Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

My father says to my mother.

My infantile eyes, Angeles, looked at that round, redundant presence — my Uncle Homero Fagoaga — with whom I had to coexist during the years of my childhood and adolescence, as did Juan Goytisolo with the caudillo, Francisco Franco: to inconceivable limits, to the point that I could not imagine life without my oppressor, without his pronouncements, orders, concessions, and rules. Uncle Homero got fatter and fatter, as if he were eating for two. It was impossible to imagine him as a child. He must have had an old man’s face when he was born. He knows everything. He’s obsequious to everyone. The active dialectical organization of all opposites is immediately perceptible between his two cerebral hemispheres, as vast, conceivable, as all the other paired fleshy parts of the abominable anatomy of my Uncle Homero Fagoaga.

Look at him as he imperiously saunters through salons and antechambers, offices and auditoriums, churches and fashionable discotheques: the archaizing thesis runs from the totemic soles of his flat feet properly protected from the slightest contact with Mexican filth by white Gucci leather to the top of his head, involuntarily tonsured by time and Pantene massages; the modernizing thesis runs from the greasy, well-oiled strands on his cranium (that head which is the top of Don Homero’s corporeal pyramid): there, in the gaze of this eminent personage (he’s arrived! he’s here! let him pass through! stand at attention, everyone! Don Homero Fagoaga has entered!) the illiterate masses would find that the entire Age of Reason, from the spirit of law to the cultivation of our own garden, parades through the bright belvedere of his eyes, now — we must admit it — often covered over by lashes ever shorter and more sticky, the Weariness ever thicker, his brows ever longer, his eyelids ever droopier, wrinkled, thinned out, and other disasters of the autumn of life; but the Spanish Counter-Reformation, with all its inquisitions, expulsions, prohibitions, and certificates of purity, remains in the same way Don Homero’s calluses last and scratch in the same way Don Homero’s uncut, mandarin toenails remain: Torquemada inhabits one of his demonstrably functioning testicles (this in spite of our liberal Uncle Don Fernando’s slanderous rumormongering), and Rousseau the other: born free, his second ball knows no other chain than that of a coquettish pair of Pierre Cardin briefs; under one armpit rests the nun, the mother, the holy betrothed saint of mine; under the other, the rumba dancer, the whore, the holy whore. There is, therefore, no admirer more devout or impassioned of the singular synthesis obtained in Mamadoc; Don Homero’s got gunpowder in one nostril and incense in the other; with one ear he hears the Blessed be He and with the other he hears that old revolutionary song, the corrida about the ballad of the Revolution, girl Valentina; with one buttock he sits at the table of reaction, with the other on the benches of the Revolution; and only in the holes and uneven centers, in the singularities of his body, which is so vast it is dual, white and flabby twice over, fundamentous and quivering in every binomial, fervent and odorous in every cotyledon of his gardenia, ambitious twice over, hypocritical twice over, a fool twice over, intuitive twice over, malicious twice over, innocent twice over, gluttonous twice over, arrogant twice over, provincial twice over, resentful twice over, improvised twice over, everything twice over, nothing twice over, Mexican to the depths of his soul, no nation was ever blessed with so much nothing and nothing of so much except the baroque mirage of a gilt altar for an unshod Virgin (thinks Don Homero Fagoaga, pinning a carnation to his lapel before the mirror and dreaming of seducing Mamadoc). Only in the holes and unmatched centers, says my father Angel, can the vital distance of so much paradox be conjugated: like a deep vein that says scratch away at me and you’ll find silver; his anus a whirl of thick golden ingots that says wait and you will receive gold, don’t be deceived by appearances (our Uncle Fernando Benítez closes his eyes as he flies over the precipices of the Sierra Madre toward the last Lacandon and smells the nearness of a mountain of blind gold): the inexhaustible verbal fuel in his tongue.

Because he owes his renown, above all, to his dominion over language, to an exquisite use of the forms of courtesy (“I do not offend through those with which I sit down, Marquise, if I say that your ladyship’s next flatulence will figure on my bill; you just go on eating this sublime dish from our national cuisine, refried beans, slices of onion, Manchego cheese, and peas, who could want more?”) and to his marvelous use of the subjunctive (“If I were to like or were not to like, I might not doubt, exquisite friend, to proceed perhaps if to do so you would have or might not have some problem alluding to your female progenitor, but only if to do it, there were incontrovertible proofs of your being bastards”), without forgetting his incomparable use of the national political language (“After the proclamation of Independence by Father Hidalgo and the expropriation of oil by General Cárdenas, the inauguration of the Road Dividers of Chilpancingo is the most transcendent act of National History, Mr. Governor”) and even of international political language (“From the cosmic balcony of Tepeyac may be heard, vicars, Holy Father, the hallelujahs of the deaf genius of Bonn!”). To any word Don Homero Fagoaga ascribes some twelve syllables even if it only happens to have three: gold on his lips is transmuted into go-oo-aah-ll-dd and Góngora comes out sounding like gonorrhea.

“Learn, my boy, the Fagoagas never lose, and what they do lose they yank right back!”

Pillars of the Government, of the Church, and of Commerce, lost in the immensity of His-panic time:

Who defeated the Moor in Granada?

Fagoaga!

Who defended the cross in Castile?

Fagoaga!

From those faggots, Fagoagas.

From those powers, Homers!

exactly as it is written on the family coat of arms. Angel stared at the final product of that line — his Uncle Homero — and said no.

“If I squeeze, as if they were lemons, all the Fagoagas who have existed over thirteen centuries, Angeles, I swear I wouldn’t get more than a bubble of bitter bile and another of flatulence, to use his term. Sorry, baby; I except my dead mom the inventor who showed her intelligence by marrying a blundering scientist who was a man of few words, like my dad.”

My father bade farewell to the house of his childhood — the house of the bright colors — by silently walking through the gallery of pearlescent light, as if there were two different kinds of light in that one space, the light of the new world and the light of the other, which if not old world, grew further and further away for the Americas of the nineties, where the carefully framed portraits of my grandparents’ heroes were hanging.

There was Ernest Rutherford, looking rather like a sea lion, tall and with a shaggy mustache, gray, as if he had just come from the depths of his cave, dazzled as he left the darkness behind, seeing in the heavens a duplication of the world of the atom.

There was Max Planck, with his high forehead right out of a Flemish painting and his narrow shoulders and drooping mustache, and Niels Bohr, with thick, protuberant lips, looking like the good-natured captain of a whaling ship, forever pacing the deck of a universe on the verge of rioting and throwing the savant into the open sea in a rowboat without oars, and Wolfgang Pauli looking like the perfect Viennese bourgeois, stuffed with pastry and the music of violins.