Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

Our little Lucha, on the other hand, had fewer refinements than her husband: for her there existed nothing beyond stores, stores, and more stores, especially U.S. malls; the reward for being proudly rich and Mexican was to spend hours obsessively patrolling the Galleria in Houston, Trump Tower in New York, the Hancock in Chicago, the Rodeo Collection in Los Angeles, and Copley Place in Boston: hours and hours, from the moment they opened until closing time, Lucha Plancarte de López walked more miles through those commercial corridors than a Tarahumara Indian through his mountains.

“That’s why we made the money in the first place! And now what happens? I hate your guts!”

With these words skiing over the fissures and grooves in his cerebral cortex, Ulises went back into his bedroom, laid himself down, and instead of counting sheep, repeated: I did lots of favors, lots of favors were done for me, returned to me, there was never a contradiction between my interests and the interests of the nation, it’s all favors, I do the nation a favor, the nation does one for me, I’ll do it back, how will I get even with Robles, how will I get even with, how will I get zzzzzzzzzzzzz and Lucha, on her side, was trying to get to sleep by reading, at her husband’s entreaty, López Velarde’s Sweet Fatherland. Learn something, honey, he’d say, don’t always look so dumb, you’re Ulises López’s wife, don’t forget that, and all that seemed true to the lady, but what stuck in her craw was that line about “The Christ Child bequeathed you a stable,” an idea that instead of making her relax set her to hopping around, subliminally reminding her that Christ was the God born in a manger (they always pop up where you least expect them!) and literally reminding her that a mob of squatters left over from the earthquake were building mangers on her property. Bullshit, said Doña Lucha Plancarte de López, wife of the eminent financier and minister, stables for Christmas Eve, fine, God bequeathed to me my house in Las Lomas del Sol, 15,000 square feet, a tennis court, black marble toilets, the bedrooms lined with lynx to rub up against cozily before making whoopee on the water bed with a melodious musical background by the great composer Mouseart piped in and my televised scale that electronically tells me my weight and the image of the ideal figure to which I get a little closer every day: size 12 here, girls, so drop dead! Besides, think of all we did for our little Princess Penny to make her existence cute: a heart-shaped Jacuzzi, a ballroom right here with three hundred of the latest cassettes, a little casino where her friends can have fun with backgammon tables, roulette wheels, a screening room done in red velvet, a stable of ponies to pull cute little coaches when Penny rides around the garden dressed up as Marie Antoinette, she says, although to me she looks like an elegant little shepherdess, and a track for dog racing, a cockpit, a little heated pool in the shape of the States, a modest copy of the first floor of Bloomingdale’s, modest because we don’t want to cause any fuss, what with the crisis, and we almost never travel anymore, but it does have shopgirls imported directly from the U.S. and a perfume counter that, my God! makes my, my … my nose twitch! So have a good time with your stable! Me, I’ll take my cash, my property, my little girl who speaks English, my greenbacks to travel with once in a while even if it’s to Mexamerica, my little group of girls to laugh with and have a good time with and a few drinks, or more than a few — who’s counting? Stables: not for this filly!

* * *

My parents spent half of June running from one government office to another, from the SECULELA, which was where Angeles composed her Mexican versions of Shakespeare, and where, naturally, the contest ought to have some cultural impact. They were sent back to the Palace of the Citizenry, where the same old man in the blue visor read them the following regulation:

“You cannot enter the contest unless you present the child first.”

“But how can we present the child when he hasn’t been born yet?”

“No way around this regulation. It says right here that only those who present their child can enter,” all of which led them to the SEDECONT (Secretariat for Demography and Birth Control) to see if they could find an explanation for this requirement, but all they found there was the same old man who worked in the morning at the Palace of the Citizenry, with the same cripple in his wheelchair, eternally sitting in his own shit with no one to help him, acting as doorman. My parents, more fatigued than desperate (and Angel thinking: in any case, she’ll have the baby, contest or no contest, quincentennial or no) (and Angeles saying to herself: this contest is essential to Angel’s free, unstructured life, the contest gave him a goal; without it, I wonder if his adventure and his faith, his love for anarchy and his ideology of order will all be compatible…), decided that to cover all contingencies they ought to earn more money by means of new jobs and enterprises, and that explains the birth of their parallel activity in

TUGUEDER

A Service That Brings People Together

and Organizes Brilliant Parties

Get Yourself Out of the Labyrinth of Solitude!

“Do you know any lonely proletarians?” asked Egg, explaining why the project was a sure thing. “You don’t, right? Only the rich are going to need this service, mark my word.”

Baking Services Under the Direct Supervision of: Baby Ba

Service Director: Angel Palomar y Fagoaga

Meanwhile, Angel went on translating sayings, Angeles translated classics into street talk. Orphan Huerta hired himself out to the various newfangled political parties that had sprung up in the wake of President Paredes’s free-will reform: he became a political cream-pie thrower, an essential figure at all political rallies. Hipi Toltec, because he looked like a magician, sold pills that let you dream your favorite TV program, and Egg along with Baby Ba devoted themselves exclusively to TUGUEDER.

“Bet you can’t guess,” said Egg one June afternoon to Angel. “I just got a call from the house of Ulises López. They want us to organize a birthday party for their daughter, Penny.”

Egg paused as he was writing down a list and looked knowingly at Angel: “Remember her dancing at Divan the Terrible down in Aca?”

How could he forget her? Egg watched the reverie pass through the gypsy (if myopic) eyes, streaked with Moor and Aztec, of his friend Angel: even if Penelope’s golden butterfly eyes had merely fluttered over him that New Year’s Eve, his own were fixed on his memory of her that night: he’d only seen her once, and for that reason his visual memory was charged with nostalgia; she was more beautiful, more brilliant than if he’d seen her every day and, above all, more beautiful than if she had noticed him even once: ah, the golden girl, who abandoned the sun to come down here and console the stars, said Ada Ching that night (rightly, for a change), and it was then Penny’s eyes had settled like two dark butterflies on my father, only to move on, never to return. She danced, lifted her leg, showed her thigh under her sequined skirt, and a down-covered crease, a slice of quince, a tiny, moist copper coin which suddenly, tonight, my father desires more than anything in the world, as he spontaneously rejects my mother, the contest, and me, desiring more than anything else a night with Penny, his penis in Penny, penetrating Penny, forcing Penny to look at him with her butterfly eyes as they come at the same moment, all for the promise which in that instant passed through his mind, filling his with color fugues, red and blue circles that light up and go out, futuristic, energetic murals shot into the void, all in the name of his resurrected passion for Penny López, the daughter of the minister, and all because feeling nostalgia, living on nostalgia, on the unreachable becomes intolerable for my father, a kind of death in reverse, a waiting for the past in order to die in it, an impotent dissatisfaction with what is already dead and gone. A catatonic nostalgia for the films of Constance Bennett or the records of Rudy Vallee or Schiaparelli’s dresses or fin-de-siècle postcards from Baden-Baden was possible, but so was a violent nostalgia to recover Fiume, annex the Sudetenland, or manifest your destiny to Texas and California: my father didn’t want nostalgia, he wanted Penny and he wanted Penny to want penis, and when he desired all this, we (the contest, Mommy, and Baby Meme) faded into the background, although my father did feel enough remorse to admit the faults in his stable character, which was conservative, traditionalist; damn, man, he dared to say aloud to Egg, everything conspires against what I want to be; and that’s how it would be if you wanted to be just the opposite, our buddy Egg said with a smile in his eyes; I can’t stop playing the lover boy, even though it means putting my balls on the line, said my father in silence (I know he said it because later on he said it aloud to my mother):