Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

I was a foreign body within my mother’s body, a splinter that would normally be rejected by the wounded skin: a button, a ring, a watch, swallowed by mistake: I forgot, Reader, about national contests, Mamadoc, and Uncle Homero, and I defended myself as best I could, I scrambled up into my spaceship and I launched myself into intrauterine star wars: I ate my mother’s mucous membrane, I penetrated my mother’s circulatory system, devouring her oxygen and food like a desert rat, I excavated, Reader, a hole within my mother’s hole, until my oh so poor, fragile, and frugal existence became, through my will to survive, part of her body and life: I buried myself in my mother, Reader, I caused myself to be swallowed by my mother’s matrix against the rejecting will of my mother herself (an unconscious will, but a will nevertheless) until I felt the surface of this recondite cunt close over my head like a beneficent roof (just like the Cupola that the government, says Uncle Homero, is building over Mexico City to purify the air and then distribute it equitably among the thirty million inhabitants), until I felt that I was expanding, that I was triumphing by cannibalizing my mother, who was unaware that a tiny Saturn was inhabiting her guts, taking up all the free space of that dear curlicue, until I felt, oh benign Reader, that the maternal, generous, flowing blood was drowning me …

(My father, feeling the need for the constant company of my mother and surprised by it, he who had always lived on a sexual merry-go-round since he had escaped the nets of Capitolina and Farnesia until he abandoned the flashy Brunilda, wanders Uncle Homero’s house during the afternoon, melodically shouting Angeles, Angeles, I’m back from the beach: he enters a long gallery that faces the sea and at the end of it he sees her, on her knees, her shoulders bare, wrapped in a towel from the waist down, her head hanging before her and in front of her, on a white towel, arranged as if they were a surgeon’s tools, a whip and a crucifix, a high, pointy, penitent’s cap and a sign painted with red letters which she hangs around her neck and which hangs over her glacially unprotected breasts: I AM THE WORST WOMAN IN THE WORLD. Angel is about to shout something, but even the name “Angeles” freezes on his lips. Was it really she? The afternoon light is uncertain and treacherous. He thinks she has seen him in comparable situations hundreds of times and has never made him feel vulnerable: she, who has accompanied him in everything he’s decided to do from the time they first met, does not deserve to be interrupted by him. He stares intently so that he will never forget the scene.)

While these portentous events were transpiring here inside, just think, your mercies benz, that outside in the cosmos my parents spent the four, five, now the six weeks that separated them from Twelfth Night waiting for news that never came.

What did people know?

What were people saying?

What did they think the Acapulco catastrophe meant?

Mom and Dad had begged the Four Fuckups: inform us by Arabian telephone (what in Englatl you call smokesignatl or popocatele), smoke signals, or anything else, of any news you have: nothing.

They asked Don Fernando Benítez: tell us where we can rendezvous with you in the mountains: nothing.

My folks spent long hours contemplating the crackling, gray, striped blackboard of the Sony television set: nothing.

Nothing about the Acapulcalypse. Nothing that would precipitate, which was my parents’ secret intention, a national crisis which would shake up the predictable, pleasant normality of Mamadoc’s contests, which during the days of our confinement followed one on the other with all joy and inexpressible collective enthusiasm:

First Week: National Prize for the Best Oral Description of the Fifty-Centavo Silver Coins Quality 0720 [no longer in existence (neither the coin nor the quality)], nicknamed El Tostón;

Second Week: National Prize for the Inhabitant of the Central Plateau Who, Overcoming His Natural and Genetic Disgust, Eats the Most Fish in a Week;

Third Week: National Prize to the Lady Who Returned the Lost Wallet of Don Wigberto Garza Toledano (Native of Monterrey), While Traveling on the Niños Heroes Subway Line;

Fourth Week: National Prize to the Citizens Who Confess in an Act of Civic Courage without Precedents to Having Been Supporters of Benito Coquet, Donato Miranda Fonseca, Esequiel Padilla, Emilio Martínez Manautou, Javier García Paniagua, Aarón Sáenz, Angel Carvajal, or Francisco Múgica in Past Internal Conflicts within the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

It was as a function of this last contest, held during the first few days of February, that my parents (and I along with them) became most upset — when we least expected it — by the announcement that, in the first few days of March, Dr. Don Homero Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca, after a month of reflexive reclusion in his beach home and careful preparation in his offices on Frank Wood Avenue, had announced his candidacy for the office of Senator from the state of Guerrero. His campaign would kick off with a mass meeting in the town of Igualistlahuaca. The citizens of Guerrero were cordially invited to view the event on television and to express their support for the PRI candidate. Dr. Fagoaga is a distinguished son of Guerrero, as irrefutable documents clearly prove, and in order not to put off for twenty years the democratic opportunity of today, and in order not to be excluded by main force, as were Benito, Donato, Emilio, and …

Angel and Angeles exclaimed in one voice: “But Uncle H. is strictly from Mexico, D.F. He’s never set foot in Guerrero, what did Guerrero do to the boys in the capital to deserve this punishment, etc., as we’ve been saying for decades: Angel and Angeles got over their spontaneous indignation and awaited the next newscast with bated breath.

Angel closed his eyes and said to my mother that they must be totally befuddled by the success of the operation, the failure of the operation, by all of the above = he shook her by the shoulders in order to shake himself.

“It’s all make-believe. We forget that from time to time. I get carried away.”

“Let go of me, Angel.”

“The idea of passing from chaos to despair with no transition scares the hell out of me.”

“Being a conservative anarchist is a little stupid, honey…”

“Nihilist. What I am is a nihilist. And I’m afraid of what I am, I swear. I want to restore certain values, not to be left with no values at all.”

“Calm down. That’s not what you are.”

“Well? What are we going to end up being — unintentionally?”

“There will be many obstacles, what you want won’t be easily achieved, all that stuff about the Sweet Fatherland, your…”

“I’m afraid of ending up as what you’re saying, the opposite of what I’m trying to achieve. Everything always ends up like that, the opposite of what we set out to do.”

“Terrorists. My Uncle Fernando, who lived through that era, would call us terrorists — if he knew.”

“He doesn’t know a thing. He thinks it’s a joke. Better a joke than a crime.”

“Was all that a crime? Tell me. I have no past. I learn everything from you. Everything I get from you sticks to me, even my need not to be like you!”

“Angeles, it’s taken for granted that in the nineties we young people all have the right to an adventure of this kind, it isn’t a statute in any constitution, it’s like what going to a whorehouse or getting drunk used to be; terrorism is a rite of passage, nothing more, it has no importance … Everybody does it. Remember when the Spanish kid García poisoned all the people in his father’s restaurant? Or when Baby Fernández put dynamite under the altar of the Infant of Prague and set it off during twelve o’clock Mass?”