Christopher Unborn (3 page)

“Now what are you going to do?”

“Tomorrow's another day.”

“When? When will it be that kind of day?”

“The boy has to be born, understand?”

“But he's so all alone. Nine months alone. With whom will he talk?”

“With your mercies benz.”

“Who?”

“The reader, just the reader.”

WELCOME TO LIFE, CHRISTOPHER PALOMAR

1

The Sweet Fatherland

The fatherland is impeccable and adamantine …

Ramón López Velarde
The Sweet Fatherland

 

1

El Niño comes running up from Easter Island, tepid and sickly, the offspring of death by water, beating against the Peruvian coast, suffocating the anchovies and algae in its hot embrace, kidnapping the vital equatorial nitrates and phosphates, breaking the vast food chain as well as the procreation of the great sea fish: heavy and sweating El Niño swims, hurling dead fish against the walls of the continent, stupefying and putrefying it all, water sinking water, the ocean asphyxiated in its own dead tide, the cold ocean drowned by the hot ocean, the winds driven mad and pushed off-course. Destructive and criminal, El Niño flattens the coasts of California, dries out the plains of Australia, floods the Ecuadoran lowlands with mud. My uncle, Fernando Benítez (eighty years of age), is flying toward the Usumacinta River, weeping for his lost fatherland, at the very moment that my Uncle Homero Fagoaga flies over Acapulco, in diarrheic fear, fleeing from the guerrillas. And so my father recapitulates, while I make frantic efforts to hang on to solid ground in the uterine oviduct as I head for the cavity of this woman who is preparing to be my cave for who knows how long, the space which she and I are supposed to share for who knows how long a time (I hope they—it's the least they can do—inform me about the meaning of this word “time,” which I'm starting to think is of capital importance if I am to understand what the fuck is happening to me, how I am to live with and without them, inside and outside of myself and of them), and they should get busy and tell me when I was conceived, how much “time” I have to spend here inside, if I'm going to get out someday or not and where, if the answer is affirmative, I'm going, what all this means, “place,” “space,” “earth,” my new home now that I've left (or was thrown out of) my old house of skin and sperm between my father's legs (he threw me out, the miserable bastard, just for a fleeting moment of pleasure, right? oh! how ever to forget that deed, how ever to forgive him?) where I was so comfortable with my secret genealogies, one big happy family now scattered, scattered to the four winds, and all these questions I have (time? what is it? how much is there? when do I begin to count the days of my life? inside my father's testicles? inside my mother's egg? inside of outside? now that I've passed into my mother's possession just because of my father's pleasure? I ask in despair: for how much “time”?), all my previous security and serenity completely destroyed by the lusts of Mr. Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, Esq. (twenty-four years of age—but we already said that), about five feet ten inches tall (descriptive news for your Mercies Bends), with yellow, panther-like but shortsighted eyes (this we knew) and olive, gypsy-like complexion (this we did not know), who before the entire world will attempt and presume to be my father; okay, I have to tell you I love you, Dad, that despite everything I adore you and that from now on I will live in imaginary complicity with you and that I depend on you to tell me where I am, where I come from. Once you've told me my name and given me my time—they say this is my time, tell me what country this is, where are we? where do you want me to be born? Is it true what my genetic code is telling me?: that there is no other land like this one? and that it's either a blessing or a curse that there is no other land like this one? that it's true that
someone
(He, She) never did to any nation what he or she did here, that now our problem is to administer our wealth? that we're not really ready yet for democracy? that the Tlaxcaltecas are to blame for everything? that you've got to admit the Indian is right, even if he isn't? that we should go out and lynch some lousy Spaniards? that you are foolish men, foolish men, you who accuse women unjustly? that we have not come to live but to dream? that there is a Ford in your Future? that in a crisis we rise to meet the challenge? that God denied us talent for journalism and movies but made us geniuses at survival? that: why doesn't my father want me to be a girl? just on account of that fucking contest? because of the little Christophers?

