Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

She was no longer there when I woke up in the morning when the first of the faithful entered the church.

I searched for her in the market, in the plaza, in old Elpidia’s patio, in the churches through which I’d followed her that November Sunday. I asked Doña Elpidia, the girl who sold me the crickets and led me to San Cosme and San Damián. I even asked the parrot, who only said: “He who eats a locust will never leave this place…”

I tried to answer him again with Quevedo, almost bringing myself down to the damn parrot’s level:

Fowl of the wasteland, who, all alone,

Leads a carefree life …

The parrot was never going to learn that poem, and I was never going to find Agueda.

I realized it that night as I strolled around the plaza:

Now the Oaxaca girls did look at me, flirt with me. As if they knew I was their own; that I belonged to them; that I shared a perfumed and black secret with them. As if before they hadn’t looked at me so as to force me to look for Agueda.

And the parrot’s verse? And the looks and notes and instructions of Doña Elpidia? And the girl who sold locusts in the market? Wasn’t it perhaps a perfect and logical chain that had led me to Agueda in the shadowy Church of San Cosme and San Damián? I stared intensely into the eyes of one of the girls in the plaza: she stopped, proud and fearful, as if I had insulted her; she hid her face in her hands and left the circle of love, accompanied by another girl, who looked at me reproachfully.

Dried out, crazy, or dead: that’s what I told them without speaking; the only thing I thought as I looked at them.

They fled as if condemned by my words to the clean injury of virginity: a resignation full of thorns.

The enchantment was broken.

Renewed, happy, and retrograde, my heart spent many more weeks in Oaxaca. I let Oaxaca penetrate and possess me, just as I had wanted to penetrate and possess the vanished Agueda. Slowly but surely, I purged myself of the need to hurry. I wisely reconquered the softness of Agueda’s back, sitting alone on a bench in an anonymous park. I won it all little by little, my boy: the willowy bodies of the girls, their sugar lips, their loving provincial modesty, my nostalgia for the feet of my beloved, the clear Sundays, the cruel sky and the red earth, the chronic sadness, the miraculous illusions, the wells and the windows, the dinners and the sheets, the prolonged funeral rites, the prophecy of the turtle …

I made everything mine. Even the source of Matamoros Moreno’s prose: I recognized it, I shared it; we were brothers, doubles, barely separated by the lines on an open hand: courtesy and camp. Brothers, doubles, because López Velarde transformed the commonplaces of our small-town kitsch into poetry and mystery, and that’s something Matamoros knew better than I.

In Oaxaca, I even acquired the insanely heroic habit of talking to myself.

I returned to Mexico City when I thought the danger of Matamoros and Colasa had succumbed to my prolonged absence, by which time they would have avidly sought new, more promising opinions, backing, and recommendations for Matamoros’s efforts.

I returned by bus, alone, repeating, repeating to myself the verses of López Velarde’s Sweet Fatherland

surface: maize

oil wells: devil

clay: silver

tolling bells: pennies

smell: bakery

fowl: language

breathing: incense

happiness: mirror

I looked for Agueda and I did not find her

I looked for the Sweet Fatherland and didn’t find it

Three months later, I found your mother.

I searched for a nation identical to itself. I searched for a nation built to last. My heart filled with an intimate, reactionary joy: as intimate as the joy felt by millions of Mexicans who wanted to conserve at least the borders of their poor country: conservatives. I said I learned to love true conservatives. Bishop Vasco de Quiroga, who constructed a utopia in Michoacán in 1535 so that the Indians could conserve their lives and traditions and not die of despair. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, the Franciscan scribe who saved the memory of the Indian past. The Indian and Spanish builders whose structures were meant to last. Resistant stone, faithful countries: was only Mexico’s past serious? asked my father Angel after his return from Oaxaca, his loss of Agueda, his meeting my mother. Does Mexico’s future have to be like its present: a vast comedy of graft and mediocrity perpetrated in the name of Revolution and Progress? Thus, I want the Sweet Fatherland, my father Angel ordered us to say, ordered, that is, my mother, whom he had still not met, and me, still in the most perfect of limbos: a country identical to itself: hardworking, modest, productive, concerned in the first instance with feeding its people, a country opposed to gigantism and madness: I refuse to do anything, plant anything, say anything, erect anything that will not last five centuries, Christopher, my son, created to celebrate the five centuries: beloved Angeles.

This was his resolution, mulled over in the few instants of solitude he enjoyed in his coach-house merry-go-round over in Colonia Juárez. But putting the resolution into practice presented him with a mass of contradictions. He would understand these contradictions later in February when he met his friend the fat little guy, the projectionist and lyricist for rockaztec, who explained to him that the tragedy of his life and the source of his artistic inspiration was his father, a living (when he was alive) contradiction. When he married, his father was given a horrible gift, nothing less than a vast, hideous bronze sculpture, dominating and inexorable, that contained images of Father Hidalgo, Don Benito Juárez, and Pancho Villa, together raising the national flag (executed in tricolor silk) above the Basilica of Guadalupe, on whose portals (executed in polychromed wood) hung the tricolor shields of the PRI. This gift was sent to the fat guy’s father, who was an engineer specializing in public works, by his principal client, the head man at the Secretariat of Public Works, and even though our buddy’s dad detested the sculpture and huffed and puffed about it the whole day, and even though its presence in the entryway of the family house in Colonia Nápoles almost caused his divorce and was certainly the source of a conjugal irritation that lasted throughout his parents’ life, our buddy would tell us all that his dad would never take it away from there: suppose the Director General of the Secretariat comes around and doesn’t see his present? Suppose people think that in our house we don’t respect the symbols of the nation? Our national heroes? The flag? The Virgin? I’ll tell you what could happen: bye-bye contracts, bye-bye three squares per diem!

But this same man, his father, as our buddy again remembers, mocked authority all day. He said he would take nothing from no one, let’s see someone try to give him an order, he was a serious professional, independent, an engineer, to be more precise: he’d like to see someone try: he refused to do his military service or to pay income tax (which, according to him, ended up in the Swiss accounts of government officials); he refused to join with the neighbors to create a neighborhood patrol; he refused to get on line for movies or bread (lines? me? I’d like to see the guy …); he never stopped for a red light; and he never ever (it redounds to his honor) paid off any cop or meter maid: he hated all uniforms, even those of street sweepers or ushers: he would urge them to be individuals, to dress as they pleased, they weren’t nuts and bolts in a machine, they were individuals, damn it, INDIVIDUALS! not rags, not doormats; he never signed petitions of any kind, never bought a lottery ticket, never lent candles to the neighbors when the power went out, never depended on anyone so that no one would depend on him, never helped anyone, never asked for help; but he never got rid of that hideous sculpture down in the entryway: he would say, what if the boss comes?; then bye-bye three squares per diem; but more than that, he never dared to touch the symbols: his individualism became abjection in the face of those domineering symbols; just as he always refused to go to a political meeting or obey a traffic light, he refused to act against any abstract abuse by the powers that be, even an abuse that condemned him and his family to walk in front of that sculptural monstrosity every day of their lives: individualist to the end, but abject to the end as well: my poor old man, our pudgy little pal would sigh, anarchist and synarchist, and that’s the way we are in these parts: rebels in our private lives and slaves in our civic lives.