Christopher Unborn (10 page)

Because he owes his renown, above all, to his dominion over language, to an exquisite use of the forms of courtesy (“I do not offend through those with which I sit down, Marquise, if I say that your ladyship's next flatulence will figure on my bill; you just go on eating this sublime dish from our national cuisine, refried beans, slices of onion, Manchego cheese, and peas, who could want more?”) and to his marvelous use of the subjunctive (“If I were to like or were not to like, I might not doubt, exquisite friend, to proceed perhaps if to do so you would have or might not have some problem alluding to your female progenitor, but only if to do it, there were incontrovertible proofs of your being bastards”), without forgetting his incomparable use of the national political language (“After the proclamation of Independence by Father Hidalgo and the expropriation of oil by General Cárdenas, the inauguration of the Road Dividers of Chilpancingo is the most transcendent act of National History, Mr. Governor”) and even of international political language (“From the cosmic balcony of Tepeyac may be heard, vicars, Holy Father, the hallelujahs of the deaf genius of Bonn!”). To any word Don Homero Fagoaga ascribes some twelve syllables even if it only happens to have three: gold on his lips is transmuted into go-oo-aah-ll-dd and Góngora comes out sounding like gonorrhea.

“Learn, my boy, the Fagoagas never lose, and what they do lose they yank right back!”

Pillars of the Government, of the Church, and of Commerce, lost in the immensity of His-panic time:

Who defeated the Moor in Granada?

Fagoaga!

Who defended the cross in Castile?

Fagoaga!

From those faggots, Fagoagas.

From those powers, Homers!

exactly as it is written on the family coat of arms. Angel stared at the final product of that line—his Uncle Homero—and said no.

“If I squeeze, as if they were lemons, all the Fagoagas who have existed over thirteen centuries, Angeles, I swear I wouldn't get more than a bubble of bitter bile and another of flatulence, to use his term. Sorry, baby; I except my dead mom the inventor who showed her intelligence by marrying a blundering scientist who was a man of few words, like my dad.”

2

My father bade farewell to the house of his childhood—the house of the bright colors—by silently walking through the gallery of pearlescent light, as if there were two different kinds of light in that one space, the light of the new world and the light of the other, which if not old world, grew further and further away for the Americas of the nineties, where the carefully framed portraits of my grandparents' heroes were hanging.

There was Ernest Rutherford, looking rather like a sea lion, tall and with a shaggy mustache, gray, as if he had just come from the depths of his cave, dazzled as he left the darkness behind, seeing in the heavens a duplication of the world of the atom.

There was Max Planck, with his high forehead right out of a Flemish painting and his narrow shoulders and drooping mustache, and Niels Bohr, with thick, protuberant lips, looking like the good-natured captain of a whaling ship, forever pacing the deck of a universe on the verge of rioting and throwing the savant into the open sea in a rowboat without oars, and Wolfgang Pauli looking like the perfect Viennese bourgeois, stuffed with pastry and the music of violins.

Perhaps Wolfgang Pauli, in his constant coming and going on the Copenhagen ferries, revived the dialogue between men and forgotten words. Like Rimbaud, said my father (as my genes tell me), like Pound, like Paz: resurrection of language.

“What language will my son speak?”

“In what world will my son live?”

“Which world is this?”

“Who is the Mother and Doctor of All Mexicans?”

“Why did they first run off and then kill the inhabitants of the mountains around Acapulco?”

“What's Hipi Toltec doing surrounded by friendly coyotes in the middle of a dried-out palm grove?”

Nevertheless, the eyes of my child-father, educated by my scientific grandparents in the brightly colored house in Tlalpan, reserved their greatest interest, their greatest affection for the photograph of a young, blond, smiling savant on the verge of launching himself down the toughest slopes of the grand slalom of science. My father always thought that if someone had an answer for all the riddles of the day of my conception, it was this boy: his name, inscribed on a tiny copper plaque at the bottom of the photo, was Werner Heisenberg, and nothing affected my father's young imagination so much as the certainty of his uncertainty: the logic of the symbol does not express the experiment; it
is
the experiment. Language is the phenomenon, and the observation of the phenomenon changes its nature.

Thanks, Dad, for understanding that, for assimilating it into your genes that come from my grandparents and that you transmitted to me. A kind of cloud of warm rain bathes me and covers me from the unruly mop of hair, mustaches, and calf's eyes of Albert Einstein, and I've been living with him from before my conception, swimming in the river of when and the three wheres of my current and eternal dimension; but when I emerge from the interminable river to see a time and a place (which are my own), the one who accompanies me is the young mountain climber: thanks, Werner, and because of you and for you my very personal Heisenberg Society formed in the uterus of my mother Angeles, the first club I ever belonged to and from whose fluffy (enjoyable!) armchairs I already observe the world that nurtures me and which I nurture by observing it.

Thanks to them, I understand that whatever is is provisional because the time and space that precede me and whatever I know about them I know only fleetingly, as I pass, purely by chance, through this hour and this place. The important thing is that the syntheses never finish, that no one save himself, ever, from the contradiction of being in one precise place and one precise time and nevertheless thinking about a time and place that are infinite, denying the end of experience, maintaining open the infinite possibilities for observing the infinite events in the unfinished world and transforming them as I observe them: turning them into history, narrative, language, experience, infinite reading …

My poor father: he grew up in this world, he lost it, and would take years to return to it by the most labyrinthine paths: his Sweet Fatherland, mutilated and corrupt, had to return to the universal promise of the physical wisdom characteristic of the men whose portraits hung in the pearlescent gallery of the house in Tlalpan and to the reason in the dream of heroic Mexicans, capable of being biologists, chemists, physicists, creative men and women, producers, productive, not only consumers, barnacles, drones, in a society that only rewarded rogues. The reason in the dream and not only the dream of reason: men and women devoured and devouring, chronophagous, heliophagous, cannibals eating their own fatherland. This is what Isabella and Diego, my grandparents, wanted to overcome. But now their son, my father, had lost the house of intelligence.

How long it would take us to return to the portraits in this gallery!

It's time I revealed myself before you, Reader, and tell you I have already returned by way of
my genes,
which know all, remember all, and if, a bit later, I, like you, forget everything when I'm born and have to learn it all over again before I die, who would deny that in this instant of my gestation I know everything because I am here inside and you, Reader, are you out there?

3

And so, when his parents died, my father was brought to live with his Aunts Capitolina and Farnesia Fagoaga, sisters of his mother (and my deceased grandmother) Isabella Fagoaga de Palomar and that powerful survivor, my avuncular Don Homero Fagoaga (oh, horror). Although Don Homero did not live with his little sisters, he did visit them every day, took most of his meals with them, and in their house on Avenida Durango he honed his moralizing rhetoric and gave his punctilious lessons in proper Christian conduct. My father, between the ages of eleven and fifteen, was the principal object of this evangelizing.

It is not possible (my genes inform me) to give the precise ages of Capitolina and Farnesia. In the first place, my aunts have fixed themselves in an environment that denies them contemporaneity and that facilitates their seeing themselves as younger than all that surrounds them. While other ladies of their generation, less astutely perhaps, have sold off all the furniture, bibelots, pictures, and other decorations that at a given moment go out of fashion, Capitolina and Farnesia have never consented to deacquisition what they inherited and, moreover, to use and inhabit their inheritance. Wrapped in antiques, they always seem younger than they are.

