Christopher Unborn (49 page)

“Didn't you just say Columbus, the Columbus Contest is what you said a moment ago. Have you changed your mind?”

“Christopher or Columbus, it's all the same, Christopher Columbus: don't you know who he was?”

“Look, if you get smart with me, I'll slam this window shut right in your face.”

“Let's see you do it…”

“I'd just be dumping you on one of my office mates here, sir, and that would not be kind.”

“Knock off the crap. The Columbus Contest, announced by Mamadoc on October 12, 1991…”

“Didn't you say that it was for 1992, this year? How can anyone help you if you can't say things straight?”

“The contest will be held in 1992, but it was announced in 1991 by Mamadoc…”

“Trying to use influence on me now?”

“It just so happens that she announced the contest.”

“You know what happens to people who threaten to use influence around here? Have you ever heard of moral renovation?”

“I was just a kid when that came out.”

“And now he insults me for being old, what a lack of respect!”

“Look, sir, all I want to know is how I can find out about this contest, I don't want to have anything to do with you…”

“Very nice. Now he calls me an incompetent. Keep it up, son, keep it up. I want to see how far this insolence of yours will take you.”

“With all due respect, sir, where can I…”

“Now listen, I have a name, why do you keep calling me sir, it's as if you called me buddy.”

“Okay, what's your name?”

“Use your imagination.”

“I don't have any left. You used my last drop when you wore out my patience.”

“In that case, go over to the personnel office and find out what my name is so you learn how to treat a public employee with respect.”

“But all I…”

“Soon you'll be calling me that guy or damned old baldy there behind the bars, that's what I expect from you, come on, why don't you call me a miserable bureaucrat with smelly feet standing there all day like a jerk, careful when you call me a jerk, sonny, or I'll have you thrown out of here, hey, security, get over here, this guy's threatening me, what else am I going to have to put up with!”

My parents, still followed, like it or not, your mercies, by the cloud of suspicion resulting from the Acapulco caper, stepped out of line and headed in the opposite direction, looking for another information window. They actually and respectfully dared ask a middle-aged guard with a sweaty upper lip, wearing a gray uniform and a strange French kepi, sitting in a wheelchair next to a staircase: “Information about the Christopher Columbus Contest, please?”

“Take this staircase,” said the crippled guard.

“Thank you.”

My parents started to walk toward the stairs.

“Just a moment,” said the guard.

“Yes?”

“Are you going to go up or down?”

“I don't know. We're going to the contest office, and you told us…”

“This is a down staircase.”

“Okay, is the contest office upstairs or downstairs?”

“That depends.”

“Depends? Depends on what?”

“On if you go up by going down or if you go down by going up. There's a big difference.”

“Where is the contest office?”

“Don't change the subject.”

“I don't want to change the subject, what I want is information…”

“Well, why didn't you say so? The information window is right over there, where that gentleman with the blue visor is standing…”

“Let's go over this again calmly, sir. You told us that we should take this staircase. Now tell me: should we go up by going up or go down by going down.”

“Now we're getting somewhere.”

“Well?”

“It all depends.”

“On what, now?”

“Well, before you get to the stairs, there's the door.”

“I can see it. I'm not blind.”

“Well, tell me if you think you're going to go out the door or enter it.”

“Go out, go out, no question about it: go out.”

“In that case, go down three levels and on the left you'll find the Columbus Contest office.”

“The Columbus Contest?” suspiciously asked a lady who looked like one of the Bergen-Belsen jail guards in an early-forties Warner Brothers movie: hair pulled back, chignon, pince-nez, shadows under her eyes, lips like Conrad Veidt's, high collar, scarf, and cameo with the profile of Hermann Goering painted on it, and the Ride of the Valkyries playing insinuatingly on the Muzak:

“Mozart,” said my mother.

“What?” The lady sitting there narrowed her serpent's eyes as she carved an Iron Cross into the wood with the knife she held in her hand.

“We would like to know where to sign up for the Christopher Columbus Contest set for the twelfth of Oct…”

“You've come to the right place.”

“What do you know.” My father sighed, putting on his pince-nez so as not to be a step behind the receptionist.

“Who is going to have the baby?” said the bureaucrat directly.

“I am,” said my mother.

“It will have to be verified.”

“Certainly.”

“Dr. Menges!” barked the lady. “Another one for the Götterdämmerung!”

A man with black-dyed hair, twitching cheeks, and blue, slightly crossed eyes appeared behind a white hospital screen. He himself wore a white gown, black patent-leather shoes, and brick-colored gloves. He smiled.

He asked my mother to come into the space behind the screen (I inside, trembling with fear), my father tried to follow her, but the lady stopped him.

“Spread your legs,” said the doctor.

“Isn't my verbal statement enough? I had my last period almost two months ago and…”

“Spread your legs!” shouted the doctor.

“Think the rain will let up?” my father asked the lady with the chignon.

“Don't try making small talk with me,” answered the lady.

“So sorry, but when do you think World War III will break out?”

“Don't get all gemütlich with me, I'm warning you.”

“Me? I wouldn't dare. I'd rather listen to you.”

“What do you want to know?”

Suddenly a light went on inside my dad's head: “What law governs the activities of this office, what is, shall we say, its Kantian categorical imperative?”

The lady in charge answered with great seriousness: “Everyone can do whatever he pleases as long as there is someone to blame.”

Angeles screamed horribly when the doctor brought a white-hot branding iron with a glowing swastika on its tip close to her labia: the entrance, meine Damen und Herren, to Ali Baba's cave, where the final treasure is
ME
; my mother gave the doctor a kick in the jaw, and as he fell to the floor he shouted that this baby is not Aryan, this baby should not be allowed to enter the contest, this baby has the blood of slaves, gypsies, Indians, Moors, Jews, Semites, he mights, he did go insane, screaming his head off, and we fled. We ran up the three levels, we saw the guard in his wheelchair, abandoned, unable to move, soaked in his own urine, asking us: “Where are you going, folks? Stop! First ask me! You can't go that way! That window is not for looking out but for looking in!”

My parents and I (more upset than ever, more even than when I was visited by the proletarian, carnal cylinders in the Guerrero mountains, I horrified by what I saw, oh my, oh innocent, impure me, in the lightning flash of the instant in which my mother spread her legs and the doctor's beswastikaed branding iron approached my exit—would that aperture be useful only as an entrance and not as an exit?) ran toward a fountain of light, and I, only I, saw in the burning swastika a pair of hypnotic blue eyes, a pair of eyes that was also a sea of eyes, wave after wave with the same eyes, as if the air, the ocean, and the land were made of blue, hypnotic, cruel eyes: my father in his haste collided with a man, and my out-of-breath mother fell into his arms in the grand marble corridor of the Palace of the Citizenry. The man blushed, held her so she wouldn't fall, but actually offered her to my father with a strange sweetness that said, I don't want her, she isn't mine; is she yours?

The tall, thin man with huge black eyes, bushy eyebrows, a full, thick, black head of hair and the long, wolfish ears of a Transylvanian vampire, Nosferatu from the silents, begged her pardon for his clumsiness. He was looking for the exit.

“I'm looking for the exit.”

“I think it's over there,” pointed my father.

“I've been looking for it for years,” added the man, wearing a celluloid collar and a black suit, vest, and thick gray tie, without listening to us.

He went on to say, with just a faint gasp of hope, that he never expected to find it, but that he would never give up trying.

My parents passed in front of the window where the employee with the blue visor was standing. He was saying to a fat, dumpy little fellow of indeterminate age: “I've already told him that you can't go because you're drunk, but what does it matter to you if you go tomorrow?”

He raised his eyes and caught sight of my parents. “You again? Now what do you want?” he shouted. “Do you want to know everything? Everything? Everything?”

