Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

“He thinks he’s always right in the middle of the conquest of Mexico, that he’s come back and that no one recognizes him; he’s a harmless nut, until he screws up the signifiers.”

“Well then, fat boy, we’ve got to keep his signifiers straight for him.”

“It’s worth the trouble. He’s the best drummer around. But you’ve got to convince him the drums are tom-toms. He sort of disintegrates as he plays. He drives the girls crazy.”

“What do you do, pudgy?”

He played the piano, the maracas, and the piccolo, and — he blushed — he had to include in the group a ten-year-old girl who played the flute, any problem with that?

“It’s your band,” said my dad Angel with a no-problem wave, imagining the girl in that privileged age, between three and thirteen.

“We’re all set, then,” said Fatty. “The four of us are friends and we even have a name, the Four Fuckups. All we needed was someone to get us moving, to provide moral support. Thanks, Angel.”

“You’re welcome. If you like, I could even be your business manager.”

On the afternoon of the birthday party, the fat boy arrived first at the Clair-de-Lune, so he could set things up, arrange the tables, put flowers in vases, clear a space for the musicians, and check out the marvelous metal egg put there by the constantly recharged imagination of the salon’s directors as a spectacular device for introducing the guest of honor: they raised the egg to the ceiling, which was decked out with Styrofoam stars and half-moons, and then, once all the guests were present, lowered the egg with a trumpet fanfare to announce the arrival of the new citizen, the sweet-sixteener, or the daring society debutante.

Fatty’s intention was to make sure things would go well and that my father Angel would be comfortable during the hour or so he’d have to spend in the ovoid prison where he’d wait for all the guests until the moment—11 p.m. — when the signal would be given, the egg would descend, and my dad would pop out of it in the bloom of health.

My dad’s pal was deeply involved in poking a needle through the ventilation holes to make sure nothing was blocking them (not an easy task in the half light of afternoon) when suddenly two hands, not powerful but having the advantage of surprise, pushed him into the improvised sarcophagus, locked him in, and sent him up to the ceiling. It didn’t take Fatty long to understand his situation: no one would get him out of there before eleven. But even that hope faded when through the ventilation holes he heard a pomaded voice say:

“Do not concern yourselves with this ovoid artifact, workers of the manual sort. My nephew has decided not to use such a worn-out symbol. I have convinced him to abandon this ceremony in exchange for a tasty and much to be preferred gift of a million pesos. To you, for acceding to my desires and withdrawing from this locale tonight, I grant a similar sum. Besides, as the Admiral of the Ocean Sea might have said to his mutinous crew: Why should I worry about one ovoid ball, when I need two?”

Then, when the workers left, dividing up those devalued pesos, the same voice shouted to Fatty, locked within the metal egg: “May you rot in there, you irresponsible spendthrift! A Fagoaga never loses, and what he does lose, he snatches back!”

This was followed by the kind of laugh a mad monk makes in his catacomb. Afterwards, hours and hours of silence in which Angel’s chum, feeling rather like one of Dickens’s poor heroes taking the place of his friend at the guillotine, decided to while away his time writing a novel in his head. He said to himself that the principal problem in such a project is knowing how to begin, so, since he’d thought of Dickens first, he began his mental novel with the words “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…” But he shook his head. He felt something was superfluous there and tossed those pages written in the ovoid darkness into the trash heap of his mind before taking up his imaginary pen and making a fresh start. “For a long time I used to go to bed late. Sometimes, my candle still burning, my eyes so firmly open that I had no time, not even for counting burros and cursing my insomnia…” No, no. He began again: “In a place in La Mancha which I remember perfectly, and which is located barely twelve miles to the east of Ciudad Real, in the foothills of the Valdeña Mountains and right on the bank of the Jubalón River…”

No, that wasn’t right either. He tried another beginning: “All unfortunate families resemble each other; happy families are such each in its own manner.” Bah! He thought about the stupid death of his own family or that of his buddy Angel Palomar and wondered if with that story he could at least start a novel. But he left it for another day, because the hours were going by and he was in total darkness. Happy families: “When his father brought him to see ice, Aureliano Buendía thought that one day he would be shot.” Unhappy families: “When he woke up that morning after a restless night, the insect found he’d been transformed into Franz Kafka.”

In the darkness, he saw in his mind a black whiplash and thought that in reality it was the dark ghost of a perfect spermatozoon like the one that might give life to his own son or that of his friend Angel Palomar, or those of his buddies the Orphan Huerta, Hipi Toltec, and the Baby Ba, and directly below the Reader would be able to wonder, wherever he might be reading a book apocryphally entitled

Christopher Unborn

by

CARLOS FUENTES

years after the events narrated there took place, that is, as it always happens, the most rejected books end up being the most accepted books (mentally wrote the pudgy rock-and-roller), the most obscure books become the clearest, the most rebellious become the most docile, and that’s the way it goes, Reader. The most likely thing is that You are a poor adolescent girl in the Sacred Heart Secondary School busily copying down in your crabbed hand some classic passage from this novel which you have stuck between your missal and a joint and that perhaps you have opened to the page where in this instant you find Yourself and I find Myself and deprived of any other guide you begin to write My Novel as if it were Your Novel, copying not the one you are reading here, that is, a new novel that begins with these words:

Prologue: I Am Created

I am a person no one knows. In other words: I have just been created. She doesn’t know it. Neither does he. They still haven’t named me. No one knows my face. What will my sex be? I am a new being surrounded by a hundred million spermatozoa like this one:

imagination engendered me first, first language: it created the black, chromosomic, heraldic snake of ink and words that conceives everything, unique delectable repetition, unique riveting that never fatigues: I’ve known it for centuries, it’s always the same and always new, the serpent of spiral sperm, the commodius vicus of history, narrow gate of vicogenesis, vicarious civilization that God envies us: phallus and semen, conduct and product, my parents and I, serpent and egg

rather a novel in which the possibilities of all the participants are comparable: the possibilities of the Author (who obviously has already finished the novel the Reader has in his hands) and those of the Reader (who obviously still doesn’t know the totality of this novel, barely its first months), as well as those of the Author-Reader, that is You when you finish reading the novel, possessor of a knowledge the potential Reader as yet does not have, the Reader who may one day read the novel or perhaps never read it, or who may know of it and intend to read it — just to distinguish the potential Reader from the kind who know it exists but who refuse to read it because they disdain the Author, are bored by him, and turn down his invitation to a ludic read, and also to distinguish the potential Reader from those completely ignorant of the existence of this book and who will never have this knowledge, those, possibly, who are already dead or as yet unborn, those who, should they be born, will never find out about, or find out about but not want to, or want to but be unable to read it; or, simply, the sinister novel, its earthly function accomplished, may forever be out of print, out of circulation or excluded from libraries because of its obscenity, its offenses against reigning good taste, or because of its political impossibility: in any case, Fatty, big feet and all, hanging in his unwanted aviary, consoles himself, the limit to what a person can read is not the same as the limit to what that person can say, nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last possibility is the possibility of literature, our pudgy friend smiled without witnesses, his superiority over the accidents and contingencies of life or over the strict propositions, so demanding of being tested, of science and philosophy: infinite possibility, common possibility of the Reader and the Reader, common possibility of Life and Death, Past and Present, of a Man and his unborn Son: to recognize themselves in the same book, symbolized by a spurt of black sperm, a spark of sinuous ink: life and opinions, peau de chagrin that consume themselves in desire and thus articulate the certainty that we all have to die our lives and live our deaths.