Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

“And you are like the bored maguey; you are like the maguey; soon you will have no juices,” Gingerich read hastily. “You men have impetuously ruined yourselves; you are empty. In us, the women, there is a cave, a canyon, whose only function is to wait for what is given us. We only receive. You, what will you give us?”

“That’s enough,” interrupted Matamoros. “This is only a taste. Now read my things. But you must think I’m a boor. Colasa! Pour the gentleman a cup of coffee!”

But Colasa did not answer, and Matamoros laughed and said that the girl had suddenly taken up star counting as a hobby. Gingerich looked around for D. C. Buckley, but said nothing about his absence; Matamoros Moreno had forgotten about the assistant. Had he really forgotten about him, wondered the professor as he walked back down to Christopher Columbus Street with the sample of the myth in one back pocket and Matamoros Moreno’s manuscript in the other. D. C. Buckley’s Akutagawa was still there.

“I saw you dancing last night at the Divan,” whispered Buckley into the girl’s ear. “You looked as if you’d been dipped in tea.”

Colasa Sánchez brought her warm dark body closer to the gringo’s white cold body.

“Why don’t you say anything?” asked D.C.

The girl sang, My heart’s delight’s this little ranch/ Where I live content/ Hidden among the mountains blue/ With rainbows heaven sent, and stared at D.C. for a long time. Finally she told him that there was a boy at the disco, tall with green eyes, dressed Hippieteca style. His wife was in Tehuana costume and they were with their fat uncle. Didn’t he see them?

“I have the vague impression that there were lots of people there.”

Oh, she thought that place was like a club; the owners, the frog and the chink, were giving out free tickets to poor boys and girls to promote class confrontation, that’s how they explained it to her so she would go. It was terrific that the gringo had noticed her, now he was on top of her, it was terrific that she could count the stars, he couldn’t, he had his back to the sky down at the bottom of this barrel: couldn’t they both go find that boy she was talking about?

“What do you want to tell him? What do you want to give him?”

Just what I’m giving you, said Colasa Sánchez seriously, come on now, gringo, I’m moist and ready for you, come inside your sweet little girl, I’ve just had my thirteenth tropical birthday and all for you.

D. C. Buckley unbuttoned his fly, and Colasa opened her legs as if they were tea leaves and stared at him with the eyes of an anxious deer. D. C. Buckley’s member slowly felt around the entrance to Colasa Sánchez’s body, took aim like a bullfighter’s sword about to make the kill, and pushed its way in with strength and a single, brutal motion. The white teeth in Colasa Sánchez’s vagina shattered on D. C. Buckley’s infinitely hard phallus. The gringo laughed with pleasure, while Colasa wept for the same reason.

Later he took her brusquely by the nape of the neck, twisted her black hair, and said all right now count all the stars, and don’t leave out a single one.

This is the novel I am imagining inside my mother’s egg. I was certainly not going to be put in the shade by my parents’s buddy Egg. Of course, little Christopher: if the earth is round, why shouldn’t a narrative also be round? A straight line is the longest distance between two words. But I know that I am calling in the desert and that the voice of history is always about to silence my voice. But that’s all over with, and anyone might think I’m telling all this twenty years after my birth. But if the reader is my friend and collaborator, as I wish and am sure that … he will not stop to figure out whether this novel is narrated by me ab ovo or twenty years after (either in Horace’s fashion or à la Dumas). Whatever his premise, he will contribute something of his own, he will be an auxiliary, an external, respectful chronicler of the conscientious inquiry into my internal gestation and of what happened before it, because no event comes without its accompaniment of memories: in this you and I, Reader, resemble each other; we both remember, I with the syntony of my genetic chain, in the world exterior to my own: what I don’t know how to remember, you can remember for me; you know what happened, you will not let me lie, you remember and tell me that …

Gingerich returned to the Sightseer on foot and found a small group from his flock still drinking at the bar decorated with ship helms and dolphins next to the sea cliff. The tourists looked even more faded than they had before; as they age, North Americans lose color, even those with Mediterranean blood turn as white as talcum powder, their faces white as sheets until they die.

“Where are you from?”

“How much do you make a year?”

“When’s the last time you moved?”

He was tired, sweaty, and unwilling to answer the indiscreet questions asked by these happy, drunk, and old farts. No, philanthropy had not come to the rescue of higher education, Gingerich told them. President Ronald Ranger should have been sentenced to spend the rest of his life watching Robert Bresson movies or listening to someone read him select passages from the Quixote. The tourists could not understand what he was talking about, and behind his back one gestured that Gingerich must be mad.

Buckley saved him. He walked in, saying, “Hi there, Pastor Gingerich, what news from your lambs?” and ordering a double Scotch in the same breath. He then dropped into the sofa-rocker next to the professor. In his hand, he carried a wooden device in the shape of a phallus — it was battered, bitten, bristling with splinters, but still erect.

“The myth is alive, Mr. Shaman. Take it. It’s a souvenir. And now let’s get some sleep. Tomorrow I want to go to the beach.”

At 9 a.m. on Monday, January 6, 1992, complaining about the duties entailed in this kind of meeting — comparable in ways to military training or obligatory sugarcane harvesting — the Antillean critic Emilio Domíngez del Tamal, known as the Sergeant because of his long record of denunciations, detective-like snooping, and thundering excommunications, carefully wiped the green sauce off his thin lips and caught sight of his pale reflection in the bluish windows of the tropical dining room, an imitation aquarium made of thick smoked-glass panels.

The Sergeant, the colors of passion dripping out of his mouth (ancient hope, eternal envy), grimaced and straightened his guayabera over his body, which was so thin he could only be seen from the front. He was getting ready to give his celebrated lecture on the responsibility of the writer in Latin America, a rhetorical jewel that had been his bureaucratic launch pad and in which he first enunciated abstract, philanthropic, and utopian goals, linked, naturally, to concrete historical-material realities and to prophetic warnings aimed at those who did not write for the people and who, therefore, were not comprehensible to the Party, and who, therefore, were ridiculing the representatives of the people incarnate in its leadership elite more than in its artistic elite: How could such things be allowed? the Sergeant would ask with rhetorical astonishment, standing before the crowds at the First Congress of the Newest and Most Recent Literature. Since when has the artistic elite paid the salaries of bureaucrats, since when!? This is a realistic question, an honest question; left adrift on the literary market, artists like him, who sacrificed their poetic inspiration to the Revolution, would not survive, so they stopped writing in order to advise, influence, perhaps govern, no, long live the governing elite because it pays the poet a salary, and not the public or people, which is incapable of understanding him. What am I saying!? But the Party and the state understand his silence, they appreciate it, they pay him for it, they reward him for it: because, although Domínguez del Tamal never writes a word, he is perfectly capable of demanding in no uncertain terms that everyone else write in such a way that the Party and the governing elite understand them: to demonstrate my sense of responsibility with regard to the people and my fidelity to the Revolution, I now read my list of art-for-art’s-sake snobs, CIA agents disguised as lyric poets, ingrate formalists who have turned their backs on the nation, francophiles! structuralists! aaaaah, the pleasure of denunciation replaces the pleasures of fame, sex, or money: I shall sacrifice myself for truth and let no one accuse me of having an impoverished imagination: in nine months, the exact time nature grants for human gestation, Sergeant del Tamal went from Vademecum of the Opus Dei looking to heaven, to Falangist looking to Madrid, to Christian Democrat looking to Rome, to Social Democrat looking to Bonn, to being unaligned and looking to Delhi, to Directed Democrat looking to Jakarta, to Tito Communist looking to Belgrade, to Marxist-Leninist looking to Moscow: all in nine months, I tell you! Imagination! Imagination! and Protection! Protection!: the Sergeant paused for an instant, looking at the roll with which he was about to dip into his huevos rancheros, and in that piece of bread he found the moving memory of his Latin American Catholic origins: oh, indivisible sacrament, how I need you, he confessed to his roll that morning, oh divine prostitution, possession of the body of truth and the word in my mouth that hungers for dogmatic security, oh Latin American with five centuries of Catholic Church, Inquisition, and dogma behind me, how can I abandon you in order to be modern, how can I deny you without setting myself adrift in the storm, oh Holy Trinity, oh Holy Dialectic, oh Papal Infallibility, oh Directive from the Politburo, oh Immaculate Conception, oh Proletariat, Fountain of History, oh Path to Holiness, oh Class Struggle, oh Vicar of Christ, oh Supreme Leader, oh Holy Inquisition, oh Union of Writers, oh schismatic heretics: Arians, Gnostics, Manichaeans, oh heretical Trots, Maoists, petit bourgeois, Luxemburgists, oh mystic ladder, oh democratic centralism, oh protecting cupola, oh Thomistic scholasticism, oh socialist realism, oh bread of my soul, oh matter of my bread, oh oh oh