Christopher Unborn (70 page)

“What the hell was that! I can't see a thing! I almost killed you, you idiot!”

The driver's voice screams from the truck, he leans out a face that looks like a made-up clown; it's a white skull wearing enormous black glasses. Irritated, he takes off his baseball cap and shows his hair, which has no color, not even white.

“Help, help a poor devout girl, show mercy, sir, says the clown Colasita Sánchez, kneeling before the albino driver, the girl bathed in scales of mercury, and the driver opens the door, helps her to her feet, while she points to my father: “And my friend, too. Won't you give us a ride? Jesus, Patron of the Needy, will love you for it!”

12

Inside the border checkpoint between Mexamerica North and Baja Oklahoma, the immigration agent, Mazzo Balls, stares attentively at the infrared screen that detects heat from human bodies. Tonight the screen is blank. No heat waves activate the detection device and none shows up as a ghost-like image on the screen. Nevertheless, Mazzo Balls's sixth sense tells him that there are ghosts crossing the forbidden frontier tonight, just as there are every night. The exception does not prove the rule—a maxim they taught him in his training course for interdicting illegal aliens. The invasion from the South is constant, unstoppable, a flood. It takes place at all hours.

Tonight would be the first night in his entire three-year tour of duty (a solitary posting in this no-man's-land out on the Texas plains) in which he would not detect at least one Mexican, Honduran, or Salvadoran trying to sneak into Baja Oklahoma, not happy with the nice reception arranged for him in Mexamerica, that version of the Polish Corridor between Mexico and the United States, which supposedly declared itself independent from both countries, although in reality it served the interests of both, absorbing eighty percent of the illegal aliens that used to sneak into Texas, California, the Midwest, and the Great Lakes states …

Agent Mazzo Balls was the most zealous enforcer of the final version of the Simpson–Nobody law, which, in exchange for metaphysical control over the U.S. frontier, sanctioned fines and prison terms for employers of illegals. Foreseeably, this punishment was applied indiscriminately to anyone who employed dark-skinned workers, whether they were U.S. citizens or not, and ended up (also foreseeably) forcing every traveler to carry first an identity card, then a passport, and finally being able to move only within hermetically sealed zones—just like South Africa. Blocking the entrance and employment of Latin American laborers into the United States not only heightened the social crisis in Mexico and Central America but brought about the collapse of the labor market in the United States. The absence of Hispanic workers in hospitals, restaurants, transportation, farming, and manufacturing left a horrible vacuum which, contrary to the laws of physics and the baroque (noted our Uncle Fernando Benítez with a bitter smile), was not filled by anyone: no one wanted those jobs, but everyone had to take a step down as far as getting loans, good salaries, and jobs was concerned, in order to disguise the labor shortage.

All this (Don Fernando would have wanted to warn the city and the world) had to contribute to pauperization and the current disintegration of the States in the Union, with no one winning anything: how could Uncle Fernando explain all this to the pair of blind young Indians who one day turned up at the house of the blackboards on the way to their chimerical goal: Chicago, the city of the big shoulders, far from the fatality of poverty, sickness, and tradition, breaking the circle of their age-old destiny. Don Fernando foresaw a catastrophe for the young couple (the girl, remember, your mercies, made pregnant at the same time as my mother, she bearing a baby who would be my contemporary, olé!).

*   *   *

Now I foresee: the day we meet Uncle Fernando again, he will tell us what probably happened: Mazzo Balls cannot believe that the greasers have skipped a night in their attempt to slip through the rat trap, which is emblazoned with a huge sign in Gothic letters:

VOTE WITH YOUR FEET

and just to give himself the satisfaction, he orders the service helicopter to take a look and see if there aren't any illegals crossing the border. It'd be a miracle! A peaceful night! Silent night, holy night! hums Mazzo Balls, his Miller Lite in one hand, his unlit Marlboro dangling from his lips, his feet perched on the console, and his favorite TV program on:
The Forsyte Saga.
The series transports him to another era, like a fairy tale: how Mazzo would have liked living in Edwardian England, with butlers, kitchen boys, and parlor maids running up- and downstairs all day long!

But it wouldn't be tonight: the helicopter takes off and the pilot radios an urgent call to Mazzo Balls, listen, shithead, did your detector break down on you? What made you think there weren't any Spies? I put on my night-vision glasses, the ones activated by moonlight, and I hope you realize that it's a clear, starry night, and I'm following two, a man and a woman, I'll describe them to you since your fucked-up screen can't pick them up: the two of them are wearing straw hats, white outfits, all ragged, both barefoot, the miserable rats, they're carrying something that looks like a supermarket bag, or it might be a shoulder bag, hanging down on one side, they're staggering as if they're drunk, scratched up by the wires, as if they don't see them, do you hear me, Mazzo? It's the first time in my life that I turned these searchlights on greasers and they don't automatically look up or get scared shitless when they see me with my black mask on and my robot eyes, they think I'm Darth Vader, hahaha, dazzled or covering their eyes with one arm, listen, fat man, this time we're going to arrest them, right? What do you say, jerk-off? And Mazzo Balls flushed with rage and shame and said into the microphone no, you know that it isn't worth the trouble to arrest them, and we don't have the funds to pay for the gas to send them to Norman, but we do have funds to pay for the gas in this stupid chopper? asked the pilot. That's right, answered Mazzo, that's the way the funds are distributed, you have gas, you get the good part, stop complaining, the highway patrol doesn't have a cent. Well, I'm a son of a bitch if I don't feel like giving away my gasoline so we can capture this pair of savages, you should see them, Mazzo, they look like Powhatan and Pocahontas or something like that, we would have wiped them out around here years ago, savages, barefoot, they don't seem to see me, Mazzo, but they sure do hear me, she's got her hands over her ears, and he's waving his arms around as if he were scaring off a horsefly or a swarm of bees, listen, Mazzo, check it out, he thinks I'm a bee, hahaha, buzzbuzzbuzz, how did that song about the flight of the bumblebee go? an old radio program used it as its theme song, buzzbuzzybuzz, hahaha, I'm gonna drop down and really scare 'em, they don't seem to see me, these stupid Indians, but they know I'm here, uh-oh, her ripped skirt's blowing up, Jesus, she's knocked up, the slut, they can't stop screwing and having kids, these pigs, the woman's disgusting, she must be eight months gone, her gut's almost as big as yours, Mazzo Balls, hahaha, that swollen, Christ, but not from Miller Lite, like you, but with one more little brown greaser, another shitass who's here to take the food out of our mouths and steal another American's job, walkin' in here like it was their own home, Jesus, the woman's stuffed with another little easy-livin' fucker! they're takin' rocks out of their bag, rocks, haha, they're gonna chase me away with rocks, Mazzo! rocks against the chopper! Who do they think they are, Sitting Bull? Viva technology! Listen, Mazzo, this is getting cute, I wish you were here, I swear this is the best battle I ever saw since they cut off General Custer's balls at the battle of the Little Bighorn, did you ever see Ronald Reagan in
Santa Fe Trail
on the Late Show? haha, well I'm gonna get even for Custer, I'm gonna blow away this pair of Indians, I've been asking for a license to kill for over a year now, but I'm takin' matters into my own hands here, haha … Mazzo, they hit me on the head, Mazzo, can ya see me? Mazzo, the rock's blinded me, what an eye that guy's got, can't ya see me, Mazzo? If only the Congress had bought you an infrared 'scope like the one they have at Sandy Ego so you could see at night, track down the illegals, see them under the midnight sun, Mazzo, Mazzo, I'm comin' down, they're … Mazzo, do ya read me?… Mazzo…?

Sitting on his splendid backside, Mazzo Balls looked through his window at the desolate frontier and saw the helicopter drop swiftly, then spin madly, and crash in a ball of fire.

Just before the crash, Mazzo looked at his screen for any sign of the couple: they produced no heat whatsoever. But the helicopter certainly did—the needles were jumping off the scale, and the screen filled with an orange glow.

One day, Uncle Fernando Benítez will tell us that on the Baja Oklahoma frontier a strange man received the blind Indian couple, doffed his bowler (although they could not see that courteous gesture), and with his other hand straightened his starched butterfly collar. With a gesture of his gloved hand and an innocent sparkle in his big black insomniac and persecuted eyes, he said: Welcome to the Grand Theater of Oklahoma.

Then this tall, thin dark man, who resembled a question mark, pointed to a place far away on the plain where a mirage appeared, that is, it had to be a mirage: a circus tent, a papier-mâché Arc de Triomphe, a circle of flags fluttered by the wind blowing over the prairie. The tall, sleepless man called the two Baltic poets, the extremely pale man and woman, so that they could help the blind Indians. Take them to live in the round house and then bring them to the Grand Theater so they can tell their dreams there, said the man with the bowler and walking stick, who had ears like Nosferatu, trembling as if he already knew that the two Indians from the plateau of the blind tribe dreamed everything they could not see:

“I hope you get your heart's desire, that you reach your goal, that your dreams become reality!” said the man in the bowler.

“Let's go to the round house,” said the Baltic poet in Nahuatl to the Indian.

“Let's go,” answered the Indian. “Let's go with my wife and my unborn son.”

“Let's go,” said the woman poet, taking the new arrivals by the hand in the Baja Oklahoma night, the mirages dissipated by now. “We're going to your house. My name is Astrid. My husband's is Ivar. But that's another story. Let's go.”

And the Indian couple: We have nothing, we've come home, this land was always ours, we passed through here on our way south, one day a long time ago when we first walked on this land, do you remember, woman? We've brought our son to be born on our land, not strange land, not the frontier: our land, the North, the place of meetings.

13

It turns out that I, Christopher, am capable of finding relationships and analogies (I don't divine things: I relate things, make things similar!) others don't see because they have forgotten them. For example, all I have to do is establish the relationship between a couple on the run, two blind Indians from the mesa visited one day by my Uncle Fernando, she pregnant like my mother, he in search of something better like my father (see how I keep my faith in you, pro-gen-i-tor!), and the Indian fetus perhaps imagining my parents just as I imagine his. Accordingly, I establish the relationship between that couple in flight and the disunited couple constituted by my dad and mom: looking at the two Indians on the frontier between Mexamerica and Baja Oklahoma, I see my parents crossing other frontiers, and thus I conclude, in the first place, that we are always in frontier situations, either exiting or entering, as in stage directions—enter Hamlet and Ophelia—exeunt Quijote and Dulcinea, etc. But, the reader exclaims indignantly, your parents aren't even together, each one is in a different corner of the woods, one in Montesinos's cave, the other in El Toboso, we left your mother a hostage in the bosom of Hipi Toltec's Nahuatl-speaking family, with you (inevitably) in her belly, sharing with them (with Them) a dinner of cactus salad and orange slices (Plato's banquet in a somber thieves' den: by the way, what page are you on, Mom?), while your father climbed up into the truck of the albino driver, Bubble Gómez, which Colasa Sánchez had flagged down with tricks worthy of Claudette Colbert, of enchanting memory: your father in the company of the Discalced Carmelite dazzled by the jukebox lights and the pictures of Guadalupe, Virgin, Thatcher, Margaret, and of Doctor and Mother, so where's the comparison, Christopher (finally you wake up, Reader, and you ask me something!)? Only this one, I note, I newt:

We're all different, but it's good that we resemble one another as well. In this world, everything is different, but only if everything is related to everything else. Readers, I don't know another secret to be truer after my eight months of gestation: we've always got to be in the situation where difference is in tension with sameness. We are recognized because we are different, but also because we are similar I, Christopher, am likely to be recognized because of the form in which I share and admit the sameness of my gestures and my words with those of others. We human beings are not the only animals who need and recognize the scattered members of our species: the lamb, ladies and gentlemen, can always recognize his mother (who happens to be a female) in an anonymous flock of one hundred animals.

In the same way, I recognize, from my solar center, which orders establishes hierarchies, yet is most free, my distant father and my infinitely close mother and I join them in my vision as one with the pair of illegal Indians, and I'll stake my reputation on it:

My mother Angeles is sitting in the cave of tin water tubs and cardboard that belongs to Hipi & Family, bereft of hope, when suddenly an unusual disturbance resounds in the jailed night and the fires of the circular wall of garbage join together and run like the proverbial scalded cat. (Do proverbial cats have nine lives?) (Or should those who keep proverbial cats as pets be tickled with a cat-o'-nine-tales?) Don't forget, dear Readers, that the vast Cittá del Messico is totally surrounded by garbage dumps, its genetic chain is a circular mountain of trash dumps all linked together as if to announce to the city: Garbage is Your Destiny. And now it seems that the foreseeable is happening: