Carlos Fuentes: Christopher Unborn

“Mexico is a country of sad men and happy children,” said my father, Angel (twenty-four years old), at the instant of my creation.

Before that, my mother, Angeles (under thirty), had sighed: “Ocean, origin of the gods.”

“But soon there shall be no time for happiness, and we shall all be sad, old and young alike,” my father went on, taking off his glasses — tinted violet, gold-framed, utterly John Lennonish.

“Why do you want a child, then?” my mother said, sighing again.

“Because soon there will be no time for happiness.”

“Was there ever such a time?”

“What did you say? Things turn out badly in Mexico.”

“Don’t be redundant. Mexico was made so things could turn out badly.”

So she insisted: “Why do you want a child, then?”

“Because I am happy,” my father bellowed. “ I am happy! ” he shouted even louder, turning to face the Pacific Ocean. “I am possessed of the most intimate, reactionary happiness!”

Ocean, origin of the gods! And she took her copy of Plato’s Dialogues, the edition published in the twenties by Don José Vasconcelos, when he was rector of the University of Mexico, and put it over her face. The green covers bearing the black seal of the university and its motto, THROUGH MY RACE SHALL SPEAK THE SPIRIT, were stained with Coppertonic sweat.

But my father said he wanted to sire a son (me, zero years), right here while they were vacationing in Acapulco, “in front of the ocean, origin of the gods?” quoth Homerica Vespussy. So my naked father crawled across the beach, feeling the hot sand drifting between his legs but saying that sex is not between the legs but inside the coconut grove, around the svelte, naked, innocent body of my mother, crawling toward my mother with the volume of Plato draped over her face, Mom and Dad naked under the blazing and drunken sun of Acapulque on the day they invented me. Gracias, gracias, Mom and Dad.

“What shall we name the boy?”

My mother does not answer; she merely removes the tome from her face and looks at my father ironically, reprovingly, even disdainfully — not to say compassionately — although she doesn’t dare call him a disgusting male chauvinist pig. What if it’s a girl? Nevertheless, she prefers to overlook the matter; he knows that something’s wrong and can’t allow things to stay like that at this point in time and circumstance and so he solves the problem by nibbling at her nipples as if they were cherry-flavored gumdrops, cumdrops — postprandial but prepriapic jelly beans, puns my dad, in whose prostatic sack I still lie in waiting, innocent and philadelphic, with my sleepy chromosomatic and spermatic little brothers (and sisters).

“What shall we name the boy?”

“Things exist without anyone’s having to name them,” she says, trying not to reactivate their old argument about the sex of the angels.

“Of course, but right now I’d like a taste of that pear in heavy syrup of yours.”

“You and I don’t need names to exist, right?”

“All I need right now is that sweet thing of yours.”

“Just what I mean. Sometimes you call it the Hydra and other things.”

“An’ figs, sometimes.”

“And figs, sometimes”—my mother laughs—“as your Uncle Homero would say.”

“ Our Uncle Homero,” my father jokingly corrects her. “Ay!” Even he didn’t know if he was complaining about that undesired family tie or roaring because of the precipitate pleasure he did not want to see lost in the sterile sand, even if he knows, stretched out on his belly, that both good and evil are merely violent pleasures, and thus they resemble and cancel each other out in their infrequent eruption. As for the rest: kill time and kick ass.

“Yeah, yeah, go ahead and howl, or laugh at the old guy,” said Angeles, my mother, “but here we are on vacation in Kafkapulco, in front of the ocean origin of the gods, guests in his home.”

“His home, bull,” blurts out my father, Angel. “It belongs by rights to the peasants from the communal lands he stripped it away from, damn the old moneybags and damn his granny, too.”

“Who happens also to be your granny,” my mother says, “because you and I say ‘sea’ to refer to the ‘sea,’ but who knows what its real name is, the name the gods utter when they want to stir it up and say to themselves ‘Thalassa. Thalassa. We come from the sea.’”

Blessèd mother of mine: thank you for your multitrack mind — on one track you explain Plato; on another you fondle my father, while on a third you wonder why the baby must necessarily be a boy, why not a girl? And you say Thalassa, thalassa, well named was Astyanax, the son of Hector, well named (Angeles my mother, Angeles my wife looks toward the wrathful sea); well named was Agamemnon, whose name means admirable in his resistance (and what about my resistance, moans Angel my father, if you could only see how my Faulknerian chili pepper resists, it not only survives, it endures, it perdures, it’s durable stuff). Well named are all the heroes, my mother murmurs, reading at her vasconcelosite tome with its elegant Art Deco typography, to postpone with her first mental track the unrepeatable pleasure playing on the second: heroes who share the root of their identity with Eros: Eros, heroes. What shall we name the baby? What are we going to do today, January 6, 1992, Epiphany, and the anniversary of the very day of the First Agrarian Law of the Revolution, so that he’s conceived on ancient lands belonging to the community improperly appropriated by our uncle and lawyer Don Homero Fagoaga, and so that he will win the Discovery of America Contest on October 12 next? In which of my mama’s multitrack mind’s circuits and systems am I going to be onomastically inserted? I shudder to think. The paternal genes send horrible messages: Sóstenes Rocha, Genovevo de la O., Caraciollo Parra Pérez, Guadalupe Victoria, Pánfilo Natera, Natalicio González, Marmaduke Grove, Assis de Chateaubriand, Archibald Leach, Montgomery Ward Swopes, Mark Funderbuck, and my mother repeats the question:

“Then why do you want a son?”

“Because I am happy,” bawls my dad. She throws away the green volume published in 1921 by the rector of the University of Mexico, Don José Vasconcelos, with its thick Platonic pages that survived, look now your mercies, the murders at La Bombilla and Huitzilac, the massacre of the students in Tlateloco Plaza in 1968, the principal cadavers and the subordinate cadavers, the dead with mausoleums and the dead in potter’s fields, those dead on marble legs and those dead without a leg to stand on: what shall we name the child? Why the fuck does it have to be a boy? Because the contest rules state:

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: The male child born precisely at the stroke of midnight on October 12, and whose family name, not including his first name (it goes without saying the boy will be named Christopher), most resembles that of the Illustrious Navigator, shall be proclaimed PRODIGAL SON OF THE NATION. His education shall be provided by the Republic and on his eighteenth birthday he will receive the KEYS TO THE REPUBLIC, prelude to his assuming the position, at age twenty-one, of REGENT OF THE NATION, with practically unlimited powers of election, succession, and selection. Therefore, CITIZENS, if your family name happens to be Colonia, Colombia, Columbario, Colombo, Colombiano, or Columbus, not to say Colón, Colomba, or Palomo, Palomares, Palomar, or Santospirito, even — why not? — Genovese (who knows? perhaps none of the aforementioned will win, and in that case THE PRIZE IS YOURS), pay close attention: MEXICAN MACHOS, IMPREGNATE YOUR WIVES — RIGHT AWAY!