11. I'll Believe in You as Long as a Mexican Girl

The twenty-odd days they'd spent in Mexico City had transformed my parents. My genetives tell me that when we live with someone we don't notice the passing of time, until one day we exclaim, just look at the old geezer! when did your clock strike midnight, man? but the guy was only a kid just the other day! and then we catch sight of ourselves in a smoky mirror and we realize that we, too, have not managed to save ourselves from the ravages of … Well, all I know is that my mom, as soon as she got to Mexico Circus, began to cough, her nose began to run, she started blowing her nose all day, she sneezed, things I sense and convulsively resent, you tell me, dear Readers, if I'm not right, there's no one closer to her secretions than I am and I say this eternal postnasal drip is polluting my swimming pool. She coughs and the Richter Scale in here hits 7.

I'm inside her and that's how I know what no one else knows: my mother Angeles may occasionally seem passive, but inside she's extremely active, who's going to know better than your humble servant, when the coconut inside her spins at about a thousand m.p.h. and the best proof is all of what I've been saying, because if she weren't my intermediary, I'd be quieter than the Congress during Gustavo Díaz Ordaz's administration. All I want to say on this occasion is that thanks to her I know that she sees my father Angel, twenty-two years of age, when they all return to Mexico, D. F., and says: “He's young. But he looks tired. He's going to inspire too much compassion. No chick will be able to resist him.”

There was solid evidence that something was happening. Because there were certain interesting earnings to be had in foreign exchange. Because of this proverb translation business, my parents had the pleasure of making incursions into the gigantic Tex-Coco-Mex-Mall, which was divided into the four arms of an enormous cross, Mall-efic, Mall-feasance, Mall-function, Mall-formed, where, on the bed of what in ancient times was Lake Texcoco, all the luxury, the elegant consumer goods, the chance to go shopping without getting on lines, abundance: my father says it's something like the foreign-currency stores in Communist countries—if you don't have dollars, don't bother coming in.

Angel goes up the escalator in the Nuevo Liver Puddle, which happens to be going down: he has his hand resting on the rubber handrail. He doesn't lift it, not even when (much less then) he sees a woman's hand, which is coming down. He touches it. Sometimes the feminine hand pulls back. Sometimes it doesn't. Other times it squeezes. Others it touches lightly. Others it caresses. And other women, no sooner do my mommy and I look the other way, return to the scene of the crime and leave tiny pieces of paper in my father's predisposed hand. My father once again applies the eternal motto of the eternal Don Juan (which he is): Let's see if it's chewing gum and if it sticks!

Which doesn't mean that amid this florid May, as my mom's tummy grows (and I, too, inside her), my father was not assailed by the anguished desire to know if he was getting old without having experienced sexual plenitude, if he'd let opportunities slip away, even if the sense of the contradiction between his ideas and his practices held him back. His renascent sexuality, was it progressive or reactionary? Should his political activity lead him to monogamy or to the harem?

Ultimately he concluded that a good screw explodes all ideologies.

She forgives him everything, the jerk (I say), because, says the egghead, jealousy is an exercise based on nothingness: the other is not there, she refuses to see it (her): the other woman. What is there, finally, is jealousy and its object: which is invisible. What matters to her is that he comes to her at night and says forgive me, I'm not perfect, I want to be something else, and I still haven't reached it, help me, Angeles, and she, the dumbbell, really loves him, since she sees in him everything that is opposite to what she is, everything, therefore, that completes her. But, for all that, she does not give up the hope that after a time they will be equals.

“Give me things to think about at night,” she said to him one day, and now she can't complain. He's giving them to her, by the ton. She does not know if little by little, instead of being fascinating, she is becoming fascinated by Angel and my father's problem of creating a program of rebellion and personal creation and not being able to purge out the temptations that deny and smash that program. This fascinates Angeles, but Angeles ceases to be fascinating for him and she does not realize it and I don't know how to communicate it to her. She doesn't know how to say anything other than this hint of a reproach: