Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

“Take this staircase,” said the crippled guard.

“Thank you.”

My parents started to walk toward the stairs.

“Just a moment,” said the guard.

“Yes?”

“Are you going to go up or down?”

“I don’t know. We’re going to the contest office, and you told us…”

“This is a down staircase.”

“Okay, is the contest office upstairs or downstairs?”

“That depends.”

“Depends? Depends on what?”

“On if you go up by going down or if you go down by going up. There’s a big difference.”

“Where is the contest office?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“I don’t want to change the subject, what I want is information…”

“Well, why didn’t you say so? The information window is right over there, where that gentleman with the blue visor is standing…”

“Let’s go over this again calmly, sir. You told us that we should take this staircase. Now tell me: should we go up by going up or go down by going down.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“Well?”

“It all depends.”

“On what, now?”

“Well, before you get to the stairs, there’s the door.”

“I can see it. I’m not blind.”

“Well, tell me if you think you’re going to go out the door or enter it.”

“Go out, go out, no question about it: go out.”

“In that case, go down three levels and on the left you’ll find the Columbus Contest office.”

“The Columbus Contest?” suspiciously asked a lady who looked like one of the Bergen-Belsen jail guards in an early-forties Warner Brothers movie: hair pulled back, chignon, pince-nez, shadows under her eyes, lips like Conrad Veidt’s, high collar, scarf, and cameo with the profile of Hermann Goering painted on it, and the Ride of the Valkyries playing insinuatingly on the Muzak:

“Mozart,” said my mother.

“What?” The lady sitting there narrowed her serpent’s eyes as she carved an Iron Cross into the wood with the knife she held in her hand.

“We would like to know where to sign up for the Christopher Columbus Contest set for the twelfth of Oct…”

“You’ve come to the right place.”

“What do you know.” My father sighed, putting on his pince-nez so as not to be a step behind the receptionist.

“Who is going to have the baby?” said the bureaucrat directly.

“I am,” said my mother.

“It will have to be verified.”

“Certainly.”

“Dr. Menges!” barked the lady. “Another one for the Götterdämmerung!”

A man with black-dyed hair, twitching cheeks, and blue, slightly crossed eyes appeared behind a white hospital screen. He himself wore a white gown, black patent-leather shoes, and brick-colored gloves. He smiled.

He asked my mother to come into the space behind the screen (I inside, trembling with fear), my father tried to follow her, but the lady stopped him.

“Spread your legs,” said the doctor.

“Isn’t my verbal statement enough? I had my last period almost two months ago and…”

“Spread your legs!” shouted the doctor.

“Think the rain will let up?” my father asked the lady with the chignon.

“Don’t try making small talk with me,” answered the lady.

“So sorry, but when do you think World War III will break out?”

“Don’t get all gemütlich with me, I’m warning you.”

“Me? I wouldn’t dare. I’d rather listen to you.”

“What do you want to know?”

Suddenly a light went on inside my dad’s head: “What law governs the activities of this office, what is, shall we say, its Kantian categorical imperative?”

The lady in charge answered with great seriousness: “Everyone can do whatever he pleases as long as there is someone to blame.”

Angeles screamed horribly when the doctor brought a white-hot branding iron with a glowing swastika on its tip close to her labia: the entrance, meine Damen und Herren, to Ali Baba’s cave, where the final treasure is ME; my mother gave the doctor a kick in the jaw, and as he fell to the floor he shouted that this baby is not Aryan, this baby should not be allowed to enter the contest, this baby has the blood of slaves, gypsies, Indians, Moors, Jews, Semites, he mights, he did go insane, screaming his head off, and we fled. We ran up the three levels, we saw the guard in his wheelchair, abandoned, unable to move, soaked in his own urine, asking us: “Where are you going, folks? Stop! First ask me! You can’t go that way! That window is not for looking out but for looking in!”

My parents and I (more upset than ever, more even than when I was visited by the proletarian, carnal cylinders in the Guerrero mountains, I horrified by what I saw, oh my, oh innocent, impure me, in the lightning flash of the instant in which my mother spread her legs and the doctor’s beswastikaed branding iron approached my exit — would that aperture be useful only as an entrance and not as an exit?) ran toward a fountain of light, and I, only I, saw in the burning swastika a pair of hypnotic blue eyes, a pair of eyes that was also a sea of eyes, wave after wave with the same eyes, as if the air, the ocean, and the land were made of blue, hypnotic, cruel eyes: my father in his haste collided with a man, and my out-of-breath mother fell into his arms in the grand marble corridor of the Palace of the Citizenry. The man blushed, held her so she wouldn’t fall, but actually offered her to my father with a strange sweetness that said, I don’t want her, she isn’t mine; is she yours?

The tall, thin man with huge black eyes, bushy eyebrows, a full, thick, black head of hair and the long, wolfish ears of a Transylvanian vampire, Nosferatu from the silents, begged her pardon for his clumsiness. He was looking for the exit.

“I’m looking for the exit.”

“I think it’s over there,” pointed my father.

“I’ve been looking for it for years,” added the man, wearing a celluloid collar and a black suit, vest, and thick gray tie, without listening to us.

He went on to say, with just a faint gasp of hope, that he never expected to find it, but that he would never give up trying.

My parents passed in front of the window where the employee with the blue visor was standing. He was saying to a fat, dumpy little fellow of indeterminate age: “I’ve already told him that you can’t go because you’re drunk, but what does it matter to you if you go tomorrow?”

He raised his eyes and caught sight of my parents. “You again? Now what do you want?” he shouted. “Do you want to know everything? Everything? Everything?”

The twenty-odd days they’d spent in Mexico City had transformed my parents. My genetives tell me that when we live with someone we don’t notice the passing of time, until one day we exclaim, just look at the old geezer! when did your clock strike midnight, man? but the guy was only a kid just the other day! and then we catch sight of ourselves in a smoky mirror and we realize that we, too, have not managed to save ourselves from the ravages of … Well, all I know is that my mom, as soon as she got to Mexico Circus, began to cough, her nose began to run, she started blowing her nose all day, she sneezed, things I sense and convulsively resent, you tell me, dear Readers, if I’m not right, there’s no one closer to her secretions than I am and I say this eternal postnasal drip is polluting my swimming pool. She coughs and the Richter Scale in here hits 7.

I’m inside her and that’s how I know what no one else knows: my mother Angeles may occasionally seem passive, but inside she’s extremely active, who’s going to know better than your humble servant, when the coconut inside her spins at about a thousand m.p.h. and the best proof is all of what I’ve been saying, because if she weren’t my intermediary, I’d be quieter than the Congress during Gustavo Díaz Ordaz’s administration. All I want to say on this occasion is that thanks to her I know that she sees my father Angel, twenty-two years of age, when they all return to Mexico, D. F., and says: “He’s young. But he looks tired. He’s going to inspire too much compassion. No chick will be able to resist him.”