Christopher Unborn (77 page)

3. Fatherland, unto You I Give the Key of Your Good Fortune

As they were crossing from Guerrero into Michoacán, a group of armed peasants demanding the restitution of their lands—stolen by a lumber company—were cornered in the hills: hungry, weak, they were hunted down and summarily shot in the town of Huetámbaro, under the naked flanks of the deforested mountain. Colonel Inclán, under orders after the night of the Ayatollah to restore order wherever and however necessary in the Mexican Republic, pronounced these peremptory words:

“Bury them without coffins. They were fighting for land, right? So give them land until they choke on it.”

The loudspeaker in the Huetámbaro plaza blared out “Jingle Bells,” drowning out the shots.

Homero Fagoaga shook with fear watching the peasants fall one after another because instead of shots all he could hear was “Jingle Bells,” as if Christmas had killed them.

“Look, you wretch, look straight in front of you,” said Benítez to Uncle Homero, digging the muzzle of his rifle into the rolls of fat hanging off Homero's ribs. “Take a good look.”

“Fernando, I was having a good time in my Acapulco house, protecting my niece and nephew … right,
our
niece and nephew…”

“You were taking advantage of them to set up a new scam, Homero you con man, you know that the child will be born exactly at midnight tonight, October 11, and you want to have him in your power so you can walk into Pacífica carrying him in your arms: that's what you want, you miserable tub…”

“So what's wrong with that?” Don Homero got upset, then calmed down instantly when he felt the Mauser digging into his lard. “What's wrong with that, I ask you?”—His voice now a whisper—“That's why I went about having myself kidnapped by another unfaithful Filipino. I can be useful to our niece and nephew and to the baby, I have contacts in the Philippines, I know the…”

Benítez paid him no attention. He watched the scene with Homero from a window protected by wrought-iron bars: the Santa Claus music, the scattered cadavers, and Colonel Inclán walking around with his riding crop in his hand, okay, spread their legs, laughing, let's see which ones shit themselves out of fear.

“Homero,” said Don Fernando, “take a good look at what you've never wanted to see in your life.”

A bulldozer or a match could end all this, murmured Don Fernando Benítez. The mountains of Mexico are bald, worn away by erosion. Topsoil has become as fleeting as life itself. For him, he said to Homero Fagoaga, trembling behind the bars over the little plaza of Huetámbaro, reality was animated by the past.

Does life become more resilient because of that? A woman wept in the same room from which Fernando and Homero watched the atrocious scene acted out by Colonel Nemesio Inclán and the executed peasants.

“Don't cry,” Fernando said to the woman. “There's nothing you can do. Tomorrow…”

“Life's always been terrible here,” the sobbing woman said. “And besides, who's going to fight against helicopters?”

How well Benítez knew it. Today's weapons were no longer those of yesterday's revolution. Could Zapata have withstood a barrage of white phosphorus or napalm? But how did Ho Chi Minh survive it? How did the Sandinistas manage to topple Somoza? Because their societies were much simpler, much more black-and-white, less complicated, and with fewer complicities than the Mexico of 1992? With what weapons was it possible to fight today without exposing everyone to a useless death? With what weapons, without playing the game of the cynics who control power? With what weapons, so one could say to oneself: I haven't asked anyone to give more than what I am willing to give? I haven't ordered anyone to go to his death by asking him to do what I would not be willing to do? I haven't said to anyone: the only option is armed revolt, romantic suicide? To no one.

“… but, Fernando,” Homero Fagoaga was saying, since he had no reason to listen to the barely murmured thoughts of his relative, “what's wrong with the kids joining up with Pacífica? Things are hopeless here, you can see that for yourself, if you brought me here to prove it to me, you were certainly successful, Fernando, you've scared me to death, don't you think that as far as shocks are concerned, enough is enough? Listen, and even from the nationalistic point of view, Pacífica is our salvation, we refused to form a common market with the United States and Canada in the seventies, but now Japan and China dominate the United States and Canada. Pacífica is our ace in the hole; we'd be walking into commerce and technology through the front door, plus we wouldn't owe a thing to the gringos!”

“First we've got to finish up what we began here,” Don Fernando Benítez said, through clenched teeth.

“Bah, here and everywhere else the main idea is to make money and get power, the rest is words, words, words,” said Don Homero Fagoaga bluntly, but the words froze on his rose-colored lips: “Fernando, Fernando, what are you doing?” Benítez aimed his rifle through the window bars, shot, and Colonel Nemesio Inclán fell down next to the peasants' bodies: there was no surprise on his face because it already was a skull. Green slime poured out of his cheek instead of blood. His black glasses smashed against a bullet-riddled wall. The soldiers pointed at the small, three-story building. They surrounded it instantly. Benítez waited with his rifle at the ready. Homero shook like Hegelatine. The imperturbable loudspeakers blared out the bolero “You Have to Know How to Lose.” The music was drowned out by the roar of the helicopters.

4. Land!

Reader: all this is happening in my head, because now I think that the world outside has ceased to exist, and if something does live there, today only my memory or my imagination can bear witness to it. I could be wrong. Or worse: perhaps what I'm saying to myself can escape my own mind and be heard outside. What would happen then? would happen if the voice of an unborn child were heard outside before birth? What witchcraft would they accuse the mother of? Of what traffic with the Holy Spirit would they accuse the father? And me too, of what would (or won't) I be accused of before I'm born, what would they call me?

Reader, that's why I need such a web of complications, like the ones I've been weaving over the course of my nine months here enumerated. You know that I haven't narrated anything alone, because you've been helping me ever since the first page. Your mediation is my health; just imagine my terror without you: me blind, veiled, enclosed, I would have spent my time going around in circles (vicious, vicos: tight little vicolini), asking myself:

“Where are the people who brought me here? I don't see them!”

You know, Reader, that without you I would not have done what I want, which is to communicate to the living my nightmares and my dreams: by now they are
your
nightmares and
your
dreams. My ghosts accompany me; now I also share my nightmares with them: my genes (my gegels, my gegelatines?) that for each one of the six billion inhabitants of the planet, there are thirty ghosts who accompany him: thirty progenitors, physically disappeared, but alive and kicking, your mercies benz should know, in each one of the 100 billion individual genes that occupy each one of the cells of my imminent little body! and in each one of these cells is written
ALL THE INFORMATION
necessary to reconstruct every function and every structure in the body:
READER, TRY TO UNDERSTAND WHY I CHRISTOPHER KNOW EVERYTHING AND AM AFRAID OF LOSING IT ALL
: Ah, Reader, my pact with you is not disinterested—it goes without saying: I'm going to need you more than ever
afterwards
(will there be an
afterwards
…?), after I'm born, according to what people say and what they call what is going to happen, shit, it's as if I were dead already!

Afterwards: when I need you to stretch out your hand to me so that I can recover everything I'm going to lose, I'm certain of it when I abandon my mother. Not yet. My mother is alive and I am inside her on the last day of my gestation, my mother is alive and is lighting the fire over my head and I on the point of being born: the dead dolphins on the Revolcadero beach and a desperate scream from my mother: and as if in response to her scream, the ships appear in the distance, shining on the crepuscular sea, and my mother falls on her knees in the hot sand, Egg and my father Angel run to help her, my God, what's wrong? What shaking is this? Since when does my house, my pool, my moist, humid, warm cave tremble like this, beyond the boomboomboom rhythm of the rockaztec outside and my mother's identical heart inside?

Soon, please, you must decide, says the Lost Boy blinded by the light of the ships (the galleon of China? the galleon of the Philippines? how they shine in the night of my death!), and my father looks toward the farthest point on the horizon: Pacífica, the New World of the New World, and in that instant in which I fumble in horror for a handhold in my communication with the world outside, everything that has taken place is passing through my head, and I think that at the same time the world outside has ceased to exist, and if something is going to remain alive of it one day, today only my memory or my imagination can attest to it. I may be wrong. Or worse: what I'm trying to say to myself may escape from my mind and be heard
outside.
What would happen then? I repeat this fear of mine: what would happen if my voice inside here were heard outside? Would they kill me and kill my mother in the process? Witch doctors, did I say? monsters? But my voice cannot be heard out there, simply because complicity with my father has been reestablished, and my father should think about unborn me, but I'm on the point of saying what we are both saying when the Lost Boy urges us to choose: are you going to stay here or are you coming to Pacífica? New World: eternal obligation to complete the world: New World!

America is in my father's balls, from which I emerged, New World is what Columbus gave Castile and Aragon: the double hemispheres in your egg sack, my dear progenitor, steady producer of millions of sperm, constant from puberty to old age: ready to abandon your body at a moment's notice, whenever someone shouts: Go!; because the fly flies, and goes to meet my mother's rationed-out egg, her stingy cervix, protected from the world by a hard mucous stopper, and only once a month, one glorious day, is it unstopped, and then it becomes a river of glass, a sliding board for the sperm; the egg found the snake, the serpent found its fecund nest, and
ME VOILÀ
!

And to think that in those testicles of yours that created me, father of mine, can be found all the sperm necessary to produce the current population of the world: in the hemispherical duplicity of a single man: you, my father, Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, twenty-two years of age, of an uncertain and failed life, youthful errors behind you (or so you think), new horizon, promising aurora before you (or so you think): in your balls, Pop, is all the sperm necessary to invent six billion Aztecs, Quechuas, Patagonians, Caribs, Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, and arrogant Aryans, polyracial Polynesians, hungry Hungarians, Finlandish finalists, and basking Basques fallen from the moon: all your semen would fit in a shot glass; patriarch!

all the eggs necessary to re-create the populations of the planet would fit as well, Mamma Mia, you who produce them, in a test tube:

thank you, thank you, for creating only me!

me instead of the six billion other possibles (plus pixies, Gasparine ghosts, Nahuatl poltergeists, children of the night, and other Frankedenics who accompany us)

thanks for ejaculating me among 300 million other sperm all competing in the same contest and whom I defeated

thanks for allowing me to travel the eight inches from my father's penis to my mother's egg, which to me, dear Readers, seemed as great a distance as that from Jupiter to Venus (but I will never be a hungry little Saturn and eat my parents, I am no patriphage!)

thanks for giving victorious me lodging

thanks for my nine months and for what I've learned in them: I have lived for nine months, I am a gerontonone at birth: I note that I am a not-yet-neonate! and above all, are my little brothers from the New World of the New World, the Utopia of the Pacific, inviting us to leave this land for a better one? As if my father's sperm which I say could not re-create and repopulate the earth which fell to us! As if my father's Hegelatinegenes could invent a different past, different information, in the technological paradise being offered to us by the second Tomasito, the heretofore Lost Boy, and his brother O. Huerta both standing hand in hand! The new Columbuses arrived from the Orient: New World of the New World!

We are all Columbuses, those of us who bet on the truth of our imagination and win; we are all Quijotes who believe in what we imagine; but, ultimately, we are all Don Juans who desire as soon as we imagine and who quickly find out that there is no innocent desire, the desire to complete oneself takes over the other, changes him, makes him one's own: not only do I desire you, I desire besides that you desire as I do, that you be like me, that you be I: Christopher, Quijote, Juan, our fathers who art on earth, our everyday Utopia, give it to us tomorrow and forgive us our debts ($1,992 billion, according to this morning's
Gall Street Journal!
), although we (Aztecs! Incas! Sioux! Caribs! Araucanians! Patagonians!) will never forgive our debtors: yessir, make us fall into temptation, because pleasure without sin is not pleasure, long live Thomistic Catholicism which presents us with unattainable ends in exchange for inexcusable means, long live Augustinian Catholicism, which protects us from personal responsibility before God and obliges us to seek His grace through the intermediary of the hierarchy, long live Ignatian Catholicism, which allows us all ways to conquer souls in the name of God and death, Angeles, death above all to the worst enemy of our Mediterranean, Catholic, Thomistic, Augustinian, Jesuit, Marianite tradition: not this pacific Confucianism being offered to us with such conviction and tenderness by the Lost Boy, but the false revolutionaries, the modernizers, be they Russians, gringos, or just local upstarts, Angeles my wife, Christopher my son, the destroyers of our faithful image and our modest destiny: says my father, in the first place the gringos, the greatest revolutionaries in Mexico, those who have upset everything, those who really set us on the trail of the mirage of the future, those who mutilated our territory and turned silver into plastic and filled bakeries with smoke and broke the mirrors, the Yankee revolutionaries who made us dream about progress but who invaded us, humiliated us, persecuted us, and slugged us every time we made a move toward progress by being ourselves; death to their puritanical and militant hypocrisy; to the gigantic agonic and pentagonic corruption that allows itself to point at us with the finger of one hand and hold its nose with two fingers of the other because of our skimpy corruption of playful dwarfs; death to all their imitators, Mexican modernizers-at-all-costs, those drunk on paper, cement, and mercury juice wealth and the right to steal and to export earnings and total amnesia about what happens in the blind mountains and the mute slums; and death, too, to all the left-wing modernizers, who secularized the ecclesiastical tradition and offer it now disguised as progress: let them have their German, abstract ideology passed through a sieve of Slavic Cesareopapism for a people whose Counter-Reformation authoritarianism is enough and more than enough for it, thank you: let's toast all of them with a glass of filthy water from the bay of dead dolphins: Angeles, Christopher, I don't want a world of progress which captures us between North and East and takes away from us the best of the West, but at the same time I don't want a pacific world which we will not deserve as long as we don't resolve what's going on inside here, my father says to us, with all that which we are, good and bad, bad and good, but still unresolved; wife, son, we shall arrive at Pacífica one day if we first stop being North or East in order to be ourselves, West and all. That would be Kantinflas's categorical imperative: Mock de Summa! Mere Cortésy won't take Cuauhtémoc off his bed of roses! All the cold rains of the world come to us from the Escorial! Queen Juana the Mad-der of Fact! Isabel the Chaotic, the tour brulée (and the Abolished Prince) and the Inky Session: I've drunk enough juice of the Cal Vine and swallowed enough Jacobites that I could shit a Constipated Luther and a J.-J. Rousseau, long live my chains! Condor Ché, long live my past! Chief Er Sun, Jamil Tun, and Rubberspyre: Calmás and We Dawn, Le Nin Le Nain Le Non, Engels Angeles Engelschen: let your halo shine once more, my love: my mother's aureole shines intensely, the galleons from the Orient shine, as well as the Lost Boy's golden hands, the argentine voice of he who was the Orphan Huerta, begging us, come, asking us, are you coming with us or not?