Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

Neither one could answer. For the first time, she was terrified of her openness, her willingness to be everything that fell upon her and stuck to her in her newness or innocence. She’d never seen towels marked His and Hers, or sheets with Mickey and Minnie Mouse, or personal hair dryers, or peach-flavored vaginal ointments. She missed her history, and said to my father:

“Of what interest could these sordid provincial tales be to you: bastard children, runaway father, new lover for mother, exile with relatives who live far away? Of what possible interest could my past be?”

Let’s see now: six years after Uncle Homero’s green Jell-O bath, the Four Fuckups are playing rockaztec in the floating disco moored off Califurnace Beach down old Acapulkey way, and my parents take advantage of the circuntstance (as you might say) to ask Uncle Homero to bury the hatchet and invite them to spend New Year’s of 1991–92 in his castellated house on Peachy Tongue Beach, where their fat relative has constructed a kind of Foreign Legion fort right out of Beau Geste to protect himself from whatever might happen. He gave his niece and nephew the complete guided tour this end-of-December morning, marching them past towers and battlements that shot up out of the sand, blockhouses and casemates, parapets and escarpments, and even fearsome concertina rolls of razor wire, ranks of poised, pointy lances — excellent defense against cavalry charges!

In the center of his fortress, Uncle Homero built a pool in the shape of a tongue, with a secret tunnel disguised as a drain which would allow him to escape in a minisub (How would he fit? Like a pig in a sausage, said my father; like a rabbit in a pâté, like Christ in the host, host! said my mother) into the sea, shot out like a cork, in case of emergency.

“I’m making you a gift of some beach property,” Uncle Homero said one day in a tone of magnificent condescension to Uncle Fernando, some twenty or so years earlier, after the Tlateloco riots. He compounded this felonious friendliness by clapping Uncle Fernando, a small, high-strung, but sturdy little gent, on the back. “You can build a house there for your declining years.” To which Don Fernando said no thanks, how would I ever defend it against the guerrilleros who’ll be coming along in twenty years?

Tomasito the waiter served my mother a pineapple filled with whipped cream and then slipped directly into a reverie, staring obliquely and nostalgically toward the Pacific route of the Spanish galleons. Acapulco, key to the Orient, warehouse for the silks of Cipango, the ivory of Cathay, the scents of the Moluccas: good old Acapulkey!

My mother follows his eyes and stares at the sea as the sun goes to the Philippines. None of this distracts Uncle Homero from his task of presiding over the al-fresco dinner in the patio illuminated by the torches that Tomasito lights so that the flames and the glow of the setting sun can clash on the grand cheeks of the grand personage, as if they were fighting over the round color of the soft, saliva-drenched, cushioned tongue that slithers over lips, molars: Don Homero sighs and looks at my parents, who had felt obliged to dress in folkloric costumes. He then raises his glass of piña colada and gives instructions to Tomasito, which the Filipino does not manage to understand completely: when Uncle Homero says “More drinks,” Tomasito answers, “More stinks? No, master, smell fine.” Don Homero wilts and proffers his glass as if he were a blind man selling pencils. He sighs: There you see it all: four centuries a Spanish colony and all they have to show for it is pidgin English. Pigeon, master? Pigeon make too much shit on head. Shit on head, eh? Well, as the patient Filipino public servant, Don Manuel Quezón, said on a memorable occasion, you must have fallen out of your crib and landed on your head!

To which Tomasito immediately responds by feigning a yawn, checking his watch, and saying good night, as he serves Uncle H. a slice of Gorgonzola, following the ancient Mexican custom of serving cheese before dinner.

No! I said head, not bed. My God, this is the end of language as communication: no one understands me. With that he drank down his piña colada in one gulp and instantly felt, as our friend Ada Ching (whom the reader will meet shortly) would have said, “soulaged.” He was admiring my parents’ outfits: my mother dressed Tehuanastyle, with a sleeveless blouse and skirt made of virtually transparent cloth, and my father decked out in railroad-worker blues, complete with red neckerchief: who knows what images of sin and revolution, Demetrio Vallejo and Frida Kahlo, folly and finality, passed through the carefully combed, plastered-down, parted-down-the-middle mind of Our Relative; his manner, from the moment he opened his door to them, had been, come to me, you innocent doves.

He said this was just not his day as far as servants, local or imported, were concerned. Nothing, decidedly nothing, had gone well for him from the moment one of these somber servants crossed his path, he sighed. Nothing at all had gone well, belovèd niece and nephew, but he felt better, like Perón safe-at-home, as Don Eduardo Mallea had so wittily written. Mallea, who maintained the proud purity of our language with Argentine passion from his bay of silence. He (Uncle H.) was happy to have his niece and nephew here with him on vacation, all useless rancor dissipated, no bad memories, once again one big happy family as Tolstoy or Tolstuá (his name can and should be pronounced both ways) might have said; ah Federico, Federico, you were the last poet to say Understand me for I understand you, now, as you can plainly see, no one understands anyone and this is my challenge, my mission: as Antonio de Nebrija the grammarian said to Queen Isabella the Catholic, Language is always the companion of Empire and Empire (he pointed to himself with a butter knife) is one Monarch and one Sword: Tomasito, pour out the nectar.

Instantly, the Filipino snatched off his own bow tie and tried to fasten it onto our stupefied uncle, whose imperial discourse died, along with his fallen glass, on the cement of the tiny island. You said pull off necktie, masssster. Moron, monkey from Manila, let go of me, get that thing off my neck. He sneezed, swallowed, gagged, his round red eyes darting toward Angel and Angeles, and he saw what he did not want to see: no one got up to pat him on the back, to fill his glass, or to attempt the Heimlich maneuver on him. Angeles = dark eyes, those of a child who has never been treated tenderly, Angel = green, serene eyes, like a lake, green how I love you green, the black night spread its mantle, the mist rose, the light died: dark eyes and green eyes full of what Don Homero did not expect to find there in response to his call for aiuto! help! au secours! auxilio!

“Ah,” coughed our uncle, “ah, hatred persists, as the enlightened Venezuelan despot Don Juan Vicente Gómez said once in a jocular mood — when he publicly announced his death in order to arrest and then punish those who dared to celebrate it, ah yes, so this is the way…?”

He pounded his delicate fist into his open palm.

“I have right on my side, nephew. If I sued you for being a spendthrift when you turned twenty-one, it was not, as God is my witness, to increase my own personal fortune, but to save yours, that is, what remains of it after your father, my poor brother-in-law, embarked on that mad enterprise, the Inconsumable Taco.”

“Leave my old man out of this, Uncle H. He’s dead and never hurt a fly.”

“Ah, my little sister Isabella Fagoaga is also dead. And a dark day it was when she linked her destiny, as the superb Chilean bard Pablo de Rokha said, in a rare metaphor, to that of an enemy of the national economy like your father, Diego Palomar. An inconsumable taco! A taco that grows as you eat it! The solution to the problems of national nutrition! The greatest idea since the invention of mole in Puebla de los Angeles by a dyspeptic nun!”