Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

Off we go into the wild gray yonder, hanging on to the wings, tail, and hoof of the only angel interested in telling a story, the curious fallen angel who only has his imagination left to raise himself up, and we’re flying over a city whose roofs, faithful to his own tradition, the devil begins to lift: the roofs of Mexico, D.F. (hold on tight, little Christopher) (the crippled devil coughs, spits, spits some phlegm on the posh Zona Rosa, phlegm that lands smack in the center of a bowl of stracciatella soup in a restaurant located on the Génova mall and which is eaten as if it were floating egg yolk) (the limping devil scratches at the thick air with his free hoof; Don Fernando is clinging to the other and the dust from the free hoof falls like snow devoid of temperature on the Nueva Anzures zone, upon which all the locals bring out their Christmas trees): FLYING DOWN TO VICO!

The crippled Lucifer of storytelling simultaneously raises the roof of one house in Bosques de las Lomas and another in Santa María Camarones: we did not see, in the first case, if in fact we used our eyes (and mine still lack the veil of eyelids), any material or physical movement inside that mansion surrounded by nationalized banks or, in the second case, inside that shack trapped between railroad tracks: in the mansion we saw a naked couple embracing, but the physical reality was the desire to suppress the difference between the two of them and their fear of being changed or changing; in the shack we saw another naked couple embracing and they were afraid of staying inside the shack and they were afraid of leaving the shack: prisoners within, exiles outside: Mexico City.

We rose so high, so very high, that my mother was afraid of smashing against the dome which, according to what Uncle H. said in Aca, was being built to dole out to each and every inhabitant of the city a ration of pure air, and she screamed out in fear, but Uncle Homero laughed in the heaven of heavens because the dome was a lie, an illusion, another governmental placebo: all they had to do was announce one day that it was being built and announce on some other day that it was finished for everyone to breathe more easily: like an aspirin posing as a vitamin, and this is the snake oil that brings the dead back to life: we did not, therefore, smash into the arc of the nonexistent dome, but the devil laughed at what Homero said and dropped us, and we fell coughing and spitting into the black hole that swallows all, we dropped like meteors tearing through the layers of pollution (only Homero’s fall was slowed, because of his full skirts). From a distance we saw a tourist attraction: a bulldozer half buried in a lake of cement next to some hastily abandoned mansions patrolled by howling dogs, we scraped our noses against the extravagant slogans of the past peeling off walls more eternal than words:

and we flew like a flash over the thousands crowded together who had not been allowed to enter the city and then we lost our bird’s-eye view of the closed city, the concentration of wealth, migration, and unemployment; the capital of underdevelopment: Mexico City here I come! and when we could make out the noble cupolas, real and solid this time, of San Juan de Dios and Santa Veracruz, opposite the Alameda, where my parents met, I realized, if not what my destiny would be, at least what my vocation was:

I shall attempt to decipher the perennial mystery of names

I shall fight untiringly against the unknown

I shall irreverently mix languages

I shall ask, speak familiarly, imagine, finish just to start a new page

I shall call and answer relentlessly

I shall offer the world and its people another image of themselves

I shall undergo a metamorphosis while remaining the same:

CHRISTOPHER UNBORN

Time flies: barely had the eternal devil lifted the roof of my parents’ house in Tlalpan and dropped us all inside (all of us: Uncle Homero dressed as a china poblana; Uncle Fernando with his slicker and his broken glasses; my parents with beach shirts and blue jeans, and I Christopher inside my dear mother Doña Angeles Palomar) when we all felt that time was different: we were inside the capital city of the Mexican Republic, where, by definition, everything is faster, above all time: time flies, leaves us behind: time weighs on time itself, it drags, because, as my dad says to my mom, who’s making us be modern: before, time was not our own, it was providence’s own sphere of influence; we insisted on making it ours just so we could say that history is the work of man: and my mother admits, with a mixture of fatal pride and responsibility, that if such is the case we must make ourselves responsible for time, for the past and the future, because there is no longer any providence to coddle our times: now they are our responsibility: we must sustain the past; invent the future:

“But only here, today, in the present, only here do we remember the past, only here do we desire the future,” my mother tells my father as she caresses his cheek the night of their return to the city; cleansing herself of the filth of the road, simple things, enjoying them the way they enjoy them (for my recovered happiness), without accepting that something broke on the road from Malinaltzin and now she is going to wait until after they make love to tell him:

“I’m quite certain.”

Six weeks have gone by since my conception; menstruation is more than four weeks late and I’m already floating in all my splendor — I’m fully half an inch long — convinced, deluded that I’m still in the ocean, giver of life and origin of the gods, with no more ties to terra firma than the umbilical cord and with no clouds on my horizon except the dark cloud that will be my circulatory system, still alien to my body, still distanced from, outside of, me, in the placenta, sucking blood and oxygen, filtering out waste; if this is my new ocean, it’s only a sea of blood that threatens to blind me:

My skin is thin and transparent.

My spinal cord is phosphorescent.

These are the lights I use to fight the strange tide of blood that envelops me.

My body is arched forward. The umbilical cord is thicker than my body. My arms are longer than my legs: I would really like to touch, caress, embrace; I don’t really want to run: Where would I go? What place could be better than this one? Have I learned of anything out there better than this place? After all, home is where you hang yourself …

I am my own sculptor: I am shaping myself from within with living, wet, malleable materials: what other artist has ever had available to him as perfect a design as the one possessed by my hammers and chisels: the cells move to the exact spot for building an arm: it’s the first time they’ve ever done it, never before and never again, do your mercies benz understand what I’m saying? I will never be repeated.

Nothing could be more dynamic than my fetal art, ladies and germs, just like that a foot appears, and at the same time five condensations on my hand that will be my bones and fingers: feet and hands detach from the trunk (but I don’t want to run away; I only want to touch); and my cheeks, my upper lip all join in the work: my nasal cavity sinks so it can take part in the development of my palate; my face begins to take shape; the cells on both sides of my trunk start moving in twelve horizontal currents to form my ribs; my future muscle cells emigrate between my ribs and under my chest, the subcutaneous tissue stretches backward and forward, the cells on the external layer of my little body begin to form my epidermis, my hair, sweat glands and sebaceous glands: do your mercies know of any combined action more perfect than this one, one that is more exact than the dancing little feet of the Rockettes, the southern flight of ducks from Canada in October, the perfect rainbow the butterflies form in the hidden valleys of Michoacán, the Wehrmacht goose-step, or the deadly aim of General Rodolfo Fierro: the precision of a parachute battalion, of a triple-bypass cardiac operation, of one of Le Nôtre’s gardens, or of an Egyptian pyramid?