Christopher Unborn (71 page)

The fire burst into life at the very door of Hipi's family's house, and everyone ran to put it out, all of them (the old, the babies, the huehuetiliztli and the xocoyotzin grab what they can); the suffocating smoke billows, asphyxia is imminent, there is no water, so one man quickly makes some orange juice and throws it on the blaze, another man shouts, laughs, and urinates powerfully on the fire (my mother remembers the day she reached the city and peed on the flame in the monument to the Revolution, remembers her dream about urinating until she refills the Lake Texcoconut; she remembers and I dream about the lost city of lakes! the place where the air is clear!), but it isn't enough, they all scatter through the thief-ridden slum (dolorous city, lost city, city without a name), all except one old man as stubborn as a stone. He remains seated in the cave when our buddy Egg rushes nervously in and pulls my mother to her feet (and me along with her, horrified—it goes without saying!), telling her, Angeles, get a move on, if this fire really catches, it'll consume all the oxygen in the city, the city will suffocate, and then they see the old veteran sitting there, immobile, waiting for the catastrophe, immutable, his face fixed, the inexpressive screen of the play of lights and shadows, and the philanthropic Egg tries to pull him to his feet as well, he warns him about the danger, but the old man is wrapped in his serape, and with his immobile face he says something in Nahuatl and our buddy Egg abandons him and swiftly guides my mother (and me, Readers, and me!) out of the dark shack to an Army jeep, where the grandparents, Rigoberto and Susana, wait and hug my mother and the general does the driving, throws it into reverse, gets stuck for an instant in the garbage. Hipi Toltec fighting the fire, but when he sees us, he becomes disconsolate. He picks up a long stick, sets it on fire, raises it as if to threaten us, then acts as if he were going to toss it on the garbage pyre, but instead he smiles in an ugly way, blows out the burning point of his javelin, and throws it at us. It looks like he's let us get away, let us save ourselves, my mother and I, Egg, and the grandparents, in an Army jeep, vintage 1944, about which General Palomar says: “This relic has finally come in handy! You drive, Mr. Egg, all right? I'm getting too old, and get us out of here, head for Oaxaca! Aaaaah, the city is burning! Let's head for the pure air, Susy, don't be afraid of anything. I've been in worse situations! Don't be afraid, Miss Angeles! Or your unborn baby!”

General Rigoberto Palomar falls forward, his face smashing against the windshield, then back, into the arms of his wife Doña Susana Rentería. In his back is the spear thrown by Hipi Toltec. My mother screams. It's the same lance that killed Tomasito down in Acapulco. Exactly the same. Doña Susana smiles and caresses the shaved head of her dead husband.

Hipi sheds his skin before the incredulous eyes of Egg and Angeles, and it's our fat friend, accelerating in horror, who shouts out a description of him, they were real tight, they played in the same group, he was tying up his trousers with a belt made of snakes, and he was shedding, he always was, but now in the light of the fire all his skin was vanishing. Hipi is peeling, right down to the muscle, his skin is coming off in huge chunks, like a peeled banana, right down to the white but corrupt, worm-eaten bone: in the distance, Hipi's skull shines after a while, smiling, amid the red night, and they can no longer see, no longer know, no longer imagine that new skin grows on him instantaneously, only the skull smiles, and we flee, and Doña Susy Rentería caresses the shaven head of her old husband, and Egg drives the jeep like a soul who is carrying the very devil who brought us here.

At the same time, my father is traveling next to Colasa, who sits alongside the albino driver, and no one can talk because of this man's constant chatter, this man the radio calls Bubble Gómez. He gives instructions nonstop, avoid the curve at mile 8, there's been a landslide, there's an unnoticed Smokey at the Atlixco exit, slow down with the Manila provisions at the intersection of Highway 2 and the Christopher Columbus Highway, Inclán knows about your load, use your radar detector so they don't pick you up on Huamantla, the Tijuana Taxis at Teziutlán look funny to me, this is Bubble Gómez, do you read me, Bubble Gómez here, I'm protected, I'm carrying a little girl dressed like a religious nut (watch those personal comments now, son), accompanied by a guy who looks like a fag (come on now, son, you're charging a lot for this ride!), and it seems to me they could be like camouflage to screw up the cops if I have close encounters of the worst kind, okay? Okay, Bubble Gómez, you're the man of the hour, you know your mission, but stay out of the way of the gringo Marines headed toward the Chachalacas River, and our own soldier boys, too, because some haven't been notified by Inclán, remember the situation is confused, a huge fire has broken out in the slums, it's hard to breathe here, go south young man, stay out of trouble, good buddy, roger, Bubble Gómez effectivesuffragenoreelesion, no more lesions, CB radio signing off, good night.

