Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

INCEST IS BEST BUT ONLY AS LONG AS YOU KEEP IT IN THE FAMILY, flashed the Samurai in immediate dialogue with Federico Robles Chacón. He turned it off and said to himself: Who can be eating those microchips disguised as sugar which I had intended for my rival Ulises López?

Reader: Think about us. Don’t abandon us like that, just because your prurience has been tickled by my father’s adventures in the López household. Stop. Think. Remember that she and I are left here alone. She with her abdomen weighed down by an intense increase in blood circulation, in pain because of the expansion of her uterus, as heavy-breasted as a cow: look on her and sympathize with her irritated nipples and her colossal appetite, her weight increasing, hormone production in her placenta increasing, all her glands stimulated, tired, sleepy, ferociously nauseous, imagining banquets of foie gras and couscous, goulash and Aztec ants, and no one there to go out and get them for her, with this absence without leave of that bastard, pater meus, who has decided to drain his life to the bottom (the ass!) before becoming a pure and idealistic man. When? On October 12 next? And as if that weren’t enough, I’m here robbing the poor thing’s calcium, milk, almost half her iron (I want ostrich eggs with truffles!), and she threatened by the loss of all her teeth! Shit, gentle Readers, just think: why in the world did my mother have me? Why did hundreds of thousands of millions of mothers have all the sons of bitches born after Citizens Kane and Able? That’s the way it goes: no going backward: I’m in my fifth month since conception, and I can use my little feet to swim, tap out secret messages, dance in the water, and kick: until this month I paddled in the water without touching her; from now on, on top of Angel’s infidelity, the poor lady has to put up with kick after kick on the walls of this homeland of mine: my mother thinks she’s got Moby Dick in person inside her, the poor dear lives in the bathroom, tenser and tenser, with vaginal secretions, hemorrhoids, cramps, upset stomach (my father doesn’t give her love, so she uses Maalox instead), her hands, feet, and face all swell up, she gets hypertension, she has difficulty breathing, she’s bloated, thankful she has no wedding ring because she could never get it off, she feels hot at the oddest times, sweats, would like to eat but also to put on talcum powder, toilet water, smell fresh, she is constantly afraid she smells and doesn’t realize it, a secretion dries on her nipples, she’d would like to squeeze a tub of Suzy Chapultepecstick onto each of them, God help me! and there I sit or stand or float uselessly inside her, goddamn Olympic swimming champion, the poor man’s Mark Spitz, yippie, and tell me, your mercies benz, if all that wouldn’t make you think twice before trying it!

Which is why I ask you, Reader: now more than ever, don’t abandon us! Understand that your reading is our company, our only consolation! We can put up with everything so long as you hold our hand! Don’t be cruel! Go on reading!

What would my father remember, ultimately, of his stormy but forgettable affair with Mrs. Lucha Plancarte de López? Just this: how on the first night she told him it didn’t matter what her husband Ulises had said: take a good look at her now while she’s naked. She didn’t know if Ulises had actually said that, and she would never tell Angel if she’d seen them spying on her from the star’s water hole. She asked him to believe that she had surprised him ogling her, she made him her lover, but she didn’t demand that he kill her husband in exchange for her favors. The idea would never have occurred to Angel if she hadn’t repeated it a hundred times: I would never demand you kill my husband for having incited you to look at me while I was naked. But the truth is that at least half the ideas that feed a love affair belong to neither partner and come instead from the couple; the bad thing is that the same is true for destructive ideas. What was great about Doña Lucha was that her vagina had a life of its own, it was more self-propulsive than, say, a dog, its movements were like those of an open mouth (a banal comparison, I know), but also like a gloved hand, an undulating, down-filled duvet, a bowl of boiling hot fudge, a swirling Jacuzzi, Seabiscuit winning the Kentucky Derby, the emotion of the Quartetto Italiano playing Haydn’s Emperor, to say nothing of the peregrinations of the wind god Ehécatl when he met the sea goddess Amphitrite right in the middle of the Sargasso Sea and above sunken Atlantis: wow!

And the way they sat down, night after night, the Scheherazade of Las Lomas and her innocent Sultan, to tell each other stories about street violence, encounters with the police, armed robberies, ecocidal horror stories, the criminal drip-drip-drip of toxic waste, truck exhausts, water and air contamination: and how hot that made them, she hotter than he, but even he got really hot (Doña Lucha knew it perfectly well) when she brought out a blue-velvet album and showed him the outline of Penny’s foot when she was a baby, the list of the presents she got when she was baptized, who came to the baptism, and especially the lock of the little girl’s hair, pasted onto the blue page and decorated with a blue ribbon. Doña Lucha’s excitement grew:

“Look, Angel, here’s the proof that she had light hair when she was a little girl, look, it just isn’t true what those gossipy bitches say, I never bleached her little twat, I never straightened her hair down there, which is what my enemies say. Penny’s light, she doesn’t have kinky hair, she doesn’t have any of that half-breed blood from the Guerrero coast like her daddy, she took after me, and my pa was an honest businessman who emigrated from Zapotlán in Jalisco, where the French left behind a ton of kids during the Empire, and they’re all fair-haired, don’t you believe me, Angel honey? And then she asked him to look at her mons veneris, with its thick bush, almost wavy it was, but he should screw her as if she were a black rumba dancer, what the hell, she knew how to move her hips like the best Afro dancer. Alas, but my father, no matter how much he tried, he could not ascend with her to the febrile climax that marked my conception nor attain the anticipated glory he would have with Penny. Finally he reached the point when, with Doña Lucha, it just wouldn’t get hard unless he had Penny’s childhood curl right before his eyes.

One night, when she received him sobbing and he didn’t even bother to ask why, she blurted out:

“Are you married?”

“No.”

“Your wife’ll like that news.”

That night, after Doña Lucha sucked him dry, wore him out, left him mere skin and bones, Angel became desperate because he realized his sacrifices were not bringing him any nearer to that eagerly desired night with Penny. So, toward the end of June, he set about making the lady feel old and decrepit, by reminding her every once in a while about how old she was (forty-eight, fifty?), by tricking her into betraying herself by recalling the remote past, setting traps for her so she’d admit having learned how to roll her hips studying the belly dancers at the Tivoli during the fifties, that she’d learned to sing boleros listening to Agustín Lara in the wee hours of the morning in the old Capri cabaret in the Regis Hotel. He tried to get Doña Lucha to hate him by forcing her to do hideous things like sitting her in front of a mirror and having her make faces, or no dickie ce soir, or making her take out her false teeth in front of him, or having her make herself up as a gargoyle by painting on thick, pointed eyebrows, emaciated lips, creases in her forehead, and hollows in her cheeks, forcing her to pull out chunks of hair so he could have it as a souvenir, to limp around the room and give herself diarrhea by forcing her to share huge amounts of papaya and granulated sugar, which she secretly served him, hoping that the aphrodisiac would bring about certain effects and unintentionally sending multiple incomprehensible and garbled messages to Robles Chacón’s computer, overloaded to the point of saturation because when Chef Médoc returned from his vacation, confirmed with a sardonic smile that the Sweet-Sixteen Party was a failure, did not weep over the premature disappearance of Ms. Ponderosa, but did anxiously hunt for the minicomputers in the shape of granulated sugar to start serving them again to Don Ulises, he had to ask for a new supply from his secret Maecenas, Robles Chacón, who in this way learned that Ulises was no longer using sugar on his papaya and that instead the not very secret lover of Mrs. López did and that he was a certain Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, the nephew of the newly resurrected senatorial candidate for Guerrero, Don Homero Fagoaga, and that there was something fishy about this whole deal, or as Don Bernardino Gutiérrez, first supporter of President Calles in the state of Guerrero would say, even the lame are high-wire walkers in this country.