Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

“Liberated from time! Liberated from the body! What will happen, brothers and sisters, if they are set free? What will they do with their time? What will they do with their bodies?”

He didn’t see Angel, but in Ulises López’s devastated house everything was happening simultaneously, theater in the round, theater without footlights, theater and its double; then, on that same staircase of death, appeared the deluxe chef Médoc d’Aubuisson wearing a liberty cap and a ripped shirt, singing “La Carmagnole” as loud as he could, Ça ira, Ça ira, les aristocrates à la lanterne, but no one knew French or had ever heard of the Bastille, so they beat him up, and next to my father a familiar hand pulled on his sleeve, and my father twisted around in the crowd; it wasn’t Colasa anymore, she’d been displaced, disappeared, swallowed up by the tide: it was Homero Fagoaga! Homero Fagoaga alive, dressed strangely, wearing a hat with bells and a ruff that reminded my father for an instant of his favorite, forgotten poet Quevedo:

Into the water, swimmers,

Swimmers into the water.

A well-shaved shark

Is in these parts.

In addition he had on a Roman toga that wrapped his slightly thinner body, as if death itself could not take ten pounds off him, not even that, the phantasmagoric Uncle Homero. My scourge, my nemesis! My disaster! whimpered Angel Palomar, desperately seeking even the support of Colasa Sánchez amid the mob that was now completely out of hand. In the pool shaped like the U.S.A., scores of people were urinating, adding their tears to the sea. At the dog track, the racing hounds were first set free and admired, then compared with the mutts from the Mexican slums that dragged their teats around, castrated, tangled in their own filth and sickness, their eyes infinitely covered with grime, and, as a result, the greyhounds were abominated, damn hounds probably eat better than we do, throw gasoline on them, set them on fire, they lived better than we do, kill them! And in flames the greyhounds, following a strange instinct, kept on running around the track, will-o’-the-wisps, and smoking muzzles, barking until they died:

“Weeds never die, do they, illustrious nephew? As the Maiden of Orléans said or might have said on a rising occasion to the one who had a better time of it than your beloved Princess Penny, hahaha. Look at the Ayatollah! Remember him? Remember him from the Malinaltzin highway exit? Remember how he beat us up? Remember how he screwed your pregnant wife? Hahaha.” Homero was laughing in a new style, professionally, festively, as if this were his new role: to laugh. “The best is yet to come! It was I who put this idea into the head of Our Guide!”

The Ayatollah? Our Guide? His schoolmate Matamoros Moreno? Could a frustrated writer reach any height in Mexico? Hadn’t Uncle Homero died when he fell from the balcony of his penthouse as a result of Uncle Fernando’s efforts?

“Tell that nearsighted fool of a dwarf that it would take more than a second-string pseudo-Mazatec witch doctor to finish off Homero Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca!” said Homero, pointing to himself with an eternally sausage-thick finger, disabusing his nephew once and for all of the illusion that he was dealing with a ghost that resembled his deceased uncle. “Destiny is more unexpected than any logic, more of a bastard than luck itself, and wider than any individual life,” he proclaimed now, with the burning greyhounds as a backdrop. “Listen to me and just see if you can contradict me: under my balcony, a little circus had set up, and the circus had a tent that broke my fall and then tore, dropping me nervously but safely onto a flexible, playful safety net, and I bounced around in it for about a minute and a half, as naked as the day I was born, my distinguished if rather diminished nephew, and the audience laughed, applauded, and made so much of me that the owner of the circus, a certain Bubble Gómez, an albino ex-truck driver whose lifelong dream was to own a circus, signed me up right on the spot, as Lana Turner, the never-to-be-forgotten starlet, might have said when she was discovered at the marmoreal soda fountain where she was ingesting a cloying ice-cream soda — cherry — and wearing a very tight sweater; he introduced me to his patrons, the Ayatollah Matamoros and the singer Concha Toro, now transformed into Galvarina Donoso, of Chilean and aristocratic origin, as that mad geographer Don Benjamín Subercaseaux was apt to invoke on nitrate evenings of cuecas and lilacs, as in turn might have been said by…”

“And what about this getup?” said my father, recovering the floor. “You look like a fifth-rate Rigoletto.”

“Momus!” exclaimed Uncle Homero. “I am King Momus of this stupendous carnival!”

“Stupendous? They’ve emptied the supermarkets where you used to sell your poisonous baby food! They’ve ruined you, you barrelassed old fart!”

“Careful with the insults now.” Homero Fagoaga laughed, pointing with his sausage finger in a superior gesture. “The oven’s not ready for cakes like that; now try to translate and export that proverb.” He laughed with even greater pleasure.

“My oven is no place for your muffins. How’s that?”

“I mean: all sacrifices are worthwhile! My protectors have proclaimed me king of laughter!”

“Mock-king, you fool.”

“As you wish, Angelito: but my scepter is real in a revolution that is, after all, carnivalesque, a revolution of mad laughter, finally, my anarchic but idiotic nephew, finally! A horizontal Mexican revolution, everything for everyone and everyone for everything, here in the land of the vertical Aztec Empire followed by the vertical Spanish Empire followed by the vertical, centralized, patrimonial, and pyramidal Republic, the inversion of the hierarchy.” Homero Fagoaga laughed loudly, pushing my father all the time toward the replica of the first floor of Bloomingdale’s, where the holy mob was touching everything without understanding what those things they’d never seen or even dreamed were, perfumes, and more perfumes, Estée Lauder, Givenchy, Togarama, dresses and more dresses, Saint Laurent, Valentino, Cio Cio Sanel, riding clothes, clothes for hunting in Africa, sailing off Cape Cod, mountain climbing in Tibet, vaginal spermicide with the color and taste of strawberry, grapes, carob, camellia, cherry. How do you use this, how, when, what for? They passed alongside the destructive fury that broke and burned everything in Penny’s personal sanctuary, where Penny stopped looking like a nun and started looking like a whore, but where was Penny in all this? “The inversion of the hierarchy!” Homero Fagoaga laughed, disguised as the King of Laughter, Prince of Comedy, Lord of Levity, Sultan of Smiles: Ah, what laughter, what crazy laughter! To think they began with me, you all begin with me, little nephew, you and your grimy proletarian friends and your pregnant, well-fornicated little wife — fornicated by my Luminous Guide — you began by making fun of me, oranges, pears, and figs, of course, hahaha, magnifying glass, Shogun limousine, remember? Jell-O baths, anything goes to make fun of Homero Fagoaga, sadistic Chinese and cow yokes and bottle caps in my dessert, why not, killing my Tomasito, even that, the destruction of my electoral campaign, my humiliation by that ragged bum Benítez, ha! my genes and not his Hegels are going to win, not your gelatines: laugh at me now, fools, laugh at the King of Laughter and the inversion of hierarchies and see what’s before your eyes, beloved nephew, look carefully and remember that

FAGOAGA NEVER LOSES

AND WHAT HE LOSES HE SNATCHES BACK!

Matamoros Moreno rehearsed his every gesture in front of Concha Toro’s dressing-room mirror; the singer showed him how to turn movement into ritual: she taught him how to look at his audience, raise one arm or both, take a step forward then stop dramatically, smile, throw his head back, get angry, speak, be silent. Matamoros went through the extremes of pride and trampled humility in front of that mirror, where Concha Toro purged herself of her own histrionic frustrations. Little by little, Matamoros Moreno, who in Concha’s company had discovered a surprising new kind of lovemaking, full of nuances and refinements (even secrets) he had never known before, transcended the gestures and the rituals and persuaded himself in his innermost being that what he was doing (outside the dressing room, for the public, for the people) was the external manifestation of what he was within: a solitary man who had stored up a power that was only now revealing itself. His gratefully accepted sexual encounters with Concha-Dolly-María Inez (for which she was thankful, now that she was fifty, or perhaps a bit older) revealed to Matamoros the dark and blind energy he had held in reserve, which only now burst forth. The only condition was that he believe what he said: the Ayatollah Matamoros had to speak, move, and be seen with a total faith in what he said, the way he moved, and in how he looked. He would tell the masses that followed him that “faith is faith. It can’t be proven, insulted, judged, or even jailed.” Let them think about this; just in case, he said during the weeks in which he had hastily, secretly gathered together those bands of official thugs — those falcons — who had been scattered after their last operation way back in 1972, a police corps disbanded ever since those remote days of moral renovation, bodyguards left unemployed in the wake of the exodus of the rich to Houston, Miami, and Los Angeles. But he had to convince even these swine that now they had to act out of faith, that the policeman or bodyguard who joined the movement had to do what he did for something greater than they had ever done before: like the thieves and fire-eaters, like the beggars and squatters, they all had to seek and feel the same thing: