Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

“What the hell was that! I can’t see a thing! I almost killed you, you idiot!”

The driver’s voice screams from the truck, he leans out a face that looks like a made-up clown; it’s a white skull wearing enormous black glasses. Irritated, he takes off his baseball cap and shows his hair, which has no color, not even white.

“Help, help a poor devout girl, show mercy, sir, says the clown Colasita Sánchez, kneeling before the albino driver, the girl bathed in scales of mercury, and the driver opens the door, helps her to her feet, while she points to my father: “And my friend, too. Won’t you give us a ride? Jesus, Patron of the Needy, will love you for it!”

Inside the border checkpoint between Mexamerica North and Baja Oklahoma, the immigration agent, Mazzo Balls, stares attentively at the infrared screen that detects heat from human bodies. Tonight the screen is blank. No heat waves activate the detection device and none shows up as a ghost-like image on the screen. Nevertheless, Mazzo Balls’s sixth sense tells him that there are ghosts crossing the forbidden frontier tonight, just as there are every night. The exception does not prove the rule — a maxim they taught him in his training course for interdicting illegal aliens. The invasion from the South is constant, unstoppable, a flood. It takes place at all hours.

Tonight would be the first night in his entire three-year tour of duty (a solitary posting in this no-man’s-land out on the Texas plains) in which he would not detect at least one Mexican, Honduran, or Salvadoran trying to sneak into Baja Oklahoma, not happy with the nice reception arranged for him in Mexamerica, that version of the Polish Corridor between Mexico and the United States, which supposedly declared itself independent from both countries, although in reality it served the interests of both, absorbing eighty percent of the illegal aliens that used to sneak into Texas, California, the Midwest, and the Great Lakes states …

Agent Mazzo Balls was the most zealous enforcer of the final version of the Simpson — Nobody law, which, in exchange for metaphysical control over the U.S. frontier, sanctioned fines and prison terms for employers of illegals. Foreseeably, this punishment was applied indiscriminately to anyone who employed dark-skinned workers, whether they were U.S. citizens or not, and ended up (also foreseeably) forcing every traveler to carry first an identity card, then a passport, and finally being able to move only within hermetically sealed zones — just like South Africa. Blocking the entrance and employment of Latin American laborers into the United States not only heightened the social crisis in Mexico and Central America but brought about the collapse of the labor market in the United States. The absence of Hispanic workers in hospitals, restaurants, transportation, farming, and manufacturing left a horrible vacuum which, contrary to the laws of physics and the baroque (noted our Uncle Fernando Benítez with a bitter smile), was not filled by anyone: no one wanted those jobs, but everyone had to take a step down as far as getting loans, good salaries, and jobs was concerned, in order to disguise the labor shortage.

All this (Don Fernando would have wanted to warn the city and the world) had to contribute to pauperization and the current disintegration of the States in the Union, with no one winning anything: how could Uncle Fernando explain all this to the pair of blind young Indians who one day turned up at the house of the blackboards on the way to their chimerical goal: Chicago, the city of the big shoulders, far from the fatality of poverty, sickness, and tradition, breaking the circle of their age-old destiny. Don Fernando foresaw a catastrophe for the young couple (the girl, remember, your mercies, made pregnant at the same time as my mother, she bearing a baby who would be my contemporary, olé!).

* * *

Now I foresee: the day we meet Uncle Fernando again, he will tell us what probably happened: Mazzo Balls cannot believe that the greasers have skipped a night in their attempt to slip through the rat trap, which is emblazoned with a huge sign in Gothic letters:

VOTE WITH YOUR FEET

and just to give himself the satisfaction, he orders the service helicopter to take a look and see if there aren’t any illegals crossing the border. It’d be a miracle! A peaceful night! Silent night, holy night! hums Mazzo Balls, his Miller Lite in one hand, his unlit Marlboro dangling from his lips, his feet perched on the console, and his favorite TV program on: The Forsyte Saga. The series transports him to another era, like a fairy tale: how Mazzo would have liked living in Edwardian England, with butlers, kitchen boys, and parlor maids running up- and downstairs all day long!

But it wouldn’t be tonight: the helicopter takes off and the pilot radios an urgent call to Mazzo Balls, listen, shithead, did your detector break down on you? What made you think there weren’t any Spies? I put on my night-vision glasses, the ones activated by moonlight, and I hope you realize that it’s a clear, starry night, and I’m following two, a man and a woman, I’ll describe them to you since your fucked-up screen can’t pick them up: the two of them are wearing straw hats, white outfits, all ragged, both barefoot, the miserable rats, they’re carrying something that looks like a supermarket bag, or it might be a shoulder bag, hanging down on one side, they’re staggering as if they’re drunk, scratched up by the wires, as if they don’t see them, do you hear me, Mazzo? It’s the first time in my life that I turned these searchlights on greasers and they don’t automatically look up or get scared shitless when they see me with my black mask on and my robot eyes, they think I’m Darth Vader, hahaha, dazzled or covering their eyes with one arm, listen, fat man, this time we’re going to arrest them, right? What do you say, jerk-off? And Mazzo Balls flushed with rage and shame and said into the microphone no, you know that it isn’t worth the trouble to arrest them, and we don’t have the funds to pay for the gas to send them to Norman, but we do have funds to pay for the gas in this stupid chopper? asked the pilot. That’s right, answered Mazzo, that’s the way the funds are distributed, you have gas, you get the good part, stop complaining, the highway patrol doesn’t have a cent. Well, I’m a son of a bitch if I don’t feel like giving away my gasoline so we can capture this pair of savages, you should see them, Mazzo, they look like Powhatan and Pocahontas or something like that, we would have wiped them out around here years ago, savages, barefoot, they don’t seem to see me, Mazzo, but they sure do hear me, she’s got her hands over her ears, and he’s waving his arms around as if he were scaring off a horsefly or a swarm of bees, listen, Mazzo, check it out, he thinks I’m a bee, hahaha, buzzbuzzbuzz, how did that song about the flight of the bumblebee go? an old radio program used it as its theme song, buzzbuzzybuzz, hahaha, I’m gonna drop down and really scare ’em, they don’t seem to see me, these stupid Indians, but they know I’m here, uh-oh, her ripped skirt’s blowing up, Jesus, she’s knocked up, the slut, they can’t stop screwing and having kids, these pigs, the woman’s disgusting, she must be eight months gone, her gut’s almost as big as yours, Mazzo Balls, hahaha, that swollen, Christ, but not from Miller Lite, like you, but with one more little brown greaser, another shitass who’s here to take the food out of our mouths and steal another American’s job, walkin’ in here like it was their own home, Jesus, the woman’s stuffed with another little easy-livin’ fucker! they’re takin’ rocks out of their bag, rocks, haha, they’re gonna chase me away with rocks, Mazzo! rocks against the chopper! Who do they think they are, Sitting Bull? Viva technology! Listen, Mazzo, this is getting cute, I wish you were here, I swear this is the best battle I ever saw since they cut off General Custer’s balls at the battle of the Little Bighorn, did you ever see Ronald Reagan in Santa Fe Trail on the Late Show? haha, well I’m gonna get even for Custer, I’m gonna blow away this pair of Indians, I’ve been asking for a license to kill for over a year now, but I’m takin’ matters into my own hands here, haha … Mazzo, they hit me on the head, Mazzo, can ya see me? Mazzo, the rock’s blinded me, what an eye that guy’s got, can’t ya see me, Mazzo? If only the Congress had bought you an infrared ’scope like the one they have at Sandy Ego so you could see at night, track down the illegals, see them under the midnight sun, Mazzo, Mazzo, I’m comin’ down, they’re … Mazzo, do ya read me?… Mazzo…?