Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

Sitting immobile for an entire month in front of nationalized television, my parents and their Uncle Homero Fagoaga resembled catatonics awaiting the reliable news that would galvanize them and pull them out of this TV-induced hypnosis.

Uncle Homero Fagoaga, his Turkish slippers resting on an old telephone book, drowsily pointed out that the government was constantly creating false news items they broadcast as live action: just look, he said, languidly pointing one morning, at that police agent, caught by the cameras just at the precise moment he is refusing to accept a serious bribe from a North American tourist arrested for drunk driving, who is now compounding the felony by trying to bribe a representative of the police force; look now at those pictures of retroactive justice being meted out to government functionaries who got rich under past regimes; look now at that auction of bibelots, paintings, and racing cars for the benefit of the people, look at these ceremonies for the transfer of private parks to public schools and the return of tropical golf courses to members of rural collectives: every single event is false, it’s all made up, nothing of what you’re seeing is really happening, but it’s all presented as a fact freshly caught by the camera. Now look, Mamadoc in person just dove into Lake Pátzcuaro to save a group of pure-hearted girls who were bringing little headache poultices of onion and rose petals to the statue of Father Morelos in Janitzio because, in their gay naïveté, they thought he suffered from perpetual migraines — after all, didn’t he have a handkerchief tied around his head all the time? Well, in the enthusiasm of their ingenuous fantasy they capsized their canoe, which, by the way, dear niece and nephew, allows us to admire the cathedrallike figure of Our Mother and National Doctor in her lacy bathing costume of Copacabana design, and this, dear niece and nephew, is happening right now, at 12 noon, March 18, 1992, as President Paredes enters the Azcapotzalco refinery to celebrate fifty-six years of nationalized oil production — switch to the other channel, Angelito — and to remind us that our lack of sovereignty over the black gold is transitory. By paying the nation’s debts, oil is still serving Mexico, and Mexico faithfully keeps her currently pawned word to the International Monetary Fund: it doesn’t matter who administers the devil’s wells, as long as Mexico gets the benefits; and now a word about the construction of the famous dome which is to purify the atmosphere of our capital and distribute the pure air fairly among its thirty million inhabitants, but you, dear niece and nephew, already know by experience that this is just one more trick to give a longed-for distraction to our people, and when some innocent demands an explanation about the construction from some functionary, that bureaucrat knows just what he has to answer:

“As the Lady says, it’s part of a Strategic Beautification Plan.”

* * *

They sit there for a month watching TV. My mom makes trips to the market to buy the food my Uncle Homero gobbles down. We are visited, infrequently but cathartically, by Uncle Fernando Benítez, who would often arrive at around 5 a.m., pounding on the door. My alarmed parents would discover Don Fernando on the threshold, dressed in a trench coat, a Stetson pulled over his eyes, and pointing a flashlight into my parents’ bleary eyes:

“Proof that we live in a democracy: if someone’s knocking at your door at five in the morning, would you think it was the milkman?” At other times these visits would end with a heated exchange of noncommunication between Fernando and Homero:

“Immanuel Kant.”

“But Cesare Cantù.”

But the sign just doesn’t come. What is not a contest is a news flash, and what is not a news flash is a subliminal ad, which runs for a fraction of a second every fifteen minutes: the defining motto of Mamadoc’s regime:

UNION AND OBLIVION

UNION AND OBLIVION

UNION AND OBLIVION

And then the television goes back to running contests and celebrations, because, as our Mother and Doctor reminds us, not a day goes by, not a second passes, without something worthy of being celebrated in it, Bach is born, Nietzsche dies, the sun comes up, Tenochtitlán is conquered, black thread is invented, the last time it rained in Sayula, finally we hit a whole new level of

UNION AND OBLIVION:

They created a brand-new prize for the parvenu poet Mambo de Alba for Not Having Written Anything during the year 1991: Literature Is Thankful; the contest about the Last Mexican Revolutionary was voided because there were no contestants; President Jesús María y José Paredes, from the PAN party, impulsively declared that the PRI, after recent local events (our Uncle H.’s heart if not his dessert almost flew out of his mouth), reaffirmed its respect for the most absolute pluralism and admitted the existence of splinter groups in its very bosom which, if the citizens of Mexico so desired, could become authentic political parties.

To add spice to this political pizza, President Paredes, in a master stroke, renounced his membership in the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) — just to set an example — and then declared, in absolute impartiality, that he was joining millions of voters like himself who had to debate very seriously in their heart of hearts a decision pregnant with consequences: to which party do I wish to belong from now on?

This took place at the end of March. Then there was a long silence, until April 2, when President Paredes asked at a joint session of Congress meeting to honor Porfirio Díaz (UNION AND OBLIVION), whose name was inscribed that same afternoon in gold letters in the Congress, why citizens were so slow about massively joining the new parties, upon which Representative Hipólito Zea, deputy from the ninth district of Chihuahuila, stood up to exclaim emotionally, spontaneously, and brilliantly from his place:

“Because we are waiting to see which party you join, Mr. President!”

And that shout was followed by another from Representative Peregrino Ponce y Peón, Senator from Yucatango:

“Your party will be our party, Mr. President. Just tell us which way to go, so we can be with you!” added the peasant leader Xavier Corcuera y Braniff, deputy from the twentieth district of Michoalisco, and “Please stop torturing us, Mr. President,” tearfully whined the deputy from Tamaleón and representative of the actors’ guild, Ms. Virginia Iris de Montoya.

Genuinely moved, the President answered amid an impressive national silence:

“You just can’t make a snap decision in a situation of such transcendence as this one. I cavil. I ponder. I consult the core of my Mexican being. In September I will reveal my decision. But let it not be an impediment to anyone else’s decision: let everyone freely choose the party that’s best for him.”

This time, Uncle Homero rose from his semirecumbent position, the tears in his eyes reflecting those of our President, and from his lips came forth this exclamation, one of his favorites, almost as an involuntary reflex, the essential expression of his political being: “At your service, Mr. President!”

But knowing himself to be excluded, for the moment, from these events of historical transcendence, his candidacy for the Senate suspended (he hoped) but not nipped in the bud, he had to limit himself to lucubrating in the void, like the proverbial man on the street who has no access to well-founded rumors, political breakfasts, high-quality gossip, unnamed sources, and other funds of solid information: what does this declaration mean for the fortunes of the National Action Party (PAN), to which until this very moment President Paredes said he belonged, having won the election under its blue-and-white banner? Might the situation have so bettered that the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) could once again take control of the executive responsibility and symbolism, without piling the blame of all our problems on the back of the opposition? What part would Mamadoc play in all this as the central symbol of unity amid this inter- and intraparty squabbling? Would her creator Minister Federico Robles Chacón lose power because of what happened to her? Does this decision mean a return to power of the most eminent emissary of the past, Minister Ulises López? Enigmas, enigmas that Homero, in despair, could not resolve, which made him once again sink into the contagious languor of pure spectatorship; and what, he mused, were the majority of Mexicans if not spectators for those endless contests served up by national television, betting on every conceivable thing: how many miles is it from Acaponeta to San Blas, how many tortillas were sold in the month of March in the state of Tlaxcala, be the first to call, we will give a prize to the first caller to our studio, the first letter, the first coupon; how many miles are there on the odometer of the Red Arrow Mexico City — Zumpango bus number 1066, manufactured by Leyland and sold to Mexico because it was spewing out clouds of carbon monoxide, nicknamed Here’s My Sword, Follow Me, Men? Hold on! Looks like Leyland’s getting a corner on the prize market: the driver who’s brought most merchandise into the City of Palaces in a single day has also won himself a prize. (There appears on the screen an albino boy dressed in black leather, said to be named Gómez, long-haul trucker; he disappears from the screen as quickly as he appeared.) They all saw the entire nation immersed in prizes, tests, anniversaries, which don’t leave them a free minute, as they await the grand prize, the perpetual superlottery of Makesicko Shitty: useless, exhausted, dead — but about the Mexican middle class we can at least say that it was never bored: this was its solution and its paradox: UNION AND OBLIVION and yet one more subliminal message that each afternoon blinks on all the TV sets and which says, redundantly: