Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

She led me to a tiny church that looked more like a passageway, with windows open onto the street, and only there did she hand me the bag of locusts. Then she ran off, covering her mouth with her hand.

I ate those delicious insects that crackle between your teeth before releasing into your palate the airy burn of dawn (Matamoros dixit). Then I walked into the Church of San Cosme and San Damián, perhaps the simplest I’d seen in this city of baroque frills.

It was crowded.

But there was only one Agueda.

How could I not recognize her? Normally I wouldn’t have noticed a woman there praying before the Christ of the Way of Calvary, but in this Sunday crowd I believed anything and everything when I saw her there kneeling in contradictorily prestigious starched skirts and fearsome full mourning.

Of course I bit my tongue as I recognized I was quoting the poem by López Velarde I’d read the night before in my solitary bed, resisting the temptation to masturbate, imagining Cousin Agueda’s fingers weaving “gently and perseveringly in the sonorous corridor.” How could I not recognize her this morning if just last night, sadly, I ended up offering up to her that small, jumping, nervous sacrifice, I myself a cricket with chili on it, imagining her as I saw her now, dressed in mourning, but resonant with starch, with her coppery eyes, and her ruddy cheeks, and I wishing she would caress me as she was caressing the beads on her rosary with her fine, agile fingers.

Oh my chaste and pure soul! Agueda turned her head covered with veils of black lace just at the moment when I decided to give in to the seductions of the language appropriate to the woman and the place: to stop resisting and become that language. She turned her head and looked at me — just for an instant (telling makes it seem longer, but it all happened in an instant) — with her unusual copper sulphate eyes.

“I had, inland, an impoverished sweetheart”: in those eyes that rhymed with each other I detected an infinitely modest happiness, oh my unborn son, and all my sour tedium drained from me. In Agueda’s eyes I discovered not conformity but peace.

She looked at me for an instant and again wrapped her mourning in her shawl the color of ivory and mother-of-pearl. I followed her to the exit. She didn’t try to avoid me. She didn’t stop to say, “Do not compromise me further, sir.”

To the contrary. She turned to look at me from time to time; and I stopped each time she turned, telling her that I would follow wherever she led: Agueda. Well, she went from the flagstone floor of San Cosme and San Damián to the golden glory of Santo Domingo, and from there to the temple of Our Lord of Health, which smelled intensely of flowers and the bakeries next door, and finally to the art-nouveau Church of San Felipe Neri, where she settled down for a long stay. It was now five in the afternoon and she wasn’t moving, surrounded by those fleurons that seemed invented by Gaudí in Barcelona but which in fact were the work of Zapotec craftsmen from Oaxaca in the seventeenth century. I began to think of the gaze of the Holy Child of Atocha dressed in brocade and red feathers more as that of a rival than as a gaze of reproach.

“Young man, we are closing now,” a bald sacristan dressed in a filthy brown suit informed me I don’t know how much later.

On the other hand, he said nothing to Agueda, who was still wrapped in her radiant mourning.

Since I saw she wasn’t about to move, it occurred to me to hide in one of the confessionals, on the priest’s side. The doors were locked and the lights were extinguished, but when I left my hiding place, I saw Agueda still kneeling there, Christopher my boy, and I didn’t want to watch her become an old maid.

I approached her; I touched her shoulder; she turned toward me. All her symbols depended on her eyes: the apostolic spider, the nocturnal hieroglyphic, the enigmatic Edens of her hair, the cruel scorpions of sex; the vacuous intrigue of erotic chess.

She, too, remained silent; she left everything to my immediate memory of López Velarde’s verses, names and musicality, a poet dead at the age of thirty-three, my unborn Christopher, all because he strayed from the old park of his heart in Jerez de Zacatecas to go to die in the noisy thoroughfare of the decadent, rouged, and lipsticked capital; in 1921, on a June morning, the poet Ramón died with his pockets full of papers without adjectives.

Oh, my retrograde heart: Agueda looked at me and I feared she would think all this about me: this dark, tall, green-eyed boy with the brand-new mustache is my sweetheart, my cousin, my poet Ramón López Velarde. But it didn’t happen that way — that was only my imagination seeking to explain the sudden solitude of the Church of San Felipe on a Sunday night in November in 1990, when the poet from Jerez had enjoyed barely sixty-nine years of immortality.

She said nothing; but she did raise her veil over the comb she wore in her hair, thus revealing the rustic novelty of her perfumed nape. The nape was both annunciation and invitation. I had no idea that a nape, the beginning of her hair and the nakedness of her neck, could be as exciting as the meeting ground between pubic hair and belly skin. I kissed her as her clothes slid off her back and she abandoned the starched mourning shawl on her shoulders.

She knew me (or rather knew the poet): she bared only her back, shoulders, and nape; she invited me to monopolize with my kisses the incomparable smoothness of her body, she gave me the ecstasy of the chaste, acid fragrance of her armpits; of her shoulders, perfect for a copious and liquid cry; of the wingèd virtue of her soft breast; in the sleepy quintessence of her soft back: I breathing it all in, I forever in love with the smoothness and softness of provincial women, fair-skinned and light on their feet, pretty faces that never miss a Mass, young ladies with apple-shaped faces, prisoners of the glacial abandon of their beds, who so quickly turn from being intact virgins to Matres dolorosas: I would like to fall asleep in your beatific arms, Agueda, as if on the breasts of a saint.

The perfumed partiality of Agueda’s body in the church infected me with the absolute. Clenching my teeth, I told her I could not desire her and only desire her, that she should give me what she had even if it were on the threshold of the cemetery, “like perfume,” I whispered in her ear, “and bread and poison and cauterization.”

The statue of the Virgin in the church, dressed in mourning like Agueda, was also a somber triangle presiding over the lucid mist: Mexican Virgins have feminine sex and shape, and then Agueda, who felt me kissing her back and shoulders and nape but who felt me within as well as near her underskirts, raised her feet and offered them, sliding on the pew, to my insatiable curiosity.

I took off her shoes, I kissed her feet, and I remembered verses about feet that fascinated me enormously. It is not I who return but my enslaved feet, said Alfonso Reyes the exile among us. I love your feet because they walked on the earth until they found me, said Pablo Neruda the immortal lover. Luis Buñuel in enraged tenderness washed the feet of the poor and of some young Mexican ladies in the most exciting scene of Christian eroticism on a certain Good Friday. Now Agueda’s feet seek my sex, which is opportunely free of its prison of shorts and zippers, and Agueda kisses me only with her feet, Agueda makes me tremble and I imagine her in the role of Veronica, granting me the gift of her patience while her now tranquil, thaumaturgic eyes watch my pleasure: for you, Christopher my son, not yet: that time it was for her and for me because unless the father experiences pleasure the son never will.

She gave me water to drink from her cupped hands.