Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

It isn’t a person, it’s a symbol, said Egg: Acapulco.

Therefore, the revolutionary grandfather Rigo Palomar concluded with perfect logic, what you should do is destroy Homero by destroying Acapulco. Perfect syllogism.

No, exclaimed Angel. Not Homero. Not Acapulco. The Sweet Fatherland.

That expression was going to hang over my father Angel like a dream he could half remember when awake, but in the meantime, things started happening very quickly: in August, my father saw my mother’s face, and only when he’d seen it did he have the desire to put into effect his symbolic plan for the destruction of Acapulco which in reality turned out to be the splendid fancy of saving the Sweet Fatherland, the Good Fatherland: but this took, know it your mercies benz, something like half a year, during which time our buddy Egg wondered why he had given that purely symbolic reason, “Acapulco,” instead of revealing that it was none other than Don Homero Fagoaga who had pushed him into the birthday egg. Who else could it have been? But he didn’t tell on the uncle, nor did the others ask him: How did you get inside that egg, Egg? It had to have been that malignant Uncle Homero who … This was a mystery, and on nights of moral ecstasy Egg asked himself, Why did Jesus allow himself to be crucified knowing beforehand what was going to happen and above all having singled out Judas at the Last Supper (Would I find the Baby Ba…?)? He also knew that one day, once things got moving, he would not be able to resist the temptation. He would expose Uncle Homero. Egg was not Jesus, nor did he wish to be. Besides, Acapulco was calling for them.

But before we get to the New Year’s party, won’t you tell me how you and Daddy met, Mom?

“What a stickler for details you are! It was during April. Come on now, it’s nothing to bite your nails about.”

“I don’t bite much of anything, Mom.”

“Right. Okay, but if I tell you what you want to know now, I can only tell you as if we had met in December.”

“Just the facts, ma’am.”

“Okay, I met him by whispering into the ear of the statue of Benito Juárez in the Alameda Hemicycle. We climbed all the way up. No, I don’t know what Angel said to the Great Hero, but what he told me — he speaking into one of Juárez’s ears while I listened at the other — was: ‘Listen, baby, if we manage to hear each other through the marble ears of the Great Zapotec, we’ll really have made it.’”

I think I mumbled back something like, “Let’s never hurt each other. We’re all here together.”

A fat child wearing a summer hat and holding a helium balloon came toward us out of the Alameda Park, holding the hand of a woman who looked like a skeleton dressed in a ball gown from the beginning of the century. The child, who resembled a wise, contented frog, stared up at us as we clung to Juárez’s head, and then went off, still clutching Death by the hand. Actually, I don’t know if we saw that or if Angel told me about it later. The next month we came back to the same place on the same day of the week even though we had not laid eyes on each other. Something else: we came back without having seen each other the first time, as if from the first moment we had promised not to look at each other until later; we spoke through the heroic marble of the Indian of Guelatao — let’s not ask for more than is given us.

Q. What is a miracle?

A. Something that takes place very rarely.

Because, by the time the day came when he let himself be seen by me, we’d already spoken through the ears of Benito Juárez and gone on doing it for more than four months, meeting again and again without fixing a time or day, without even saying “See you here next month, baby”; of course, it happened that one would get there before the other, but we’d wait: how could I not wait when I didn’t sleep a wink the night after I met him because I was so happy? And that was without seeing him!

My father Angel, is he a poet?

He would be if he were ugly. The day he finally let me see him he turned up disguised as Quevedo, his glasses as curlicued as his mustachios and goatee, wearing a ruff, and limping. But he forgot one thing: he didn’t change his voice: “My voice was not that of the poet Quevedo, who died in September of 1645 in Villanueva de los Infantes because he couldn’t stand the idea of one more winter sitting next to the fireplace where each chill convinced him that he was only living to see himself dead. Quevedo died from the cold and the humidity that came from the river that flowed directly behind his bed, denounced to the Inquisition, a courtier who remained independent, humorous and funereal, imperialist and libertarian, medievalizing and progressive, moralist and cynic — like Love “who is in all things contrary to itself.” That’s the disguise your father turned up in the first time he let me see him.

As contradictory as our famous Uncle Homero?

Yes, but able to use language like a great poet. I think your father did that intentionally. It was his first attempt to overwhelm Uncle Homero and his world, and the way he did it was by refusing to concede Homero a monopoly on language, by using Quevedo — no less — to taunt Homero, Quevedo, who was just as opportunistic as Homero but who was saved by his poetic genius. Of course, your father’s voice was not Quevedo’s.

No, it was the voice of the world remembering Quevedo, and Quevedo remembering himself, immortalized and self-immortalizing a hundred, two hundred, a thousand years after his death. It was Ramón Gómez de la Serna calling him the great Spaniard, the most absolutely Spanish Spaniard, the immortal bestower of tone — he who gave tone to the soul of our race, it was César Vallejo calling him Quevedo, that instantaneous grandfather of all dynamiters, and it was Quevedo himself requesting a place in an academy of laughter and disorder, and calling himself the child of his works and stepfather of other people’s works, as short of sight as he was of luck, given to the devil, on loan to the world, and recommended to the flesh: with slit eyes and a slit conscience, black hair and black luck, long in the forehead and rather long-winded as well! : the portrait of the poet Quevedo was identical to that of my father Angel disguised as Quevedo, when he finally revealed himself to my mother, but my father already had an answer, a suggestion, before she could say a word:

I looked at him for the first time, and he looked at me.

“You’ve got a halo, baby,” he said, touching my cheek.

“No, I never had a halo before.”

“I think you were born that way but that you never really saw yourself.”

“Maybe no one ever saw me that way before.”

Then a guy carrying a glass tower on his back bumped into us; then two playful kids came along. I didn’t know if his disguise was in fact Quevedo’s ghost. In the ugly bustle of Mexico City, who would know about such things. And yet they exist. Even though you’ve got to be a poet to know about them. Know about them? To see them even, because, as everybody knows, that’s the beautiful thing about your father, Christopher. So of course I didn’t sleep all that night, out of pure happiness. The devil took me away from Plato. Or maybe he put me more deeply into Plato. “We say it was or it is or it shall be, when in truth all we can say about things is that they are.”

The first thing I thought when I saw Angel disguised: he’s Quevedo, if Quevedo had been handsome. Then I said to myself: Quevedo is handsome.

His name is Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, he lives with his grandparents, but now he has met me, and I am a woman who can’t sleep because she’s so happy she met him. But that night we went to the Café de Tacuba to eat pambazos and chalupas, as if we wanted to sink our roots deep in the earth because we were both flying like kites we were so excited at having seen our faces, saying to ourselves in secret: This is how he looks; this is how she looks; this is he; this is she.