Christopher Unborn (44 page)

“Because we are waiting to see which party you join, Mr. President!”

And that shout was followed by another from Representative Peregrino Ponce y Peón, Senator from Yucatango:

“Your party will be our party, Mr. President. Just tell us which way to go, so we can be with you!” added the peasant leader Xavier Corcuera y Braniff, deputy from the twentieth district of Michoalisco, and “Please stop torturing us, Mr. President,” tearfully whined the deputy from Tamaleón and representative of the actors' guild, Ms. Virginia Iris de Montoya.

Genuinely moved, the President answered amid an impressive national silence:

“You just can't make a snap decision in a situation of such transcendence as this one. I cavil. I ponder. I consult the core of my Mexican being. In September I will reveal my decision. But let it not be an impediment to anyone else's decision: let everyone freely choose the party that's best for him.”

This time, Uncle Homero rose from his semirecumbent position, the tears in his eyes reflecting those of our President, and from his lips came forth this exclamation, one of his favorites, almost as an involuntary reflex, the essential expression of his political being: “At your service, Mr. President!”

But knowing himself to be excluded, for the moment, from these events of historical transcendence, his candidacy for the Senate suspended (he hoped) but not nipped in the bud, he had to limit himself to lucubrating in the void, like the proverbial man on the street who has no access to well-founded rumors, political breakfasts, high-quality gossip, unnamed sources, and other funds of solid information: what does this declaration mean for the fortunes of the National Action Party (PAN), to which until this very moment President Paredes said he belonged, having won the election under its blue-and-white banner? Might the situation have so bettered that the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) could once again take control of the executive responsibility and symbolism, without piling the blame of all our problems on the back of the opposition? What part would Mamadoc play in all this as the central symbol of unity amid this inter- and intraparty squabbling? Would her creator Minister Federico Robles Chacón lose power because of what happened to her? Does this decision mean a return to power of the most eminent emissary of the past, Minister Ulises López? Enigmas, enigmas that Homero, in despair, could not resolve, which made him once again sink into the contagious languor of pure spectatorship; and what, he mused, were the majority of Mexicans if not spectators for those endless contests served up by national television, betting on every conceivable thing: how many miles is it from Acaponeta to San Blas, how many tortillas were sold in the month of March in the state of Tlaxcala, be the first to call, we will give a prize to the first caller to our studio, the first letter, the first coupon; how many miles are there on the odometer of the Red Arrow Mexico City–Zumpango bus number 1066, manufactured by Leyland and sold to Mexico because it was spewing out clouds of carbon monoxide, nicknamed
Here's My Sword, Follow Me, Men?
Hold on! Looks like Leyland's getting a corner on the prize market: the driver who's brought most merchandise into the City of Palaces in a single day has also won himself a prize. (There appears on the screen an albino boy dressed in black leather, said to be named Gómez, long-haul trucker; he disappears from the screen as quickly as he appeared.) They all saw the entire nation immersed in prizes, tests, anniversaries, which don't leave them a free minute, as they await the grand prize, the perpetual superlottery of Makesicko Shitty: useless, exhausted, dead—but about the Mexican middle class we can at least say that it was never bored: this was its solution and its paradox:
UNION AND OBLIVION
and yet one more subliminal message that each afternoon blinks on all the TV sets and which says, redundantly:

CIRCUSES AND CIRCUSES

and further transcending Roman demagoguery which promised, besides, bread bread the doctor's dead, the blessèd smell of the bakery, but who likes bread without butter? yeah, but what about circuses and circuses? Ah, sighed Don Homero, the meaning of Catholic carnival was to abolish terror, even if our relative Benítez would say that among our Indians it's the devil who organizes the carnival.

Don Fernando Benítez rapidly sketched out a map of the republic on one of the blackboards in the Tlalpan house. He made Don Homero Fagoaga, dressed as always in red-striped pajamas and barefoot, sit down in front of it as if he were the class dunce.

“Where are we?” asked Benítez, marking an X with green chalk on the blackboard.

“In Tepatepec Hidalgo,” huffed Homero, “prepared to give our lives so that the peasant organization shall be respected.”

“And now?” asked Uncle Fernando, marking another spot on his map.

“In Pichátaro Michoacán. We've just walked into Pichátaro to defend the workers' cooperative.”

“Look—and don't shut your eyes, fatso—where's this?”

