Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

Angeles: “I have no idea. What was supposed to happen?”

Angel: “At 15:49, Hipi and the Orphan enter Uncle Homero’s house.”

Angeles: “You mean here, where we are right now the day after Candlemas, February 3, 1992.”

Angel: “It was a Tuesday. Tomasito opens the gate for them, knowing that at that time Uncle Homero is always in his sauna next to the pool.”

Angeles: “Then the guys from the band and Tomasito burst in on him, so that Uncle Homero realizes he’s been betrayed.”

Angel: “Homero shouts, ‘You Judas, I never should have confided my security to a scion of that damned colony named after my King Don Felipe, as the universal Argentine genius Don Manuel Mujica Lainez might have said!’”

Angeles: “And perhaps he remembered what Uncle Fernando said to him when Homero offered him a lot here twenty-four years ago: ‘And how do I defend it from guerrillas?’”

Angel: “Perhaps he did. Why not? But perhaps Tomasito had an attack of conscience.”

Angeles: “What do you mean? What are you getting at?”

Angel: “What I mean, Angelucha, is that after all, Tomasito owes his life to Uncle Homero.”

Angeles: “You knew that and you went ahead anyway?”

Angel: “How can there be risk if nothing’s left to chance? Uncle Homero, to prove his humanitarian, philanthropic, and liberal credentials, took in Tomasito when he was a boy, when UNICEF put him up for adoption after Marcos’s last massacre in Manila. Would you like to tell the rest? Please do.”

Angeles: “It was when Ferdinand and Imelda were desperately trying to wipe out the opposition. They couldn’t sleep because they were making up crueler and crueler repressions. Now you pick it up, silver tray. Up and at ’em, oh genius!”

Angel: “Then Lady Imelda goes bananas and announces to Ferdinand: ‘Last night I dreamed that fifteen years ago a boy was born who was going to plocraim himself King of the Luzons: you were Herod and I was Herodias and we went out to kill all the boys born yesterday fifteen years ago to rid ourselves of these redeemers, using the slogan “Better Deads Than Reds.”’ The Mindanao death squads went out to hit all fifteen-year-olds.”

Angeles: “And Tomasito was saved from that death thanks to Uncle Homero, who just happened to be in Manila … Are you kidding?”

Angel: “He just happened to be in Manila because he was funneling a few hundred million Mexican pesos through the Philippine stock market. The money he’d kept from the tax man he’d picked up from the sale of a subsidiary of the International Baby Foods Company that was supposed to bring foreign investment to Mexico and did just the opposite — but it still had to have a Mexican as the majority shareholder. That patriot just happened to be our trusty uncle, who, to be sure, is hard to imagine as a straw man, but he turned up one day with a check from the Mexican branch of INBAFOO, payable to the Philippine branch. The price paid for the Mexican subsidiary was minuscule, but no one in Mexico or the Philippines ever saw a centavo, not the public treasury, not the consumers, not even the brats who eat that shit, but, you guessed it, the Board of Directors and Preferred Stockholders of INBAFOO in the Republic of the Sun Belt, in the capital of the said republic, Dallas, did indeed see some centavos. How’m I doin’, babe?”

Angeles: “Super, Angel. Your uncle’s your major theme.”

Angel: “And that’s how Homero appropriated all that humanitarian publicity and ducked all the attacks on him for being a go-between, but the fact is that Tomasito hates him, too, but he must also love him, because if, on the one hand, Homero did save him from the Herodian fury of the Marcoses, on the other he knows that the kids who didn’t die in the massacre did die of gastric hemorrhages after eating the little bottles of slime distributed in the Philippines by the Mexican branch of the conglomerate.”

Angeles: “So when he heard Hipi and the Orphan knocking on the gate outside Homero’s house, Tomasito began to have doubts.”

Angel: “Just imagine that his fate could have been this one: having his head cut off by a machete in the pay of Imelda.”

Angeles: “And, instead of that, here he is living like a captive prince in a golden tropical cage, so how could his heart not start beating double-time and he not begin to have his doubts?”

Angel: “But it may be that Tomasito, paralyzed by doubts, mulling over his own salvation compared to the death of his little brothers, consumers of the baby food made by Homero, just went back to his room to let things run their own course, just as you say: the supreme availability, someone else will do it for him…”

Angeles: “Or maybe Tomasito, letting his gratitude get the better of his doubts, instead of admitting the Four Fuckups, cuts them off and then the Orphan Huerta gets mad and shoots Tomasito…”

Angel: “I’m telling you we’ve got to calm that boy down. Sometimes he goes too far.”

Angeles: “Aroused by the noise, Homero leaves the sauna naked, puts on his guayabera just when the Orphan was overcoming the resistance of the doubtful Tomasito, overcome this time by an aberrant fidelity…”

Angel: “Then Homero puts on the parachute, gives rapid orders to the man driving the motorboat, and escapes by flying, he passes over our heads, shits on us, and disappears into the thick air of Acapulco.”

Angeles: “If that’s so, then where is Tomasito?”

Angel: “I don’t know. Where are the Orphan, Hipi, and Egg?”

Angeles: “And the Baby. Don’t ever forget the Baby. I don’t know where she is, either.”

In this and in other sparkling repartee, my mother and father spent the first month after my conception in Uncle Homero Fagoaga’s silent, abandoned house. That adipose Icarus left them, devoting himself to an avian life and, of course, adding his own small contribution to the epidemic in Cacapulco.

Angel and Angeles did not open the doors of the fort. No one, by the by, ever knocked. Tomasito decamped, leaving a full pantry; Uncle Homero had prepared his mansion, since 1968, for a prolonged guerrilla siege.

Thus it was that my father tried to transform the besieged house (in their imagination, of course, nothing beyond that) into a phalanstery = he said to my mother that without discipline they would not survive and that his own conservative revolutionary plans would be frustrated. Punctuality and discipline: my mother made no objection when, at seven o’clock in the morning, they prolonged the postures of their pleasure by going down on all fours and mopping down the tropical terraces of the mansion that belonged to the fugitive Don Homero.

This news was only lived by me and with pleasure during this long month. I communicate them to the readers. You should know that during the first week I floated freely in the secretions of the oviduct until I set up camp permanently in my mother’s uterine cavity. At that time, I, Christopher, was a cluster of well-organized cells, with defined functions, learning the classic lesson, innocent that I was, about the unity of my person — confirmed by the diversity of my functions. Well, if each and every one of the cells that emerged from the fertilized egg has the same genetic structure and therefore each and every one preserves, latent, what my hair color will be, the color of my eyes, not all give these factors equal importance: only the eye- and hair-pigmentation cells concern themselves with a function that is, nevertheless, inscribed in all the other cells.

But after the second week of waiting for the nonexistent news about what transpired on Twelfth Night, when the Three Wise Men are supposed to come, I already thought myself the Wisest Man on Earth (a melodic gene informs me), then bang, my situation becomes so precarious that I almost, dear Reader, never got to tell this intriguing story which has no set ending (because it had no set beginning) because, between being pissed off and pissed on, I began to show myself for what I was, or rather for what purpose I was: