Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

I closed the door on them, Susana, and even though I ran the risk of being punished, I abandoned my post. You see, my innocent girl, I didn’t want to hear a thing. That night was his alone; he deserved it more than anyone. I hoped he was happy, but I didn’t want to rob him of even an instant of pleasure. So I began to think about sad and impossible things, Susanita. Suppose Mr. Juárez wins. The Republic will be poorer than ever. How can it ever pay the debts piled up by the conservatives, the Empire, the war? How can he rebuild the country? Oh, Lord, I said to myself, closing my eyes in the cold desert, which was like a bedroom at the bottom of the sea: if only Mr. Juárez had that gringo Drake’s discovery in Pennsylvania to light up all the cities in the world like glowing coals! Oh, Lord, if instead of owing fifteen million pesos to the French, Don Benito Juárez had received $15 billion a year for exporting liquid fossils! That’s why I screamed, Susana. I had that horrible nightmare.

“Don’t worry, Rigoberto. Your dream will turn out all right.”

When the earth calmed down, my mother Angeles tried to calm down with it and to speak rationally. While our buddy Egg strolled around my father’s old coach house playing the guitar, she said that when a woman’s left alone a vacuum is created and that anything can be pulled in to fill it; she did not want Egg to be a mere fill-in, so she thought it was better that he hear her out and understand her point of view. When I met him — she told us — I told him I didn’t sleep all night because I was so happy I met you. And it was true: Angel made me happy by creating me. He didn’t find me: he invented me, he made me his by inventing me. I didn’t sleep, I was so happy, because Angel met me exactly the way I met myself and exactly when I met myself; neither before nor after. I don’t remember anything before him. I don’t know who I am, where I come from, nothing.

“Let me confess something to you. I saw him as young and rebellious. So I instantly appropriated everything I thought he liked — feminism, left-wing politics, ecology, Freud and Marx, university exams, every opera ever written — the whole deal, whatever I found at hand, as if it were in someone else’s closet. Imagine how surprised I was when he turned out to be a conservative rebel! No way. There was no way I was going to change my symbols just for him, Eggy boy.

“I decided it was better for us to complement each other, so I kept my mouth shut, the better to enjoy making love without understanding too well about making ideology. Love, love, love, Egg, ideology, ideology, ideology, and at the same time, running neck and neck with all this, my question: what is the meaning of all these things we do? It may help him to see in me everything that is opposite to him, to see at the same time everything that completes him. And he even shares with me the hope that we will become equal by being different (the ideal?). At what moment will Angel pass from nonsense to despair without having picked up something positive in the process? What are all of us afraid of, going insane or going sane? Who really loses, who really wins in all this? And who will leave the other one first when both of us realize that nobody can live only in rebellion without ending up in despair? You need something else, I swear, I swear, buddy, something else, and I swear that I tried to find it, quite rationally, I tried to believe in Angel, seriously, in his ideology, only because I want to believe that the good things in this world should be repeated someday, not be left behind, not necessarily rendered obsolete by progress. While you play your guitar, think about this: can progress kill your song because it is your song each time you play it, Egg, an event again and again, with or without penicillin, with television or without? Does what you play go on being an event, while infections do not and the pictures you see at home do? Art is a continuous event or a continuity that takes place: I would have wanted to communicate that to Angel in order to save him from his either/or, you know, his madness or reason, stagnation or progress, his world of dramatic possibilities which he likes so much and which does him such damage. I agreed to have his child in order to bring this idea to reality, the idea of the continuity of happening between the nonsense and the despair that will devour my poor Angel if he doesn’t understand me. Even if he ends up doing it alone, without me, just as long as he understands me.”

“You are lovable,” Egg said in English as he stopped strumming. “With a little humor and intelligence, I think you’ll survive all the disasters of Mexican life. That’s why I love you. You are totally lovable.”

“Animus intelligence!” she shouted, but she realized that her exclamation was a reflex action. So she looked at our friend, an interrogatory expression on her face, her head turned to one side. She told him that he, too, was a survivor.

“The only kind of genius that exists in this country is that of survival. It’s lost everything else. But it survives.”

What about him?

He took my mother’s hand and remembered that after his parents’ death, when he had no friends, no money, neglect, not caring, and ignorance possessed him for a time. He realized what was happening, became terribly alarmed because he could look at himself as if he were someone else. Then he wrote his first hit, “Take Control.”

What about her?

She was afraid. She was afraid that things would happen and we wouldn’t notice and that we would only realize that the most important event in our lives had already taken place when it was too late. She also dreamed that a vine sprouted out of her vagina.

“We all have days when nothing goes right. Options, movements, not being what people see, not seeing what’s there, believing I do know, knowing I think everything is a mistake. I’ve been like this for thirty days. Help me, Eggy, please, help me, little buddy. I swear I’ll be eternally grateful to you.

“Help me get my halo back, buddy. Don’t you see it went out on me?”

That’s how August began: the step toward the eighth month of my gestation.

Dear Reader, you may remember that in the month of March Angel and Angeles saw the Chilean bolero singer Concha Toro on one of the National Television Contests, presenting herself as the Last Playboy Centerfold, and that in June Egg went to interview her at the Simon Bully Bar to request the services of her Home-Delivery Theater, which participated — with what disastrous results, we all know — in Penny López’s Sweet-Sixteen Party. The reader may also recall that Angel refused to do that chore because Concha had taken his virginity sometime during the mid-eighties at the solemn insistence of Grandfather Rigoberto Palomar (a revolutionary general at age fifteen), who could not tolerate the idea of having a virginal fifteen-year-old grandson in his house.

Since the Four Fuckups did not want personal matters interfering in their apocalyptic projects (perennially frustrated, as your lordships fully realize), Egg went to see the dear lady, but Concha Toro’s appearance, her fame, and her life story impressed him so much that he blurted out that he’d been sent by Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, did she remember him?

“Of course I remember him, such a well-hung kid, remembered his name just like that, step right in, son, place’s a mess, I know, but last night we, uhh, had a little fight with the cops, you know, and the police almost locked us up. But there’s wine, and avocados, and peaches and white jam left over, so just help yourself. No one ever called Concha Toro a cheapskate, especially when a hungry poor boy like you turns up. The question is, what are you hungry for, son?”