Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

“I understand you, old boy. Nothing is perfect.”

“Su: when I was a boy, there was nothing here but a little boastful elite and the mass of peons. I’m right; we didn’t fail, my madness is reasonable. What had to be done was done; this country had no roads, no dams, no telephones, no schools, no industry, no freedom of movement. All that we accomplished. You say that nothing is perfect. Ask those who came after us why they were so irresponsible with what we created, those who worked from 1915 to 1940, when I was young and you a little girl. Anyway, the problem with a revolution is not to betray it. It’s not going through with it for fear of betraying it.”

“What are you trying to tell me, old man?”

“Susy. Once again, I have a mission in life. I don’t have to lie to myself and say that the Revolution is not over. You heard the President. The Yankees have invaded us! We have to defend the fatherland!”

“Let me remind you of a mission a bit closer to home. Our granddaughter has been kidnapped. Along with our unborn great-grandson.”

“What do you think I should do, Susana Rentería?”

“General: delegate and give orders. You’re too old for these fracases. You’re over ninety. Behave like a commander-in-chief.”

“I thank you for your wisdom, Su. What orders should I give?”

“Egg knows where this Hipiteca person, the boy with the peeling skin, lives. Angel should rescue his wife. And if he doesn’t, well, then he should owe the favor to his friend. That first. Then you can order Angel to fight in Veracruz and redeem himself for all the idiotic things he’s done. Get your priorities straight, General.”

“How talented you’ve always been, my dear girl!”

But all their attempts to find Angel were useless. Don Fernando Benítez was incommunicado, out with the Huicholes, taking a bath in the Golden Age. The Simon Bully Bar was closed, and no one knew where Concha Toro or her dog Fango Dango was. The piano player and barman in the new club that had opened across the street, Giuseppe Birthday, said that he was new in the neighborhood, that he knew nothing about any Chilean woman, and that he hoped the general and his wife would have a libation in his new bar the Lady of the Camels: Quench Your Thirst Here. The López mansion had been looted and its inhabitants (Ulises and Lucha) murdered, although the girl (Penny) wanders around the U.S.A.-shaped pool tossing in sunflower petals and muttering:

“You can look but you can’t touch. You’re ugly and a plebe. If it’s Thursday, this must be Philadelphia.”

Dear Readers:

Only my genes, the current seat of my intelligence, can assure you that my vision, activated perhaps by a dream or one of my mother’s desires (I dream of you without wanting to, Angel, I desire you without dreaming of you, without knowing why. You receive the seed from both of us, my son, dream and desire, my son), is capable of dreaming of desiring and of seeing my father in this particular instant: I cling to that intelligence, which, after all, I inherited from him and her and not from the stinking environment where I’m suffocating in this shack that belongs to Hipi Toltec’s family. (One hundred genes determine intelligence! superior intelligence dominates inferior intelligence! eighty percent of the differences between individuals are genetic! neither race nor country of origin nor social class nor climate nor pollution: intelligence is what counts.)

I mean that I feel sure of my genes, you see, and my genes feel sure of me. This mutual confidence allows us to see what others only imagine: by illuminating my genes, I see my father from the kidnapped belly of my mother:

On the highway out of the black hole called Mexico, D.F.cation. My father and Colasa Sánchez look from Paso de Cortés, where the Van Gogh gave up the ghost, out of gas, sick, deaf (the other loudspeaker fell off). They look toward the swamp of toxic waste and contaminated water. Angel realizes that for her all this is normal. The city under the persistent acid rain is not something different. But culture and nostalgia have set my father apart. But she doesn’t know that the city is the cramped waiting room of eternity. Perhaps she doesn’t even know that her father is dead. My father feels remorse for having abandoned us, although his feeling grows weaker when he looks at the external city (the extreme city) and its distant rumbles of hunger, crime, and violence: the persistent dripping that he cannot locate continues to pursue him; she is pursued by her own vulnerability: she’s run after this young man — my father — since she was eleven years old, she obeyed the homicidal orders of her father Matamoros Moreno, she owns the only vagina dentata in America the Toothyful, and nevertheless here they are, the two of them, chilled to the bone this early September night, looking at the city’s deceptive lights from the Paso de Cortés. He slips his jacket over her shoulders, protects her, accepts her, and the two of them feel that being a loving couple is more difficult but also more important than having no ties. Angel covers and protects Colasa because he remembers my abandoned mother (and perhaps me!) and he feels guilty. But Colasa doesn’t know this and accepts Angel’s tenderness with a little shudder of pleasure that is also not without its tinge of guilt. She wanted to kill this man she desires. She’s loved and hated him since she was a girl, when she set herself up in a striker’s tent outside his door on Calle Génova. Today, on this cold, sad night up on the heights, she is going to have to decide. If she gives herself to him, she destroys him with her teeth. If she doesn’t give herself to him, she will have to sustain love in some other way, without physical contact, and she doesn’t know how that can be done, but she fears that he does know and that he’ll go back to Angeles and keep her as a mascot. What problems I make for myself! Colasita exclaims, hugged, protected by my father, covered by my father’s 1920s-style jacket this cold night in the mountains, but she doesn’t have time to express her doubts or make decisions, and for one reason alone: this city of death should, despite everything, live. The fog lifts suddenly and the caravan of lights blinds the night: it’s the armada of long-haul trucks that travel in the darkness to fill thirty million bellies in Mexico City. They enter the city with their ephemeral cornucopia of fruits and vegetables, meats and cheeses and chickens and lobsters and fowl and oysters and beer, but Angel Palomar and Colasa Sánchez want to flee from the city. To flee because he feels guilty, overwhelmed, no compass, his reasons forever scattered (he tells Colasa: I’ve lost my reasons, understand? and she says no, that she doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but it doesn’t matter because it’s so nice being together, the two of them, keep talking, keep talking. Once I went to Oaxaca and I found my reasons; maybe I ought to go back; in any case, I ought to get out of here, I wanted to confront Mexican society and Mexican society defeated me; and do you know how, Colasa? by not paying me any attention, Colasa! And she: But you talk so pretty, gosh), and all the trucks entering the city: only one is leaving, going in the opposite direction. They are doubly blinded by the clash of lights, like blind men fencing, the beams of light from the powerful headlamps of the trucks crossing each other and Colasa squirming free of the arm of my protective father, Colasa always excessive and impetuous in the middle of the highway exposing herself to death, my father shouting to her from the shoulder of the road, Colasa, be careful, you’re crazy! and the enormous wheels of the only truck abandoning the city, an eighteen-wheel Leyland, fourteen feet high, with a revolving light on its roof, brakes to a screeching halt in front of the small figure still dressed as a Discalced Carmelite.