Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

Angel understood the shrug and the challenging expression on his grandfather’s face: one meant fatalism, the other meant freedom, a mixture appropriate to an old man as wise as this one, who was always saying to his grandson that even though he could help him — although now there was little he could do, true enough — Angel ought to use his imagination and his own resources.

“But you know so much, Grandfather.”

“No matter how much I know, I am not your age and I can’t sniff out everything you can. Your intuition is definitely better than my knowledge.”

Freedom is everything, everything, Angelillo, said the old man, handing him the documents. Even fatalism, he said, is a way of being free. Sometimes our will is not enough, see? if we don’t know that things can go wrong for no good reason. Then we aren’t free. We’re deluded. You can count on my support, but manage your affairs freely, with imagination, and without fear, Angelillo.

Angel had been going out with Brunilda for quite a while and preferred ending a relationship which had no more to it than a pleasure which, if solid, was always the same. The additives Brunilda used to try to diversify normal sexuality — unilateral jealousy, inopportune encounters with other occasional lovers, letters from one boyfriend left for no good reason in the bed of another — wore Angel out: a romantic relationship was nothing if it wasn’t a means whereby one man could be set aside from all the rest. Brunilda imbued all her relationships with analogies in order to avoid the harmony of tedium; her diversions frustrated Angel’s romantic intentions.

Three weeks after the break with Brunilda, my father, on a whim, decided to go out on the town in disguise. He put on a toga and a Quevedesque mustache and walked unnoticed by anyone from Calle Génova to Río Mississippi, where traffic was heavier. There a boy of unusual whiteness (accentuated by his shiny pitch-black hair) was putting on a spectacular performance of bullfighting with cars and trucks; his agility momentarily disguised his thick, soft body and the fact that he resembled nothing so much as a pear.

Angel, for his part, watched with openmouthed admiration as the boy executed a twirl around a bloody-minded taxi, a left feint in front of an irate heavy truck driven by an albino in black glasses, a rapid-fire series of veronicas in the face of a ferocious squad of motorcyclists. But when the fat young man posed on his knees in the path of a Shogun limousine without license plates but with darkened windows — which accelerated down the wide street as soon as it saw the boy on his knees — Angel leapt to rescue the erstwhile torero and dragged him to safety.

“You nuts, man?” asked Angel.

“What about you, goin’ around dressed like the Masked Avenger!?” panted the pudgy lad.

“If it bothers you, I’ll take it off.”

“Who said you should take off?”

“No, not me, it. My disguise, I’ll take it off.”

My father pulled the cape off his shoulders and the huge glasses off his nose.

“Actually, I did all that to get your attention,” panted the fatty. “Brunilda told me to tell you that if you don’t call her this afternoon, tonight she’ll kill herself. Swear to God.”

They walked along Paseo de la Reforma to the flower market at the entrance to Chapultepec Park. Fatso explained that he was a composer; perhaps Angel knew his last hit, “Come Back, Captain Blood”?; well, he wrote that number along with the new group he was putting together, because the group he’d belonged to before, Immanuel Can’t, did not respect the individual personality of its artists, required everything to be group experience, collective expression; that was their categorical imperative, laughed the overweight conversationalist as he raised the dust on the Reforma sidewalks with his big feet. He was not in agreement, he said, with that philosophy, which was too sixties; he wanted to be conservative, romantic post-punk conservative, and his motto was REWARD YOURSELF!

“Reward yourself, that’s what I say. You never know what tomorrow may bring.”

They reached the flower market. As Angel placed an order, Fatty recited a few stanzas of his rockaztec hit:

Wontcha come back, Captain Blood?

You’re a great big iron stud,

And we all need what you’ve got

Adventure, honor: HOT!

You gave it to our dads:

Now what about the lads?

They liked each other and agreed to meet the next day for coffee. Fatty then told him that the funeral wreaths had begun to arrive at Brunilda’s apartment in Polanco at four in the afternoon, one after another, purple and white, violets and tuberoses, some shaped like horseshoes, others plain wreaths, still others artistic diaphragms; suffocating, perfumed, permutated, indefatigable dead man’s flowers to celebrate her announced suicide, truckloads of flowers that invaded the apartment of the girl with immense eyes and clown mouth: she wept. She tore apart her sky-blue satin robe, she threw herself on the bed, she tried to keep any more wreaths from entering the house, she dramatically fainted off the bed and onto the floor, revealing one exuberant breast, all of which only convinced the messengers they should bring her more flowers than those Angel had ordered, so they tossed a whole cartload of flowers on her, only looking for a glimpse of that trembling antenna of Brunilda’s pleasures.

“When I left her, she was crying with rage. She said she’d get even by marrying your rival tomorrow. They’ll be on their honeymoon starting tomorrow night in the Hotel Party Palace and they’ll drink to your death.”

Now my dad Angel ordered a piñata delivered the next night to the bridal suite at the Party Palace. He added a note addressed to Brunilda’s brand-new husband: “At least you’ll have one thing to break, asshole.”

Along with the fat boy, Angel set about making the preparations for the coming-of-age party his grandparents had insisted on throwing for him in the very room where his deceased parents had been married, the traditional Clair-de-Lune Salon on Avenida Insurgentes, where thousands and thousands of sweet-sixteen-party piñatas had done service ever since the forties. The grandparents say that aside from the sentimental value of the place, Uncle Homero will be looking for evidence of Angel’s spendthrift ways (for example: his recent flower purchases at Chapultepec, his numerous girlfriends, his dinners in posh restaurants, his cassette business, or the rumors of his shacking up, according to Aunts Capitolina and Farnesia, in boardinghouses, and, Holy Mother! even in Oaxaca churches after hours), but the whole idea of celebrating his coming-of-age in the Clair-de-Lune is such a cheap idea, so I-wish-I-could-afford-better that it will give you a humble air, Grandson. No, you can’t hold it here in the house because anything private has to be exclusive, luxurious, and criminal.

Angel and his new buddy the fat boy (whose original name no one remembered or chose to remember) spent a nervous week preparing the July 14 party. Angel convinced him not to rejoin the snobs in the Immanuel Can’t group while at the same time admonishing him not to fall into the horrible vulgarity of those plebes the Babosos Boys. Instead, the two of them should use their imagination to create a new group that would synthesize those two extremes. Fatty said no problem, that he knew a fabulous guitarist/singer, a protégé of the eminent polymath Don Fernando Benítez, a guy named Orphan Huerta. In his urban rambles, he’d also come upon a grotesque named Hipi Toltec, who walked the broad avenues of the city, his long, greasy locks hanging down, his face thin and long-nosed, like a plumed coyote, wearing rags and a luxurious snakeskin belt that announced in French: “La serpent-à-plumes, c’est moi.”