Christopher Unborn (48 page)

I don't really understand what's going on, I admit it. Don Fernando reasons and fights; they say “Chicago”; it's cold; that's where the Orphan Huerta's grandmother is; if they insist, well here's her address; but they're asking for trouble.

In bed, my father says to my mother:

“Quetzalcoatl went east.”

“Cortés came from the west.”

“Wetbacks go north.”

“The dead go south.”

“Those are the cardinal points of Mexico, and no one can escape them!”

9

My father needs a compass to find his way through the city: he's like a navigator in the Unknown Sea. The group has decided that if they're going to survive, all of them will have to find work in a city overflowing with the unemployed; suspiciously, no one knows anything about Uncle Homero, and Uncle Fernando, who lives off a modest university pension and the success of his books in Poland and Yugoslavia (he's piled up millions of zlotys and dinars he never expects to see, but he does consume the income in pesos of thirteen Polish and Yugoslav writers in Mexico), has dedicated himself to sowing panic in D.F. parking lots.

Example: he materializes and announces he's the parking-lot inspector. People think it's Jupiter turning up at the Last Judgment: they all run, hide, pour water on the heroin, flush the grass down the drain, pretend they know nothing about the smell of marijuana in the air, and even though everyone knows that in parking lots, in trunks, motors, and under seats is where drug trafficking takes place, only Don Fernando takes the bull by its moralizing horns and tells people he's an incorruptible inspector. No one ever saw such shock, and sowing moral terror is all our Uncle Fernando desires: the point is not to accept any bribe, so that his activity benefits neither himself nor us.

“In any case, with us bribes have become very exclusive. Before, there was a certainty and a democracy to them—they were available to all. In fact, the only human right won by the Mexican Revolution was the right to corruption, which in El Salvador or Paraguay is the privilege of a minority, but which in Mexico belongs to all, from the president to newspapermen, to the cop on the beat—and anyone who isn't corrupt is an asshole. In any case, in Mexico bribery used to be natural, as it had been since the Aztecs and the colonial period: why, in the court of Carlos III of Spain, bribes were called “Mexican grease.” But nowadays, dear niece and nephew and you FUBARS here present, functionaries refuse the first bribe and play to see who'll give more, they make scenes—How dare you, sir! International Baby Foods offered me double that, the Emirates Baksheesh Corporation triple that, what an idea! Come now, you can do better than that, sir. They even use an international vocabulary nowadays: the pure and simple bribe is called the perquisite or baksheesh, kickbacks are called pot-de-vin. Even the bribers have begun to put on airs; now they choose those they want to bribe and don't try to buy off just anyone. There are categories, what did you think, eh? Anyone who bribes a transit cop is committing a serious breach of Mexican etiquette. Bribing a customs agent brings a total loss of face. Bribing, real bribing, takes place only if you bribe the Cardinal Primate, the President, Minister Robles Chacón, Mamadoc, or, extraterritorially, the North American President, Ronald Ranger (if in fact he really exists and isn't merely what he always was: a photo opportunity, a fleeting TV image no one could hear because his voice was drowned out by the roar of the helicopter whisking him away for a weekend at Camp Goliath, just one more decal on vans with Colorado oasis windows, a hologram!). Okay, let's see you bribe the Iron Lady, Emperor Akihito, Bishop Tutu, or Mother Teresa. Now that's bribery, not some flea-bitten congressman, the cop on the corner, or the customs officer, forget it!”

This being the situation, my father took his compass and, together with my mother (me inside her) and the Four Fuckups, organized first their jobs within the generalized unemployment in order to survive until we won the Christophers Contest in October, when we'd live it up and up and up, oh don't be perverse, universe, or as Dad says, “Avoid the mess, avoid the mess…”

This is what they managed to do in the merry month of May:

Egg was hired as a TV weatherman for the Tlalpan district, but he was fired because his powerful resolve led him to scorn storms, hurricanes, earthquakes, and other forms of excitement that traditionally and officially were suggested to make the programs more pleasant. He was content to say, “The weather today is the same as it was yesterday,” or “Yesterday's weather was a little better than tomorrow's will be.”

Fired from this job, he managed to get a job as cleanup man in the Sanborn's on Avenida Universidad. When the restaurant and the stores were finally empty, our buddy Egg would first clean up all the trash and mop the floor, and then he would take down from the book rack a volume published by Alianza Editorial in Madrid (prohibitively expensive books) and would sit down to read in the solitary café until dawn. He thus became something enormously secret: the Sanborn's Reader. Without knowing it, he took the same book that Angeles, my mother, never finished reading: Plato's
Cratylus,
that dialogue where all they talk about is names: What is a name? Does a name exist because the thing demands to be named? Is a name merely a caprice? or, perhaps: Was it God who named us?: Egg and Angeles, that book connected Egg to the world of Angeles and neither one knew it.

Hipi Toltec was, successively, a tobacco spitter and fire-eater out on the streets, dresser (or tailor) for fleas, fireworks expert, and a walker of elegant dogs. But he contaminated all the dogs he touched with rabies; one of his skyrockets went so high that it proved convincingly that the dome was nothing more than a fairy tale; the fleas abruptly formed a union; and his longest tobacco expectoration hit the license plate of Don Ulises López's black Transnational limo and no one could ever get it clean: what Hipi spits, I think, is the liquid equivalent of the fire in the Fifth Sun.

The Orphan Huerta began by going to Cuernavaca as a pool digger, but he gave up the job because every time he finished digging, it was dead bodies instead of water that flowed into the hole, right on his head. He didn't want to find out any more about it, so he went back to Mexico City, where his new look, that Chaplinesque air of innocence, guaranteed him a certain success as a house sitter. That's how he came to be taking care of the immense house that belonged to Don Ulises López and his wife Doña Lucha, when they went to Taxco on vacation in May. He also informed my father that Miss Penny López, whom we thought killed in Ada and Deng's nightclub in Aca, was alive and kicking (that's kicking, not screwing): all alone in her mansion in Las Lomas del Sol, under the protective eye of her somber duenna, Ms. Ponderosa.

Dad filed that precious bit of information and offered his services to SEPARVE, which was looking for a translator of Mexican sayings, since—to everyone's surprise—they'd found a European market for Mexican folk sayings: such was the hunger for certitude and wisdom in the Vecchio Mondo.

Among the most celebrated of my pop's exports are these, which were received with open arms, even in London and Paris:

You left me whistling on the hill

A qu'elle est naine ma fortune, que est-ce qu'elle grandira?

Thou hast made me muffins with goat's meat!

La prudence, on l'appele connerie

Here only my fried pigskins crackle!

Aux femmes, ni tout l'amour ni tout le fric

We only visit the cactus when it flowers

Faute de baguette, mangez des tortillas

Don't call me uncle, we haven't met yet

Les amours à la distance sont pour des cons à outrance

This clean industry (except when Angel had to translate “Aguacate maduro, pedo seguro” and came up with “Art Is a Fart”), devoid of problems (even “rosario de Amozoc” had illustrious equivalents in “Donnybrook” and “Branlebas”), yielded a nice income which, in accordance with the Tlalpan pact, my father divided up with my mother, Egg, Hipi, the Orphan, and (possibly) with Baby Ba, not to mention your humble servant.

At the same time, my mother was hired by the Secretariat of Culture, Letters, and Literacy (SECULELA) to devise ordinary-language versions of Shakespeare that could be understood in the proletarian neighborhoods (are there any other kind?) in the D.F., DeeEff, DeeFate, DeeForm, De Facto, Defecate, Dee Faculties. Her greatest success was her translation of
Hamlet:

“To be or what?”

But then she had to revise everything because perhaps she should have begun:

“To be here or not?”

Not all members of the group knew such success. The Four Fuckups were deeply demoralized by having their musical vocation frustrated, enervated by their absence from the space preemptively occupied by and divided up among the affected intellectuals in the Immanuel Can't group.

The critique of reason puuure

For madness a sure cuuure

To say nothing of the crude, gross violence of the Baboso Brothers:

Last night as I watched yer daddy screw yer mom

Ah jes had to puke my guts up, the grits an' eggs an' ham

which was all you heard on the radio from morning till night, while the Fuckups had to hide their great nineties lyrics under a bushel for a year:

If ah stay, ah'l jes forgit her,

So it's better that ah go.

Oh, Lady Disdain, do not

Let me be your Swain:

If ah stay, ah'l jes forgit her,

So it's better that ah go.

which they composed at night, exhausted, in the Tlalpan house, at which, one day, the following note from Uncle Don Homero Fagoaga inevitably arrived:

Doubtlessly Distinguished Niece and Nephew:

I saw you both leave the house on May 1. I observed your costumes and listened to your comments. I thought that since we'd all taken refuge under a common roof, to which all of us had a right, that at least, juris tantum, we'd all spoken the absolute truth about what happened in the recent past. I must confess my disillusion. You two, with perfidy and with an eye to profit, caused yourselves to pass for old-fashioned hippietecs with long hair and blue jeans, using the slang of the sixties in order to deceive my habitual sagacity and make me think I was dealing with naïve greenhorns from the age of Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin, and Chic Guevara. But it was all a huge hoax! You both are part of the reactionary avant-garde of rebel conservatism! You look for your fashions in the first half of the century, before any gringo left his poop on the moon, forever changing the balance of the universe! I've had to suffer lots of shocks in my life, but none of them has put my understanding of the world into such a crisis as this trick of yours. You may expect my revenge. Pack up your gear, because that house won't belong to you for very long!

Effective Suffrage. No Reelection.

(
signed
) Homero Fagoaga, LL.D.

Hipi and the Orphan said they should get ready for the siege of Tlalpan: Homero would only get them out by force, and before that happened they'd pour molten lead on him and shove a stake up his ass, even if it gave him infinite pleasure, but Angeles my mother said that what really surprised her was the idea that Uncle H. had managed a reconciliation with the Party and the government (the rest was a pretext) and would screw up the Christophers Contest: that would be his greatest perversity, it had to be stopped. So, one morning in May, my parents, dressed in the most conservative and old-fashioned way, took the Van Gogh and the compass and set out (I a marble within) to find out the status of the contest and to enter it in proper form now that there remained no doubt whatsoever that Angeles, as Capitolina and Farnesia would say, was “in a family way.”

10. More Rumors Than Pennies in a Piggy Bank

The Palace of the Citizenry, in the northern sector of the city, was the symbolic end point—when it was built—of the Pan-American Highway and was flanked on both sides by statues of the Green Indians. From there, a causeway, surrounded by recycling water, ran to the vast central island, where, no joke, an eagle perched on a cactus devoured several serpents every day. If the eagle was replaced every so often, it was something no one ever checked or even desired to check.

From that central island a dozen stairs descended to the tunnels, where, in an asymmetrical arrangement, the barred windows opened for the business that more than justified this multimillion-dollar structure, erected by the government of President Jesús María y José Paredes in the midst of our ongoing crisis.

ALL CITIZENS HAVE THE RIGHT TO INFORMATION

ALL CITIZENS HAVE THE RIGHT TO COMPLAIN

ALL CITIZENS HAVE THE RIGHT TO GIVE UP

Dressed in black, he flourishing his walking stick, she flouncing her mourning veils, Angel and Angeles walked down a stairway to the tunnel and, before doing anything else, got on the
INFORMATION
line. Their first order of business was to find out how a couple went about entering the Columbus Day contest for 1992. Two hours later, a man with his hair combed forward to cover his baldness, dressed in the old-fashioned bureaucratic style, wearing a blue eyeshade and sleeve garters, listened distractedly to my parents' request:

“Gosh, there are sooo many contests…”

“Yes, but this is the Christopher Columbus Contest, arranged for October 12, 1992—this year…”

“Of course, but, you know, there are lots of contests every day…”

“There certainly are, but there is only one Columbus Contest…”

“Are you sure of that, sir?”

“Of course I am, and so should you be, if you know what you're doing…”

“Now don't you get nasty with me, young fellow … Next!”

“The next person is my wife, who will ask you the same question: about the Christophers Contest…”