Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

The greatest human symbol ever invented:

THE MOTHER,

The sweet name where biology acquires a soul,

where nature becomes transcendent

and where sex becomes history:

OUR HOLY MOTHER!!!

And the minister offered his hand to the incredible apparition as she reached the last step:

GENTLEMEN: I PRESENT TO YOU OUR LADY MAMADOC.

He released her hand, fatigued, Jupiter without glory, devalued Pygmalion, observing in his most tranquil voice that the bureaucracy ends up creating what it conceives. Mamadoc will prove that the secret of the system is its secret. The important thing now is to keep up the momentum, gentlemen, of what we have set into motion.

“She is my gift to you, gentlemen.”

She never saw him again. At one point, she actually thought she was falling in love with him. Folly, folly. They sat her in her silver Mercedes with darkened windows; and with a motorcycle escort they brought her to the National Palace, they brought her up in an elevator, they led her out to the balcony, she knew what she had to do, weep, thank, wave, pretend the people were cheering her and weeping with her and then they, the multitudes of Mexico City, in this night of castles of fire and bands and fireworks and dead stars and showers of gold, would associate their national holiday, their September 15, not with a president or liberator, all devalued now, but with her, she-who-cannot-be-devalued, the mother who returned with her slave feet, her feet searching for her children, her ideal feet …

What Mexican alive in the Year of Our Lady 1992, when this story of the polyphonic gestation of the child Christopher Palomar and his imminent travels around an oceanic egg takes place, could forget the supreme instant of the national destinies that my father and mother remember while they plan out my birth for October 12 next so they will win the Christopher Contest, since without Her there would be no contest: Who, I repeat, who could forget the instant in which the spotlight focused on the central balcony of the Palace on the night of flying gold, the night of September 15, 1991, when the unique cornucopia of Mexico was a castle of light and the sparkle of a fleeting rocket when the spotlight moved away from President Jesús María y José Paredes, away from his family, from his cabinet, from his bodyguards, to tremble for an instant, indecisively, and then quickly stop, white and whitewashed like the object of their desire, on Her?

She with her mountain of platinum curls and her face whiter than the moon (the same moon Robles Chacón was staring at, but he had created this one; how they stared at her now, the children of Our Lady the Mother Doctor of All Mexicans!) and her spangled skirt shining with green reptile scales and her chubby little feet, white, naked, now that She, like an apparition, simulated, made people believe she levitated, rising above the copper railing and showing naked little tootsies, Our Lady, her bare little tootsies posed delicately over the horns of a bull; who was going to pay any attention to the President, who had resigned himself to this for the sake of the continuity of the system; who was going to pay any attention to the tight-lipped rage of Robles Chacón’s rival, Superminister Ulises López, ready, after so many defeats, to exchange wheels for deals; who was going to pay any attention to the sullen chief of police, Colonel Nemesio Inclán, so tenacious about remaining true to his archetype with his dark glasses at 11 p.m., and that stream of green spit running out of the corner of his mouth, when this celestial apparition, the subtle summa of all our mothers and lovers, shook the national flag over the heads of a million Mexicans and cried out. Gentlemen, can’t you see? she made no speeches, recalled no heroes, condemned no Spaniards, none of that! If the business at hand was to give the Cry of Dolores, Mamadoc, right here, gave her first Cry, as if she were giving birth to the mob that was staring at her in rapture, a shout that cracked the bells in the Cathedral, that knocked a pair of stone putti off the Sagrario Metropolitano, a Cry that made each and every one of the million souls down below with their tiny tricolor flags and their sugar candy and their lollipops shaped like oil derricks, believe that She was giving birth to all of them, that now this ceremony did make sense, that finally they understood what this Cry of Dolores was: it’s that our little mother is giving painful birth to us, sons of a whore! And yet that shout which was so loud was also so melodic, so tender, so sweet that it seemed like a bolero intoned on a velvety afternoon by Adelina Landín, by Amparo Montes, by the Aguila sisters …

My father and mother went together. My father, oh so lopezvelardian, shouted with impassioned and repugnant love to that figure who from now on would be at the center of our history:

“Prisoner of the Valley of Mexico! You don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into!”

Robles Chacón stared at his creation from a balcony at some distance from the system’s central nervous center. He looked at Mamadoc and then at the people — his plural enemy. He thought about his own parents. He’d never seen his father, Federico Robles, a ruined banker who died before his son was born. And his mother, Hortensia Chacón, had never seen him: she was blind. And now he was giving to all Mexico a mother that everyone could see and who could see them. Now he was the father of the mother of all.

She would be forgiven everything, that was the point. The triumph of the people would be to see in her what they didn’t have: she would have the right to have what the rich had, because she came from the secretarial pool of the SEPAVRE and was the girlfriend of a mortician and she had memorized all the boleros Manzanero and Agustín Lara had ever written, to the point that she could win one of her own contests, those famous (from now on) National Contests of Mamadoc.

She certainly could confess, and sublimate in the name of the system, all the corruption of the system: she would confess her propensity toward luxury, extravagance, ostentation; she would be forgiven this and more, but no one else would be; what in others would be a vice would be in her sincerity, popularity, admiration, matriarchal right.

Her astounded creator watched her, with her tall platinum hairdo, her décolleté flowing with diamonds, her cartridge belts crossed over her chest, her beaded bustle, her snakeskin petticoats, her bare feet, all of her as whitewashed as the moon, responding to the exclamations she aroused, trembling and weeping an instant before the masses did but persuading the masses to believe that they made her weep and tremble for their sake; and he would have wanted to say to her by way of farewell, seeing her enthroned, she all by herself assuring political legitimacy for fifty or a hundred more years, with no revolutions, with renewed hopes, that the sin of others was to have destroyed a nation to satisfy their vanity; she, on the other hand, could do the very same thing because, knowingly or unknowingly …

“Everything that is not vanity is pain, girl.”

He corrected himself instantly: “Excuse me … señora.”

Then the fireworks spelled out the night’s message:

NO ONE SHALL POSSESS HER BUT THE PEOPLE

For which reason she yawned this morning before the mirror and her hairdresser said to her, honey, don’t pucker your cunt, and she stood up, even taller than she was and mounted on the elaborate high heels she wore in private to balance out so many hours walking barefoot in public, and she gave the impudent, upstart wench a slap in the face, señora! señora! that’s right, I’m señora here and you’re my little maid, my little asshole, yes señora, pardon señora, and now she could remember herself as she was before all this because she had a reason and the power to do it: Minister Federico Robles Chacón, her creator, her torturer, the object of her passion, Mamadoc began to spit like a llama perched on a peak in the Andes, spitting on the mirrors which they’d finally let her look into, although they forbade her to have a son, now she understood it when she’d proclaimed this shitty contest about the shitty little Christophers, sewn up forever with diamonds sharpened like shark teeth, condemned forever to Virginity, not even Mary was required to do so much, they let Mary give birth, but not Mamadoc, Mary lost her virginity, but Mamadoc recovered hers, Mamadoc would not have a son, but she would proclaim the Son of the Republic, the odious infant who would be born on October 12 to inaugurate the Mexican dynasty of the Christophers, colonized colonists, no more need for elections, no more headaches, chosen successors, nonreelections, all over a dynasty, ingenious Federico Robles Chacón and she about to explode in rage, scratching at all the mirrors of identity, her hands sticky with reflections, her fingers smearing her own saliva over those fleeting portraits of her accumulated iconography, trapped by a bolero into feeling that, despite everything, she existed, she had a love, she was loved, that he was the one who whispered in her ear — in Lucho Gatica’s voice: