Christopher Unborn

1. Your House Is Still So Very Big

While all this was going on in Acapulco, Don Fernando Benítez was flying over our mutilated nation: from up above, he saw it as an island in a gulf of shadows.

Then, as they landed, he understood that he was in a dry, silvery valley, surrounded by dark ravines that left it in eternal isolation.

The helicopter landed on a mesa, and Don Fernando thanked the pilot, an employee of the National Indigenist Institute. The pilot asked him if he was sure he didn’t want him to come back, but my Uncle Fernando Benítez said no; perhaps he no longer had the strength to climb all the way up here, but getting down would be a different matter. Right, said the pilot with a crooked grin, going downhill’s always easier.

The inhabitants of the mesa gathered together when they heard the noise of the propellers and dispersed without making a sound as soon as the chopper landed. Perhaps they thought the pilot would be leaving instantly to return to the Salina Cruz base, and that they, living at this isolated altitude, could return to their normal life.

The wind came and went, ruffling their tattered clothes.

A high, burning sun returned. The Indians looked at him without closing their eyes. But the wind did make them close them.

He saw a people in rags.

When the pilot from the NII disappeared into the distance of the southern Sierra Madre, my Uncle Fernando walked quickly toward the group of Indians which by then had begun to scatter. He raised his hand in greeting, but no one responded. In more than thirty years of visiting the most isolated and inhospitable places in Mexico, he had never seen such a thing. Uncle Fernando had spent half his life documenting Mexico’s four or five million Indians, those who were never conquered by the Spaniards, who never allowed themselves to be assimilated into the creole or mestizo world, or who simply survived the demographic catastrophe of the conquest: there were twenty-five million of them before Cortés landed in Tabasco; fifty years later, only one million were left.

My Uncle Fernando looked at them respectfully, with his intense, ice-blue eyes, as fixed and piercing as two needles behind his round, gold-framed glasses. He took off his worn straw hat, which was wide-brimmed and sweat-stained — his good-luck charm on these journeys that took him from the Tarahumaras in the north, who were tall and who would run like horses over the roofs of Mexico, to the sunken remains of the Mayan Empire in the southeast, the only place in the world where each generation is shorter than the previous one, as if they were slowly sinking into the sinkholes of their forests.

He always said and wrote that all the Indian nations, from Sonora to the Yucatán, had just three things in common: poverty, helplessness, and injustice.

“You are no longer owners of what the gods bestowed upon you,” he said in a low voice, stretching out his hand toward the first man to come near him that morning on the sunny, cold plateau.

But the man went on.

My Uncle Fernando did not move. Something he could not see told him, stay right where you are, Benítez, don’t move a muscle; easy now. The clouds that surrounded the plateau like a cold foam moved one flight lower and shredded in a hoary wind that combed through the dried-out fields. The men in rags took up their wooden plows, shook their heads, shrugged off the potbellied flies that tried to land on their faces, and began to plow, they were slow but they seemed to be working more quickly than usual — they raised their faces to the sun and groaned as if they knew that midday would arrive today sooner than ever — with clenched teeth, as if enraged about the time they’d lost. The noise. The wind murdered by the helicopter.

My uncle did not move. The groups of ten or twelve men plowed in perfect symmetry, they plowed as if they’d erected and then decorated a sacred talus; but each one of them, when he’d reached the edge of the field with his plow, awkwardly butted against the rocky soil and the twisted roots of the yuccas and had to make a huge effort to get his plowshare free, turn the tiller around, and plow in the opposite direction — as if he’d never seen the obstacle.

The rest was pure clockwork: the sun was the minute hand, the rhythm of work, the noise of feminine hands slapping the tortilla dough. The only irregular element was the passing of the hasty clouds that fled toward the sea; the wail of the babies clinging to their mothers, almost ripping off their old rebozos, the ragged blouses that had once been white, stiff, and embroidered — even the roses on an Indian blouse ended up wilting in these parts, my uncle said to himself: in other villages, kids are like little animals, free, daring, and happy; in Mexico, who knows why, kids are always beautiful and happy; a country of sad men and happy kids, said Fernando Benítez to himself without knowing why, at this the stroke of noon, surprised by the formula that came into his mind and which he wrote down in his notebook in his minuscule, illegible scrawl.

The children here cling to their mothers, incapable of leaving them, and the women shoo away the flies that drink up their babies’ eyes.

He put the notebook in one of the pockets of his guayabera and shook his head, in just the way the Indian farmers shook the flies off their faces. He shook his head to free himself of that formula which kept him from understanding the mystery, the ambiguity of this land inside Mexico, the seed of Mexico, but so totally alien to the white Mexico with blue eyes, of the Nouvel Observateur and Time, and BMWs, toothpaste, toasters, cablevision, periodic checkups in Houston clinics, and the imminent celebration of the Quincentennial of the Discovery of America — a fact totally unknown by the men, women, and children he was contemplating: an undiscovered population unaware that it had ever been discovered, a date, an enigma imposed on it by others.

The men, women, and children he was contemplating.

And now hearing: they began to wail something in a language my uncle, abandoned on the insular crown of the mountains, had never heard before, something like Zapotec, he thought, he was going to write it down, but he realized he shouldn’t lose even an instant in writing, that his eyes were his uncertain guides, helped powerfully by the thick dioptric lenses in his glasses, but they, too, after all were bathed by light, not permanently separated from light, screw that, not yet, he said to himself: my Uncle Fern, a bantam rooster, a fighting cock, almost eighty years old, sprightly, short, but straight as a die, loaded with memories, romantic adventures, diabolical jokes, and bragging arrogance: my Uncle Fernando Benítez, whom your worship the reader will get to know very well because in my prenatal life he was my firmest ally and the nemesis of my horrid Uncle Homero Fagoaga, who in the very instant of my conception excrementally plowed the air over the Bay of Acapulque.

Now my Uncle Fernando was listening to that impressive music wailing, which had no other purpose than to greet the sun at its zenith: the Indians, high noon on their heads, the blazing sun of the tropics, a desert in the clouds, first close to their hands, then to their naked shoulders and burned faces, finally as straight as an arrow aimed directly down onto the top of those heads, covered in black, straight hair, the heads of the Indians of the mesas.

They stopped. Time belonged not to them but to the sun.

It was only an instant of raised faces and hands stretched forward — not to protect themselves from the sun but to try to touch it. From wherever they might be — the fields, the entrances to their adobe shacks, a sonorous well like the bell missing from the church in ruins, here there was no priest, shopkeeper, teacher, or doctor (in the modern sense, noted my uncle scrupulously) — the men, women, even the children helped by their mothers tried to touch the sun without averting their eyes from it. No one protected his eyes. Midday passed as it had come: an instant now lost forever.

The cloud banks around the plateau came down another step. Now it was possible to see the other side of the extremely deep canyon, to see another frozen plateau on top of one of the thousands of extinct Mexican volcanoes.

Another tribe had gathered there, right at the precipice. My Uncle Fernando walked as far as he could, until the tide of clouds kept him from going any farther. The people on the other shore were too far away; he could not hear what they were saying, although he could guess what their gestures meant. Dressed in white, with starched, shining shirts and trousers, these were a different people, not the abandoned tribe my uncle had perhaps just discovered — why not? as astonished as Cabeza de Vaca must have been when he discovered the Pueblo Indians — but a people who had connections outside their village: they were waving their arms as if they wanted to bridge the gap between their village and this one: they stretched out their hands. They were smiling, but there was anguish in their brows: they didn’t want to frighten him, that’s all.

He turned his back on them. It made no sense to push them into an impossible communication. They would say nothing to each other. He sat down to eat the tacos wrapped up in napkins he carried in his knapsack; a drink of water. He listened. The music from the throats of the tribe lingered on, hanging sonorously on the mountain peaks for a long time after silence had returned to the earth, interrupted only by the punctuation of a baby crying. He looked. The gesture of the hands greedy for sun remained sculpted in the air an instant longer than the flesh that had made it. The silence was stronger, more persistent than the wails of the baby; but even more powerful was the image of this place that he began to free from all similarities with anywhere else.

When afternoon began, the ten- or twelve-year-old boys turned out to guide their elders in the plowing and sowing: they stumbled from time to time because they still did not know how to set the pace with their fathers, but the boys guided their fathers in the same way a father helps his son take his first steps. All, young and old, leaned on the plow staffs, long or short, that also served to split the earth. And the small boys — he saw and understood immediately — cradled their mothers.

He smelled. In the mountain afternoon, near and secret smells displace the vast cargo of the passing wind — its storms and errant flowers. As the sun sinks in the distance, the earth withdraws into itself, snuggles under its covers and smells itself in its intimacy. The men left their plows, picked up their torches, while, heedless of the bright light of sunset, the boys lit them and the men then instantly raised them on high.

On the distant side of the canyon, the Indians crossed themselves and went down on their knees.

On this side, the women, feeling the smoke in their noses, stood up with their infants. They all walked toward the dusty spot that could pass for the center of the village.

It was only a dry mound, with that smell of old excrement left out to weather, forgotten even by the flies that live in the fields. But here the mountain of shit was sculpted, arranged — by whom? Who was the witch doctor responsible for this coprologic stele? Where was he? First the entire village silently knelt before it, their hands joined, and now, for the first time in the whole day, they closed their eyes and took a deep breath: they didn’t chant, they only breathed rhythmically, in unison, they breathed in the smell of shit, the strongest smell of the body, thought my uncle, the one that displaces all the rest and confirms our physical existence: the soft metal of the body, its offering to the gods: shit is the gold of our body, shit in the same way that gold is the excrement of the gods, their feces which are our riches.

My old Uncle Fernando felt himself to be mortal and stupid. His spirit suddenly waned, as if flowing through a sieve, and he tried to rationalize the absurdity of the body. Only symbols, allegories, or ideas could be more grotesque than the body and its functions: symbols, the allegories, or ideas superimposed on the body in order to alleviate it of its own mortal horror. He felt his bowels loosen and only barely managed to control himself. There where he could no longer imagine it urinating, shitting, fornicating naturally, without a perturbing symbol that said to his body: You need me because you are mortally absurd.

He knew of a Polynesian tribe for whom all deaths were murders. The shock of death did not violate our lives but rather our immortality.

They stayed there worshipping the little mountain of poop for an hour, breathing deeply, and then, in perfect discipline, the children first, followed by the women, then the young men, and finally the oldest (ninety-two altogether, counted my Uncle Fernando, the same number of people as years had been used up in the century), they all went to the mound, dropped their trousers or raised their skirts — if they had them; if not, they shit right through the holes in their garments — and gave their offering to nature, giving back to their absent gods their treasure. Thus they added to the height of that olfactory monument, the temple dedicated to the living senses of this tribe of sleepwalkers.

Night fell fatally, and the Indians, once again leaning on their plows, had to return to their domestic chores, eat hunkered down next to their dying fires, all in silence, alien to my uncle now as always, my uncle who for them had never been there, this man who traveled and wrote books invisibly, that’s how he felt it that afternoon on the dry plateau in the uplands: they never saw him or greeted him. The invisible author.

He approached them without touching them, one after another, afraid he would awaken them from an ancient dream (and some felt the nearness of his breath, they grunted, walked away, dropped a piece of blue tortilla, some drew together, embraced as if fearing the nearness of an implacable ending; one grabbed up a burning branch and began to beat the shoulders of the wind, to burn the eyes of the darkness). Up until then, my uncle, with his mannish humors, his breath, his distant cosmetics, did not approach any of them; no sooner did he do so than he disrupted everything. They smelled all the difference, they extinguished the hostile fires, unnecessary in any case for seeing things at this hour of the day, got into single file, hands on each other’s shoulders, as if they’d been practicing this rite (or defense) forever, each Indian with his hand on the shoulder of the one in front of him, forming a circle that would capture my uncle as if he were a wild animal. They smelled him. They knew how to use their sense of smell. Nothing was stronger than smell for them, nothing more venerable, nothing more certain as a fact of the world beyond the shadows. No odor was stronger than that of shit. Not even the smell of creole historian.

Noise displaced smell, the helicopter blades overwhelmed the olfactory presence of my uncle, even that of the scatological mound. No animal had ever dared to climb up here. Pumas or ocelots knew what awaited them here. Did anyone give better beatings than these people? On the other hand, today, twice, an eagle … Nothing was faster or stronger than the machine piloted by the man from the NII, who descended to the confusion of the tribe, opened the door — never ceasing to chew his gum — and told my uncle that he was sorry to have disobeyed him, but that he had had to inform his superiors that Professor Benítez intended to spend the night in the mountains with an unknown group of Indians, that the information reached President Paredes, and the President himself gave him the order to go back and get him. How had it gone? asked the pilot as his helicopter, which never again landed on the lands of that tribe, levitated.

In the air, flying toward Palenque, under the aegis of a special permit that allowed them to fly over and land in the Chiapas — Tabasco — Campeche Trusteeship, my Uncle Fernando felt afraid of himself, afraid of his historical curiosity: he had the anguishing feeling that he had interrupted something, perhaps a sacred cycle that sustained the life of that lost tribe on that mountain which was like an island on the moon; he feared a catastrophe. His own was sufficient. His own fear was enough for him.

The permit granted by the Trusteeship administered by the Five Sisters stipulated that the Mexican national Fernando Benítez could land in Chitacam territory for the purpose of interviewing the last Lacandon Indian, before, as the document put it, “it was too late.” He feared, as he flew over the mountains of Oaxaca, that today he had just precipitated the disappearance of the last ninety-two members of the tribe of eternal night.

Could it be, he wondered, staring at the inglorious sunset, that from now on each year there would be one Indian less in that tribe of hereditarily, willfully blind people who were born with the sense of sight but who had it devoured by the larvae of those flies which were their only company, all victims of their isolation? He could not find out; but from now on he would imagine it. An invisible author for an imaginary day.

Mexico — what remained of Mexico after the Partition — was dying without Mexicans — those locked within the confines of the emaciated Republic — ever getting to know each other. Without ever getting to know what was left of the fragmented fatherland.

The tribes separated by the canyon never shook hands. But one tribe could see the other, and one would never see its brothers.

Don Fernando Benítez was on the verge of vomiting out of the helicopter window, but a strange vacillation, one that secretly seemed to warn him against the horror of symmetry, calmed him.

“Do you believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe?” he asked the pilot.

“The what?” the pilot answered (the racket, the earphones).

“I say that only a miracle like another manifestation of the Virgin of Guadalupe can save Mexico.”

“No, we’re going to Palenque,” shouted the pilot. “Not to Mexico City … The Presi…”

Fernando Benítez closed his eyes and patted the shoulder of the young pilot.

Incredible! All solutions seem irrational except one: believing in the Virgin. Our only rationality!

Then something extraordinary occurred: afternoon renounced night and on both sides of the canyon there exploded in midair, as if they were trying to reach the helicopter, race with it, or damage it, bouquets of skyrockets, green and blue fireworks, hysterical, colorless lights, luminous sheets and then bunches of liquid silver and castles made of piercing air: a night full of red, acrid, and miraculous gunpowder: my Uncle Fernando, his eyes closed, did not see the night of the Mexican fiesta, that astonishing night and that astonishing fiesta, born of plundering and absence: fans of fire, towers of liquid metal, the wealth of poverty, rockets and castles that came out of who knows what invisible hiding place, out of who knows what savage squandering of money; harvests and carpentry, pottery, masks, looms and saddles: all of it set on fire here at the instant of the communication between the two shores, a communication he either could not or did not know how to accomplish, savings wiped out in a blast of powder; wealth existed only for that: to dazzle the eyes of the white, nostalgic village, for the glory of the sense of smell of the blind, ragged village: finally they had shaken hands, surrendered all their wealth to one instant of irreparable loss: the fiesta.

He opened his eyes, and the sun had still not set.

