Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

In the air, flying toward Palenque, under the aegis of a special permit that allowed them to fly over and land in the Chiapas — Tabasco — Campeche Trusteeship, my Uncle Fernando felt afraid of himself, afraid of his historical curiosity: he had the anguishing feeling that he had interrupted something, perhaps a sacred cycle that sustained the life of that lost tribe on that mountain which was like an island on the moon; he feared a catastrophe. His own was sufficient. His own fear was enough for him.

The permit granted by the Trusteeship administered by the Five Sisters stipulated that the Mexican national Fernando Benítez could land in Chitacam territory for the purpose of interviewing the last Lacandon Indian, before, as the document put it, “it was too late.” He feared, as he flew over the mountains of Oaxaca, that today he had just precipitated the disappearance of the last ninety-two members of the tribe of eternal night.

Could it be, he wondered, staring at the inglorious sunset, that from now on each year there would be one Indian less in that tribe of hereditarily, willfully blind people who were born with the sense of sight but who had it devoured by the larvae of those flies which were their only company, all victims of their isolation? He could not find out; but from now on he would imagine it. An invisible author for an imaginary day.

Mexico — what remained of Mexico after the Partition — was dying without Mexicans — those locked within the confines of the emaciated Republic — ever getting to know each other. Without ever getting to know what was left of the fragmented fatherland.

The tribes separated by the canyon never shook hands. But one tribe could see the other, and one would never see its brothers.

Don Fernando Benítez was on the verge of vomiting out of the helicopter window, but a strange vacillation, one that secretly seemed to warn him against the horror of symmetry, calmed him.

“Do you believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe?” he asked the pilot.

“The what?” the pilot answered (the racket, the earphones).

“I say that only a miracle like another manifestation of the Virgin of Guadalupe can save Mexico.”

“No, we’re going to Palenque,” shouted the pilot. “Not to Mexico City … The Presi…”

Fernando Benítez closed his eyes and patted the shoulder of the young pilot.

Incredible! All solutions seem irrational except one: believing in the Virgin. Our only rationality!

Then something extraordinary occurred: afternoon renounced night and on both sides of the canyon there exploded in midair, as if they were trying to reach the helicopter, race with it, or damage it, bouquets of skyrockets, green and blue fireworks, hysterical, colorless lights, luminous sheets and then bunches of liquid silver and castles made of piercing air: a night full of red, acrid, and miraculous gunpowder: my Uncle Fernando, his eyes closed, did not see the night of the Mexican fiesta, that astonishing night and that astonishing fiesta, born of plundering and absence: fans of fire, towers of liquid metal, the wealth of poverty, rockets and castles that came out of who knows what invisible hiding place, out of who knows what savage squandering of money; harvests and carpentry, pottery, masks, looms and saddles: all of it set on fire here at the instant of the communication between the two shores, a communication he either could not or did not know how to accomplish, savings wiped out in a blast of powder; wealth existed only for that: to dazzle the eyes of the white, nostalgic village, for the glory of the sense of smell of the blind, ragged village: finally they had shaken hands, surrendered all their wealth to one instant of irreparable loss: the fiesta.

He opened his eyes, and the sun had still not set.

He looked outside the cabin and found eyes identical to his own. He shook his head; it was not a reflection. It was a bird. It was an eagle with the head of an owl, and a collar of rainbow-colored feathers, tied up like a chignon, as flowery as a ruff; the harpy eagle that was flying throughout the entire New World, from Paraguay to Mexico, celebrating all by itself the discovery of which the Indians were ignorant. Fernando Benítez saw those eyes and the dogged flight of the eagle, parallel to that of the helicopter: flying like two arrows, both of them together that afternoon in the Sierra Madre. In its powerful talons, the harpy eagle was carrying a living monkey, its shrieks drowned out by the noise of the motors.

There are two movements, my mother says her Platonic tome says: that of all things, which eternally revolve around themselves without changing place, and that of things that wander eternally, things that move, Angel my love, far from this secluded shore where I already shine one month after my conception in the immobile center of my mother, and I concentrate in myself the two movements of which they speak outside of me. They are desperate to understand what has happened between January and February, I who arrived in the impetuous gush of my father’s errancy, and I now feel that I am hanging on for all I’m worth to a wet, hot cave from which I never ever want to leave, Mommy, I beg of you, don’t say what you’re saying, let everything spin endlessly around you and me, both of us together, not errant, not displaced, not …

The two of them cuddle in Uncle Homero’s grand, uninhabited, and silent mansion on Peachy Tongue Beach, and each one agreed with the other, never again would so many significant occasions come together at one time, New Year’s Eve parties, the beginning of the year of the Quincentennial, the Literature Congress, Uncle Homero’s vacation, the vacation of the military and diplomatic high command in Washington — a break before masterminding the destabilization of the new enemy, Colombia — and Penny López’s vacation, eh? My mother winked and my father feigned ignorance, self-confidently adding Ada and Deng’s disco. It’s better to prepare things with a will, is what I say (said my mom), than to leave them to that Mexican, weeeelll, let’s see how it falls and if it does happen, good thing (she said, interpreting my father’s will). She decided to contradict him only in order to maintain a modicum of independence within her willing acceptance of her tight union with my father. Which is why she said:

“I want to enjoy the supreme availability. I don’t want to earn money, organize a trip, or even plan what we do in a single day. I’ll bet you someone will do it for me.”

My father laughed and asked himself if everything that had taken place in Aca a month ago had been merely gratuitous. We can always imagine what could have happened if everything had gone well, but we always had to be sure that chance would get an oar in now and again; that’s why she would like to understand better what she still doesn’t know and not to think that it was only a joke, but by the same token that it was not just an act of perfect will: not even a getting even, she says to him, not even an act of meting out justice, which someday may separate you from me, and deprive us of our love, my love.

Angel: “Why? I really wish jokes or gratuitous acts could be a way to get justice, why not, Angeles?”

Angeles: “Because the twentieth century is soon going to die on us, and I refuse, whatever the justifications, to equate justice with death, what about you?”

Angel: “All I know is that what we had to do here is either all done or should be all done.” My father spoke in muffled tones: he’d put his head between my mother’s legs, as if he were looking for me.

Angeles: “As Tomasito would say, till no see, no berieve.”

Angel: “Unfortunately, everybody in these parts thinks just the opposite. They say that if you want to believe you’re better off not seeing.” My father raises his head. “Why didn’t the Filipino carry out the final part of the plan?”