Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

And to think that in those testicles of yours that created me, father of mine, can be found all the sperm necessary to produce the current population of the world: in the hemispherical duplicity of a single man: you, my father, Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, twenty-two years of age, of an uncertain and failed life, youthful errors behind you (or so you think), new horizon, promising aurora before you (or so you think): in your balls, Pop, is all the sperm necessary to invent six billion Aztecs, Quechuas, Patagonians, Caribs, Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, and arrogant Aryans, polyracial Polynesians, hungry Hungarians, Finlandish finalists, and basking Basques fallen from the moon: all your semen would fit in a shot glass; patriarch!

all the eggs necessary to re-create the populations of the planet would fit as well, Mamma Mia, you who produce them, in a test tube:

thank you, thank you, for creating only me!

me instead of the six billion other possibles (plus pixies, Gasparine ghosts, Nahuatl poltergeists, children of the night, and other Frankedenics who accompany us)

thanks for ejaculating me among 300 million other sperm all competing in the same contest and whom I defeated

thanks for allowing me to travel the eight inches from my father’s penis to my mother’s egg, which to me, dear Readers, seemed as great a distance as that from Jupiter to Venus (but I will never be a hungry little Saturn and eat my parents, I am no patriphage!)

thanks for giving victorious me lodging

thanks for my nine months and for what I’ve learned in them: I have lived for nine months, I am a gerontonone at birth: I note that I am a not-yet-neonate! and above all, are my little brothers from the New World of the New World, the Utopia of the Pacific, inviting us to leave this land for a better one? As if my father’s sperm which I say could not re-create and repopulate the earth which fell to us! As if my father’s Hegelatinegenes could invent a different past, different information, in the technological paradise being offered to us by the second Tomasito, the heretofore Lost Boy, and his brother O. Huerta both standing hand in hand! The new Columbuses arrived from the Orient: New World of the New World!

We are all Columbuses, those of us who bet on the truth of our imagination and win; we are all Quijotes who believe in what we imagine; but, ultimately, we are all Don Juans who desire as soon as we imagine and who quickly find out that there is no innocent desire, the desire to complete oneself takes over the other, changes him, makes him one’s own: not only do I desire you, I desire besides that you desire as I do, that you be like me, that you be I: Christopher, Quijote, Juan, our fathers who art on earth, our everyday Utopia, give it to us tomorrow and forgive us our debts ($1,992 billion, according to this morning’s Gall Street Journal! ), although we (Aztecs! Incas! Sioux! Caribs! Araucanians! Patagonians!) will never forgive our debtors: yessir, make us fall into temptation, because pleasure without sin is not pleasure, long live Thomistic Catholicism which presents us with unattainable ends in exchange for inexcusable means, long live Augustinian Catholicism, which protects us from personal responsibility before God and obliges us to seek His grace through the intermediary of the hierarchy, long live Ignatian Catholicism, which allows us all ways to conquer souls in the name of God and death, Angeles, death above all to the worst enemy of our Mediterranean, Catholic, Thomistic, Augustinian, Jesuit, Marianite tradition: not this pacific Confucianism being offered to us with such conviction and tenderness by the Lost Boy, but the false revolutionaries, the modernizers, be they Russians, gringos, or just local upstarts, Angeles my wife, Christopher my son, the destroyers of our faithful image and our modest destiny: says my father, in the first place the gringos, the greatest revolutionaries in Mexico, those who have upset everything, those who really set us on the trail of the mirage of the future, those who mutilated our territory and turned silver into plastic and filled bakeries with smoke and broke the mirrors, the Yankee revolutionaries who made us dream about progress but who invaded us, humiliated us, persecuted us, and slugged us every time we made a move toward progress by being ourselves; death to their puritanical and militant hypocrisy; to the gigantic agonic and pentagonic corruption that allows itself to point at us with the finger of one hand and hold its nose with two fingers of the other because of our skimpy corruption of playful dwarfs; death to all their imitators, Mexican modernizers-at-all-costs, those drunk on paper, cement, and mercury juice wealth and the right to steal and to export earnings and total amnesia about what happens in the blind mountains and the mute slums; and death, too, to all the left-wing modernizers, who secularized the ecclesiastical tradition and offer it now disguised as progress: let them have their German, abstract ideology passed through a sieve of Slavic Cesareopapism for a people whose Counter-Reformation authoritarianism is enough and more than enough for it, thank you: let’s toast all of them with a glass of filthy water from the bay of dead dolphins: Angeles, Christopher, I don’t want a world of progress which captures us between North and East and takes away from us the best of the West, but at the same time I don’t want a pacific world which we will not deserve as long as we don’t resolve what’s going on inside here, my father says to us, with all that which we are, good and bad, bad and good, but still unresolved; wife, son, we shall arrive at Pacífica one day if we first stop being North or East in order to be ourselves, West and all. That would be Kantinflas’s categorical imperative: Mock de Summa! Mere Cortésy won’t take Cuauhtémoc off his bed of roses! All the cold rains of the world come to us from the Escorial! Queen Juana the Mad-der of Fact! Isabel the Chaotic, the tour brulée (and the Abolished Prince) and the Inky Session: I’ve drunk enough juice of the Cal Vine and swallowed enough Jacobites that I could shit a Constipated Luther and a J.-J. Rousseau, long live my chains! Condor Ché, long live my past! Chief Er Sun, Jamil Tun, and Rubberspyre: Calmás and We Dawn, Le Nin Le Nain Le Non, Engels Angeles Engelschen: let your halo shine once more, my love: my mother’s aureole shines intensely, the galleons from the Orient shine, as well as the Lost Boy’s golden hands, the argentine voice of he who was the Orphan Huerta, begging us, come, asking us, are you coming with us or not?

But my parents don’t seem to heed this supplication.

My father and mother kiss.

She is still on her knees.

It must be an ancestral posture.

On her knees in the sand that grows cooler minute by minute.

We share in a moment of pleasant solitude (placentic, I mean). How much time between each apocalyptic tremor in Mamma Mia’s belly? Nothing moves and I take advantage of the free time to count time and tell myself: I still haven’t been born yet I already feel as if my soul were ancient. I still haven’t been born yet I already fear that I’m going to act again the way my ancestors acted. Glory and ambition. Love and liberty. Violence. A land of sad men and happy children: how many children are born and die and are reborn with me?

I know that this is the calm before the storm. I know it.

Ayayay, here comes the earthquake again, I knew it, I knew it, you loved me, you loved me, Dad! Mom! Reader! Tell me, all of you! What’s happening to me? Am I going? How I grab on to my destiny now that the racket’s starting up again, my mother’s commotions, her belly as agitated as the deepest tide of the deepest part of the ocean over which the Lost Boy and the Orphan Huerta are urging us to flee: I repeat to myself like a prayer: my destiny is defined by the genes of my father and mother — I am unique — I am the product of a conjunction of genes that had never combined before in the same way — it’s possible that the genetic combination that fell to me will make me happy — it’s possible it will make me unhappy — but I’ll never know it unless I’m born, and what I’m feeling as my mother’s contractions grow more frequent is that I’m going to be thrown out of my home sweet home, once again to wander, but if the first exit of little Christopher took place during pleasure, this one — I can smell it — will take place amid pain; why, my God, why conceived in pleasure and born in strife? My fear is yellow like the faces from Pacífica: am I going to be born? or am I actually going to die? I have aged irremediably in my mother’s belly, yes, what they call being born is a deception, I am going to die a little old man; nobody gets any more time than nine months, we all die at nine months of age; the rest is death because it is oblivion (how you tremble, holy little Mother, calm down, for heaven’s sake: give your little Christopher some peace! Not so hard, Mom, I feel like a marble made of blood rolling down a tunnel of smoke! Are you casting me out into the world? And suppose the world also only lasts nine months, what then? Mommy, Mommy, holy God, Daddy, Dada, Dada …). I’m forgetting everything I knew, the light is going out, here inside I knew everything, genes and Hegels, Hegelatines, my ancestors lived nine months keeping me company, my telephone book’s full of lawyers, and more lawyers, shysters, rhetoricians, yakkers, ambulance chasers, prosecutors and prostitutors, hearings and seeings, syndicates and cynicates, tried and retried, executors and executioners, houses of detention and houses of correction: well, correct me if you can, let’s see you correct the world.