Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

Uncle Fernando Benítez, a Catholic in his youth, can’t remember if in fact that night was the first time in sixty years that he’d prayed; in any case, just talking (even to oneself) was a prayer in this, the last Indian church in Mexico: Malinaltzin, fruit of a desperate nostalgia in the soul of a conquered people: a temple of aboriginal dreams transformed into forms and colors.

Kneeling below the lemon-and-gold garlands in the vaults and clutching the gold-and-green carved railings with both hands; wrapped in this vast mirage of flowers, our uncle closed his myopic eyes: the earth seemed as fleeting as life itself. For Fernando Benítez, reality was animated by the past. He stared at the eternal season of flowers created by the Indians in this church. Our ancestors die on us before we are ready to live without them. Then they come back as ghosts, because the gods have fled. The Indians are our ghosts: these are the sentences he repeated in my mother’s ear, and this is her question:

Does life become stronger because of that?

Because they don’t know what to say to each other after what happened, she speaks to me: this for me is the important thing: she knows her period is now four weeks late, she knows that in a couple of days she will know for certain, but she doesn’t know that my body, arched forward, my great big head, which is all forehead and brain, the curved tube which is my heart, the sprouting buds that are my legs and hands, and my constantly open eyes — I still have no eyelids, are focused on her, trying to hear her and understand her, just as she, at a distance, hears and understands her Uncle Fernando, in exactly the way I would like to hear her, more than ever in this night in which I have convinced myself that I don’t yet exist outside her no matter how different I am from her; she saved me from the thick lances that came in to smash against my half-finished little head with their own blind and hungry sconces; the fact is that she spoke to me and said that she didn’t know how to tell Angel that what he’d heard here today was old and useless; the ideas were blockaded by an outmoded vocabulary (blockabulary?), and that all the speakers, from both sides, were talking in terms of absolutes because only in the absolute could beauty, the good, and politics get mixed up together; but only art can really tolerate the absolute; the common good and politics cannot: when the good and politics aspire to be absolutes they demand our blind, romantic, unconditional commitment, with no criticism allowed, and that, she told me, me a more powerful imminence than many realities, was the same for both factions: being absolute, well, that was easy; what was hard was to be relative in everything, as relative as the world, science, love, memory, life, and death: who is alive? my mother Angeles asks me, because tonight she does not know how to ask my father, who is silently holding her, lulling her, and soothing her.

At the risk of being misinterpreted, she only tells my father the same thing she told him the first day they met: “Let’s never hurt each other. We’re all here together.”

And she took him by the hand. He had the impression (he told her later) that she was talking to herself. Who could hear her? he wondered.

“And I said to myself that with you I could be apart.”

“I said we failed, Angel.”

“I can’t hear you, baby.”

“What a pair. You aren’t supposed to scream in church.”

“But there’s nobody here but us.”

“Are you sure? What a pair. We’ve been together for ten months. I’ve gone along with you in everything. You said the system is a total chaos, and that we’re going to answer it first with tiny chaoses.…”

“What else can you do in the kingdom of Mamadoc but create chaos, honey?”

“We failed.”

“What’s that?”

“I said we failed, Angel.”

“What’s become of your halo? It went out, Angeles. They really worked it over.”

“Angel, listen to me: Don Homero Fagoaga the millionaire never committed any crime against us like the one that proletarian, the head of the work gang, committed. What do you say to that, Angel? Are we going to kill the proletarian?”

My father did not answer, but she closed her eyes and squeezed his hand. It was the moment in which she had to confess the lateness of her period to admit that I existed: she had to do it in that instant or she would have lost my father and me: whose son would I be, if in that instant, in the Indian church of Malinaltzin, she didn’t recognize me: of what member of Matamoros’s crew? I had to have been made before that: on the beach at Aca, on Twelfth Night, Year of Our Lord 1992, so I could win the Christophers Contest, so I could not be the product of a rape in the Guerrero sierra: I had to be born for her, in her mind, in her voice, from that moment on, in that instant which is the instant in which she recognizes me: she recognizes me because she desires me and she desires me because she needs me and she needs me because she imagines me. It was there she mysteriously found out about me, poor little me who was still between being and not being, conceived for barely two weeks, freely floating in my mother’s secretions, in the depths of the uterine cave, but no longer just any old lump but an organized system of extremely active cells that are dividing up the job. And you desire me, imagine me, even name me, Mom, although you cannot know if I’m going to be a stranger who will be cast out in your next menstruation and in that case ciaoaufwiedersehenseeyoulaterbyebyesalutututut and then on to another pleasure bout and once more bambambam let’s see if now yes but I don’t want to get lost, Mommy, after all we’ve been through together, after what’s been set in my genes, what you’ve had me learn, do something so I won’t be lost, now that you’ve just recognized me in this instant while a spark of fiery blood flies from your womb to what someday will be my brain, and from my existence, which already is and is not yours, to yours, which already is and is not mine.

MOMMY!

MRS. ISABEL DE LOS ANGELES PALOMAR

HOME ADDRESS:

TLALPAN, MEXICO, D.F.

WE ARE PLEASED TO INFORM YOU THAT YOU ARE PREGNANT, AND THAT WITHIN EIGHT MONTHS, GOD WILLING, YOU WILL GIVE BIRTH TO A SON

STOP CONGRATULATIONS STOP

SIGNED

Christopher Unborn

As rubicund as a rose, Uncle Homero woke them up. The light was pouring through the high cupolas, illuminating the sumptuous nave of the grand Indian church made of wood and polychromed stucco.

There were no authorities around because yesterday, throughout the state of Guerrero, the masses had seized control of the local offices of the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI).

Here in Malinaltzin they took over the van with the two huge loudspeakers attached to it the Party used for propaganda purposes — it was a U. S.-style van translated into Mexican by decoration: a setting sun glowing between two volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl.

In their hysteria, the masses knocked off one of the loudspeakers. A matter of slight importance. In order to bring himself into harmony with the group, Homero decided that the van, deprived of one of its ears, would henceforth be named vango.

They would return to the capital.

The van stood outside the church, and Angel would drive it.

Uncle Homero approached the representatives of the Mixtec community as they were eating an early and frugal breakfast, but this time he abstained from speaking to them in Latin or hyperbaton. He asked for the Indian who spoke Spanish and told him — winking an ironic eye and licking his sweaty lips, that’s our unc — who was with us and in what battered condition: he identified Don Fernando Benítez, the Protector of the Indian — a Bartolomé de las Casas who traveled by helicopter — and then asked if they would lend them the van, not a great deal to ask for a person of the importance of Don Fernando Benítez!