Christopher Unborn (54 page)

“Cut it out. Don't change the subject on me. Remember: we went to Aca to finish off people like her.”

“Her? Who do you mean?”

“Penny! People like her! Symbols, man! But what are you so interested in…?”

“I'm reading an article by Philip Roth, that's all.
Writers of Newark, Unite!
You have nothing to lose but your baseball gloves…!”

“Bull. Listen to me now: why are you getting so nervous?”

“It's what I was saying: what women love to do is make men feel guilty. It's your mission in life.”

“The mission of all women?”

“Right.”

“But not of all men?”

“No. Not us. Men are loyal and sincere with each other. We never say bad things about our friends.”

“Know something? I wish I had a notebook to write down all these things we say to each other, but only if it could be in ancient Chichimeca. What bull!”

“Not at all. What you want is for people to
know
what you accuse us of. Don't kid yourself.”

“And what would you accuse me of?”

“Me? Nothing. I'm merely alienated by the means of reproduction.”

“Is that a fact? Well, just think about this baby that seems to be weighing so heavily on your mind…”

“I never said anything like that!”

“You did!” she shouted, pulling out her rollers, sitting there against the headboard while Einstein sadly stared from the wall, sticking his tongue out at her.

She throws the rollers at my father, and they go crack, crack, crack against the open pages of
The New York Review of Books
and drop down onto my father's lap, piling up on the fly of his pajamas.

“Just think that I could have had this baby
by myself,
that I could have gone to a sperm bank for famous people and had my baby without your famous contest!”

“The contest!” my highly distracted father suddenly remembered. All he'd been thinking about was conquering Penny López during my mother's pregnancy.

“That's right, I could have gotten sperm from Don Ulises López, your little Penny's daddy, or Minister Robles Chacón, or Julio Iglesias, or Duran Duran, or from Pope John Paul himself, or maybe even from Einstein, sticking his tongue out at me there on the wall. He must have left a little come behind in the refrigerator! Ozom!”

“You wouldn't win the contest, big mouth, because the rules say the baby has to be the child of the
parents
that enter…”

“The mother always knows the child is hers, the father
never
knows:
voilà!
”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I'm not trying to say anything: I'm saying and I repeat and I reiterate and I proclaim: I had the child without you. I don't need you for anything, and besides, the child belongs only to me, no one can prove that it isn't mine, but no one can prove who the father is, and it isn't you, bastard, it isn't you,” said my mother, kneeling on the bed and beginning to throw whatever came to hand at my father's bobbing head, the six volumes of
The Indians of Mexico
by Fernando Benítez, Luis Echeverría's
Charter of the Rights and Obligations of States,
a souvenir ashtray from Tlaquepaque, Fernando del Paso's
Palinurus of Mexico,
and Carlos Fuentes's
Terra Nostra,
finally revealing the color photo of Penny from
Novedades
glued to the page of the New
York Review
article by Philip Roth = jealousy finally made visible, jealousy focused on the palpable object of desire, the blind stare of hatred, all her tenderness and understanding now forgotten, the chalk scattered all over this house filled with blackboards, the photo of Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue, the chamber pot with flowers painted on it left behind by Uncle Homero, my mother shouting I could have had it alone! only the mother knows that the baby is hers! consummating the break with my father that perhaps he wants even more than she, showing to me at this early stage of life how delicate dreams are and how easily images are destroyed: leaving me unsheltered, an orphan of the storm, just when I need them most because, as I listen to them, I realize that the world is always an act with two performers, equally determined by the one who moves and speaks and the one who hears and receives: my body.

my body

is the system

with which I am going to answer

the physical world, I shall answer the world

by creating the world, I shall be the author of what precedes me,

by answering it, no matter what they do, whether they love

each other, hate each other, separate, come together,

I shall have to answer with my body and my words,

answer the world they are creating for me

creating,
careful!
as soon as I appear

I shall create their world

for them

by answering that world they have created for me. They will not escape without paying the price, they shouldn't even dream of getting away with it, their action, whether it's fighting or being happy, maybe they think that as soon as I appear I will no longer intervene with

word and flesh

to create my world beginning with them, by thus changing their world which they still don't imagine me affecting, their ridiculous squabbles, they don't have a clue, poor jerks!

Here I come!

Careful!

There will be three of us in the world and you will never again be able to act or speak exactly as you did today! just
be careful,
I'm telling you!

           —… nothing, Penny was saying as they went down the ramp, 'cause my mom is one tough bitch and she like says to me better learn now for when you grow up, like you give one of these parvenus an inch and he'll like give you six back, don't turn your back or your front on any of them, yesterday Mommy set fire to the shacks those squatters set up on her property and I think they all went up in smoke like a barbecue and today she like asked Daddy to have my chaperon Ms. Ponderosa shot at the garden wall because she was like the one who made the deal with your service, the gay old freak, the ya know reeall ahhshole, and had all those reeally yuucky mummies come as guests, well I mean, ya know, I mean ooooh, and then that cake made of shit, I mean that was uh like uh soooo grotty, ya know, but I like went down on my knees and begged them not to shoot her and my daddy decided it would be better just to send her back to Segovia, that's worse than death, must be like Chilpancingo, where my poor daddy came from, and like here's your bedroom, young man, sleep tight now, and don't even think of trying anything with me, I'm out of your range, scuzzbag, buzz off.

Angel watched Penny López's bouncing little head as if in a dream, as it gradually disappeared with its shiny carrot-colored curls, her tiny painted eyebrows and her eyelids coated with gold dust, her eyes of oneiric depths and her face alive with twitches that turned out to be its saving grace: it was, en fin, an isthmus of beauty and emotion, or, as my father punned to himself: her strawberry lips, her cute little perfumed ears, pierced by orchid-shaped earrings, her pneumatic gait—Michelin legs, Pirelli thighs, Goodrich (of course?) ass, pulling out of his life: he walked into the aforementioned Gloria Grahame bedroom, named thus, said my film-loving father to himself, because it looked like a set from a fifties film noir: anemic Art Deco, devoid of personality, conceived to rebuff any ideological identification either with President Eisenhower or with Senator McCarthy: a bed with a satin spread …

My father, say I in imaginary complicity with him, fell into a slough of frustration, incompetence, and reduced social, moral, and sexual scale: Penny communicated all this to him, but here he was, the conservative rebel, the window washer of the filthy building that was Mexico in '92, the purifier of the once Sweet and now Debauched Fatherland, on his knees in front of this pretentious bonbon from Las Lomas del Sol, and what else: well, the old boy reacted—how could he not if he was going to supply himself with a measure of self-justification. Out loud he said:

“I am going to screw Penny! That's why I'm here!”

“But, honey, why don't you just screw me?” said a voice through the door while invisible but inflammatory fingernails scratched with a singular, invitational rhythm.

Angel put his face close to the door: he smelled a whiff of seafood mixed with Joy de Patou.

The door opened and his expected, unwelcome, but exciting neighbor appeared in all her glory, which she'd mail-ordered from Fredericks of Hollywood: a transparent black peignoir whose wide sleeves were trimmed with raven feathers, the neck idem, and underneath, a pastry-crust bra, just waiting to be ripped off, layer by layer as if it were a biscuit, and stiletto-heeled, black-velvet slippers, black stockings held up by a garter belt, beneath which the lace panties split right over the jackpot, where was embroidered:

FOND HOPES
!

When my father gave the same explanation to my mother that he'd earlier given to Penny López on that corkscrew staircase, the words were the same, gentle Readers, but it all sounded different. For example, all that about leaving my mom because she was his ideal woman and he needed Penny to keep his rebelliousness alive, his hatred, seemed insanely funny to us, because where did he get off coming around telling us that he was leaving for ideological reasons when it was nothing but sex. It was like adding a tiny lie to the huge lie that he said he was struggling against. I don't know how aware my father Angel was that his rebellion was merely a romantic pose, which is what my mother thinks; but she tells him his explanation doesn't matter because for her he's always been a different sort of man and that therefore she naturally sees him that way, a different sort of man, and she doesn't have to come up with complicated explanations.

In all this, Angeles fears that Angel is using her own desires against her, without understanding that she shares them with him; this is what hurts us most in my dad's betrayal (what else should we call it?)—setting yourself up in the Gloria Grahame bedroom in the López mansion and enjoying the favors of Doña Lucha without realizing that my mother's words were not idle talk, that she was with him even in this business but that she couldn't tell him for fear of humiliating him:

“I didn't sleep all night I was so happy I met you”—hoping that he would answer her with her words, which he had picked up in order to make them belong to both of them:

“I was there too, remember?” and culminating with something like a chorus in which, poco fa, my own little voice chimed in:

“Let's never hurt each other.”

But nothing like that happened. She was left alone with a great big belly (with me inside it), while we knew nothing about Mr. Angel Palomar y Fagoaga except what he told us the afternoon in which he put on his big sincerity act and sprayed us with his absurd pretexts, without realizing (the jerk) that my mother's halo, which he said he was defending, was quite extinguished, battered, worn out. The worst thing my father said to us was that they had created me with the contest in mind but that she was certain the contest was nothing more than a fraud perpetrated by the government, and if the contest was in fact a farce, the superbastard went on, then it didn't matter that he was abandoning my mom and me. Was the reason for getting pregnant the contest? This particular insult, which to me seemed unpardonable, my mother took quite serenely, and although he never became so rude as to tell her that Penny was nothing more than a passing fancy and that she should let the sickness run its course and he would be back by August or September, in any case, before she gave birth, she actually accepted both maternity and solitude, even though I shouted to her from the vast silent echo of my six months of conception: “When a woman's left alone, a vacuum is created, and anything can fill it!” But perhaps she didn't believe that I was filling it to the brim (I adore her!). She could understand the fear in a man who doesn't dare abandon his wife because he feels unsure about conquering (not loving, merely conquering) another woman, and she preferred that he take a chance, that he not get frustrated—taking the risk that he might not return at all. But if he came back, she would accept him again, hoping that he would realize it was she who let him go. That was her way of loving him: letting him go.

To me this seemed like the dumbest thing in the world, a harebrained idea that was unworthy of my mother and me, so from that moment on I decided to work by means of the mysterious powers I might lose the moment I was born, so that my mother, belly and all, with me and all, would make an instant cuckold of my father Angel. Like a real Boy Scout, I started looking around, and quite soon, without my having to persuade him in any way, the correspondent turned up, although in a very peculiar way. You can't have everything.

*   *   *

As I was saying, she was left alone with me swelling her belly while he lived the rebellious illusion of penetrating the sanctum sanctorum of the López family. What a blast! as Doña Lucha López would say. But, by the way, how do we know now what's being said and in what way? Easy: the Lópezes sent Ms. Ponderosa off to Segovia on a fatal Iberia flight which naturally crashed when it reached Barajas Airport in Madrid: poof! and there goes the dream of a lifetime and the secret of the chaperon—to whit: to be possessed passionately by the chef de cuisine Médoc d'Aubuisson (during whose absence these tragedies took place), through force majeure that microchip-in-Ulises's-papaya business was interrupted. To sum up: when Don Ulises told Doña Lucha that the sugar they sprinkled on his papaya gave him double his normal sexual strength, the lady stole the tube of granules and served them to my dad every day at breakfast; my errant progenitor's internal information ended up in the Samurai computer of the disconcerted minister Don Federico Robles Chacón, who at first couldn't understand what the fuck was going on with the truculent Don Ulises, why the functionary and financier's mind was sending him bizarre messages such as: