid of laughter, devoid of hatred, devoid of tears, with their unmoving terra-cotta features, as Uncle H. would say from his bandstand, with a blind determination and an enthusiasm that was frightening precisely because of its silence, a quiet horde of Mixtec Maenads moving toward the bandstand occupied by Uncle Homero and the Sixty-three Hierarchs: can you guess what happened next? They didn't applaud, they didn't throw tomatoes or grasshoppers at the distinguished personages on the dais: they just moved, advanced, my father later said, in the same way the waves, the clouds, all the beautiful and terrible things in this world, move, as Homero opened his arms to receive the love of the masses which would waft him on to a senatorial bench, from this dump to
SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW
! oh, my Uncle H., in what moment did you realize what the Sixty-three PRI Hierarchs had begun to guess, the worst, seeing that silent mass, hardhearted, devoid of emotion, moving toward him with the fatality of the six-year term, with an imperturbable resolution that was open to any and all interpretations, and Homero asked the young coffee-cup-sized orator on his left, whose name was Tezozómoc Cuervo, LL.D.:

“Did they like it?”

“My dear sir, see for yourself.”

Homero sighed in the face of this native political dexterity and turned to the hierarch on his right, an old man with a pear-shaped body and loose suspenders, famous in local circles as the first and foremost supporter of President Calles in the state of Guerrero, Don Bernardino Gutiérrez:

“Tell me: why don't they clap?”

“They don't know how.”

“Then why don't they throw tomatoes and onions if they don't like my speech?”

“It isn't a matter of their liking it or disliking it. To the contrary.”

“You mean they didn't understand my Latin allusions, is that it?”

“No, sir. They didn't understand anything. Not one of these Indians speaks Spanish.”

Don Homero had no time to show shock, fury, or disdain, much less to get on his horse and hightail it; impossible to know if it was excessive hatred, outrage, or fascination, or perhaps a love incapable of showing itself in any other way, that was moving five thousand Mixtec men, women, and children from the Guerrero mountains who, beyond communication, incapable of communication, reached the bandstand, stretched out their hands, pulled down the tricolor paper flags, the tricolor rosettes, and the PRI posters, then the eyeglasses belonging to the state delegate from Cuajinicuilapa, buck-toothed and myopic, the daisy in the lapel of the m.c. and the old politico's suspenders, which snapped back against his feeble chest, and that's when the panic began: the hierarchy turned its back on the people and went running into the church, shouting sanctuary, sanctuary!: the trembling candles were extinguished by their stampeding feet and their screams and my father, still wearing his rain poncho and with his face covered by four days' growth of beard, led my mother, still on her burro and wrapped in a blue shawl and with me in the center of the universe, and the Indians gave way, they let us pass and my father made a sign with his hand and said come here Homero, you shall pass through the eye of a needle because that's exactly how wide our mercy is: but virtue is measured in magnitude, not things, and of course our Uncle Don Fernando translated these holy words into Mixtec and all of them stood aside without uttering a word, like the waters of the watermelon-colored sea while the sixty-three hierarchs locked the church doors, and braced themselves against them to add to the bolts the weight of each one of their sixty-three years of political predominance, and Don Bernardino Gutiérrez, first and foremost supporter of President Calles in the state of Guerrero, exclaimed that you can't get milk from an ox but that when it's time to fry beans what you need is grease, and Elijo Raíz, LL.D., who came in in 1940 with Avila Camacho, added that it all had to end the way it began, in the bosom of the Holy Mother Church, hallelujah, amen, push, pull, and national unity!

6

Curiously enough, the first things we feel, even as mere monozygotes inside the maternal womb, are the fluctuations in the exterior dynamics that surround us and in which our mothers participate; for instance, the apprehensions entailed in our flight from the holy places of Igualistlahuaca when we were going against the tide of the masses who listened to my Uncle Homero's discourse as they pressed up against the locked doors of the rose-colored church with its double cut-stone towers, against which doors sixty-three leaders of the Revolutionary Institutional Party of Guerrero were pushing with all their might, shoulders, hands, hips, and backsides to keep the aforesaid masses from entering, since those masses had just scared them out of their wits by moving without them and they didn't understand (nor did we, the group running away) whether what the citizens, the faithful, the plebes, the helots, the great unwashed, the redskins (each of the sixty-three was muttering what he really thought about them as he pushed against the splintering door), wanted to show was a great love, a concentrated hatred, or an explosive despair devoid of hatred or love.