Christopher Unborn (58 page)

“No, Mr. President, thank you, but Don Benito Juárez would turn over in his grave if the Army were to take power again in Mexico, no, Mr. President. The respect for civilian authority in the Mexican Army is sacred.”

“This is a portent,” says President Paredes, quieted down somewhat, although he has always been terrified of earthquakes. “Just like the warnings to Moctezuma in the year Ce Acatl. What do we do if there's a revolution?”

“Don't worry, Mr. President. I'll take charge of bringing you your daily quota of dead men. All contingencies have been planned for. Neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street, wherever we find them: your daily quota of dead men. The revolution will be stopped dead in its tracks.”

“Thank God!” Don Jesús sighs.

“He's always on the side of those with power.”

He leaves the colonel, with the green saliva oozing out from between his parted lips.

*   *   *

Unknown to these men of power, far away, invisible to them, Mamadoc in person is looking directly into the Angel's golden eyes, and she tries to read in them a warning that the fallen statue does not dare to communicate to her. Capitolina and Farnesia hug each other, full of anguish, thinking that death is coming for them, they have left so much undone, who will take care of the unborn child? They will perhaps die together and that makes Capitolina happy, but Farnesia weeps bitterly, thinking that everyone will come to go through her drawers and leaf through her secrets. Don Fernando Benítez is not daunted by earthquakes, and he bangs his fist against the door of Don Homero Fagoaga's penthouse. The owner quickly, fearfully, and nervously opens the door, fleeing but wrapped in a towel, and Fernando rebukes him, you've gone back on your word, you fat faggot, you have not defended democracy, you have not protected your niece and nephew, you've besmirched your honor! Well, now you'll go out with me, you miserable stewpot, to combat those who get rich from the toil of the masses, you will come, you filthy barnacle, to walk with me along the roads of Mexico, losing all your extra pounds and ready, with me, to give your life so that in Tepatepec Hidalgo the right of the peasants to organize is respected and so that in Pichátaro Michoacán the municipal election is not tampered with!

By the force of his insults and threats Fernando drives Homero back into the apartment, miserable lump, bloodsucker, fixture of waiting rooms, survivor of the United Front of Asslickers (UFA), with a good condom the world would have been spared your lamentable presence. He went on attacking the fat man and stripping him now that he had no Tomasito to defend him, although the lawyer screams, Tomasito! Au secours! and the implacable Don Fernando Benítez: you will have the faith in your fellow citizens no one has ever had and you will see that from below, my fat and greasy relative, if we allow them to, Mexicans will practice democracy without gunmen, without crime, without bribes, without orders and abuses. Don Homero Fagoaga cornered, shouting back to Benítez, sure, sure, this mass of lazy good-for-nothings, this irresponsible people, you'll see what they'll do if you leave them alone, what they'll do to you, to us, just what they did on the Malinaltzin highway! they'll beat us to a pulp because we're the enlightened minority that for good or ill has made this poor country despite its flea-bitten, passive, asshole masses, stupefied by incest, liquor, genes, the hopeless race, the damned race, the ra …

Cornered now, Don Homero, who entered this story flying through the air under a parachute, now leaves it tumbling off his balcony over Mel O'Field Road and onto the vacant lot, across which on a distant day he chased Orphan Huerta with conflictive intentions, the Orphan (pears, lemons, an' figs!) and now, with the threatening Fer Ben (Fer-de-lance!) in front of him, demanding all these horrors of him, the naked lawyer and academician falls, naked, from the tenth floor of this bouncing building down toward the trembling earth, clutching his immense Cannon towel, imported of course! He does seven flips in the air, his naked body just like mine inside Mamma Mia because the tremor does not stop and finally she is holding on tight to Egg, my father's best friend, our buddy Egg, and he has an uncontrollable attack of the giggles, finally hugging my mother Angeles filled with me and I, Reader and Friend, ready to take over this text, if not the entire world then at least the novel, amid the noise of a golden Angel that falls and Egg who says to my mother: “Look. Your halo had gone out. Now it's on again, and I Christopher, I with no weapons but my stubborn battle against the unknown, my irreverent mix of languages and my decision to put them all into play, the conflict and the cause: I tell myself that when the Mexican earth shakes and when the Angel of Independence falls and when the bats fly in search of the food that remains, that History is faster than Fiction (here, in Mexico, in the New World!) and that it's time to get a move on, no more holdups, to the month of August and what awaits us in it, pushing forward, toward the conclusion, toward my Na-ti-vi-daddy! my Mother-Ni-Dad!

*   *   *

But sleep, which is memory set free from action, gets between reality and my desire, and this is the dream of the grandparents the night of the earthquake and the fall of the Angel and the visit of the Four Fuckups to the coach house, where my mother and I take refuge, and the dream is this:

11. Fatherland, Always Be Faithful to Yourself

Ayayay, Grandfather Rigoberto Palomar woke up screaming: a nightmare. It's just a dream, Grandmother Susana Rentería lying at his side consoled him; it was nothing. An uprising? said Don Rigoberto, astounded. No, nothing but your balls, laughed his wife. Ay, my little innocent girl, said General Palomar, my great-grandfather, to his wife my great-grandmother, sixty-five years of age, merely because he was ninety-one, and do you remember, Susy?

“You're not going to tell me you dreamed about me, are you, Rigo?”

The lady smiled, pausing, and caressed her husband's silky-white mustache.

“Because remember you said it was a nightmare.”

He covered her with kisses—on her hair, on her cheeks, on her lips, until one of the sleeves of his brown-and-white pajamas tore open at the shoulder and the two of them laughed. She asked him to take off his pajama top and sat on the edge of the bed to sew it up, swinging her legs, which were too short to reach the floor,
her ideal feet.

Don Rigoberto, a skinny old man, wrapped his arms around himself as he sat next to her on the edge of the bed. She sighed. “Tell me your dream, Rigo.”

Now, my innocent little girl, let me see. I was about twenty and I was in President Benito Juárez's personal guard up in the northern part of the Republic. We were being chased by the French and the Mexican traitors who helped them. Two years of travel, Su, imagine what that was then, on worn-out coaches and carts pulled by oxen, all loaded with the national archives, and Mr. Juárez with a sort of portable desk in his black carriage, where he wrote and signed things.

Just imagine, my pure little girl, from Mapimí to Nazas to San Pedro del Gallo to La Zarca to Cerro Gordo to Chihuahua and from there across the desert to the far north. Every day fewer and fewer soldiers, less water, less food. Juárez put up with everything because when we began the journey he told us: “We'll never have a chance like this again in our history,” and whenever we got tired, Susana, or whenever we started wondering what the devil we were doing there pushing carts loaded with old papers through mud holes and up mountains, we remembered his words and we understood them very, very well. The opportunity granted us was that of saving Mexico from a foreign invasion and an Empire imposed on us by force of arms.

The opportunity to defend a legally constituted government, which for the moment consisted of some old archives and a desk on wheels.

I don't think our fatherland was ever so poor or so beloved by Mexicans as it was then. Have you seen, sweetheart, how ugly this country becomes whenever it is wealthy and arrogant? Well, you would have seen it beautiful in my dream.

What did I have to say in those days, honey? Nothing: I was a poker-faced lancer protecting the President, who one day decided to redistribute the Church's wealth, to make people respect the laws of men so they'd be better at respecting the laws of God, and to take privileges away from the Army and the aristocracy. Just like that, the roof fell in, and all the furies in heaven and hell were loosed on the land. He defeated the conservatives, but the conservatives left him saddled with a foreign debt of fifteen million pesos, which was the price of some bonds bought by French bankers in exchange for a pound of Mexican flesh. The bonds had no real value. The debt, for which France demanded payment, did. Juárez suspended payments. Napoleon III responded with an invasion and an Empire. Looking at Don Ben, you could see he was so serious, so worthy of his position, so—how to put it? Susanita, he was, well, so sure of his role in history. And since he didn't doubt for a minute that despite all its sorrow Mexico would end up being an independent and democratic country, he never doubted it was his job to make it so, no more, no less. I really wanted to ask him, listen, Don Benito, and if you're not here, will this country collapse, will it go on fighting, or what? I don't know how he would have answered. Lots of people thought they did know: that he thought himself indispensable. And since he was heroic, poor, and a firm believer in the law, there was no one who could argue with him. There was something else: he was a model husband and father. He protected his family; he sent them to the United States to be safe; he wrote his wife and children, punctually and lovingly. Excuse me, Susy, but I was starting to get upset: I saw him sitting like an idol inside his carriage, imperturbable, dressed all in black, frock coat, trousers, vest, a Zapotec idol dressed up—as what?

From looking at him so much, I ended up saying to myself, listen to me now, sweetie, that this man was disguised as something he loved and hated at the same time. Why was he so different? Sometimes he'd let it out in conversation; he'd been an Indian boy, a shepherd in Oaxaca, illiterate and without the Castilian language until he was twelve; between the twelfth and the twentieth year, just imagine, my dove, that farm boy, dispossessed heir to a spectral culture, as old as it was dead, Susana, that boy, lost in the light of a magic simplicity, learns to look on his past as an irrational night, can you imagine that, honey? A horror from which he'd have to save all Mexicans: in ten years he learns to speak Spanish, learns to read and write, becomes a liberal lawyer, an admirer of European revolutions, of U.S. democracy, of the law-loving French bourgeoisie, marries a white bourgeois lady, dresses up as a Western professional man, and just when he finds himself armed with all the writings and laws of Western civilization, boom! Susy, that same world he admires so much turns against him, denies him the right to modernize Mexico, denies Mexico her independence, and I wept for Benito Juárez, I swear I did, angel, when I understood that: the man was sad, divided, masked by his great contradiction, which from then on would belong to all of us, to all Mexicans: we would feel uncomfortable with our past, but even more so with our present. We would be in permanent disharmony with our modernity, which was supposed to make us happy in a flash and which only brought us disasters. How Mr. Juárez stared sadly on that desert he was rapidly leaving behind, where nothing was his, not a cactus, not a yucca.

And there I was wanting to tell him, let yourself go, Don Ben, don't hold it all in, I, your most screwed-up lancer, tell you this because I love you and I spend my time looking at you through the window of your carriage, I look at you as I bounce along to the lean and hungry trot of my horse and you lurch along to the broken and violent rhythm of your carriage; the ink spills, Mr. President, the papers are covered with blots, your top hat slides over on your head, but you are impassive, as if you were presiding over a court in Poitiers when you're right here with us, surrounded by mesquite and Apache feathers; just look over there, look at what Durango is, what Coahuila is … Christ!

The first time I saw him break down just a little bit was when common sense told him, listen here, you simply cannot go on carrying the archives of the Republic from the presidency of Guadalupe Victoria to yesterday as if they were nothing more than a bundle of love letters: Don Benito, we're talking about tons of paper here, even if you think paper creates reality, as do all the blessed shysters of our Holy Roman juridical tradition, there is a limit to human patience: the papers are going to drown us, are we going to lose the paper war the way we lost the War of the Cakes in '38 against these selfsame frogs? I swear his mask cracked a bit when he resigned himself to leaving the archives hidden in a cave in the Sierra del Tabaco, over in Coahuila. He bade farewell to those papers as if they were his own children: as if he had just buried each and every piece of paper, each of which for him had a soul.

He never closed his door. It was one of his principles: the door would always be open so that anyone who wanted to see him could come in. Also so that people would always see he had nothing to hide.

He was as clear as crystal. At times he went so far as to take the liberty of sitting down to write with his back to the shacks, the old ruined mission buildings, the houses of friends of his that happened to be on this road which we thought was the road of exile—but no, he'd say, it was merely the desert, which is not the same thing. The point is that for a lancer under orders to protect him, he made my life very difficult because of his self-conscious acts of bravado, fitting for a national leader destined to be immortalized in marble.

On one occasion, right in the Chihuahua desert, he got tired of writing all night and watched me guarding the open door that faced the desert, me half asleep because it was just coming on dawn, but leaning on my lance, which was firmly stuck into that hard earth. He smiled and said that the gray brush surrounding us was wiser than men. That at dawn I should look over the rise punctuated by bushes spaced out perfectly with an almost legal symmetry, like that of a good civil code, he said. Did I know why it was laid out that way? I didn't. And he said that the bushes kept their distance from each other because their roots are highly poisonous. They would kill any plant that grew next to them. We've got to keep our distance in order to respect each other and to survive. That is the foundation of peace, he said, and he quickly walked over to sit down again, to write something rapid, short, and assuredly lapidary.