Christopher Unborn (25 page)

Serpents are better

When feathered

—See their eggs fly!

And after they shed

Their skins

You can bake them

In a pie

Baby, baby, in a pie

Reptiles in the sky!

No no no listen to me, please, don't just change the subject, tell me if you can hear that little refrain, the only melody in this cacophony they call rockaztec, tell me even before I'm conceived if there isn't a cute little girl with chestnut hair pulled back and parted down the middle, wearing a white percale dress, who's playing a flute in the Four Fuckups band, but my parents' invisible, hasty glances do not see what I can see before being born. They do not listen to the flute I listen to from my perfect limbo.

they hear the rockaztec of the plumed serpent,

they see Egg, his face growing paler by the minute, our belovèd buddy is losing his face, he has no more face, it's not his fault, let's restore his face to our great buddy Egg, to whom we owe so much, merely our lives, says my father, all our lives, I would say, because if my father had suffocated inside that metal egg because of Homero, he would neither have met my mother nor created me,

they see Hipi Toltec falling to pieces, sprinkling tiny shards of skin about as he dances on the bandstand, his snakeskin belt and his conchshell at his lips, a combination Tezcatlipoca and Mick Jagger,

they see the Orphan Huerta leading the band, a rearview mirror tied to his head so he can see what's going on behind him, see himself from behind, see the world in a 360-degree pan, ah my
BARROCANROLL
, ah my rockaztec, how they shout when the Orphan sings

Reptiles in the sky! with his shrill but erotic voice and Hipi with his low, phantom-like voice, and Egg without a face, much less a voice

(and Baby Ba's flute: Only I hear it)

Serpents are better

When feathered

the grand dionysian delirium out of doors in Acapulco, under the luminescent, sick sky. Angel and Angeles make their way through the throng and pick out the faces that dominate the color sections of the ever more numerous newspapers and the ever more sporadic gossip spots on TV, Mariano Martínez Mercado, the handsomest, most marriageable (excuse me, I meant marketable) young man in the National Organization of Commercial Kingpins (NOCOKS), creole with violet eyes and an aura of beige elegance: wearing, of all things, a mess jacket, can you beat that? to come to the Acapulco Raj from the sulphurous metropolis, the D.F., starched shirt-front, wing collar, black tie, black trousers with red stripe, and now barefoot in order to greet the well-bred, dark-skinned little girl dressed as a Carmelite nun, who seems to have been dipped in tea, how else could she have touched the infinitely brittle skin, so thin a sigh would tear it, of Mariano M. M., the most etc., but she doesn't even look at him, the upstart, he might be turning cartwheels, but she doesn't look at him, she merely allows her bare foot to touch the naked foot of Mariano, dazzled by the light and by this naked contact between his white foot and the unshod nudity of her lost girl's foot:

anonymous and naturally barefoot—she is dressed as a Discalced Carmelite, she looks at you, Dad, looks behind Mariano and looks at you, beyond the very tall, very thin, very blond, and very snooty gringo that you, Mom, recognize as D. C. Buckley, of all the species of carnivorous hymenoptera, the best-acclimated Wasp in our country, the favorite emissary in Mexico of the Liberal and Independent Republic of New England and Adjacent Islands, the autonomous entity that in the early nineties united libertarian tendencies, protests against abuses of human rights, gay rights, lesbian rights, without gagged, controlled, or disinformed press, New York and its islands, Long, Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, where abortion is a right but where no rights are aborted: the last refuge in the world of habeas corpus and due legal process represented here by the last Lector of Lawrence and Lowry who believes in Mexican sensuality here not in the incestuous drunken brawls of the Four Islands (Manhattan and), D. C. Buckley is dancing touching toes with a street girl who usually hawks corn candy and other sweets on the Acapulco docks, as the owner of the disco, Ada Ching, tells my folks, that's what he asked for, a daughter of nature to be his escort for the night, pure, a tabula rasa, a room without furniture, untouched by the oracles of sibylization, a nobel sauvage, understand, mon Ange? someone who could scrape the grime of Chicago off him even if it meant a case of Chilpancingo crabs

and now she makes her entrance, this then! the blue foot! fools, get those spots on her, the queen of the jeunesse dorée of the capital, look at her, Angel, the golden girl, she abandoned the sun just to console the stars down here, what an honor, what a privilege, drenched in sequins, sweet sixteen, it's Penny López, the daughter of the minister Don Ulises You Know Who, author of the key slogan of Mexican industrialization, the one you see written on every mountain, every wall, in the sky itself, dragged by blimps and engraved in skywriting on the clouds:

