Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

“What did you say to the fat old man, my little cabbage?”

“That it possible we all inside nightmare of bat.”

“And to Angeles?”

“Brind man no flaind snakes.”

“And to the garçon Angel?”

“You know where is Pacífica?”

“Do you think that it was enough for them to see the fat uncle humiliated?”

“No, no. They want kir him, not him suicide serf.”

“Well then, my little Papa-God, we won’t get out of this one alive.”

“Wolk of priest to save humanity, not save humble skin.”

Ada Ching looked at herself in the cabin mirror with a sense of misgiving and of having lost her way.

“I was really beautiful. When no one loved me. Not this painted-up, fiftyish old monster. Ooooh, they called me La Fellini when I was young. Until they finally understood the task I’d taken on and respected me.”

Deng Chopin looked at her with supplicating eyes. She caught the reflection of that glance and began a vigorous brushing of her red hair — almost burned to a crisp, Was it by Breton hot combs? Norman ones? Or Provençal?

“Don’t look at me that way. Throughout my childhood I had to put up with the humiliation my parents suffered after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Then in the sixties I myself had to say that it just wasn’t so. Beijing and Moscow have not had a fight, they are the bastions of the proletarian revolution. If Beijing and Moscow separate, there will be no revolution, no proletariat. No one could sacrifice that power, Sacred Blue!”

She put down the brush. Deng stared at her intensely.

“Well, what do you say, chinaboy?”

He shook his head in the negative and sadly looked at the sheets.

“And to the world then, what do you say to the world, my sublime dwarf?”

“When people talk you about it, paladise, when you living there, it hell. I tell it to you, World. But you undersand it, Universe.”

“And to me what do you recount, my adored rekeket?”

“With one hair from woman possible to lift elephant.”

“Papa-God!”

“Papa-papa, papagoda!”

“Ayy, now my little yellow pearil, wouldn’t you like me to take you inside, my dove, my dive, my divinity?”

“Yes, Ada Ching.”

“Well, how does it feel to want? Put your glasses back on and read something from the Palace of Pleasure and stop screwing around because you know very well that you don’t get into my pussycat until the Sino-Soviet alliance is reestablished. That’s that.”

“Tomollow maybe we dead.”

“That’s no reason to throw out one’s principles.”

“Nothing glow ’less seed planted, even death.”

“Alors, a fallen bud never returns to its branch. Bon soir, mon Chou.”

Well now, we were saying that sexual cells enter the sea to meet, to fertilize each other, without all the complications (my genes have been warning me about them for eons) that surround the simple conception of a human being and the philosophicomoralhistoricoreligious ceremony of copulation (I know all about whole eras of genes but only a little about gentlemen and ladies, after all): coral and jellyfish enter the sea to fertilize themselves and to peer through the corrupt water of the hotel drain and the turbulence caused by El Niño at the mountains where the people can no longer live, available now only to tourists and unsleeping advertisements: All the neon lights in Aca are lit, wasted during daylight hours:

WE HAVE ENERGY TO BURN!

Nobody else. Never again. Around here, yes, the coral and the jellyfish reproduce by external fertilization (listen, Reader, I’m going to talk about something your honor knows nothing about: about what I am: a sperm that left its ancestors behind and defeated his little brothers in the race of the charros of ire and who now has found the hot egg and is distributing his X’s and Z’s) and the sexual cells (I’m talking about my family history, living now and certainly external, which for me is a short, secret history unless your mercies deign to inform me starting now and from the outside, to which purpose I concede exactly one page to add whatever you might want, now or never, before I take up my discourse again, recapitulating, as follows):

Reader’s List

on seeing her from a dark balcony, without even daring to think of her as a human being: his statue, his bronze Galatea with wig and tricolor skyrocket

* (Ulises López nervously choosing between consulting his Hindustani guru at Oxford University or defending himself against the plots of Secretary Robles Chacón, his political rival, plots which will keep him from becoming president. He finally opts for forgetting economics and politics and thinks only about squash)

* (In the old El Mirador hotel: its shape

Christopher’s List

* (the two of them on Pichipichi beach washing themselves off in the sea after creating me)

* (Uncle Homero flying diarrheically through the skies of Acapulco, fleeing from the guerrillas)

* (Uncle Fernando flying through the skies of the Chiticam Trusteeship in a helicopter toward the Lacandon forest)

* (Mamadoc foaming at the mouth and spitting at the mirrors because she has understood the reason for the Christophers Contest: to deprive her of children and to invent an artificial dynasty for Mexico)

* (Federico Robles Chacón remembers how he saw his creation, the Mother and Doctor, conquer the people and

* (My parents on the beach remembering what happened days before during the New Year’s celebration that led to my conception)

* (I demanding from my new existence, which they don’t even suspect, that they explain to me how and when, the place and the time in which all this takes place, what space is, what happens within the within and outside the outside and within outside and outside within)

* (They answering my demands before I make them by pure intuition. I already adore them!)

* The first thing Professor Will Gingerich noted when he arrived at the New Year’s cocktail party on the terrace of the Hotel Sightseer (originally El Mirador) was that all the guests were made of glass.

that of layered terraces:

He didn’t blame his headache for this illusion. Aspirin should be delivered with the Acapulco sun. But now the sun was not shining. Night had fallen. His herd of gringos had met to get to know each other before before beginning tomorrow’s Fun & Sun Toltec Tour.

Each one had stuck a badge on his chest with his name and address on it. Damn! So why weren’t they looking at each other? He observed each of them looking at the badge of the person standing next to him just as that person looked at his, smiling in a happy but absent way and avidly seeking the badge of the next guest. Their eyes pierced the badges as if they were panes of glass framed so they could see the Vermont landscape in winter. But here, behind the glass, there was only more glass. All of them wanted desperately to leave behind the next traveling companion and meet another one, who was also made of glass, all of them waiting, innocent and crystalline.

An Acapulco waiter offered him a Scarlet O’Hara. Will Gingerich took the glass with its brittle stem and felt nauseous as he tasted the cloying liquor flowing around drunken strawberries. He looked into the thick, bovine, impenetrable eyes of the Mexican waiter: his body was as square as a black die, so thick that no glass gaze could ever penetrate it. Professor Gingerich breathed deep and remembered that he ought to be introducing himself and looking after his flock. He slowly strolled across the terrace balanced high over the rocky, sonorous sea that night.

“Hi, I’m your professional guide.”

He didn’t have to tell them his name because he, too, had it written on the chest of his faded windbreaker, which also had Dartmouth College Vox Clamantis in Deserto 1769 inscribed on it. The inscription was too light for anyone to decipher. He would bet on it. No one looked him directly in the eye. No one in fact did read the faded inscription. And he was not going to tell anyone that he had set himself up as a tour guide in Acapulco because Ronald Ranger had destroyed higher education in the United States with the speed of the fastest gun in the West. Among the items the President had certainly read on the hit list for budget cuts were two exotic subjects, Spanish-American Literature and Comparative Mythology. The President had wondered what earthly use they could have and marked them as definite cuts from the federal aid package. Gingerich consoled himself thinking that it was worse for the insane because the President had also eliminated federal aid for mental health: he had appeared on television with a statistical chart which showed beyond the shadow of a doubt that cases of mental imbalance had diminished sharply in the United States during the previous twenty years. Aid for an illness in decline was no longer necessary.