Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

Don Ulises guffawed over his own witticism, and once again patting Angel’s knee, he concluded: “See, kid? I put all my cards on the table. Now it’s your turn. I noticed you like my little Penny.”

“I go where my peenie takes me,” said my father cynically. “If you really want me to be frank with you…”

“I’ll tell you again: I like the fact that you’re a wise guy, but you’ve got to focus your energy. Just imagine if you were my son-in-law…”

Angel’s eyes clouded over with emotion, not because of Ulises but because of Penny.

“See what I mean? I’m putting all my cards on the table.”

My father understood perfectly. This was a second invitation for him to come across with something, but he refused to give in to the temptation to fall into Don Ulises’s most obvious trap. The old master still had a couple of cards up his sleeve. He repeated that he was sincere but he could be cold and calculating. He had just repeated that his maxim in terms of political action was “Don’t talk about anything, but think things over again and again.” His conversational style was a chess game in which Ulises, in all sincerity, could always say afterwards: “I knew it all along. You can’t surprise me.”

Even so, Angel sighed as he looked at this Machiavellian figure. I’m me, my young friend, in Ulises López there exists a sentimental, generous man, a man in love. He pushed a button and one wall took on a glassy opacity.

“How could I not be in love with my wife?” Ulises asked uselessly. “She’s much better-looking than my daughter. Just look at her.”

He pushed several buttons and the lights went down in the salon, but those near the screen (or was it a whorehouse mirror so he could look in from this side without being seen from the other?) brightened. On the other side appeared Lucha Plancarte de López yawning. She was wearing a pink silk robe with white feathers fluttering at her cuffs and collar. She brushed her teeth. Then she took off her robe and stood there in a scarlet lace monokini, her big bouncy breasts decorated with enormous black nipples that looked like black plums. Doña Lucha rinsed off a tiny razor and began very carefully to shave her right armpit, which was covered by a black stubble. She did the same with her left armpit, but this time she cut herself. She winced and then used spit to close the cut. Angel was fascinated by the trickle of blood that ran out of the decidedly gray underarm. Then Lucha studied her extensive bush, which rose in baroque curls almost to her navel and spread out on both sides like a golf course, as Don Fernando Benítez would have said. Doña Lucha swiftly soaped up the perimeter of her pubic lawn: with one hand she shaved herself, while with the other she gently caressed her labia. Her husband said to my father, “She isn’t alone, ha ha, look,” as she stuck her finger into a jar of (wine-flavored) Celaya jelly and then spread it over her clitoris, “she isn’t alone”: a Siamese cat impatiently watched the lady’s every movement and in a flash, as if trained to do so, jumped into its mistress’s lap and began to lick her recently shaved skin, cleaning it of any traces of leftover hair.

Suddenly, Doña Lucha stopped touching herself, stood stock-still, and stared at them, stared at my father (at least that’s what he thought), stared at them through the mirror with all the emotions in the world crossing her face, rage at being discovered in an intimate situation, surprise that her husband was accompanied by that young man, desire for that young man, envy for anyone in the world who was not alone, jealousy toward herself, and the solitude of her own lasciviousness, invitation (But for whom? Ulises? Angel? Was she looking at both of them? Was she looking only at Ulises because she was used to putting on this little pantomime for him and found him standing there with a strange man next to him? Was she looking at Angel, expecting to find him alone as she had promised Ulises and instead finding the two of them there united against her? Or were the two of them — she smiled for an instant — desiring her? Or were they laughing at her, and she tossed the ill-favored cat off her lap). Perhaps she wasn’t looking at anything, didn’t know anything, and her stares were only a solitary, ruinous deception? Every passion in the world had flitted across Doña Lucha’s face except one: shame. She raised a finger dripping clit jam to her lips as she looked at them. Ulises turned off the screen. The reader is free to choose.

Someone knocked at the door of the Dietrich-Garbo-Fleming salon.

“Come in, Penny,” said her father.

The girl walked in without looking at Angel.

“Show this young man to the Gloria Grahame bedroom,” said Don Ulises, without giving Penny, who wanted to interrupt to say, “But Mommy sleeps next door,” or Angel, who perhaps might have wanted to say, “But I have a pregnant wife at home waiting up for me,” any opportunity to protest.

Ulises’s eyes said: “I already knew it. I guessed it. You don’t surprise me. But obey me.”

Emotion clouded my father’s eyes, his reflexes, his very equilibrium as he walked ahead of Penny López down the spiral staircase in the Guggenheimic house in Las Lomas del Sol. He never turned his back on her, turning it instead toward the steep staircase that led to the bedrooms. She never looked at him, disdainful to the end, the bitch, he walking bowlegged, backward so he wouldn’t lose sight of her for an instant, so he could explain to her, tell her what he’d been thinking since New Year’s Eve in Aca, now that her sweet-sixteenish presence was within range, touchable, perfumed, so near and yet so far. She stared past him, and when he stopped right in front of her to force her to see him, she said something he took, to soften the blow, to be what Penny must have said to every man in her life, to him too, okay, but not only to him:

“You can look, but you can’t touch. You’re poor, ugly, and a boor. You’re not for me.”

She went on ahead, but he thought that if he didn’t do something right at that moment, he might never see her again, he might never be able to tell her what he was bearing inside, never mind that she wouldn’t understand a word. Angeles, my mother, now she would certainly understand, and I inside her, but of course! And if I know all this, Reader, it’s because the same thing my father Angel hastily told Penny López that night when the Valley (Anáhuac) Princess led him to her guest bedroom, he repeated on his knees and quite slowly to my mother some days later, when Angeles and I within her went to live in the house of Dad’s grandparents Rigoberto and Susana, leaving my father to his freedom, and he didn’t even have that because Uncle Homero, once again in favor with the Powers That Be (when he discovered that he’d never been hated by them and that they’d been anxiously searching for him everywhere, oh where oh where has our little Homero gone? which is what the PRI delegate asked who met him at the door of his house when the quondam candidate for Senator appeared and threw a tantrum when he realized they always waited for him there and that he’d spent all that lost time with his insane and unappreciative niece and nephew), returned with a squad of blue-uniformed thugs, agents of the district attorney’s office, and a team of lawyers to sue for the return of the house of bright colors in Tlalpan. But before that there occurred the following, which I faithfully reproduce for your lordships, more precisely, look at the dangers a fetus runs when everyone forgets he exists and, if they do remember, merely add it to a list of errors. So I exist and I exist as an error! A gigantic error, gigantic luck, an ephemeral and fleeting apparition in the infinity of a bubble — I—who managed to squeeze his drop of liquid out of creation at the exact moment that it coincided with the strange, improbable temperature of some moist drops in the improbable warmth of love, and what the fuck do all these accidents matter to the great prestellar cloud that is immutable, eternal, infinite, and I tell you parents of mine and universe what I, hidden here, know all on my own: