Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

He looked with disgust and surprise at the discolored hand he’d raised and instantly concealed it. He desperately looked for his black glove. He saw it on the seat in the truck cab, climbed up, grabbed it, sat down on the driver’s throne, and as he put it on he glanced at the icons on his dashboard: votive lamps, the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, his swarthy little mother, and a photo of the Lady, the Mother and Doctor of all Mexicans. The union bosses ordered him to add that picture to those of the Virgin, his Mother, and the PM. First Bubble Gómez balked at the idea and was on the point of spitting out his eternal chewing gum: at least his holy little shrine was his, just his and not the property of the PRI or the union! But he’d grown fond of the photo of the Lady, word of honor, it even went well with the other three, and the proof of his fondness is that every so often, to pass the long hours he spent on the highway, the driver blew bubbles with his chewing gum until they burst; this was his maximum tribute to life: Bubble Gómez, bringing to the sterile resort indispensable provisions, transporting from one place to another the wealth produced elsewhere, totally unaware of the irony of Hispanic wealth, imported, unproductive Road to Santiago, gold of the Indies, treasures of the Hapsburgs, electric gadgets from Texas, treasures that escape like water through our fingers, only the symbols remain, only the continuity of the symbols is ours.

Now SHE IS THE SYMBOL.

I saw her — he told the huge man with the bushy mustache sitting next to him with a tiny thirteen-year-old girl dressed as a Carmelite nun sitting on his lap — like, well, one of us, a woman of the people, despite the jewels and feathers, like a real pal. Didn’t he think so, too?

The mustachioed man stepped down from the truck. “Come on, Colasa. The truck isn’t going in. We’ll go on foot.”

He slammed the door shut and said to the albino: “Don’t let her fool you, man. That bitch is the whore of Babylon. This is the Ayatollah Matamoros giving you the true facts.”

He raised two fingers in benediction, rested his other hand on the tea-colored girl, and told the driver he could quote him if he liked.

Bubble Gómez started his truck and popped a bubble right in front of the Lady’s photograph.

She was seated before the mirror: she looked at herself, surrounded by powerful, pore-perforating spotlights. She had no time to remember herself. She hadn’t been allowed to look at herself in a mirror for more than a year.

The squad of makeup artists and hairdressers fell on her. First they erased her face, the one she was wearing, the one she had when she’d walked into the makeup room. She did her best to see and remember that face, but they didn’t give her the time. To remember her earlier face, the real one, the original — that was certainly impossible. She had even come to doubt she ever had an original face.

She shut her eyes while they marcelled her hair and refused to accept what she’d just thought. She wrinkled her brow to cling to the shred of memory and the makeup girl said, señora, please don’t frown like that.

She decided that this morning, before they put her on exhibit again, she would remember herself; soon there would be no time. She would be taken away from the mirror. A year after her enthronement, they allowed her to look into the mirror when they made her up. But she preferred to try the impossible: to remember herself as she was before all this. And she couldn’t. The present was too strong, it washed away her memory and left her abandoned on the isle of the present moment, as if her present could be her salvation and not, as her soul warned her, her prison. She even came to think that memory was her worst enemy, the shark in a blind and opulent wave that kept her on its crest but without ever moving her, fixed forever in the terror of the past.

For that reason it was such a valiant act on her part to yawn in front of the mirror and decide, against, despite the fact that this morning, before they put her on exhibit, she would remember the girl who worked for two years in the secretarial pool of the Secretariat of Patrimony and Vehiculation of Resources (SEPARVE) on Avenida de los Insurgentes.

What was she like?

That was the problem: the last two years seemed an age to her and how was she going to recognize herself in a thin, tall shorthand-typist, well stacked, or so they said, with chestnut-mousy lank hair, pale makeup that was a bit too much for her because she had very pretty cinnamon skin, and wearing a pants suit bought in the Iron Palace with the savings from her previous job, one she indeed did not remember.

Her job at SEPARVE she certainly did remember, it’s when she was the girlfriend of Leoncito, the mortician from San Luis Potosí Street, not very far from the Secretariat. They would meet in the Vienna Café in Parque Hipódromo, because that garden was the only oasis in these neighborhoods, where the diesel buses and dump trucks raced with their exhausts wide open (in Mexico, Nader is Nadir; this is where the Nothing with Nader Society was founded, Nader Enemy of National Development), vomiting clouds of poison onto the dead trees: they would drink cappuccino and eat chocolate pastries with German names and he offered her, so she could dress up a bit, so she would not appear so simple, well, so that he could feel proud of her, some ribbons, which were always left over after the national holidays in September, tricolor ribbons, green, white, and red, with the mortician’s favorite letters printed right on the knot: RIP.

“Even when we celebrate the Day of the Cry of Dolores, people die, you know,” he told her in pedagogical tones.

Of course someone laughed at her for turning up at the office decked out that way, but so long as she pleased her boyfriend Leoncito, their sneers rolled right off her back; actually, she rather liked the fact that they took more notice of her, even if it was just to take their minds off the flood of national disasters and all the other secretaries. Before, all they did was fool around or gossip about romance, movies, and soap operas, but now, suddenly, they gossiped about foreign debt and devaluation and seizing savings, my God, and she had nothing, nothing, nothing except her coquettish ribbons, the tricolor flag and the RIP, and a few wilted flowers left over from old wakes that Leoncito gave her.

Not that she was blind and deaf, no way. When she went in to take dictation (from the old-fashioned functionaries who still didn’t use dictaphones or who were afraid to have their voices on tape or leave any evidence that might be directly attributed to them) or went from office to office with letters to sign (there were no executive secretaries higher up than she was to give her the listen here don’t you think that you or anyone else around here is going over my head to get to the boss ), she would pick up a word here, a word there. Of course, she understood nothing. And when she walked out of conference rooms where a pool of secretaries labored to immortalize each parenthesis, each comma, each subordinate clause created by the teams of economists who replaced each other at roller-coaster speed even though their verbal chorus was always the same (the economists, unlike the politicians, aspired to have all their words immortalized), she wondered if someone somewhere could really understand the prose of the ten thousandth National Development Plan.

But then two things happened, one after the other. Dr. Federico Robles Chacón came to the ministry cursing right and left about the language of economists, saying, to think that in the eighteenth century Montesquieu called economics the science of human happiness, thank you, Carlyle, for correcting him and calling it an abysmal science, a grim science. And the day she became the handmaiden of the interministerial committee, tricolor ribbons, dictation notebook, and all, Robles Chacón happened to say: “Mae West doesn’t wear feathers and beads and she doesn’t put on her diamonds just to take a walk through Central Park at midnight.”