Christopher Unborn (33 page)

He opened his eyes, and the sun had still not set.

He looked outside the cabin and found eyes identical to his own. He shook his head; it was not a reflection. It was a bird. It was an eagle with the head of an owl, and a collar of rainbow-colored feathers, tied up like a chignon, as flowery as a ruff; the harpy eagle that was flying throughout the entire New World, from Paraguay to Mexico, celebrating all by itself the discovery of which the Indians were ignorant. Fernando Benítez saw those eyes and the dogged flight of the eagle, parallel to that of the helicopter: flying like two arrows, both of them together that afternoon in the Sierra Madre. In its powerful talons, the harpy eagle was carrying a living monkey, its shrieks drowned out by the noise of the motors.

2

There are two movements, my mother says her Platonic tome says: that of all things, which eternally revolve around themselves without changing place, and that of things that wander eternally, things that move, Angel my love, far from this secluded shore where I already shine one month after my conception in the immobile center of my mother, and I concentrate in myself the two movements of which they speak outside of me. They are desperate to understand what has happened between January and February, I who arrived in the impetuous gush of my father's errancy, and I now feel that I am hanging on for all I'm worth to a wet, hot cave from which I never ever want to leave, Mommy, I beg of you, don't say what you're saying, let everything spin endlessly around you and me, both of us together, not errant, not displaced, not …

The two of them cuddle in Uncle Homero's grand, uninhabited, and silent mansion on Peachy Tongue Beach, and each one agreed with the other, never again would so many significant occasions come together at one time, New Year's Eve parties, the beginning of the year of the Quincentennial, the Literature Congress, Uncle Homero's vacation, the vacation of the military and diplomatic high command in Washington—a break before masterminding the destabilization of the new enemy, Colombia—and Penny López's vacation, eh? My mother winked and my father feigned ignorance, self-confidently adding Ada and Deng's disco. It's better to prepare things with a will, is what I say (said my mom), than to leave them to that Mexican, weeeelll, let's see how it falls and if it does happen, good thing (she said, interpreting my father's will). She decided to contradict him only in order to maintain a modicum of independence within her willing acceptance of her tight union with my father. Which is why she said:

“I want to enjoy the supreme availability. I don't want to earn money, organize a trip, or even plan what we do in a single day. I'll bet you someone will do it for me.”

My father laughed and asked himself if everything that had taken place in Aca a month ago had been merely gratuitous. We can always imagine what could have happened if everything had gone well, but we always had to be sure that chance would get an oar in now and again; that's why she would like to understand better what she still doesn't know and not to think that it was only a joke, but by the same token that it was not just an act of perfect will: not even a getting even, she says to him, not even an act of meting out justice, which someday may separate you from me, and deprive us of our love, my love.

Angel: “Why? I really wish jokes or gratuitous acts could be a way to get justice, why not, Angeles?”

Angeles: “Because the twentieth century is soon going to die on us, and I refuse, whatever the justifications, to equate justice with death, what about you?”

Angel: “All I know is that what we had to do here is either all done or should be all done.” My father spoke in muffled tones: he'd put his head between my mother's legs, as if he were looking for me.

Angeles: “As Tomasito would say, till no see, no berieve.”

Angel: “Unfortunately, everybody in these parts thinks just the opposite. They say that if you want to believe you're better off not seeing.” My father raises his head. “Why didn't the Filipino carry out the final part of the plan?”

Angeles: “I have no idea. What was supposed to happen?”

Angel: “At 15:49, Hipi and the Orphan enter Uncle Homero's house.”

Angeles: “You mean here, where we are right now the day after Candlemas, February 3, 1992.”

Angel: “It was a Tuesday. Tomasito opens the gate for them, knowing that at that time Uncle Homero is always in his sauna next to the pool.”

Angeles: “Then the guys from the band and Tomasito burst in on him, so that Uncle Homero realizes he's been betrayed.”

Angel: “Homero shouts, ‘You Judas, I never should have confided my security to a scion of that damned colony named after my King Don Felipe, as the universal Argentine genius Don Manuel Mujica Lainez might have said!'”

Angeles: “And perhaps he remembered what Uncle Fernando said to him when Homero offered him a lot here twenty-four years ago: ‘And how do I defend it from guerrillas?'”

Angel: “Perhaps he did. Why not? But perhaps Tomasito had an attack of conscience.”

Angeles: “What do you mean? What are you getting at?”

Angel: “What I mean, Angelucha, is that after all, Tomasito owes his life to Uncle Homero.”

Angeles: “You knew that and you went ahead anyway?”

Angel: “How can there be risk if nothing's left to chance? Uncle Homero, to prove his humanitarian, philanthropic, and liberal credentials, took in Tomasito when he was a boy, when UNICEF put him up for adoption after Marcos's last massacre in Manila. Would you like to tell the rest? Please do.”

Angeles: “It was when Ferdinand and Imelda were desperately trying to wipe out the opposition. They couldn't sleep because they were making up crueler and crueler repressions. Now you pick it up, silver tray. Up and at 'em, oh genius!”

Angel: “Then Lady Imelda goes bananas and announces to Ferdinand: ‘Last night I dreamed that fifteen years ago a boy was born who was going to plocraim himself King of the Luzons: you were Herod and I was Herodias and we went out to kill all the boys born yesterday fifteen years ago to rid ourselves of these redeemers, using the slogan “Better Deads Than Reds.”' The Mindanao death squads went out to hit all fifteen-year-olds.”

Angeles: “And Tomasito was saved from that death thanks to Uncle Homero, who just happened to be in Manila … Are you kidding?”

Angel: “He
just happened
to be in Manila because he was funneling a few hundred million Mexican pesos through the Philippine stock market. The money he'd kept from the tax man he'd picked up from the sale of a subsidiary of the International Baby Foods Company that was supposed to bring foreign investment to Mexico and did just the opposite—but it still had to have a Mexican as the majority shareholder. That patriot just happened to be our trusty uncle, who, to be sure, is hard to imagine as a straw man, but he turned up one day with a check from the Mexican branch of INBAFOO, payable to the Philippine branch. The price paid for the Mexican subsidiary was minuscule, but no one in Mexico or the Philippines ever saw a centavo, not the public treasury, not the consumers, not even the brats who eat that shit, but, you guessed it, the Board of Directors and Preferred Stockholders of INBAFOO in the Republic of the Sun Belt, in the capital of the said republic, Dallas, did indeed see some centavos. How'm I doin', babe?”

Angeles: “Super, Angel. Your uncle's your major theme.”

Angel: “And that's how Homero appropriated all that humanitarian publicity and ducked all the attacks on him for being a go-between, but the fact is that Tomasito hates him, too, but he must also love him, because if, on the one hand, Homero did save him from the Herodian fury of the Marcoses, on the other he knows that the kids who didn't die in the massacre did die of gastric hemorrhages after eating the little bottles of slime distributed in the Philippines by the Mexican branch of the conglomerate.”

Angeles: “So when he heard Hipi and the Orphan knocking on the gate outside Homero's house, Tomasito began to have doubts.”

Angel: “Just imagine that his fate could have been this one: having his head cut off by a machete in the pay of Imelda.”

Angeles: “And, instead of that, here he is living like a captive prince in a golden tropical cage, so how could his heart not start beating double-time and he not begin to have his doubts?”

Angel: “But it may be that Tomasito, paralyzed by doubts, mulling over his own salvation compared to the death of his little brothers, consumers of the baby food made by Homero, just went back to his room to let things run their own course, just as you say: the supreme availability, someone else will do it for him…”

Angeles: “Or maybe Tomasito, letting his gratitude get the better of his doubts, instead of admitting the Four Fuckups, cuts them off and then the Orphan Huerta gets mad and shoots Tomasito…”

Angel: “I'm telling you we've got to calm that boy down. Sometimes he goes too far.”

Angeles: “Aroused by the noise, Homero leaves the sauna naked, puts on his guayabera just when the Orphan was overcoming the resistance of the doubtful Tomasito, overcome this time by an aberrant fidelity…”

Angel: “Then Homero puts on the parachute, gives rapid orders to the man driving the motorboat, and escapes by flying, he passes over our heads, shits on us, and disappears into the thick air of Acapulco.”

Angeles: “If that's so, then where is Tomasito?”

Angel: “I don't know. Where are the Orphan, Hipi, and Egg?”

Angeles: “And the Baby. Don't ever forget the Baby. I don't know where she is, either.”

In this and in other sparkling repartee, my mother and father spent the first month after my conception in Uncle Homero Fagoaga's silent, abandoned house. That adipose Icarus left them, devoting himself to an avian life and, of course, adding his own small contribution to the epidemic in Cacapulco.

Angel and Angeles did not open the doors of the fort. No one, by the by, ever knocked. Tomasito decamped, leaving a full pantry; Uncle Homero had prepared his mansion, since 1968, for a prolonged guerrilla siege.

Thus it was that my father tried to transform the besieged house (in their imagination, of course, nothing beyond that) into a phalanstery = he said to my mother that without discipline they would not survive and that his own conservative revolutionary plans would be frustrated. Punctuality and discipline: my mother made no objection when, at seven o'clock in the morning, they prolonged the postures of their pleasure by going down on all fours and mopping down the tropical terraces of the mansion that belonged to the fugitive Don Homero.

This news was only lived by me and with pleasure during this long month. I communicate them to the readers. You should know that during the first week I floated freely in the secretions of the oviduct until I set up camp permanently in my mother's uterine cavity. At that time, I, Christopher, was a cluster of well-organized cells, with defined functions, learning the classic lesson, innocent that I was, about the unity of my person—confirmed by the diversity of my functions. Well, if each and every one of the cells that emerged from the fertilized egg has the same genetic structure and therefore each and every one preserves, latent, what my hair color will be, the color of my eyes, not all give these factors equal importance: only the eye- and hair-pigmentation cells concern themselves with a function that is, nevertheless, inscribed in all the other cells.

But after the second week of waiting for the nonexistent news about what transpired on Twelfth Night, when the Three Wise Men are supposed to come, I already thought myself the Wisest Man on Earth (a melodic gene informs me), then bang, my situation becomes so precarious that I almost, dear Reader, never got to tell this intriguing story which has no set ending (because it had no set beginning) because, between being pissed off and pissed on, I began to show myself for what I was, or rather for what purpose I was:

I was a foreign body within my mother's body, a splinter that would normally be rejected by the wounded skin: a button, a ring, a watch, swallowed by mistake: I forgot, Reader, about national contests, Mamadoc, and Uncle Homero, and I defended myself as best I could, I scrambled up into my spaceship and I launched myself into intrauterine star wars: I ate my mother's mucous membrane, I penetrated my mother's circulatory system, devouring her oxygen and food like a desert rat, I excavated, Reader, a hole within my mother's hole, until my oh so poor, fragile, and frugal existence became, through my will to survive, part of her body and life: I
buried
myself in my mother, Reader, I caused myself to be swallowed by my mother's matrix against the rejecting will of my mother herself (an unconscious will, but a will nevertheless) until I felt the surface of this recondite cunt close over my head like a beneficent roof (just like the Cupola that the government, says Uncle Homero, is building over Mexico City to purify the air and then distribute it equitably among the thirty million inhabitants), until I felt that I was expanding, that I was triumphing by cannibalizing my mother, who was unaware that a tiny Saturn was inhabiting her guts, taking up all the free space of that dear curlicue, until I felt, oh benign Reader, that the maternal, generous, flowing blood was drowning me …

(My father, feeling the need for the constant company of my mother and surprised by it, he who had always lived on a sexual merry-go-round since he had escaped the nets of Capitolina and Farnesia until he abandoned the flashy Brunilda, wanders Uncle Homero's house during the afternoon, melodically shouting Angeles, Angeles, I'm back from the beach: he enters a long gallery that faces the sea and at the end of it he sees her, on her knees, her shoulders bare, wrapped in a towel from the waist down, her head hanging before her and in front of her, on a white towel, arranged as if they were a surgeon's tools, a whip and a crucifix, a high, pointy, penitent's cap and a sign painted with red letters which she hangs around her neck and which hangs over her glacially unprotected breasts:
I AM THE WORST WOMAN IN THE WORLD.
Angel is about to shout something, but even the name “Angeles” freezes on his lips. Was it really she? The afternoon light is uncertain and treacherous. He thinks she has seen him in comparable situations hundreds of times and has never made him feel vulnerable: she, who has accompanied him in everything he's decided to do from the time they first met, does not deserve to be interrupted by him. He stares intently so that he will never forget the scene.)