Christopher Unborn (31 page)

On the other hand, inside the hotel, one coyote leaps at the throat of the eminent Antillean critic Emilio Domínguez del Tamal at the exact moment he is finishing his habitual lecture with the words The peoples of our nations demand this revolutionary commitment from the writer and is awaiting the usual counter-statement from the no less celebrated South American critic Egberto Jiménez-Chicharra with questions such as what about preterition? And diachrony? And epanidiplosis? But this time the words of the Literary Sergeant are mortally tasted by the coyote's saw-like canines, since Chicharra decides to express his scorn for del Tamal by skipping his lecture and sinking instead into his bath, which is bubbling with wonderful lemon-colored Badedás bath salts. He leaves his book of structuralist criticism on a book stand next to the tub and leaves the door to his suite open as well, open to chance, danger, and sin, said the eminent critic to himself, even though he was frankly annoyed that homosexuality was no longer a sin for anyone and merely one more practice among so many others, tolerated by all, denounced by none. He wanted homosexuality to be a sin again, that it be the vice that dares not speak its name, not an activity as neutral as brushing one's teeth. Why did the idea of sodomy as a sin excite him so much and leave the young men cold? he wondered, when through his bathroom door, like a miraculous dream, came, fleetingly and busily, a naked young man, covered in gold dust, his whisk-broom hair covered by a horrid rimless borsalino decorated with bottle caps but oooooh what a penis and what a hard little ass … The Orphan Huerta said not a word; at the same time, he dropped a hair dryer, an FM radio, and an electric mixer (all three plugged into a transformer) right into Chicharra's bath; he died fried without responding to del Tamal: a silent critic, a thankful Angel would sigh, but the same was not to be said for Matamoros Moreno, who violently strode toward the congress, followed by his daughter Colasa, in hopes that he would have his works published by one of the participants, perhaps with a prologue by Sergeant del Tamal and perhaps with an epilogue by Jiménez-Chicharra: father and daughter hear the repeated sound of the song “Flying Down to Vigo” played on a broken phonograph, but it does not rain cotton flakes, here what is coming down is darkness, their blood freezes, and Matamoros says to Colasa:

“If I find out that this opportunity was also stolen from me by that punk Palomar, I swear, Colasa, I swear to you I'll…”

He had no time to finish; outside, the phalanx of coyotes once again advanced toward the sea, pushing the phalanx of
Vogue
models toward the water's edge; the coyotes howled and the models shrieked, and there were no more photographers to be seen.

The symptoms of arsenic poisoning are convulsions and leg cramps, vomiting and diarrhea; the throat dry and closed; unbearable headache; precipitous fall in pulse rate, cessation of breathing, finally collapse of the frozen bodies (snow in Managua, ice in Macondo, refrigerators in Ciudad Bolívar, Flying Down to Vigogogo! Forever/ Forever!), and those on the Fun & Sun Toltec Tour exhibited quite a few of those symptoms. They lay there over the counters, on their backs on the tile floors, clutching a handful of straws in the Coastline Burger Boy; Professor Gingerich, overly absorbed in his theory of frontiers, had eaten nothing and walked out onto the avenue trembling with fear, abandoning the death that had been injected into plastic bottles of Log Cabin syrup: he looks at the desolation around the Tastee-Freez, the Kentucky Fried Chicken, the Denny's, the VIPS, the Sanborn's, the Pizza Huts, all overwhelmingly silent while their neon signs finally fall dark and the howls of the coyotes are followed by their almost human laughter, a cross between the laugh of a hyena and an old man, the laughter of clowns and witches.

The coyote's laugh, if you've never heard it, sends real chills down your spine: Gingerich sees groups of the beasts on the hilltops, gathered in circles, as if they are holding a meeting before attacking the lost, helpless gringo tourists in their pink jeeps. The coyotes pour down crags and hillsides; no one on the coast road can move now, the animals are much faster than any old taxi or new Mustang: a knot of silence, no one dares to blow his horn out of fear of attracting their attention, so the traffic jam stretches from the new hotel Señorita Mariposa on the site of the old Navy base of Icacos to Elephant Stone Point on the Caleta peninsula, and at the amusement park the noise of the squirting fountains and hoses and the artificial waves isolate the happy families from the horror around them. Don't tell me that all this isn't cuter than the beach, more comfortable and modern, says Reynaldo, who imagines himself in the Cathedral of Amusement for Suburban Man, Eden Regained! Matilde, who is very Catholic, follows him intuitively because in nature it's just like that, well, you know, that's where Adam and Eve sinned, right? Our First Parents were chased out of there by angels snapping towels, just like Pepito snapping his towel at the parrot, who now reappears as a bird of ill omen, screaming on top of the slide: Bastards, It's All Over, All Over, Bastards, which Pepito had taught his little parrot at night under the covers. Soak Your Ass for the Last Time, You'll Be Drinking Through Your Ass Soon, My God, make him shut up, Rey, what will people say, at least no one knows it's our son or our parrot either, said Matilde who prefers to look toward the pool, where the waves were beginning to stir again and her Reynaldo, what? Because the parrot from his forest perch is screeching Matilde Rebollo is a Whore and Reynaldo Rebollo is a Faggot, ay ay ay, Matilde starts to faint now for sure, everyone would find out, her husband stopped her, the fat matron gets away from him, falls into the pool, and there she becomes entangled with the insecure bodies of those of her class enjoying their tropical vacation, amusement paid for out of savings, mindful of advertisements, and the considerations of prestige: both of them, Reynaldo and Matilde Rebollo, hugging in the pool, amid one hundred and thirty-two other bodies defined by centuries of monastic pallor or canefield ringworm, and our Pepito, where, for God's sake, is he? why don't we see him? why can't we get out of here? How slippery this is getting, Rey, the waves are getting higher, isn't it too much now? Why don't they stop it? Answer me, Rey, but Reynaldo was dragged to the eye of the cyclone along with the other one hundred and thirty bodies submerged by the artificial waves that kept them from moving freely, tossed like corks, less than corks! The pounding of water on their heads, once, again, again, and again and again, the machines manipulated by the Orphan Huerta down in the underground control room, the cascades of broken glass hidden in the slide water, the screams, the astonishment, and once again the silence.

The cockroaches checked out of the hotels of Acapulco that morning, the coyotes moved in to devour the asphyxiated bodies, the bodies with dilated pupils, clenched teeth, foam-covered mouths, and that smell like almonds; and the cadavers with acid guts, burning tripes, metallic tongues, and blue vomit. Behind the pack, the dispossessed from the hillsides reunited by the Four Fuckups along with Angel and Angeles, who told the homeless: Do unto them what they did unto you: Acapulco belongs to two nations, tourism below and squatters above, okay, now come down, and this young fellow here, Hipi Toltec, has been training the same coyotes they used against you.

Angel, an old connoisseur of garbage, had laid out, as if he were setting up an open-air market, bottles of Heinz ketchup, Cap'n Crunch and Count Chocula cereal boxes, bottles of relish and rancid mustard, rubbery bread, and plastic chickens, McDonald's murderous hamburgers, the sickly concoctions found in gringo refrigerators, open bags of North American garbage food, chips, Fritos, Pop-Tarts, gobstoppers, smurfberry crunch, pizza-to-blow, and the spilled syrups of Coke and 7-Up and Dr Pepper, and side by side with the most grotesque examples of this antifood of suicidal madness—the balloon, fart, prepared, and greasy heart foods of the North—he put deodorants like Right Guard, the soaps and shampoos of Alberto V05, Glamour and hairspray and Dippity-Do jell, and capillary dye, Sun In, tanning creams made by Sea
&
Ski, and the most secret element of all, vaginal ointments—lemon-scented, strawberry, raspberry—menthol condoms, eucalyptus suppositories. All so the coyotes could smell them, know one from another, and attack those who used, digested, sweated, wore, put up with, or who were all this. All this escapes exclusive receptacles to join the shit in the sea and the national refuse of fried-food stands and plastic Virgins of Guadalupe, sumptuous
zapote
rinds and soda bottles used as nesting places for small mice and snakes; the garbage of the North comes out to join the garbage of the South and the coyotes are trained and fed by Hipi Toltec with pieces of his skin. Egg took charge of poison and gas logistics, the Orphan Huerta was responsible for drains and pumping stations, to say nothing of (he had a personal interest in it) the destruction of the amusement park: he spends half an hour looking at Pepito's castrated cadaver, his balls cut off by the glass sent down the slide, and the Orphan, a crooked grin on his face, stands there watching him: so you had a mom and dad, did you, you little bastard, so you lived in Nouveau Heaven, and had your little vacations in Aca, so you had lots of Ocean Pacific swimsuits and lots of rubber balls, well now you've got glass balls, you little bastard!

The entire spectacle was conceived and directed by Angel and Angeles Palomar, as were the mottoes, especially the gigantic sign that now at midday is burning brightly on the decrepit walls of the last Sanborn's in Acapulco:

SHIT MEETS SHIT

SHEET MEATS SHEET

LONG LIVE THE SWEET FATHERLAND
!

LONG LIVE THE CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION
!

5

Christopher in Limbo

 

1. Your House Is Still So Very Big

While all this was going on in Acapulco, Don Fernando Benítez was flying over our mutilated nation: from up above, he saw it as an island in a gulf of shadows.

Then, as they landed, he understood that he was in a dry, silvery valley, surrounded by dark ravines that left it in eternal isolation.

The helicopter landed on a mesa, and Don Fernando thanked the pilot, an employee of the National Indigenist Institute. The pilot asked him if he was sure he didn't want him to come back, but my Uncle Fernando Benítez said no; perhaps he no longer had the strength to climb all the way up here, but getting down would be a different matter. Right, said the pilot with a crooked grin, going downhill's always easier.

The inhabitants of the mesa gathered together when they heard the noise of the propellers and dispersed without making a sound as soon as the chopper landed. Perhaps they thought the pilot would be leaving instantly to return to the Salina Cruz base, and that they, living at this isolated altitude, could return to their normal life.

The wind came and went, ruffling their tattered clothes.

A high, burning sun returned. The Indians looked at him without closing their eyes. But the wind did make them close them.

He saw a people in rags.

When the pilot from the NII disappeared into the distance of the southern Sierra Madre, my Uncle Fernando walked quickly toward the group of Indians which by then had begun to scatter. He raised his hand in greeting, but no one responded. In more than thirty years of visiting the most isolated and inhospitable places in Mexico, he had never seen such a thing. Uncle Fernando had spent half his life documenting Mexico's four or five million Indians, those who were never conquered by the Spaniards, who never allowed themselves to be assimilated into the creole or mestizo world, or who simply survived the demographic catastrophe of the conquest: there were twenty-five million of them before Cortés landed in Tabasco; fifty years later, only one million were left.

My Uncle Fernando looked at them respectfully, with his intense, ice-blue eyes, as fixed and piercing as two needles behind his round, gold-framed glasses. He took off his worn straw hat, which was wide-brimmed and sweat-stained—his good-luck charm on these journeys that took him from the Tarahumaras in the north, who were tall and who would run like horses over the roofs of Mexico, to the sunken remains of the Mayan Empire in the southeast, the only place in the world where each generation is shorter than the previous one, as if they were slowly sinking into the sinkholes of their forests.

He always said and wrote that all the Indian nations, from Sonora to the Yucatán, had just three things in common: poverty, helplessness, and injustice.

“You are no longer owners of what the gods bestowed upon you,” he said in a low voice, stretching out his hand toward the first man to come near him that morning on the sunny, cold plateau.

But the man went on.

My Uncle Fernando did not move. Something he could not see told him, stay right where you are, Benítez, don't move a muscle; easy now. The clouds that surrounded the plateau like a cold foam moved one flight lower and shredded in a hoary wind that combed through the dried-out fields. The men in rags took up their wooden plows, shook their heads, shrugged off the potbellied flies that tried to land on their faces, and began to plow, they were slow but they seemed to be working more quickly than usual—they raised their faces to the sun and groaned as if they knew that midday would arrive today sooner than ever—with clenched teeth, as if enraged about the time they'd lost. The noise. The wind murdered by the helicopter.

My uncle did not move. The groups of ten or twelve men plowed in perfect symmetry, they plowed as if they'd erected and then decorated a sacred talus; but each one of them, when he'd reached the edge of the field with his plow, awkwardly butted against the rocky soil and the twisted roots of the yuccas and had to make a huge effort to get his plowshare free, turn the tiller around, and plow in the opposite direction—as if he'd never seen the obstacle.