Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

“But now,” said Uncle H. as he swallowed an armadillo in green mole sauce in one of the incomparable culinary retreats lining the Igualistlahuaca plaza, “it falls to us to reconcile secular faith with divine faith, the sacred with the profane.”

Who could forget the visit of the Polish Pope to Mexico fourteen years before, the most spectacular entrance into the capital since that of Hernán Cortés, when, sotto voce, the most prudent strategists in national politics said to themselves, as they peeked out from behind the thick brocade curtains at the Seat of Executive Power at the seven million souls who awaited, who followed, and who surrounded the Vicar of Christ in the Zócalo and the Cathedral:

“All the Holy Father would have to do is order them to seize the National Palace. They would do it, your honor, and nothing could stop them. Am I right?”

“Well,” Uncle Homero directed his beautifully enunciated prose against the difficulties of a bit of crackling (overcoming that recalcitrant tidbit, of course), “the time has come for us to reconquer the sacred for the Revolution. Let us stop, Mr. Delegate, being fools and playing at anticlericalism. We’ve recaptured everything in order to achieve our heart’s desire, National Unity: left and right, bankers and field hands, now also, thanks to our August National Guide, even our Ancestral Matriarchy. I warn you, let us capture the world of the sacred before it captures us. I warn you, Mr. Delegate from the state of Guerrero, Coreligionist in PRI, Don Elijo Raíz: there is an Ayatollah in our Future. Now let’s finish up this crackling!”

A parrot squawked on the shadowed portal of the plaza, and Homero, flying on metaphoric wings, swallowed his plum dessert in one gulp, eagerly thinking about the Mixtec-Zapotec homeland.

5

And so it was that at midday Don Homero Fagoaga ascended the bandstand erected in front of the old rose-colored church in Igualistlahuaca, equidistant, our budding national figure, from the two towers and from the bell towers worked in pale cut stone and watered-down marble. Uncle H. standing before his microphone, surrounded by sixty-three local PRI hierarchs, the tribunal festooned with banners that repeated the slogans of the day, Don Homero surrounded by small-town orators eager to be seen with the future Senator but also with the sixty-three hierarchs, one for each year the Party had been in power, to think there are men sixty-three years old who have never seen any other party in power, murmured Uncle Fernando indignantly as he led my parents Angel and Angeles (and, as a bonus, me as well, though none of them knew about it at the time, they’ll only remember me retroactively, retroattractively — really acting retro is what I understand it to be), who were now entering the crowded square, she on the burro, he wrapped in his poncho, heading toward the tribunal where Uncle H., saved from the Acapulco furies right under the noses of my impotent parents Angel and Angeles, lets himself be loved by the PRI ephebocracy, the young men who make sure his microphone is set at the proper angle, who smile at him by smiling at the sun, and who seek their own rapid, not to say meteoric, rise through the hierarchy of our civil church, the P — R–I, their black eyes already shining with the dream of being Pope, cardinal at least, what about archbishop? okay, bishop would be enough, deacon if there’s nothing better to be had, sacristan sounds good, altar boy’s better than nothing, Swiss Guard, whatever, whatever your mercies say as long as they’re not left out in the cold, and his honor Homero Fagoaga glowing amid the ambition of the young men and the fatigue of the old ones, ayyy the survivors of heighty campaigns like this one, height million height hundred heighty-height glasses of Hi-C, mountains of black mole, horse meat, barbecued pork with everything on it, skin and hair, civic parades and social nights dancing polkas with fat ladies, in town after town, village after village, survivors of phantasmagoric campaigns — the sexennial Mexican presidential nonrace — for president and senator, the triennial races for the Congress, biennial races for local legislators and municipal presidents, all of them bewitched by this need to campaign, to become president, as if they were going up against the Italian Communists, the English Tories, and the French Gaullists: bah! exclaims Uncle Fernando, whose speech my mom is recording amid the Mixtec Mass this morning for the future reference of my collective unconsciousness, only the gringos beat us out with a single party that pretends to be two parties. The only truly authentic slogan should be:

ELECTIONS COME EVERY SIX YEARS,

BUT MISFORTUNE IS ALWAYS WITH US

Sixty-three years, my dear niece and nephew, what do you think of that, and no end in sight, said Uncle Fernando: not Hitler, not Perón, not even Franco, only the U.S.S.R. beats us and now not even them because now we have a PAN president, which allows the PRI to blame the opposition for everything and to govern with more power than ever, and for that very reason Don Homero Fagoaga adjusts the microphone to the height of his multiple chins, warms up his delivery, the crowds gather, curious, trucked in, bribed, a hundred pesos, a taco, lemonade, a beer, a brass band, you name it, things might get screwed up if you don’t come, let’s see now about your property-line suit, let’s see, let’s sue, let’s sewer: with a great sense of satisfaction, Homero scanned the multitude of Mixtec citizens spread out in front of him, standing there on the pavement stones next to the sickly pines and laurels near the church and beyond the gates out to the unpaved street and the market tents of opulent misery. He looked at the heads of the multitude of varnished straw hats, the heads of the women crowned with green, blue, and scarlet silk, their tresses tied up with orange and lilac wool, four thousand, five thousand heads carrying traditional offerings, with earthenware pots balanced on their heads, heads offering tomatoes and herbs, grasshoppers and onions, and the nervous little heads of the children, first running like porcupines but finally they too, the happy children in the land of sad grownups, captured by the sinuous words of Don Homero Fagoaga, who was comparing the Guerrero sierra “to Italic Latium and Hellenic Attica, glorious sites of humanistic honor, cradles of democracy, crucibles of society where a metaphysical tremor made men and mountains, children and stones all speak in one voice to repeat with the immortal tribune, quaestor, and consul, my model in action and speech, Don Marcus Tullius Cicero, of Arpino, mens cuisque is est quisque, which in the glorious language we speak thanks to the Hispanic Motherland, to, of course, no discredit to the Autochthonous Motherland, which I see here exemplified in its roots of impassioned telluric tremor, means the spirit is the true being and where, oh citizens of Guerrero, would that truth be more profoundly true and scientifically rational and precise than here in the Mixtec homeland, ever fertile cradle of the glorious motherland — MEEXXXIIICCCOOO: Civis Romanum sum, the glorious tribune exclaimed with pride but without arrogance and here we can repeat, Civis Guerrerensis sum, because if indeed the uncle of Augustus declared his modest and for being modest moving preference to be first a son of his village and second a son of Rome, it was not merely for that reason that he stood a model for legions of his admirers then and now, but above all looking forward to, anticipating, the Mexican meritocracy that our Revolutionary Institutional Party offers with equal opportunities for all, for each and every one of you, to rise, as the Well-Deserving Don Benito Juárez rose, from illiterate shepherd to the Presidential Throne, from being first in place of honor in Rome and saying to his people: You have Caesar and his fortune with you!”