Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

Serpents are better

When feathered

— See their eggs fly!

And after they shed

Their skins

You can bake them

In a pie

Baby, baby, in a pie

Reptiles in the sky!

No no no listen to me, please, don’t just change the subject, tell me if you can hear that little refrain, the only melody in this cacophony they call rockaztec, tell me even before I’m conceived if there isn’t a cute little girl with chestnut hair pulled back and parted down the middle, wearing a white percale dress, who’s playing a flute in the Four Fuckups band, but my parents’ invisible, hasty glances do not see what I can see before being born. They do not listen to the flute I listen to from my perfect limbo.

they hear the rockaztec of the plumed serpent,

they see Egg, his face growing paler by the minute, our belovèd buddy is losing his face, he has no more face, it’s not his fault, let’s restore his face to our great buddy Egg, to whom we owe so much, merely our lives, says my father, all our lives, I would say, because if my father had suffocated inside that metal egg because of Homero, he would neither have met my mother nor created me,

they see Hipi Toltec falling to pieces, sprinkling tiny shards of skin about as he dances on the bandstand, his snakeskin belt and his conchshell at his lips, a combination Tezcatlipoca and Mick Jagger,

they see the Orphan Huerta leading the band, a rearview mirror tied to his head so he can see what’s going on behind him, see himself from behind, see the world in a 360-degree pan, ah my BARROCANROLL, ah my rockaztec, how they shout when the Orphan sings

Reptiles in the sky! with his shrill but erotic voice and Hipi with his low, phantom-like voice, and Egg without a face, much less a voice

(and Baby Ba’s flute: Only I hear it)

Serpents are better

When feathered

the grand dionysian delirium out of doors in Acapulco, under the luminescent, sick sky. Angel and Angeles make their way through the throng and pick out the faces that dominate the color sections of the ever more numerous newspapers and the ever more sporadic gossip spots on TV, Mariano Martínez Mercado, the handsomest, most marriageable (excuse me, I meant marketable) young man in the National Organization of Commercial Kingpins (NOCOKS), creole with violet eyes and an aura of beige elegance: wearing, of all things, a mess jacket, can you beat that? to come to the Acapulco Raj from the sulphurous metropolis, the D.F., starched shirt-front, wing collar, black tie, black trousers with red stripe, and now barefoot in order to greet the well-bred, dark-skinned little girl dressed as a Carmelite nun, who seems to have been dipped in tea, how else could she have touched the infinitely brittle skin, so thin a sigh would tear it, of Mariano M. M., the most etc., but she doesn’t even look at him, the upstart, he might be turning cartwheels, but she doesn’t look at him, she merely allows her bare foot to touch the naked foot of Mariano, dazzled by the light and by this naked contact between his white foot and the unshod nudity of her lost girl’s foot:

anonymous and naturally barefoot — she is dressed as a Discalced Carmelite, she looks at you, Dad, looks behind Mariano and looks at you, beyond the very tall, very thin, very blond, and very snooty gringo that you, Mom, recognize as D. C. Buckley, of all the species of carnivorous hymenoptera, the best-acclimated Wasp in our country, the favorite emissary in Mexico of the Liberal and Independent Republic of New England and Adjacent Islands, the autonomous entity that in the early nineties united libertarian tendencies, protests against abuses of human rights, gay rights, lesbian rights, without gagged, controlled, or disinformed press, New York and its islands, Long, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, where abortion is a right but where no rights are aborted: the last refuge in the world of habeas corpus and due legal process represented here by the last Lector of Lawrence and Lowry who believes in Mexican sensuality here not in the incestuous drunken brawls of the Four Islands (Manhattan and), D. C. Buckley is dancing touching toes with a street girl who usually hawks corn candy and other sweets on the Acapulco docks, as the owner of the disco, Ada Ching, tells my folks, that’s what he asked for, a daughter of nature to be his escort for the night, pure, a tabula rasa, a room without furniture, untouched by the oracles of sibylization, a nobel sauvage, understand, mon Ange? someone who could scrape the grime of Chicago off him even if it meant a case of Chilpancingo crabs

and now she makes her entrance, this then! the blue foot! fools, get those spots on her, the queen of the jeunesse dorée of the capital, look at her, Angel, the golden girl, she abandoned the sun just to console the stars down here, what an honor, what a privilege, drenched in sequins, sweet sixteen, it’s Penny López, the daughter of the minister Don Ulises You Know Who, author of the key slogan of Mexican industrialization, the one you see written on every mountain, every wall, in the sky itself, dragged by blimps and engraved in skywriting on the clouds:

MEXICANS: INDUSTRIALIZE:

YOU WON’T LIVE LONGER, BUT YOU WILL LIVE BETTER

and she passes by right next to you, accompanied by her governess, Miss Ponderosa, her two bouncy bodyguards, and her usual companion, the young Brazilian diplomat, Decio Tudela, dressed like Tyrone Power (of short memory) in The Rains Came, oo-la-la! I danced with Tyrone Power in La Perla cabaret, How long ago was that, mon Ange? where are the snows of yesteryear, and oo-la-la Decio Tudela’s wearing exactly the same outfit as Mariano Martínez Mercado, except that Decio has a red turban, like a maharadish, and one of two things is going to happen: either they will start fighting or they will make the mess jacket de rigueur for nocturnal visits to discos. But now excuse me, if I don’t get the FUBARS rolling again there’s going to be sikhening melee here.

My dear parents: I tell them that the dark little girl who was dipped in tea wearing the caramel Carmelite habit dancing with Mariano Martínez Mercado is looking at her escort as if he were Cervantes’s Glasscase Licentiate and her low, fearful eyes only see my father. The golden Miss López rests her eyes like two dark butterflies on my progenitor-to-be and then looks elsewhere without paying him any more attention. But my mother Angeles does indeed pay him more attention and stares at him. I was still hanging around my dad’s egg pouches, but I can say to the reader straight from the heart, the fact is that my very life depended on that stare, look here your mercies benz! I’ll never forget it.

Ada Ching on the bandstand, bathed in a glow of mercury vapor, asking her clientele what it was you desire, my minettes, what do you wish my infants. You know Ada! Ching! all shout in chorus, except the ones you know straightaway to be nouveau hicks who have never been here before, like the tea-stained dark girl who never takes her eyes off my dad Angel. What do mes minettes want to see? That ass with class, drop those pants! And on those delectable half-moons shine forth two tattoos: on the left cheek of this Norman Magdalene we see the ruddy countenance of the Great Helmsman, swimming across the broadest part of Ada Ching’s gluteus maximus as if it were a milky Yangtze; on the right cheek, Breton bread, emblazoned for all the world to see, is our dear uncle, smiling Steely Joe, with his pipe in his mouth, pointing toward Ada Ching’s delightful curves as if he were asking for a light: with a coquettish gesture inherited from the improbable memory of Renée St.-Cyr, Ada Ching pulls off her blouse and pulls up her drawers; D. C. Buckley begins shouting Moon-Ah, Moon-ah, and the Four Fuckups pick up the rhythm of the M’s — after all, that’s what everyone’s here for — and mooooooo groans Homero from the bowels of the beached rubber galleon, mooooo, M, My M’s, they sing