Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

He looked homerically at the face of the Orphan Huerta with a confused feeling of desire and hatred he simply could not repress. He did not even see the faces that corresponded to the other two pairs of legs, the chubby ones and the tattered ones, nor did he hear what one said to the other, listen, bro’, where’s the girl, and the other answered that he hadn’t seen her and the bottle-capped one don’t worry, Baby Ba will turn up when she feels like it, all that matters is that she does her flute accompaniment for us.

Homero was both inconsolable and uncontrollable, almost attacking the Orphan Huerta bodily; the three boys scattered and only two pairs of hands were left clutching Uncle Homero’s equally tiny hands. Angeles thought they were even smaller in proportion to the fagoagean hulk that weighed in at three hundred and ten pounds; my Uncle Homero’s Vienna sausage-pink hands blended with the yellow lemon-colored hands of the little man whose smile was as tenacious as his grip and who refused to let go of our uncle and kept him from pursuing his object of desire with passion and hatred.

“I’m the psychialtlic pianist, Deng Chopin. I takey velly good care patients by coming down hatch next to galley storage cupboard. I telly you maybe you need selvices.”

“Well, as the Procurator Pontius P. once asked on a memorable occasion — where can I wash my hands around here? Oh yes, please decamp instantly, oh Mongolian minihorde,” said Don Homero, not deigning to look at the little man.

But Deng Chopin (short hands, indefinite age, long fingers, shaved head, dark eye shadows, redolent of opium) refused to release him and forced our relative to bend over until his cheeks brushed his Sino-Polish lips.

“Only fool or drunkard no see water when in ocean,” said Deng. “Set me free. I do not understand your argot,” said Don H., but he could not break that iron grip.

“Oh”—Deng Chopin smiled—“must go on deck, hear noise of lain or voice of God. Rust mean tears, and preasure is seed of pain because pain is seed of preasure.”

In his uncomfortable and undignified pose — he looked like an elephant kneeling to hear the advice of a mouse — Homero, his eyes ablaze with the sparkle of awakened desire, inquired, “Preasure? Pleasure?” he asked, confirmed, and desired. “Pain? Is that what you said?”

“Ah, I see you understand. Mouth is door of disaster. No speak more.” Deng scurried away with the rapid steps of a Mademoiselle Butterfly (maid in Japan), summoning, with a mandarinesque wave of the hand, our panting, polecat-scented Uncle Homero, who once again saw the Orphan Huerta pass by, this time with an electric balalaika in his hands:

“Careful,” murmured Deng. “Even Devil handsome when only fifteen. Better you come me, Homelo. Lemember, good deeds stay at home; evil deeds travel around world.”

Homero followed Deng through a hatch. Angel and Angeles glowed, phosphorescent in the tropical night, looking from the deck of the floating disco at the nocturnal world of Dockapulco, itself dominated by this ominous symbol: a gigantic pleasure raft with four Byzantine onion cupolas made of rubber and inflated with gas, all floating over a sea of oil (don’t put your hands in the water, Mom and Dad; all of Neptune’s waters could not wash your oil-blackened hands clean) (WELCOME TO BLACAPULCO GOLD) itself floating on the liquified shit of an Imaginary Fatherland: Oil of Olé! Welcome! It is here where all the oil pipes, the wells, the refineries, the motor of progress, the circulation of our wealth, the end of mortmain disgorge: an Acapulco discotheque! Welcome! WE HAVE ENERGY TO BURN and the sewage from one hundred hotels, shit, piss, bottles, orange peels, rotten papaya skins, chicken bones, Kotex, condoms, tubes from various kinds of cream, the creams themselves, the bubbles from bubble bath, used gargles, the liquid, oily equivalent of what Angel had in his garage on Calle Génova was bobbing around on the black waves.

“Welcome!” shouted the owner, Ada Ching (fifty-five years old), “and merci, merci,” Ada thanked Angel and Angeles for having sent her the Four Fuckups, “a success,” gestured Ada, as she cheered on the arrival of the New Year’s celebrants, the launches, the fashionable gondolas, and the humble rowboats bobbing around the disco. She was dressed in a slate-blue tunic and elephant trousers, which hid her imaginably tiny feet. “Most esteemed guests,” Ada Ching said breathlessly to Angel and Angeles, gently pushing them toward another hatch on the ever more crowded raft, “great keeds, these minettes, thanks for envoying them to me,” she said: Ada Ching, the last remaining supporter of the Sino-Soviet alliance, armed with a portentous French accent which enabled her to communicate with reporters from Le Monde, the only people interested in her case, as personal as it was peculiar, and “come along, my infants,” she said to my parents, “did you know that your ongle, your oncle sent his valet to find out if there was a sadomaso cabaret here in Aca? Since we’re here to serve our customers because the customer has always reason, well, just regard, sacred blue! Enter please the cathedral of S & M! Formal attire required: Rubber, Leather, or Skin!”

The dark cabin Ada Ching led them to was fitted with a two-way mirror through which they saw Uncle Homero, on his knees, entering through a narrow little door, a comfortable enough passageway for his Sino-Polish host, but not so for this fattest of sausages, sweating away on his knees. Uncle Homero stands up, brushing the sawdust from his knees; Deng Chopin’s sadomasochistic cabaret looks like a stable — it’s filled with cows. Homero pinches his long, thin nose between two of his fingers as he stands there amid the slaughterhouse gear, looks at his knees smeared with manure, then sits down at a table. Deng, with a napkin over his arm, takes his order, what you rike, Mr. Homero? I would like lobster, says Don H., In that case, you’ll have a steak, asshole, says Deng, delivering our astounded uncle a smart slap in the face, and from behind the tail of a cow leaps a blue dwarf wearing an orange-and-black banner from Princeton University, who sits down on the aforementioned fat knees of Our Relative. And what does this mean? asks Homero, seeing that the painted dwarf is staining his white safari jacket blue. It to piss you off, asshole, answers Deng, and next to my folks in the penumbra of the mirrors, Ada Ching repeats, biting her nails in excitement: “Pour t’embêter, pauvre con,” as she admires the performance of her lover, the psychiatrist/pianist.

Now Deng takes up a yoke, hangs it around Don H.’s fat neck, and orders Homero, “Down on all fours, fatso,” and hangs water bags over his back, slips a girth around him — he’s agile, that mandarin, remarks my dad — puts the bridle over Our Relative’s sweaty nose, encloses his double chin with a halter, and then attaches a crupper. Delighted with the President of the Royal, who can still use his tongue and whines with pleasure, Deng Chopin ties a cowbell around the neck of Don Homero Fagoaga, President of the etc., and orders him to moo, and mooooo he does, moooooo, moooooooo, longer and longer. The Chinese whips his buttocks and then, nude, as if in an all-too-tangible dream, the Orphan Huerta appears, no longer dark-skinned but golden, covered with golden dust, his buttocks golden, likewise his erect phallus, which Homero, on his knees, spattered with cow shit, yoked, stretches his arms out to touch, and he moos, moos as the naked Orphan sings in his usual voice: The ox shits, the cow shits, the girl with the biggest tits shits, and he drops a little golden nugget, round as a lump of Klondike gold right in front of Uncle Homero’s bridled face. He stretches out his hands, invincible Uncle H. Take the excremental gold of your obscure object of desire, Angel and Angeles urge him on from the immobility of the mirror, try to eat it, you coprophagic old man, rub it into your muzzle while the Orphan passes and disappears like a dragonfly, and with each movement of his impossible and humiliated desire Uncle makes the cowbell ring and moos and his voice, tremulous from longed-for humiliations and defeats rises whining, through clangs of the bell, through hatches, and between planks, to the deck, where it blends in with the voices of the musicians, moooo, moooooosica. The pretty girls dance to the sound of the bells, For Whom the Belles Toil, moooo, moooooostery, moooouerte, the rockaztec on deck in counterpoint to a distant subterranean bellow made by the humiliated, beaten Relative, trembling from unfulfilled pleasure, kissing the feet of the diminutive psychoanalyst, and on deck, the Orphan Huerta, now on the bandstand with his electric balalaika, Hipi Toltec with his tom-toms and teponaztlis, Egg at the synthesizer, and a wind section consisting of a flute. Pop and Mom, now that you are fixed in your decision not to confuse humiliation with death, don’t give humiliation prerogatives. Angel, don’t confuse humiliation with non-existence, don’t let yourself be seduced, my love, by the cruelty that makes the victim know who his executioner is and thus satisfies executioner and victim: Uncle Homero deserves only death, the most radical disappearance, although he does not know who gives it to him. Angel and Angeles come up on deck and join the dancers on the floating discotheque and the flute solo accompanied by the singing of the Four Fuckups: