Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

My sixteen-year-old father marches with his homemade sign DELENDA EST ACAPULCO in front of the offices of Don Ulises López on River Nylon Street, and the short, astute functionary and financier laughs to see such a bizarre sight. The city has filled up with outlandish lunatics, religious fanatics, charlatans. Look at that loon demanding the destruction of Acapulco! he said to the meeting of the administrative council of construction and real estate, his back to the window: of course, of course, what we’re going to do in Acapulco is just what we’re going to do here in Mexico City: we’re going to give full value to property, not sell it off cheap. Where did these nuts get this idea of hauling off the debris from the earthquake to construct miniparks and libraries? Kids and books on lots that are going to be worth five times more than before just because the buildings next to them didn’t fall down, and we — we, gentlemen, we, partners — are going to construct the best, the most solid and secure buildings, government offices first — we’ve got to take care of Big Brother first — then, frankly, buildings with commercial value, after all the government doesn’t know how to keep books, identify property, or find out where anything is. We do. Ulises López stood up, we are going to evaluate — right away — every square inch of property hit by the catastrophe, with a view to taking advantage of its value and rebuilding on it, if not today then tomorrow; in Mexico, sooner or later, you can do anything because sooner or later someone who thinks like us, partners! will have more power than those who oppose us.

The homeless — thirty thousand, fifty, a hundred thousand? — demonstrated a few times, demanding housing, some got it, most spent time in flophouses, hangars, schools which they then had to leave, they went back where they came from or stayed on with relatives or scattered among the traffic islands in the city streets where they set up their tents and huts: immovable. Others returned to the empty places where they once had a place to live, a job, a little shop, they settled down in vacant lots, and Ulises López just laughed at them, looking forward to the day when the public authorities would agree with him in kicking them out; the financier-functionary snapped his fingers and said, a good day’s work, an earthquake Mexican-style, classist, racist, xenophobic, and what’s that young economist doing there, Robles what’s-his-name, what? digging? he’s looking for his mother, ha ha, I didn’t know he had one! The eyes of Ulises López in his Shogun model limousine, of Federico Robles Chacón with a smashed piece of Sheetrock in his hands, and those of my father with his ridiculous poster against Acapulco, all met.

And where was I? Tell me right away before I forget, O mighty Breeder: my parents have just conceived me, surrounded by blazing beaches and crumbling towers and peaks as white as bones and the miserable hillsides, where, says my father, the human ivy of Acapulchritude used to live, hanging on like ticks to the sumptuous body, he says, although by now gone soft, wormy, of old Acapulcra, O my nubile fisher-girl whose limp hair once hung down to her waist (he says in the name of all the children of the past who went to spend happy, prepollution vacations in Acapulco), in yesteryear busy with your nets and your brightly painted boats, now betrothed to death, a courtesan in exhausted sands: Look, Angeles, look at your Acapulco like a Cleopatra about to nest the scorpion in your breasts, a Messalina ready to drink the cup of sewage, a Pompadour bewigged to camouflage the cancers on her hairy skin, ugh …

The Army kicked their asses out of the mountains around the bay, even out of the mountains not visible from the white half-moon of hotels, restaurants, and McDonald’s (which, the upstanding citizens claimed, the guerrillas wanted, horror of horrors, to rename Marxdonald’s and force to sell chalupas filled with caviar instead of that classic Mexican dish cheeseburgers and catsup). All a matter of aesthetics, said a television talk-show host, because (though he didn’t say this) no one meddled with the invisible, squat neighborhoods of repair shops, dust, food stands, and tents behind the barrier of skyscrapers that came, more and more, to resemble sand: but, since they’d kicked their asses out of the visible and invisible mountains, everyone said that it wasn’t a matter of public health or aesthetics but self-interest: the mountains were to be parceled off, the Icacos Navy base was sold to a consortium of Japanese hotel owners, and the inhabitants of the mountains resisted for months and months, squatting there challenging, refusing with the swollen stomachs of their children, their trichinosis, their water filled with revenge, their eyes so clouded over with grief and glaucoma that they couldn’t see the magic carpet at their feet, the Acapulco diamonds over a velvety night, an aquamarine day, a blond sunset, the opulent asphyxia of toasted bodies and pink jeeps and pale condominia, and gangrenous lunch counters, and cadaveric discotheques and crab-infested motels, and neon signs turned on at midday because

MEXICO HAS ENERGY TO BURN

says my mom to my dad the afternoon of my conception: those who were displaced to the hidden lands — points out my mother from the water — behind the mountains where no offended tourist could see them, much less hear them and much less smell them, found that the promises of new homes were just words: they were screwed perfectly by being sent from the mountains facing the sea to a swamp called Florida City because the only thing there was a cesspool with no electricity, plumbing, or roof, just some piles of lumber and prefab Sheetrock, which turned out to have been bought by the municipal president of Acapulco from the company of a brother-in-law who was cousin to the governor, who sat next to Minister Ulises López in school, who was owner of the aforementioned cement factory, uncle of the administrator of the aforementioned cesspool, may God keep him in the cabinet of our incumbent President Jesús María y José Paredes, and who will, God willing (the important people in Kickapulco support this) (moral support, you understand), within fewer than four years comply with the huge revolutionary responsibility of naming his successor, do it in favor of, please, svp, come on now, prego, the aforementioned Don Ulises López, preferred and proffered son (prefabricated they say over behind the mountains in Florida City) of the Costa Chica of Guerrero, where I am taking a nice bath right now, where I sense, knowing, do you know? throbbing, throbbing me, that the coral and the jellyfish surround me outside my mom’s belly (thanks, Mother, for taking me in when my father fired me out of his pistol, I suspect that just for having done it, most belovèd protectress, I will always love you more than I love him, but nyahh!).

They say that the mayor of Tearapulco, Dr. Noel Guridi, received the gift of thirty coyotes trained by the governor of the state of Guerrero, General Vicente Alcocer, and he told him, don’t be afraid, you’ve got to work over these rebels, you understand me, work them over.

And the trained coyotes went out at night with their tongues and eyes irritated and burning, bonfires of smoke and blood in their eyes and snouts, the coyotes went out to do some working over, went out with their bodies covered with mangy fur and their muddy claws on the necks of the old and dying, on the necks of the sick and the helpless, whether they were cooling off on the mountains, groaning on their pallets, creaking motionless in their huts. They were the last rebels to remain scratching the mountains with a view of the sea and the bay: the sea and the bay belong to the jet set, not to the squatters, said Governor Vicente Alcocer as he stared at his photo in Paris-Match.