Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

* * *

I’ll be brief because now events are starting to rush ahead, Readers, and I am the victim of the blessed simultaneity that frees us from fearful symmetry, but both, my last (or penultimate) memory tells me, are lies, nothing is simultaneous and nothing is symmetrical; at least, then, nothing is linear, thank God all of us are circular or spiral observers, it’s our privilege, yours and mine, Reader, here on this beach at midnight at the edge of the sea of waves, one chained to the next where float the galleons of Manila and China, which have come to bring me to the next Utopia.

— Pacífica—

Remember with me that portrait in the house of bright colors, the young Werner Heisenberg, dressed as a mountain climber, blond and smiling, telling us by way of farewell that the observer introduces instability in the system because he cannot separate himself from one point of view and therefore the observer and his point of view are part of the system and therefore there are no ideal systems because there are as many points of view as there are observers and each one sees something different: truth is partial because consciousness is partial: there is no universality except relativity, the world is unfinished because the men and women who observe it still have not finished, and truth, unexhausted, fugitive, in perpetual motion, is only the truth that takes all arbitrary positions into account and all the relative movements of each individual on this earth to which I am vertically heading, far from any lamps above my noggin: by god, Readers! it’s my grandparents, the ones that created the Inconsumable Taco, who are telling me all this, I don’t know if through the chain of my genes or by means of a sonar device in the shape of a hanging gourd that shines black from the highest mast on the China galleon, and that this is the conjuncture: on one side, the Lost Boys urge us one last time, are you coming or not? On the other side, I try to hold on to whatever I can, I stretch out my arms in my mother’s convulsed belly, under a downpour of coagulations, my holy little hands hit a cellophane wrapper, they tear it, and they seek, in the way cartilage follows after bone, in the way little feet seek water to splash around in, that’s how my hands seek out the fraternal twin: the dizzygothic twin, born from the other egg fertilized at the same time as I was, I seek him with my blind little fingers, my sweet little fingers that find another present wrapped in cellophane, they tear it open, they sniff the other being in the way the coyotes know how to smell and distinguish the differing scents of the twins: I touch those neighboring little fingers even if they are those of another and I know whose they are: Baby Ba! She was here all the while! She was here and I didn’t know it! Gestating with me! I am not alone! The girl was gestated with the same semen and the same egg that I was! The woman appeared at the same time as I did! Christine appeared with Christopher! I am not alone: I never was, Electra! I quickly think before I forget everything: I see a powerful city, a big-shouldered city, windy, early snow, the hut of a mute Indian woman, a grandmother who didn’t learn English and who forgot Spanish, receiving into her hands another child who appears between the dark and bloody legs of a blind woman, the blind father holds the woman’s head to make her comfortable, the blind boy is being born in Chicago, my fellow, my brother, he frozen and me hot! I who stretch out my fingers and tell Baby Ba my fraternal twin, I no longer have to choose, girl, of course I could see you, come on, come on, let’s go out together, you are my supreme reason for leaving, repeat that with me, we need each other, I cannot see half of the world without you, Baby Ba, nor can you without me, let’s go out to answer the world, to be responsible in the face of reality, stretch out your little hand and touch mine, please, repeat with me the last thing I say to you:

I tell you this: with the same facility that we leave behind the achievements and the ruins. Everything builds and feeds the future, success as well as failure. Everything, therefore, will be ruins. Except the present, girl. Except the present instant in which we were chosen to remember the past and desire the future. Memory and desire, girl. Desire and memory, goo, dada, ma, heeeeere comes the aaaaaaaah, clown begins with c, Baby, we’re together, play with me, let’s be playmates on earth, don’t be afraid anymore, Baby Ba, hold my little hand, I’m here with you, don’t you see, Baby, play with me, play sea serpent, booboo, agoo, dada, mama, papa …

* * *

Angel Palomar refused with a shake of his head: “We’re not going with you.”

I think my father feels that in this moment he is a desperate apparition.

* * *

Alone again! What an absolute solitude. Only my mother’s halo shines intensely. Egg left with the Lost Boy and the Orphan Huerta. We stayed behind. The caravels from the Orient went out to sea, foggy, radiant, their red sails unfurled on the masts, Chinese characters painted on them. Their three masts piercing the deck like stakes made of gold, heading out to sea, far from the dying beach, far from the turbid fever of El Niño and the mortal whiteness of the dolphins and the red and gray circle of coyotes, far from the poem erased by the white tongue of the sea, far away, the caravels shine far away on an ocean where the dolphins live again their pleasurable time, their perpetual leaping and diving in the sea, from the surface to the bottom and from the bottom to the surface, as regular as a clock, as pragmatic as an anchor, as serene as a plumb line, from the bottom to the surface and from the surface to the bottom, eternally, until they die. They have no other fun.

* * *

The distant sea, the entire sea, murmured my father, watching the ships from Pacífica sail away without them, the water revived with a puff of air printed on smoke.

* * *

A country of sad men and happy children.

* * *

A child is being born just as October 12, 1992, is born, on the beach at Acapulco. He comes into the world holding the hand of a little girl whose eyes are closed. The boy has his eyes wide open, as if his eyelids had never formed. He looks fixedly at the earth that awaits him. The boy swims toward the land, softly, carrying the girl with him. He emerges from the belly of his mother as if he were crossing the pacific sea, carrying the girl on his shoulders, saving her from death by water. The light went out; the fire over their heads went out. The boy comes out. From the sky a swift Angel descends, an Angel with a golden helmet and green spurs, a flaming sword in his hand, an Angel escaped from the Indo-Hispanic altars of opulent hunger, from need overcome by sleep, from the coupling of opposites: body and soul, wakefulness and death, living and sleeping, remembering and desiring, imagining: the happy boy who reaches the sad land carries all this on his lips, he bears the memory of death, white and extinguished, like the flame that went out in his mother’s belly: for a swift, marvelous instant, the boy being born knows that this light of memory, wisdom, and death was an Angel and that this other Angel who flies from the navel of heaven with the sword in his hand is the fraternal enemy of the first: he is the Baroque Angel, with a sword in his hand and quetzal wings, and a serpent doublet, and a golden helmet, the Angel strikes, strikes the lips of the boy being born on the beach: the burning and painful sword strikes his lips and the boy forgets, he forgets everything forgets everything,

1 The fortunes of President Jesús María y José Paredes can be read about in the novel, The King of Mexico; or, If You Move You Won’t Come Out in the Photo.