Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

“Let him pass,” my mother says. “Truck drivers don’t care who you are or whether you live or die. In my town…”

She stops talking; the noisily insolent truck went ahead of us. The truck had the right (or wrong) of way and showed it in its open back door, which revealed its refrigerated interior, where the cadavers of steers swung back and forth on bloody hooks; fresh cow and calf carrion, fresh pig heads and trotters, shimmying gelatines, brains and liver, kidneys and lamb heads, testicles, sausages, loins, breasts, the albino’s armada gets ahead of our van, drowning out the joyous exclamation of Uncle Fernando: “A Soutine!” drowning out everything with the prepotency of its mission: all of that was going to feed the monstrous city of thirty million people: we, if we were lucky, were going to be fed too, and if we were on the highway, it was because there was no other way to get to the city: first the roads were left to rot when it only cost ten pesos to go from Mexico City to Acapulco by plane, but then the creaking planes stopped working because there were no spare parts and inspection was totally inadequate, airports without radar, colonial backwardness, less than what you find in Botswana, whined Don Homero!

The truck armada passed us laughing, giving us the finger, all of them with their doors open and their hacked-up wares hanging out so we could see what they were carrying and why they had the right to pass us, put our lives at risk, and enter Mug Sicko City before we did, they were carrying the red, chilled death just to bring life to the pale, suffocated life of the capital; they were the long-haul drivers, a race apart, a nation within the nation, who possessed the power to starve people and link the remotest parts of the squalid, disconnected territory of the Sweet Fatherland. A decal on a fender proclaimed:

TRUCK DRIVERS WITH THE VIRGIN

Their cargo would be our lives: we let them pass by and just miss smashing head-on into the Red Arrow that was coming from the opposite direction, and we waited our turn, exhausted, paralyzed, inching along just to have the privilege of reentering the Federal District by means of the highway, without having Uncle Homero — which would have been the easy way to do it — take out his PRI identification, which he cannot do because he has to keep a low profile for a bit, and Uncle Fernando can’t appeal to President Jesús María y José Paredes without bringing Uncle H. to grief, and as for us, well, it’s better no one knows where we’re coming from or what we did in Kafkapulco in what seems a century ago now — time flies, time flees, time fleas, time flies, tempus fugit!

“Eheu, eheu, fugaces!” sighed our fecund Don Homero Fagoaga, as if he were reading my intrauterine thoughts. My parents turned around to see both uncles: Don Fernando had his head in his hands and was muttering, his eyes turned upward: “Oh, Lord, please, please free us from our relatives, Lord. What a nightmare! This is the last straw.”

Homero Fagoaga was decked out with two lustrous pitch-black tresses tied up with tricolor ribbons; he’d shaved off the tuft of hair he wore under his lip, rouged his cheeks, powdered his brow, smeared his lips scarlet, and restored the sparkle to his dying eyes with the help of some Maybelline; naturally, he had no need to powder the milky whiteness of his bosoms and his bare arms, given the rather small size of the blouse embroidered with carnations and roses he’d managed to squeeze into, although it was true he did have to tighten the red rebozo around his waist and, finally, work his way into the tiny red velvet slippers and shake out the beads on the wide skirt of the china poblana outfit he’d tricked himself out in.

Dear niece and nephew, please don’t look at me that way. You know how curious I am: well, this morning I was poking through the chests and armoires in the Malinaltzin sacristy. I found no white vestments, no stoles, no bodices, but I did find this proudly national costume. Think what you like, imagine what you please. I’ll simply repeat the famous words of the onetime chronicler of this magnificent city — which, it seems, is keeping us at arm’s length for the nonce — Don Salvador Novo, when a press photographer discovered him sitting at his dressing table: “I feel pretty, and witty, and gay.”

He hummed a tune from West Side Story and delicately stepped out of the Van Gogh to deal with the ill-featured but well-armed cop who was about to question us. He swirled his beaded skirt even more: Uncle Homero needed no crinolines to stand out in a crowd. The width of those homeric hips was such that the design of the eagle perched on the nopal devouring the serpent did not flaccidly hang down from his waist to the ground but virtually flew, proudly unfurled over Uncle Homero’s ass.

“I’m coming, I’m coming, if I don’t that eagle’s gonna lay an egg!” exclaimed the policeman. With a graceful gesture, Homero pushed aside the cop’s submachine gun and, with his eyes as bright as streetlights, said, “I can see you’re happy to see me, Mr. Policeman, but let’s not get carried away; come on now, put your little gun away!”

“Got a pass?”

“A pass?” swaggered Homero, his hands resting on his hips. “A pass for the queen of the bullring, the empress of the arena, Cuca Lucas, who’s needed no pass to get into Buckingham Palace or the White House?”

“But it’s that…”

“Don’t say a word. Our national honor has been carried through the world on my songs, young fellow. Neither the world nor love has ever closed its doors to me — so do you think you’ll be the first?”

“But it’s that we’ve got to know where you’re coming from.”

“Where do my songs come from,” said Homero in a singsong voice, “and where do they go: to praise the singularity and the beauty of the fatherland!”

“We’ve got our orders, miss.”

“Madam, if you please.”

“Okay. Madam.”

“Don’t bully me now, young man. Put that gun away. So you want to know where I’m coming from, do you now, dearie? From my little farm just beyond the wheatfield there.”

“And what about your friends here, ma’am?”

“Friends? You could treat me with more respect, handsome.”

“Ma’am, the law…”

“The law, the law, handsome! Papers, license plates, influence, friends, isn’t that what you mean?”

The representative of the law looked sadly and apprehensively at Uncle Fernando’s handlebar mustache and his broken glasses. “I’m her agent,” said the loyal Benítez as the cop closed his eyes. Then he opened them in curiosity at the resort shirts and blue jeans my parents were wearing: “We’re the lady’s musical accompanists,” said my father. “I play the guitar and she plays the violin.”

“Okay…”

“You can believe me, Mr. Policeman,” said Homero, climbing back into the van. “Thanks to me, the glories of Mexico are known throughout the world. Why, because of me, people know that only Veracruz is beautiful, how pretty Michoacán is, that there is no other place like Mexico, how pretty the morning in which I come to greet you is, that I’m a guy from the borderland, hurray for Ciudad Juárez, hurray for Chihuahua, and my pretty country! and Granada, a land I’ve dreamed of…”

“Okay, okay…”

The cop closed the door behind Don Homero’s ass — including the eagle in repose — just barely resisting the temptation to stretch out his hand, resisting the reflex action of firing his machine gun.

“My, how pretty Taxco is, that cute little town with a saintly face! Toledo, the shining star of the world is what you are! Matamorelos the handsome, with your superb orange groves, and Puebla is just the frosting on the cake, that’s what Puebla is!”