Christopher Unborn (43 page)

My blood pulsates rapidly, it runs toward the forest of my nascent veins; a tunic falls over me, like the shroud over the city we saw from the air:

My eyes are about to close for the first time!

Can you understand this terror?

Do you even remember it?

Until now, weak and unformed, at least I had my eyes wide open, always wide open: now I feel as if had gone to sleep inside my white thin tunic, as if a weight against which I have no strength were covering my eyes little by little:

My time changes because I don't know if from now on I will not, deprived though I am of sight, know anything about what's going on outside, nor will I be able to connect my genetic chain with the simulacrum of vision: I'm going to accelerate a time I thought eternal, mine, malleable, as subject to my desire as are the fragments of information supplied by my genes: now my eyes close and I am afraid of losing time; I'm afraid of turning into a being who only bursts into different times without knowing with whom or with what he'll meet whenever he makes one of his sudden appearances: I close my eyes, but I am preparing to substitute desiring for looking: I want to be recognized, known, please Mommy, swear you'll recognize me, Daddy swear that you're going to recognize me: don't you see that I have no other weapon but desire, but that there is no desire that achieves that condition if it is not known and recognized by others and without knowing that you know that I am condemned to the unsavory condition of unknowing: I could have been conceived in Untario!

Without my desire reflected in yours, Pop and Mom, I shall succumb to the terror of the fantastic: I shall be afraid of myself until the end of time.

4. The Devil's Wells

And I begged them: Please give time and tenderness to your little Christopher. Tell him everything that happened in the time between our arrival in the city and the third month of his gestation.

Which is to say, once we'd moved into the one-story, rainbow-hued house whose balcony faces the plaza and a hospital of the Porfirio Díaz period, near the symmetrical stairways of the Church of San Pedro Apóstol, the Campidoglio of underdevelopment, the Place Vendôme of the Parvenus, the Signoria of the Third World, our basic situation was this:

First, Uncle Homero Fagoaga, whose political instincts were infallible, decides to hide out in my parents' house until he finds out what the official reaction is to the events surrounding the electoral riot in Igualistlahuaca; it's likely he'll be blamed for that outburst, which could be confused with either love or hate, depending, but in Mexican politics you're better off not depending on depending—Don Homero pontificates, having seated himself, as if by divine right, at the head of the table during all three daily meals, with a view of the aforementioned hospital, wolfing down pastry after pastry—and should only skate on thick ice, like that old supporter of President Calles, Don Bernardino Gutiérrez, who wouldn't make a move without finding out which way the wind was blowing. In other words, don't take a step without having your sandals on, especially if you're in scorpion country, and he fully intended to spend two months in retreat here, at least until the beginning of May, when the combined festivities of the Virgin Mary and the Martyrs of Chicago might just allow him to show himself in public with the assurance that the politicos would recognize his liberal merits, which would shine once more, while his conservative defects would be forgotten. Was there anyone in our political world who hadn't at one time or another done the same thing?

When my incredulous and gaping father and mother stopped listening to him in order to eat a slice of coffee cake, they noticed that Uncle Homero, who never stopped talking for an instant, had devoured the mountain of powder cakes my mother had delicately arranged on a blue platter of Talavera ware. Now Don Homero was dunking the last bit in his hot chocolate and was asking my mother Angeles if she would be so kind as to make him another cup—but it had to be freshly ground chocolate, comme il faut, to give the Aztec nectar its aromatic foaminess. A chocolate stain occupied the place once reserved for Don Homero Fagoaga's mustache, only now beginning to reappear.

My parents, malgré their recovered lovemaking, and despite as well their happy certitude that I was on the way and could compete in the national Little Christophers Contest, had a secret fissure in each of their souls, one they preferred not to reveal. It was no longer the Matamoros Moreno horror; I think that event actually drew them closer together. It was, rather, the terrible suspicion that in this country at this time and in this history everyone was being used. The Spanish tongue, lawyer Fagoaga admitted during the long meals in which he made his domestic appearances, did not possess expressions as well-wrought to indicate in laconic fashion a colossal joke as did that lapidary French possessive:

Tu m'as eu

or its no less terse Anglo-Saxon equivalent:

We've been had.

You just can't say these things because in Spanish (gigantic wink from Uncle Homero) they have an excessively sexual charge: Don Homero strongly suggested they not comment in public about the events that transpired in Guerrero, in return for which he would himself keep silent: he had seen nothing at the highway construction site; they had seen nothing at the Igualistlahuaca riot and the events that followed: Don Homero was not tossed in a blanket; they weren't raped. Everything that happened in Acapulco resulted from the government's clever maneuvers.

Thus, the increasingly infrequent visits by Uncle Fernando Benítez to remind Don Homero of his promise to sally forth and defend the honor of Lady Democracy as soon as his retreat was over were deflated not only by the obese academic's understandable desire not to be the object of a routine extermination at the hands of the uncontrollable and ignorant police force run by Colonel Inclán but by my parents' lack of support:

“But are you really going to let this beached whale rot here for another month?” exclaimed Benítez. “If you keep this up, I'm going to disown you.”

Whenever he bothered to notice the look on their faces, Uncle Homero would tell them not to worry, that he would keep his promise to withdraw his suit about Angel's prodigality, so they could live in luxury until the end of their days. Ah! in life everything was exchange, give to receive, receive to give, according to the law of convenience, and when my parents sat down at the table, they found there was nothing to eat: Fagoaga had swallowed, as if his mouth were a rapid, cannibalistic straw, the chicken in red sauce my mother had prepared with her own dainty little hands. All that was left were the bones and a sigh of satisfaction made by Don Homero as he wiped his lips with a king-size napkin. My parents were still afraid, given the absolute whimsicality of Mexican public decisions, of an unexpected change in the rules of the Little Christophers Contest; but no, the national contests sponsored by Mamadoc followed one on the other, undisturbed. During the month of March, for instance, quiz shows called the Last of the Last were broadcast almost every day: at the end of the show, a representative of Mamadoc would personally hand a prize (a sugar skull with the name of the winner written in caramel over the forehead) to the Last Fan of Jorge Negrete, a decrepit gentleman who in his wicker-seat wheelchair would pedomaniacally play the first bars of “Ay Jalisco Never Give In,” or to the Last Supporter of President Calles in Mexico (a title won, foreseeably, by Don Bernardino Gutiérrez, previously mentioned as the First Supporter of President Calles. Don Bernardino took advantage of the prize ceremony to hurl veiled accusations against the Cristeros who might be hiding in the ranks of the Revolution, nefarious types who with their intention to reconcile things that were simply unreconcilable—the flowing, crystalline water of the temporal with the heavy, priestish oil of the eternal—undermined the foundation of the Party of Revolutionary Inst …). Uncle Homero nervously turned the television off, taking Don Bernardino's words as a direct allusion and a certain index of the officially low fortune of our relative, who sighed and pulled a tea cozy over his head.

Sitting immobile for an entire month in front of nationalized television, my parents and their Uncle Homero Fagoaga resembled catatonics awaiting the reliable news that would galvanize them and pull them out of this TV-induced hypnosis.

Uncle Homero Fagoaga, his Turkish slippers resting on an old telephone book, drowsily pointed out that the government was constantly creating false news items they broadcast as live action: just look, he said, languidly pointing one morning, at that police agent, caught by the cameras just at the precise moment he is refusing to accept a serious bribe from a North American tourist arrested for drunk driving, who is now compounding the felony by trying to bribe a representative of the police force; look now at those pictures of retroactive justice being meted out to government functionaries who got rich under past regimes; look now at that auction of bibelots, paintings, and racing cars for the benefit of the people, look at these ceremonies for the transfer of private parks to public schools and the return of tropical golf courses to members of rural collectives: every single event is false, it's all made up, nothing of what you're seeing is really happening, but it's all presented as a fact freshly caught by the camera. Now look, Mamadoc in person just dove into Lake Pátzcuaro to save a group of pure-hearted girls who were bringing little headache poultices of onion and rose petals to the statue of Father Morelos in Janitzio because, in their gay naïveté, they thought he suffered from perpetual migraines—after all, didn't he have a handkerchief tied around his head all the time? Well, in the enthusiasm of their ingenuous fantasy they capsized their canoe, which, by the way, dear niece and nephew, allows us to admire the cathedrallike figure of Our Mother and National Doctor in her lacy bathing costume of Copacabana design, and this, dear niece and nephew, is happening right now, at 12 noon, March 18, 1992, as President Paredes enters the Azcapotzalco refinery to celebrate fifty-six years of nationalized oil production—switch to the other channel, Angelito—and to remind us that our lack of sovereignty over the black gold is transitory. By paying the nation's debts, oil is still serving Mexico, and Mexico faithfully keeps her currently pawned word to the International Monetary Fund: it doesn't matter who administers the devil's wells, as long as Mexico gets the benefits; and now a word about the construction of the famous dome which is to purify the atmosphere of our capital and distribute the pure air fairly among its thirty million inhabitants, but you, dear niece and nephew, already know by experience that this is just one more trick to give a longed-for distraction to our people, and when some innocent demands an explanation about the construction from some functionary, that bureaucrat knows just what he has to answer:

“As the Lady says, it's part of a Strategic Beautification Plan.”

*   *   *

They sit there for a month watching TV. My mom makes trips to the market to buy the food my Uncle Homero gobbles down. We are visited, infrequently but cathartically, by Uncle Fernando Benítez, who would often arrive at around 5 a.m., pounding on the door. My alarmed parents would discover Don Fernando on the threshold, dressed in a trench coat, a Stetson pulled over his eyes, and pointing a flashlight into my parents' bleary eyes:

“Proof that we live in a democracy: if someone's knocking at your door at five in the morning, would you think it was the milkman?” At other times these visits would end with a heated exchange of noncommunication between Fernando and Homero:

“Immanuel Kant.”

“But Cesare Cantù.”

But the sign just doesn't come. What is not a contest is a news flash, and what is not a news flash is a subliminal ad, which runs for a fraction of a second every fifteen minutes: the defining motto of Mamadoc's regime:

UNION AND OBLIVION

UNION AND OBLIVION

UNION AND OBLIVION

And then the television goes back to running contests and celebrations, because, as our Mother and Doctor reminds us, not a day goes by, not a second passes, without something worthy of being celebrated in it, Bach is born, Nietzsche dies, the sun comes up, Tenochtitlán is conquered, black thread is invented, the last time it rained in Sayula, finally we hit a whole new level of

UNION AND OBLIVION
:

They created a brand-new prize for the parvenu poet Mambo de Alba for
Not Having Written Anything
during the year 1991: Literature Is Thankful; the contest about the Last Mexican Revolutionary was voided because there were no contestants; President Jesús María y José Paredes, from the PAN party, impulsively declared that the PRI, after recent local events (our Uncle H.'s heart if not his dessert almost flew out of his mouth), reaffirmed its respect for the most absolute pluralism and admitted the existence of splinter groups in its very bosom which, if the citizens of Mexico so desired, could become authentic political parties.

To add spice to this political pizza, President Paredes, in a master stroke, renounced his membership in the right-wing National Action Party (PAN)—just to set an example—and then declared, in absolute impartiality, that he was joining millions of voters like himself who had to debate very seriously in their heart of hearts a decision pregnant with consequences: to which party do I wish to belong from now on?

This took place at the end of March. Then there was a long silence, until April 2, when President Paredes asked at a joint session of Congress meeting to honor Porfirio Díaz (
UNION AND OBLIVION
), whose name was inscribed that same afternoon in gold letters in the Congress, why citizens were so slow about massively joining the new parties, upon which Representative Hipólito Zea, deputy from the ninth district of Chihuahuila, stood up to exclaim emotionally, spontaneously, and brilliantly from his place: