Christopher Unborn (76 page)

Who are we? Who are you, Mom? Angeles? Agueda?

Both of them, son, both. I learned to be both.

How many of us are there, Mom?

Just three, son, the three of us, reconciled, with fewer illusions but with infinitely more tenderness.

Where are we, Mom?

Back in Acapulco, son, giving thanks because you are going to be born.

When, Mom, when?

Right now, son, between Sunday, October 11 (we are on the beach), and Monday, October 12 (we are in Acapulco), 1992.

Who is with us, Mom?

Our friend Egg, the Orphan Huerta, and Tomasito, the second Tomasito, the chauffeur who drove us from Oaxaca and who turned Uncle Homero over to Uncle Fernando, who was waiting for us in the Chilpancingo airport, where that day they were holding the funerary ceremonies for a local favorite son, Don Ulises López, and his family, who etc. etc., loading Don Homero forcibly into the broken-down two-motor plane of the Institute for Indian Studies with Don Fernando and heading for new horizons while Tomasito took charge of the Shogun and headed for Acapulco.

And the little sisters?

An albino trucker picked them up at the Chilpancingo exit. He said he would bring them to Mexico City. He told them to sit in the rear, where they'd be much cooler.

And us?

Mom, I see a lamp, a burning light above my head, here inside your stomach, a light bathes me and says: Thanks to me you know everything, everything, everything, Chris,

Christopher

Christopher Critic

Christicritic

Christopher Crisis

Christopher Crime

Christopher Incriminated

Chri Chri Christopher

Mother! that light has been there for how long, from when you conceived me, above my little head, and I never saw it until now, Mother, hurry up, don't let that light go out yet, give me a few minutes more of that wisdom, don't take it away from me yet, how it shines, how it shines, how right you were to teach me everything here inside, how right it was for me to learn everything here inside, a burning fire above my little head, that's the origin of the light, a fire that shines and that is consumed inside your plexus and that illuminates my little head, telling me also, Mother:

“Let's never hurt each other. We're all here together.”

I HEAR WHAT IS GONE, WHAT I STILL DO NOT TOUCH

We are facing the sea, at Revolcadero beach, facing the Pacific Ocean. There are twelve dead dolphins on the beach: a perfect dozen dolphins murdered by the contamination in the bay and the insane swirling of El Niño sent from Peru.

Twelve white dolphins implacably turning purple as if they were losing their innocence, which was identical to their beauty: their tender eyes, marine brothers of paschal sweetness; their smooth bodies, changing color; and their open jaws: naïve sharks. At our feet.

The Oriental boy turns his back on the setting sun. He has taken off his chauffeur's cap, revealing a youthful head and straight hair, he wears a black uniform that gives him an air somewhat like that of an admiral in the Japanese Navy on the eve of Pearl Harbor and he tenderly takes the hand of Orphan Huerta, naked at his side, both of them looking at my father and mother (and me inside her belly!) and at Egg barefoot with his trousers rolled up and his shirt open, revealing his hairless, almost feminine breasts, Egg does not look at us nor does he look at the couple made up of the boy dressed in black and the naked Orphan: Egg looks toward the ocean, where one day the other Tomasito sailed, dead. He thinks perhaps about the symmetry of the speared destinies: the first Tomasito in the sea Grandfather Rigoberto in the mountains, and Hipi Toltec incinerated in the upland, and the bombs of Reverend Payne in the Gulf: the end of the world that came to die there, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, cradle and prison, mother and stepmother of the world for five centuries: now they do not look toward the Gulf, the Antilles, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean: now they look toward the Pacific, and the Oriental boy takes the hand of his brother the Orphan Huerta, my brother, my brother he calls him again and again, I could not come for you until the right moment, I knew that my brother had to carry out his destiny and that his destiny was inseparable from that of all of you and your child: you had to reunite, you and your child, who were separated, so that all of us could be together on this beach and so that I could reveal myself to you:

“He's my lost brother,” said Orphan Huerta with an astonished seriousness. “The lost boy I told you about … He's come back for me …

