Read Christopher Unborn Online
Authors: Carlos Fuentes
They gave a demonstration and agreed to see each other a lot and meet to practice their music in Don Fernando's house. The fat boy, who never mentioned his name and who evaded answering all questions about his family, expressed himself with difficulty, but now he said goodbye to Don Fernando with his brows worried and in a voice of mundane fatigue and extreme precision:
“Don Fernando, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
He put on his dirty trench coat and went out hugging the Orphan. Two days later, they both returned with a third friend: a dark boy who was peeling and disheveled, barefoot, with a snakeskin belt wrapped around his waist. He was falling to pieces. The Orphan and the fat boy introduced him as Hipi Toltec, but the boy only said in (bad) French: “La serpent-Ã -plumes, c'est moi.”
His instrument was a matchbox, and soon they began to rehearse together, dedicating themselves to their music. Don Fernando would walk by and look at them with satisfaction, but suddenly two things occurred to him: with each session, the musical harmony of the three boys became stronger and more refined. And he, BenÃtez, about to turn eighty, still had not exhausted his vital plan, his struggle in favor of the Indians, democracy, and justice, but his physical strength was indeed waning. Perhaps these boys ⦠perhaps they would be his phalanx, his advance guard, his accomplices ⦠They would help him bring his revolutionary plan to fruition.
One Saturday, he gave them three instruments: a set of Indian drums for Hipi Toltec, an electric guitar for the Orphan, and a piano for the long-haired fat boy. There was no need to sign a contract. They all understood they owed each other something.
“A man is nothing without his partner,” the little fat boy enunciated clearly, pulling his gray fedora down over his brows.
But he immediately reverted to his normal personality, saying to Uncle Fernando, “Well ⦠it's that we need ⦠I mean, we aren't just three⦔ BenÃtez expressed his astonishment: he even counted on his fingers.
“No ⦠it's that ⦠well ⦠umm ⦠the girl's missing.”
“The girl?”
“Yes, yes, the girl Ba ⦠She, I mean, plays the piccolo,” the fat boy suddenly declared solemnly, and then he sighed.
BenÃtez preferred not to ask for explanations and, humoring them, honored their tacit agreement. He bought the little flute and handed it over to the fat boy. That night, in his room, he listened to them practice and could identify all the instruments perfectly: the piano, the guitar, the drums, and the flute.
They baptized themselves the Four Fuckups.
BenÃtez could find out nothing about the origins of Hipi Toltec; he accepted the invisible existence of Baby Ba and he paid attention to every word the fat boy said, so tongue-tied in ordinary conversation but so sure of himself when he applied dialogues he'd learned in the theater to everyday life.
But our uncle, a journalist after all, never let up in his investigation of Orphan Huertaâwhere did he come from? did he escape from his lost city only because the new subway line had opened? how much was this kid going to reveal about himself?
With a kind of fortunate parallelismâDon Fernando commentedâthe detestable Homero Fagoaga also had a young boy, Philippine in origin, named Tomasito, only where BenÃtez gave the Orphan and his buddies the courage and freedom to be independent, Fagoaga incorporated the Filipino into his service as his valet and chauffeur.
At that time, a story was going around, and one night BenÃtez repeated it to my father and mother, so they would see that he was man enough to give the devil his due. Homero had saved the young Tomasito from a farewell slaughter ordered by the Philippine dictators, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, before they fell. Homero left him, so it seems, at the mercy of a U.S. officer in the Subic Bay naval base, and now he brought him to serve as his houseboy in Mexico City.
“But don't go soft on Homero,” warned BenÃtez insistently, waving a severe finger. “You should all know that Homero owes his relationship with the Philippines to the fact that he acts as Ulises López's front man there, exporting wheat which cannot be sold in the U.S. because it's been poisoned with a chemical agent. It's exported to Mexico, where Ulises López stores it and then, through Homero, exports it to the Philippines. There it's received, hoarded up, and distributed by a monopoly that belongs to Marcos's buddies, who still can't be dislodged. It sounds very complicated, but given Ulises López's global economic thinking, it's not.”
When he heard that name, the Orphan Huerta jumped up from behind a green velvet chair where he'd been hiding and with an audacious fury he repeated: López, López, Ulises López, Lucha López, as if they were the names of the devil himself and his henchman. They burned our houses, they said the land was theirs, they murdered my folks. Because of them, my lost brother and I fled!
