Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

There was solid evidence that something was happening. Because there were certain interesting earnings to be had in foreign exchange. Because of this proverb translation business, my parents had the pleasure of making incursions into the gigantic Tex-Coco-Mex-Mall, which was divided into the four arms of an enormous cross, Mall-efic, Mall-feasance, Mall-function, Mall-formed, where, on the bed of what in ancient times was Lake Texcoco, all the luxury, the elegant consumer goods, the chance to go shopping without getting on lines, abundance: my father says it’s something like the foreign-currency stores in Communist countries — if you don’t have dollars, don’t bother coming in.

Angel goes up the escalator in the Nuevo Liver Puddle, which happens to be going down: he has his hand resting on the rubber handrail. He doesn’t lift it, not even when (much less then) he sees a woman’s hand, which is coming down. He touches it. Sometimes the feminine hand pulls back. Sometimes it doesn’t. Other times it squeezes. Others it touches lightly. Others it caresses. And other women, no sooner do my mommy and I look the other way, return to the scene of the crime and leave tiny pieces of paper in my father’s predisposed hand. My father once again applies the eternal motto of the eternal Don Juan (which he is): Let’s see if it’s chewing gum and if it sticks!

Which doesn’t mean that amid this florid May, as my mom’s tummy grows (and I, too, inside her), my father was not assailed by the anguished desire to know if he was getting old without having experienced sexual plenitude, if he’d let opportunities slip away, even if the sense of the contradiction between his ideas and his practices held him back. His renascent sexuality, was it progressive or reactionary? Should his political activity lead him to monogamy or to the harem?

Ultimately he concluded that a good screw explodes all ideologies.

She forgives him everything, the jerk (I say), because, says the egghead, jealousy is an exercise based on nothingness: the other is not there, she refuses to see it (her): the other woman. What is there, finally, is jealousy and its object: which is invisible. What matters to her is that he comes to her at night and says forgive me, I’m not perfect, I want to be something else, and I still haven’t reached it, help me, Angeles, and she, the dumbbell, really loves him, since she sees in him everything that is opposite to what she is, everything, therefore, that completes her. But, for all that, she does not give up the hope that after a time they will be equals.

“Give me things to think about at night,” she said to him one day, and now she can’t complain. He’s giving them to her, by the ton. She does not know if little by little, instead of being fascinating, she is becoming fascinated by Angel and my father’s problem of creating a program of rebellion and personal creation and not being able to purge out the temptations that deny and smash that program. This fascinates Angeles, but Angeles ceases to be fascinating for him and she does not realize it and I don’t know how to communicate it to her. She doesn’t know how to say anything other than this hint of a reproach:

“I hope you’re not going to say someday that you wished you were like everyone else.”

Angeles, my mother, knows how to radiate an admirable confidence. People say that she and my father met when they were very young and incomplete. She thinks the two of them can shape each other, share their formation, and get to know each other. She’s an optimist. That’s why she admits that sometimes one wins and sometimes the other. It’s a game they have both accepted ever since the two of them were raped at the same time by Matamoros and his cohorts in Malinaltzin: there they both lost, but they both won the ability to accept what happened one afternoon in the month of March without blaming each other. Only in May did they begin to compensate for that sublime nobility and to make barbed little comments that meant, this time I win, this time you lose, since even Angeles’s intrinsic nobility, when it notes Angel’s peccadillos, becomes a figure of speech: this time I win because I’m noble and understanding. Then he lets her know that he will not feel blameworthy unless she shows a little outrage. What sickens him is precisely all this nobility of soul: my mom as Gerald Ford — let’s pardon everyone in sight so we can be home in time for cocktails. But if my mom shows the slightest disgust, then my father starts talking again about women as the creatures who created guilt. Then she gets indignant and says to him:

“Draw me a picture of them.”

“I’m better at telling,” says Angel and he puts out the light, and I’m left disconcerted. But, after a while, one or the other (and this is where they really take turns, punctually, mathematically) brings his or her cheek close to the ear of the other, one looks for the other’s little foot (like a hamster), one (him) slips his fingers into her luxurious mink triangle, one (she) has already taken the measure of the bag where the golden nuggets are stored, and we’re off and running: the sheets get hot, the pillows are fluffed up, and my old friend the guy with no ears is already inside his home and I happily greet him: Ahoy there! Animus intelligence!

How much time will pass before each one refuses to see him- or herself in the mirror of the other, before each one refuses to know through the other if he or she is getting older, if he or she still makes love well, if he or she should go on a diet, if he or she is taken seriously, if they really do share memories? Who knows, Reader! Better turn the page on this chapter.

Médoc d’Aubuisson, the López family’s cook, was the only survivor of the final explosion, attributed to the Princes of Turenne and the Abbesses of Tooloose (POTATOS), the legitimist terrorist organization that blew up the ancient Le Grand Vefour restaurant, which had occupied a beautiful corner of the Palais Royal in Paris since the times of the Duc de Choiseul.

The reason the POTATOS gave for their attack was that Le Grand Vefour was serving meals to functionaries from the neighboring Ministry of Culture on the rue de Valois and the ministry was the brain behind red, antimonarchist propaganda in France. Farewell Vefour, welcome Médoc: the survivor’s celebrity caused Doña Lucha Plancarte de López, wife of the ex-Superminister Ulises López, to demand the services of the chef de cuisine: how the girls would howl when they found out!

Fought over by the bourgeoisies of Peru, the Ivory Coast, and the Seychelles, the emir of Abu Dhabi, and, last but not least, the Republic of Mexico, Médoc accepted the last offer because of one special circumstance: his great-great-grandfather had been cook for Princess Salm-Salm, Maximilian’s lover in Cuemavaca during the ephemeral Mexican Empire. Besides, one of Médoc’s uncles, a hit man from Marseilles, emigrated to El Salvador and founded the death squads there. Médoc wanted at least to be near his American past, but he accepted only after making outrageous demands: these meteques from Las Lomas del Sol would not only pay him in dollars and in New York (twenty thousand per month) but would also unquestioningly accept his menus and would purchase the raw materials he required from wherever they were to be found — be it Roman truffles in season or Chinese ants from the tombs of Qin Shi Huang — at whatever the price; once a week the lady of the house (Doña Lucha herself) would prepare and serve him his meals, only so that insidious comparisons be established, and although Médoc had the right of veto with regard to the persons the Lópezes might invite to eat his delights, he absolutely ruled out dinners for more than eight people.