Christopher Unborn (21 page)

Thanks to this symbol our big-footed, shiny-maned Fatty could imagine everything, a son for his new friend Angel Palomar, the child's mother a beautiful, slender, dark girl who walks through a park, hidden sometimes by a tree, at other times by a balloon, come closer in the flutter of her skirts and the rhythm of her waist: a girl with … with a halo!: Angel and Angeles, parents of a child yet to be born, what shall we name the child? what language will the child speak in Makesicko Dee Eff, what air will the child breathe here where the air is queer? will the child find his little chromosomatic brothers and with them reconstruct their X's and Z's, probing to the very root of their chain of genetic information? well, wrote Pudgy, in the same way, a novel seeks out its novels, the ascent and descent of its spermatozoon of black ink: like the child, the novel is no orphan, it did not spring from nothingness, it needs a tradition just as the child needs a family tree: no one exists without something, there is no creation without tradition, no descendence without ascendence.
CHRISTOPHER UNBORN
philadelphically seeks its novelistic brothers and sisters: it extends its paper arms to convoke and receive them, just as the recently conceived child misses its lost brothers and sisters (he even misses the girl he might have been, which I give him straightaway: the girl named Baby Ba) and convokes them all blindly with a movement of his hands. This is his genealogy:

Erasmus: Appearances are deceptive

Don Quijote: Windmills are giants

Tristram Shandy: Digressions are the sunshine of reading

Jacques Le Fataliste: Let's talk about something else

Christopher Unborn: Okay, while the captive fat boy decided without thinking to triumph over boredom by means of these concerns, rewarding himself despite the situation, but resigned to writing an overly pessimistic novel whose only repetitive element would be “It was the worst of times. It was the worst of times. It was the worst of,” the salon was filling up with waiters, bartenders, guests, the guest of honor—my father because he was Angel Palomar y Fagoaga happily twenty-one years of age, and his grandparents (my greats in that case) Don Rigoberto Palomar and Doña Susana Rentería, the members of the new band, still incomplete but which, nevertheless (the prisoner in the iron egg felt almost as a posthumous homage), played and sang the hit song he'd composed: “Come Back, Captain Blood”

From the masthead you wave to us

Sailing toward the sunset

Fatso listened, half suffocated, already with a taste in his mouth that said: Baby, you're turning blue: half crazy inside the metal egg, now smelling himself, now smelling the exudates from the silver-plated copper: on the verge of shouting Help! Au Secours? Help! Aiuto! I Need Somebody! but, in the first place, no one would have heard him with all the noise of the party and, second, he was no crybaby; he was a tough little man who neither gave nor accepted explanations, just like his hero from the pirate movies:

Bye-bye, Captain Blood,

I'll never see you again …

He closed his eyes, making his last effort at a first line for a novel: “Call me Christopher.” Then, as if he had spoken a magic word (down sesame!), he heard the creak of the pulleys, the movement of the cables, and the abrupt descent of the egg from the star-studded ceiling of the Clair-de-Lunatic to its dance floor.

Trumpets sounded and the band played the march from
Aida.
People laughed, their voices grew louder, they exclaimed. Angel laughed and said it was a mistake, what's going on? he was already there, he laughed nervously, what is all this? he was already at the party and was certainly not going to pop out of any egg, he feared the unforeseen, a fantastic surprise: a girl was going to step out of the egg! A woman he didn't know but loved, whom he had wanted to introduce to family and friends, as a surprise, as if the girl were his gift to them and they would introduce her to him, not knowing that he already knew her! not knowing that the two of them (he and she) had met in a park but had promised to get to know each other little by little, between April and August, one meeting per month, first the voice, then contact between their (respective) feet (May), then their fingertips only (June), they would clasp each other's hands (yummy-yummy) (July), and only in August, as the grand prize, would they finally see each other's face.

The lights went on in his head: Don Fernando Benítez!

And there he was on the other side of the hall, arm in arm with his wife, the two of them drinking his health.

Benítez had a gift for bringing young people together, for protecting them, taking them under his wing. Had he put a girl inside this egg for him, for Angel? Was this his supreme gift for coming of age? A dream! The idea shocked him because of its excessive pleasure and he wanted to stop the whole thing, but the workers said no way, it's in our contract that we lower the egg at eleven o'clock, without finding out about anything else and a bit drunk from the beers they'd bought with Uncle Homero's bribe, and Grandfather Rigo: get on with it, boys, do your job, let them, Angelillo, don't get into trouble with a union on top of the problems you already have with Uncle Homero's lawsuit, and the workers, in low voices: fat old asshole! today we get paid twice, whaddaya think: hatred blinds you, no doubt about it!

When they opened the doors of the ovoid sarcophagus, they found the nice boy with no air, blue in the face, disoriented and totally bald. His quondam black and shiny hair had all fallen out.

The fat boy was pulled out of the egg and brought back to consciousness by Angel, the Orphan Huerta, and Hipi Toltec, who put a hand mirror in front of Pudgy's face to see if he was still breathing. Then he put his coyote-like muzzle to the pink lips of the fat boy to resuscitate him, breathing like an animal, like a bellows. The boy came out of his faint and saw his bald reflection.

“Call me Egg,” he managed to gasp.

“Our dear buddy, the Egg,” said my father Angel, publicly baptizing him.

“Where is Baby Ba?” Egg asked as he came out of his stupor, and he didn't know if with that question he should begin another novel: “Would I find the Baby…?”

After the guests departed, Don Rigoberto and Doña Susana listened to each one of the boys—their grandson, Angel, the recently baptized Egg, and the new friends of the rockaztec band, the Orphan Huerta and Hipi Toltec—give the hitherto unknown reasons that united them in their hatred for Homero Fagoaga.

They were highly amused to learn that each faction on its own, the Four Fuckups and Angel with Uncle Fernando as a providential intermediary, had already perpetrated myriad parallel tricks on the pesky, pernicious, and pestiferous (each group had its adjective) Don Homero Fagoaga: now they would join forces and nothing would stop them!

Fat, disgusting,
an'
a motherfucker, said Orphan Huerta, smiling, remembering and reaffirming at the same time.

The stolen communal lands in Acapulco, said Hipi Toltec truculently. Les terres communales dépouillés à Acapulco.

My parents' legacy, said Angel, while secretly repeating to himself: why Mexico City and not Acapulco, when the epicenter was on the coast? His eyes grew misty as he remembered that terrible and heroic day when he was sixteen: the earthquake of September 19. I wanted to shout from the unborn center of my pregnant mother: and what about the children of Acapulco? Would it have mattered to you that they died if you could have saved those who died in D. F.? This certainly says a lot about my father's moral sense, but for the moment I can't argue the matter with him face to face. I'm dying of rage! I'm getting carried away! How impatient I can get to be born, damn!

It isn't a person, it's a symbol, said Egg: Acapulco.

Therefore, the revolutionary grandfather Rigo Palomar concluded with perfect logic, what you should do is destroy Homero by destroying Acapulco. Perfect syllogism.

No, exclaimed Angel. Not Homero. Not Acapulco. The Sweet Fatherland.

That expression was going to hang over my father Angel like a dream he could half remember when awake, but in the meantime, things started happening very quickly: in August, my father saw my mother's face, and only when he'd seen it did he have the desire to put into effect his symbolic plan for the destruction of Acapulco which in reality turned out to be the splendid fancy of saving the Sweet Fatherland, the Good Fatherland: but this took, know it your mercies benz, something like half a year, during which time our buddy Egg wondered why he had given that purely symbolic reason, “Acapulco,” instead of revealing that it was none other than Don Homero Fagoaga who had pushed him into the birthday egg. Who else could it have been? But he didn't tell on the uncle, nor did the others ask him: How did you get inside that egg, Egg? It had to have been that malignant Uncle Homero who … This was a mystery, and on nights of moral ecstasy Egg asked himself, Why did Jesus allow himself to be crucified knowing beforehand what was going to happen and above all having singled out Judas at the Last Supper (Would I find the Baby Ba…?)? He also knew that one day, once things got moving, he would not be able to resist the temptation. He would expose Uncle Homero. Egg was not Jesus, nor did he wish to be. Besides, Acapulco was calling for them.

8

But before we get to the New Year's party, won't you tell me how you and Daddy met, Mom?

“What a stickler for details you are! It was during April. Come on now, it's nothing to bite your nails about.”

“I don't bite much of anything, Mom.”

“Right. Okay, but if I tell you what you want to know now, I can only tell you as if we had met in December.”

“Just the facts, ma'am.”

“Okay, I met him by whispering into the ear of the statue of Benito Juárez in the Alameda Hemicycle. We climbed all the way up. No, I don't know what Angel said to the Great Hero, but what he told me—he speaking into one of Juárez's ears while I listened at the other—was: ‘Listen, baby, if we manage to hear each other through the marble ears of the Great Zapotec, we'll really have made it.'”

I think I mumbled back something like, “Let's never hurt each other. We're all here together.”

A fat child wearing a summer hat and holding a helium balloon came toward us out of the Alameda Park, holding the hand of a woman who looked like a skeleton dressed in a ball gown from the beginning of the century. The child, who resembled a wise, contented frog, stared up at us as we clung to Juárez's head, and then went off, still clutching Death by the hand. Actually, I don't know if we saw that or if Angel told me about it later. The next month we came back to the same place on the same day of the week even though we had not laid eyes on each other. Something else: we came back without having seen each other the first time, as if from the first moment we had promised not to look at each other until later; we spoke through the heroic marble of the Indian of Guelatao—let's not ask for more than is given us.

Q. What is a miracle?

A. Something that takes place very rarely.

Because, by the time the day came when he let himself be seen by me, we'd already spoken through the ears of Benito Juárez and gone on doing it for more than four months, meeting again and again without fixing a time or day, without even saying “See you here next month, baby”; of course, it happened that one would get there before the other, but we'd wait: how could I not wait when I didn't sleep a wink the night after I met him because I was so happy? And that was without seeing him!

My father Angel, is he a poet?

He would be if he were ugly. The day he finally let me see him he turned up disguised as Quevedo, his glasses as curlicued as his mustachios and goatee, wearing a ruff, and limping. But he forgot one thing: he didn't change his voice: “My voice was not that of the poet Quevedo, who died in September of 1645 in Villanueva de los Infantes because he couldn't stand the idea of one more winter sitting next to the fireplace where each chill convinced him that he was only living to see himself dead. Quevedo died from the cold and the humidity that came from the river that flowed directly behind his bed, denounced to the Inquisition, a courtier who remained independent, humorous and funereal, imperialist and libertarian, medievalizing and progressive, moralist and cynic—like Love “who is in all things contrary to itself.” That's the disguise your father turned up in the first time he let me see him.