“I'm in Cotepec de Harinas, struggling to have the municipal election respected.” Homero stood up with his eyes closed and grabbed Benítez by the throat. “I'm going to send you to jail for life, your honor”—Benítez shaken about by the furious Uncle Homero—“for allowing yourself to be suborned so you'd be on the good side of the stronger party”—and Benítez slams his elbow into Homero's paunch. “It's you who's going to prison, your honor, because unless the judiciary is independent everything else is an illusion.” And Benítez raised his miner's-boot-covered foot to squash Homero's bare toes. “Listen here, your honor,” snorted Homero, hanging on to the neck of the semi-asphyxiated Benítez, “we Mexicans can practice democracy without any need for hit men, or crimes, or bribes, or hucksters!” and Don Fernando had doubts about what to do: “Do I allow him to go on living out my teaching with such conviction, or do I stop him from strangling me?” He stopped doubting and let his miner's boot fall on Homero's bare toes, the fat man shrieked and sat down in his dunce's seat once again, rubbing his smashed toe. Benítez straightened his tie and went on, coughing from time to time:

“You shall walk the byways of Mexico untiringly, shedding those extra pounds, ready to give your life so that in Tepatepec Hidalgo the peasant organization shall be respec…”

*   *   *

My father, an apostle (though now he was somewhat reluctant about it) of disorder, then imagined a diabolical play in which laughter and fear would coexist perfectly: the humor would not annihilate what is individual in terror, only what is finite in it. My mother did not understand this, later on, in bed, my father pointed toward a photo from the Cristero war, taken around 1928, which they had tacked up next to their bed: a religious guerrilla wearing a felt hat, open shirt, vest, riding trousers, and boots with spurs, stands against a wall and waits for his death. The government rifles are already cocked. But he holds a dry cigarette in his stained fingers and bends a knee forward as if he were expecting his girlfriend and not death (and who said what?) and he smiles the way no one has ever smiled. Baby, I swear: can you imagine yourself smiling like that when you're about to die, when they're going to shoot you? Could you do it? Would you like to try? She said no; things like that were macho myths, magic ceremonies for jerks; she wasn't interested in dying, with or without dignity.

He says how hard it is to die.

She says how hard it is to be free.

And that's what he wants too, he says, but if he has to take his revolt to the edge of life and not the edge of ideology, that means taking it to the edge of death (he says to my mother in secret this dry night of mid-April the ***est month under the sheets that isolate them from the part of their space occupied by Homero Fagoaga: during the day he swills, at night he snores, he's always pushing his way in, what a pain this uncle is!), but she repeats, I do not accept death, even with dignity: if you die on me you'll create a void in the world, a woman's left alone and anything can be pulled in to fill her void; she said she didn't want a void left by him and he answered that she mustn't forget she's expecting a son; that—he laughed—should fill all her voids. But, without wanting to, he dreamed about something (he dreamed when he pulled away from my mother and fell asleep with his knees touching hers) that walks into a discotheque bathed in the cold light of the spots and covered with sequins: she has eyes like two cloudy butterflies and as she dances she raises her leg and, without wanting to, reveals her thigh under her short skirt, a crease of down, a moist little copper coin: my father dreams, without wanting to, of her.

In the meantime, my eyes close. But my ears open.

*   *   *

My mother dreams while she's asleep (because sometimes she dreams while she's awake, the divine diviner): she's already missed two periods, sleeping like this with her hair down, hiding her light-olive-complected face, sleeping deeply with me now, breathing deeply, hot under her arms and on her nape and between her legs: hot and me there all complete now, as if to make up for my sudden blindness: all complete now in myself, small, I don't need anything more, too many cooks spoil the broth: I am already a tiny little person who from now on will do nothing but grow and perfect my functions: do you know my heart's been
BEATING
for a month? That my muscles have begun their exercises? My mother wakes in surprise; she wants to tell my father Angel; she smiles and keeps her secret; I feel happy knowing she's happy, and in the marvelous pool she's given me, I, out of pure pleasure, do a few aquatic flips, like the little seal that I am: but I am already beginning to acquire my human face, and my priest-like hands invite prayer and peace. My face is human, I say, but my eyelids have closed up tight. And I don't know if I'm going to fall asleep or if I'm going to wake up. But if I say all this it's because I want to convince myself quickly that I am becoming the artist of my own creation, and I say this big fat lie only to protect myself from the suspicion that my father can believe I am not his son, that I am no longer his son or that I was never his son, after that gang of thugs had free run of my mommy's guadalcanal: now I depend more than ever on her convincing him that I was made before then and that what happened in Malinaltzin doesn't affect me, but suppose it affects him, suppose it turns him into a Mexican macho, and even if he was buggered by Matamoros Moreno himself, in this sibylization it's the men who are priests and their auguries say permit all and forgive all men all things, but the women, the eternal vestals, no way: is that how it's going to be? Well then, I'm already screwed, Readers, and for that reason my fetal scream in this instant of my return (all right, my arrival) in Makesicko Seedy is:

Give time and tenderness to your little Christopher!

Sing ballads to one another!

Remember one another!

Screw yourselves into Siamese twins!

Love each other, Mom and Dad!

