Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

Matamoros Moreno released my father Angel Palomar and buttoned his fly.

“To make up for what you did to me, bastard. For having laughed at my literary first steps. For having refused to help me get published. For having snubbed my precious little girl Colasa. You didn’t give a shit about me, right? Well, let’s see if you forget me now! All that’s left now is for the gringo to make you eat my book on the vagina dentata, that’s the last detail, stuck-up bastard shitass!”

Then he made a gesture that my father be beaten until he stopped moving, until he lay there in the middle of the highway that would never be finished because tomorrow the President would see the paved strip from a distance and appearances are enough because in Mexico appearances are not deceiving: my father stretched out there with his trousers tangled around his knees, a burning pain, and the feeling that he was talking by himself, dreaming by himself, walking by himself.

Matamoros and his gang tramped noisily away along the road to Malinaltzin. One of the workers took the time to throw the church keys to Don Fernando: “So you can cleanse yourself of your sins, you shitassed redeemers!”

My father remained lost in his own thoughts, his eyes closed, not daring to look at his Angeles. Don Fernando, on the other hand, still searching the field for his glasses, could still shout: “Miserable bastards! Save yourselves, then!” and Don Homero could only groan, making an obscene gesture with his finger: “Take your democracy.”

It began to get dark and I suppose that everything calmed down. I held on with something like a desperate fatigue to my mother’s flesh, she watched Angel get up in silence and pull up his trousers. But without knowing that I inside her, more than ever intimately bound to her, listened to her, she wondered what Angel would or could say out loud. What could anyone say out loud now, in this year, in this land?

It was nighttime in Malinaltzin and the village seemed asleep; but a presence that could not be silenced, more eternal than the Creator himself, continued to dominate the air: the loudspeaker in the plaza in front of the church, a copied tape that copied itself over day and night without stopping filling the infinite silence of the town with noise. The loudspeaker became the second nature of the abandoned villages of Mexico. Angeles my mother wondered if someone heard it or if it were by now as natural as breathing. Who tries to hear the beat of his own heart?

The mariachi band was playing furiously when Uncle Fernando, with his broken but recovered glasses, opened the doors of the Malinaltzin church.

My happy little ranch, my jolly little nest,

My little perfumed nest of garden flowers

Where dwells the one that I love best,

Her black cherry eyes glow in my little bower.

“What can anyone say out loud?” repeated my mother.

What? What, indeed? I try to answer her, I who am gestating right along with language because if I weren’t I wouldn’t be able to say any of the things I’m saying: language gestates and grows with me, not one minute, not one centimeter before or after or less or more than I myself. You, selective readers, have no more proof of my existence than my words here, growing with me: my words grow eyes and eyelids, fingernails and eyebrows, just as my body does. I want to be understood; for that to happen, I myself must understand. I want to understand what’s being said here, outside of me: language, invoked so much by Uncle Homero, applied so much by Uncle Fernando, used so much by all. What I do is share it: what my genes tell me is that you are language. But what kind of language am I? This question is my vicohistoricoribonucleic spiral: I am vicoized, in flagrante devictus, convict: St. John the Baptist Vico, the only saint I pray to. Everything, before any anecdote lived or heard or repeated here (Who knows the order these things should be in? You do, sublime Reader, father and son of mine, oh!), is language, but the languages I listen to, that of Uncle Homero as well as that of his enemy Uncle Fernando as well as that of my father, are, how shall I put it? preallocated languages (is that the right way to say it? located beforehand? locos from birth? ideological or ideolocos?), that is they are languages and they are always already there, not only do they precede me, unborn as I am, but they precede as well those who speak them, they are languages that precede themselves and in the very act of speaking them (which, for that very reason, is the act of repeating them): they are official idioms, my Uncle H.’s is unabashedly official, and he brags about it; but the moving democratic discourse of my nice old Uncle F., and the reasoning in three verbal tempos of my belovèd father A. (before: Sweet Fatherland; today: hard fatherland; later on: new fatherland), aren’t they also, in a certain sense, preestablished modes of discourse, preestablished by their liberal or conservative tradition, by their blind necessity (which is their tender summons) to be shared by others? But when they are, won’t they also turn into official discourse? Isn’t every language approved, applauded, understood by many people, because of that, what I call official discourse: but doesn’t the mere idea of official discourse signal an immediate need for another language, one that is not directed at many but at the few, to one of you and not only to all of you, to me and not only to us, when the balance of language tilts more to the plural than to the singular, and more to us than to me, to all of you and not only to one of you, when the opposite occurs? My mother speaks very little: gentle Readers, you may have noticed it, and if her silence continues, my progenitrix will break the world silence record. She’s simply devoid of language. She’s empty of words (she communicates me in silence or communicates it in silence, but it turns out that I, mere sleepyhead that I am, happen to be bedded down in her soft womb, whether she knows it or not: I listen to her, I hear her marvelous silence: her silence speaks to the other, the one who is absent; she receives what the world prints on her language, but a marvelous compensation leads her always to find the antonym of the word given her: her discourse shares my father’s discourse, but it completes it as well). She does not speak. I only listen. It isn’t the same. But something links us. She creates me, but I create myself as well. She comes toward me. I go toward her. Her son. My mother. I see the world through the life she gives me. But she also sees it through the life I give back to her. We will never be the same, we will never be a union, we shall always be a difference: mother and child, we shall celebrate not our union but our alterity! We are the mirror of our languages. I shall be within hers to say what she cannot say. She shall say what I cannot say. Gentle Readers: pray for me, pray that I do not forget (as I shall forget so many other things the instant I am born) the lesson of language I’ve learned in my mother’s womb. Allow me on being born to know not only my language but the language I leave behind, so that for ever and ever in my life I can always say not only what I say but what she says: the other: the others: what I am not. And I hope to God the same thing happens to them! Today I am accusing no one. I know as well as they (Homero, Fernando, Angel, and Angeles) that all languages have antecedents (as Egg proved in his egg), that before ceding, on being said they become present: I sail away from my mother’s verbal softness! What’s dis, Cadiz, the port of departure? Enough is enough. Throughout this, my monologue (involuntary, I assure you), I should allow all exterior voices to clash like storms within my solitary discourse (listen: here you can hear the politico, the lover, the ideologue, the comic, the powerful, the weak, the child, the intellectual, the illiterate, the sensual, the vengeful, the charitable, the personage, but also history, society, language itself: the barbarous, the corrupt, the Gallic, the Anglic, the latic, the pochic, the unique, the provincial, and the Catholic: listen your mercies, please, pay attention!), I request the presence of this blast of voices in the chamber of my own echo in the hope that one day, today and tomorrow (or yesterday: who knows?), my own voice will cross the verbal universe like a storm, the dialogues and monologues that belong to them, to YOU, out there, others and yet nevertheless here as well, inside, equal: I shall send these messages from my fleshly catacomb, I shall communicate with those who do not hear me and I shall be, like all minority, silenced authors, the rebellious voice, censured and silent in the face of the reigning languages, which are, not those of the other, not those that belong to us, but those of the majority. I’m telling them to you, as silent as a fish on the bottom of the sea. Silent and not only from a minority but, God help me! a minor! Think then, oh sublime, sublimating, sublimated Reader, that, having said what I just said, this person speaking with you will not hesitate, within seven tiny little months, to keep the silence of the absolute, catacombish minority of infancy (in-fancy) and that, instead of those high genetic intentions, he will be reduced to saying goo-goo, if he’s lucky be/a: ba and, now at the apex of his eloquence, here comes the A, with its little feet spread wide, here comes the U, like a little umbilical cord for you to skip rope with, tell me if all this isn’t enough to drive a person mad! What iniquities we children must suffer!