“I'm hungry!” exclaimed Colasa Sánchez when Bubble Gómez turned off his CB. “Don't you have anything to eat?” she asked, and he just laughed. “What are you carrying in back?” A big old refrigerator, said the albino. “Is it empty?” asked the girl. No, no way, answered Gómez, my job is to bring food back and forth to D.F. “So can we take a little to eat?” If you like, baby, but why don't you tell your main man here to take a nap and to stop looking at me like that, I don't like people to look at me like that, tell him it's dangerous to look at me like that,
tell him
later we'll stop and have some salt pork for breakfast! The driver laughed, and my father has no desire whatsoever to think or act, he prefers to tell himself you're an idiot, Angelito, you don't hear or understand anything, take Colasa's hand, it's there so you don't feel so alone and so fucked up so suddenly, go ahead, better than nothing, go ahead, pimp, aren't you hungry, too?

14

I'm an honest guy: the reader should know that a third situation is interpolating itself between these two, involving the circumstances of my mother and father; it's as if the citizens band the truckers use had squeezed between the AM and FM bands on the radio, so that if on the first band Colasa says I'm hungry, on the second Egg translates they've been tricked, they take shadows for reality, but on the third, the intruder band, Minister Federico Robles Chacón laughs and, like a child kept after school, writes one hundred times: You can't beat the system, you can't beat the system, you can't beat the system, you can't beat the system, you can't beat the system, you can't beat the system, you can't beat the system, you can't beat the system, you can't beat the system, you can't beat the system, you can't beat the system, you can't beat the system, you can't beat the system, you can't beat the system, you can't beat the system, you can't beat the system, you can't beat the system, you can't beat the system, you can't beat the system, you can't beat the system, you can't beat the system, you can't beat the system, you can't beat the system, you can't beat the system, you can't beat the system. He suddenly forgot which number he was on and bucked like a bad-tempered horse when the flow of his inspiration was cut off by the buzz of the telephone.

Robles picked up the presidential hot line with a stratospheric storm of curses; he felt, suddenly, full of self-pity. In the simple act of picking up the receiver of that green apparatus, he proved once again that he was sacrificing his time and his talent to the common good, to the highest goals of the state. And what did the community, personified in the voice of President Jesús María y José Paredes's private secretary, say to him? What? Whatwhat? Whatwhatwhat?

The secretary had left his temporary office in the National Palace to return to his regular office on Avenida Insurgentes, the one decorated with Roche-Bobois furniture. It was a sign that the crisis had passed. And now—whatwhat?—were they saying that Mamadoc was refusing to give the Cry this year? What the fuck was all that about? Say that again, Mr. Private Secretary? She refuses…? But what the hell … what the fuck does that old slut think she's here for anyway? Does she think we brought her here to knit booties and watch soap operas? You get her over here now! Whatwhat? She's already in my waiting room? That that's what she wants, to see me to speak to me, or she won't give the Cry? The President says to go easy with her, that this monster is more useful to us than ever, that after all, she's your Frankenstein, you invented her, Mr. Secretary, you imposed her on us. Of course, of course …

He hung up in a rage and ordered his toady to be sure that the Mother and Doctor of Mexicans was in his waiting room.

Meanwhile, the secretary of the SEPAFU calmed down, carefully put his papers away in a schoolboy's botany portfolio, and neatly tied the ribbons with bows.

Smiling, he received the apparition, as serene, certainly, as she, who came to ask him for God knows what, one of those little caprices of women in power, send the presidential jet to carry my angora sweater from Mexico to Rome, fire those three functionaries for having taken me to a fifth-rate restaurant, and get rid of these other five for having made jokes about me over the telephone, build me a swimming pool in the center of the Zócalo, burn the writings of my predecessors, their hospitals, movies, schools, there can be nothing before or after
LITTLE OLD ME
!

But now it was nothing like that, and he would have expected anything but this: the Holy Lady, wearing a riding cape of orange suede and chaps decorated with silver, and underneath a Mexican riding outfit, in the Jesusita in Chihuahua mode, suede, silver, short jacket, Andalusian riding skirt, and a riding crop in her hand, with which she instantly slapped Robles Chacón's face. Now he was astonished; she then dropped to her knees before him, weeping, damn it, with almost the same words as Concha Toro begging for the body of the Ayatollah, oh, my love, my little love, turn around and look at me at least, my little lovey-dovey, be nice, it's your honey talking to you, don't make me suffer, do it to me pretty, sweetie pie, give your honey what she wants, don't make me stay here on my knees like this, don't you see I'm dying for love of you?

