Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

We celebrated Columbus Day, October 12, 1864, in the city of Chihuahua, and President Juárez spent it reading back issues of newspapers written in English that had arrived from New Orleans, God knows how, but he had memories of that port in Louisiana where he’d been exiled by the dictator Santa Anna and had earned his living by rolling cigars in a tobacco factory (oh, Lord, and now his beloved papers were all rolled up in the Sierra del Tabaco, he thought ironically) and he learned English, just as his children were learning it now in schools in New York.

One item caught his attention: a gringo named E. L. Drake had discovered a new substance by digging sixty-foot wells in western Pennsylvania. According to the article, the substance was extracted from the wells from deep deposits of sedimentary rocks. This material, which occurs both as a liquid and as a gas, read Mr. Juárez, can be readily substituted, in either form, according to Mr. Drake, for whale oil, which is growing scarce, and can supply bright, cheap light to modern cities. Mr. Juárez nodded his dark head, thinking perhaps about the candle stumps that he had to use in these northern villages in order to write at night.

He talked about the discovery with other guests of Mr. Creel in Chihuahua, and an engineer said that the part about light, while certainly important, was not as significant as the use this famous “petroleum” (the name given the new substance) would have in locomotion, in steam engines, in trains, and in factories. In that instant, Susanita, I saw a vision pass through the usually impenetrable gaze, as if he were imagining himself swiftly traveling through the desolation of the Republic, free of the trammels of terrain or climate, both of which were so rough, sweetheart, so hostile to men.

He shook his head; he exiled his dream. If the important thing was to recover the Republic inch by inch, slowly, in love and poverty, perhaps Don Benito Juárez, cutie, managed to imagine himself, why not? flying by plane from Mexico City to El Paso, Texas, with a stopover in Chihuahua; but then he would have lost the country: the idea was to show that the country was ours, that here we were, and that like our native briars we had very deep roots and thorns all over our branches: let’s see anyone try to pull us out, let’s see who was going to come live with us in this penury, not in this fiesta. That was the unrepeatable opportunity as he saw it: “We’ll never have another chance like this in all our history.” Not the oil, Susanita, but dignity. Can you imagine Don Benito Juárez getting rich on the oil boom of the seventies to take off in a Grumman jet to Paris to have a good time, Susy, with a stopover in Las Vegas to play a little poker in the Sands Hotel? Not a chance.

But let’s go back to my dream. My dream started filling up with death. You’ll see. First he found out that his favorite son, Pepe, was sick. All the intuition, all the atavism, all the innate fatality surfaced in this Zapotec disguised as a French lawyer. His Indian fatalism told him, Susy my dear innocent girl, that Pepito was already dead and that no one would tell him so he wouldn’t suffer, already they were treating him like a statue. You should have seen him then in Chihuahua, honey, fearful about his kid, the son he called “my delight, my pride, and my hope.” He fell apart; he said he lost his head and filled his letters with smudges. Then he pulled himself together; but I saw him as a victim of what he thought he’d left behind forever: the Indian sense of fatality. His will took over. He went back to being his old self. No one wrote to him from home. The mail system, an accident in a situation full of accidents.

When his premonition came true, Susana, all he did was walk around like a ghost repeating, as he strode through the halls of Creel’s huge house in Chihuahua:

“My beloved son is dead … my beloved son is dead … Nothing can be done about it!”

I felt that Pepe’s death precipitated one disaster after another; for later on, Mr. Juárez, right in the same house, received the news of President Abraham Lincoln’s death, and then in July the French launched a general offensive against Republican resistance in the north, and in August we had to leave Chihuahua for the border — but that’s as far as we could go, captured in Mexico, cornered in Mexico, but never outside of Mexico, he said, never an exile who could be accused later on of having abandoned his country:

“Don Luis”—I heard him say to his friend Governor Creel, who was urging him to save himself by crossing the border—“you know this state better than anyone. Show me the most inaccessible, the highest, the most arid mountain, and I’ll go up there to die of hunger and thirst, wrapped in the nation’s flag, but I will never leave the Republic.”

We went bouncing off again, in the carriages and with the carts, through sagebrush and cactus, the sun on our heads and the rocks under our feet … What can I say? Well, one night in a village in the Chihuahua desert, when I was on guard duty, posted behind a wall of crumbling adobe, he closed his door. He’s going to sleep early tonight, I said to myself. But soon after I heard him weeping. I didn’t dare to interrupt him; but I had the same duty the next day, and when I went to my post with my lance, which wasn’t standing as straight as it once did, Susy, I said to myself, well, if he doesn’t cry again, we’ll forget about it. Well, as Talleyrand said to Napoleon, look, even me, the one in charge of the door, doesn’t spend so much time looking into the street; in other words, I’d stay out of his business. But if the old man cried again …

“Is something troubling you, Mr. President?”

“No, Rigo. It’s nothing.”

“In that case, excuse me, Mr. President.”

“What is it, Rigo?”

“You know I don’t meddle…”

“Yes.”

“But why don’t you talk to me a little?”

He wasn’t a saint, he had no reason to be one, he was happy being a hero, and there are lots of heroes we never hear of, heroes who don’t have streets named after them or statues put up in their honor: but of what use is a saint? That night he told me about his love affairs, about the children he’d had out of wedlock, about his son Tereso, who was ugly and brave and who was fighting like his father against the invaders; he told me about the poor suffering Susana — like you, my love, the same name, did you know that? — his invalid daughter in Oaxaca, condemned to virginity, drugged to alleviate her pain, and my own for my grownup daughter, what? far away, in pain, my strange daughter captured in an artificial dream: Susana …

I told the farm girl to come in, not to be modest, that everything was all right, she knew it, and Mr. Juárez, too; he should look at her the way I, Rigoberto Palomar of the Second Lancers Company of the Republic, looked at her, nothing more, nothing less; we were at war, but we didn’t stop living because of that; he should look at her rosy cheeks and her black eyes, her hair streaming down to her waist, and her shape like a newly turned vase; she has a name, it’s Sweet Names, that’s her name, I rustled her starched blouse, she’s barefoot so she won’t make any noise, one day not so far off she’s going to die because her hands prophesy mourning, I wanted her for myself, Mr. Juárez, but I’ll give her to you, you need her, we need for you to have a night of illicit love, Don Benito, tender, sweet love like a stick of cinnamon, and as strong as an earthquake, which is so close to the life from which it comes that to you it might seem, because it gives itself to you so readily, like an answer to death: go to it, Mr. Juárez, screw this farm girl, get rid of your melancholy, win the war, reconquer the country, love this girl as you loved your dead son, as you love your invalid daughter; this is as good a thing to close the door for as going to the bathroom or opening it to receive friends: don’t turn into a statue on me, Mr. Juárez, you’re not dead yet.