Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

“We thought we’d never see each other again,” said my dad.

“You thought the Four Fuckups were

said the Orphan

“As a matter of fact, I did,” said Angeles.

A group dressed in green began clubbing the horses pulling the coach, first beating them to their knees and then continuing to pound them until they died, always shouting Equus, equus, the horses of the conquistadores. As they rolled over, the two Percherons tipped over the conch-shaped carriage.

Angel was the only one who looked. Without turning his head, Egg said: “There’s this competition to get included in the frieze on the Monument to the Heroes of Violence.”

“So they didn’t kill you in Aca?”

“Níxalo; draftearon us for to clinup Aca.”

“Under what conditions?”

“Jus juan: that we not sing for a whole year so people’d think we died wit de udders in Aca.”

“Ce Akatl!”

“Wich mean dat da Babosos Brudders gonna teikover da calpulli.”

“Disisdapits.”

“Bulook: der’s no competencia in the mágica of da marketa except da Immanuel Can’t.”

“Parvenus an home boys facetaface.”

“Awzom!”

“Don’ spase out, Orphan, an stop wit da self-flagellation, ’cause der’s broken glass anstoff.”

“Laic yunó.”

“Cheesis, man, ay mus eet seben time ahuic Damningo Loonys Madness Mercolates Hoovers Bernaise an Savagedog.”

“Good buddy.”

“Ay too mus tacofy from damningo to savagedog.”

“Baby Ba says she’s hungry: won’t you invite her to your house for dinner?”

“We ain’t got much.”

“Except for Uncle Homero.”

“You forget it’s the first of May: he’s gone with the wind.”

“We saw him from here: he gone.”

Alone in the house of bright colors, Don Homero Fagoaga said to himself: “This is my chance.” For the first time he found himself without Angeles, who, though she did sometimes go out shopping, would leave him with Angel, who never left the television set alone; but what a time to choose to abandon him: would that missionary Benítez pop in again to catechize him about democracy? Alone and permanently dressed in red-striped pajamas: the owner of Pichilinque and Mel O’Field and Frank Wood harbored the feudal suspicion that his sister Isabella Fagoaga and her husband the inventor Diego Palomar were not as disinterested and spiritual as it seemed; aside from the forty million gold pesos that Isabella left her son Angel, there had to be something else, Homero felt sure of it this morning; he had investigated bank accounts, stocks, CDs, but had turned up nothing: there had to be a hiding place in the house, money, jewels, papers, something.

Like a teenager who takes advantage of the fact that parents and servants are out of the house to get out his pornographic magazines and excite himself, exciting himself above all with the prospect of the imminent return of those guardians and punishers, in the same way Homero threw himself into exploring the house of the Curies of Tlalpan, crammed with blackboards and portraits of famous scientists and mousetraps. Homero immediately went down to the cellar to find the family treasure, where the first thing that happened to him was that a mousetrap caught his pinkie, and the pain, the anger, and the humiliation of the uncle were so great that he came charging back upstairs, knocking over blackboards and smashing a prehensile mousetrap against the photo of Niels Bohr, as if only a human face deserved the reaction of this rage, but barely had the trap hit the glass covering the photo when the fragments reassembled themselves instantly and once again covered the benign face of the Danish scientist, who looked like the benevolent captain of a whaling ship. Don Homero fell over backward, tripping over a stepladder that instantly folded up, allowing a pail of black paint to fall on a white cat that just happened to be there searching for the house’s celebrated photogenic mice; and the cat, now transformed into a black cat, jumped on top of a cabinet and knocked a box of salt onto Homero’s shoulders. Homero grabbed an umbrella that happened to be handy in order to protect himself from the rain of objects, but as he opened it, a rainstorm hidden inside it fell on his head, and Homero in despair threw himself on a bed where there happened to be twelve top hats, which, because of the homeric obesity, snapped open, forcing our startled academic out of bed, and making him run through the halls in hopes of destroying all the other photos of scientists, but he found the frames empty, the glass all broken expressly to cut his feet, and at the end of the corridor, he found a long banquet table and twelve men sitting at it, dining by candlelight: as they had in the Sun & Fun Toltec Tour of Acapulco, under the tutelage of Will Gingerich, each guest had a name tag on his chest: E. Rutherford, Cambridge; N. Bohr, Copenhagen; M. Planck, Berlin; W. Heisenberg, Göttingen; W. Pauli, Vienna; R. Oppenheimer, Princeton; A. Einstein, Princeton; E. Fermi, Chicago; J. D. Watson, Cambridge; F. Crick, Cambridge; L. de Broglie, Paris; L. Pauling, Berkeley, and as soon as they saw Homero they all politely stood and invited him, in a friendly way, to join them and take the last seat at the table: number 13, shouted our uncle, horrified, turning his back on them, running away, tripping over blackboards, paint cans, umbrellas, top hats, cats, mice, and mousetraps intent on pinching his naked toes: he fled out into the street, in pajamas, barefoot, and those who saw him thought he was a madman escaped from the nearby Tlalpan sanatorium or perhaps an escaped convict, what with those stripes on his uniform and with no shoes on, Sadie!

They decided to look for jobs while everything that had to happen did happen, meaning that I had to be born on exactly October 12 in order to win the contest, and after that, watch out, baby, but how was the contest going? Did anyone know anything? Even so, it would have to be checked out and in the meantime all of them would have to stay together in the Tlalpan house, unless it turned out that our miserable Uncle Homero had flown the coop merely to order the police to keep anyone from living in it while he mended fences with the PRI, God knows what goes on behind that feverish brow. In the meantime, everybody is here in the tits of the family, so to speak — Hipi still disintegrating, portable electric fan in hand; the Orphan changed forever, my mom says that now he looks like Charlie Chaplin when Chaplin was young, an amazed look on his face, all eyebrows, with a tiny black mustache and kinky hair, and complaining that without the income from rockaztec he won’t be able to dress in style.

Woe is me, he complains as he strolls through the secondhand clothing stores with their wares hanging in huge stalls along the streets of Ejido with the monument to the Revolution in the background and under its dome dealers in products whose importation is strictly forbidden, blackmarket clothes that aren’t even in style but were ten years ago; woe is me, complains the Orphan, followed by Egg and Baby Ba among the clothes hangers on the avenue, succulently caressing the tweed and leather, the glittering hobnails, and the soft cotton of the gringo T-shirts, all forbidden because of a year of abstinence imposed by the government on the Four Fuckups. Our buddy Egg stares nostalgically at the brands of internationally produced consumer goods sold illegally but right out in the open under the dome of the monument to the Revolution, the things he’d like to buy Baby Ba so she’d look better, and he limits himself instead to serving her in secret: he makes her bed, he puts her to bed, he tucks her in, he gives her her favorite Cabbage Patch dolls: that’s how we know he’s got a past and what fucks me up about these fucked-up types is that I have just as much past (genetic info) and they, the Orphan most of all, don’t have any past, and Hipi only the past he’s invented, which isn’t even his: je suis la serpent-à-plumes, sure, buddy, with that fan in your hand.