Christopher Unborn (69 page)

But now, Reader, now I feel for the first time that I'm being deprived of everything necessary for life; now the air, water, earth, voices (corrupted sound) have conspired in an alliance of insults, and I cannot adapt myself to that. Something's going on here that seems to have been preestablished so that I can't breathe, digest, see, hear, or speak: the insult is way out of proportion! My genes have determined (I know it for a fact!) that I will have chestnut eyes and that I will walk upright, but now that we've reached the place they've brought us to (you see that I include you in my story, Mom), I think that can change, too: we're surrounded by a death sentence, or at the very least an accident sentence, or a defect sentence, sentences so implacable, so fearsome that I would like to scream from the solar center of my gestation:
CUT ME LOOSE FROM THE D. F.
! I'm going to walk upright and have brown eyes! I'm going to breathe and drink and shit and screw and hear like a normal person!

The environment is not going to kill me, my genes are going to be more powerful than this vile concatenation of garbage!

I think my mother must be having the same thoughts, except that her fear is greater than mine: we've been taken from the grandparents' house, supposedly because of the days of violence, by this so-called Hipi Toltec, who has promised to bring us to a safe place where my father Angel—conciliatory, loving, and, above all, alive—is waiting for us; but as we make our way, we are surrounded by everything but security, and if I can identify and tolerate the violence of the times we're living through, I already know that all history is ephemeral.

FLYING DOWN TO VICO
!

(A mental flash from Mamma Mia's roof: even the passage of History is a passing thing: there is more time without time and more history without history than avec: time before time: not time, time that doesn't know it's time, time incapable of imagining itself, history that isn't even prehistory because it doesn't conceive history: death of what precedes us in the absolute origin; why not then, thinks Angel, the death of a future without us; she rebels and desires my father, desires his company, his being with her, my padre mío.)

Hipi, on the other hand, brings us to a place of violence (of permanent history: is this hell? So burning hot, dry, stinking, beyond redemption, eternal, as eternal as paradise?). (My God, sighs my mother Angeles, when will you forgive the devil so that all this can come to an end. Let Lucifer ascend to your place so that your authentic grace shines forth: God has forgiven the Fallen Angel! Hallelujah, hallelujah: there is no more temptation, fear, or doubt about divine goodness; we all know it now because Lucifer appears seated at the right hand of the Lord; so don't we all believe because seeing is believing? Is it the case that we don't have faith because we have certitude? Is there faith only when we know it is true because it is impossible?)

FARE FEAR STARVING STRIVING

I was saying that even she, Angeles my mother, with her bare feet sunk in a corrupt mud (she'd abandoned her black low-heeled pregnant woman's sandals in a puddle of dying grass and liquid shit), is beginning to wonder, here, in the misery belt, whether the environment can force the genes to change me into another individual unforeseen in my DNA: something innate and even comforting tells me I shouldn't regard my genetic inheritance and my environment as enemies but as allies that divide up the work and that mutually support each other: the nature of nature consists in never working alone; nature and all things that nurture it act within previously established limits; but this nature of the Mexican city, this città dolente, has gone way out of proportion:

QUASIMODO CITY

SAMSAVILLE

HUITZILOPOCHTLIBURG

a misshapen and bloody cockroach, I receive you like the eucharist this violent morning, sacrament of dying, plague communion: I haven't been born yet and you already threaten to transform me: I'll be a scientific exhibit, numbered and classified, like the Mexican salamander: under different conditions, I'll take on different forms; if I had remained in the waters of Kafkapulco forever, I would have developed scales and gills and a tail for swimming; what will I develop if I stay in this neighborhood of garbage and thieves, this cemetery for automobiles where Hipi Toltec has brought us after the night of the Ayatollah, claiming that my father had sent him to get us? Will I be like the Orphan Huerta, rubber feet, leather soles, the Little Rascals, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit of D.F., Eddypoe, Eddyfuss?

My class intelligence, genetically uncertain, rebels against all this: I am not now nor have I ever been a plebe, a lumpen, or a vulgar swine: I am Don Christopher the Classy, you might as well know it here and now, your Mercedes-Benz, no matter who it hurts, and now I remember a smell, I recall a sound, we've left the sick air in order to enter the sickness of the air, what a misty jail, how close the zinc ceilings are and the cement water tubs, burning and hostile like a bath in lava, how close we are to a ravine in the garbage belt that surrounds the city, what a mass of people there, people who are invisible but who are kissed, spoken to, and greeted by Hipi:

“Ne netilztli!”

“Xocoyotzin!”

“Ollohiuhqui, ollohiuhqui!”

“Cíhuatl!” Hipi points to my mother.

“Xocoyotzin, ixcluintli!” An old man points to my mom's belly, to me!

“Toci, toci.” Hipi points to my mother and then points to himself.

They speak a bit more, and then Hipi tells us that his family is happy he's gotten married and that very soon he will have his first child. Amid so much misery and slaughter, they are happy to see that life goes on. Welcome to the wife and soon-to-be-born son of our young pup Xipe!

The old folks offer us their house along with all the electric appliances Hipi has been bringing them over the years: let the offerings be ours, translates the flayed boy. He asks my mother to sit down near the old folks, between the smoke and the stench, and to make ourselves comfortable, because we will be staying here until the child is born.

“Ixcluintli, ixcluintli,” the old folks say, announcing our evening meal, raw, smoky dog—without hair.

“We greet the young son of the gods who is about to be born.”

Take note, your mercies, take careful note, dear Readers: these oldsters are referring to
ME
when they say these things,
THEY REFER TO ME
! Just think how frightened I am, trapped you know where, consulting my genetic chain like a madman to see if something was condemning me to be born in a hut belonging to some tipsy Aztecs and to incarnate, who knows? the sun, sacrifice, and who knows what the fuck else!
NOTHING
, Readers, exactly
NOTHING.
If a kind of proto-Quetzalcoatl is going to be born in this miserable hut, it isn't going to be me, maybe my fraternal twin, born from my mother at the same time as I will be but formed from an egg different from mine, fertilized by another sperm than the one I call my own: ladies and gentlemen, I feel around in the fetal night that surrounds me to see if this fraternal twin, dizzygothic (gothic and dizzy!), is within reach, coexisting near me in the womb of Doña Angeles Palomar my mother, and if it's that way, just understand, because of what might happen later, that this dizzygothic twin was not created by the same father who created me, that we inhabit different placentas and that the only thing we share is the same time within Mom's womb: only that, nothing more, not paternal origin, not destiny in the world, he is not the
OTHER CHRISTOPHER
, in any case he's probably the other Hipi Toltec, and good luck to him: so keep your eyes open, gentle Readers: listen to what I say, watch out for my face, my gestures, my words: we've been getting to know each other now over hundreds of pages, don't fail me now, in the moment of truth, of Baby Ruth, of the Bambino! Anagnorisis is what it's called: recognize me, it all depends on you, so when Hipi and his paleototonacs come to claim me: I am Christopher Palomar, not the (bastard) Son of the Gods!

11

No sooner had Grandfather Rigoberto Palomar slammed the door in the faces of the Fagoaga sisters than his spirits began to soar: he turned to face his wife, Doña Susana Rentería, leaned against the door, closed his eyes, and tilted his aged head back.

“Su, dearest Su,” said the old man, with his eyes closed.

“What is it, Rigo? Here I am.”

He opened his eyes, kissed his wife passionately, and smiled as he stepped back. “Do you remember when your father handed you over to me and you were a little girl and I'd tuck you in every night?”

“And you were thirty, but you liked being called ‘old fellow' by a girl because in those days all the young men wanted to look old so people would take them seriously. You were such a young soldier.”

“Things go in circles! It's the same now. Look: Angel and Angeles dress the way you and I did when we were young.”

“Fashions that come to us from the North,” said Doña Susana Rentería. “Don't pay any attention to it. Twenty years ago—remember?—everybody wanted to look like a teenager.”

“Ah, those barbarians to the North!”

They laughed at all this, looking tenderly at one another. After a moment, she took him in her arms.

“Did you hear the President?” Don Rigo asked her. “We have to fight again. Of course, nothing is perfect, Su, and I'll tell you again that I'm not mistaken. It doesn't matter to me that Mexico is all fucked up, but what does matter to me is that Mexico exists. We shouldn't give up on the country just because it's in a bad period. To reform a country you have to have a country. I know people think I'm crazy, but just tell me if you and I could have had a better life than being taken for lunatics by everyone and only being crazy on a single point, which I chose, while being sane on all the rest. If I weren't insane about the Revolution, they wouldn't let me be sane about the rest, namely the love I have for you, and the skill with which I manage my affairs, and how well I know how to use my leisure time and have friends. It's a concession, sweetie.”

“I understand you, old boy. Nothing is perfect.”

“Su: when I was a boy, there was nothing here but a little boastful elite and the mass of peons. I'm right; we didn't fail, my madness is reasonable. What had to be done was done; this country had no roads, no dams, no telephones, no schools, no industry, no freedom of movement. All that we accomplished. You say that nothing is perfect. Ask those who came after us why they were so irresponsible with what we created, those who worked from 1915 to 1940, when I was young and you a little girl. Anyway, the problem with a revolution is not to betray it. It's not going through with it for fear of betraying it.”

“What are you trying to tell me, old man?”

“Susy. Once again, I have a mission in life. I don't have to lie to myself and say that the Revolution is not over. You heard the President. The Yankees have invaded us! We have to defend the fatherland!”

“Let me remind you of a mission a bit closer to home. Our granddaughter has been kidnapped. Along with our unborn great-grandson.”

“What do you think I should do, Susana Rentería?”

“General: delegate and give orders. You're too old for these fracases. You're over ninety. Behave like a commander-in-chief.”

“I thank you for your wisdom, Su. What orders should I give?”

“Egg knows where this Hipiteca person, the boy with the peeling skin, lives. Angel should rescue his wife. And if he doesn't, well, then he should owe the favor to his friend. That first. Then you can order Angel to fight in Veracruz and redeem himself for all the idiotic things he's done. Get your priorities straight, General.”

“How talented you've always been, my dear girl!”

But all their attempts to find Angel were useless. Don Fernando Benítez was incommunicado, out with the Huicholes, taking a bath in the Golden Age. The Simon Bully Bar was closed, and no one knew where Concha Toro or her dog Fango Dango was. The piano player and barman in the new club that had opened across the street, Giuseppe Birthday, said that he was new in the neighborhood, that he knew nothing about any Chilean woman, and that he hoped the general and his wife would have a libation in his new bar the Lady of the Camels: Quench Your Thirst Here. The López mansion had been looted and its inhabitants (Ulises and Lucha) murdered, although the girl (Penny) wanders around the U.S.A.-shaped pool tossing in sunflower petals and muttering:

“You can look but you can't touch. You're ugly and a plebe. If it's Thursday, this must be Philadelphia.”

Dear Readers:

Only my genes, the current seat of my intelligence, can assure you that my vision, activated perhaps by a dream or one of my mother's desires (I dream of you without wanting to, Angel, I desire you without dreaming of you, without knowing why. You receive the seed from both of us, my son, dream and desire, my son), is capable of dreaming of desiring and of seeing my father in this particular instant: I cling to that intelligence, which, after all, I inherited from him and her and not from the stinking environment where I'm suffocating in this shack that belongs to Hipi Toltec's family. (One hundred genes determine intelligence! superior intelligence dominates inferior intelligence! eighty percent of the differences between individuals are genetic! neither race nor country of origin nor social class nor climate nor pollution: intelligence is what counts.)

I mean that I feel sure of my genes, you see, and my genes feel sure of me. This mutual confidence allows us to see what others only imagine: by illuminating my genes, I see my father from the kidnapped belly of my mother:

On the highway out of the black hole called Mexico, D.F.cation. My father and Colasa Sánchez look from Paso de Cortés, where the Van Gogh gave up the ghost, out of gas, sick, deaf (the other loudspeaker fell off). They look toward the swamp of toxic waste and contaminated water. Angel realizes that for her all this is normal. The city under the persistent acid rain is not something different. But culture and nostalgia have set my father apart. But she doesn't know that the city is the cramped waiting room of eternity. Perhaps she doesn't even know that her father is dead. My father feels remorse for having abandoned us, although his feeling grows weaker when he looks at the external city (the extreme city) and its distant rumbles of hunger, crime, and violence: the persistent dripping that he cannot locate continues to pursue him; she is pursued by her own vulnerability: she's run after this young man—my father—since she was eleven years old, she obeyed the homicidal orders of her father Matamoros Moreno, she owns the only vagina dentata in America the Toothyful, and nevertheless here they are, the two of them, chilled to the bone this early September night, looking at the city's deceptive lights from the Paso de Cortés. He slips his jacket over her shoulders, protects her, accepts her, and the two of them feel that being a loving couple is more difficult but also more important than having no ties. Angel covers and protects Colasa because he remembers my abandoned mother (and perhaps me!) and he feels guilty. But Colasa doesn't know this and accepts Angel's tenderness with a little shudder of pleasure that is also not without its tinge of guilt. She wanted to kill this man she desires. She's loved and hated him since she was a girl, when she set herself up in a striker's tent outside his door on Calle Génova. Today, on this cold, sad night up on the heights, she is going to have to decide. If she gives herself to him, she destroys him with her teeth. If she doesn't give herself to him, she will have to sustain love in some other way, without physical contact, and she doesn't know how that can be done, but she fears that he does know and that he'll go back to Angeles and keep her as a mascot. What problems I make for myself! Colasita exclaims, hugged, protected by my father, covered by my father's 1920s-style jacket this cold night in the mountains, but she doesn't have time to express her doubts or make decisions, and for one reason alone: this city of death should, despite everything, live. The fog lifts suddenly and the caravan of lights blinds the night: it's the armada of long-haul trucks that travel in the darkness to fill thirty million bellies in Mexico City. They enter the city with their ephemeral cornucopia of fruits and vegetables, meats and cheeses and chickens and lobsters and fowl and oysters and beer, but Angel Palomar and Colasa Sánchez want to flee from the city. To flee because he feels guilty, overwhelmed, no compass, his reasons forever scattered (he tells Colasa: I've lost my reasons, understand? and she says no, that she doesn't know what he's talking about, but it doesn't matter because it's so nice being together, the two of them, keep talking, keep talking. Once I went to Oaxaca and I found my reasons; maybe I ought to go back; in any case, I ought to get out of here, I wanted to confront Mexican society and Mexican society defeated me; and do you know how, Colasa?
by not paying me any attention, Colasa!
And she: But you talk so pretty, gosh), and all the trucks entering the city: only one is leaving, going in the opposite direction. They are doubly blinded by the clash of lights, like blind men fencing, the beams of light from the powerful headlamps of the trucks crossing each other and Colasa squirming free of the arm of my protective father, Colasa always excessive and impetuous in the middle of the highway exposing herself to death, my father shouting to her from the shoulder of the road, Colasa, be careful, you're crazy! and the enormous wheels of the only truck abandoning the city, an eighteen-wheel Leyland, fourteen feet high, with a revolving light on its roof, brakes to a screeching halt in front of the small figure still dressed as a Discalced Carmelite.