Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

INFOREADER: They haven’t spoken, they haven’t done anything beyond what they’ve already said and done, they haven’t lived beyond what they’ve already lived, and what about me? When they started imagining probabilities, alternatives for the story, without remembering, first of all, that they’ve already made me and, second, that I myself possess a thousand alternatives, they drive me nuts and make me want to cut out, to leave my mother’s ovary without returning to my father’s testicle:

They say I will be a boy and be named Christopher, they’ve gone so far as to decide that for me, the assholes, but suppose I turn out to be a girl? Are they going to Herodize me the way Imelda did with Tomasito? They realize that the probabilities of my being a Mexican boy named Christopher are about one in 183,675, 900, 453, 248 and that all it would have taken was a turn of the genetic screw for me to be an armadillo, and you know, I like that idea. It sounds good, a lost, friendless armadillo with no obligations on one of those misty hilltops down which we tumble, or a jolly dolphin, making love at ten miles per hour over the blue Pacific?

“Have you ever been in Pacífica?”

Why does my dad always ask himself that same question? He’d be much better off thinking that, thanks to me, lost unity will be reconstituted, lost time found once more, all because of little old me, my respected progenitors, your information divided, get it? understand what I’m telling you?

“Is information really power?” asks my dad, and I start trotting along like a burro, wishing I could tell him that his sperm only had half of my vital information, and my mother’s reproductive cells only had the other half, and then

I ARRIVE

and just for being myself I gather together all the NEW information, oh what a glory, to know it now, from this moment on, I combine the total number of chromosomes that my father and mother can give to a new being so he will be new and will not be they, even if they have engendered him, and so that one day I can return them what they lost, their memory, their prophecy, their complete being: so why are they mistreating me like this, bouncing me along a ridge on top of a burro in a rainstorm, with night coming on? What did I ever do to them? We barely know each other and already they start fucking me over!

What do they know?

INFOTEL: Someone called Uncle Homero’s house in Acapulco, saying he has a radiogram from my Uncle Fernando Benítez transmitted from an NII helicopter to the presidential antenna in Mexico City and from there to the private telephone of Dr. Fagoaga, LL.D., in the Pearl of the Pacific, the Mecca of Tourism, the Oriental Port of the New World, the Bay of the China Galleon and the Manila Galleon:

“Have you ever been in Pacífica?”

This is what the message says to my nephew and niece Angel and Angeles Palomar: I expect you on the 22nd of February, the anniversary of the day President Madero, the Apostle of democracy, was murdered, in Cuajincuilapa, all communication between the D.F. and Aca inexplicably cut did you know Homero is a candidate question mark yours Benítez.

What do any of us know?

Wake up, children, wake up, said Grandpa Rigoberto Palomar in an alarmed but serious voice, wake up, today is Saturday, the 22nd of February, and they pulled the blanket off the still-sleeping President Francisco Madero, they took him, surrounded by bayonets, out of his cell, they put him in an automobile along with Mr. Pino Suárez, they stopped the car at the gates of the penitentiary, they made them both get out, they shot each one, a bullet in the head, at 11 o’clock p.m.: Wake up, children, we have to go to the Revolution.

What do I know?

The day of the great uproar, the blind young Indian, wild from the intensity of the invisible noises and smells, took the virgin girl he’d been sniffing after for over a week with a dizzy delicacy: it was after the girl’s first visit from the sticky sorceress, and the smell of blood both repelled and attracted him. She said nothing, she allowed herself to be touched, and she herself touched the man’s smooth hot cheek with pleasure.

INFOGENES: This only I know: That in the vertigo of my Uncle Fernando Benítez’s visit to the people up on the plateau, a blind boy was created at the same time that I was created in Acapulco.

The right to information: this only I know. Grandfather knows which day it is in history, Uncle Fernando knows what days those are in the calendar. But my parents, do they know anything?

INLOCOPARENTIS: They must not even be aware that they’ve created me; they just couldn’t be so cruel, such children of their own genes that they have created my death without even acknowledging my life: acid and arid, irritated and insecure, scraping against everything around me, everything that comes to me in this seesawing around (seesaw my eye, something between a gallop and an earthquake!), which in reality is a throbbing racket for one who was conceived on the beach under the palm trees and who now knows he is in another place, savagely transported in one jump to a restless, volcanic, thorny landscape: one day they’ll tell me about it, and I’ll visualize it, even though I know it right now, I know that (it’s my darkest secret) one day I’ll forget it because your mercies should know that no one is willing to give a child the supplementary days to which he has a right: nine months extra, winning the lottery and getting a Christmas bonus all at the same time, nine months more than the adults, but the adults say, how can this be? They think that it’s enough to recognize that

WHEN WE’RE BORN WE ARE ALREADY NINE MONTHS OLD

which means we possess an intolerable advantage, namely that we have the power to impose the laws of our infancy on them and there is nothing they fear more even though they won’t admit it: what I’m dreaming is, what is is what I dream, what I want I touch, I touch what I want, what I desire exists, what exists is what I desire, I have no reason to work, intrigue, screw other people, covet my neighbor’s property, what for, when all I want I have right here at hand, can you see this your mercies idem?

There is nothing more subversive than instantly turning desire into reality, and that’s why they try to surround us unborn types, and later, when we’re children, they limit us, surround us with schools and jails and churches and programmed vacations and calendar holidays and economic whorehouses erected between a child and the object of his desire, which would be Christmas in July and Two-Year Vacations and Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (which, for Julio Cortázar, would be July in Christmas), and the Garden of Delights — no, all pleasures deferred, we have to conquer it all by means of obedience the discipline of work austerity abstinence Calvinistic savings and the banishment of fantasy from the desert of reality instead of the fantasy of banishment from the desert of reality, Satan: look, says my old and interminable chain of genes to me, look where we’ve gotten to since puritanism took over the world, pretty well fucked up since Simon Peter, say my chromosomatic chains, and Saul-Saul-Why-Do-You-Persecute-Me imposed his rules of abstention after abstention, says my father on foot behind my mother trotting along on her burro through the Sierra Madre, riding the burro along the steep, curved, almost virgin paths that go, says Uncle Fernando, who is guiding us, from Acapulco to the Sierra, not even Cortés knew about these routes, adds our uncle, who knows all of them, and says put on your ponchos here comes a cloudburst and the peaks grow gray suddenly, crowns of misty iron, fleeting heart flutter in the sky: my mother’s nearby heart also beats faster and my father recites out loud, almost sings, scolding the storm that whips us and is about to take revenge on us, say I thoroughly saturated by the Acapulco excesses organized by my mom and dad, by the contradictions I already perceive between their condemnations of puritanism and their indiscriminate extermination of vice in Acapulco: did two young homosexual lovers deserve to die merely because they went around wearing mess jackets à la Tyrone Power? Did Egberto deserve to die because he was a fag or because he was a critic? And Emilio, because he was a puritan or because he was intolerant? And the models, because of the pleasure they gave or for the money they earned? Ada and Deng because…?