Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing, nothing at all,” said my father and he looked for an instant at the mask of his Uncle Don Fernando Benítez, who would be turning eighty in a few days and who still walked energetically through the tropical highland storms, leading us on foot through mountains he knew better than the back of his hand, Don Fernando Benítez’s creole mask, his blue eyes blurry from the storm that beats against the lenses of his gold-plated wire-rimmed glasses, his slightly bulbous nose distilling the essence of the squall that drips off the ends of his handlebar mustache bathed in the idem, his mouth a rictus of sad wisdom:

“You two asked me about Pacífica, but do you know where I’ve just been? Doing an interview with the last Lacandon Indian. But guess what happened? The last of the Lacandon Indians interviewed me instead.”

He groaned and furrowed his brow, raising a hand to the imaginary knot of an imaginary tie. He says the Indians are all we have left; they are our ghosts; for thirty years he’s been interviewing them, defending them, going to the most remote places to see them before they disappear, oh of course, saying to Mexicans, we owe loyalty to the world of the Indians, even if we disdain them, exploit them, because it’s the loyalty we owe to death. He gets excited about the idea, he stops a moment, just for theatrical effect, damn but we’ve become just as eccentric, just as fragile, just as condemned to extinction as they have, why don’t we recognize the fact?

“Killing an Indian is like burning down a library.”

He roared out a lament that conquered the storm and echoed through the sierra:

“Oh, God, all of us are Lacandons!”

“So no one in the rest of the country said anything about Acapulco?” asked my mother Angeles, insistently but serenely. I suspect that she hasn’t got the remotest idea that I’m bouncing around like a marble in these boondocks she’s carried me to.

“No.” Uncle Benítez shook his hat-covered head, turning his back on them once again and stubbornly maintaining the pace. “Nobody knows a thing about it.”

Our Uncle Fernando Benítez made his nemesis face, and I registered what happened in the seed of what would soon be my cerebral cortex: “Killing an Indian is like burning down a library,” and we’ve already got more than two hundred pages written, one movie hour, two TV hours (including commercials), several oppressive nightmares because it’s all over, and nevertheless we persist in reliving it every twenty-four hours: Father and Mother, my genes tell me better get used to it, Chris, that’s Mexico for you, live one more day so you can live on that day the seven centuries since the advent of the Heagle and the Herpent.

Please, your discriminatory worships, please do not ask to know what my parents and Uncle Fernando Benítez see at 2 p.m., three days after their climb up the sierra, the southern mommy, in the storm, three days after sleeping in shacks Don Fernando knows and in Indian villages which take him in with astonished recognition, as if they were getting ready to visit him quite soon and don’t bother coming out here to see us, Quetzalcoatl: cold, high nights I remember (I shall remember), the smell of burned forests, the grunting of hogs running around freely and the soulful laugh of the burro who is sadly, happily sure we don’t understand him simply because he doesn’t speak to us. Now we descend to the flatland, where the sun and shadow are equally long at all hours of the day, sculptures made of air, astonished at their own existence (we are in Guerrero, at the corner of Oaxaca, says my father; let’s go to the market in Igualistlahuaca, I’m hungry and they make delicious grasshoppers in red pepper there and then they say he who eats grasshopper never leaves this place):

Better look at what’s written on the hillsides:

MEXICANS: INDUSTRIALIZE

YOU WON’T LIVE LONGER, BUT YOU WILL LIVE BETTER

The saying that made Don Ulises López, Penny’s father, remember? famous. My mother threw the rebozo that had been covering her head over her shoulders, good old Penny sure does get around.

MIXTEC: ACT RESPONSIBLY!

VOTE DIALECTICALLY!

but my father says look at the farmers on horseback, riding at a controlled pace, wearing grimy straw hats, the bridles black with sweat, the red tulips, the blue sky through the leafy laurels, the burros laden with hay, the light rain, a three-minute sprinkle, the noise of the rivers hidden underground and the vast rose-colored fields, a valley of rolling heather and the sudden end of the rain.

No, says Uncle F., you don’t have to look so far away, just look over there at the gangrenous walls of Igualistlahuaca, Guerrero:

CITIZENS OF GUERRERO STATE

VOTE FOR A MAN WHO’S REALLY GREAT

VOTE FOR PRI, VOTE FOR HOMERO

HE’LL MAKE A FUTURE FOR GUERRERO!

and if any doubts remained

INSTITUTIONAL REVOLUTIONARY PARTY

Today at 2 P.M.

Igualistlahuaca Arena

DON’T MISS THE BIG WRESTLING MATCH

His Honor, Homero Fagoaga, Senatorial Candidate

Mass Meeting Outside Igualistlahuaca Church

ROBIN VERSUS BATMAN

Eight O’clock Sharp

A five-fall match

It all begins at 2:00, right in front of the church

Citizens Unite Behind Homero

Fagoaga, He’s Our Man

Bluedevils versus Ungrateful Pussy

FAGOAGA, HE’S OKAY!

HIT A HOMER WITH HOMERO!

CITIZENS OF IGUALISTLAHUACA: WAKE UP!

GET BEHIND THE INTERNATIONALIST SOCIALIST PARTY

LUXEMBURGIST FACTION OF

LIEBKNECHT TENDENCY

OAXACA PLEKHANOV CHAPTER

FIGHT FOR THE VICTORY OF THE DICTATORSHIP OF

THE PROLETARIAT!

ALL UNITE AGAINST HOMERO!

HOMERO: THE LANGUAGE CANDIDATE

Yes, I, Homero, am your homer, I win the game and save hometown honor for the forgotten masses of hometown Mexico, intoned His Honor Homero Fagoaga, from the bandstand set up in front of the Igualistlahuaca church. He insisted on it, my debut, my maiden speech, if you’ll allow me to play the coquette with you, brother Delegate of the PRI, maiden speech in the language of Shakespeare means a virgin speech, ha ha, see, just imagine for a moment, after all that this tongue, bequeathed to me by the glorious hand mutilated at the battle of Lepanto, has been through! By which I mean, metaphorically, you’ve got to understand the subtleties of our maiden-spain prosody, that is, you’ve got to understand the language of Spain, Mr. Delegate, made in pain, because Pain Is Spain, Mr. Delegate, the Spanish tongue taken as a perpetual and painful wedding night of proper discourse, and since the local Delegate, a bucktoothed, myopic lawyer from Cuajincuilapa, baptized, of all things, Elijo Raíz, was staring at him in incomprehension, Homero said to himself, humm, out in these boondocks there isn’t a single shyster, graduated from some music school or other, who doesn’t think he’s potential Benito Juárez: now they’re going to see what it means to use language to fascinate the multitudes, right now! He demanded and was granted permission by the local PRI to give his first speech, his virgin speech, his maidenspich made in Spain maiden’s pain Maiden Spain and Mad in Spain in the plaza outside the Igualistlahuaca church, with the street and the market in front of him and the altars behind, demonstrating in that way, candidate Fagoaga explained to his crosseyed interlocutor, that in the Party of Revolutionary Institutions all Mexicans should coexist, rich and poor, chauvinist and xenophile, reactionaries and progressives, after all Mr. Delegate, what was the meaning of our national political system if not to overcome, once and for all, the fratricidal confrontations between liberals and conservatives which in their nineteenth-century avatars condemned us, as they did our sister republics of Bolivaresque destiny, to swing back and forth between anarchy and dictatorship, self-perpetuating despotism and savage hatred, worthy of Shakespeare’s Verona: the Mexican Revolution, Mr. Delegate, reconciled the Masonic Montagues of the Scottish Rite with the Capulets of the Yorkish Rite, it overcame Mexico’s Sicilian weaknesses and the Balkanic lethargy of Latin America and only erred in its rhetorical opposition to the banners of Christ.