MEXICANS: INDUSTRIALIZE
:

YOU WON'T LIVE LONGER, BUT YOU WILL LIVE BETTER

and she passes by right next to you, accompanied by her governess, Miss Ponderosa, her two bouncy bodyguards, and her usual companion, the young Brazilian diplomat, Decio Tudela, dressed like Tyrone Power (of short memory) in
The Rains Came,
oo-la-la! I danced with Tyrone Power in La Perla cabaret, How long ago was that, mon Ange? where are the snows of yesteryear, and oo-la-la Decio Tudela's wearing exactly the same outfit as Mariano Martínez Mercado, except that Decio has a red turban, like a maharadish, and one of two things is going to happen: either they will start fighting or they will make the mess jacket de rigueur for nocturnal visits to discos. But now excuse me, if I don't get the FUBARS rolling again there's going to be sikhening melee here.

My dear parents: I tell them that the dark little girl who was dipped in tea wearing the caramel Carmelite habit dancing with Mariano Martínez Mercado is looking at her escort as if he were Cervantes's Glasscase Licentiate and her low, fearful eyes only see my father. The golden Miss López rests her eyes like two dark butterflies on my progenitor-to-be and then looks elsewhere without paying him any more attention. But my mother Angeles does indeed pay him more attention and stares at him. I was still hanging around my dad's egg pouches, but I can say to the reader straight from the heart, the fact is that my very life depended on that stare, look here your mercies benz! I'll never forget it.

Ada Ching on the bandstand, bathed in a glow of mercury vapor, asking her clientele what it was you desire, my minettes, what do you wish my infants. You know Ada! Ching! all shout in chorus, except the ones you know straightaway to be nouveau hicks who have never been here before, like the tea-stained dark girl who never takes her eyes off my dad Angel. What do mes minettes want to see? That ass with class, drop those pants! And on those delectable half-moons shine forth two tattoos: on the left cheek of this Norman Magdalene we see the ruddy countenance of the Great Helmsman, swimming across the broadest part of Ada Ching's gluteus maximus as if it were a milky Yangtze; on the right cheek, Breton bread, emblazoned for all the world to see, is our dear uncle, smiling Steely Joe, with his pipe in his mouth, pointing toward Ada Ching's delightful curves as if he were asking for a light: with a coquettish gesture inherited from the improbable memory of Renée St.-Cyr, Ada Ching pulls off her blouse and pulls up her drawers; D. C. Buckley begins shouting Moon-Ah, Moon-ah, and the Four Fuckups pick up the rhythm of the M's—after all, that's what everyone's here for—and mooooooo groans Homero from the bowels of the beached rubber galleon, mooooo, M, My M's, they sing

My Mexico My Mortification My Muerte My Mordida Marina Mystery Malfeasance, and each one takes the M the Musicians assign and each one shouts back his own M toward the altar of the moooosicians, Hipi at the drums, Egg at the synthesizer, the Orphan manning the balalaika, Ada shaking her breasts and panting out the rhythm into the microphone, Mictlán, says Marianito, and all of them repeat it in a roar, both funereal and joyful, Malediction, says Decio, and that too is chorused, Marina Mystery. Mordida, Mamacita, Merde, interpolates Ada, Muck, the Fuckups, Mystery, Mother, Malinche, Mortification, and Mustang, Miramón Mariano looks with indifference at Decio the pestio, and Mariano Monkey Mendicant, Machineguns Mexican M's, all together
não

My M's Muddy Murdered Miraculous Monks they sing, they answer, they shout, the boys and girls mixed, mestizos, mixed, all together
não

Mixing bowl Mesalina Monk Mortification Mortar Mamá, Máaaaamá, Mammary, Mamado …

Penny's bodyguards have their hands on their holsters, an instant of terror flew over one and all like a foamy angel soaring over the bobbing heads in the disco Divan the Terrible, Penny herself did not seem to understand what was happening as she danced the rockaztec called
MEXICAN M'S
with Decio

the pop style of the nineties, Penny López choruses the new series Mesa, Maraca, Martyrdom, Mixtec, Matamoros Matamoros. When he heard that name shouted and sung by the band and the dancers, my father Angel stopped, thought something (what it was, Reader, I don't know; I'm not omniscient, all I know is what my genes have set aside for me since the days of Mock the Summa), I say that he got an idea, this was the night of the loose ends, the unfinished suggestions, the unkept promises: it was his fault, his and only his, he wanted to be free and available for the great event set for Epiphany, and everything unrelated to that day made no impression on him, his mind was an opaque veil For whom the veils soil except for What's Going to Happen on Epiphany:

