Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

Between his sixteenth and his twentieth year the pests pestered him and the parachutists rained on him, as if the independence of his generation (which grew progressively more disciplined under paternal tutelage) depended on Angel in his house, from which it was possible to see the Angel of Independence on Paseo de la Reforma. It was as if that were the price of the unsettled, excited twenty years of death, repression, opening, reform, triumph, collapse, and austerity in which Angel and his friends had the good fortune to be born and grow up: they saw their own coming-of-age postponed again when they were between eighteen and twenty-two and the effective control of their parents extended and strengthened to a degree worthy of the most severe household of the prerevolutionary Porfirio Díaz era — until, thought my father Angel, privileged spectator that he was, the time for the inevitable reaction came, the helplessness, solitude, escape, and nomadism that began after the Disaster of 1990.

But one might also say that the very illusion of liberty depended on Angel’s isle of autonomy, on that and something else: as if the eventual resurrection (oh, vain illusion!) of the moribund city, where by now all the worst prophecies about it come true, without anyone’s ever having raised a finger to stop them, depended on the wobbly survival of Colonia Juárez, the only urban oasis that still maintained a certain veneer of civilization. In the ears of Angel, in the ears of his genes, and in the ears of his descendants in limbo, there rumbles the sound of filthy water, pumped in and out, pestilential, a gigantic parallel to the beats and vulnerabilities of his own heart.

In the coach house on Calle Génova, my father found himself alone with a mountain of garbage and the conviction that nothing — really nothing — of all that was piled up there was worthy of being saved: the magic of the marketplace, as President Ronald Ranger liked to say, at the outset of the odious eighties, saved nothing: it destroyed everything, while making people believe that the garbage deserved to remain. And the worst thing is that Angel could not or would not get rid of the mountain of detritus that threatened to bury him in his own cave. He wouldn’t deprive himself of that most eloquent testimony to the era he was honored to live through: the monument of scrap, vinyl, and old hair. Hitler’s evil genius consisted in offering to the times in which we lived its most truthful prognostication — the mountains of enslaved objects from Auschwitz. Who didn’t have his innocent Auschwitz in an attic, a coach house, a medicine chest, a trunk, or in his own back yard?

Thus it was that my father Angel, when he reached his twentieth birthday, one before by law what he had inherited from his deceased parents, the inventors, should be handed over to him, he came to the full realization that having grown up in a world that was proudly conservative in its economics, both in its principles and in their application, in reality he had grown up in a world of junk and economic anarchy. The truth had been a lie, and realizing it offended him greatly.

This afternoon of my creation, my genes and chromosomes begin to talk as if my life depended on language more than on the fortuitous meeting of semen and egg: listening to my father and mother speak immersed in the sea which is the cradle of life, the unique refrigerator in the burning world that incinerated all forms of life in the universe except those that took refuge and developed underwater and left, I tell you with perfect certainty, the primitive ocean inside every one of us, floating eternally in a certain sense in saltwater, because the problem, your mercy the reader should know, is not to dry out. Never, under no circumstance: if you dry out you die, like a fish without scales, a bird without feathers, or a pup without fur: pity the person who tends not the savage ocean he bears within him because it’s the only thing left to him from two overlapping creations: that of the world and that of the child. I say this because I feel that my parents are speaking one afternoon from within the Pacific Ocean, about another ocean of dust: a city they will, I suppose, bring me to someday, since they talk so much about it, think about it so much, predict so many things about it, and fear it so much. For example: “Look, Angelito,” his (mine, mighty, mymighty?) Grandpa General Rigoberto Palomar said to him, “the Drainage Sewer was built by Don Porfirio Díaz in around 1900 at a level lower than the city’s at that time. But now the city has sunken in its swampy bed and the sewer is higher than our shit. Now it costs millions to pump day in day out so that the shit rises to the level of the sewer and flows away. If they stopped pumping for two minutes, Mexico City would be flooded with poop.”

Angel put up with everything until the day when a pest of a different nature joined the crowd. A tall, robust, dark, mustachioed young man with the eyes of one of the guerrilleros photographed by Casasola drinking chocolate in Sanborn’s in the Year of Our Lord 1915. I see him now: I’d seen him in the halls of alma mater, HEROES OF 1982, walking as if he’d spent his life pushing the cannon in the Zacatecas campaign, with his gorilla-like shoulders: invisible cartridge belts crossed his chest, an invisible, blackened straw hat covered his big head: anyone who did not avert his eyes ran the risk of meeting him in person and getting demolished. His name was Matamoros Moreno.

“What can I do for you, bro’?” asked Angel, opening the door, his ability to be surprised having early on been eradicated. An ear of green corn in mole rolled from the inside of the house toward the street.

“Remember me?”

“Who could forget you?”

“Do you mean that?” He bared tremendous teeth as he gazed with unfeigned lust at the pile of deflated condoms and dried-out Kotex behind Angel. “Bet you can’t remember what my name is.”

“Petero Palots,” said my dad with insouciance, not so much out of irreverence but simply because he was unconscious of the danger.

“Whadya mean?” grunted Matamoros Moreno.

“Listen, man,” answered my pop, “it’s not good manners to knock on someone’s door and then ask the guy who answers if he remembers your name ten years after having been in the same class with you and two hundred other assholes, staring at the map of the country while the son of a bitch of a teacher spent most of the class calling the roll. The only thing I remember is that he took sixty minutes to get from Aguilar to Zapata by way of your humble serviette Palomar y…”

“Moreno,” grunted the visitor, while my father, after a mnemo-technical shove like that, saw once again the map of the Republic before its current shrinkage (the country abbreviated during the disaster of 1990!), and the light bulb went on in his head.

“Tabasco Moreno.”

“Too far south.”

“Jalisco Moreno,” suggested my father timidly.

“Farther north,” said Moreno melancholically.

“Sonora Moreno.”

“ O, it ends in o, ” he said, this time almost begging for recognition. “Even by name I’m macho, Palomar.” He looked toward some false eyelashes someone had stuck on a mannequin head and forgotten there.

“Of course,” exclaimed my young father, “of course, who could forget that name: Matamoros Moreno. You just caught me off-guard. Now, what can I do…?”

Before he could finish the sentence, Matamoros managed to put one foot between the door and the jamb. “He won’t jamb me,” my father said to himself. “Enough is enough.” But this orangutan was scaring him.

“Don’t get all bent out of shape, Palomar,” said the big guy, now blinking one of his tiger eyes through the partially open door and speaking in a voice that was so sweet my father felt ashamed of himself.