Christopher Unborn

1. Your Truth of Blessed Bread

Pay attention now, Reader: wait for me because I’m going to need you more than ever, don’t hide from me, don’t go away: you have to be there when I need you to lend me a hand so that I can recover everything I shall lose, I’m certain of it, when I abandon my mother; not yet: my mother is alive and I am inside her during these last days of my gestation, my mother is alive, sitting in the Church of San Felipe Neri in Oaxaca, surrounded by fleurons and looking (since she still can’t look at me!) at a Holy Child of Atocha dressed in brocade and rose-colored feathers and as she looks at the Holy Child our buddy Egg looks at her with a mixture of melancholy and unbounded passion but she and I know that something is going to happen, a tremulous premonition makes both of us see you, Dad, blazing along the highway on a broken-down Kurosawa motorcycle ripped away from the body of a Yankee sentinel, far from the temptations of sweet tropical Veracruz, far away and returned to the sacred highlands, rapidly along the road from Orizaba and Tierra Blanca and the Tuxtepec River, over hill over dale, through Cuicatlán toward Oaxaca. My father, who left Bubble Gómez and his refrigerated truck full of edible cadavers as well as Colasa Sánchez with Professor Will Gingerich united for better or for worse, while you, Dad, you have no reason to doubt it, it’s for better, for better it will be that you ride toward us, toward my mother and toward me, certain of the place where we’re all going to meet come on, where else could it be?

Oh, how I see you, Pop, tall and gypsy-colored and green-eyed and myopic and tense, every muscle on your angular face more sharply drawn than ever, the bad roads beating you and bouncing you on your balls, which is where you feel the physical danger of the highway, its violence, its potholes, and that I feel with you because that’s about where we relate, you and I, what the fuck, that’s where we begin: that’s where America was invented, that’s where it was desired, that’s where it was needed, and nowhere else: America is in my father’s balls!

* * *

He’s biking along toward Oaxaca on the Christopher Columbus Highway, a rioting sea of potholes, and my father says son don’t be born without me don’t be born halfway my son wait for your father I’m on my way to you I’m almost there wait just a little longer Christopher wait for me hope stop time I’m just about there Angeles don’t get all self-absorbed without me don’t give birth without me don’t close the circle yet without me don’t just be you two but we three always three don’t leave me out of your halo Angeles let me enter your light don’t finish your light without me don’t take your air away without me don’t have our son without me look I’m coming back forgive me and forgive me above all for not explaining to you that I left you for reasons I will never understand completely, but that I began to understand, know when? when I saw the gringo professor and Colasa Sánchez risk sharing everything even the fearsome myth even the painful past to transcend, in the dangerous love of a couple, the social stupidity of reputation appearances conventions. Because if two people really love each other Angeles that’s the most revolutionary thing in the world that changes the world just that there’s nothing more to do but live a love telling to go fuck themselves all those who will tell who told what happened before will be or will not be will do or will not do with those whom the middle class fills its days without imagination without love withoutwithout the substitution of possible quantities of love for equivalent quantities of things and I lost and disoriented never reached this but between my conservative revolution and your leftist revolution I inserted a passion called jealousy and a justification called machismo and because of them I was unable to imagine the worst thing that could happen to me: not that I would cheat on you, Angeles, but that you would no longer think about me, that killed me with jealousy, that is what pulled me out of my sensual justification: a world in which you could go on living with our son without loving me anymore without even thinking about me: I was no longer jealous of anyone but of myself Angeles in the instant in which I imagined not only your absence I confess it or that of the child but my absence from your world and that of our son: your light without me your air without me your body without me is what I cannot stand from now on and that’s why I’m returning so that you pardon me and admit me once again into your light your air your flesh: listen to me Angeles and Christopher: my words are a call for help! I put on the brakes, I skid, the dust covers me.

My father entered the church in Oaxaca: golden glory, intense perfume of flowers and the neighboring bakeries, incense and recently washed tile floors; he went to her, touched her shoulder. She did not look at him. She raised her veil and showed him the nape of her neck.

My mother dropped the volume of Plato published by the UNAM with green covers and the black shield THROUGH MY RACE THE SPIRIT WILL SPEAK.

She had to lift her long hair, which she promised not to cut until she finished reading the Cratylus.

Egg looked at them together and stood up from the pew.

Egg and the Baby Ba walked out, he with his flat feet and his bald head, she wearing her plaid schoolgirl’s smock, with her tresses and little round face.

And my saddened heart: don’t go away, little girl, don’t leave me alone, Baby Ba! Suppose that now, as it seems, everything is forgiven and the couple reunite and I’m left alone: who but you can be with me, little girl, Baby Ba: remember I’m the only one who sees you as you are! Don’t forget that! Don’t forget me!

Ah, the egoism of love. No one does anything to get me closer to the girl, who goes off, following Egg along the nave of the Church of San Felipe Neri in Oaxaca an October morning in 1992. She turns back, holding the hand of our buddy, and looks at me:

She waves goodbye to me with her little hand raised to the height of her cheek.

Bye-bye. Ciao. See you soon, sweetie pie!

The church is empty at this hour.

My father holds up my mother’s long hair. He brings his lips to my mother’s perfumed nape. He bares only her back, her shoulders her nape. My father kisses the incomparable softness of my mother Angeles’s body. Angeles gives him the ecstasy of the acid fragrance of her armpit; she gives him her shoulders, good for a copious, liquid cry; she gives him the wingèd virtue of her soft bosom and the sleepy quintessence of her light back: breathing all of her in, forever in love with what is soft about my mother, how I want to fall asleep in your arms, to forget everything, Penny, Lucha, and Ulises and the Ayatollah and Colasa and Bubble Gómez’s truck and the Veracruz war. I wanted to sleep in the crackling sheets and imagine her as I saw her, dressed in the radiant mourning of resonant starch, with her coppery eyes and her ruddy cheeks, and I wishing she would caress me as she caressed the beads on her rosary with her fine, agile fingers … the luxury of ivory and mother-of-pearl.

He told her again that he could not desire her and only desire her, that she had to give him whatever she had even if it were on the threshold of the cemetery. Her feet. He dreamed wide awake of her feet. He asked for her feet. But at that moment she said no. She then spoke for the first time to say no. Not this time. Everything will repeat itself except this.

“Why?” asked my father.

“I don’t want you ever to see me insane, dried out, or sick. That’s why.”

My father understood then (I understood, says my father) that this time he was not going to take off her shoes (I did not take off her shoes), nor was she going to offer (her feet) so that I wouldn’t get sick (because of absolutes) here in Oaxaca (where the best and worst of me began) (my mission, Angel my father now laughs): (your love, the best of me, says my father, and she repeats it with him).

She raised her thaumaturgical eyes and looked into my father’s green eyes.

My mother gave my father the water she held in the hollow of her hands to drink.

When we left the church, nevertheless, the unexpected was waiting for us: a white Shogun limousine right in the Oaxaca plaza, a uniformed Oriental chauffeur wearing a black cap, obsequiously opening the car door, next to which, on foot, leaning against the half-open window, one little Gucci-poochie foot coquettishly posed on the carpet of the limousine, the other posed unceremoniously on the cobbles of the Oaxaca plaza, dressed, all of him, in white as if for an extemporaneous First Communion, in his hand an elegant malacca cane which he twirled in his idle fingers before our astonished eyes, his jowly face perfectly polished, shiny, pulled tight, well shaven except for the tiny black spot of a mustache on his permanently sweaty upper lip: our Uncle Don Homero Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca, of the best etc.…

“Ah, dearly beloved niece and nephew, don’t gape at me in such an astonished fashion.” Don Homero laughed musically. “Rather, you should repeat as the sublime poet Don Luis de Góngora said in disquieted contemplation of these Fabio, oh grief, you see before you, fields of solitude, faded hills were once famous Cempoala, or as his worthy successor, the poet Don Octavio Paz, in the same place but three centuries later: Only the fat academic is immortal! Here I am, and as your favorite poet might say (Homero said, wagging his censorious sausage finger), you seek Acapulco in Oaxaca, oh pilgrim! and Acapulco in Oaxaca you do not find because Acapulco turns out to be in Acapulco, and, oh Quevedo, grandfather of terrorist dynamiters, only the ephemeral remains and lasts! Which is to say, niece and nephew, October 12 is coming and with it the Quincentennial of our discovery, or as the Indians of Guanahaní said when they saw the caravels approach, Hurray, hurray, we’ve been discovered! But I, modest man that I am, only desire that the child of our blood, destined to win, if God wills it, the national contest of the little Christophers, come into this world with comforts and auguries worthy of his high destiny, for which I place at your and your comrades’ disposal my humble carriage — and inside the limousine my parents saw with horror Egg seated between Homero’s little sisters Capitolina and Farnesia, they full of smiles, kind, of course, wearing summery flowered dresses and wide-brimmed straw hats with ribbons, Scarlett O’Horror style, beckoning with maternal solicitude to my mother (with their hands) and to my father (with their eyes), and Egg with a gesture that said there’s no way out! shrugging his shoulders and Baby Ba is not there, she is no longer there, SHE IS NO LONGER THERE! I shout from my solar center invisible but no one pays me any mind — in order to travel to Acapulco and await the blessed event in my house, whose rustic comforts you will have to excuse (as my singular friend Don Enrique Larreta said, sipping at the straw in his hierba mate in a smoky little ranch near Paysandú) but whose austere virtues you know only too well.

And since he detected that my parents were somewhat hesitant he imperiously and impatiently tapped them with his walking stick lightly, on the shoulders (the very shoulders my father had been kissing only a few minutes earlier), on the knuckles (the very hands in which my mother had held the water she had offered to my father only a few minutes earlier) (and this gentle rapping reminded my father of the sado-erotic spankings that his uncle had given him with a lady’s shoe when he was a boy), and said come along now, my patience is limited as is my time, my little sisters here, Capitolina and Farnesia, certified virgins both, will gladly play the part of midwife: holy little hands! Acapulco is being reconstructed slowly but surely, under new and more propitious patronage than that of that deplorable petty political boss Ulises López, and it is important for our future (which is also that of your baby, beloved niece and nephew!) that the little Christopher come into the world there, that Acapulco be the site of the Grand Celebration of the Quincentennial, and that our face, which received the Illustrious Navigator, who was coming from his East which was our West, search another East that was still farther off. Let us now turn toward the true, classical Orient, the Pacific, which in reality is our nearest Occident, as we, by God, are their true Orient! But, in a word, I don’t know what I’m saying, except this: that the child be born on October 12 in the port of Acapulco, which faces the new constellation of the Pacific. Let’s declare our faith in the future at this opportune moment, upward and onward, Tomasito, as Our Candidate exclaimed as he raised on high our PRIstine banners in the Far-Off Campaign of 1970, because tonight we must sleep in Pichilinque, on the eve of October 12, and go, all of us, to ask a blessing and to give thanks in the Cathedral of Acapulco.

My parents took their place on the car’s jump seats, staring at the smiling faces of Capitolina and Farnesia as well as the ovoid face of our astonished buddy while Don Homero assumed his place in front next to the chauffeur Tomasito.

“How easy it is to see that our brother is of the same blood as we”—Farnesia sighed—“just as we call all our maids Servilia, he calls all his drivers Tomasito…”

“Enough of these vagaries, Farnesita,” Capitolina interrupted her. “Better make the Sign of the Cross quickly because this is indeed a cardinal sin, being out of our house two days in a row, and traipsing around these mountains, filled with who knows what dangers, and ending up as midwives in Acapulco, that capital of vice, the Babylon of the Pacific coast…”

“Oh, Capitita, they were right in the convent, no doubt about it, and in the first place…”

My father Angel brutally dropped the silver bracelet with the initials FF and FB separated by a heart he’d saved from the Veracruz jungle into Farnesia’s lap.

Miss Farnesia Fagoaga’s eyes almost jumped out of her head; she trembled and then wept with her head hung low. Capitolina bit her lip and hugged her, little sister, little sister … My mother raised her thaumaturgical eyes and looked at my father. I know what she thought:

Angel Palomar, you finally learned to use your violence to humanize your fellow man.

Girls were strolling around the plaza hand in hand, with a resignation overflowing with rage. Night fell suddenly on that city of greens and blacks and golds, which is eternally sculpting itself.

2. I Love You Not As a Myth

(The three of us alone back in Acapulco: She, I, He.)

I searched for Agueda and I did not find her.

I searched for the Sweet Fatherland and I did not find it.

I found Angeles, your mother.

I found her in the same way I lost Agueda.

“Let’s never hurt each other. We’re all here together.”

And when you met him, Mom, when you found out who he really was, when you followed him to Acapulco, to Oaxaca, to Mamadoc’s contest in Mexico City, when you played the passive part in his adventure, the destruction of Aca, Uncle Homero’s campaign, the encounter with Matamoros Moreno, the return to Maksicko City, the search for the city in the city, the Boulevard, the conch-shaped chariot, the contest offices, the … When you finished up living all of it, then what, Mom, what remained of your first impression or your first illusion, what did you say to yourself, Mom?

This is what I said to myself, Christopher. From the moment I met your father I never again doubted: I have a body, my son, look touch me, I have two breasts bursting with milk, I have hard, heavy buttocks, touch them, son, caress my neck, son, feel how it pulses my waist exists, it’s flesh and movement and heat, touch my navel, son, caress my sex and hold your little hand over the hot lock of the uterus through which you will leave: go ahead, son, I’m your mother, it’s your last chance to be inside your mother, look upward, from your position, now that you’re about to be born, tell me what you see, tell me, please.

Who are we? Who are you, Mom? Angeles? Agueda?

Both of them, son, both. I learned to be both.

How many of us are there, Mom?

Just three, son, the three of us, reconciled, with fewer illusions but with infinitely more tenderness.

Where are we, Mom?

Back in Acapulco, son, giving thanks because you are going to be born.

When, Mom, when?