5. Ballad of the Cruellest Month

Says my father: Time out. I have to explain to my son who he is, who we Angeles and I are: his unknown soldiers: I say it right into Angeles's tummy: in you Angeles I see everything opposite to me, everything that completes me and the hope that we become equal without ceasing to be different: I say to you give me things to think about at night which is exactly what you are going to ask of me: the most important thing we can think about each other now is that I believe in you because I believe that the good should recur someday, it cannot remain behind, and only if I accept that, my love, can I admit that I am not what I would like to be. Help me, Angeles, to be what I want to be even if it is something very different from what you want, that would be good: say something just for me, don't just stand there immobile and silent, and she (my mother, that is) will smile and say Angel we met each other when we were very young and incomplete, I'll give you what you ask of me, we can form each other (share our formation) after we know each other: would it have been better to meet when we were already mature?

I interrupt the ballad of the month of April; or perhaps I merely add a voice to the dialogue, turning it into a chorus: Mommy, remember you swore that in April you'd tell me how you and my daddy met, don't let the month go by without telling me: Mom!

“Angeles. I found you because I looked for you. That afternoon on the Juárez monument was no accident.”

“You think not?”

“I want you to know for a fact that I did not find you by chance or because I lost Agueda or because you are so different from Agueda that I perversely came up to you…”

“It doesn't matter. Our first meeting happened; it's done. Why bother bringing up that moment so often?”

(Is she saying it to him? Is she saying it to me?)

“It's that only by remembering it can you understand that if I lose you or if we separate, I will look for you again: I'm leaving nothing to chance, my love…”

“Okay. Now we live together, perhaps we'll have a son in October; for the moment we're performing together. Okay. What page of your book are you on?”

“Look: on the page where Plato says that we're living in the post-Marxist, post-Freudian, and post-industrial era.”

“We've had enough wise Jews already, now we need a few asshole Christians. Go on quoting Plato.”

“What about death?”

“Isn't it a long way off?” My father laughed.

“That's why I love you, because you're a mass of contradictions.”

*   *   *

Angel romantically reinvents himself as a conservative rebel. He would be an assassin if he could get out of himself completely. He can't. His memory won't let him. We would all be assassins if we had no memory. Memory reminds us: Cain. The Tiger of Yautepec. Caryl Chessman. Dr. Crippen. Goyito Cárdenas. But you just can't say to crime because of memory I will not make you mine. I want Angel to be able to say that no one would dare judge me betting on my dishonesty or on my virtue even though I do as I please and not what people think proper. I want a world (with me, Angeles) in which the proper thing is not to do the proper thing but what we please: doing what we please would then be the proper thing. Is it possible? Angel is not what he'd like to be. I want him to need me in order to be it. I know that all this is impossible. But I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts and I'm going to try to make it last, without his finding out about my secret: I am in love with my love for Angel, I love loving him, I don't want him to find out. Angel, on the other hand, is going to find out that love is a matter of pure will: we love what we want to love. Understanding that is going to make him very sad. But for a while he won't have the power to fight that power: he'll love whatever he wants. Angeles will be in love with her love for Angel. Angel will be in love with his will to love. When Angeles understands this, she'll want his will to be to love her, to concentrate in her all the power of his will to love. This cannot happen, gentle Readers, until Angel unfurls his will to love, imagining that the variety of the will is the proof of its existence; he will confuse the will to love with the different kinds of love and the different kinds of love with the imagination of love. Poor guy: he'll have to eliminate the different kinds so that imagination and love really see each other face to face, kiss, screw: the singularity of sexual love between man and woman is that we see each other's face and animals turn their backs on each other to screw; you and I, my love, can look into each other's eyes but we are like animals in that we can never see ourselves as others see us making love: are we good for love or are we bad? How can we compare? How can we know? Is it true when she says: you screw divinely, Angel, who taught you? Is it true when he answers: you taught me everything, aren't you the one who screws like a queen? Why do my parents say these things? to screw around? to dominate? or because it's true? to love each other more? can people love each other without dominating each other? screw around without screwing up? My father's love takes place within what he is and what he believes: He loves my mother as part of what he wants: an order. And he knows very well that no order will ever be sufficient. My mother on the other hand (we're in April, the ***est month) loves love but knows very well that love is only the search for love. How the hell can they understand each other? She proves to him that she's right: no order is sufficient if the value is to love and to love is to search for love. He proves to her that he is right: love cannot be part of an established order, it questions it and passes it by and transforms it every time two lips touch two lips and one hand stretches out to touch a sex as if it were its own that belongs to another: domination has begun, Angeles, it's inevitable that you women generate guilt, that you persecute us so that we feel guilty, the bitches are not happy unless they see us accepting that we are guilty and for that reason I accept what happened in Malinaltzin: I won't make you take the blame today so that you never make me feel blameworthy and let's be that way, my love, the first happy couple in history hip hip hurray! hip hip my rib!