Christopher Unborn (42 page)

The President of the Republic has declared war on make-believe countries and has celebrated totally fantastic historical dates. Did you know there is a battalion of Indians defending, even as we speak, the honor of our nation against the outrages and insults of the dictator of the neighboring Republic of Darkness? Did you know that the seasoned veterans of Squadron 201 from the Second World War have bombarded, just to humiliate them, the haughty despots of the tropical dictatorship of Costaguana? We've run out of the patience necessary for a Non-intervention Policy—what the hell!

And, fellow citizen, how is it possible you missed the August 14 celebration, the anniversary of the date Mexico City and Calcutta were declared Twin Cities? And what about September 31, Fatherland Plus Day, February 32, the day we Mexicans celebrate You Can't Do That to Us Day: or You Can Have Your Leap Year; I'll Keep the Five Proud Extra Days in the Aztec calendar! Don Homero is about to begin singing yet another gem from his patriotic songbook:

I'm a real ol' Mexican, my land is a tough one,

An' I swear by my manhood there's no place on earth

Prettier or tougher than my land …

But all of them (including Homero) flee from Homero the bard of the vinous smog, they fly far away from the van that coughs as often as its crew, they arise now with their mental cameras and zoom back to a far-distant point in order to reenter the Mexican metropolis, the most densely populated city in the world, a city with more people in it than all of Central America, with more than there are Argentines between Salta and Cabo Pena, or Colombians between Gorgona island and vibrating Arauca, or Venezuelans between Punta Gallinas and the Pacarima!

2. Taking Wing with the Crippled Devil

The truth is that the biggest city in the world, the city into which, in waves and successive seismic shudders, entered faceless Aztecs in 1325, Spaniards disguised as gods in 1519, gringos with their faces washed by Protestantism in 1847, and French, Austrians, Hungarians, Bohemians, Germans, and Lombards with the prognathous face of the Hapsburgs in 1862, the city of the priest Tenoch, the conquistador Cortés, General Scott, and the Emperor Maximilian, always deserves a spectacular entrance. My Uncles Homero and Fernando, my parents Angel and Angeles, and I, mere layabout that I am, Christoham, have no other choice but to imitate the first narrator of all things, the first curious individual, the crippled devil who still remembers his angelic wings, mere stumps now it's true, but stumps that rise in flight through a power God does not know, which is that of telling stories: and on this afternoon of our return to Mexico City (okay, okay: I'm here for the first time, but my genetic memory is only the scientific name for my innate sense of déjà vu) the buzz of creation is coming in loud and clear, the interminable hiss

of the original bang: creation can still be heard, I say, above the ashy scum of the city, and there is nothing strange in the fact that we all try to fly toward it, my parents hanging on to the mutilated wings of the crippled devil, Homero still dressed in his
china poblana
costume, holding on to the demon's scarlet, pointed tail, Fernando clinging to the black, broken cloven-hoof of the genius of storytelling, I, disoriented, because I don't know if I'm still swimming in the ocean inside my mother's womb or if I'm swimming in the corrupt air, which nevertheless is better than the black hole we flew out of, saving ourselves from the sensation of sinking into a fetid swamp: from above we see millions of beings crowded against the entrance to the Taco Curtain, we see the one-dimensional façades of prestige, against which crash the dark waves of peasants fleeing from violence, crime, theft, repression, and the mockery of centuries: for them we invent the illusion of a city of opportunity and promotion, a city equal to its television screens, a city of blond people advertising beer, driving Mustangs, and stuffing themselves in supermarkets before taking a well-deserved vacation in Las Vegas, courtesy of Western Airlines and Marriott Hotels: they prefer the illusion of the city to the barren fields where they were born: who can blame them? Now they want to enter the city which is just as barren, violent, and repressive as the land they left and they don't know it or they do know it (from the air, we look at the city decked out in dust) and they go on preferring it because the more of them who come, the more the image of the beer, cars, supermarkets, and vacations will be blotted out.

Off we go into the wild gray yonder, hanging on to the wings, tail, and hoof of the only angel interested in telling a story, the curious fallen angel who only has his imagination left to raise himself up, and we're flying over a city whose roofs, faithful to his own tradition, the devil begins to lift: the roofs of Mexico, D.F. (hold on tight, little Christopher) (the crippled devil coughs, spits, spits some phlegm on the posh Zona Rosa, phlegm that lands smack in the center of a bowl of stracciatella soup in a restaurant located on the Génova mall and which is eaten as if it were floating egg yolk) (the limping devil scratches at the thick air with his free hoof; Don Fernando is clinging to the other and the dust from the free hoof falls like snow devoid of temperature on the Nueva Anzures zone, upon which all the locals bring out their Christmas trees):
FLYING DOWN TO VICO
!

The crippled Lucifer of storytelling simultaneously raises the roof of one house in Bosques de las Lomas and another in Santa María Camarones: we did not see, in the first case, if in fact we used our eyes (and mine still lack the veil of eyelids), any material or physical movement inside that mansion surrounded by nationalized banks or, in the second case, inside that shack trapped between railroad tracks: in the mansion we saw a naked couple embracing, but the physical reality was the desire to suppress the difference between the two of them and their fear of being changed or changing; in the shack we saw another naked couple embracing and they were afraid of staying inside the shack and they were afraid of leaving the shack: prisoners within, exiles outside: Mexico City.

We rose so high, so very high, that my mother was afraid of smashing against the dome which, according to what Uncle H. said in Aca, was being built to dole out to each and every inhabitant of the city a ration of pure air, and she screamed out in fear, but Uncle Homero laughed in the heaven of heavens because the dome was a lie, an illusion, another governmental placebo: all they had to do was announce one day that it was being built and announce on some other day that it was finished for everyone to breathe more easily: like an aspirin posing as a vitamin, and this is the snake oil that brings the dead back to life: we did not, therefore, smash into the arc of the nonexistent dome, but the devil laughed at what Homero said and dropped us, and we fell coughing and spitting into the black hole that swallows all, we dropped like meteors tearing through the layers of pollution (only Homero's fall was slowed, because of his full skirts). From a distance we saw a tourist attraction: a bulldozer half buried in a lake of cement next to some hastily abandoned mansions patrolled by howling dogs, we scraped our noses against the extravagant slogans of the past peeling off walls more eternal than words:

and we flew like a flash over the thousands crowded together who had not been allowed to enter the city and then we lost our bird's-eye view of the closed city, the concentration of wealth, migration, and unemployment; the capital of underdevelopment: Mexico City here I come! and when we could make out the noble cupolas, real and solid this time, of San Juan de Dios and Santa Veracruz, opposite the Alameda, where my parents met, I realized, if not what my destiny would be, at least what my vocation was:

I shall attempt to decipher the perennial mystery of names

I shall fight untiringly against the unknown

I shall irreverently mix languages

I shall ask, speak familiarly, imagine, finish just to start a new page

I shall call and answer relentlessly

I shall offer the world and its people another image of themselves

I shall undergo a metamorphosis while remaining the same:

CHRISTOPHER UNBORN

3. Time

Time flies: barely had the eternal devil lifted the roof of my parents' house in Tlalpan and dropped us all inside (all of us: Uncle Homero dressed as a
china poblana;
Uncle Fernando with his slicker and his broken glasses; my parents with beach shirts and blue jeans, and I Christopher inside my dear mother Doña Angeles Palomar) when we all felt that time was different: we were inside the capital city of the Mexican Republic, where, by definition, everything is faster, above all time: time flies, leaves us behind: time weighs on time itself, it drags, because, as my dad says to my mom, who's making us be modern: before, time was not our own, it was providence's own sphere of influence; we insisted on making it ours just so we could say that history is the work of man: and my mother admits, with a mixture of fatal pride and responsibility, that if such is the case we must make ourselves responsible for time, for the past and the future, because there is no longer any providence to coddle our times: now they are our responsibility: we must sustain the past; invent the future:

“But only here, today, in the present, only here do we remember the past, only here do we desire the future,” my mother tells my father as she caresses his cheek the night of their return to the city; cleansing herself of the filth of the road, simple things, enjoying them the way they enjoy them (for my recovered happiness), without accepting that something broke on the road from Malinaltzin and now she is going to wait until after they make love to tell him:

“I'm quite certain.”

Six weeks have gone by since my conception; menstruation is more than four weeks late and I'm already floating in all my splendor—I'm fully half an inch long—convinced, deluded that I'm still in the ocean, giver of life and origin of the gods, with no more ties to terra firma than the umbilical cord and with no clouds on my horizon except the dark cloud that will be my circulatory system, still alien to my body, still distanced from, outside of, me, in the placenta, sucking blood and oxygen, filtering out waste; if this is my new ocean, it's only a sea of blood that threatens to blind me:

My skin is thin and transparent.

My spinal cord is phosphorescent.

These are the lights I use to fight the strange tide of blood that envelops me.

My body is arched forward. The umbilical cord is thicker than my body. My arms are longer than my legs: I would really like to touch, caress, embrace; I don't really want to run: Where would I go? What place could be better than this one? Have I learned of anything out there better than this place? After all, home is where you hang yourself …

I am my own sculptor: I am shaping myself from within with living, wet, malleable materials: what other artist has ever had available to him as perfect a design as the one possessed by my hammers and chisels: the cells move to the exact spot for building an arm: it's the first time they've ever done it, never before and never again, do your mercies benz understand what I'm saying?
I will never be repeated.

Nothing could be more dynamic than my fetal art, ladies and germs, just like that a foot appears, and at the same time five condensations on my hand that will be my bones and fingers: feet and hands detach from the trunk (but I don't want to run away; I only want to touch); and my cheeks, my upper lip all join in the work: my nasal cavity sinks so it can take part in the development of my palate; my face begins to take shape; the cells on both sides of my trunk start moving in twelve horizontal currents to form my ribs; my future muscle cells emigrate between my ribs and under my chest, the subcutaneous tissue stretches backward and forward, the cells on the external layer of my little body begin to form my epidermis, my hair, sweat glands and sebaceous glands: do your mercies know of any combined action more perfect than this one, one that is more exact than the dancing little feet of the Rockettes, the southern flight of ducks from Canada in October, the perfect rainbow the butterflies form in the hidden valleys of Michoacán, the Wehrmacht goose-step, or the deadly aim of General Rodolfo Fierro: the precision of a parachute battalion, of a triple-bypass cardiac operation, of one of Le Nôtre's gardens, or of an Egyptian pyramid?