Christopher Unborn

Prologue: I Am Created

“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!

TOMORROW MAY BE TOO LATE

WHEN THE FROST IS ON THE PUNKIN

THAT’S THE TIME FOR DICKIE DUNKIN

THE MOMENT IS AT HAND

THESE NINE MONTHS WILL NEVER COME BACK AGAIN

So, ladies and gentlemen, let’s get procreating! Your pleasure is your duty and your duty is your freedom! In Mexico we are all free and anyone who does not want to be free should be punished! You can count on your judges, after all: have we ever let you down?

And she, at least on the track given over to her consciousness, no longer puts up any resistance, no longer says: What if it’s a girl? What shall we name the girl, huh? She only said it’s beautiful making love like this at noon on the beach my love, ever since you said don’t take care of yourself anymore, Angeles, I want to give you a child right next to the sea, I started getting hot, for the first time in a year I shaved my armpits and also the hair that peeks through the slots in my chair asada in this Acapulcoesque incandescence, the sun, not the sun, no my love, but your cherry jubilee in my hungry mouth, your scherezada from Tampique with its chilis and little beans which I’m digging up with my long finger, your cunt, your raccunto, your ass chérie, your cherry ass, Chère Sade, flagellated by my furious whip here on the beach of Kafkapulco, but a private beach my love, sometimes private property does have its virtues, right Prudhon? Pardon?

Shhh, my love, let me imagine your chers rassés, your ché arrasado, let me live, Chère Sade, in the feverish calendar of your opec-and-one nights, let me swim in the colors you sweat, your chromohydrosis, I yearn for your yen, if only for only thirty seconds over Tokyo, I pokey-you now your ass which is all the asses that bore you my love, the waves carry grass to your ass, my Arabian mare, my divine Angeles, I drink the wine of your nalglass, I hear the toll of your knelglass, I bury my nose in your knolgrass, Oh your Mexican ass my Angeles mía, the color of sweet quince, the smell of rotten mango and fresh red snapper, your historical ass, Angeles, febrile and Phoenician, dancing the Roman rumba, Spanish and spunning, Turkissable, Castilian and Moorish, tinged with Aztec, nahuátl nalgas, Cordobuzzable buttocks, Arab pillow of the almohades, ass on horseback and ass on camelback, second face-double cheeks — what is your name? What shall we name the baby? What says the Plutonic part of your Platonic book? Have you run out of words, darling?

My father dared to look at her. She had an illuminated halo over her head, which is to say (she was saying) more illuminated than ever when she said what she had to feel or felt what she had to say or listened to what she had to hear, but her halo dimmed, saddened, when the idiots, the jerks, the dimwits, the flatfeet wore it down: my mother, her halo very brilliant on this brilliant afternoon, was complaining about it, with her elbows jammed into the sand, exiling her questions:

“And what if it’s a girl, contest or not?”

“And what if it’s twins?”

My father stares at my mother’s elbows and desires them almost more than her snatch: nubile, sensual, exciting elbows, buried in the sand. The dry smell of the palm-leaf roof: a dry coolness. Coconut and mango and scallops with Tabasco sauce. The sea is the Pacific. The farther out you look, the more the water seems to burn. Thalassa. Thalassa.

And my father once more sucks her nipples as if they were Sucrets, with the very rhythm of respiration: Air, Hera, Air, Eros, Air, Heroes, Angeles, Scheherazade, Certified Pubic Accounter, First Novelist, drown yourself in the waters of time, wet your syllables my love, ass of my angelic amour (my mother is loved, in case you missed it, by my father on the beach and I am about to be created) in Acapulco. I am happy at noon and I want to have a son in a country of happy children and sad men before the time for happiness ceases to exist, and even if Mexico exists so things turn out badly for us, in front of the ocean origin of the gods.

“Isabella,” if it’s a girl we’ll name her Isabella, whimpered my mother, hanging on to the mainmast of my father’s caravel, suddenly shifted into her unconscious track, it may be a girl. My queen. What shall we name the girl? Well! Does it have to be a boy? Well! We’ll call her Isabella, Isabella the Catholic, Isabella the Chaotic.

My Queen: give me America, give a little America to your little Angel. Let me come near your Guahananí, Angeles, caress your Gulf of Mexico, tickle the delta of your Mississippi, excite your Cuba, get engulfed in your Gulf of Darien.

Give me America, Angel: come on, my Martín Fierro, here is your pampa mía, give me your Veragua, come close with your Maracaibo, take my Honduras, snuggle up with your Tabasco, kiss my Key West, Vene, Vene, Venezuela, anchor in my Puerto, Rico, just leave your Grand Cayman right there, let me feel in the Hispaniola, ay Santiago, ay Jardines la Reyna ayayay! Nombre de Dios:

May God Give You Your Name, my son, Name him, name him, he’s coming, he’s out! The only one among millions, silvery and quick, the gay bandolero, the swashbuckler, the matador, escaping from the myriad company of the chromosomatic legions. Name him, he’s out, nothing can stop him now, with all his genes on his back, bearing, oh my God, bearing all that we are.

“Hey! Genes are to blame for everything, is what Uncle Fernando Benítez said.”

“Certainly: Hegels are to blame for everything, is what Uncle Homero Fagoaga answers.”

“That’s a fact,” confirmed Uncle Fernando:

Angel, Angeles, bearing all that we are from our very origins, everything is inscribed in him, ay, my dearest DNA, he’s going to find your egg, Angeles, your sperm, Angel, bearing, my God, name of God, nombre de Dios, Hispaniola, my Queen, by God, bearing, Christ, Christ, Christ …

CHRISTOPHER

Now they’ve found one another, he’s swashed and buckled his way through the forest of blood and sweat and throbbing mucosities an’ impatience (and impatience, son, Uncle Homero corrects, with Don Andrés Bello’s grammar book in hand). Now I’ve come out pained and paining, separated forever from the only company I’ve ever known: my packages of cells, my belovèd generations armed with precursory cells, patiently stored in my father’s pouch, regenerating themselves constantly but hopelessly, my true grandfathers and great-grandfathers, my transitory though authentic parents, my internal genealogy, adiós! Ay dios! Out I come, running, crying, borne by the hot blood and inflamed nerves of my new father, leaving behind what up until now I knew and loved, amé, ahimé, oh me, oh my … I lounged God knows how long in my father’s pruny cave, and now my father is tearing me out of my internal genealogy, far from my secret family tree of inside fathers and grandfathers and great-greats and great-great-greats I belonged to up until this moment when this man decided to do what he is doing: throw me off balance, tear me up by the roots, nip me in the bud and ejaculate me, expel me from the peninsula, me ejaculated, she fornicated, dismissed, beginning my voyage in the middle of my true life. No one knows me, they’re having a ball out there and they don’t know that

HERE I COME!

accompanied by the invincible haha armada of my one billion brothers and sisters, little Christophers an’ Isabellas (and Isabellas, shouts Uncle Homero, furious) crackling like whips, in close formation, rolling out of my father’s barrel of fun, then abandoned all to the accidents of the black tunnel, fighting upstream in my mama’s Delaware, her salty mine and truffle war, the swift, lubricious infantries inside my mommy’s Thermópelos, Vulvar boatmen, little heads and long tails. We are legion, said Lucy, whipping and snapping, jumping hurdles, over the walls of the inhospitable mucous cavity that will end up being the walls of my homeland, the steaming baths of acid secretions that dry up our salty juices, Salaam Salamis, lost in the deserts of the wrong cylic exits, Luther’s Turnpike, no exit on this expressway, the Labyrinth of Solitude, ay! I see them die like flies because they’re out of gas, because they have two heads and twelve toes, because la cucaracha cannot walk without grass, they die by millions on the roadside, all around me, my soul brothers and sisters, Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, the Andrews Sisters, and the Hermanitos Brothers, les misérables who did not make it to the goal victorious. Victor who? Go! The millions of sperm fallen into Niagara, oh watery Waterloo of my decimated fraternity, thermopiled, forever separated from our young precursory grandfathers and from all the memories the sexy couple on the beach know nothing of: battles and songs, names and tastes, goodbye forever, you never escaped from the prison pouch of he who is about to become my Lord and Father, and the rest of you have perished in the battle against the juices and the blood and the perverse tunnels of her about to name herself Mamma Mia, we are being beaten up in the dark alleys of the cervical mucosity, no left turn through the unblocked cervix, a river of glass drowns me, I’m slipping and sliding spermatically, only a few of us remain now, whipping and snapping, exhausted, nature is not kind, nature is implacable, nature doesn’t weep for us, my poor agonizing brothers and I, I?

ALONE AT LAST, AT LAST ALONE

……….Terror……….Pain………. and I, alone once more: I the only one who made it to Treasure Island: my mother’s egg awaits me in its hiding place. She on her throne of blood, Queen of the Angels — Isabella, Angeles, opens her arms to me, the Champ, victorious over the millions of soldier boys and girls dead in the useless race to get to where I am, warm and cozy, avid and sad, asking for a room of my own. A sperm for an egg. Mother, there is only one. Now p’tit Christophe is all tangled up in his roots, now no one can save him from his fate, now il piccolo Cristoforo has met his destiny, let him now speak listen know: there he is. He had no time to jump on his horse.

You’ll see, Angel, my mom told my dad when they separated and rolled on the hot sand and then embraced once more and then he licked her elbows while I lodged myself singular and triumphant in the uterus of Isabella of the Angels, who told my father once more: “You’ll see, he’ll be born when you want, I swear to you my love, I’ll have him for you on time, sure I will, God I love you, ever since I met you, I couldn’t sleep all night long I was so damn happy, what does it matter, I swear I’ll give you a son because that’s what the rules say, that’s it, I’m no longer demanding the kid be a girl, no Isabella, only Christopher, just as long as you go on whispering into my ear what you’ve always said to me, honey:

“In Mexico, the whole problem is one of attitude — toward men with power and toward women without power.”

“Come back.”

“I never went anywhere.”

“Come here.”

“I was waiting for you.”

The two of them here lying on the burning sand in the Acapedro calderoon where life is a dream, happy, a land of sad men but happy children, but before time runs out for happiness but in Mexico where everything turns out badly for us but now only you and I holding hands, naked, exhausted, on our backs, with our eyes closed against the sun but with my halo spilled all over the sand like liquid stars. And from the heavens it rains, the sun is just a tiny bit clouded over, the wings of the big bad bumblebee cover us and from up above it rains on us, butterflies? petals? plumes? tropical clouds? You bet.

“Look,” said my dad, “it’s coming from up there.”

“Smell,” said my mommy. “It’s shit.”

Over their heads flew a pair of buttocks like the trembling wings of an uncertain bat, white and bland, drained of blood by the vampires of the sun: a man was flying across the wide Mexican sky, hanging from a blue-and-orange-striped parachute, tugged over Acapulco Bay by a roaring motorboat, kept aloft by hanging on to a tightrope in the thick air was our Uncle Homero (sixty years old), clad in a yellow guayabera, without his pants on, dripping the skyborne revenge of Montezuma, fleeing from the guerrillas in Guerrero, fearful and trembling, fleeing diarrheic with terror, followed by a sign written by a skywriter:

WELCOME TO SUNNY ACAPULCO

Homer, oh mère, oh mer, oh madre, oh merde origin of the gods: Thalassa, Thalassa.

“Now what are you going to do?”

“Tomorrow’s another day.”

“When? When will it be that kind of day?”

“The boy has to be born, understand?”

“But he’s so all alone. Nine months alone. With whom will he talk?”

“With your mercies benz.”

“Who?”

“The reader, just the reader.”

WELCOME TO LIFE, CHRISTOPHER PALOMAR