Christopher Unborn (32 page)

The rest was pure clockwork: the sun was the minute hand, the rhythm of work, the noise of feminine hands slapping the tortilla dough. The only irregular element was the passing of the hasty clouds that fled toward the sea; the wail of the babies clinging to their mothers, almost ripping off their old rebozos, the ragged blouses that had once been white, stiff, and embroidered—even the roses on an Indian blouse ended up wilting in these parts, my uncle said to himself: in other villages, kids are like little animals, free, daring, and happy; in Mexico, who knows why, kids are always beautiful and happy; a country of sad men and happy kids, said Fernando Benítez to himself without knowing why, at this the stroke of noon, surprised by the formula that came into his mind and which he wrote down in his notebook in his minuscule, illegible scrawl.

The children here cling to their mothers, incapable of leaving them, and the women shoo away the flies that drink up their babies' eyes.

He put the notebook in one of the pockets of his guayabera and shook his head, in just the way the Indian farmers shook the flies off their faces. He shook his head to free himself of that formula which kept him from understanding the mystery, the ambiguity of this land inside Mexico, the seed of Mexico, but so totally alien to the white Mexico with blue eyes, of the
Nouvel Observateur
and
Time,
and BMWs, toothpaste, toasters, cablevision, periodic checkups in Houston clinics, and the imminent celebration of the Quincentennial of the Discovery of America—a fact totally unknown by the men, women, and children he was contemplating: an undiscovered population unaware that it had ever been discovered, a date, an enigma imposed on it by others.

The men, women, and children he was contemplating.

And now hearing: they began to wail something in a language my uncle, abandoned on the insular crown of the mountains, had never heard before, something like Zapotec, he thought, he was going to write it down, but he realized he shouldn't lose even an instant in writing, that his eyes were his uncertain guides, helped powerfully by the thick dioptric lenses in his glasses, but they, too, after all were bathed by light, not permanently separated from light, screw that, not yet, he said to himself: my Uncle Fern, a bantam rooster, a fighting cock, almost eighty years old, sprightly, short, but straight as a die, loaded with memories, romantic adventures, diabolical jokes, and bragging arrogance: my Uncle Fernando Benítez, whom your worship the reader will get to know very well because in my prenatal life he was my firmest ally and the nemesis of my horrid Uncle Homero Fagoaga, who in the very instant of my conception excrementally plowed the air over the Bay of Acapulque.

Now my Uncle Fernando was listening to that impressive music wailing, which had no other purpose than to greet the sun at its zenith: the Indians, high noon on their heads, the blazing sun of the tropics, a desert in the clouds, first close to their hands, then to their naked shoulders and burned faces, finally as straight as an arrow aimed directly down onto the top of those heads, covered in black, straight hair, the heads of the Indians of the mesas.

They stopped. Time belonged not to them but to the sun.

It was only an instant of raised faces and hands stretched forward—not to protect themselves from the sun but to try to touch it. From wherever they might be—the fields, the entrances to their adobe shacks, a sonorous well like the bell missing from the church in ruins, here there was no priest, shopkeeper, teacher, or doctor (in the modern sense, noted my uncle scrupulously)—the men, women, even the children helped by their mothers tried to touch the sun without averting their eyes from it. No one protected his eyes. Midday passed as it had come: an instant now lost forever.

The cloud banks around the plateau came down another step. Now it was possible to see the other side of the extremely deep canyon, to see another frozen plateau on top of one of the thousands of extinct Mexican volcanoes.

Another tribe had gathered there, right at the precipice. My Uncle Fernando walked as far as he could, until the tide of clouds kept him from going any farther. The people on the other shore were too far away; he could not hear what they were saying, although he could guess what their gestures meant. Dressed in white, with starched, shining shirts and trousers, these were a different people, not the abandoned tribe my uncle had perhaps just discovered—why not? as astonished as Cabeza de Vaca must have been when he discovered the Pueblo Indians—but a people who had connections outside their village: they were waving their arms as if they wanted to bridge the gap between their village and this one: they stretched out their hands. They were smiling, but there was anguish in their brows: they didn't want to frighten him, that's all.

He turned his back on them. It made no sense to push them into an impossible communication. They would say nothing to each other. He sat down to eat the tacos wrapped up in napkins he carried in his knapsack; a drink of water. He listened. The music from the throats of the tribe lingered on, hanging sonorously on the mountain peaks for a long time after silence had returned to the earth, interrupted only by the punctuation of a baby crying. He looked. The gesture of the hands greedy for sun remained sculpted in the air an instant longer than the flesh that had made it. The silence was stronger, more persistent than the wails of the baby; but even more powerful was the image of this place that he began to free from all similarities with anywhere else.

When afternoon began, the ten- or twelve-year-old boys turned out to guide their elders in the plowing and sowing: they stumbled from time to time because they still did not know how to set the pace with their fathers, but the boys guided their fathers in the same way a father helps his son take his first steps. All, young and old, leaned on the plow staffs, long or short, that also served to split the earth. And the small boys—he saw and understood immediately—cradled their mothers.

He smelled. In the mountain afternoon, near and secret smells displace the vast cargo of the passing wind—its storms and errant flowers. As the sun sinks in the distance, the earth withdraws into itself, snuggles under its covers and smells itself in its intimacy. The men left their plows, picked up their torches, while, heedless of the bright light of sunset, the boys lit them and the men then instantly raised them on high.

On the distant side of the canyon, the Indians crossed themselves and went down on their knees.

On this side, the women, feeling the smoke in their noses, stood up with their infants. They all walked toward the dusty spot that could pass for the center of the village.

It was only a dry mound, with that smell of old excrement left out to weather, forgotten even by the flies that live in the fields. But here the mountain of shit was sculpted, arranged—by whom? Who was the witch doctor responsible for this coprologic stele? Where was he? First the entire village silently knelt before it, their hands joined, and now, for the first time in the whole day, they closed their eyes and took a deep breath: they didn't chant, they only breathed rhythmically, in unison, they breathed in the smell of shit, the strongest smell of the body, thought my uncle, the one that displaces all the rest and confirms our physical existence: the soft metal of the body, its offering to the gods: shit is the gold of our body, shit in the same way that gold is the excrement of the gods, their feces which are our riches.

My old Uncle Fernando felt himself to be mortal and stupid. His spirit suddenly waned, as if flowing through a sieve, and he tried to rationalize the absurdity of the body. Only symbols, allegories, or ideas could be more grotesque than the body and its functions: symbols, the allegories, or ideas superimposed on the body in order to alleviate it of its own mortal horror. He felt his bowels loosen and only barely managed to control himself. There where he could no longer imagine it urinating, shitting, fornicating naturally, without a perturbing symbol that said to his body: You need me because you are mortally absurd.

He knew of a Polynesian tribe for whom all deaths were murders. The shock of death did not violate our lives but rather our immortality.

They stayed there worshipping the little mountain of poop for an hour, breathing deeply, and then, in perfect discipline, the children first, followed by the women, then the young men, and finally the oldest (ninety-two altogether, counted my Uncle Fernando, the same number of people as years had been used up in the century), they all went to the mound, dropped their trousers or raised their skirts—if they had them; if not, they shit right through the holes in their garments—and gave their offering to nature, giving back to their absent gods their treasure. Thus they added to the height of that olfactory monument, the temple dedicated to the living senses of this tribe of sleepwalkers.

Night fell fatally, and the Indians, once again leaning on their plows, had to return to their domestic chores, eat hunkered down next to their dying fires, all in silence, alien to my uncle now as always, my uncle who for them had never been there, this man who traveled and wrote books invisibly, that's how he felt it that afternoon on the dry plateau in the uplands: they never saw him or greeted him. The invisible author.

He approached them without touching them, one after another, afraid he would awaken them from an ancient dream (and some felt the nearness of his breath, they grunted, walked away, dropped a piece of blue tortilla, some drew together, embraced as if fearing the nearness of an implacable ending; one grabbed up a burning branch and began to beat the shoulders of the wind, to burn the eyes of the darkness). Up until then, my uncle, with his mannish humors, his breath, his distant cosmetics, did not approach any of them; no sooner did he do so than he disrupted everything. They smelled all the difference, they extinguished the hostile fires, unnecessary in any case for seeing things at this hour of the day, got into single file, hands on each other's shoulders, as if they'd been practicing this rite (or defense) forever, each Indian with his hand on the shoulder of the one in front of him, forming a circle that would capture my uncle as if he were a wild animal. They smelled him. They knew how to use their sense of smell. Nothing was stronger than smell for them, nothing more venerable, nothing more certain as a fact of the world beyond the shadows. No odor was stronger than that of shit. Not even the smell of creole historian.

Noise displaced smell, the helicopter blades overwhelmed the olfactory presence of my uncle, even that of the scatological mound. No animal had ever dared to climb up here. Pumas or ocelots knew what awaited them here. Did anyone give better beatings than these people? On the other hand, today, twice, an eagle … Nothing was faster or stronger than the machine piloted by the man from the NII, who descended to the confusion of the tribe, opened the door—never ceasing to chew his gum—and told my uncle that he was sorry to have disobeyed him, but that he had had to inform his superiors that Professor Benítez intended to spend the night in the mountains with an unknown group of Indians, that the information reached President Paredes, and the President himself gave him the order to go back and get him. How had it gone? asked the pilot as his helicopter, which never again landed on the lands of that tribe, levitated.

In the air, flying toward Palenque, under the aegis of a special permit that allowed them to fly over and land in the Chiapas–Tabasco–Campeche Trusteeship, my Uncle Fernando felt afraid of himself, afraid of his historical curiosity: he had the anguishing feeling that he had interrupted something, perhaps a sacred cycle that sustained the life of that lost tribe on that mountain which was like an island on the moon; he feared a catastrophe. His own was sufficient. His own fear was enough for him.

The permit granted by the Trusteeship administered by the Five Sisters stipulated that the Mexican national Fernando Benítez could land in Chitacam territory for the purpose of interviewing the last Lacandon Indian, before, as the document put it, “it was too late.” He feared, as he flew over the mountains of Oaxaca, that today he had just precipitated the disappearance of the last ninety-two members of the tribe of eternal night.

Could it be, he wondered, staring at the inglorious sunset, that from now on each year there would be one Indian less in that tribe of hereditarily, willfully blind people who were born with the sense of sight but who had it devoured by the larvae of those flies which were their only company, all victims of their isolation? He could not find out; but from now on he would imagine it. An invisible author for an imaginary day.

Mexico—what remained of Mexico after the Partition—was dying without Mexicans—those locked within the confines of the emaciated Republic—ever getting to know each other. Without ever getting to know what was left of the fragmented fatherland.

The tribes separated by the canyon never shook hands. But one tribe could see the other, and one would never see its brothers.

Don Fernando Benítez was on the verge of vomiting out of the helicopter window, but a strange vacillation, one that secretly seemed to warn him against the horror of symmetry, calmed him.

“Do you believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe?” he asked the pilot.

“The what?” the pilot answered (the racket, the earphones).

“I say that only a miracle like another manifestation of the Virgin of Guadalupe can save Mexico.”

“No, we're going to Palenque,” shouted the pilot. “Not to Mexico City … The Presi…”

Fernando Benítez closed his eyes and patted the shoulder of the young pilot.

Incredible! All solutions seem irrational except one: believing in the Virgin. Our only rationality!

Then something extraordinary occurred: afternoon renounced night and on both sides of the canyon there exploded in midair, as if they were trying to reach the helicopter, race with it, or damage it, bouquets of skyrockets, green and blue fireworks, hysterical, colorless lights, luminous sheets and then bunches of liquid silver and castles made of piercing air: a night full of red, acrid, and miraculous gunpowder: my Uncle Fernando, his eyes closed, did not see the night of the Mexican fiesta, that astonishing night and that astonishing fiesta, born of plundering and absence: fans of fire, towers of liquid metal, the wealth of poverty, rockets and castles that came out of who knows what invisible hiding place, out of who knows what savage squandering of money; harvests and carpentry, pottery, masks, looms and saddles: all of it set on fire here at the instant of the communication between the two shores, a communication he either could not or did not know how to accomplish, savings wiped out in a blast of powder; wealth existed only for that: to dazzle the eyes of the white, nostalgic village, for the glory of the sense of smell of the blind, ragged village: finally they had shaken hands, surrendered all their wealth to one instant of irreparable loss: the fiesta.