Christopher Unborn
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Authors: Carlos Fuentes
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Contents
1.
El Niño comes running up from Easter Island
2.
Fatherland, Your Mutilated Territories
4.
Mother and Doctor of All Mexicans
1.
Later my father and mother emerge from the sea
2.
My father bade farewell to the house of his childhood
3.
And so, when his parents died
5.
What Will My Baby Breathe When He's Born?
6.
Fatherland, Your Surface Is Pure Corn
1.
My circumstance consists of certainties and uncertainties
3.
Angel put up with everything
4.
Your Breath the Blue of Incense
5.
Fatherland: Always Remain the Same, Faithful to Your Own Reflection
6.
In these annals of a wonderful life prior to my conception
7.
Angel and his new buddy the fat boy
8.
But before we get to the New Year's party
9.
Things didn't just happen all by themselves
1.
I Don't Want to Serve Anymore
2.
I declare that my mother's black eyes are a beach
3.
Behind Deng Chopin he emerged
4.
And that first dawn of the New Year
5.
Well now, we were saying that sexual cells enter the sea
6.
This is the novel I am imagining inside my mother's egg
7.
Gingerich returned to the Sightseer on foot
8.
At 9 a.m. on Monday, January 6, 1992
9.
The coyotes run along all the beaches
1.
Your House Is Still So Very Big
2.
There are two movements, my mother says
3.
While these portentous events were transpiring here inside
4.
All Citizens Have the Right to Information
5.
And so it was that at midday Don Homero Fagoaga
6.
Curiously enough, the first things we feel
7.
Don Fernando paused triumphantly
9.
Uncle Fernando BenÃtez, a Catholic in his youth
2.
Taking Wing with the Crippled Devil
3.
Time
5.
Ballad of the Cruellest Month
7.
You Live Day to Day, Miracle to Miracle, a Lottery Life
8.
They decided to look for jobs
10.
More Rumors Than Pennies in a Piggy Bank
11.
I'll Believe in You as Long as a Mexican Girl
1.
Médoc d'Aubuisson, the López family's cook
3.
“Life,” Samuel Butler once wrote
4.
Emotion clouded my father's eyes
6.
What would my father remember
7.
The current Servilia served tea
11.
Fatherland, Always Be Faithful to Yourself
13.
Dear Reader, you may remember
2.
The Ayatollah Matamoros's first order
3.
The fact is they didn't have faces
5.
Matamoros Moreno rehearsed his every gesture
6.
Colonel Inclán raised his fingers
7.
This ⦠is what Minister Federico Robles Chacón said
8.
On the night of the Ayatollah
10.
Like the plague entering the village
11.
No sooner had Grandfather Rigoberto Palomar
12.
Inside the border checkpoint
13.
It turns out that I, Christopher
15.
“I'm
hungry!
” Colasa Sánchez shouted
17.
The Other Bank of the River
3.
Fatherland, unto You I Give the Key of Your Good Fortune
4.
Land!
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The author is grateful for the helpâboth creative and criticalâof his friends
JUAN GOYTISOLO
and
PROFESSOR ROALD HOFFMAN
Â
Naturally, to my mother and my children
Prologue
I Am Created
The body is the part of our representation that is continuously being born.
Henri Bergson
Â
“Mexico is a country of sad men and happy children,” said my father, Angel (twenty-four years old), at the instant of my creation.
Before that, my mother, Angeles (under thirty), had sighed: “Ocean, origin of the gods.”
“But soon there shall be no time for happiness, and we shall all be sad, old and young alike,” my father went on, taking off his glassesâtinted violet, gold-framed, utterly John Lennonish.
“Why do you want a child, then?” my mother said, sighing again.
“Because soon there will be no time for happiness.”
“Was there ever such a time?”
“What did you say? Things turn out badly in Mexico.”
“Don't be redundant. Mexico was
made
so things could turn out badly.”
So she insisted: “Why do you want a child, then?”
“Because
I
am happy,” my father bellowed. “
I am happy!
” he shouted even louder, turning to face the Pacific Ocean. “I am possessed of the most intimate, reactionary happiness!”
Ocean, origin of the gods! And she took her copy of Plato's
Dialogues,
the edition published in the twenties by Don José Vasconcelos, when he was rector of the University of Mexico, and put it over her face. The green covers bearing the black seal of the university and its motto,
THROUGH MY RACE SHALL SPEAK THE SPIRIT
, were stained with Coppertonic sweat.
But my father said he wanted to sire a son (me, zero years), right here while they were vacationing in Acapulco, “in front of the ocean, origin of the gods?” quoth Homerica Vespussy. So my naked father crawled across the beach, feeling the hot sand drifting between his legs but saying that sex is not between the legs but inside the coconut grove, around the svelte, naked, innocent body of my mother, crawling toward my mother with the volume of Plato draped over her face, Mom and Dad naked under the blazing and drunken sun of Acapulque on the day they invented me. Gracias, gracias, Mom and Dad.
“What shall we name the boy?”
My mother does not answer; she merely removes the tome from her face and looks at my father ironically, reprovingly, even disdainfullyânot to say compassionatelyâalthough she doesn't dare call him a disgusting male chauvinist pig. What if it's a girl? Nevertheless, she prefers to overlook the matter; he knows that something's wrong and can't allow things to stay like that at this point in time and circumstance and so he solves the problem by nibbling at her nipples as if they were cherry-flavored gumdrops, cumdropsâpostprandial but prepriapic jelly beans, puns my dad, in whose prostatic sack I still lie in waiting, innocent and philadelphic, with my sleepy chromosomatic and spermatic little brothers (and sisters).
“What shall we name the boy?”
“Things exist without anyone's having to name them,” she says, trying not to reactivate their old argument about the sex of the angels.
“Of course, but right now I'd like a taste of that pear in heavy syrup of yours.”
“You and I don't need names to exist, right?”
“All I need right now is that sweet thing of yours.”
“Just what I mean. Sometimes you call it the Hydra and other things.”
“An' figs, sometimes.”
“And figs, sometimes”âmy mother laughsâ“as your Uncle Homero would say.”
“
Our
Uncle Homero,” my father jokingly corrects her. “Ay!” Even he didn't know if he was complaining about that undesired family tie or roaring because of the precipitate pleasure he did not want to see lost in the sterile sand, even if he knows, stretched out on his belly, that both good and evil are merely violent pleasures, and thus they resemble and cancel each other out in their infrequent eruption. As for the rest: kill time and kick ass.
“Yeah, yeah, go ahead and howl, or laugh at the old guy,” said Angeles, my mother, “but here we are on vacation in Kafkapulco, in front of the ocean origin of the gods, guests in his home.”
“His home, bull,” blurts out my father, Angel. “It belongs by rights to the peasants from the communal lands he stripped it away from, damn the old moneybags and damn his granny, too.”
“Who happens also to be your granny,” my mother says, “because you and I say âsea' to refer to the âsea,' but who knows what its real name is, the name the gods utter when they want to stir it up and say to themselves âThalassa. Thalassa. We come from the sea.'”
Blessèd mother of mine: thank you for your multitrack mindâon one track you explain Plato; on another you fondle my father, while on a third you wonder why the baby must necessarily be a boy, why not a girl? And you say Thalassa, thalassa, well named was Astyanax, the son of Hector, well named (Angeles my mother, Angeles my wife looks toward the wrathful sea); well named was Agamemnon, whose name means admirable in his resistance (and what about my resistance, moans Angel my father, if you could only see how my Faulknerian chili pepper resists, it not only survives, it endures, it perdures, it's durable stuff). Well named are all the heroes, my mother murmurs, reading at her vasconcelosite tome with its elegant Art Deco typography, to postpone with her first mental track the unrepeatable pleasure playing on the second: heroes who share the root of their identity with Eros: Eros, heroes. What shall we name the baby? What are we going to do today, January 6, 1992, Epiphany, and the anniversary of the very day of the First Agrarian Law of the Revolution, so that he's conceived on ancient lands belonging to the community improperly appropriated by our uncle and lawyer Don Homero Fagoaga, and so that he will win the Discovery of America Contest on October 12 next? In which of my mama's multitrack mind's circuits and systems am I going to be onomastically inserted? I shudder to think. The paternal genes send horrible messages: Sóstenes Rocha, Genovevo de la O., Caraciollo Parra Pérez, Guadalupe Victoria, Pánfilo Natera, Natalicio González, Marmaduke Grove, Assis de Chateaubriand, Archibald Leach, Montgomery Ward Swopes, Mark Funderbuck, and my mother repeats the question: