Carlos Fuentes: Christopher Unborn

ALONE AT LAST, AT LAST ALONE

……….Terror……….Pain………. and I, alone once more: I the only one who made it to Treasure Island: my mother’s egg awaits me in its hiding place. She on her throne of blood, Queen of the Angels — Isabella, Angeles, opens her arms to me, the Champ, victorious over the millions of soldier boys and girls dead in the useless race to get to where I am, warm and cozy, avid and sad, asking for a room of my own. A sperm for an egg. Mother, there is only one. Now p’tit Christophe is all tangled up in his roots, now no one can save him from his fate, now il piccolo Cristoforo has met his destiny, let him now speak listen know: there he is. He had no time to jump on his horse.

You’ll see, Angel, my mom told my dad when they separated and rolled on the hot sand and then embraced once more and then he licked her elbows while I lodged myself singular and triumphant in the uterus of Isabella of the Angels, who told my father once more: “You’ll see, he’ll be born when you want, I swear to you my love, I’ll have him for you on time, sure I will, God I love you, ever since I met you, I couldn’t sleep all night long I was so damn happy, what does it matter, I swear I’ll give you a son because that’s what the rules say, that’s it, I’m no longer demanding the kid be a girl, no Isabella, only Christopher, just as long as you go on whispering into my ear what you’ve always said to me, honey:

“In Mexico, the whole problem is one of attitude — toward men with power and toward women without power.”

“Come back.”

“I never went anywhere.”

“Come here.”

“I was waiting for you.”

The two of them here lying on the burning sand in the Acapedro calderoon where life is a dream, happy, a land of sad men but happy children, but before time runs out for happiness but in Mexico where everything turns out badly for us but now only you and I holding hands, naked, exhausted, on our backs, with our eyes closed against the sun but with my halo spilled all over the sand like liquid stars. And from the heavens it rains, the sun is just a tiny bit clouded over, the wings of the big bad bumblebee cover us and from up above it rains on us, butterflies? petals? plumes? tropical clouds? You bet.

“Look,” said my dad, “it’s coming from up there.”

“Smell,” said my mommy. “It’s shit.”

Over their heads flew a pair of buttocks like the trembling wings of an uncertain bat, white and bland, drained of blood by the vampires of the sun: a man was flying across the wide Mexican sky, hanging from a blue-and-orange-striped parachute, tugged over Acapulco Bay by a roaring motorboat, kept aloft by hanging on to a tightrope in the thick air was our Uncle Homero (sixty years old), clad in a yellow guayabera, without his pants on, dripping the skyborne revenge of Montezuma, fleeing from the guerrillas in Guerrero, fearful and trembling, fleeing diarrheic with terror, followed by a sign written by a skywriter:

WELCOME TO SUNNY ACAPULCO

Homer, oh mère, oh mer, oh madre, oh merde origin of the gods: Thalassa, Thalassa.

“Now what are you going to do?”

“Tomorrow’s another day.”

“When? When will it be that kind of day?”

“The boy has to be born, understand?”

“But he’s so all alone. Nine months alone. With whom will he talk?”

“With your mercies benz.”

“Who?”

“The reader, just the reader.”

WELCOME TO LIFE, CHRISTOPHER PALOMAR

El Niño comes running up from Easter Island, tepid and sickly, the offspring of death by water, beating against the Peruvian coast, suffocating the anchovies and algae in its hot embrace, kidnapping the vital equatorial nitrates and phosphates, breaking the vast food chain as well as the procreation of the great sea fish: heavy and sweating El Niño swims, hurling dead fish against the walls of the continent, stupefying and putrefying it all, water sinking water, the ocean asphyxiated in its own dead tide, the cold ocean drowned by the hot ocean, the winds driven mad and pushed off-course. Destructive and criminal, El Niño flattens the coasts of California, dries out the plains of Australia, floods the Ecuadoran lowlands with mud. My uncle, Fernando Benítez (eighty years of age), is flying toward the Usumacinta River, weeping for his lost fatherland, at the very moment that my Uncle Homero Fagoaga flies over Acapulco, in diarrheic fear, fleeing from the guerrillas. And so my father recapitulates, while I make frantic efforts to hang on to solid ground in the uterine oviduct as I head for the cavity of this woman who is preparing to be my cave for who knows how long, the space which she and I are supposed to share for who knows how long a time (I hope they — it’s the least they can do — inform me about the meaning of this word “time,” which I’m starting to think is of capital importance if I am to understand what the fuck is happening to me, how I am to live with and without them, inside and outside of myself and of them), and they should get busy and tell me when I was conceived, how much “time” I have to spend here inside, if I’m going to get out someday or not and where, if the answer is affirmative, I’m going, what all this means, “place,” “space,” “earth,” my new home now that I’ve left (or was thrown out of) my old house of skin and sperm between my father’s legs (he threw me out, the miserable bastard, just for a fleeting moment of pleasure, right? oh! how ever to forget that deed, how ever to forgive him?) where I was so comfortable with my secret genealogies, one big happy family now scattered, scattered to the four winds, and all these questions I have (time? what is it? how much is there? when do I begin to count the days of my life? inside my father’s testicles? inside my mother’s egg? inside of outside? now that I’ve passed into my mother’s possession just because of my father’s pleasure? I ask in despair: for how much “time”?), all my previous security and serenity completely destroyed by the lusts of Mr. Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, Esq. (twenty-four years of age — but we already said that), about five feet ten inches tall (descriptive news for your Mercies Bends), with yellow, panther-like but shortsighted eyes (this we knew) and olive, gypsy-like complexion (this we did not know), who before the entire world will attempt and presume to be my father; okay, I have to tell you I love you, Dad, that despite everything I adore you and that from now on I will live in imaginary complicity with you and that I depend on you to tell me where I am, where I come from. Once you’ve told me my name and given me my time — they say this is my time, tell me what country this is, where are we? where do you want me to be born? Is it true what my genetic code is telling me?: that there is no other land like this one? and that it’s either a blessing or a curse that there is no other land like this one? that it’s true that someone (He, She) never did to any nation what he or she did here, that now our problem is to administer our wealth? that we’re not really ready yet for democracy? that the Tlaxcaltecas are to blame for everything? that you’ve got to admit the Indian is right, even if he isn’t? that we should go out and lynch some lousy Spaniards? that you are foolish men, foolish men, you who accuse women unjustly? that we have not come to live but to dream? that there is a Ford in your Future? that in a crisis we rise to meet the challenge? that God denied us talent for journalism and movies but made us geniuses at survival? that: why doesn’t my father want me to be a girl? just on account of that fucking contest? because of the little Christophers?