Christopher Unborn (79 page)

I tell you this: with the same facility that we leave behind the achievements and the ruins. Everything builds and feeds the future, success as well as failure. Everything, therefore, will be ruins. Except the present, girl. Except the present instant in which we were chosen to remember the past and desire the future. Memory and desire, girl. Desire and memory, goo, dada, ma, heeeeere comes the aaaaaaaah, clown begins with c, Baby, we're together, play with me, let's be playmates on earth, don't be afraid anymore, Baby Ba, hold my little hand, I'm here with you, don't you see, Baby, play with me, play sea serpent, booboo, agoo, dada, mama, papa …

*   *   *

Angel Palomar refused with a shake of his head: “We're not going with you.”

I think my father feels that in this moment he is a desperate apparition.

*   *   *

Alone again! What an absolute solitude. Only my mother's halo shines intensely. Egg left with the Lost Boy and the Orphan Huerta. We stayed behind. The caravels from the Orient went out to sea, foggy, radiant, their red sails unfurled on the masts, Chinese characters painted on them. Their three masts piercing the deck like stakes made of gold, heading out to sea, far from the dying beach, far from the turbid fever of El Niño and the mortal whiteness of the dolphins and the red and gray circle of coyotes, far from the poem erased by the white tongue of the sea, far away, the caravels shine far away on an ocean where the dolphins live again their pleasurable time, their perpetual leaping and diving in the sea, from the surface to the bottom and from the bottom to the surface, as regular as a clock, as pragmatic as an anchor, as serene as a plumb line, from the bottom to the surface and from the surface to the bottom, eternally, until they die. They have no other fun.

*   *   *

The distant sea, the entire sea, murmured my father, watching the ships from Pacífica sail away without them, the water revived with
a puff of air printed on smoke.

*   *   *

A country of sad men and happy children.

*   *   *

A child is being born just as October 12, 1992, is born, on the beach at Acapulco. He comes into the world holding the hand of a little girl whose eyes are closed. The boy has his eyes wide open, as if his eyelids had never formed. He looks fixedly at the earth that awaits him. The boy swims toward the land, softly, carrying the girl with him. He emerges from the belly of his mother as if he were crossing the pacific sea, carrying the girl on his shoulders, saving her from death by water. The light went out; the fire over their heads went out. The boy comes out. From the sky a swift Angel descends, an Angel with a golden helmet and green spurs, a flaming sword in his hand, an Angel escaped from the Indo-Hispanic altars of opulent hunger, from need overcome by sleep, from the coupling of opposites: body and soul, wakefulness and death, living and sleeping, remembering and desiring, imagining: the happy boy who reaches the sad land carries all this on his lips, he bears the memory of death, white and extinguished, like the flame that went out in his mother's belly: for a swift, marvelous instant, the boy being born knows that this light of memory, wisdom, and death was an Angel and that this other Angel who flies from the navel of heaven with the sword in his hand is the fraternal enemy of the first: he is the Baroque Angel, with a sword in his hand and quetzal wings, and a serpent doublet, and a golden helmet, the Angel strikes, strikes the lips of the boy being born on the beach: the burning and painful sword strikes his lips and the boy forgets, he forgets everything forgets everything,

BOOKS BY
Carlos Fuentes

Where the Air Is Clear

The Good Conscience

Aura

The Death of Artemio Cruz

A Change of Skin

Terra Nostra

The Hydra Head

Burnt Water

Distant Relations

The Old Gringo

Myself with Others

Christopher Unborn

English translation copyright © 1989 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Originally published in Spanish as
Cristóbal Nonato,

copyright © 1987 by Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, D.F.

All rights reserved

Published simultaneously in Canada by Collins Publishers, Toronto

First American edition, 1989

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fuentes, Carlos.

[Cristóbal Nonato. English]

Christopher unborn / Carlos Fuentes.

p. cm.

Translation of: Cristóbal Nonato.

I. Title.

PQ7297.F793C713   1989   863—dcl9

89-1371
CIP

eISBN 9781466840096

First eBook edition: February 2013

1
 The fortunes of President Jesús María y José Paredes can be read about in the novel,
The King of Mexico; or, If You Move You Won't Come Out in the Photo.