Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

“Enough, ma’am…”

“Din-din-din go the bells of Medellín; ay, Jalisco don’t give up; Querétaro, rétaro, rétaro, don’t hold me back, ’cause here I come!”

“All I’m gonna say now is get the fuck out of my sight, ma’am, get going ’cause you’re blocking the way…”

“The way to Corralejo, my beautiful Pénjamo, you shine like a diamond…”

“Stop, ma’am!” shouted the cop in a flood of tears.

“Don’t stop, nephew, step on it now!”

“Ma’am,” sang out the cop, “I want to hear more about Pénjamo, that’s where I come from…”

“Step on it and don’t lose your nerve, Angelito! Just what I was afraid would happen…!”

“Oh, honey, don’t do this to me, it’s breaking my heart!”

“Will you get going, you idiot!”

He could hear the weepy voice of the trooper—“a girl from Cuerámaro told me I looked as though I came from Pénjamo”—and then he entered the gray-skied world, near to where Hernán Cortés had his private hunting preserve on Peñón de los Baños, plastered up with signs advertising beer, lubricants, and cockroach poison, while Angel stuck his head out the window trying to find a way through the wheezing jalopies and Angeles began to cough: her eyes vainly sought the birds of Moctezuma’s aviary, the quetzals with their green plumage, the royal eagles, the parrots, and the fine-feathered ducks, the flower gardens and fragrant trees, the pools and cisterns of fresh water, all of it built in cut stone and stuccoed over, and instead they found the monumental series of one-dimensional façades of famous buildings and statues and bodies of water all lined up at the entrance to the city to raise the spirit of traveler you have reached the place where the air is etc.: the Arc de Triomphe and the Statue of Liberty, the Bosphorus, and the Colosseum, St. Basil’s, the Giralda, the Great Wall and the Taj Mahal, the Empire State Building and Big Ben, the Galleria in Houston (Texas) and the Holiday Inn in Disneyland, the Seine, and Lake Geneva, all lined up in a row, in hallucinatory succession, like a vast Potemkin Village erected in the very porticos of Mexico City in order to facilitate self-delusion and so we could say to ourselves, “We aren’t so badly off; we’re at least at the level of; well, who knows, we’re as good as; well, who said we didn’t have our very own Galleria Shopping Mall and our own Arc de Triomphe: who says this is the only great metropolis without a river or a lake; who would dare say it; only a bad Mexican, a sell-out, someone green with envy…”

But as they stared at this hallucination, Angel and Angeles knew (Don Homero was rubbing off his makeup, removing his wig; Don Fernando refused to believe what he was seeing through his glasses broken by Matamoros Moreno’s thugs) that this one-dimensional cardboard prologue to the city was identical to the city itself, that it wasn’t a caricature but a warning: Potemkin City, Potemkin Land in which President Jesús María y José Paredes heads a government in which nothing that is said is done, was done, or will ever be done: dams, power stations, highways, agricultural cooperatives: nothing, only announcements and promises, pure façades and the President goes through a series of ritualized actions devoid of content which are the content of TV news programs: the President of the Republic ritualistically distributes land that doesn’t exist; he inaugurates monuments as ephemeral as these painted backdrops, he pays homage to nonexistent heroes: have you ever heard of Don Nazario Narano, hero of the Battle of the Coatzacoalcos Meat Packing Plant? About the child heroine Malvina Gardel, who gave her life for our sister republic wrapped in a true-blue sky-blue Argentine flag? About Alfredo Mangino, who donated his entire bank account — in dollars — to the tune of $1,492, to the nation during the 1982 crisis? About the oil worker Ramiro Roldán, who ripped off his wife’s ears and cut off her fingers so he could donate her earrings and rings to the National Solidarity Fund to pay our foreign debt? About the Unknown Giggler, who died laughing sitting in front of his television set and seeing all the aforementioned acts of heroism and seeing functionaries in mansions surrounded by stone walls in Connecticut and condos next door to the Prince of Wales and Lady Di in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, and in Parthenons over the sea in Zihuatanejo, receive the life savings of Mexico’s poor?

The President of the Republic has declared war on make-believe countries and has celebrated totally fantastic historical dates. Did you know there is a battalion of Indians defending, even as we speak, the honor of our nation against the outrages and insults of the dictator of the neighboring Republic of Darkness? Did you know that the seasoned veterans of Squadron 201 from the Second World War have bombarded, just to humiliate them, the haughty despots of the tropical dictatorship of Costaguana? We’ve run out of the patience necessary for a Non-intervention Policy — what the hell!

And, fellow citizen, how is it possible you missed the August 14 celebration, the anniversary of the date Mexico City and Calcutta were declared Twin Cities? And what about September 31, Fatherland Plus Day, February 32, the day we Mexicans celebrate You Can’t Do That to Us Day: or You Can Have Your Leap Year; I’ll Keep the Five Proud Extra Days in the Aztec calendar! Don Homero is about to begin singing yet another gem from his patriotic songbook:

I’m a real ol’ Mexican, my land is a tough one,

An’ I swear by my manhood there’s no place on earth

Prettier or tougher than my land …

But all of them (including Homero) flee from Homero the bard of the vinous smog, they fly far away from the van that coughs as often as its crew, they arise now with their mental cameras and zoom back to a far-distant point in order to reenter the Mexican metropolis, the most densely populated city in the world, a city with more people in it than all of Central America, with more than there are Argentines between Salta and Cabo Pena, or Colombians between Gorgona island and vibrating Arauca, or Venezuelans between Punta Gallinas and the Pacarima!

The truth is that the biggest city in the world, the city into which, in waves and successive seismic shudders, entered faceless Aztecs in 1325, Spaniards disguised as gods in 1519, gringos with their faces washed by Protestantism in 1847, and French, Austrians, Hungarians, Bohemians, Germans, and Lombards with the prognathous face of the Hapsburgs in 1862, the city of the priest Tenoch, the conquistador Cortés, General Scott, and the Emperor Maximilian, always deserves a spectacular entrance. My Uncles Homero and Fernando, my parents Angel and Angeles, and I, mere layabout that I am, Christoham, have no other choice but to imitate the first narrator of all things, the first curious individual, the crippled devil who still remembers his angelic wings, mere stumps now it’s true, but stumps that rise in flight through a power God does not know, which is that of telling stories: and on this afternoon of our return to Mexico City (okay, okay: I’m here for the first time, but my genetic memory is only the scientific name for my innate sense of déjà vu) the buzz of creation is coming in loud and clear, the interminable hiss

of the original bang: creation can still be heard, I say, above the ashy scum of the city, and there is nothing strange in the fact that we all try to fly toward it, my parents hanging on to the mutilated wings of the crippled devil, Homero still dressed in his china poblana costume, holding on to the demon’s scarlet, pointed tail, Fernando clinging to the black, broken cloven-hoof of the genius of storytelling, I, disoriented, because I don’t know if I’m still swimming in the ocean inside my mother’s womb or if I’m swimming in the corrupt air, which nevertheless is better than the black hole we flew out of, saving ourselves from the sensation of sinking into a fetid swamp: from above we see millions of beings crowded against the entrance to the Taco Curtain, we see the one-dimensional façades of prestige, against which crash the dark waves of peasants fleeing from violence, crime, theft, repression, and the mockery of centuries: for them we invent the illusion of a city of opportunity and promotion, a city equal to its television screens, a city of blond people advertising beer, driving Mustangs, and stuffing themselves in supermarkets before taking a well-deserved vacation in Las Vegas, courtesy of Western Airlines and Marriott Hotels: they prefer the illusion of the city to the barren fields where they were born: who can blame them? Now they want to enter the city which is just as barren, violent, and repressive as the land they left and they don’t know it or they do know it (from the air, we look at the city decked out in dust) and they go on preferring it because the more of them who come, the more the image of the beer, cars, supermarkets, and vacations will be blotted out.