And for you, said the Oriental boy, whom it was difficult to imagine, as my parents were trying to do, in a nameless slum, a lost city in the D.F. adipose, eddyfeet calcified running from the settlement of squatters burned down by Doña Lucha Plancarte de López: and it was he, vomited out by the subway on the corner of Calle Génova and Liverpool; nevertheless, it was from there he emerged and now it was this: and he gave his hand to his brother: and he extended his other hand to my parents (and to me), come with us, let's go to Pacífica, the New World is no longer here, it's always elsewhere, celebrate the Quincentennial by leaving behind your Old World of corruption, injustice, stupidity, egoism, arrogance, disdain, and hunger, we've come for you: here is our hand, the child will be born at midnight, as was written, quickly one day, very soon the ships will come for us and we will leave for Pacífica, Pacífica awaits you, there you are necessary, here you are superfluous, said Orphan Huerta's brother, don't hand your about-to-be-born son over to the unsalvageable horror of Mexico, save him, save yourselves: come to a better world of which a part of Mexico already belongs, the whole Pacific coast from Ixtapa north, the whole Pacific basin from California to Oregon, Canada and Alaska, all of China and Japan, the peninsulas, the archipelagos, the islands, Oceania: a basin of 108 million square miles, three billion inhabitants, half the world's population, working together, three-fourths of the world's commerce, almost all of the world's advanced technology, the maximum conjunction of labor, technical know-how, and political will in human history, said the Lost Boy, found boy, intoning all this as if it were a psalm, using his hands with their long fingers, come with us to the New World of Pacífica, turn your backs on the tyrannical Atlantic which fascinated and dominated us for five centuries: end your foolish fallacious fascistic fascination with the Atlantic world, turn your backs on that past look to the future because it's there we men and women are triumphing who simply said this to ourselves, only this: Behind the mask of glory is the face of death; let us renounce glory, force, domination, let us save the West from itself by teaching it once again to deny power to power, to stop admiring force, to open its arms to the enemy (yes, sweetie, look at him now), to choose life over death: We have enough to be moderately happy, in the name of what are we going to sacrifice the technical means we have now of achieving abundance, peace, intellectual creation, in the name of what? We asked ourselves that and we got no answer: we had it all in our hands, technology, resources, inventiveness, labor, we have what we need to invent a new world—the Orphan Huerta naked with his eyes closed turned away from the sea imitates with his hands the movements of his brother's hands—beyond the old frontiers separating nations, classes, families, races, sexes: why don't we use it? What's stopping us? We decided that all this was possible in a new community, not a utopia, because in Pacífica we never lose sight of the fact that we will never escape destiny, that was the West's madness, to think they had dominated destiny and that progress would eliminate tragedy (Nietzschevoice); that's how tragedy became a crime, by taking advantage of the dream of consciousness, sentencing tragedy to take refuge like a hunted animal in a concentration camp and to appear anonymous and bloody in historical massacres, without finding its place in the community and saying to history: there are too many exceptions to progress, happiness is capable of attacking itself (fe-de-rico!), we have to admit what it denies us in order to know we are complete, our face is that of the other, we don't know ourselves if we don't know what we aren't and we admit it: we are unique because we are alike: in Pacífica we helped both the rapid advance of technology and the tragic awareness of life by taking seriously what a novel, a poem, a film, a symphony, a sculpture says: we decided that the works of culture were as real in the world as a mountain or a transistor, that there is no real life without a still life to compensate for it in art, no living present with a dead past, no acceptable future that does not allow exceptions to progress, and no technological progress that does not incorporate the warnings of art:

*   *   *

My father and my mother saw the two brothers—one dressed as a Japanese chauffeur, the other nude, holding hands—begin to say all these things in unison, in a chorus whose setting was the crepuscular ocean: my parents saw what was behind the brothers: Angel, Angeles: my father and mother looked at each other and their eyes shone, they understood:

Others give us their being.

When I complete you, Angeles.

I complete you, Angel.

They exchanged the gift of their perfectible existence the way the two brothers did and the four of them now sought (the five of them: I inside my mother's womb; the six of them: Egg stops staring sadly toward the distant horizon and turns toward us, doubtful as to whether he should join with the brothers or with us: he waits, a big buddy, he waits a bit, we're coming, we're understanding):

Come with us to Pacífica, we can't force you, we merely suggest it, although we can tell you that in all this, friend Angel, friend Angeles, as yet unborn child Christopher, there is something definitive, something inexorable: friend Angel, in your house of bright colors in Tlalpan there are many portraits of men named Rutherford and Planck, Einstein and Pauli, Bohr and Broglie, Heisenberg, above all Heisenberg, your favorite, Angel, isn't that right?

To observe all phenomena simultaneously is impossible: we must
choose
a time and place within the vast continuum which it is given us to imagine because it exists in reality: our slice of the global phenomenon is our limit but it is also our liberty: it is what we can affect, for better or for worse: what we can see, touch, it is only one face of reality: the position or the movement of something, one or another, but never both at the same time: that's our limit, but it's also our power:

We depend on the vision of others to complete our own vision: we are half eye, half mouth, half brain, half face; the other is I because it completes me:

The two brothers slowly touched each other's face, each one with his eyes closed, each one speaking now in the sudden tropical night with modulated alternations, a surprising hymn:

Knowing this was understanding at the same time our grandeur and our servitude, our freedom and our dependence, and by knowing them, it was possible for us to attain what our understanding of limits would seem to have forbidden us: precisely because one only knew his position perfectly while the other only knew his movement perfectly. When the two united, each knew what the other didn't know and they could, complete, be what neither was alone (the Pacific is a horizontal flame; the sky moves quickly to take possession of it, extinguish it: we do not see the light that is born elsewhere when here everything becomes darkness): in that way, we manage in Pacífica to conciliate destiny with technology, unite what we know spiritually with what we know technically and make a new life because we don't control freedom but we do dominate technology:

Come with us, said the two brothers, and my parents, turning to look at each other, marveled as, in the renewed Acapulco dusk, the memorious port of his childhood, the happy scale of his vacations, was reborn in my father's eyes: my parents saw themselves splendid as they saw the tongues of fire on the horizon like a literal message from the ocean: the distance of the voices of the other side came closer in the presence of the magician who came from the sea, the Orphan Huerta's brother: the Lost Boy now found them, he returned on the voyage opposite to that of the Europeans, not Columbus's caravel but the China galleon, not Cortés's brigantine but the Philippines galleon: the other half of our face, our blind eye, seeing once again: we have two horizons and a single face and the Lost Boy was saying: No one can catch up to us technologically, we've gone beyond the fifth generation of computers, what your parents wanted without knowing it, Angel, we've left behind the four serial, arithmetic generations of computers that simply added up one operation after another, in order to enter the generation of computers that process various currents of information simultaneously: Look—said the Orphan Huerta with a strange return to his habitually nasal voice—before, it was only possible to put one tortilla at a time on the fire, heat it, flip it, and toss it into the basket: now, see? we can heat up all the tortillas at the same time, all at once, flip them all over at once, and put them all in the basket at the same time

the multitrack mind of Mamma Mia

reading Plato getting my old man hot in Aca

the inconsumable taco of my Grandparents Palomar

the Curies of Tlalpan

antimatter: life not death

Federico Robles Chacón wants to dictate two letters at the same time

In Pacífica we've already won the technological race, and for that very reason we do not want power: we offer well-being: whoever dominates computers dominates the economy dominates the world: we don't want to dominate but to share: come with us, Angel, Angeles, Christopher yet-to-be-born, leave the corruption and death of Mexico behind, leave the interminable misery and the ageless vices of your fatherland in order to save it someday, pulling it little by little, piece by piece, out of its corrupt stupidity and its historical madness: the two reunited brothers spoke in chorus, now our buddy as well, and with them my father and mother: and I on the point of being born.