Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

The entire spectacle was conceived and directed by Angel and Angeles Palomar, as were the mottoes, especially the gigantic sign that now at midday is burning brightly on the decrepit walls of the last Sanborn’s in Acapulco:

SHIT MEETS SHIT

SHEET MEATS SHEET

LONG LIVE THE SWEET FATHERLAND!

LONG LIVE THE CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION!

While all this was going on in Acapulco, Don Fernando Benítez was flying over our mutilated nation: from up above, he saw it as an island in a gulf of shadows.

Then, as they landed, he understood that he was in a dry, silvery valley, surrounded by dark ravines that left it in eternal isolation.

The helicopter landed on a mesa, and Don Fernando thanked the pilot, an employee of the National Indigenist Institute. The pilot asked him if he was sure he didn’t want him to come back, but my Uncle Fernando Benítez said no; perhaps he no longer had the strength to climb all the way up here, but getting down would be a different matter. Right, said the pilot with a crooked grin, going downhill’s always easier.

The inhabitants of the mesa gathered together when they heard the noise of the propellers and dispersed without making a sound as soon as the chopper landed. Perhaps they thought the pilot would be leaving instantly to return to the Salina Cruz base, and that they, living at this isolated altitude, could return to their normal life.

The wind came and went, ruffling their tattered clothes.

A high, burning sun returned. The Indians looked at him without closing their eyes. But the wind did make them close them.

He saw a people in rags.

When the pilot from the NII disappeared into the distance of the southern Sierra Madre, my Uncle Fernando walked quickly toward the group of Indians which by then had begun to scatter. He raised his hand in greeting, but no one responded. In more than thirty years of visiting the most isolated and inhospitable places in Mexico, he had never seen such a thing. Uncle Fernando had spent half his life documenting Mexico’s four or five million Indians, those who were never conquered by the Spaniards, who never allowed themselves to be assimilated into the creole or mestizo world, or who simply survived the demographic catastrophe of the conquest: there were twenty-five million of them before Cortés landed in Tabasco; fifty years later, only one million were left.

My Uncle Fernando looked at them respectfully, with his intense, ice-blue eyes, as fixed and piercing as two needles behind his round, gold-framed glasses. He took off his worn straw hat, which was wide-brimmed and sweat-stained — his good-luck charm on these journeys that took him from the Tarahumaras in the north, who were tall and who would run like horses over the roofs of Mexico, to the sunken remains of the Mayan Empire in the southeast, the only place in the world where each generation is shorter than the previous one, as if they were slowly sinking into the sinkholes of their forests.

He always said and wrote that all the Indian nations, from Sonora to the Yucatán, had just three things in common: poverty, helplessness, and injustice.

“You are no longer owners of what the gods bestowed upon you,” he said in a low voice, stretching out his hand toward the first man to come near him that morning on the sunny, cold plateau.

But the man went on.

My Uncle Fernando did not move. Something he could not see told him, stay right where you are, Benítez, don’t move a muscle; easy now. The clouds that surrounded the plateau like a cold foam moved one flight lower and shredded in a hoary wind that combed through the dried-out fields. The men in rags took up their wooden plows, shook their heads, shrugged off the potbellied flies that tried to land on their faces, and began to plow, they were slow but they seemed to be working more quickly than usual — they raised their faces to the sun and groaned as if they knew that midday would arrive today sooner than ever — with clenched teeth, as if enraged about the time they’d lost. The noise. The wind murdered by the helicopter.

My uncle did not move. The groups of ten or twelve men plowed in perfect symmetry, they plowed as if they’d erected and then decorated a sacred talus; but each one of them, when he’d reached the edge of the field with his plow, awkwardly butted against the rocky soil and the twisted roots of the yuccas and had to make a huge effort to get his plowshare free, turn the tiller around, and plow in the opposite direction — as if he’d never seen the obstacle.

The rest was pure clockwork: the sun was the minute hand, the rhythm of work, the noise of feminine hands slapping the tortilla dough. The only irregular element was the passing of the hasty clouds that fled toward the sea; the wail of the babies clinging to their mothers, almost ripping off their old rebozos, the ragged blouses that had once been white, stiff, and embroidered — even the roses on an Indian blouse ended up wilting in these parts, my uncle said to himself: in other villages, kids are like little animals, free, daring, and happy; in Mexico, who knows why, kids are always beautiful and happy; a country of sad men and happy kids, said Fernando Benítez to himself without knowing why, at this the stroke of noon, surprised by the formula that came into his mind and which he wrote down in his notebook in his minuscule, illegible scrawl.

The children here cling to their mothers, incapable of leaving them, and the women shoo away the flies that drink up their babies’ eyes.

He put the notebook in one of the pockets of his guayabera and shook his head, in just the way the Indian farmers shook the flies off their faces. He shook his head to free himself of that formula which kept him from understanding the mystery, the ambiguity of this land inside Mexico, the seed of Mexico, but so totally alien to the white Mexico with blue eyes, of the Nouvel Observateur and Time, and BMWs, toothpaste, toasters, cablevision, periodic checkups in Houston clinics, and the imminent celebration of the Quincentennial of the Discovery of America — a fact totally unknown by the men, women, and children he was contemplating: an undiscovered population unaware that it had ever been discovered, a date, an enigma imposed on it by others.

The men, women, and children he was contemplating.

And now hearing: they began to wail something in a language my uncle, abandoned on the insular crown of the mountains, had never heard before, something like Zapotec, he thought, he was going to write it down, but he realized he shouldn’t lose even an instant in writing, that his eyes were his uncertain guides, helped powerfully by the thick dioptric lenses in his glasses, but they, too, after all were bathed by light, not permanently separated from light, screw that, not yet, he said to himself: my Uncle Fern, a bantam rooster, a fighting cock, almost eighty years old, sprightly, short, but straight as a die, loaded with memories, romantic adventures, diabolical jokes, and bragging arrogance: my Uncle Fernando Benítez, whom your worship the reader will get to know very well because in my prenatal life he was my firmest ally and the nemesis of my horrid Uncle Homero Fagoaga, who in the very instant of my conception excrementally plowed the air over the Bay of Acapulque.

Now my Uncle Fernando was listening to that impressive music wailing, which had no other purpose than to greet the sun at its zenith: the Indians, high noon on their heads, the blazing sun of the tropics, a desert in the clouds, first close to their hands, then to their naked shoulders and burned faces, finally as straight as an arrow aimed directly down onto the top of those heads, covered in black, straight hair, the heads of the Indians of the mesas.