Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

I interrupt the ballad of the month of April; or perhaps I merely add a voice to the dialogue, turning it into a chorus: Mommy, remember you swore that in April you’d tell me how you and my daddy met, don’t let the month go by without telling me: Mom!

“Angeles. I found you because I looked for you. That afternoon on the Juárez monument was no accident.”

“You think not?”

“I want you to know for a fact that I did not find you by chance or because I lost Agueda or because you are so different from Agueda that I perversely came up to you…”

“It doesn’t matter. Our first meeting happened; it’s done. Why bother bringing up that moment so often?”

(Is she saying it to him? Is she saying it to me?)

“It’s that only by remembering it can you understand that if I lose you or if we separate, I will look for you again: I’m leaving nothing to chance, my love…”

“Okay. Now we live together, perhaps we’ll have a son in October; for the moment we’re performing together. Okay. What page of your book are you on?”

“Look: on the page where Plato says that we’re living in the post-Marxist, post-Freudian, and post-industrial era.”

“We’ve had enough wise Jews already, now we need a few asshole Christians. Go on quoting Plato.”

“What about death?”

“Isn’t it a long way off?” My father laughed.

“That’s why I love you, because you’re a mass of contradictions.”

* * *

Angel romantically reinvents himself as a conservative rebel. He would be an assassin if he could get out of himself completely. He can’t. His memory won’t let him. We would all be assassins if we had no memory. Memory reminds us: Cain. The Tiger of Yautepec. Caryl Chessman. Dr. Crippen. Goyito Cárdenas. But you just can’t say to crime because of memory I will not make you mine. I want Angel to be able to say that no one would dare judge me betting on my dishonesty or on my virtue even though I do as I please and not what people think proper. I want a world (with me, Angeles) in which the proper thing is not to do the proper thing but what we please: doing what we please would then be the proper thing. Is it possible? Angel is not what he’d like to be. I want him to need me in order to be it. I know that all this is impossible. But I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts and I’m going to try to make it last, without his finding out about my secret: I am in love with my love for Angel, I love loving him, I don’t want him to find out. Angel, on the other hand, is going to find out that love is a matter of pure will: we love what we want to love. Understanding that is going to make him very sad. But for a while he won’t have the power to fight that power: he’ll love whatever he wants. Angeles will be in love with her love for Angel. Angel will be in love with his will to love. When Angeles understands this, she’ll want his will to be to love her, to concentrate in her all the power of his will to love. This cannot happen, gentle Readers, until Angel unfurls his will to love, imagining that the variety of the will is the proof of its existence; he will confuse the will to love with the different kinds of love and the different kinds of love with the imagination of love. Poor guy: he’ll have to eliminate the different kinds so that imagination and love really see each other face to face, kiss, screw: the singularity of sexual love between man and woman is that we see each other’s face and animals turn their backs on each other to screw; you and I, my love, can look into each other’s eyes but we are like animals in that we can never see ourselves as others see us making love: are we good for love or are we bad? How can we compare? How can we know? Is it true when she says: you screw divinely, Angel, who taught you? Is it true when he answers: you taught me everything, aren’t you the one who screws like a queen? Why do my parents say these things? to screw around? to dominate? or because it’s true? to love each other more? can people love each other without dominating each other? screw around without screwing up? My father’s love takes place within what he is and what he believes: He loves my mother as part of what he wants: an order. And he knows very well that no order will ever be sufficient. My mother on the other hand (we’re in April, the ***est month) loves love but knows very well that love is only the search for love. How the hell can they understand each other? She proves to him that she’s right: no order is sufficient if the value is to love and to love is to search for love. He proves to her that he is right: love cannot be part of an established order, it questions it and passes it by and transforms it every time two lips touch two lips and one hand stretches out to touch a sex as if it were its own that belongs to another: domination has begun, Angeles, it’s inevitable that you women generate guilt, that you persecute us so that we feel guilty, the bitches are not happy unless they see us accepting that we are guilty and for that reason I accept what happened in Malinaltzin: I won’t make you take the blame today so that you never make me feel blameworthy and let’s be that way, my love, the first happy couple in history hip hip hurray! hip hip my rib!

“Is it true or not?”

And Angeles: if you accuse me of something which I think but don’t do, I cannot deny it. That isn’t guilt. But desiring even if it isn’t carried out, is that blameworthy for you? Don’t just sit there without speaking, say something. Angeles dreamed she urinated and urinated until she refilled Texcoco Lake, and refloated the damned dried-out city, restored its canals, its water traffic, its liquid death. Angeles dreamed that they returned to Mexico City and lived again in the house of bright colors and I asked them, please:

Give time and tenderness to your little Christopher.

What a lack of imagination! They don’t listen to me.

I don’t know if I’m going to sleep or waking up.

But my big old ears grow and listen.

I hear someone say that the domestic situation has become impossible. My parents have never been examples of Calvinist parsimony; no matter how postmodern, post-industrial, enlightened, conservative, Freudian, Marxist, or ecologist they declare or have declared themselves to be over the course of their brief and disturbed existences, Angel and Angeles are Catholic — Hispanic — baroque prodigals, spendthrifts, anachronisms: it’s impossible to be modern without being Protestant, even if you happen to be Catholic, Angel muses again as he watches Uncle Homero devour the groceries of the young married couple in the house of bright colors: he wouldn’t dream of asking permission or saying thank you or offering to raise a finger, that is, until my mother says to my father Angel one April morning:

“I’ve just smashed the last piggy bank, honey. What a pain. What do we do now?”

In a certain sense they exempted Uncle Homero because, after all, he did say that he would withdraw the suit against Angel, and, in this world of great expectations and perpetual illusions which is Mexico ’92, that means that the kids (my parents) had in their possession forty million in gold pesos. Just like that. The fact is that the cupboard was bare, and they, looking seriously into one another’s eyes, declared the primary truth: we’ve got to get jobs. The secondary truth was that, without the help of the Four Fuckups, they didn’t stand a chance in the job market.

Their logical conclusion, after hearing what Uncle Homero said in Malinaltzin, was that their buddies, Egg, Orphan Huerta, Hipi Toltec, and the Baby Ba (despite the fact that she was invisible) had perished in the hecatomb arranged by the government in Acapulco and blamed on the victims.