Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

Homeric pause.

“Can you really ask me to give that up? What else?”

Don Fernando Benítez, wrapped in his corn-husk mantle, with his head bare and his old, muddy, scuffed boot resting on the lowered nape of this conquered Gaul, our Uncle Don Homero Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca, LL.D.

“Yes, you filthy barnacle bloodsucker, there is something more.”

“More, more?” whined Homero.

“This you will have to do and confess, Homero, to pay for your sins. You shall believe in liberty and democracy, Homero. You will go forth to fight for them whenever I order you to do so, Homero. You will have faith in your fellow citizens, the faith no one has ever wanted to have in them. You will give this disdained land the chance to be democratic, Homero.”

“But it has never been democratic!” exclaimed the hollow-eyed Don Homero as Don Fernando ground his cheek into the mud with his boot.

“You will have to do it despite all evidence to the contrary, you coward. The important thing is that you believe it without proving it, that you confess it, admire it, and defend it: Mexico can be a democratic country! With your powerful arm on our side, Homero, we shall undo all the wrongs of our history in order to proclaim to all, blessed age and blessèd century.”

I’m inside my mother, but my mother can’t know it yet, and nevertheless one day I’ll know that she doesn’t say anything out loud that afternoon because in a strange way she feels that she’s trying to confer an impossible dignity on things with her silence, my mother says in secret, staring at Uncle Homero, submissive to the insane demands of Uncle Fernando, who stands, as small and nervous as a prancing fighting cock, bald and pink, with his handlebar mustache and his blue eyes, his tiny glasses in a creolized Franz Schubert style, expert on Indians, and author.

“Get down off that burro, Homero, and do me the honor of leading me to Malinaltzin!”

Don Fernando paused triumphantly and told the humiliated Don Homero and my parents (and me, hanging on as best I could, unrecognized by them just as they are not recognized by Nature) that in memory of this victorious campaign for democracy we would all take refuge in the baroque beauty of the Malinaltzin church, which the Indians had built, and thus unite — this was our Uncle Fernando’s permanent intention — tradition and modernization, culture and democracy. He turned his steps and his trots toward the church, but soon they discovered that the sacristan wasn’t there, that he’d gone to the state capital (Chilpancingo) to drink up a good tip given him by a tourist who’d come yesterday, and so who had the keys? Don Fernando asked one of the locals, So-and-so, and where might this person be? well, working on the highway, breaking rock and laying asphalt, why didn’t they get someone to stand in for the sacristan? who knows, go ask him yourself, and they walked and trotted toward the highway under construction on the outskirts of the village, this miserable hamlet, which is a vast brown hole dotted with puddles, which were its only amenity and distraction. Its walls were made of sad mud, a lament of dry adobe, and on them the opposition had plastered slogans denouncing Don Homero and his party.

MIXTEC PEOPLE, AWAKE!

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

MEANS VICTORY FOR THE PROLETARIAT

cheek by jowl with:

CHRISTIANS YES! COMMIES NO!

VOTE WITH THE SYNARCH FALANGE AND

CROSS OUT THE ATHEISTS!

and just beyond the usual fucked-over faces, my mother sends me effluvia of vibrant acid, all to this drop of tremulous life, this tiny Mercury without wings that I am, beyond the walls and among the puddles and dogs are the men, women and children, the mass of fleas, hunger, sickness, self-centered pride, and abysmal ignorance of what really matters in the modern world and equally abysmal knowledge of what no one can any longer touch, listen to, understand. My mother orders me to say, not you Homero, not you Fernando, not you Angel, not I, not you, Reader, not even you, my own future offspring.

From a distance, they caught sight of the workers busily paving a stretch of the access road to the highway: the mounds of gravel, the barrels of tar, sieves, and an ancient leveler that ecumenically announced its passage in a series of steam hiccups.

“The time has come!” exclaimed Don Fernando Benítez, sitting astride his burro, to Don Homero Fagoaga, who was docilely leading him along by the reins just as my father Angel was leading my mother Angeles through the rose-colored fields of heather in this provincial place where he had learned to love a land which he had not given up for lost, doubtless because between strolling through the garden and sitting immobile in church he’d learned to talk to himself and in doing that he’d heard for the first time: don’t give me up for lost; wipe off my makeup; I know how to endure.

“The time has come!” repeated Uncle Fernando energetically.

“The time for what?” Homero asked in consternation.

“The time for you to prove your loyalty, villain.”

“I don’t understand what you mean,” said Uncle Homero, regaining a measure of his tottering conceit.

“You most certainly do: you are going to go up to that group of workers we see in the distance and you are going to speak to them, Homero, not in official jargon but in the language of democratic truth.”

“What do you want me to tell them?” asked Homero with less irony than resignation.

Don Fernando scanned the horizon.

“I’m willing to bet they’re not unionized. In these parts, they subcontract some jobs and the worker is not protected in any way. Bah, the economic philosophy of that skunk Ulises López has spread and now people think that the democratic way to do things is for each worker to make his own contract with the boss. You must convince them in socialist-style talk of their need to join together and bargain from a position of strength about salaries. Get going, you rat.”

Don Homero’s protests were useless; the group made up by my two uncles, my father, and my mother (and I, bouncing along without anyone but your worships knowing anything about it) went trotting along in the classic style toward the workers, who stopped working when they saw them; someone whistled, laughter rang out, and a huge, powerful, dark man got down from the leveler. The machine ground to a halt, either as if the man had been pedaling it and simply stopped or as if it simply refused to go if he weren’t driving it: the image was that the man, who was wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat pulled down over his eyes, its brim turned downward so that his face was always in the shadow, was consubstantial with the machine he drove. A centaur of our national machinery.

The other workers were all wearing old khaki, as if they were in uniform. And, just like the man who got off the leveler, they, too, wore old hats to protect themselves from the sun. My mother squeezed my father’s hand, trying to tell him something’s going to happen, I have a feeling, this is no joke, I swear I suddenly feel more afraid than I did in Acapulco, as if all that had been a joke and now being here with these people was not.

But there was no time for any more hunches. Uncle Homero, following Uncle Fernando’s irrevocable command and showing the agility he only revealed on grand occasions, ran toward the leveler recently abandoned by the somber, powerful man, who was walking as if he were dragging a chain and cannonball. Still agog, Uncle H. clambered up the leveler, on the side facing a row of dried-out agave, slipping and sliding, squeezing himself over under and around the driver’s seat and finally posing on the outside stair.

Two things happened: first, our admirable relative, as soon as he realized he was once again on a speaker’s platform, recovered all his flatulent self-confidence; second, his traditional lordly bearing was comically undermined by his having to cling to the iron handle on the outside of the leveler so he wouldn’t fall into the fresh tar above which he was swinging while the members of the work squad nudged each other. Don Homero launched into the second speech of his nerve-racking electoral campaign: he always knew to whom he was speaking; in his bosom and in his tongue all opposites came into harmony; Fagoaga never loses, so: Comrades!: