Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

“We have come for her,” declared Capitolina, “so that she may deliver the child properly and so that the new member of our family may come into the world protected, loved, and in a Christian cradle.”

“Are you saying that the devil would get him here?” Don Rigoberto laughed quietly.

“Well, that’s what my little sister and I fear most.”

“You’d turn him into a holy little hypocrite of a pharisee son of a bitch like you two…”

“Sticks and stones, General, sticks and stones!” Capitolina shrugged her shoulders. “Humph!” chimed in Farnesia.

“And in the process you’d have yourselves named heirs of the heir, the Palomar fortune would come to you, you pair of grave robbers.”

“Our considerations are of a purely moral nature!” Capitolina shook her finger directly into the general’s nose. Farnesia, who had eaten an extremely early breakfast in order to fortify herself for the day’s vicissitudes, tried to copy her sister but gave up when she realized that on her finger there glistened a few drops of rich blackberry jam, so she quickly licked her finger instead.

“Moral my ball bearings!” shouted the general, but just then there appeared behind him, her shoulders trembling with cold, his wife, Doña Susana Rentería.

“Tell them the truth,” said Great-grandmother Palomar serenely.

“You tell them.”

“Angeles disappeared yesterday in the riot.”

“You’re hiding her from us!” Capitolina managed to shout before the general slammed the door in their faces. Farnesia, standing on the sidewalk, burst into laughter, a laughter that did not seem to be caused by the events but rather by the absence of any cause, a distant torment, a foreseeable humiliation, as if the immediate cause, the disappearance of my mother Angeles with me (quite frightened, I might add, your mercies), meant absolutely nothing to her.

Capitolina silenced her with a slap in the face: “Sniveling fool.”

The elder sister turned her face toward the Paseo de la Reforma, and the younger, shocked, ran after her, wrapped in her shawl, laughingly observing that the destiny of an unmarried woman is to be a leader of monkeys in hell.

“A tour guide for monkeys!”

Both thought the same thing; both felt (I shall feel, I shall know when I feel, I shall feel when I know, I shall know) the immense pain of the lost child (that’s why I feel and know: all of us fetuses are like the Corsican brothers for all those who have been born or who are about to be born): the lost child, one more, again without a child, women alone, empty houses, lost children.

They took each other by the hand and felt like dying.

Where can my child be, with his bracelet around his ankle? whimpered Farnesia.

Where can the child about to be born be? sighed Capitolina.

Where can I be?

The din of the loudspeakers was only made worse by the lugubrious silence that weighed on the city that September 1, 1992. Buoyed up by the acclamations of Congress, President Jesús María y José Paredes stood at the tribune of the National Assembly and released these messenger pigeons — or were they doves of light? — one after another:

The threats to the nation had been extinguished; the obstacles to Mexican progress had been overcome; the extremist riot had been violently repressed because it was born of violence; but the heroic actions of the police, whom we salute here and now (ovation; Colonel Inclán stands at attention, does not smile, is wearing his black glasses, the green spittle runs down his chin; he sits stiffly down), protected us from having to surrender our civil government to the armed forces: neither anarchy nor tyranny, only Mexico! Her institutions saved! Her revolution permanent! Neither order without liberty nor liberty without order, neither progress without tradition nor tradition without progress, neither justice without authority nor authority without justice! exclaimed our Chuchema at the climax of what was in effect a chiasmic delirium in Mexican politics, and he exclaimed it so loud over all the loudspeakers of the Mexican Republic (or what’s left of it) that even I, within the maternal womb, heard it: Let us honor Colonel Nemesio Inclán (second ovation; this time the man in black glasses, either modest or annoyed, who knows? doesn’t even stand up), who subordinated his personal ambition to the triumph of institutional order; glory to the Lady, Mother, and Doctor (she is not present; she is looking at herself in the mirror; she only shows herself to give the cry, to proclaim a contest; she neither steals nor shares the show: she, the Lady Pharaoh, works alone!), who held on high the symbols of the nation threatened by chaotic licentiousness disguised as freedom for the majority which so crudely sought to wrest from the Mexican people their own symbols, conquered with so much difficulty over five centuries of national experience. President Paredes, after excoriating the duped and criminal anarchists, topped off his speech by assuring one and all that the time for reconciliation and unity had come. He admitted that the nation had been threatened; he revealed to the astonished nation that since last January the United States Military Command (Caribbean) had asked permission to land twenty thousand Marines at Veracruz to carry out maneuvers that would put pressure on the totalitarian tyrants of Costaguana and protect the oil refineries of the Chitacam Trusteeship, threatened like mere dominos by the red tide but essential to the strategic health of the free world. Permission was granted in accordance with the prior commitments of Mexico within the Modified and Reaffirmed Inter-American Rio Treaty (MORE-RIOT), but when the time allotted for the maneuvers had passed, the twenty thousand Marines had refused to withdraw from the state of Veracruz, saying that they’d never actually been there since not a single one of them had remained longer than 175 days in Mexico, and that they would, according to the treaty, have to be there for a minimum of 180 days in order to be considered fully transferred from their home base in Honduras. How could the Marines pull out if, legally, they had never arrived: rotated, transferred quickly to the neighboring Republic of Shadows, relieved by replacements who in turn never remained the full 180 days. There were twenty thousand Marines in Mexico, but there were not twenty thousand Marines in Mexico: what were we going to do? And those nonexistent Marines had already advanced to Perote and scattered in the mountains, and even though President Rambolt Ranger had assured President Jesús María y José Paredes (with whom he maintains a most cordial relationship) over the red hot-line telephone that the Marines are on their own, not under orders from Washington, motivated exclusively by their autonomous decision to defend democracy wherever and however they can, it is also true that the U.S. President does not want to disavow them publicly as long as they are objectively serving the interests of the United States and the will-to-greatness of the people of the United States, and President Paredes is announcing today to the Congress that, despite all, it is incumbent on Mexico to expel those troops, which are, after all, an invasion force, to which end it is essential that the national unity be renewed, and what better example than the one proposed by the President in this moment in which all of us (even me in my ultrasonic and impermeable cabin) are listening: this is no time for selfish party politics, we must all militate in one single party, the Party of Mexico!!

“Which one, Mr. President, which one?” Peregrino Ponce y Peón, Senator from Yucatango, dared to shout, interrupting the executive’s discourse.

“Don’t torture us any more, Mr. President, tell us which party it will be,” said Doña Virginia Iris de Montoya, deputy from Tamaleón who also represented the union of actors.