Christopher Unborn (34 page)

3

While these portentous events were transpiring here inside, just think, your mercies benz, that outside in the cosmos my parents spent the four, five, now the six weeks that separated them from Twelfth Night waiting for news that never came.

What did people know?

What were people saying?

What did they think the Acapulco catastrophe meant?

Mom and Dad had begged the Four Fuckups: inform us by Arabian telephone (what in Englatl you call smokesignatl or popocatele), smoke signals, or anything else, of any news you have: nothing.

They asked Don Fernando Benítez: tell us where we can rendezvous with you in the mountains: nothing.

My folks spent long hours contemplating the crackling, gray, striped blackboard of the Sony television set: nothing.

Nothing about the Acapulcalypse. Nothing that would precipitate, which was my parents' secret intention, a national crisis which would shake up the predictable, pleasant normality of Mamadoc's contests, which during the days of our confinement followed one on the other with all joy and inexpressible collective enthusiasm:

First Week: National Prize for the Best Oral Description of the Fifty-Centavo Silver Coins Quality 0720 [no longer in existence (neither the coin nor the quality)], nicknamed El Tostón;

Second Week: National Prize for the Inhabitant of the Central Plateau Who, Overcoming His Natural and Genetic Disgust, Eats the Most Fish in a Week;

Third Week: National Prize to the Lady Who Returned the Lost Wallet of Don Wigberto Garza Toledano (Native of Monterrey), While Traveling on the Niños Heroes Subway Line;

Fourth Week: National Prize to the Citizens Who Confess in an Act of Civic Courage without Precedents to Having Been Supporters of Benito Coquet, Donato Miranda Fonseca, Esequiel Padilla, Emilio Martínez Manautou, Javier García Paniagua, Aarón Sáenz, Angel Carvajal, or Francisco Múgica in Past Internal Conflicts within the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

It was as a function of this last contest, held during the first few days of February, that my parents (and I along with them) became most upset—when we least expected it—by the announcement that, in the first few days of March, Dr. Don Homero Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca, after a month of reflexive reclusion in his beach home and careful preparation in his offices on Frank Wood Avenue, had announced his candidacy for the office of Senator from the state of Guerrero. His campaign would kick off with a mass meeting in the town of Igualistlahuaca. The citizens of Guerrero were cordially invited to view the event on television and to express their support for the PRI candidate. Dr. Fagoaga is a distinguished son of Guerrero, as irrefutable documents clearly prove, and in order not to put off for twenty years the democratic opportunity of today, and in order not to be excluded by main force, as were Benito, Donato, Emilio, and …

Angel and Angeles exclaimed in one voice: “But Uncle H. is strictly from Mexico, D.F. He's never set foot in Guerrero, what did Guerrero do to the boys in the capital to deserve this punishment, etc., as we've been saying for decades: Angel and Angeles got over their spontaneous indignation and awaited the next newscast with bated breath.

Angel closed his eyes and said to my mother that they must be totally befuddled by the success of the operation, the failure of the operation, by all of the above = he shook her by the shoulders in order to shake himself.

“It's all make-believe. We forget that from time to time. I get carried away.”

“Let go of me, Angel.”

“The idea of passing from chaos to despair with no transition scares the hell out of me.”

“Being a conservative anarchist is a little stupid, honey…”

“Nihilist. What I am is a nihilist. And I'm afraid of what I am, I swear. I want to restore certain values, not to be left with no values at all.”

“Calm down. That's not what you are.”

“Well? What are we going to end up being—unintentionally?”

“There will be many obstacles, what you want won't be easily achieved, all that stuff about the Sweet Fatherland, your…”

“I'm afraid of ending up as what you're saying, the opposite of what I'm trying to achieve. Everything always ends up like that, the opposite of what we set out to do.”

“Terrorists. My Uncle Fernando, who lived through that era, would call us terrorists—if he knew.”

“He doesn't know a thing. He thinks it's a joke. Better a joke than a crime.”

“Was all that a crime? Tell me. I have no past. I learn everything from you. Everything I get from you sticks to me, even my need not to be like you!”

“Angeles, it's taken for granted that in the nineties we young people all have the right to an adventure of this kind, it isn't a statute in any constitution, it's like what going to a whorehouse or getting drunk used to be; terrorism is a rite of passage, nothing more, it has no importance … Everybody does it. Remember when the Spanish kid García poisoned all the people in his father's restaurant? Or when Baby Fernández put dynamite under the altar of the Infant of Prague and set it off during twelve o'clock Mass?”

“Sure I do. I like what you're saying. I don't see any problems in it.”

“I hope you see some problems in this damned news blackout!!”

“There's something that worries me even more. Everything turned out too perfectly. There wasn't even a blink between cause and effect. It's as if we started gambling with ten pesos and the possibility of winning a hundred and instead we came home with a million.”

“We're some mean fuckers.” My father laughed unwillingly. Then, genuinely afflicted, he hung his head—not without first kicking the Sony, which fell onto the marble floor, shattering and scattering gray glass, sorry, Angeles, those are just words—terrorist, nihilist, conservative, left-winger, sorry: I'm a guy who's always pissed off, understand? pissed off that I've spent my whole life, since I was born back in 1969 until now in 1992, desperate because I'm so mad and so impotent, I never had the slightest optimism about “openings” or “booms” or “renewals,” guys my age just felt hemmed in, desperate, pissed off: at least being pissed off is something, right? Better than trading in your pesos for dollars, making jokes about the president, blaming the gringos for everything we don't do, sitting down to wait for the next president to announce his successor, transferring hope every six years despite all the evidence to the contrary, demanding that others do what we can't, saying the people lack all confidence, that there's no leadership, that there's no this, there's no that … Shit, Angeles, at least I get pissed off and only much later will I ask myself your horrible question, which is breaking my balls, as if it were a good kick: does justice justify murder? Ask me again some other day, don't forget about it, don't throw it out with the trash, please. Think the worst of my moral sense.”

“What do we know, Angel?” asked my mother, stroking my father's hand. He hesitated, then answered:

“About what we did, nothing. They're not going to say a word. At least not until it suits them. And if they're not saying anything now it's because it suits them to keep quiet. Remember the President's favorite motto: ‘In Mexico you can do anything, as long as you can blame it on someone.'”

A half-opaque light passed through my mother's eyes.

“You say you're conservative, and I say I'm left-wing. But we both know that labels don't matter. What does matter are concrete acts, okay? But did we really do what we did, Angel of love? Are you sure?
Are we both sure? Did we really do it?
”

Ever since their first night in seclusion, she was answered by the wailing voices of the professional mourning women, who were always hired to come down from the town of Treinta up in the mountains to lament the daily but sporadic deaths that occurred in Acapulco.

These new dusks belonged to their most dolorous, their longest choral chanting: it seemed to be born at the bottom of the sea, and my parents heard it every night without speaking, because it reminded them that not only tourists, literary critics, government functionaries, and millionaires died that day in Aca, but waiters and chambermaids, taxi drivers, and cashiers: but Homero Fagoaga did not die, and now he's a senatorial candidate, we're fucked …

These bastards
are not thinking about me in the slightest.

They know nothing about my shock: expelled by my father, rejected by my mother, against both of them I've set myself up in the womb and I myself am creating the placenta, sucking blood and food through the sponge that I'm weaving onto my mother, who has been invaded now by my new being: I, the accepted parasite, the guest who devours his mother to stay alive, taking refuge there for nine months, thinking now that this pair of nuts is following the noise of the hired mourners, which has supplanted that of the coyotes, that I'm already a disk about one one-hundredth of an inch across which is rapidly growing from button shape to tiny needle shape with head, trunk, and umbilical cord. What else matters? I'd like to ask them noisily about all this that happens without anyone's knowing it. Or about everything that you endlessly discuss, what's happening with everyone's knowing about it.

Beginning in the third week, when the nice lady who returned the wallet belonging to Don Wigberto Garza Toledano (native of etc.) was given a national prize, I was already a well-established embryo beneath the surface of Mom's uterus, I eat away at things and grow in search of food, I expand the very cavity that received me, I fill the empty spaces, creating my own head and my own tail.

But then they endanger this entire enterprise by hiking up to the highest peak on Uncle Homero's property, a crag that dominates Acapulco's two fronts, Puerto Marqués and Revolcadero Beach on one side, and the entire bay on the other, in order to make sure that Acapretty was destroyed over a month ago, on Epiphany, and that even if the newspapers and television do not reveal it, the Professional Mourners from Treinta certainly do, as do my parents' eyes (the remains of the discotheque float like a gigantic condom; the crepe worn by the models trapped on the rocks at La Countess beach flutters in the air), and their long strides to the top of the crag make me fear a Christophalypse consisting of hormonal deserts, hunger, thirst, the prelude to a rain of blood that kills me and washes out the cloaca which I will have become, dissolved, unformed, again: inform.

My parents go down to the beach where I was conceived, staring at the smoke and dead fury that was Acapulco, the Babylon of the poor, chosen to exemplify in the mind of the nation
ALL THAT IS NOT THE SWEET FATHERLAND
: standing on the hilltops, they hear the melancholy sirens, and my father reminds my mother that one day he returned from Oaxaca transformed—a different man, disconcerted by the melancholy of having lost what he'd just won.

On the beach where they created me and over which Uncle Homero flew, my father writes on the sand:

Fatherland, your surface is a pothole, I mean

Your sky is stagnant smog

The Baby Jesus granted you a palace in Las Lomas and a ski lodge in Vail

And your oil deposits were a gift from a devil who lives on the spot market in Rotterdam, I mean

A little wave came and washed it all away.

Angel and Angeles found Tomasito's body in an advanced state of decomposition in a canoe that had lodged between two rocks on Pichilinque beach.

Piercing his back was a black spear, fantastically wrapped in green feathers: a jungle spear.

Angeles: “Just a minute. Homero and Tomasito weren't enemies: they were allies.”

Angel: “Homero thought Tomasito was his enemy, so he killed him when he fled.”

Angeles: “The Four Fuckups found out about Tomasito's betrayal and they killed him.”

Angel: “Tomasito was just one more victim of the slaughter that went on in Acapulco.”

Angeles: “What Tomasito died of was his death.”

Angel: “Everything happened simultaneously. One event happened neither before nor after but right next to or between another two events:

TOMASITO AND HOMERO
FRIENDS

TOMASITO AND HOMERO
ACCIDENTS

TOMASITO AND HOMERO
ENEMIES

Angeles: “Nobody died; they all went to the beach…”

Angel: “You and I are walking arm-in-arm along Peachy Tongue Beach.”

Angeles: “Animus intelligence!”

They freed the canoe, set fire to it, and launched it on the tide, where it floated toward Manila, the Pacific, Tomasito's home …

Then it happened that out of the seas of smoke and blood and arsenic and mustard, enveloped in the distant fog of panting coyotes and mist the obscene color of pureed cockroaches, there emerged a body that swam and panted like a coyote but which was tenacious in its decision not to sink in those waters polluted in saecula saeculorum: the smoke rose from the burst cupolas, ashes rained down like grotesque green and yellow chewing gum over the sea from the floating disco Divan the Terrible: and the diminutive figure of a tiny man's tiny yellow hand seized the prow of the black canoe where the cadaver of the Filipino servant Tomasito was lying, and emerged from the seas of smoke and blood and arsenic and mustard, falling prostrate like a Pekinese puppy at the feet of the Filipino.

4. All Citizens Have the Right to Information

INFOREADER
: They haven't spoken, they haven't done anything beyond what they've already said and done, they haven't lived beyond what they've already lived, and what about me? When they started imagining probabilities, alternatives for the story, without remembering, first of all, that they've already made me and, second, that I myself possess a thousand alternatives, they drive me nuts and make me want to cut out, to leave my mother's ovary without returning to my father's testicle: