Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

What’s happening, from the lunar center of my mother I hear them, smell them, oh Granny: it’s the coyotes of Acapulco, have they come back to be present at my entry into life? into death? I smell their wet fur, their reddish eyes penetrate my mother’s transparent belly, they could sink their sharp fangs between my fed navel and her exhausted navel: the coyotes form a circle around us, my father, my mother, and me, separating us from the Lost Boy and Orphan Huerta, who urge us: Soon? There’s no time left! Choose: Pacífica or Mexico?

Or Mexico: will I be born here? You know where? Will I leave this country? Owing a thousand dollars, dead or alive! Will I be led to the D.F.? To breathe from birth eleven thousand tons of sulphur, lead, and carbon monoxide every day? To join a half million annual births — anal birds, antic words? To join a quarter of a million kids who die of asphyxia and infection each year? To shit, to add my shit to that of millions of dogs, cats, mice, horses, bats, unicorns, eagles, serpents, plumed coyotes? To swallow thirty thousand tons of garbage per day? To join the vultures that devour the rot: blessed art thou, Our Lady Tlazoltéotl, first star of the eternal night and of the invisible day, you who cleanse by devouring and then dirty it all in order to have something to clean; lady, can you compete with seven million automobiles, five million bureaucrats, thirty million pissers, shifters, eaters, fuckers, sneezers? Am I going out into that country? So that they can tell me that thanks to oil we’re in good shape? That from now on we have nothing to worry about, just to administer our wealth? That I’ll have my refrigerator even though I may not have electricity, and my Walkman so that people can be jealous when I walk the streets that are buried in garbage and fires?

READERS, RESOLVE MY DILEMMA:

Is it worth it to be born in Mexico in 1992?

Please! I’m forgetting everything! With each maternal shake something else slips out of my memory, I’m talking to my ancestors to see if they remember, but now they, too, have slipped away and with them everything I knew, now I won’t know anything, goo, be-a-ba here comes the ahhhhh: the fire above my little head went out, and outside I can hear the ubiquitous loudspeakers that travel the streets and plazas of my Sweet Fatherland, announcing that the celebration has been postponed, presidential decree / speech by Mamadoc and her / Columbus was colonial / there is nothing to celebrate the little Christophers are finished / Mexican time is postponable time, postponable, postponable: everything’s happening tomorrow, not today, what do you say? All this happened tomorrow! (My mother trembles even more, now she howls like the coyotes that surround us.) Will my birth be postponed? So, after all that, I won’t be born? Am I being given the right not to be born? Can I choose? Can I perhaps stay here forever in my soft salon, swimming in my Olympic pool, living in ease on the blood, the pâté, and the mucus of Madonna Angelica? Aaaaay here comes the aaaaaah: she is screaming in pain, the killer quake of ’85 is being reproduced in its entirety in my mother’s city, on uterus avenue (labyrinth of solitude! Luther’s Expressway!), and I curse my mommy,

MOTHER

NAME WHERE BIOLOGY ACQUIRES A SOUL!

WHERE NATURE BECOMES TRANSCENDENT!

AND WHERE SEX BECOMES HISTORY!

Can you hear me, Mom? Why don’t you answer me? You, too, are forgetting — are you forgetting me? I kick I dive I bend like a reed, I hear, ever more faintly, your voice which during nine months accompanied me, soothed me, sang to me, celebrated me, what’s happening to me, Mommy? History’s happening to me, the past is happening to me, the nation is happening to me and the narration of the nation is happening to me, the earth is happening to pass me toward you who lead me, I hear you say it, weakly now, the gas is passing out of me, my memory and my desire are passing out of me, my imagination and my language, love and envy are passing out of me, resentment and celebration are passing out of me, narrowness and symbols, analogies and differences all passing out of me, tacos, eggplant parmigiana (Anna? Anna, like manna, banana, banana split? That’s it!), I’m heading for the earth, Mother, on this beach you received me and on it you are going to toss me, just as Uncle Homero was tossed, flying, naked, and spraying the world with blood and shit to celebrate my arrival: do you know what you are doing when you expel me into the world, Mother? Have you taken account of your responsibility and my own? You expel me to earth knowing that I am going to violate it, just as you, and my father and Homero Fagoaga and a pair of blind Indians with wooden hoes and Don Ulises López armed with lawsuits and checkbooks and bonds without bonds: will the very earth that we violate receive us, will you tell me, you and my father? We kill the earth in order to be able to live, and then we expect the earth to forgive us, absolve us of death even though we kill it? I’m being thrown, Pop and Mom, into a world where there is no possible reconciliation: we cannot be at one with the exploited earth, she gives us fewer punishments (death) than we give to her (violence): now I take revenge on you, world, to take out my portion of violence on you, violence on nature, violence on men, violence on myself: I am going to that destiny, beyond the ephemeral idiocies of smog, debt, the PRI, our national symbols, that’s what I’m coming into, taking revenge on myself: to exploit the world from the moment I walk on it and to spend my life trying to expiate the guilt of my first exploitation, which was to suck your milk, which was to spit in a stream, which was to eat a jar of pureed Paschal Lamb sacrificed for me: am I arriving just to share this guilt? Can I do something to redeem it? Can I love a woman, write a book, free a people? Not even that, not even that: I’ll do it all, gentle Readers, except allow the good earth to speak for itself, to express itself directly, not through my song or my curse, that I will not permit because I think (that’s his father talking, you say) that art or politics or science (that comes from his grandparents!) is a sufficient compensation for our crime; that’s why I go resigned to debt, oh Readers, to the PRI, to the smog, and to Mamadoc, because an instant before leaving my mother’s womb I know (and I will forget it!) that neither I nor any other child about to be born, here or anywhere, could stand being born in a perfect world, a just world: it would horrify us, deprive us of all our pretexts, we need, oh Lord, oh Reader, oh Pro-Gen-I-Tors, an unjust world in order to dream about changing it, by ourselves, into a better world: the earth smiles before paying us, mercifully, with death …

I ask myself: I ask you: I ask all of you:

Will I have the right, at least, to intimacy with the world?

I do not have (I don’t have, we don’t have) time to answer; the contractions are more and more frequent; my father embraces my mother; they kiss; the two of them are kneeling on the beach, on their knees in the sand that grows colder by the minute, and their fingers are buried in whatever is left of the heat. Now my father takes her hand. He guides her finger over the sand. Their fingers write:

It is burning ice, frozen fire,

a wound that pains yet is unfelt

a dreamed-of good, a present ill

a brief rest which is no rest.

A wave breaks and washes away the poem — by whom? just written on the wet sand:… what is the name of that poem?

The wave takes away something else: I tremble as I hear that poem my father recites aloud, where have I heard it before? where? by God, before I knew everything, I heard that poem before. Now the fire over my head is going out, I knew who wrote it before, what its title was, now even the verses are disappearing just as lifelines disappear when the dead grow old: am I growing old, am I dying, am I forever leaving behind my ancestors, my memory, and my future imagining here inside as well? What do I hold on to, my God? I invoke you, see? I shall not end my poor unborn novel without directing a prayer to you, without recognizing you (just in case), but I’ll be brief: I’ll leave you this spot, you will decide whether to occupy it or not!