Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

Sitting across the room from the Sergeant, finishing his breakfast of waffles with pecans, the eminent South American critic Egberto Jiménez-Chicharra, fat and olive-complexioned, all beard, oil, and melancholy eyes. He looked toward the Acapulco beach and mentally reviewed the structuralist darts he would hurl with deadly accuracy that morning against Domínguez del Tamal: but despite the lecture on synchrony that was pouring between his cerebral hemispheres just as the Log Cabin syrup was pouring over his frozen, hard waffles smeared with unmeltable margarine, he could not erase the sense of delightful nocturnal obligation which would force him to choose between the handsome Jamaican poet and the rough Argentine novelist who had seduced him, literally, with a lecture whose referent was, d’ailleurs, ailleurs, the otherness of a literature that was being produced, metonymically, at the level of syntagmatic structure, but which also, semantically, in successive preteritions constituted substantive constellations without any sacrifice of the aforementioned preterition. Using his fork, he sketched out a tiny diagram in the syrup he’d poured on his waffles; it faded, only to be replaced by palindromes and palpitations that raced through his feverish mind.

Emilio and Egberto caught sight of each other. Emilio was the first to look away and move toward the exit that led to the hall where the First Congress of the Newest and Most Recent Spanish-American Literature that Never Grows Old and Always Astonishes, only to find, to his disgust, on the other side of the bluish windows a line of caryatids out in the open air, women as svelte as Sergeant Censor, with long white necks, twist the neck of the swan of sex, there is no socialism with sex, said Emilio to himself: it was as an article of faith. There is no capitalism without decadence, smiled the flabby Egberto, uncomfortable because he insisted on wearing his corset in the tropics. Deo Gratias both, both finally Catholic, both believers, frightened of being bereft of their Church, of their sins, the spice of their life, both of them staring at the gringa models with swan-like necks, in a phalanx on the sand, in the water, draped with blue, red, lilac, pistachio organdy, posing with their arms raised and their armpits shaved as smooth as ivory, wearing straw hats, the Acapulco touch, they who had not the slightest trace of heavy religious traditions, holding on to their hats with one hand while the wind, what wind? both literary critics asked themselves, when this January heat lowers your blood pressure and sentences you to drink cups of coffee (Emilio) or to stay in a tub of cold water with the door open and one of Madame Kristeva’s old books leaning against the bar of Palmolive just in case (Egberto), but those girls were fluttered by a wind that made the patresfamilias walking on the beach with their kids toward the playground tremble until naughty little Pepito, who was snapping his towel at a tropical parrot, said look, they’re blowing air onto those gringas, hahaha, they should have hired me to fart at them, shut up you little bastard, is that why we brought you on vacation here where the peak season never peaks, oh come on now honey, stop complaining, we’ll have a good time and look how nicely they make the wind blow on the pretty gringas with those breeze machines that flutter their clothes, when you gonna buy me some rags like that, hon, why do I always have to go around with Salinas y Rocha clothes when all the other ladies in the neighborhood take their little trips to Mexamerica to buy outfits in the Laredos and Juarazo. Because they’re smugglers and bitches, said her husband. What pisses me off, sweetie, is seeing these models surrounded by beggars, cripples, blind people, and hawkers trying to sell decorated gourds and embroidered blouses, as if there were only Indians in this country, look at them photographed for Vogue, holding serapes and things made of onyx: little burros, ashtrays, and bookends of Mexicans asleep with big sombreros over their eyes, the whole world’s gonna see that, Matildona, they’re gonna think that’s what we’re like here, so where do you get off with wanting to make a trip to Mexamerica to buy clothes, that’s why when you get there they look you up and down as if they were doing you a big favor to sell you their shit, because they think you just that minute walked away from your corn grinder, that you’re married to some slob who sleeps off his siestas under a big hat on a street full of lost burros and nopal cactuses, just like that, is that what we’ve progressed for? is that why we became dignified, clean members of the middle class? well, what about it?

“Calm down, Rey,” said Matilde to her husband, and the three of them — father, mother, and son — entered the vast Acapulco amusement park, but at the gate the guard told Pepito that the parrot was not allowed, that it was dangerous, an insane animal, and the little bastard gave him the finger and ran in anyway, even if Matilde and Reynaldo stopped for an instant to contemplate the entryway, whose arch was made up of gigantic plaster whales, Moby Dick ballerinas, which Matilde said were very cute and Reynaldo said he was shocked at her lack of ignorance since anybody knew that this was the posthumous creation of David Alfaro Siqueiros, his 3-D Acapulco polyforum, ah, said Doña Matilde as they walked into that implacable paradise unblemished by a dot of shade, all cement and still waters, completely dedicated to the cult of sunstroke.

They walked toward plaster islands decorated with pirate ships, squirting fountains, hoses, jungle slides reached by bamboo and sand ramps that rise to Tarzanish heights and from which you slide down, ass to the burning tin, here comes someone down said the kid as a vulgar girl cools her steaming backside in the pool where a young, thin, dark-skinned life guard wearing a racing suit and a cap decorated with bottle caps on his hairy head waits for her, he’s got to protect himself from the sun, poor guy, out here the whole damn day in the sun to help the kids who slide down, but Pepito is now running, followed by his breathless parents, to the gigantic pool, the sea in miniature, the Pediatric Pacific, which is calm one minute and the next, to the accompaniment of an air-raid siren, becomes artificially turbulent, full of waves higher than their heads, and Pepito is happy, that’s what he’s here for, Mati, yes it is, Rey, look how much fun our son and heir is having, it was worth all our sacrifices, don’t say it wasn’t, you didn’t go to the Laredos so the kid could come to Aca, right? oh Rey, don’t go on like that, you’ll make me cry, forgive me, honey, you’re right, you’re always right, don’t worry, Matilde, we’re going places, they’ll always need accountants, some because they’ve got dough, others because they don’t, some because they make a lot, others because they lose a lot, but I’m telling you they all need accountants. What’s that, Rey? What, sweetie? That noise, I mean it isn’t normal.

That’s exactly what the folks on the Sun & Fun Toltec Tour were wondering — go on cooperating out there, Reader — as they breakfasted in the Coastline Burger Boy, whose mercury vapor lights blinked and then darkened to the color of the omnipresent Log Cabin syrup: that noise is not normal, mused Professor Will Gingerich, lecturer attached to the tour, young and nervous, and eager to communicate his thesis, even at this time of smiling pancakes from smiling Aunt Jemima. We North Americans always try to get to the frontier, the West, that was the source of our energetic optimism, there will always be a new frontier, we joyfully look for it within the American continent, sadly outside the continent, and hysterically when we use both up: Isn’t there any other place left? Is the whole world California, the end of the earth, the shaky cliff over the sea, the San Andreas Fault? And the ground here in Acapulco is shaking too, but with a frisson the Richter Scale doesn’t register: That’s just how a herd of buffalo sounds, said a sleepy old man from the Wisconsin flatlands as he lit up his old corncob pipe: but what they saw first were not buffalo but three swift camels racing along the beach, mounted by an old man, a black, and a Chinese, all scattering golden nuggets and thick perfumes: oh, typical Mexico — fiesta, carnival, joy, but the Vogue model asked if she might wash her hands after four hours of posing, and when she pulled the chain at the beach club, a tide of shit came bubbling out of the toilet bowl. The model wrapped her green tulle around her, patted her nonexistent stomach, right, that shit was not hers, certainly not hers; she tried to open the door, the lock, naturally, did not work, a strange beach boy, fat and hairless, had removed the handle, the shit tide rose, gobbled up her beribboned, silver Adolfo slippers, wet her infinitely discreet Kotex blemish, her flat tummy, swirled in her belly button and her pursed asshole, she had no time to scream, to escape.