Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

Babylon? You mean Baby Loan, since we’ve mortgaged our children’s future. Of Babylon nothing remains: she looked at Angel and understood that the entire situation prior to her arrival, the crisis, the impotence, the rage, the corruption, the past, the youth — all of it was forcing Angel (explicitly), Egg (a bit less), Hipi and the Orphan (intuitively), to exorcise the demons, to upset the order, to humiliate the king, sweep out the garbage, find (Angel!) the Sweet Fatherland: Angel the postpunk, romantic, conservative who went from disorder to anarchy to the sadism of underdevelopment in order to find the utopia of the spotless fatherland: she would see him plunge into horror in order to destroy it; or would they be destroyed, he, she, all of them, by the horror which was indifferent to them?

These thoughts transformed my mother during the Acapulco ape-pick (simian and marine) into the most cautious and taciturn woman in the world; at times she thought she was going to win the Johnny Belinda deaf-mute contest, and, frankly, she could not foresee that her participation in the extraordinary events of the month of January would prove to be so tranquil. She would participate from now on in a silent dialogue in the hope that all of them (the band of buddies) would be able to speak together afterwards, and that triangular dialogue would go something like this:

ANGEL: I WANT ORDER

(FULLY KNOWING THAT NO ORDER WILL EVER BE SUFFICIENT)

EGG: I WANT FREEDOM

(FULLY KNOWING THAT I SHALL FAIL)

ANGELES: I WANT LOVE

(FULLY KNOWING THAT LOVE IS ONLY THE SEARCH FOR LOVE)

and that’s why Angel marched toward disorder, Egg sought the commitment of the invisible by singing songs to the world, overcoming his inability to express himself fluently, and my mother Angeles kept silent in order not to reveal that perhaps she hated what she was doing.

“Besides,” my dad said to her, “if we succeed in fooling Uncle H., we might get the house of bright colors back. That’s where I spent my childhood. I love the place. I’m sick of having to see you just now and again in your Uncle Fernando’s house or in my coach house. I have to live with you all the time.”

He dressed her as Annie Hall (tweed jacket, man’s tie, blue jeans), while he wore faded chinos, a Hopi shirt, and love beads. Both put on wigs of long, thick hair for their visit to Don Homero Fagoaga’s penthouse on Mel O’Field Road. They were going to ask him if they could make peace and spend New Year’s together in Acapulco.

My father had no real reason to be there, and Uncle Homero smelled a rat: he did, however, receive them. Just looking at them, he could see they were harmless. But just looking at my mother was all he had to do to suffer a shock: Don Homero Fagoaga’s sexual fantasies were infinite, and my mother put him into such a state of erotic excitement that he became a stuttering teenager:

“Well … indeed … so we have a little couple here, huh? I mean, are you thinking of getting married…? Excuse me, I didn’t mean to imply … Well!”

Angeles realized that the success of the expedition depended on her, so she coquettishly lowered her eyes and touched the hand of the invincible Don Homero.

“Ah,” groaned Don Homero, wagging his sausage-like finger, “aaaah, my innocent niece, I may call you niece, may I not? thank you: out of pure honesty, sacred temple, as the bard from Córdoba, Don Luis de Góngora y Argote, wrote on an amorous occasion…”

He carefully looked Angeles over, adding pure alabaster, small door of precious coral …

“Uncle,” my mother interrupted him sweetly but decisively, “in the first place, don’t change the subject on me: may we come to your house in Acapulco? In the second place, don’t let that lemonade go to your head, and in the third, if you go on in that way, comparing my body to hard alabaster and my cunt to a small coral door, my husband here, your nephew, is liable to take matters into his own hands. Isn’t that right, Angel?”

“Angeles! Good gracious! You’ve mistaken me, niece! That Gongoristic metaphor refers to your mouth, not to your, your…”

Don Homero dropped the spoon he used to stir his martinis: “Tomasito, fan me.”

“Yes, master.”

“My wife is right. Don’t get out of line, Uncle Homero.”

“How dreadful! For God’s sake, I hope you accept my invitation to spend New Year’s with me in Acapulco. You did receive my invitation, didn’t you? No? How awful the mails are these days, as our invincible sovereign Philip II said when he received the news about the Armada! The rest of Europe was right to say: ‘I hope my death comes by way of Spain so it gets to me late!’”

That’s why all of them except for Angeles and the Baby Ba are there stretched out on the Countess Beach listening to three chicks chatter relentlessly about if it wasn’t a bit much that each one went with two hunks to the Divan last night or if the vibes were good but right then they started in, ya know: Ya can take the boy outta Brooklyn but ya can’t take Brooklyn outta the boy; they got all hot and bothered and tried to start necking. But the girls said enough was too much now that they’d showed what grotty chauvinist pigs they really were. Situations like that were sticky, ’cause when these nouveaus get going they don’t ever wanna stop, and they chanted:

I don’t want to live forever

But I’m afraid to die

and when they saw my dad, Egg, the Orphan, and Hipi stretched out there sunning themselves in their bulging bikinis, the three chicks said, oh sorry about that, we’re not letting you rest with all our gossiping, and my father the provocateur said no, I didn’t hear you, I was thinking, and they, hmm, he didn’t even hear us, we seem so uninteresting to these nouveaus, and Egg, just to be nice, said yes, yes we did hear you, how could we not, everything you said was instructive, while the girls were putting on sun cream, ah, so these nosy nouveaus are real pests, always sticking in their noses where they shouldn’t, to which the boys: a one and a two and a three, they began to throw sand at the bonbons, who at first laughed, then enough already, then they coughed, then they screamed; finally they were buried in the sand, and Hipi danced the deer dance over them to flatten them out and make sure they were good and dead and in complete privacy, and the most curious thing is that no one turned around to look at the scene, much less to interrupt them. A lesson that did not escape the attention of Pappy & Company.

Out of all these elements, as usually happens in artistic affairs, was born the great hit broadcast by the Four Fuckups for the New Year’s parties: and with what pleasure do I transcribe them for you, from their Dickensian inspiration (a tail of two cities; hysteria of two cities; the color of Aca and Defé) up until the time they released it officially in the discotheque run by Ada Ching and her lover Deng Chopin: Here it is, all together now:

It was the worst of times

It was the worst of times

The year was the jeer

The day was the die

The hour was the whore

The month was the mouse

The week was the weak

It doesn’t get better than this!

and my folks make love in the bridal suite Uncle Homero reserved for them, and she feels opulent, sensual, rich, new things, delicious things, she’s afraid to feel things she’s never felt before, she feels more modern than ever when luxury surrounds her and she doesn’t understand why she’s never been in a place like this, air-conditioned, piped-in music, unknown smells that expel the usual olfactory experiences (markets? churches? damp patios? leafy jungles? carved stones? quince, mango, laurel and silk-cotton trees?: now what is not there begins to come back to her): she is afraid to remember everything that happened before, now that she’s in something that could never happen there, in a there she says to my father after having an orgasm, where I see myself moving, light, suddenly I saw myself a minute ago, moving and light in the past. What does that mean?