Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

Ah, the egoism of love. No one does anything to get me closer to the girl, who goes off, following Egg along the nave of the Church of San Felipe Neri in Oaxaca an October morning in 1992. She turns back, holding the hand of our buddy, and looks at me:

She waves goodbye to me with her little hand raised to the height of her cheek.

Bye-bye. Ciao. See you soon, sweetie pie!

The church is empty at this hour.

My father holds up my mother’s long hair. He brings his lips to my mother’s perfumed nape. He bares only her back, her shoulders her nape. My father kisses the incomparable softness of my mother Angeles’s body. Angeles gives him the ecstasy of the acid fragrance of her armpit; she gives him her shoulders, good for a copious, liquid cry; she gives him the wingèd virtue of her soft bosom and the sleepy quintessence of her light back: breathing all of her in, forever in love with what is soft about my mother, how I want to fall asleep in your arms, to forget everything, Penny, Lucha, and Ulises and the Ayatollah and Colasa and Bubble Gómez’s truck and the Veracruz war. I wanted to sleep in the crackling sheets and imagine her as I saw her, dressed in the radiant mourning of resonant starch, with her coppery eyes and her ruddy cheeks, and I wishing she would caress me as she caressed the beads on her rosary with her fine, agile fingers … the luxury of ivory and mother-of-pearl.

He told her again that he could not desire her and only desire her, that she had to give him whatever she had even if it were on the threshold of the cemetery. Her feet. He dreamed wide awake of her feet. He asked for her feet. But at that moment she said no. She then spoke for the first time to say no. Not this time. Everything will repeat itself except this.

“Why?” asked my father.

“I don’t want you ever to see me insane, dried out, or sick. That’s why.”

My father understood then (I understood, says my father) that this time he was not going to take off her shoes (I did not take off her shoes), nor was she going to offer (her feet) so that I wouldn’t get sick (because of absolutes) here in Oaxaca (where the best and worst of me began) (my mission, Angel my father now laughs): (your love, the best of me, says my father, and she repeats it with him).

She raised her thaumaturgical eyes and looked into my father’s green eyes.

My mother gave my father the water she held in the hollow of her hands to drink.

When we left the church, nevertheless, the unexpected was waiting for us: a white Shogun limousine right in the Oaxaca plaza, a uniformed Oriental chauffeur wearing a black cap, obsequiously opening the car door, next to which, on foot, leaning against the half-open window, one little Gucci-poochie foot coquettishly posed on the carpet of the limousine, the other posed unceremoniously on the cobbles of the Oaxaca plaza, dressed, all of him, in white as if for an extemporaneous First Communion, in his hand an elegant malacca cane which he twirled in his idle fingers before our astonished eyes, his jowly face perfectly polished, shiny, pulled tight, well shaven except for the tiny black spot of a mustache on his permanently sweaty upper lip: our Uncle Don Homero Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca, of the best etc.…

“Ah, dearly beloved niece and nephew, don’t gape at me in such an astonished fashion.” Don Homero laughed musically. “Rather, you should repeat as the sublime poet Don Luis de Góngora said in disquieted contemplation of these Fabio, oh grief, you see before you, fields of solitude, faded hills were once famous Cempoala, or as his worthy successor, the poet Don Octavio Paz, in the same place but three centuries later: Only the fat academic is immortal! Here I am, and as your favorite poet might say (Homero said, wagging his censorious sausage finger), you seek Acapulco in Oaxaca, oh pilgrim! and Acapulco in Oaxaca you do not find because Acapulco turns out to be in Acapulco, and, oh Quevedo, grandfather of terrorist dynamiters, only the ephemeral remains and lasts! Which is to say, niece and nephew, October 12 is coming and with it the Quincentennial of our discovery, or as the Indians of Guanahaní said when they saw the caravels approach, Hurray, hurray, we’ve been discovered! But I, modest man that I am, only desire that the child of our blood, destined to win, if God wills it, the national contest of the little Christophers, come into this world with comforts and auguries worthy of his high destiny, for which I place at your and your comrades’ disposal my humble carriage — and inside the limousine my parents saw with horror Egg seated between Homero’s little sisters Capitolina and Farnesia, they full of smiles, kind, of course, wearing summery flowered dresses and wide-brimmed straw hats with ribbons, Scarlett O’Horror style, beckoning with maternal solicitude to my mother (with their hands) and to my father (with their eyes), and Egg with a gesture that said there’s no way out! shrugging his shoulders and Baby Ba is not there, she is no longer there, SHE IS NO LONGER THERE! I shout from my solar center invisible but no one pays me any mind — in order to travel to Acapulco and await the blessed event in my house, whose rustic comforts you will have to excuse (as my singular friend Don Enrique Larreta said, sipping at the straw in his hierba mate in a smoky little ranch near Paysandú) but whose austere virtues you know only too well.

And since he detected that my parents were somewhat hesitant he imperiously and impatiently tapped them with his walking stick lightly, on the shoulders (the very shoulders my father had been kissing only a few minutes earlier), on the knuckles (the very hands in which my mother had held the water she had offered to my father only a few minutes earlier) (and this gentle rapping reminded my father of the sado-erotic spankings that his uncle had given him with a lady’s shoe when he was a boy), and said come along now, my patience is limited as is my time, my little sisters here, Capitolina and Farnesia, certified virgins both, will gladly play the part of midwife: holy little hands! Acapulco is being reconstructed slowly but surely, under new and more propitious patronage than that of that deplorable petty political boss Ulises López, and it is important for our future (which is also that of your baby, beloved niece and nephew!) that the little Christopher come into the world there, that Acapulco be the site of the Grand Celebration of the Quincentennial, and that our face, which received the Illustrious Navigator, who was coming from his East which was our West, search another East that was still farther off. Let us now turn toward the true, classical Orient, the Pacific, which in reality is our nearest Occident, as we, by God, are their true Orient! But, in a word, I don’t know what I’m saying, except this: that the child be born on October 12 in the port of Acapulco, which faces the new constellation of the Pacific. Let’s declare our faith in the future at this opportune moment, upward and onward, Tomasito, as Our Candidate exclaimed as he raised on high our PRIstine banners in the Far-Off Campaign of 1970, because tonight we must sleep in Pichilinque, on the eve of October 12, and go, all of us, to ask a blessing and to give thanks in the Cathedral of Acapulco.

My parents took their place on the car’s jump seats, staring at the smiling faces of Capitolina and Farnesia as well as the ovoid face of our astonished buddy while Don Homero assumed his place in front next to the chauffeur Tomasito.

“How easy it is to see that our brother is of the same blood as we”—Farnesia sighed—“just as we call all our maids Servilia, he calls all his drivers Tomasito…”

“Enough of these vagaries, Farnesita,” Capitolina interrupted her. “Better make the Sign of the Cross quickly because this is indeed a cardinal sin, being out of our house two days in a row, and traipsing around these mountains, filled with who knows what dangers, and ending up as midwives in Acapulco, that capital of vice, the Babylon of the Pacific coast…”