Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

The critique of reason puuure

For madness a sure cuuure

To say nothing of the crude, gross violence of the Baboso Brothers:

Last night as I watched yer daddy screw yer mom

Ah jes had to puke my guts up, the grits an’ eggs an’ ham

which was all you heard on the radio from morning till night, while the Fuckups had to hide their great nineties lyrics under a bushel for a year:

If ah stay, ah’l jes forgit her,

So it’s better that ah go.

Oh, Lady Disdain, do not

Let me be your Swain:

If ah stay, ah’l jes forgit her,

So it’s better that ah go.

which they composed at night, exhausted, in the Tlalpan house, at which, one day, the following note from Uncle Don Homero Fagoaga inevitably arrived:

Doubtlessly Distinguished Niece and Nephew:

I saw you both leave the house on May 1. I observed your costumes and listened to your comments. I thought that since we’d all taken refuge under a common roof, to which all of us had a right, that at least, juris tantum, we’d all spoken the absolute truth about what happened in the recent past. I must confess my disillusion. You two, with perfidy and with an eye to profit, caused yourselves to pass for old-fashioned hippietecs with long hair and blue jeans, using the slang of the sixties in order to deceive my habitual sagacity and make me think I was dealing with naïve greenhorns from the age of Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin, and Chic Guevara. But it was all a huge hoax! You both are part of the reactionary avant-garde of rebel conservatism! You look for your fashions in the first half of the century, before any gringo left his poop on the moon, forever changing the balance of the universe! I’ve had to suffer lots of shocks in my life, but none of them has put my understanding of the world into such a crisis as this trick of yours. You may expect my revenge. Pack up your gear, because that house won’t belong to you for very long!

Effective Suffrage. No Reelection.

( signed ) Homero Fagoaga, LL.D.

Hipi and the Orphan said they should get ready for the siege of Tlalpan: Homero would only get them out by force, and before that happened they’d pour molten lead on him and shove a stake up his ass, even if it gave him infinite pleasure, but Angeles my mother said that what really surprised her was the idea that Uncle H. had managed a reconciliation with the Party and the government (the rest was a pretext) and would screw up the Christophers Contest: that would be his greatest perversity, it had to be stopped. So, one morning in May, my parents, dressed in the most conservative and old-fashioned way, took the Van Gogh and the compass and set out (I a marble within) to find out the status of the contest and to enter it in proper form now that there remained no doubt whatsoever that Angeles, as Capitolina and Farnesia would say, was “in a family way.”

The Palace of the Citizenry, in the northern sector of the city, was the symbolic end point — when it was built — of the Pan-American Highway and was flanked on both sides by statues of the Green Indians. From there, a causeway, surrounded by recycling water, ran to the vast central island, where, no joke, an eagle perched on a cactus devoured several serpents every day. If the eagle was replaced every so often, it was something no one ever checked or even desired to check.

From that central island a dozen stairs descended to the tunnels, where, in an asymmetrical arrangement, the barred windows opened for the business that more than justified this multimillion-dollar structure, erected by the government of President Jesús María y José Paredes in the midst of our ongoing crisis.

ALL CITIZENS HAVE THE RIGHT TO INFORMATION

ALL CITIZENS HAVE THE RIGHT TO COMPLAIN

ALL CITIZENS HAVE THE RIGHT TO GIVE UP

Dressed in black, he flourishing his walking stick, she flouncing her mourning veils, Angel and Angeles walked down a stairway to the tunnel and, before doing anything else, got on the INFORMATION line. Their first order of business was to find out how a couple went about entering the Columbus Day contest for 1992. Two hours later, a man with his hair combed forward to cover his baldness, dressed in the old-fashioned bureaucratic style, wearing a blue eyeshade and sleeve garters, listened distractedly to my parents’ request:

“Gosh, there are sooo many contests…”

“Yes, but this is the Christopher Columbus Contest, arranged for October 12, 1992—this year…”

“Of course, but, you know, there are lots of contests every day…”

“There certainly are, but there is only one Columbus Contest…”

“Are you sure of that, sir?”

“Of course I am, and so should you be, if you know what you’re doing…”

“Now don’t you get nasty with me, young fellow … Next!”

“The next person is my wife, who will ask you the same question: about the Christophers Contest…”

“Didn’t you just say Columbus, the Columbus Contest is what you said a moment ago. Have you changed your mind?”

“Christopher or Columbus, it’s all the same, Christopher Columbus: don’t you know who he was?”

“Look, if you get smart with me, I’ll slam this window shut right in your face.”

“Let’s see you do it…”

“I’d just be dumping you on one of my office mates here, sir, and that would not be kind.”

“Knock off the crap. The Columbus Contest, announced by Mamadoc on October 12, 1991…”

“Didn’t you say that it was for 1992, this year? How can anyone help you if you can’t say things straight?”

“The contest will be held in 1992, but it was announced in 1991 by Mamadoc…”

“Trying to use influence on me now?”

“It just so happens that she announced the contest.”

“You know what happens to people who threaten to use influence around here? Have you ever heard of moral renovation?”

“I was just a kid when that came out.”

“And now he insults me for being old, what a lack of respect!”

“Look, sir, all I want to know is how I can find out about this contest, I don’t want to have anything to do with you…”

“Very nice. Now he calls me an incompetent. Keep it up, son, keep it up. I want to see how far this insolence of yours will take you.”

“With all due respect, sir, where can I…”

“Now listen, I have a name, why do you keep calling me sir, it’s as if you called me buddy.”

“Okay, what’s your name?”

“Use your imagination.”

“I don’t have any left. You used my last drop when you wore out my patience.”

“In that case, go over to the personnel office and find out what my name is so you learn how to treat a public employee with respect.”

“But all I…”

“Soon you’ll be calling me that guy or damned old baldy there behind the bars, that’s what I expect from you, come on, why don’t you call me a miserable bureaucrat with smelly feet standing there all day like a jerk, careful when you call me a jerk, sonny, or I’ll have you thrown out of here, hey, security, get over here, this guy’s threatening me, what else am I going to have to put up with!”

My parents, still followed, like it or not, your mercies, by the cloud of suspicion resulting from the Acapulco caper, stepped out of line and headed in the opposite direction, looking for another information window. They actually and respectfully dared ask a middle-aged guard with a sweaty upper lip, wearing a gray uniform and a strange French kepi, sitting in a wheelchair next to a staircase: “Information about the Christopher Columbus Contest, please?”