The house on Avenida Durango is the last remnant of the architecture that flourished during the Mexican Revolution, precisely during the years of civil war, between 1911 and 1921: in the transition between the French hotels of the Porfirio Díaz era (1877–1910) and the indigenist, colonialist horrors of the reign of Plutarco Elías Calles, Maximum Hero of the Revolution (1924–35). Don Porfirio and his gang crowned their native versions of the Faubourg St.-Honoré with mansards; Obregón, Calles, and their disciples first built public buildings in the shape of Aztec temples and then lived in domestic versions of churrigueresque churches that had been passed through the filter of the Hollywood stars. The guerrilla fighters ended up living like Mary Pickford and Rudolph Valentino. Those who remained in Mexico City during the armed struggle, with gold under their mattresses and infinite ability when it came to hoarding food and attending property auctions—the Fagoagas, for example—built these mansions out of stone, generally one story high, surrounded by gardens with tamped-down dirt paths, fountains and palm trees, their façades ornamented with urns, vines, and impassive masks, their roofs crowned with balustrades and balconies with high French doors painted white. Inside, they stuffed their villas with all the furniture and paintings they'd inherited from the turn-of-the-century, the national Belle Epoque with its landscapes of the Valley of Mexico, its society portraits in the style of Whistler and Sargent, with display cases full of minutiae, medals, miniature cups; their pedestals with Sèvres vases and white busts of Dante and Beatrice. Heavy plush sofas, carved mahogany tables, red curtains with lots of tassels, much stained glass in the bathroom, stairs with red carpeting and gilt rug stays, parquet and canopied beds; washstands in every room, gigantic armoires, gigantic mirrors, chamber pots and cuspidors in strategic locations; the suffocation of porcelain, dust, varnish, lacquer, terror of fragile, tiny things; a house of look—but-don't-touch. In their house the little Fagoaga sisters preserved a style of life, of speech, of whispering secrets, and excitation, all of it totally alien to the city outside.

Nevertheless, though they shared a style, they were quite dissimilar: Farnesia was tall, thin, dark, and languid, while Capitolina was short, pudgy, fair, flat-nosed, and febrile. Capitolina spoke in tones that brooked no rejoinders; Farnesia left all her sentences hanging in midair. Capitolina spoke in the first person singular; her sister in a vague but imperial “we.” But both practiced piety at all hours, suddenly falling to their knees before crucifixes and spreading their arms at the least appropriate times and places. They were obsessed with death and spent endless nights in nightgowns, with their hair braided, recalling how Mr. So-and-so or Miss What's-her-name died. They only read the newspaper for the obituary notices, which they read with consternated glee. But if for Capitolina this activity was translated into the satisfaction of knowing about a misfortune so she could feel well, for Farnesia it was reduced to the conviction that sanctity consisted in doing more evil to oneself than to anyone else, and that this would open the doors of heaven to the inseparable sisters. Because Farnesia was absolutely convinced that the two of them would die at the same time; Capitolina did not share (or desire) such a calamity, but she would not argue with her high-strung little sister.

To go out or not to go out: that was their question. The house on Avenida Durango was for the sisters a convent proportioned to their needs. To abandon it was a sin, and only the most terrible events—like the death of a relative or bringing one home to live with them—could push them out of their home. But there were voyages out they believed—with pain in their souls—could not be postponed. Capitolina and Farnesia, it seems, had a passion: to find out what unbelievers were about to die so they could try to convert them on their deathbeds, for which purpose they dragged along with them the priest from the neighboring Church of the Holy Family.

No heretical will, no atheistic indifference, no lay prejudice, could stand between their crusading and the deathbed. They would clear paths by swinging their umbrellas, Capitolina snorting, Farnesia fainting, both advancing with their priest toward the bed where, more often than not, the Misses Fagoaga were accepted with a sigh of resignation or with saving praise by the dying person, who thus found in them a pretext to admit he was a closet Catholic and so to arrange his affairs—just in case—with the Other World.

This crusade by the Fagoaga sisters to save souls was put to the test by the staunchest agnostic among their relatives (by marriage), General Don Rigoberto Palomar, father of the deceased inventor Diego Palomar, husband of Isabella Fagoaga and my father Angel's grandfather. General Palomar, whose life ran neck and neck with that of the century, had been a bugle boy in Don Venustiano Carranza's Constitutionalist Army, and at the age of eighteen became the youngest general in the Mexican Revolution. His merit consisted in retrieving the arm of General Alvaro Obregón when the future President lost it in an artillery barrage during the battle of Celaya against Pancho Villa. Some say, maliciously, that the severed member of the valiant and canny division leader from Sonora was recovered when General Obregón himself tossed a centennial gold coin up in the air and the lost arm tremulously rose up from among the cadavers and, with immutable greed, snatched at the money.