My mother instinctively embraced the Orphan, and my father recited one of his favorite verses by López Velardeâthe Christ Child left you a stableâand BenÃtez agreed that the city's image is its destiny, but Ulises López did not, there was no destiny, there was will and action, nothing more, he would repeat to his wife Lucha Plancarte de López: wherever a band of squatters would set up on their lands, they would get them out with blood and fire, showing no mercy. After all, they only lived in miserable cardboard shacks, like animals in stables.
6. Fatherland, Your Surface Is Pure Corn
Uncle Fernando's second revenge was to order the Four Fuckups to stand in front of lawyer Fagoaga's Shogun limousine at the moment he was to leave for dinner.
Don Homero had spent an extremely active morning at his office, which provided him a perfect front for his activities: old-fashioned, supremely modest, on a fourth floor on Frank Wood Avenue, with old, fat-assed, half-blind secretaries who'd heard their last compliment during the presidency of López Mateos, folio upon folio of dusty legal documents, and hidden behind them a notary from Oaxaca wearing a green visor and sleeve garters. Don Homero had spoken on the telephone with his gringo partner Mr. Kirkpatrick, agreeing (Homero) to import from his partner (Kirkpatrick) all the pesticides prohibited by law in North America, to send them from Mexico to the Philippines as a Mexican export (our exports are highly applauded because they bring in revenue, ha ha), even though I pay you more than any Filipino could pay me, ha ha, don't be a joker, Mr. Kirkpatrick, I'll never eat a tortilla made from a kernel of corn sprayed with your pesticide. I have my baguettes flown in by Air France from that chic bakery on Rue du Cherche-Midi. Luckily there are no consumer protection laws here! It's better to have investments and a job, even if they bring cancer and emphysema!
Now our esteemed LL.D. descended from his traditional offices on Frank Wood Avenue, putting on his kidskin gloves and his dove-colored fedora and making his way through the masses that at three in the afternoon were filing along this central street, which in other eras had been known as San Francisco, then as Plateros, and lately Francisco Madero, got into his wide-bodied car through the door obsequiously opened by his Filipino chauffeur Tomasito. At the time, Tomasito was very young but sinister-looking because of his Oriental features. As Don Homero was making himself comfortable on the soft seats, he saw that the street mob had gathered around his car, their eyes popping out of their heads, staring at him, Don Homero Fagoaga, lawyer and linguist, as if he were a two-headed calf or a millionaire who followed the President's orders and brought back the dollars he'd exported in 1982.
Uncle Homero ordered the Filipino chauffeur to go on, to get out of here now, but Tomasito said in English
No can do, master,
and the multitude grew, rubbing its collective nose on the windows of Mr. Fagoaga's Japanese limo, sullying the windshield, the windows, and the doors with their saliva, snot, fingerprints, and blinding breath. Such was the massive and to him incomprehensible curiosity Counselor Fagoaga provoked. He sat, fearful and besieged, in all his obesity within this Turkish bath which his automobile had become with its windows closed to fend off a death which the illustrious member of the Academy of the Language didn't know whether to ascribe to excessive hatred, like the deaths of Moctezuma or Mussolini, or to excessive love, like that of any rockaztec idol of our times, stripped and dismembered by his groupies.
“Open the windows, my Manila-bred charioteer!” shouted Uncle H. to his chauffeur.
“Is danger master, me no likey lookey!” (En Anglais dans le texte.)
“Well, you're starting to annoy me, you bastard son of Quezón,” exclaimed Uncle H., who valiantly opened his window onto the excited mob, in order, as it were, to pick out the kid with the bottle-capped head, shouting orbi et urbi, gather round, free show, the kid with the vulcanized feet held aloft by his disciples, a fat guy with limp black hair and a skinny kid who had a coyote's snout and tangled hair, shouting look at this car, the windows are magnifying lenses, hoisted right off the ground by the horrible skinned kid with the huge snout and that soft fatty with long hair who could have been, ay! Homero himself at sweet sixteen, shouting look at the Japanese car, latest model with magnifying windows, and look at the fat man inside magnified, now or never, ladies and gentlemen.
“Take off, yellow peril!” said Uncle Homero furiously to Tomasito, who was rapidly closing the window. “Take off, don't worry, run them over if you have to, I've told you already, you know the official opinion of the Federal District police force: If You Run Over a Pedestrian, Do Not Stop. Get moving, Tomasito, they're using inquest reports as wallpaper in all the law offices and courts, get moving, even if you run them over and kill them. It's legal, because it costs more to stop traffic, make police reports, and sue people. Kill these downtrodden masses, Tomasito, for the good of the City and the Republic. Kill them, Homero said, but in his crazed eyes desire trembled. He loved them and he hated them, he saw them running across vacant lots, barefoot, unarmed, but by now used to the wounds caused by dioxides, phosphates, and monoxides; he peeked out the closed, dripping window of the Nipponese limo, and stared angrily at them, as they ran along Frank Wood behind him; in front of the curious crowd: the bottle caps, the skinned one, and the pudgy little one; he observed their three pairs of legs, let's see which ones he liked best, and their six feet which ran behind his automobile were deformed in some way, eddypusses, or Eddy Poes, says my dad now, punster supreme, feet deformed by that protective layer of human rubber which has been forming on the feet of the city kids and which is sure evidence that they spent their un-fancies in the streets, lots, in this place we call Mexico, DOA: eddypusses of lost children, running behind Uncle Homero Fagoaga's limo: the Lost Boys, Orphan Huerta, Orphan Annie, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit, the gaseous exhalations of Mexico, DOA:
“Charge, O Horde of Gold!” Uncle Homero closed his eyes as his faithful Filipino obeyed and cut a swath through the curious bystandersâthe spectacle looked like a Posadas engraving of Death on Horseback massacring the innocent. More than one nosy body was summarily dumped on his backside (“Fools!” exulted Don Homero), but in fact our uncle only had eyes for that boy with the ferociously grimy mien, the one wearing the bottle caps on his chapeau and running with his two companions ⦠Nevertheless, as it usually turns out with even the obsessions truly worthy of the name, he eventually stopped thinking about them and the crowd scene he'd just endured. He was exhausted. When he got home, he went up to his apartment and asked to have a bath drawn. Tomasito ran to carry out the order and then returned, delight written all over his face: “Ready, master.”
Homero tweaked his cheek. “Just for that, I forgive you all your sins, because when you're efficient, you're a wizard, my little Fu Manchu.” He undressed in his black marble bathroom, coquettishly imagining in the mirrors another form for his body, one that while being the same would drive the obscure objects of his desire mad, he, Homero, a Ronald Colman with a Paramount mustache. He sighed, thankful for the liquid verdancy of the water in his Poppaeaish tub fit for a Roman empress. Deliberately, but fleetingly, he thought that in Mexico, D.F. (aka DOA), only private comfortânot only exclusive but actually secretâexisted because anything shared with others had become uglyâstreets, parks, buildings, public transportation, stores, moviesâeverything, but inside, in the corners left to wealth, it was possible to live luxuriously, secretly, because it did not involve a violation of national solidarityâlike having to give back hard but illegally earned bucks, or giving up $5 million co-ops on Park Avenue, or selling off condos in Vail at bargain rates, it did not involve offending those less fortunate than he who ⦠He gazed with a sense of marvel at the intense green color, at the same time liquidly transparent and beautifully solid (like marble, one might say), of the water in his bath and gave himself up to it completely.
He let himself drop, with a jolly, carefree plop, into the tub, but instead of being enveloped by the delightful and warm fluidity of the green water, he was embraced by a cold, sticky squid: a thousand tentacles seized his buttocks, his back, his knees, his elbows, his privates, his neck: Lawyer Fagoaga sank into something worse than quicksand, mud, or a tank full of sharks: unable to move a finger, a leg, his head bobbing like that of a marionette, Homero was sucked in by a tub full of green gelatine, a sweet pool of viscous lime Jell-O in which Uncle H. looked like a gigantic strawberry.
“What have we here, a barrister in aspic?” guffawed Uncle Don Fernando BenÃtez from the door, wearing a starched butterfly collar, bow tie, and a light, double-breasted shantung suit.
“Tomasito!” Homero Fagoaga managed to scream, seconds before sinking into horror, surprise, and rage, which were even stickier than the gallons of gelatine put there by the Fuckups: “Tomasito! Au secours! Au secours!”