He said he wanted to have a son (me, zero years) with her because if I were conceived on Twelfth Night, with a bit of luck I'd come into the world on Columbus Day. My mother sat up as if she were on springs, covering her breasts with the university classic. A boy conceived on the beach January 6 might show up on time on October 12?

“And what if he's born in September?”

“He'd win the Independence Day Contest, but it isn't the same.”

“Of course not. Hey, where were we on the 15th of September last year?”

“Facing the palace balcony in the Zócalo, watching the first apparition of the apparition.”

“And October 12 last, where were we—bet you can't remember.”

“Standing in front of the monument to Columbus on Reforma.”

“She was carried in a sedan chair through the streets to the Columbus monument in order to proclaim…”

“She never speaks. She only cries once a year.”

“You're right.”

“And don't talk about her in that tone of abject admiration. Instead, answer these three little questions right off the top of your head.”

“Shoot.”

“Here goes. First: what are we going to name the baby?”

“What is the matter with you, you stoned? Christopher!”

“And if it's a girl?”

“Okay, okay. Isabella. The Chaotic.”

“Second question: what language will the baby speak?”

“Spanish, of course.”

“And all those new slangs, what about them? Spanglish and Angloñol, and the Anglatl invented by our buddies the Four Fuckups and…”

“And the language of our Chilean girlfriend Concha Toro, and the frog-speak of the French chanteuse Ada Ching. Adored Angeles: please realize that we live in an arena where all languages fight it out.”

“Don't change the subject.”

“Shoot.”

“And third: in what country will our son be born?”

“Easy: in the Sweet Fatherland. You go on reading Plato, Angeles. I read Ramón López Velarde.”

“Ramón who?”

“López Velarde, Ramón. Born June 15, 1888, in Jerez de Zacatecas. Dead at the age of thirty-three for having strayed from the old park of his provincial heart and wandered into the noisy concourse of the sunken-eyed and made-up metropolis in order to die. These days a shot of penicillin would have saved him from his minor but in those days fatal infection. On a June morning in 1921, the poet Ramón died with his pockets full of papers without adjectives.”

“Who did he look like?”

“It seems he looked like me. Just a bit, so they tell me. Olive skin, almond-shaped eyes. But he wore a mustache and had pouting lips.”

“What did he write?”

“The fatherland is impeccable and adamantine,” said my father.

“Impeccable and…” My mother stopped, clearly disconcerted. “Is this where our son will be born?”

2. Fatherland, Your Mutilated Territories

On the day of my conception, Don Fernando Benítez is flying toward the forest of the Lacandons along the border bound by the Usumacinta River. At a given moment, his eyes cloud over, he feels a premonition of darkness, and tries to imagine the nearness of a volcano, a village, a river. He wants to give them names so he can say them to himself and to tell to the young helicopter pilot flying him to the Frontera Corazos airport:

“Young man, show me from up here the territories of the fatherland. Tell me, what remains of Mexico?”

He is asking the pilot to help him see from the air the totality of the newly mutilated Sweet Fatherland. He could almost see, beyond the Lacandonan forest, the territory of the Yucatán, ceded exclusively to the Club Méditerranée in order to create the Peninsular Tourism Trust (PENITT), free of any meddling by the federal government, in order to pay the interest on the external (eternal) debt, which this year would reach, according to calculations, $1,492 billion—a pretty sum to celebrate the five centuries since Columbus's arrival and our division and conquest. And right now they are flying by special permission over the
CHITACAM TRUSTEESHIP
(Chiapas–Tabasco–Campeche), ceded to the U.S. oil consortium called the Five Sisters until the principal of that external debt is paid. Of course the debt only grows, assuring the foreign companies a possession in perpetuity. And he didn't want to see, beyond that cloud bank, the besieged half-moon of Veracruz, along the coast from Tampico to Cotzacoalcos, and inland from Veracruz to the foothills of the Malinche, lands ceded to an incomprehensible war, an agrarian revolution according to some, a U.S. invasion according to others: it all depends, gentlemen, on which television channel you watch in the evening. The fact is that no one can communicate with Veracruz, so what's so strange about the fact that suddenly no one can communicate with Acapulco? It's impossible to fathom those mysteries. What are you saying, Don Fernando? You can't hear over the noise of the motor. I said that Veracruz has become materially impenetrable because a line of soldiers, shoulder to shoulder, helicopters, right, this is a helicopter, Don Fernando, no, you don't get what I'm saying, and antiaircraft guns have closed to invaders the whole strip along the Perote Ridge to the Lakes Tamiahua and Catemaco. And Don Fernando has no desire to turn his eyes toward that atrocious nation on the northern border: Mexamerica, independent of Mexico and the United States, in-bond factories, smuggling, contraband, Spanglish, refuge for political fugitives, and free entry for those without papers from the Pacific Coast to the Gulf Coast, one hundred kilometers to the north and one hundred to the south from the old frontier, from Sandy Ego and Auntyjane to Coffeeville and Killmoors: independent without the need of any declaration, the fact is that there no one pays the slightest attention to the government in Mexico City or Washington. And Don Fernando would also have wanted to look toward the Pacific and understand just exactly what had happened to the entire coast to the north of Ixtapa–Zihuatanejo, the whole thing, including the coastal zones of Michoacán, Colima, Jalisco, and Nayarit, Sinaloa, Sonora, and Baja California: why didn't anyone ever talk about those lands, to whom did they belong, why were there no explanations, why was the Republic of Mexico only a kind of ghost of its ancient cornucopia-shaped self?

He saw a narrow, skeletal, and decapitated nation, its chest in the deserts of the north, its infarcted heart in the exit point of the Gulf at Tampico, its belly in Mexico City, its suppurating, venereal anus in Acapulco, its cut-off knees in Guerrero and Oaxaca … That's what was left. That was what the federal government, its PANist president, its PRIist apparatus, its financial bourgeoisie now totally addicted to the public sector (or was it the other way around? It was all the same now), its police imposed on an army that had disbanded out of discontent and demoralization, its new symbols of legitimization, its August Founding Mothers and its National Contests, and its thousands of unreadable newspapers …

Don Fernando Benítez was on the point of vomiting out the helicopter window when he hesitated, secretly fearing the horror of symmetry: how to vomit on vomit?

“Do you believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe?” he asked the pilot.

“The what?” the pilot said (the noise, his earphones).

“I'm saying that only a miracle like the reappearance of the Virgin can save Mexico…”

“No, we're not going to Mexico City,” shouted the pilot. “We're going to Frontera…”

Fernando Benítez closed his eyes and squeezed the young pilot's shoulder. “Only a miracle.”

Although for him that miracle, behind his clouded vision, consisted in being able to remember a mountain, a village, a river, and to repeat under his breath now, the noise of the motor of no importance: Nevado de Colima, Tepoztlán, Usumacinta …

Sweet Fatherland, impeccable and adamantine: the forest of silk-cotton trees, the silvered velocity of the river, the crocodile and the ocelot, the monkeys and the toucans under the vegetable vault. And a column of smoke that rose from the heart of the jungle: the forests cut down, the new highways, the drilling of the Five Sisters, the changed course of the river, the traces of the past wiped away forever by mud slides and oil spills: Yaxchilán, Planchón de las Figuras, the forest of the Lacandons … The Invisible Sweet Fatherland.

3

Take a break, You Mercedesful Readers, and listen to the story my father is telling my mother on Epiphany as they clean off the shit that rained down from heaven, and the two of them (I think) prepare to fill me in on everything that led to
this instant,
my most immediate postcuntly, but which doubtless I shall only remember at the moment in which my little head begins to function within my mother but outside of her, if I can put it that way, independent of her. At what moment am I worthy of respect and consideration? At what moment am I more important than she is, with as much right to life as she has, at what point? I ask. They are not wondering about any of this; they are on the beach where they have just conceived me without being certain of the success of their labors, remembering what happened days before, then years before, adding layer upon layer to the where and the when that I got right away. They are and will always be something like the simultaneous captivity and freedom of my “person.”