He looked at Penny: the audience was urging Penny to take off her shoes; she was the only woman who hadn't done it, and now she did, no hands, lifting her leg, her thigh, showing her thigh under her sequined skirt, along with a downy crease, a nosegay of quince, a tiny coin made of moist copper. My father looked at her but she took no notice of him. The tea-dipped girl did look at my father, but he took no notice of her. My mother Angeles looked at my father; he wanted to take notice of her but he thought something, an idea occurred to him, Matamoros, a seed of concern, hostility, enervation. He felt the arm and the iron hand seize his own.

He looked down. Deng, impassively sad, observed him. My handsome father, my tall father who could not be a poet because he was too handsome (says my mother, forgetting Lord B, the young Percy B. S. and John K., the divine Alfred de M. and old Ezra P.), had the delicacy to bend down while Deng Chopin stood on tiptoe. All he said to my father was this, but this was all my father heard under the waves of music and happy shouting:

“Have you ever been in Pacífica?”

The tide of people separated my father from the fine, long, extended hands of Deng Chopin.

It's my mother who only has eyes for the dialectic of eyes. She looks at my father Angel and says to herself (she says to my genes) that for him there must be three kinds of woman. First, the ones like Penny who look elsewhere and don't take any notice of you. Second, the ones like my mother who do take notice of you and look at you. And third, the women like this dark little girl dressed as a Discalced Carmelite who look at you but who actually look through you at someone behind you: the demon, the angel. She was not jealous of Penny. She was not sad. The dark little tea-dipped girl scared her. Her little breasts were bouncing under her scapularies.

2

I declare that my mother's black eyes are a beach that changes only so that it will look even more like itself.

I declare that my father's nearsighted yellow-green eyes are a sea devoid of progress or being: my father changes constantly but always remains the same.

I declare that my father and mother meet in the dance, but that they know this is just one more ceremony for postponing death.

I declare that she, silent and astonished, suddenly feels light, elsewhere, running through a garden of modest statues and walkways of smoke, my mother laughing, delicately treading on the grass with her silk slippers, my mother discreetly raising her crinoline, my mother feeling the thumping of her skirt hoop on her pubis and the starched brushing of her ruff under her chin. My mother is blind: a green handkerchief covers her eyes, and she laughs, not knowing if she is being chased or if she is chasing someone: ballads, gallantries, old-fashioned games.

I declare that she does not know how she came to be in this garden or why she glides with such agility through the past, she who remembers no past at all: my mother appears and disappears among the cypresses, distanced from the boomboomboom of her heart in the Acapulco night and the rockaztec and the barrockanroll but the handsome gentlemen with forbidden faces listen to her more closely than she listens to them: they hear the rustle of her green taffeta, the game of the blind doubles is brought to conclusion awkwardly, rapidly, head over heels: forehead to forehead, he and she, without seeing each other: both blindfolded, they embrace, they kiss under a sky of green flashes in an old-fashioned garden of smoke and symmetry:

I declare that he tears off her blindfold, and she looks at him and screams: dressed completely in black, my father with his ruff and his white cuffs brings the round, the game, to a successful conclusion with the capture, but she looks into my father's eyes, and in them she sees a man she knows and doesn't know, she knows him in the past and doesn't know him in the present, a man simultaneously young and old, innocent and corrupt, barely a novice in matters of love and at the brink of satiety, one foot in the bedroom and the other in the cemetery. A caddish gentleman, he embraces her, tears off her blindfold (it's the San Silvestre dance at a tropical port; it's the San Silvestre in a Fragonard landscape; it's the San Silvestre dance in an Andalusian patio), and she, horrified, stares at a man with forbidden eyes, covered by another blindfold: it doesn't matter, by the mere mute movement of his lips she knows what he is saying: I love myself through you, and I could only love you if in touching you I would touch all the women in the world: Can you offer me that? Can you swear to me that you are all the women I desire? Can you convince me you are Eve restored for me? Can you swear to me that your love will send me where I want to go: to hell?