No one had ever said anything like this to the vibrant but austere Robles Chacón: My honey man, give me some honey. (Mamadoc hugging the knees of the minister, who felt he was living through the worst nightmare of his life, but for that very reason he kept hoping that this one, like all the others, would end: this was merely an unpublished chapter in the Ayatollah saga. He closed his eyes and said: I am living through something that man I had the obligation to have killed should have lived through, this must be my punishment, these things don't happen to me, this is a scene from the theater of the incomplete, the incomplete that accompanies each and every one of our acts, this is the shortened apocalypse, only I had to live it because I killed that witch doctor. We have not gathered the One Hundred and Forty-Four Thousand Just Men. Forgive me, oh Lord—jabbered Robles Chacón, with Mamadoc still hugging his knees—nor have we left the Babylon that dizzies nor has the seventh cup been filled—I'll drink the others in Guanajuato!—with the wine of God's vengeance, and I did not find the number 666 on Matamoros Moreno's hirsute body when I carefully examined it, and I don't know if there is a woman in the jungle, but the harlot in purple did appear. Here is this great whore, hugging me, squeezing her cheek against my fly, God help me! and it's getting hard against my will, and she, give me your rod give me your son give me your come don't deny to me what you have given to all Mexican women, the right to a son on October 12.)

“There's no time!” the minister stupidly exclaimed.

“We can extend the contest a year or even ten years, we have the power to change dates, and if we don't, what good does it do to be us? Ten years, why not? it doesn't matter as long as our little boy wins the contest and the dynasty is ours, honey man! yours and mine, my little lovey-dovey, you and I can play with time, set the clocks back, put them ahead, whatever we want, I've been thinking a lot while I've been all alone, why do we have power if we can't change time? What good is power if you can't stop time and even tell death to get lost, tell me, boss man?”

She opened her eyes wide and looked at him, her mascara running because of her tears, potholes in her plastered-over face where she'd been rubbing against his fly, her original dark skin showing through here and there.

“We can't do that,” the cornered minister whimpered meekly, convinced that the Lady had gone mad. “It's a law, we have to obey it, laws are meant to be obeyed…”

“But not carried out!” She gave vent to her emotion, spattering her viscous saliva over the functionary's trousers.

He looked at her as if she were some apparition fabricated by Maybelline: he realized that this woman had been born expressly to play this scene; her whole life had been a preparation for this moment she was now living out. For that reason, Robles Chacón concentrated his intelligence and said the best thing he could:

“Dear Lady: laws are terrible, but customs are even worse.”

With that sentence, which he felt was worthy of him, Federico Robles Chacón began to reconstitute his shattered aplomb. He realized where he was, but the outrageous woman at his feet was whimpering, either you make me yours or I don't give the Cry, either you give me a son or I go on strike, either you extend the time for the contest or I kill myself, I swear I will! I was living very happily with my boyfriend Leoncito and my job as a stenographer, you came and transformed me, now pay up, I'll kill myself, I swear, and the chaps whipped against the ministerial carpeting like slaps.

Federico Robles Chacón painfully pulled himself back together again. He was in the SEPAFU Secretariat Building on Avenida Insurgentes, almost at the intersection with Viaducto, at the ill-named Insurgentes Bridge, fifteenth floor, private telephone number 515-1521, the place from which the Ayatollah Matamoros had observed the most terrible action in the life of FRCH (as the press called him), his having ordered the death of several thousand rioters (innocent? guilty? the system doesn't judge, it concludes: you can't fight the system, it is all of us, but it is more than all of us, not better, all of us with power, said Robles Chacón, trembling, he who considered himself a liberal man, on the left, humanitarian, enlightened, sensitive), and at his feet his creature, the Mother and Doctor of all Mexicans, who negated everything he thought about himself, kneeling, weeping, threatening to ruin all the symbolic ceremonies of the nation: FRCH thought of himself as a little Christopher (just like me!): in looking for the Orient, he fails and finds America; his success derives from his failure, his perception tells him the world is flat, but his intention tells him the world is round: someone else's perception negates his visionary intention, but it is intention that triumphs.