Right now, son, between Sunday, October 11 (we are on the beach), and Monday, October 12 (we are in Acapulco), 1992.

Who is with us, Mom?

Our friend Egg, the Orphan Huerta, and Tomasito, the second Tomasito, the chauffeur who drove us from Oaxaca and who turned Uncle Homero over to Uncle Fernando, who was waiting for us in the Chilpancingo airport, where that day they were holding the funerary ceremonies for a local favorite son, Don Ulises López, and his family, who etc. etc., loading Don Homero forcibly into the broken-down two-motor plane of the Institute for Indian Studies with Don Fernando and heading for new horizons while Tomasito took charge of the Shogun and headed for Acapulco.

And the little sisters?

An albino trucker picked them up at the Chilpancingo exit. He said he would bring them to Mexico City. He told them to sit in the rear, where they’d be much cooler.

And us?

Mom, I see a lamp, a burning light above my head, here inside your stomach, a light bathes me and says: Thanks to me you know everything, everything, everything, Chris,

Christopher

Christopher Critic

Christicritic

Christopher Crisis

Christopher Crime

Christopher Incriminated

Chri Chri Christopher

Mother! that light has been there for how long, from when you conceived me, above my little head, and I never saw it until now, Mother, hurry up, don’t let that light go out yet, give me a few minutes more of that wisdom, don’t take it away from me yet, how it shines, how it shines, how right you were to teach me everything here inside, how right it was for me to learn everything here inside, a burning fire above my little head, that’s the origin of the light, a fire that shines and that is consumed inside your plexus and that illuminates my little head, telling me also, Mother:

“Let’s never hurt each other. We’re all here together.”

I HEAR WHAT IS GONE, WHAT I STILL DO NOT TOUCH

We are facing the sea, at Revolcadero beach, facing the Pacific Ocean. There are twelve dead dolphins on the beach: a perfect dozen dolphins murdered by the contamination in the bay and the insane swirling of El Niño sent from Peru.

Twelve white dolphins implacably turning purple as if they were losing their innocence, which was identical to their beauty: their tender eyes, marine brothers of paschal sweetness; their smooth bodies, changing color; and their open jaws: naïve sharks. At our feet.

The Oriental boy turns his back on the setting sun. He has taken off his chauffeur’s cap, revealing a youthful head and straight hair, he wears a black uniform that gives him an air somewhat like that of an admiral in the Japanese Navy on the eve of Pearl Harbor and he tenderly takes the hand of Orphan Huerta, naked at his side, both of them looking at my father and mother (and me inside her belly!) and at Egg barefoot with his trousers rolled up and his shirt open, revealing his hairless, almost feminine breasts, Egg does not look at us nor does he look at the couple made up of the boy dressed in black and the naked Orphan: Egg looks toward the ocean, where one day the other Tomasito sailed, dead. He thinks perhaps about the symmetry of the speared destinies: the first Tomasito in the sea Grandfather Rigoberto in the mountains, and Hipi Toltec incinerated in the upland, and the bombs of Reverend Payne in the Gulf: the end of the world that came to die there, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, cradle and prison, mother and stepmother of the world for five centuries: now they do not look toward the Gulf, the Antilles, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean: now they look toward the Pacific, and the Oriental boy takes the hand of his brother the Orphan Huerta, my brother, my brother he calls him again and again, I could not come for you until the right moment, I knew that my brother had to carry out his destiny and that his destiny was inseparable from that of all of you and your child: you had to reunite, you and your child, who were separated, so that all of us could be together on this beach and so that I could reveal myself to you:

“He’s my lost brother,” said Orphan Huerta with an astonished seriousness. “The lost boy I told you about … He’s come back for me …

And for you, said the Oriental boy, whom it was difficult to imagine, as my parents were trying to do, in a nameless slum, a lost city in the D.F. adipose, eddyfeet calcified running from the settlement of squatters burned down by Doña Lucha Plancarte de López: and it was he, vomited out by the subway on the corner of Calle Génova and Liverpool; nevertheless, it was from there he emerged and now it was this: and he gave his hand to his brother: and he extended his other hand to my parents (and to me), come with us, let’s go to Pacífica, the New World is no longer here, it’s always elsewhere, celebrate the Quincentennial by leaving behind your Old World of corruption, injustice, stupidity, egoism, arrogance, disdain, and hunger, we’ve come for you: here is our hand, the child will be born at midnight, as was written, quickly one day, very soon the ships will come for us and we will leave for Pacífica, Pacífica awaits you, there you are necessary, here you are superfluous, said Orphan Huerta’s brother, don’t hand your about-to-be-born son over to the unsalvageable horror of Mexico, save him, save yourselves: come to a better world of which a part of Mexico already belongs, the whole Pacific coast from Ixtapa north, the whole Pacific basin from California to Oregon, Canada and Alaska, all of China and Japan, the peninsulas, the archipelagos, the islands, Oceania: a basin of 108 million square miles, three billion inhabitants, half the world’s population, working together, three-fourths of the world’s commerce, almost all of the world’s advanced technology, the maximum conjunction of labor, technical know-how, and political will in human history, said the Lost Boy, found boy, intoning all this as if it were a psalm, using his hands with their long fingers, come with us to the New World of Pacífica, turn your backs on the tyrannical Atlantic which fascinated and dominated us for five centuries: end your foolish fallacious fascistic fascination with the Atlantic world, turn your backs on that past look to the future because it’s there we men and women are triumphing who simply said this to ourselves, only this: Behind the mask of glory is the face of death; let us renounce glory, force, domination, let us save the West from itself by teaching it once again to deny power to power, to stop admiring force, to open its arms to the enemy (yes, sweetie, look at him now), to choose life over death: We have enough to be moderately happy, in the name of what are we going to sacrifice the technical means we have now of achieving abundance, peace, intellectual creation, in the name of what? We asked ourselves that and we got no answer: we had it all in our hands, technology, resources, inventiveness, labor, we have what we need to invent a new world — the Orphan Huerta naked with his eyes closed turned away from the sea imitates with his hands the movements of his brother’s hands — beyond the old frontiers separating nations, classes, families, races, sexes: why don’t we use it? What’s stopping us? We decided that all this was possible in a new community, not a utopia, because in Pacífica we never lose sight of the fact that we will never escape destiny, that was the West’s madness, to think they had dominated destiny and that progress would eliminate tragedy (Nietzschevoice); that’s how tragedy became a crime, by taking advantage of the dream of consciousness, sentencing tragedy to take refuge like a hunted animal in a concentration camp and to appear anonymous and bloody in historical massacres, without finding its place in the community and saying to history: there are too many exceptions to progress, happiness is capable of attacking itself (fe-de-rico!), we have to admit what it denies us in order to know we are complete, our face is that of the other, we don’t know ourselves if we don’t know what we aren’t and we admit it: we are unique because we are alike: in Pacífica we helped both the rapid advance of technology and the tragic awareness of life by taking seriously what a novel, a poem, a film, a symphony, a sculpture says: we decided that the works of culture were as real in the world as a mountain or a transistor, that there is no real life without a still life to compensate for it in art, no living present with a dead past, no acceptable future that does not allow exceptions to progress, and no technological progress that does not incorporate the warnings of art:

* * *

My father and my mother saw the two brothers — one dressed as a Japanese chauffeur, the other nude, holding hands — begin to say all these things in unison, in a chorus whose setting was the crepuscular ocean: my parents saw what was behind the brothers: Angel, Angeles: my father and mother looked at each other and their eyes shone, they understood:

Others give us their being.

When I complete you, Angeles.

I complete you, Angel.

They exchanged the gift of their perfectible existence the way the two brothers did and the four of them now sought (the five of them: I inside my mother’s womb; the six of them: Egg stops staring sadly toward the distant horizon and turns toward us, doubtful as to whether he should join with the brothers or with us: he waits, a big buddy, he waits a bit, we’re coming, we’re understanding):

Come with us to Pacífica, we can’t force you, we merely suggest it, although we can tell you that in all this, friend Angel, friend Angeles, as yet unborn child Christopher, there is something definitive, something inexorable: friend Angel, in your house of bright colors in Tlalpan there are many portraits of men named Rutherford and Planck, Einstein and Pauli, Bohr and Broglie, Heisenberg, above all Heisenberg, your favorite, Angel, isn’t that right?

To observe all phenomena simultaneously is impossible: we must choose a time and place within the vast continuum which it is given us to imagine because it exists in reality: our slice of the global phenomenon is our limit but it is also our liberty: it is what we can affect, for better or for worse: what we can see, touch, it is only one face of reality: the position or the movement of something, one or another, but never both at the same time: that’s our limit, but it’s also our power:

We depend on the vision of others to complete our own vision: we are half eye, half mouth, half brain, half face; the other is I because it completes me:

The two brothers slowly touched each other’s face, each one with his eyes closed, each one speaking now in the sudden tropical night with modulated alternations, a surprising hymn:

Knowing this was understanding at the same time our grandeur and our servitude, our freedom and our dependence, and by knowing them, it was possible for us to attain what our understanding of limits would seem to have forbidden us: precisely because one only knew his position perfectly while the other only knew his movement perfectly. When the two united, each knew what the other didn’t know and they could, complete, be what neither was alone (the Pacific is a horizontal flame; the sky moves quickly to take possession of it, extinguish it: we do not see the light that is born elsewhere when here everything becomes darkness): in that way, we manage in Pacífica to conciliate destiny with technology, unite what we know spiritually with what we know technically and make a new life because we don’t control freedom but we do dominate technology:

Come with us, said the two brothers, and my parents, turning to look at each other, marveled as, in the renewed Acapulco dusk, the memorious port of his childhood, the happy scale of his vacations, was reborn in my father’s eyes: my parents saw themselves splendid as they saw the tongues of fire on the horizon like a literal message from the ocean: the distance of the voices of the other side came closer in the presence of the magician who came from the sea, the Orphan Huerta’s brother: the Lost Boy now found them, he returned on the voyage opposite to that of the Europeans, not Columbus’s caravel but the China galleon, not Cortés’s brigantine but the Philippines galleon: the other half of our face, our blind eye, seeing once again: we have two horizons and a single face and the Lost Boy was saying: No one can catch up to us technologically, we’ve gone beyond the fifth generation of computers, what your parents wanted without knowing it, Angel, we’ve left behind the four serial, arithmetic generations of computers that simply added up one operation after another, in order to enter the generation of computers that process various currents of information simultaneously: Look — said the Orphan Huerta with a strange return to his habitually nasal voice — before, it was only possible to put one tortilla at a time on the fire, heat it, flip it, and toss it into the basket: now, see? we can heat up all the tortillas at the same time, all at once, flip them all over at once, and put them all in the basket at the same time

the multitrack mind of Mamma Mia

reading Plato getting my old man hot in Aca

the inconsumable taco of my Grandparents Palomar

the Curies of Tlalpan

antimatter: life not death

Federico Robles Chacón wants to dictate two letters at the same time

In Pacífica we’ve already won the technological race, and for that very reason we do not want power: we offer well-being: whoever dominates computers dominates the economy dominates the world: we don’t want to dominate but to share: come with us, Angel, Angeles, Christopher yet-to-be-born, leave the corruption and death of Mexico behind, leave the interminable misery and the ageless vices of your fatherland in order to save it someday, pulling it little by little, piece by piece, out of its corrupt stupidity and its historical madness: the two reunited brothers spoke in chorus, now our buddy as well, and with them my father and mother: and I on the point of being born.

3. Fatherland, unto You I Give the Key of Your Good Fortune

As they were crossing from Guerrero into Michoacán, a group of armed peasants demanding the restitution of their lands — stolen by a lumber company — were cornered in the hills: hungry, weak, they were hunted down and summarily shot in the town of Huetámbaro, under the naked flanks of the deforested mountain. Colonel Inclán, under orders after the night of the Ayatollah to restore order wherever and however necessary in the Mexican Republic, pronounced these peremptory words:

“Bury them without coffins. They were fighting for land, right? So give them land until they choke on it.”

The loudspeaker in the Huetámbaro plaza blared out “Jingle Bells,” drowning out the shots.

Homero Fagoaga shook with fear watching the peasants fall one after another because instead of shots all he could hear was “Jingle Bells,” as if Christmas had killed them.

“Look, you wretch, look straight in front of you,” said Benítez to Uncle Homero, digging the muzzle of his rifle into the rolls of fat hanging off Homero’s ribs. “Take a good look.”

“Fernando, I was having a good time in my Acapulco house, protecting my niece and nephew … right, our niece and nephew…”

“You were taking advantage of them to set up a new scam, Homero you con man, you know that the child will be born exactly at midnight tonight, October 11, and you want to have him in your power so you can walk into Pacífica carrying him in your arms: that’s what you want, you miserable tub…”

“So what’s wrong with that?” Don Homero got upset, then calmed down instantly when he felt the Mauser digging into his lard. “What’s wrong with that, I ask you?”—His voice now a whisper—“That’s why I went about having myself kidnapped by another unfaithful Filipino. I can be useful to our niece and nephew and to the baby, I have contacts in the Philippines, I know the…”

Benítez paid him no attention. He watched the scene with Homero from a window protected by wrought-iron bars: the Santa Claus music, the scattered cadavers, and Colonel Inclán walking around with his riding crop in his hand, okay, spread their legs, laughing, let’s see which ones shit themselves out of fear.

“Homero,” said Don Fernando, “take a good look at what you’ve never wanted to see in your life.”

A bulldozer or a match could end all this, murmured Don Fernando Benítez. The mountains of Mexico are bald, worn away by erosion. Topsoil has become as fleeting as life itself. For him, he said to Homero Fagoaga, trembling behind the bars over the little plaza of Huetámbaro, reality was animated by the past.

Does life become more resilient because of that? A woman wept in the same room from which Fernando and Homero watched the atrocious scene acted out by Colonel Nemesio Inclán and the executed peasants.

“Don’t cry,” Fernando said to the woman. “There’s nothing you can do. Tomorrow…”

“Life’s always been terrible here,” the sobbing woman said. “And besides, who’s going to fight against helicopters?”

How well Benítez knew it. Today’s weapons were no longer those of yesterday’s revolution. Could Zapata have withstood a barrage of white phosphorus or napalm? But how did Ho Chi Minh survive it? How did the Sandinistas manage to topple Somoza? Because their societies were much simpler, much more black-and-white, less complicated, and with fewer complicities than the Mexico of 1992? With what weapons was it possible to fight today without exposing everyone to a useless death? With what weapons, without playing the game of the cynics who control power? With what weapons, so one could say to oneself: I haven’t asked anyone to give more than what I am willing to give? I haven’t ordered anyone to go to his death by asking him to do what I would not be willing to do? I haven’t said to anyone: the only option is armed revolt, romantic suicide? To no one.

“… but, Fernando,” Homero Fagoaga was saying, since he had no reason to listen to the barely murmured thoughts of his relative, “what’s wrong with the kids joining up with Pacífica? Things are hopeless here, you can see that for yourself, if you brought me here to prove it to me, you were certainly successful, Fernando, you’ve scared me to death, don’t you think that as far as shocks are concerned, enough is enough? Listen, and even from the nationalistic point of view, Pacífica is our salvation, we refused to form a common market with the United States and Canada in the seventies, but now Japan and China dominate the United States and Canada. Pacífica is our ace in the hole; we’d be walking into commerce and technology through the front door, plus we wouldn’t owe a thing to the gringos!”

“First we’ve got to finish up what we began here,” Don Fernando Benítez said, through clenched teeth.

“Bah, here and everywhere else the main idea is to make money and get power, the rest is words, words, words,” said Don Homero Fagoaga bluntly, but the words froze on his rose-colored lips: “Fernando, Fernando, what are you doing?” Benítez aimed his rifle through the window bars, shot, and Colonel Nemesio Inclán fell down next to the peasants’ bodies: there was no surprise on his face because it already was a skull. Green slime poured out of his cheek instead of blood. His black glasses smashed against a bullet-riddled wall. The soldiers pointed at the small, three-story building. They surrounded it instantly. Benítez waited with his rifle at the ready. Homero shook like Hegelatine. The imperturbable loudspeakers blared out the bolero “You Have to Know How to Lose.” The music was drowned out by the roar of the helicopters.

4. Land!

Reader: all this is happening in my head, because now I think that the world outside has ceased to exist, and if something does live there, today only my memory or my imagination can bear witness to it. I could be wrong. Or worse: perhaps what I’m saying to myself can escape my own mind and be heard outside. What would happen then? would happen if the voice of an unborn child were heard outside before birth? What witchcraft would they accuse the mother of? Of what traffic with the Holy Spirit would they accuse the father? And me too, of what would (or won’t) I be accused of before I’m born, what would they call me?

Reader, that’s why I need such a web of complications, like the ones I’ve been weaving over the course of my nine months here enumerated. You know that I haven’t narrated anything alone, because you’ve been helping me ever since the first page. Your mediation is my health; just imagine my terror without you: me blind, veiled, enclosed, I would have spent my time going around in circles (vicious, vicos: tight little vicolini), asking myself:

“Where are the people who brought me here? I don’t see them!”

You know, Reader, that without you I would not have done what I want, which is to communicate to the living my nightmares and my dreams: by now they are your nightmares and your dreams. My ghosts accompany me; now I also share my nightmares with them: my genes (my gegels, my gegelatines?) that for each one of the six billion inhabitants of the planet, there are thirty ghosts who accompany him: thirty progenitors, physically disappeared, but alive and kicking, your mercies benz should know, in each one of the 100 billion individual genes that occupy each one of the cells of my imminent little body! and in each one of these cells is written ALL THE INFORMATION necessary to reconstruct every function and every structure in the body: READER, TRY TO UNDERSTAND WHY I CHRISTOPHER KNOW EVERYTHING AND AM AFRAID OF LOSING IT ALL: Ah, Reader, my pact with you is not disinterested — it goes without saying: I’m going to need you more than ever afterwards (will there be an afterwards…?), after I’m born, according to what people say and what they call what is going to happen, shit, it’s as if I were dead already!

Afterwards: when I need you to stretch out your hand to me so that I can recover everything I’m going to lose, I’m certain of it when I abandon my mother. Not yet. My mother is alive and I am inside her on the last day of my gestation, my mother is alive and is lighting the fire over my head and I on the point of being born: the dead dolphins on the Revolcadero beach and a desperate scream from my mother: and as if in response to her scream, the ships appear in the distance, shining on the crepuscular sea, and my mother falls on her knees in the hot sand, Egg and my father Angel run to help her, my God, what’s wrong? What shaking is this? Since when does my house, my pool, my moist, humid, warm cave tremble like this, beyond the boomboomboom rhythm of the rockaztec outside and my mother’s identical heart inside?

Soon, please, you must decide, says the Lost Boy blinded by the light of the ships (the galleon of China? the galleon of the Philippines? how they shine in the night of my death!), and my father looks toward the farthest point on the horizon: Pacífica, the New World of the New World, and in that instant in which I fumble in horror for a handhold in my communication with the world outside, everything that has taken place is passing through my head, and I think that at the same time the world outside has ceased to exist, and if something is going to remain alive of it one day, today only my memory or my imagination can attest to it. I may be wrong. Or worse: what I’m trying to say to myself may escape from my mind and be heard outside. What would happen then? I repeat this fear of mine: what would happen if my voice inside here were heard outside? Would they kill me and kill my mother in the process? Witch doctors, did I say? monsters? But my voice cannot be heard out there, simply because complicity with my father has been reestablished, and my father should think about unborn me, but I’m on the point of saying what we are both saying when the Lost Boy urges us to choose: are you going to stay here or are you coming to Pacífica? New World: eternal obligation to complete the world: New World!

America is in my father’s balls, from which I emerged, New World is what Columbus gave Castile and Aragon: the double hemispheres in your egg sack, my dear progenitor, steady producer of millions of sperm, constant from puberty to old age: ready to abandon your body at a moment’s notice, whenever someone shouts: Go!; because the fly flies, and goes to meet my mother’s rationed-out egg, her stingy cervix, protected from the world by a hard mucous stopper, and only once a month, one glorious day, is it unstopped, and then it becomes a river of glass, a sliding board for the sperm; the egg found the snake, the serpent found its fecund nest, and ME VOILÀ!

And to think that in those testicles of yours that created me, father of mine, can be found all the sperm necessary to produce the current population of the world: in the hemispherical duplicity of a single man: you, my father, Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, twenty-two years of age, of an uncertain and failed life, youthful errors behind you (or so you think), new horizon, promising aurora before you (or so you think): in your balls, Pop, is all the sperm necessary to invent six billion Aztecs, Quechuas, Patagonians, Caribs, Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, and arrogant Aryans, polyracial Polynesians, hungry Hungarians, Finlandish finalists, and basking Basques fallen from the moon: all your semen would fit in a shot glass; patriarch!

all the eggs necessary to re-create the populations of the planet would fit as well, Mamma Mia, you who produce them, in a test tube:

thank you, thank you, for creating only me!

me instead of the six billion other possibles (plus pixies, Gasparine ghosts, Nahuatl poltergeists, children of the night, and other Frankedenics who accompany us)

thanks for ejaculating me among 300 million other sperm all competing in the same contest and whom I defeated

thanks for allowing me to travel the eight inches from my father’s penis to my mother’s egg, which to me, dear Readers, seemed as great a distance as that from Jupiter to Venus (but I will never be a hungry little Saturn and eat my parents, I am no patriphage!)

thanks for giving victorious me lodging

thanks for my nine months and for what I’ve learned in them: I have lived for nine months, I am a gerontonone at birth: I note that I am a not-yet-neonate! and above all, are my little brothers from the New World of the New World, the Utopia of the Pacific, inviting us to leave this land for a better one? As if my father’s sperm which I say could not re-create and repopulate the earth which fell to us! As if my father’s Hegelatinegenes could invent a different past, different information, in the technological paradise being offered to us by the second Tomasito, the heretofore Lost Boy, and his brother O. Huerta both standing hand in hand! The new Columbuses arrived from the Orient: New World of the New World!

We are all Columbuses, those of us who bet on the truth of our imagination and win; we are all Quijotes who believe in what we imagine; but, ultimately, we are all Don Juans who desire as soon as we imagine and who quickly find out that there is no innocent desire, the desire to complete oneself takes over the other, changes him, makes him one’s own: not only do I desire you, I desire besides that you desire as I do, that you be like me, that you be I: Christopher, Quijote, Juan, our fathers who art on earth, our everyday Utopia, give it to us tomorrow and forgive us our debts ($1,992 billion, according to this morning’s Gall Street Journal!), although we (Aztecs! Incas! Sioux! Caribs! Araucanians! Patagonians!) will never forgive our debtors: yessir, make us fall into temptation, because pleasure without sin is not pleasure, long live Thomistic Catholicism which presents us with unattainable ends in exchange for inexcusable means, long live Augustinian Catholicism, which protects us from personal responsibility before God and obliges us to seek His grace through the intermediary of the hierarchy, long live Ignatian Catholicism, which allows us all ways to conquer souls in the name of God and death, Angeles, death above all to the worst enemy of our Mediterranean, Catholic, Thomistic, Augustinian, Jesuit, Marianite tradition: not this pacific Confucianism being offered to us with such conviction and tenderness by the Lost Boy, but the false revolutionaries, the modernizers, be they Russians, gringos, or just local upstarts, Angeles my wife, Christopher my son, the destroyers of our faithful image and our modest destiny: says my father, in the first place the gringos, the greatest revolutionaries in Mexico, those who have upset everything, those who really set us on the trail of the mirage of the future, those who mutilated our territory and turned silver into plastic and filled bakeries with smoke and broke the mirrors, the Yankee revolutionaries who made us dream about progress but who invaded us, humiliated us, persecuted us, and slugged us every time we made a move toward progress by being ourselves; death to their puritanical and militant hypocrisy; to the gigantic agonic and pentagonic corruption that allows itself to point at us with the finger of one hand and hold its nose with two fingers of the other because of our skimpy corruption of playful dwarfs; death to all their imitators, Mexican modernizers-at-all-costs, those drunk on paper, cement, and mercury juice wealth and the right to steal and to export earnings and total amnesia about what happens in the blind mountains and the mute slums; and death, too, to all the left-wing modernizers, who secularized the ecclesiastical tradition and offer it now disguised as progress: let them have their German, abstract ideology passed through a sieve of Slavic Cesareopapism for a people whose Counter-Reformation authoritarianism is enough and more than enough for it, thank you: let’s toast all of them with a glass of filthy water from the bay of dead dolphins: Angeles, Christopher, I don’t want a world of progress which captures us between North and East and takes away from us the best of the West, but at the same time I don’t want a pacific world which we will not deserve as long as we don’t resolve what’s going on inside here, my father says to us, with all that which we are, good and bad, bad and good, but still unresolved; wife, son, we shall arrive at Pacífica one day if we first stop being North or East in order to be ourselves, West and all. That would be Kantinflas’s categorical imperative: Mock de Summa! Mere Cortésy won’t take Cuauhtémoc off his bed of roses! All the cold rains of the world come to us from the Escorial! Queen Juana the Mad-der of Fact! Isabel the Chaotic, the tour brulée (and the Abolished Prince) and the Inky Session: I’ve drunk enough juice of the Cal Vine and swallowed enough Jacobites that I could shit a Constipated Luther and a J.-J. Rousseau, long live my chains! Condor Ché, long live my past! Chief Er Sun, Jamil Tun, and Rubberspyre: Calmás and We Dawn, Le Nin Le Nain Le Non, Engels Angeles Engelschen: let your halo shine once more, my love: my mother’s aureole shines intensely, the galleons from the Orient shine, as well as the Lost Boy’s golden hands, the argentine voice of he who was the Orphan Huerta, begging us, come, asking us, are you coming with us or not?

But my parents don’t seem to heed this supplication.

My father and mother kiss.

She is still on her knees.

It must be an ancestral posture.

On her knees in the sand that grows cooler minute by minute.

We share in a moment of pleasant solitude (placentic, I mean). How much time between each apocalyptic tremor in Mamma Mia’s belly? Nothing moves and I take advantage of the free time to count time and tell myself: I still haven’t been born yet I already feel as if my soul were ancient. I still haven’t been born yet I already fear that I’m going to act again the way my ancestors acted. Glory and ambition. Love and liberty. Violence. A land of sad men and happy children: how many children are born and die and are reborn with me?

I know that this is the calm before the storm. I know it.

Ayayay, here comes the earthquake again, I knew it, I knew it, you loved me, you loved me, Dad! Mom! Reader! Tell me, all of you! What’s happening to me? Am I going? How I grab on to my destiny now that the racket’s starting up again, my mother’s commotions, her belly as agitated as the deepest tide of the deepest part of the ocean over which the Lost Boy and the Orphan Huerta are urging us to flee: I repeat to myself like a prayer: my destiny is defined by the genes of my father and mother — I am unique — I am the product of a conjunction of genes that had never combined before in the same way — it’s possible that the genetic combination that fell to me will make me happy — it’s possible it will make me unhappy — but I’ll never know it unless I’m born, and what I’m feeling as my mother’s contractions grow more frequent is that I’m going to be thrown out of my home sweet home, once again to wander, but if the first exit of little Christopher took place during pleasure, this one — I can smell it — will take place amid pain; why, my God, why conceived in pleasure and born in strife? My fear is yellow like the faces from Pacífica: am I going to be born? or am I actually going to die? I have aged irremediably in my mother’s belly, yes, what they call being born is a deception, I am going to die a little old man; nobody gets any more time than nine months, we all die at nine months of age; the rest is death because it is oblivion (how you tremble, holy little Mother, calm down, for heaven’s sake: give your little Christopher some peace! Not so hard, Mom, I feel like a marble made of blood rolling down a tunnel of smoke! Are you casting me out into the world? And suppose the world also only lasts nine months, what then? Mommy, Mommy, holy God, Daddy, Dada, Dada …). I’m forgetting everything I knew, the light is going out, here inside I knew everything, genes and Hegels, Hegelatines, my ancestors lived nine months keeping me company, my telephone book’s full of lawyers, and more lawyers, shysters, rhetoricians, yakkers, ambulance chasers, prosecutors and prostitutors, hearings and seeings, syndicates and cynicates, tried and retried, executors and executioners, houses of detention and houses of correction: well, correct me if you can, let’s see you correct the world.

What’s happening, from the lunar center of my mother I hear them, smell them, oh Granny: it’s the coyotes of Acapulco, have they come back to be present at my entry into life? into death? I smell their wet fur, their reddish eyes penetrate my mother’s transparent belly, they could sink their sharp fangs between my fed navel and her exhausted navel: the coyotes form a circle around us, my father, my mother, and me, separating us from the Lost Boy and Orphan Huerta, who urge us: Soon? There’s no time left! Choose: Pacífica or Mexico?

Or Mexico: will I be born here? You know where? Will I leave this country? Owing a thousand dollars, dead or alive! Will I be led to the D.F.? To breathe from birth eleven thousand tons of sulphur, lead, and carbon monoxide every day? To join a half million annual births — anal birds, antic words? To join a quarter of a million kids who die of asphyxia and infection each year? To shit, to add my shit to that of millions of dogs, cats, mice, horses, bats, unicorns, eagles, serpents, plumed coyotes? To swallow thirty thousand tons of garbage per day? To join the vultures that devour the rot: blessed art thou, Our Lady Tlazoltéotl, first star of the eternal night and of the invisible day, you who cleanse by devouring and then dirty it all in order to have something to clean; lady, can you compete with seven million automobiles, five million bureaucrats, thirty million pissers, shifters, eaters, fuckers, sneezers? Am I going out into that country? So that they can tell me that thanks to oil we’re in good shape? That from now on we have nothing to worry about, just to administer our wealth? That I’ll have my refrigerator even though I may not have electricity, and my Walkman so that people can be jealous when I walk the streets that are buried in garbage and fires?

READERS, RESOLVE MY DILEMMA:

Is it worth it to be born in Mexico in 1992?

Please! I’m forgetting everything! With each maternal shake something else slips out of my memory, I’m talking to my ancestors to see if they remember, but now they, too, have slipped away and with them everything I knew, now I won’t know anything, goo, be-a-ba here comes the ahhhhh: the fire above my little head went out, and outside I can hear the ubiquitous loudspeakers that travel the streets and plazas of my Sweet Fatherland, announcing that the celebration has been postponed, presidential decree / speech by Mamadoc and her / Columbus was colonial / there is nothing to celebrate the little Christophers are finished / Mexican time is postponable time, postponable, postponable: everything’s happening tomorrow, not today, what do you say? All this happened tomorrow! (My mother trembles even more, now she howls like the coyotes that surround us.) Will my birth be postponed? So, after all that, I won’t be born? Am I being given the right not to be born? Can I choose? Can I perhaps stay here forever in my soft salon, swimming in my Olympic pool, living in ease on the blood, the pâté, and the mucus of Madonna Angelica? Aaaaay here comes the aaaaaah: she is screaming in pain, the killer quake of ’85 is being reproduced in its entirety in my mother’s city, on uterus avenue (labyrinth of solitude! Luther’s Expressway!), and I curse my mommy,

MOTHER

NAME WHERE BIOLOGY ACQUIRES A SOUL!

WHERE NATURE BECOMES TRANSCENDENT!

AND WHERE SEX BECOMES HISTORY!

Can you hear me, Mom? Why don’t you answer me? You, too, are forgetting — are you forgetting me? I kick I dive I bend like a reed, I hear, ever more faintly, your voice which during nine months accompanied me, soothed me, sang to me, celebrated me, what’s happening to me, Mommy? History’s happening to me, the past is happening to me, the nation is happening to me and the narration of the nation is happening to me, the earth is happening to pass me toward you who lead me, I hear you say it, weakly now, the gas is passing out of me, my memory and my desire are passing out of me, my imagination and my language, love and envy are passing out of me, resentment and celebration are passing out of me, narrowness and symbols, analogies and differences all passing out of me, tacos, eggplant parmigiana (Anna? Anna, like manna, banana, banana split? That’s it!), I’m heading for the earth, Mother, on this beach you received me and on it you are going to toss me, just as Uncle Homero was tossed, flying, naked, and spraying the world with blood and shit to celebrate my arrival: do you know what you are doing when you expel me into the world, Mother? Have you taken account of your responsibility and my own? You expel me to earth knowing that I am going to violate it, just as you, and my father and Homero Fagoaga and a pair of blind Indians with wooden hoes and Don Ulises López armed with lawsuits and checkbooks and bonds without bonds: will the very earth that we violate receive us, will you tell me, you and my father? We kill the earth in order to be able to live, and then we expect the earth to forgive us, absolve us of death even though we kill it? I’m being thrown, Pop and Mom, into a world where there is no possible reconciliation: we cannot be at one with the exploited earth, she gives us fewer punishments (death) than we give to her (violence): now I take revenge on you, world, to take out my portion of violence on you, violence on nature, violence on men, violence on myself: I am going to that destiny, beyond the ephemeral idiocies of smog, debt, the PRI, our national symbols, that’s what I’m coming into, taking revenge on myself: to exploit the world from the moment I walk on it and to spend my life trying to expiate the guilt of my first exploitation, which was to suck your milk, which was to spit in a stream, which was to eat a jar of pureed Paschal Lamb sacrificed for me: am I arriving just to share this guilt? Can I do something to redeem it? Can I love a woman, write a book, free a people? Not even that, not even that: I’ll do it all, gentle Readers, except allow the good earth to speak for itself, to express itself directly, not through my song or my curse, that I will not permit because I think (that’s his father talking, you say) that art or politics or science (that comes from his grandparents!) is a sufficient compensation for our crime; that’s why I go resigned to debt, oh Readers, to the PRI, to the smog, and to Mamadoc, because an instant before leaving my mother’s womb I know (and I will forget it!) that neither I nor any other child about to be born, here or anywhere, could stand being born in a perfect world, a just world: it would horrify us, deprive us of all our pretexts, we need, oh Lord, oh Reader, oh Pro-Gen-I-Tors, an unjust world in order to dream about changing it, by ourselves, into a better world: the earth smiles before paying us, mercifully, with death …

I ask myself: I ask you: I ask all of you:

Will I have the right, at least, to intimacy with the world?

I do not have (I don’t have, we don’t have) time to answer; the contractions are more and more frequent; my father embraces my mother; they kiss; the two of them are kneeling on the beach, on their knees in the sand that grows colder by the minute, and their fingers are buried in whatever is left of the heat. Now my father takes her hand. He guides her finger over the sand. Their fingers write:

It is burning ice, frozen fire,

a wound that pains yet is unfelt

a dreamed-of good, a present ill

a brief rest which is no rest.

A wave breaks and washes away the poem — by whom? just written on the wet sand:… what is the name of that poem?

The wave takes away something else: I tremble as I hear that poem my father recites aloud, where have I heard it before? where? by God, before I knew everything, I heard that poem before. Now the fire over my head is going out, I knew who wrote it before, what its title was, now even the verses are disappearing just as lifelines disappear when the dead grow old: am I growing old, am I dying, am I forever leaving behind my ancestors, my memory, and my future imagining here inside as well? What do I hold on to, my God? I invoke you, see? I shall not end my poor unborn novel without directing a prayer to you, without recognizing you (just in case), but I’ll be brief: I’ll leave you this spot, you will decide whether to occupy it or not!

* * *

I’ll be brief because now events are starting to rush ahead, Readers, and I am the victim of the blessed simultaneity that frees us from fearful symmetry, but both, my last (or penultimate) memory tells me, are lies, nothing is simultaneous and nothing is symmetrical; at least, then, nothing is linear, thank God all of us are circular or spiral observers, it’s our privilege, yours and mine, Reader, here on this beach at midnight at the edge of the sea of waves, one chained to the next where float the galleons of Manila and China, which have come to bring me to the next Utopia.

— Pacífica—

Remember with me that portrait in the house of bright colors, the young Werner Heisenberg, dressed as a mountain climber, blond and smiling, telling us by way of farewell that the observer introduces instability in the system because he cannot separate himself from one point of view and therefore the observer and his point of view are part of the system and therefore there are no ideal systems because there are as many points of view as there are observers and each one sees something different: truth is partial because consciousness is partial: there is no universality except relativity, the world is unfinished because the men and women who observe it still have not finished, and truth, unexhausted, fugitive, in perpetual motion, is only the truth that takes all arbitrary positions into account and all the relative movements of each individual on this earth to which I am vertically heading, far from any lamps above my noggin: by god, Readers! it’s my grandparents, the ones that created the Inconsumable Taco, who are telling me all this, I don’t know if through the chain of my genes or by means of a sonar device in the shape of a hanging gourd that shines black from the highest mast on the China galleon, and that this is the conjuncture: on one side, the Lost Boys urge us one last time, are you coming or not? On the other side, I try to hold on to whatever I can, I stretch out my arms in my mother’s convulsed belly, under a downpour of coagulations, my holy little hands hit a cellophane wrapper, they tear it, and they seek, in the way cartilage follows after bone, in the way little feet seek water to splash around in, that’s how my hands seek out the fraternal twin: the dizzygothic twin, born from the other egg fertilized at the same time as I was, I seek him with my blind little fingers, my sweet little fingers that find another present wrapped in cellophane, they tear it open, they sniff the other being in the way the coyotes know how to smell and distinguish the differing scents of the twins: I touch those neighboring little fingers even if they are those of another and I know whose they are: Baby Ba! She was here all the while! She was here and I didn’t know it! Gestating with me! I am not alone! The girl was gestated with the same semen and the same egg that I was! The woman appeared at the same time as I did! Christine appeared with Christopher! I am not alone: I never was, Electra! I quickly think before I forget everything: I see a powerful city, a big-shouldered city, windy, early snow, the hut of a mute Indian woman, a grandmother who didn’t learn English and who forgot Spanish, receiving into her hands another child who appears between the dark and bloody legs of a blind woman, the blind father holds the woman’s head to make her comfortable, the blind boy is being born in Chicago, my fellow, my brother, he frozen and me hot! I who stretch out my fingers and tell Baby Ba my fraternal twin, I no longer have to choose, girl, of course I could see you, come on, come on, let’s go out together, you are my supreme reason for leaving, repeat that with me, we need each other, I cannot see half of the world without you, Baby Ba, nor can you without me, let’s go out to answer the world, to be responsible in the face of reality, stretch out your little hand and touch mine, please, repeat with me the last thing I say to you:

I tell you this: with the same facility that we leave behind the achievements and the ruins. Everything builds and feeds the future, success as well as failure. Everything, therefore, will be ruins. Except the present, girl. Except the present instant in which we were chosen to remember the past and desire the future. Memory and desire, girl. Desire and memory, goo, dada, ma, heeeeere comes the aaaaaaaah, clown begins with c, Baby, we’re together, play with me, let’s be playmates on earth, don’t be afraid anymore, Baby Ba, hold my little hand, I’m here with you, don’t you see, Baby, play with me, play sea serpent, booboo, agoo, dada, mama, papa …

* * *

Angel Palomar refused with a shake of his head: “We’re not going with you.”

I think my father feels that in this moment he is a desperate apparition.

* * *

Alone again! What an absolute solitude. Only my mother’s halo shines intensely. Egg left with the Lost Boy and the Orphan Huerta. We stayed behind. The caravels from the Orient went out to sea, foggy, radiant, their red sails unfurled on the masts, Chinese characters painted on them. Their three masts piercing the deck like stakes made of gold, heading out to sea, far from the dying beach, far from the turbid fever of El Niño and the mortal whiteness of the dolphins and the red and gray circle of coyotes, far from the poem erased by the white tongue of the sea, far away, the caravels shine far away on an ocean where the dolphins live again their pleasurable time, their perpetual leaping and diving in the sea, from the surface to the bottom and from the bottom to the surface, as regular as a clock, as pragmatic as an anchor, as serene as a plumb line, from the bottom to the surface and from the surface to the bottom, eternally, until they die. They have no other fun.

* * *

The distant sea, the entire sea, murmured my father, watching the ships from Pacífica sail away without them, the water revived with a puff of air printed on smoke.

* * *

A country of sad men and happy children.

* * *

A child is being born just as October 12, 1992, is born, on the beach at Acapulco. He comes into the world holding the hand of a little girl whose eyes are closed. The boy has his eyes wide open, as if his eyelids had never formed. He looks fixedly at the earth that awaits him. The boy swims toward the land, softly, carrying the girl with him. He emerges from the belly of his mother as if he were crossing the pacific sea, carrying the girl on his shoulders, saving her from death by water. The light went out; the fire over their heads went out. The boy comes out. From the sky a swift Angel descends, an Angel with a golden helmet and green spurs, a flaming sword in his hand, an Angel escaped from the Indo-Hispanic altars of opulent hunger, from need overcome by sleep, from the coupling of opposites: body and soul, wakefulness and death, living and sleeping, remembering and desiring, imagining: the happy boy who reaches the sad land carries all this on his lips, he bears the memory of death, white and extinguished, like the flame that went out in his mother’s belly: for a swift, marvelous instant, the boy being born knows that this light of memory, wisdom, and death was an Angel and that this other Angel who flies from the navel of heaven with the sword in his hand is the fraternal enemy of the first: he is the Baroque Angel, with a sword in his hand and quetzal wings, and a serpent doublet, and a golden helmet, the Angel strikes, strikes the lips of the boy being born on the beach: the burning and painful sword strikes his lips and the boy forgets, he forgets everything forgets everything,