Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

One day, my mother (with me inside her, remember) goes out with him because Hipi wants people to think he’s got a girl and that she’s even going to have a baby. My mom is for the idea and does him this favor and he brings us to his parents’ house, which is on a roof and surrounded by water tubs near Balbuena and the Puebla highway: a shack whose walls are tubs and a crowd of people there you can’t even see because it’s so dark, but Hipi kisses all of them, talks to them in Nahuatl, repeats that greeting of his “in ixtli, in yóllotl” and my mother repeats it in Spanish (my mother would like to be minimally rational in this era in which we live), “a heart and a mind,” gravely curtsying before the shapeless old men and women wrapped in ponchos and serapes and old newspapers in the shack in the lost, nameless city built on the garbage belt, but surrounded by gadgets which, we suppose, Hipi Toltec brings them from his expeditions, because he gives his electric fan to a little old man as wrinkled up as a prune, a real prune, and the little old man carefully piles it next to his Mixmaster and his Sanyo icemaker and his Phillips TV set and his Sears toaster and his Machiko Kyo hair dryer and his Osterizer microwave oven and his Kawabata alarm radio, all stored there in that smoky, sepia-colored darkness devoid of electricity, which doesn’t even get light from the street. And my mother wonders, will they go on accumulating the trophies this prodigal son brings them forever? Like Columbus or Cortés returning to the Court of Spain loaded with coconuts and maguey, hammocks and rubber balls, gold and precious woods, feathered crowns and opal diadems, they thank him for it, he kisses their hands, they pat his long, greasy, straight hair, they all speak Aztec and say, my mother thinks they say in any case, things that are very poetic and beautiful:

“Ueuetiliztli!” (Old folks!)

“Xocoyotizin!” (Young pup!)

“Aic nel toxaxahacayan.” (We shall never be obliterated)

“On tlacemichtia.” (There everything was stolen)

“Olloliuhqui, olloliuhqui!” (How the wheel of fortune spins!) and with enormous satisfaction they look at my pregnant mother, they look at the center of my mom, where I launch into an Olympic dive, but when we get back to Tlalpan I still cannot understand Hipi’s world as a past (I want everyone to have a conscious past so I can be born a bit better) but as something very different: he has a secret family and in it there is only a memory of silence.

Something similar is going on with the Orphan Huerta (with all of them in fact, these are their pasts, barely what passes by, nothing more, my tranquil genes tell me, the past is only the past), but the Orphan at least talks about a brother who disappeared, the Lost Boy, he calls him, and about a grandmother who lives in Chicago, where she forgot her Spanish and never learned English: so she became a mute: a memory of silence, I tell them again, this time captured between the successive infernos of wind and ice and a suffocating purgatory: Chicago, City of the Big Shoulders, says my mother, reciting something or other, and the light of reverie goes on in the eyes of all present — Egg, Orphan, Hipi, the invisible Baby Ba (who suddenly I want to see more than anything in the world, convinced suddenly that only I will be able to see her: but in order to do that, I’ll have to be born, to be born and see her, it’s not true she’s invisible, I convince myself because no one sees me either, nor do they pay me the slightest attention, unless I kick or jump around or take swan dives in the stomach of Chicago and Lake Michigan).

There was lots of talk about Chicago in those May days because that’s where the Orphan’s grandma lived, condemned to silence. But there was another reason as well: Uncle Fernando passed by the San Pedro Apóstol house with two Indians, a couple he said he’d met during his excursion in February to a land of blind people, and we saw this strange couple with light eyes and dark skin, standing like two flexible statues in the doorway of the house of bright colors, I don’t know if they were blind (I’ve already said it: they don’t see me, so how can I judge those who are also not seen and who just accumulate, if your mercies would care to do the arithmetic: Baby Ba, Hipi’s smoking family, now this couple my parents tell me are handsome, strong, with a strange determination in their clouded-over eyes).

Uncle Fernando speaks for them, but my parents say the couple’s silence is even more eloquent: there is no one better, no one more intelligent in this country than this couple and people like them, no one, not the financier Don Ulises López, not the minister Don Federico Robles Chacón, not the academician Don Homero Fagoaga, not my father, the sensitive and tormented conservative rebel, not the serene and (she tries to be reasonable!) reasonable mamma mia on the left, who is so silent at times in order not to interfere in the obvious results of everything that’s happening, all of them together are not as intelligent, as determined as this pair of Indians who got married the day of the great noise and the night of her first moon, creating another child at the same time I was created, giving me an invisible brother who would never be seen by his parents, created (remember, Reader) in the final moment of an incomprehensible, noisy, incomparable day in which all times went mad and no one could tell whether he was awake or dreaming.

Uncle Fernando returned to the sierra of the blind people, and this couple, who had used his earlier visit as reason for marrying and making a child, recognized the smell (unmistakable, that odor of creole historian) of his return, they stuck to him like glue, repeating again and again a word they’d learned only the gods know where ( Chicago, Chicago ), and Benítez said to them, “Not Chicago, Chicago, no, you stay here, this is your homeland, you’re needed here, you’d get lost in the world, and two months later here they are, she pregnant, both of them blind, Indians, monolingual, idol worshippers, mythomaniacs, shamanic, syncretic, and, all in all, screwed up, how does that sound for a collection of handicaps, eh? What more can I say? And by saying Chi-ca-go, full of determination, magically willful, here they are and no one’s going to stop them: they are going to escape from the vicious circle of their rural, age-old poverty, they are the most valiant, most stubborn, craziest people in the world: and they have created my brother, the child who was conceived with me! They are going to break with their fate. Will it be worth the trouble?

I don’t really understand what’s going on, I admit it. Don Fernando reasons and fights; they say “Chicago”; it’s cold; that’s where the Orphan Huerta’s grandmother is; if they insist, well here’s her address; but they’re asking for trouble.

In bed, my father says to my mother:

“Quetzalcoatl went east.”

“Cortés came from the west.”

“Wetbacks go north.”

“The dead go south.”

“Those are the cardinal points of Mexico, and no one can escape them!”

My father needs a compass to find his way through the city: he’s like a navigator in the Unknown Sea. The group has decided that if they’re going to survive, all of them will have to find work in a city overflowing with the unemployed; suspiciously, no one knows anything about Uncle Homero, and Uncle Fernando, who lives off a modest university pension and the success of his books in Poland and Yugoslavia (he’s piled up millions of zlotys and dinars he never expects to see, but he does consume the income in pesos of thirteen Polish and Yugoslav writers in Mexico), has dedicated himself to sowing panic in D.F. parking lots.