Christopher Unborn (61 page)

She looked at herself, she liked what she saw, she sighed, Concha Toro, she walked out on the stage near the bar and sang:

You walked past me with cruel indifference

Your eyes didn't even turn toward me …

They loved her, she loved herself. She told a famous joke:

“When sex is good, it's good. But when it's bad, it's still pretty good.”

The old folks laughed and elbowed each other:
Maybe tonight
…? Singing that night under the submarine lights, blue and shimmering, and afterwards back in her dressing room, alone with Fango Dango, once again before her mirror, she analyzed her personality, her success. What had gone into it? Her success was loving to love, loving to be loved, but making clear with the cruel lyrics of the bolero that her tenderness was merely a crack in her indifference: loving but without giving herself up,

You walked past me with cruel indifference

Your eyes didn't even turn toward me …

What she wanted was what her frozen, banal, pedantic family with aquiline noses and pink skin and cruel gray watery eyes disdained the most: a Latin friendship, complete, abusive, sticky, immortal, cliquish, noisy. She gave Fango Dango a vicious kick and his howling filled the empty cabaret, but then she hugged him, petted him, begged him to forgive her, and, as she did on all other nights before turning out the light and getting into her nineteenth-century, canopied, red damask curtained bed, she wrote with lipstick on the mirror:

SHIT, LONG LIVE CHILE
!

14

Concha Toro's life of wandering and change suffered a new transformation—perhaps the most important of all—the night of May 10, 1992, Mother's Day of the Year of the Quincentennial, which for her evoked her beloved southern seas.

She was singing sweetly, her eyes closed:

Through the palms that peacefully sleep

The silver moon cuddles in the tropical sea

And just when she opened her arms to her audience of senior citizens and opened her eyes to say:

… my arms open hungrily, looking for you …

her eyes met those of that young man, much younger than she, eyes that from that moment on she could never escape, not even to save herself, because, as Concha knew, anyone who looked away from those eyes ran the risk of being demolished by them. Concha Toro trembled, stopped feeling nostalgic about Chile, felt for the first time she was in Mexico: that face, that mustache, those teeth that came directly from the movies she'd seen as a girl in the Cine Santiago: Pedro Armendáriz, Jorge Negrete, Marlon Brando as Zapata…!

In the night the scent of flowers evokes your perfumed breath

sang Concha with her eyes closed, but when she opened them the wandering light of the bar fell on the woman sitting next to that mexaphysical guerrillero, and no, he had not brought his white-haired mom to celebrate Mother's Day; he'd brought a strange girl, strange but very young, dressed as a Carmelite, her bosom covered with scapularies, her complexion the color of cinnamon tea.

I feel that you are near to me,

but it's a lie, an illusion

sang Concha Toro, née María Inez Aldunate Larraín y Cruchaga Errázuriz, alias Dolly Lama, full of despair and bitterness. Then she fainted, right onstage.

When she was a kid in Chillán she'd always wanted to play hooky, cut class, fool around, and now she was being carried piggyback, as if she were on vacation, by the only person in the cabaret strong enough to do it. A man was carrying her from the stage to her dressing room, but in her dreams the cowboy Randolph Pope was once again carrying her in his arms to a spot behind the wheat field on the riverbank where he was going to deprive her of what he wanted most and she needed least: now a tall, powerful, dark, ultramustachioed man was carrying her as if he were pushing a cannon up a hill: she clung to the man's neck passionately, and when he deposited her in her nineteenth-century bed, she, instead of singing a bolero, recited the most beautiful love poem, the most memorable love poem, and, she said to herself, the most Chilean love poem as well:

I loved her, and she, at times, loved me as well …

The tall powerful, dark, ultramustachioed man said:

“I, too, wanted to be a writer.”

“What happened?” whimpered Concha.

“The envious frustrated me.”

“You don't look frustrated to me,” said Concha coquettishly, as she looked at the girl dressed as a nun.

“This is my daughter Colasa.”

“Ah!” sighed Concha, with no frustration whatsoever.

“I had her when I was very young.”

“Colasa Sánchez, at your service, ma'am.”

Ma'am stared with an intensity worthy of the bolero “Think About Me” at the girl's father. “And what's your name?”

“Matamoros Moreno, putting both of us at your service,” said the man. Concha Toro fainted again.

*   *   *

Don't forget now, dear Readers, that in the meanwhile, no matter how many things go on out there, inside here we aren't exactly sitting around killing time: add up all the things that have gone on outside: love, disasters, jokes, trips, politics, economics, language, fashion, myths, customs, and laws, and compare all that with my simple and essential activity: my hands, for example, have grown more rapidly than the arms they're attached to, they first appear with the fingers looking like buds; the last phalanx has emerged from the palms of my hands, my fingertips have formed, little tiny nails have appeared on all my fingers and toes, and the transparent and cartilaginous skeleton I had in my first four months is now bone and I move my arms and legs energetically: I have little accidents, I scratch my face with my nails unintentionally; I have pleasures: I suck my thumb incessantly; I make discoveries: I can touch my face.

Ah, my face: there is no greater accomplishment in my small organism! I couldn't envisage a greater visage! First, I have a cranium, which is the refuge of my brain. It was made of transparent skin; in the seventh week a huge vascular tide spread toward the crown to protect and feed my little, recently born brain, which is now floating in a fluid bath (never let it dry out, your lordships!) and absorbs all the catastrophes outside my delicate mechanism (and you tell me if there haven't been lots of them in these first seven months of mine!). How strong my subcutaneous tissue is getting! How the bones of my skull grow, moving toward the crown, but without fusing with it, in order to maintain the exquisite flexibility of my shell, granting me a malleable head which will permit my brain to keep growing: when I'm born, my noggin will not be as large as it will be someday—if I live that long!

But I was talking about my face: I can touch it with my hands! Do you realize what that means, your mercies? I have a face and I can touch it with my hands! My face, which at the beginning was only a bulging brow above my future mouth, soon was focused over the window to my dark soul, my eyes: a retina appeared which became dark, pigmented; a lens and a cornea. The eyelid formed little by little. My ears were very low. My brain shone under my translucent skin. My eyes closed. But they were enormous, and there was a long distance between them. Thick lids covered them. I am blind, ladies and gentlemen! My closed eyes are awaiting eternity! But they are not closed because I am asleep. Just think: I close them but I'm not asleep. My closed lids are merely protecting my eyes, which have not yet finished forming yet. I've taken the veil. I grasp even more firmly on to my umbilical lasso, just as Quasimodo clung to the bell rope at Notre Dame. I never get tangled up no matter how much I swim, no matter how many times I ring the bell: can you hear me, Mom? I can hear you! I hear the world better than ever! I hear your heart, Mother, boomboomboom, it's my turn and my dance, and when I hear your pals' band play rockaztec, believe me, Mom, I only hear, redoubled, intense, the rhythm of your own heart and that of my gestation in your womb:
boomboomboom.

8

No Man's Fatherland

We return to nationality out of love … and poverty. Prodigal sons of a fatherland we don't even know how to define, we begin to observe it. Castilian and Moor, shot through with Aztec …

Ramón López Velarde,
“The Fatherland as Something New”

 

1. Thunderclap

In August the highways of the Republic of Mexico began to echo with rumors that were both expected and unusual: the federal turnpikes, the toll roads, the
frigüeys
as the jeunesse dorée of the Ibero-American School called them, had been maintained in (Egg is telling my mother, educating both of us in the process) a sort of autonomy with respect to the other realities of the nation. To drive on one of these highways, the Pan-American to Mexamerica, the Christopher Columbus to Oaxaca, the Transistémica to the Chitacam Trusteeship, was like heading into a country that belonged to all and to none, a free territory. The highways of the nineties are buffer zones in which all the weight of the newly mutilated Sweet Fatherland resolves itself in a kind of rapid, fleeting freedom—a swift and ephemeral freedom, but a freedom nonetheless. The highway knows no obstacles, like an arrow piercing the air.

At the end of the eighties, CB radios were brought into Mexico from the North, allowing truck drivers to communicate with each other on the superhighways. This further fomented the movement of contraband, drug trafficking, and highway prostitution. Egg told Angeles (and me) that CB culture in the U.S. had developed its own slang, which our long-haul truckers rapidly adapted to the needs of rural, desert, and mountain roads, the yellow basalt and the dusty trees of the Mexican Republic: soon we, too, had our Smokeys, plain brown wrappers, Tijuana Taxis, and bubble-gum tops—called bubble-gómez here. Bubble Gómez also happened to be the name of the young leader of the truck-drivers union. Bubble Gómez, an albino, drove a spectacular eighteen-wheel Leyland seventy-two feet long, with jukebox lights around the windshield, fog lamps on its roof, exhaust pipes that could create darkness at noon in Vulture Gulch, pictures of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mamadoc, and Margaret Thatcher on the dashboard directly opposite the leader's light eyes, which were in turn covered by fabulous wraparound sunglasses. The albino was also surrounded by opaque glass as he drove his British behemoth, which was equipped with the Whistler, the indispensable radar detector he used to warn his colleagues: listen up: speed trap at kilometer 13, pass the H to Chotas, who'll be coming in the other direction, slow down. The CBs were used for more innocent activities as well: three putas are waiting for us at the Palmillas Tamps diner … Or let's all sing and beat the boredom of crossing the Stinko Sierra, or get the dough ready for the Tijuana Taxis who'll be waiting for us at the La Chicharrona exit.

The unfortunate drivers who had no CB or radar were picked off by the Smokeys at strategic points along the highways: they were novices, naïfs. But when it happened to Bubble Gómez himself, one night just a few yards from the Mexamerica border, in Corralitos, Chihuahua, and near the Nuevas Casas Grandes airport, the news spread like wildfire over the CBs, from Palmillas, Chihuahua, to Palmillas, Querétaro, and to Palomaras, Oaxaca, from radio to radio and truck to truck: the Boss has been nabbed!

Bubble Gómez was caught by a plain old Smokey in Chihuahua!

Bubble Gómez's immediate loss of prestige (he must be an asshole!) combined with the general bewilderment (who can take his place?). Instinctively, the drivers tried to find the answer using their CBs, and the answer was waiting for them on every channel, repeated by every voice, running now from south to north, from Palomares Oax to Palmillas Qro to Palmillas Chih, the message was repeated insistently, the slogans offered by a velvety feminine voice, sometimes a virgin's voice, sometimes a whore's voice, listen good buddy in Nuevo León or oye buencuate in Hidalgo. Quite exciting, quite attractive the woman's voice, whoever she is, and again and again that message, which had never gone out before and was now coming through every truck radio:

WHEN YOU DON'T BELIEVE IN ANYTHING
,

WHAT DO YOU HAVE LEFT
?

YOUR HOLY LITTLE MOTHER
!

which became personified, as it should be, in:

TRUCK DRIVER, WHO PROTECTS YOU
?

YOUR LITTLE MOTHER THE VIRGIN
!

and since there was not a single one of these trucks that in addition to its CB and its radar detector did not also have its picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe and often even a blessed rosary hanging right under that picture, sometimes even a candle burning in front of the dark image, the slogan caught on, since the truck drivers heard the word and instantly saw the picture and the picture told them that the word was true and that outside the truck there was nothing more than tumbleweeds and cactus or ravines or bare bluffs: outside, desolation, and here inside, fellow traveler, the comforting warmth of a woman's voice and a message for you:

Blessed are those who drive alone night and day along the highways of Mexico, exposed to all kinds of danger, victims of corruption and immorality, chased by the Smokeys and the Tijuanas, adrift in a sea of stone, dust, and thorns, blessed be the long-haul drivers because they can carry the good news in all directions:

OUR VIRGIN IS NOT ABANDONING US
!

OUR DARK LADY KEEPS WATCH OVER US
!

OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE SHALL RETURN
!

and then in every diner along the way, in every tollbooth, in every melon, crackling, or tepache stand along those endless roads, a woman waited to surreptitiously pass every driver a cassette and the drivers were already prepared to hear that sweet sexy voice, which was now explaining more, saying more “to all those who feel adrift in modern society, hello and good news: Salvation is coming! Don't lose hope! Our little Mother is thinking about you and is sending you an emissary! You will recognize him when you see him because you will recognize the son of our Mother!” Cassette after cassette announced the blessed news: