Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

In these and other delightful torts and retorts Uncle Homero and Uncle Fernando whiled away the hours as our Van Gogh rattled out of Guerrero toward (you guessed it) what was once the place where the air was clear, city of palaces, and the marvel dreamed of in the stories of Amadis of Gaul.

But that will be the matter of my next chapter.

The city is the poetry of passion and movement; quietude is part of that poetry; it is rare; it is definitive; in fearing it we fear disguised death.

My father composed these sentences in his head as he realized he was returning for the second time in his life to the capital he had only left on two occasions: when he found his country in Oaxaca and when he lost it in Acapulco. On the first occasion, he’d left the provinces bearing two fears: that of not finding anything in its place when he went back to look for it; that of having too easy a time finding another woman instead of Agueda or those shadows of Agueda, her cousins with invisible shoulders and enigmatic hair: the “governesses of his heart” whom he exiled from his life when he exchanged glances with them, glances in which he imagined them all dried out, mad, or dead.

My mother Angeles has fallen asleep leaning on my father’s shoulder as he negotiates one curve after another on the old abandoned road from Apango to Mexico City. But I do not sleep: my eyes, you know, are open all the time; my eyes are transparent within the opacity of the maternal womb; my eyes still devoid of veils read my father’s words: this is something only we recently conceived types know; later on, even we forget it; but now we are too close to the origin: the pleasure and pain of that first expulsion flooding down the long chain of genetic information. What are my father’s thoughts as he takes heed of the faded signs DANGEROUS CURVE 600 FEET AHEAD compared to my DNA as it loses itself in the night of Aztec and Andalusian centuries crisscrossed by Moorish and Hebrew flashes! Well, it’s like Uncle Homero’s tongue as he sleeps there in the back of the PRI propaganda van!

For which reason I am well positioned to inform you, Reader dear, that as he drives, my father looks at the signs but he also looks at my mother’s nodding head, her hair parted down the middle, and the hint of spectral whiteness to be seen in the part itself, and he knows that, despite everything, he was not mistaken about the resolution of his second fear; there are women we see just once and see completely and others we only discover little by little; Angeles was one of the latter: he never fully discovered her; she was not the López Velarde-style woman, nor Agueda or her mourning-clad cousins: Angeles was modern, intellectual, independent, and left-wing: but as with those numinous cousins, he never fully found her, and in this movement in which he knew where things were (Agueda in the San Cosme and San Damián Church, Angeles in the Alameda Park) but things were transformed, they ran away, they reappeared enriched, they turned over their golden fruit and fled once more with the hope but not the certainty of a return. He wanted to find the harmony of the contradiction that nibbled at the apple of his life: to be a modern Mexican conservative. Thus, to find Angeles without finding her completely was never like returning to a place, experiencing the comfort of recovering it there, but knowing that he would never completely know it or understand it. This, said Angel Palomar, my father, to himself, was the secret of his soul.

And she, asleep, loving, raped, both of them raped by Matamoros Moreno, physically raped, immediately abused, not from a distance by money and power, not emblematically, as by poor Uncle Homero, who was now awake and arguing interminably with Uncle Fernando in the rear of the van. And what about her? Did she know all his secrets, understand them, keep mum about them in order not to break the harmony? The idyll of their meeting, the secret surprise:

“I couldn’t sleep all night, I was so excited after I met you…”

“And what about me, babe? I was there too, remember…”

And what about her? Before her, before Agueda, women always came to my father, sought him out, he didn’t look for them: but they were an urban nuisance: spongers, droppers-in, pests: the problem, ultimately, was always how to get rid of them; he only tracked down two women in his life. Angeles, asleep now on his right shoulder, smelling of resin and earth; Agueda, asleep on his left shoulder, as if she’d flown in through the open window smelling of dust and incense. He wondered if they knew that the ferocious promiscuity of this man who tracked them down so monogamously was only taking time out, that it was like a latent infection, a moral herpes that made him confuse the economic and political disorder of Mexico with amorous chaos: how long could the contradiction between social disorder and erotic fidelity last?

Placing his life at risk, he closed his eyes for an instant in order the better to smell my mother’s hair, and prayed that he would never fully understand her; that there would never be a third desire in his life: that he would never again be tempted to include his erotic life in the collective disorder of which he was a victim and which he wanted to judge and damage for that very reason. But my mother Angeles had her own dream, unknown to my father. He had met her in a garden in the heart of Mexico City. On the highway, she dreamed that she had never left that garden; as in some ancient book illustrated with the romanticized image of nineteenth-century childhood she’d seen in Angel’s grandparents’ house, the curious little girl opened the window of her cabin to see the forest and venture out into it, but the forest had another door to a garden and that garden yet another door to a park and the park led to a jungle and the jungle to the sea, which was the most mutable garden of all. He thought he found her in a park. But he didn’t know that she had always lived in parks. And that it was an illusion to think he could find her anywhere else. My mother has not just been found by my father because the garden she lives in has not been completely explored by him; but he doesn’t know it yet. The doors of that storybook might be the lock on the door to Aunt Capitolina and Aunt Farnesia’s bedroom.

She woke up when they were on the bridge over the Atoyac River in Acatlán and a barrier forced them to detour uselessly to Puebla and avoid — for what reason no one could tell — passing through Cuernavaca. She opened her eyes and saw the ineluctable and elemental signs of human life: women on their knees washing clothes at the river (women on their knees to enter the church, to make tortillas, to prepare to give birth), a boy happily urinating off the bridge, an angry man tugging at a mocking burro (patience is the burro’s irony), another boy’s white funerary procession: a distracted potter spinning his wheel just as God idly gave a single spin to the universal top.

Then the first walls painted on the shores of the desert:

IS GOD PROGRESSING?

The mutilated van rolled along like just one more tumbleweed past the agaves and the yuccas in the high desert, all of them hoarding water, as if they knew what was waiting for them as soon as the car dove into the sudden black hole that seemed to swallow everything around it — in this case, the backed-up line of cars and the multitude on foot, some barefoot, others wearing huaraches, all poor and fine, with the aristocratic bones of misery piercing the skin of their faces, arms, and ankles: the jammed-up cars and pilgrims who wanted to enter Mexico City through the eye of a needle, a genuine and not even slightly metaphoric Taco Curtain, said Uncle Fernando Benítez, one that completely surrounded the capital, with strategically located entrance points at Texmelucan, Zumpango, Angangueo, and Malinalco: but the Malinalco entry is closed because the son of a governor or mayor — no one bothers to remember — seized by force of arms all the land adjacent to the new highway from Yautepec to Cuernavaca and no one knows if the complaint lodged by the people from the communal land, who haven’t seen a miserable endomorphic peso, has been taken up by the authorities, or if the highway is being built, or if the son of the governor or mayor ordered it closed forever, let’s see anyone try to get through: who knows? who knows? who knows? and what about us, how are we going to get through the inspection held at the Taco Curtain, especially now that a powerful fourteen-feet-high Leyland eighteen-wheeler is getting in front of us. its driver staring ferociously out the window at my father, still driving the Van Gogh, challenging him to pass the long line of vehicles ahead on the curve, not caring that there is an armada of wheezing buses coming from the other direction. My mother wakes up instinctively at that moment and, along with my father, stares back at the truck driver, a cut-off albino about twenty-five years of age, dressed in leather, wearing gloves decorated with chrome-plated studs, clearly visible because the albino grasps the truck’s gigantic steering wheel so ferociously. The albino stares at us ferociously (they say) through his black wraparound glasses, the kind worn by blind singers (felicianos we could call them, charley rays, wonderglasses): what’s ferocious about him are his white, high, curving, mephistophelian brows. My parents see the pictures of the Virgin, Mrs. Thatcher, and Mamadoc as well as the portrait of an unknown Lady, all surrounded by votive lamps inside the cab, while, outside, the truck’s jukebox-style lights go on and off, and on the roof a light spins around, throwing out even more multicolored lights.