He looked outside the cabin and found eyes identical to his own. He shook his head; it was not a reflection. It was a bird. It was an eagle with the head of an owl, and a collar of rainbow-colored feathers, tied up like a chignon, as flowery as a ruff; the harpy eagle that was flying throughout the entire New World, from Paraguay to Mexico, celebrating all by itself the discovery of which the Indians were ignorant. Fernando Benítez saw those eyes and the dogged flight of the eagle, parallel to that of the helicopter: flying like two arrows, both of them together that afternoon in the Sierra Madre. In its powerful talons, the harpy eagle was carrying a living monkey, its shrieks drowned out by the noise of the motors.

2. There are two movements, my mother says

There are two movements, my mother says her Platonic tome says: that of all things, which eternally revolve around themselves without changing place, and that of things that wander eternally, things that move, Angel my love, far from this secluded shore where I already shine one month after my conception in the immobile center of my mother, and I concentrate in myself the two movements of which they speak outside of me. They are desperate to understand what has happened between January and February, I who arrived in the impetuous gush of my father’s errancy, and I now feel that I am hanging on for all I’m worth to a wet, hot cave from which I never ever want to leave, Mommy, I beg of you, don’t say what you’re saying, let everything spin endlessly around you and me, both of us together, not errant, not displaced, not …

The two of them cuddle in Uncle Homero’s grand, uninhabited, and silent mansion on Peachy Tongue Beach, and each one agreed with the other, never again would so many significant occasions come together at one time, New Year’s Eve parties, the beginning of the year of the Quincentennial, the Literature Congress, Uncle Homero’s vacation, the vacation of the military and diplomatic high command in Washington — a break before masterminding the destabilization of the new enemy, Colombia — and Penny López’s vacation, eh? My mother winked and my father feigned ignorance, self-confidently adding Ada and Deng’s disco. It’s better to prepare things with a will, is what I say (said my mom), than to leave them to that Mexican, weeeelll, let’s see how it falls and if it does happen, good thing (she said, interpreting my father’s will). She decided to contradict him only in order to maintain a modicum of independence within her willing acceptance of her tight union with my father. Which is why she said:

“I want to enjoy the supreme availability. I don’t want to earn money, organize a trip, or even plan what we do in a single day. I’ll bet you someone will do it for me.”

My father laughed and asked himself if everything that had taken place in Aca a month ago had been merely gratuitous. We can always imagine what could have happened if everything had gone well, but we always had to be sure that chance would get an oar in now and again; that’s why she would like to understand better what she still doesn’t know and not to think that it was only a joke, but by the same token that it was not just an act of perfect will: not even a getting even, she says to him, not even an act of meting out justice, which someday may separate you from me, and deprive us of our love, my love.

Angel: “Why? I really wish jokes or gratuitous acts could be a way to get justice, why not, Angeles?”

Angeles: “Because the twentieth century is soon going to die on us, and I refuse, whatever the justifications, to equate justice with death, what about you?”

Angel: “All I know is that what we had to do here is either all done or should be all done.” My father spoke in muffled tones: he’d put his head between my mother’s legs, as if he were looking for me.

Angeles: “As Tomasito would say, till no see, no berieve.”

Angel: “Unfortunately, everybody in these parts thinks just the opposite. They say that if you want to believe you’re better off not seeing.” My father raises his head. “Why didn’t the Filipino carry out the final part of the plan?”

Angeles: “I have no idea. What was supposed to happen?”

Angel: “At 15:49, Hipi and the Orphan enter Uncle Homero’s house.”

Angeles: “You mean here, where we are right now the day after Candlemas, February 3, 1992.”

Angel: “It was a Tuesday. Tomasito opens the gate for them, knowing that at that time Uncle Homero is always in his sauna next to the pool.”

Angeles: “Then the guys from the band and Tomasito burst in on him, so that Uncle Homero realizes he’s been betrayed.”

Angel: “Homero shouts, ‘You Judas, I never should have confided my security to a scion of that damned colony named after my King Don Felipe, as the universal Argentine genius Don Manuel Mujica Lainez might have said!’”

Angeles: “And perhaps he remembered what Uncle Fernando said to him when Homero offered him a lot here twenty-four years ago: ‘And how do I defend it from guerrillas?’”

Angel: “Perhaps he did. Why not? But perhaps Tomasito had an attack of conscience.”

Angeles: “What do you mean? What are you getting at?”

Angel: “What I mean, Angelucha, is that after all, Tomasito owes his life to Uncle Homero.”

Angeles: “You knew that and you went ahead anyway?”

Angel: “How can there be risk if nothing’s left to chance? Uncle Homero, to prove his humanitarian, philanthropic, and liberal credentials, took in Tomasito when he was a boy, when UNICEF put him up for adoption after Marcos’s last massacre in Manila. Would you like to tell the rest? Please do.”

Angeles: “It was when Ferdinand and Imelda were desperately trying to wipe out the opposition. They couldn’t sleep because they were making up crueler and crueler repressions. Now you pick it up, silver tray. Up and at ’em, oh genius!”

Angel: “Then Lady Imelda goes bananas and announces to Ferdinand: ‘Last night I dreamed that fifteen years ago a boy was born who was going to plocraim himself King of the Luzons: you were Herod and I was Herodias and we went out to kill all the boys born yesterday fifteen years ago to rid ourselves of these redeemers, using the slogan “Better Deads Than Reds.”’ The Mindanao death squads went out to hit all fifteen-year-olds.”

Angeles: “And Tomasito was saved from that death thanks to Uncle Homero, who just happened to be in Manila … Are you kidding?”

Angel: “He just happened to be in Manila because he was funneling a few hundred million Mexican pesos through the Philippine stock market. The money he’d kept from the tax man he’d picked up from the sale of a subsidiary of the International Baby Foods Company that was supposed to bring foreign investment to Mexico and did just the opposite — but it still had to have a Mexican as the majority shareholder. That patriot just happened to be our trusty uncle, who, to be sure, is hard to imagine as a straw man, but he turned up one day with a check from the Mexican branch of INBAFOO, payable to the Philippine branch. The price paid for the Mexican subsidiary was minuscule, but no one in Mexico or the Philippines ever saw a centavo, not the public treasury, not the consumers, not even the brats who eat that shit, but, you guessed it, the Board of Directors and Preferred Stockholders of INBAFOO in the Republic of the Sun Belt, in the capital of the said republic, Dallas, did indeed see some centavos. How’m I doin’, babe?”

Angeles: “Super, Angel. Your uncle’s your major theme.”

Angel: “And that’s how Homero appropriated all that humanitarian publicity and ducked all the attacks on him for being a go-between, but the fact is that Tomasito hates him, too, but he must also love him, because if, on the one hand, Homero did save him from the Herodian fury of the Marcoses, on the other he knows that the kids who didn’t die in the massacre did die of gastric hemorrhages after eating the little bottles of slime distributed in the Philippines by the Mexican branch of the conglomerate.”

Angeles: “So when he heard Hipi and the Orphan knocking on the gate outside Homero’s house, Tomasito began to have doubts.”

Angel: “Just imagine that his fate could have been this one: having his head cut off by a machete in the pay of Imelda.”

Angeles: “And, instead of that, here he is living like a captive prince in a golden tropical cage, so how could his heart not start beating double-time and he not begin to have his doubts?”

Angel: “But it may be that Tomasito, paralyzed by doubts, mulling over his own salvation compared to the death of his little brothers, consumers of the baby food made by Homero, just went back to his room to let things run their own course, just as you say: the supreme availability, someone else will do it for him…”

Angeles: “Or maybe Tomasito, letting his gratitude get the better of his doubts, instead of admitting the Four Fuckups, cuts them off and then the Orphan Huerta gets mad and shoots Tomasito…”

Angel: “I’m telling you we’ve got to calm that boy down. Sometimes he goes too far.”

Angeles: “Aroused by the noise, Homero leaves the sauna naked, puts on his guayabera just when the Orphan was overcoming the resistance of the doubtful Tomasito, overcome this time by an aberrant fidelity…”

Angel: “Then Homero puts on the parachute, gives rapid orders to the man driving the motorboat, and escapes by flying, he passes over our heads, shits on us, and disappears into the thick air of Acapulco.”

Angeles: “If that’s so, then where is Tomasito?”

Angel: “I don’t know. Where are the Orphan, Hipi, and Egg?”

Angeles: “And the Baby. Don’t ever forget the Baby. I don’t know where she is, either.”

In this and in other sparkling repartee, my mother and father spent the first month after my conception in Uncle Homero Fagoaga’s silent, abandoned house. That adipose Icarus left them, devoting himself to an avian life and, of course, adding his own small contribution to the epidemic in Cacapulco.

Angel and Angeles did not open the doors of the fort. No one, by the by, ever knocked. Tomasito decamped, leaving a full pantry; Uncle Homero had prepared his mansion, since 1968, for a prolonged guerrilla siege.

Thus it was that my father tried to transform the besieged house (in their imagination, of course, nothing beyond that) into a phalanstery = he said to my mother that without discipline they would not survive and that his own conservative revolutionary plans would be frustrated. Punctuality and discipline: my mother made no objection when, at seven o’clock in the morning, they prolonged the postures of their pleasure by going down on all fours and mopping down the tropical terraces of the mansion that belonged to the fugitive Don Homero.

This news was only lived by me and with pleasure during this long month. I communicate them to the readers. You should know that during the first week I floated freely in the secretions of the oviduct until I set up camp permanently in my mother’s uterine cavity. At that time, I, Christopher, was a cluster of well-organized cells, with defined functions, learning the classic lesson, innocent that I was, about the unity of my person — confirmed by the diversity of my functions. Well, if each and every one of the cells that emerged from the fertilized egg has the same genetic structure and therefore each and every one preserves, latent, what my hair color will be, the color of my eyes, not all give these factors equal importance: only the eye- and hair-pigmentation cells concern themselves with a function that is, nevertheless, inscribed in all the other cells.

But after the second week of waiting for the nonexistent news about what transpired on Twelfth Night, when the Three Wise Men are supposed to come, I already thought myself the Wisest Man on Earth (a melodic gene informs me), then bang, my situation becomes so precarious that I almost, dear Reader, never got to tell this intriguing story which has no set ending (because it had no set beginning) because, between being pissed off and pissed on, I began to show myself for what I was, or rather for what purpose I was:

I was a foreign body within my mother’s body, a splinter that would normally be rejected by the wounded skin: a button, a ring, a watch, swallowed by mistake: I forgot, Reader, about national contests, Mamadoc, and Uncle Homero, and I defended myself as best I could, I scrambled up into my spaceship and I launched myself into intrauterine star wars: I ate my mother’s mucous membrane, I penetrated my mother’s circulatory system, devouring her oxygen and food like a desert rat, I excavated, Reader, a hole within my mother’s hole, until my oh so poor, fragile, and frugal existence became, through my will to survive, part of her body and life: I buried myself in my mother, Reader, I caused myself to be swallowed by my mother’s matrix against the rejecting will of my mother herself (an unconscious will, but a will nevertheless) until I felt the surface of this recondite cunt close over my head like a beneficent roof (just like the Cupola that the government, says Uncle Homero, is building over Mexico City to purify the air and then distribute it equitably among the thirty million inhabitants), until I felt that I was expanding, that I was triumphing by cannibalizing my mother, who was unaware that a tiny Saturn was inhabiting her guts, taking up all the free space of that dear curlicue, until I felt, oh benign Reader, that the maternal, generous, flowing blood was drowning me …

(My father, feeling the need for the constant company of my mother and surprised by it, he who had always lived on a sexual merry-go-round since he had escaped the nets of Capitolina and Farnesia until he abandoned the flashy Brunilda, wanders Uncle Homero’s house during the afternoon, melodically shouting Angeles, Angeles, I’m back from the beach: he enters a long gallery that faces the sea and at the end of it he sees her, on her knees, her shoulders bare, wrapped in a towel from the waist down, her head hanging before her and in front of her, on a white towel, arranged as if they were a surgeon’s tools, a whip and a crucifix, a high, pointy, penitent’s cap and a sign painted with red letters which she hangs around her neck and which hangs over her glacially unprotected breasts: I AM THE WORST WOMAN IN THE WORLD. Angel is about to shout something, but even the name “Angeles” freezes on his lips. Was it really she? The afternoon light is uncertain and treacherous. He thinks she has seen him in comparable situations hundreds of times and has never made him feel vulnerable: she, who has accompanied him in everything he’s decided to do from the time they first met, does not deserve to be interrupted by him. He stares intently so that he will never forget the scene.)

3. While these portentous events were transpiring here inside

While these portentous events were transpiring here inside, just think, your mercies benz, that outside in the cosmos my parents spent the four, five, now the six weeks that separated them from Twelfth Night waiting for news that never came.

What did people know?

What were people saying?

What did they think the Acapulco catastrophe meant?

Mom and Dad had begged the Four Fuckups: inform us by Arabian telephone (what in Englatl you call smokesignatl or popocatele), smoke signals, or anything else, of any news you have: nothing.

They asked Don Fernando Benítez: tell us where we can rendezvous with you in the mountains: nothing.

My folks spent long hours contemplating the crackling, gray, striped blackboard of the Sony television set: nothing.

Nothing about the Acapulcalypse. Nothing that would precipitate, which was my parents’ secret intention, a national crisis which would shake up the predictable, pleasant normality of Mamadoc’s contests, which during the days of our confinement followed one on the other with all joy and inexpressible collective enthusiasm:

First Week: National Prize for the Best Oral Description of the Fifty-Centavo Silver Coins Quality 0720 [no longer in existence (neither the coin nor the quality)], nicknamed El Tostón;

Second Week: National Prize for the Inhabitant of the Central Plateau Who, Overcoming His Natural and Genetic Disgust, Eats the Most Fish in a Week;

Third Week: National Prize to the Lady Who Returned the Lost Wallet of Don Wigberto Garza Toledano (Native of Monterrey), While Traveling on the Niños Heroes Subway Line;

Fourth Week: National Prize to the Citizens Who Confess in an Act of Civic Courage without Precedents to Having Been Supporters of Benito Coquet, Donato Miranda Fonseca, Esequiel Padilla, Emilio Martínez Manautou, Javier García Paniagua, Aarón Sáenz, Angel Carvajal, or Francisco Múgica in Past Internal Conflicts within the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

It was as a function of this last contest, held during the first few days of February, that my parents (and I along with them) became most upset — when we least expected it — by the announcement that, in the first few days of March, Dr. Don Homero Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca, after a month of reflexive reclusion in his beach home and careful preparation in his offices on Frank Wood Avenue, had announced his candidacy for the office of Senator from the state of Guerrero. His campaign would kick off with a mass meeting in the town of Igualistlahuaca. The citizens of Guerrero were cordially invited to view the event on television and to express their support for the PRI candidate. Dr. Fagoaga is a distinguished son of Guerrero, as irrefutable documents clearly prove, and in order not to put off for twenty years the democratic opportunity of today, and in order not to be excluded by main force, as were Benito, Donato, Emilio, and …

Angel and Angeles exclaimed in one voice: “But Uncle H. is strictly from Mexico, D.F. He’s never set foot in Guerrero, what did Guerrero do to the boys in the capital to deserve this punishment, etc., as we’ve been saying for decades: Angel and Angeles got over their spontaneous indignation and awaited the next newscast with bated breath.

Angel closed his eyes and said to my mother that they must be totally befuddled by the success of the operation, the failure of the operation, by all of the above = he shook her by the shoulders in order to shake himself.

“It’s all make-believe. We forget that from time to time. I get carried away.”

“Let go of me, Angel.”

“The idea of passing from chaos to despair with no transition scares the hell out of me.”

“Being a conservative anarchist is a little stupid, honey…”

“Nihilist. What I am is a nihilist. And I’m afraid of what I am, I swear. I want to restore certain values, not to be left with no values at all.”

“Calm down. That’s not what you are.”

“Well? What are we going to end up being — unintentionally?”

“There will be many obstacles, what you want won’t be easily achieved, all that stuff about the Sweet Fatherland, your…”

“I’m afraid of ending up as what you’re saying, the opposite of what I’m trying to achieve. Everything always ends up like that, the opposite of what we set out to do.”

“Terrorists. My Uncle Fernando, who lived through that era, would call us terrorists — if he knew.”

“He doesn’t know a thing. He thinks it’s a joke. Better a joke than a crime.”

“Was all that a crime? Tell me. I have no past. I learn everything from you. Everything I get from you sticks to me, even my need not to be like you!”

“Angeles, it’s taken for granted that in the nineties we young people all have the right to an adventure of this kind, it isn’t a statute in any constitution, it’s like what going to a whorehouse or getting drunk used to be; terrorism is a rite of passage, nothing more, it has no importance … Everybody does it. Remember when the Spanish kid García poisoned all the people in his father’s restaurant? Or when Baby Fernández put dynamite under the altar of the Infant of Prague and set it off during twelve o’clock Mass?”

“Sure I do. I like what you’re saying. I don’t see any problems in it.”

“I hope you see some problems in this damned news blackout!!”

“There’s something that worries me even more. Everything turned out too perfectly. There wasn’t even a blink between cause and effect. It’s as if we started gambling with ten pesos and the possibility of winning a hundred and instead we came home with a million.”

“We’re some mean fuckers.” My father laughed unwillingly. Then, genuinely afflicted, he hung his head — not without first kicking the Sony, which fell onto the marble floor, shattering and scattering gray glass, sorry, Angeles, those are just words — terrorist, nihilist, conservative, left-winger, sorry: I’m a guy who’s always pissed off, understand? pissed off that I’ve spent my whole life, since I was born back in 1969 until now in 1992, desperate because I’m so mad and so impotent, I never had the slightest optimism about “openings” or “booms” or “renewals,” guys my age just felt hemmed in, desperate, pissed off: at least being pissed off is something, right? Better than trading in your pesos for dollars, making jokes about the president, blaming the gringos for everything we don’t do, sitting down to wait for the next president to announce his successor, transferring hope every six years despite all the evidence to the contrary, demanding that others do what we can’t, saying the people lack all confidence, that there’s no leadership, that there’s no this, there’s no that … Shit, Angeles, at least I get pissed off and only much later will I ask myself your horrible question, which is breaking my balls, as if it were a good kick: does justice justify murder? Ask me again some other day, don’t forget about it, don’t throw it out with the trash, please. Think the worst of my moral sense.”

“What do we know, Angel?” asked my mother, stroking my father’s hand. He hesitated, then answered:

“About what we did, nothing. They’re not going to say a word. At least not until it suits them. And if they’re not saying anything now it’s because it suits them to keep quiet. Remember the President’s favorite motto: ‘In Mexico you can do anything, as long as you can blame it on someone.’”

A half-opaque light passed through my mother’s eyes.

“You say you’re conservative, and I say I’m left-wing. But we both know that labels don’t matter. What does matter are concrete acts, okay? But did we really do what we did, Angel of love? Are you sure? Are we both sure? Did we really do it?”

Ever since their first night in seclusion, she was answered by the wailing voices of the professional mourning women, who were always hired to come down from the town of Treinta up in the mountains to lament the daily but sporadic deaths that occurred in Acapulco.

These new dusks belonged to their most dolorous, their longest choral chanting: it seemed to be born at the bottom of the sea, and my parents heard it every night without speaking, because it reminded them that not only tourists, literary critics, government functionaries, and millionaires died that day in Aca, but waiters and chambermaids, taxi drivers, and cashiers: but Homero Fagoaga did not die, and now he’s a senatorial candidate, we’re fucked …

These bastards are not thinking about me in the slightest.

They know nothing about my shock: expelled by my father, rejected by my mother, against both of them I’ve set myself up in the womb and I myself am creating the placenta, sucking blood and food through the sponge that I’m weaving onto my mother, who has been invaded now by my new being: I, the accepted parasite, the guest who devours his mother to stay alive, taking refuge there for nine months, thinking now that this pair of nuts is following the noise of the hired mourners, which has supplanted that of the coyotes, that I’m already a disk about one one-hundredth of an inch across which is rapidly growing from button shape to tiny needle shape with head, trunk, and umbilical cord. What else matters? I’d like to ask them noisily about all this that happens without anyone’s knowing it. Or about everything that you endlessly discuss, what’s happening with everyone’s knowing about it.

Beginning in the third week, when the nice lady who returned the wallet belonging to Don Wigberto Garza Toledano (native of etc.) was given a national prize, I was already a well-established embryo beneath the surface of Mom’s uterus, I eat away at things and grow in search of food, I expand the very cavity that received me, I fill the empty spaces, creating my own head and my own tail.

But then they endanger this entire enterprise by hiking up to the highest peak on Uncle Homero’s property, a crag that dominates Acapulco’s two fronts, Puerto Marqués and Revolcadero Beach on one side, and the entire bay on the other, in order to make sure that Acapretty was destroyed over a month ago, on Epiphany, and that even if the newspapers and television do not reveal it, the Professional Mourners from Treinta certainly do, as do my parents’ eyes (the remains of the discotheque float like a gigantic condom; the crepe worn by the models trapped on the rocks at La Countess beach flutters in the air), and their long strides to the top of the crag make me fear a Christophalypse consisting of hormonal deserts, hunger, thirst, the prelude to a rain of blood that kills me and washes out the cloaca which I will have become, dissolved, unformed, again: inform.

My parents go down to the beach where I was conceived, staring at the smoke and dead fury that was Acapulco, the Babylon of the poor, chosen to exemplify in the mind of the nation ALL THAT IS NOT THE SWEET FATHERLAND: standing on the hilltops, they hear the melancholy sirens, and my father reminds my mother that one day he returned from Oaxaca transformed — a different man, disconcerted by the melancholy of having lost what he’d just won.

On the beach where they created me and over which Uncle Homero flew, my father writes on the sand:

Fatherland, your surface is a pothole, I mean

Your sky is stagnant smog

The Baby Jesus granted you a palace in Las Lomas and a ski lodge in Vail

And your oil deposits were a gift from a devil who lives on the spot market in Rotterdam, I mean

A little wave came and washed it all away.

Angel and Angeles found Tomasito’s body in an advanced state of decomposition in a canoe that had lodged between two rocks on Pichilinque beach.

Piercing his back was a black spear, fantastically wrapped in green feathers: a jungle spear.

Angeles: “Just a minute. Homero and Tomasito weren’t enemies: they were allies.”

Angel: “Homero thought Tomasito was his enemy, so he killed him when he fled.”

Angeles: “The Four Fuckups found out about Tomasito’s betrayal and they killed him.”

Angel: “Tomasito was just one more victim of the slaughter that went on in Acapulco.”

Angeles: “What Tomasito died of was his death.”

Angel: “Everything happened simultaneously. One event happened neither before nor after but right next to or between another two events:

TOMASITO AND HOMERO

FRIENDS

TOMASITO AND HOMERO

ACCIDENTS

TOMASITO AND HOMERO

ENEMIES

Angeles: “Nobody died; they all went to the beach…”

Angel: “You and I are walking arm-in-arm along Peachy Tongue Beach.”

Angeles: “Animus intelligence!”

They freed the canoe, set fire to it, and launched it on the tide, where it floated toward Manila, the Pacific, Tomasito’s home …

Then it happened that out of the seas of smoke and blood and arsenic and mustard, enveloped in the distant fog of panting coyotes and mist the obscene color of pureed cockroaches, there emerged a body that swam and panted like a coyote but which was tenacious in its decision not to sink in those waters polluted in saecula saeculorum: the smoke rose from the burst cupolas, ashes rained down like grotesque green and yellow chewing gum over the sea from the floating disco Divan the Terrible: and the diminutive figure of a tiny man’s tiny yellow hand seized the prow of the black canoe where the cadaver of the Filipino servant Tomasito was lying, and emerged from the seas of smoke and blood and arsenic and mustard, falling prostrate like a Pekinese puppy at the feet of the Filipino.

4. All Citizens Have the Right to Information

INFOREADER: They haven’t spoken, they haven’t done anything beyond what they’ve already said and done, they haven’t lived beyond what they’ve already lived, and what about me? When they started imagining probabilities, alternatives for the story, without remembering, first of all, that they’ve already made me and, second, that I myself possess a thousand alternatives, they drive me nuts and make me want to cut out, to leave my mother’s ovary without returning to my father’s testicle:

They say I will be a boy and be named Christopher, they’ve gone so far as to decide that for me, the assholes, but suppose I turn out to be a girl? Are they going to Herodize me the way Imelda did with Tomasito? They realize that the probabilities of my being a Mexican boy named Christopher are about one in 183,675, 900, 453, 248 and that all it would have taken was a turn of the genetic screw for me to be an armadillo, and you know, I like that idea. It sounds good, a lost, friendless armadillo with no obligations on one of those misty hilltops down which we tumble, or a jolly dolphin, making love at ten miles per hour over the blue Pacific?

“Have you ever been in Pacífica?”

Why does my dad always ask himself that same question? He’d be much better off thinking that, thanks to me, lost unity will be reconstituted, lost time found once more, all because of little old me, my respected progenitors, your information divided, get it? understand what I’m telling you?

“Is information really power?” asks my dad, and I start trotting along like a burro, wishing I could tell him that his sperm only had half of my vital information, and my mother’s reproductive cells only had the other half, and then

I ARRIVE

and just for being myself I gather together all the NEW information, oh what a glory, to know it now, from this moment on, I combine the total number of chromosomes that my father and mother can give to a new being so he will be new and will not be they, even if they have engendered him, and so that one day I can return them what they lost, their memory, their prophecy, their complete being: so why are they mistreating me like this, bouncing me along a ridge on top of a burro in a rainstorm, with night coming on? What did I ever do to them? We barely know each other and already they start fucking me over!

What do they know?

INFOTEL: Someone called Uncle Homero’s house in Acapulco, saying he has a radiogram from my Uncle Fernando Benítez transmitted from an NII helicopter to the presidential antenna in Mexico City and from there to the private telephone of Dr. Fagoaga, LL.D., in the Pearl of the Pacific, the Mecca of Tourism, the Oriental Port of the New World, the Bay of the China Galleon and the Manila Galleon:

“Have you ever been in Pacífica?”

This is what the message says to my nephew and niece Angel and Angeles Palomar: I expect you on the 22nd of February, the anniversary of the day President Madero, the Apostle of democracy, was murdered, in Cuajincuilapa, all communication between the D.F. and Aca inexplicably cut did you know Homero is a candidate question mark yours Benítez.

What do any of us know?

Wake up, children, wake up, said Grandpa Rigoberto Palomar in an alarmed but serious voice, wake up, today is Saturday, the 22nd of February, and they pulled the blanket off the still-sleeping President Francisco Madero, they took him, surrounded by bayonets, out of his cell, they put him in an automobile along with Mr. Pino Suárez, they stopped the car at the gates of the penitentiary, they made them both get out, they shot each one, a bullet in the head, at 11 o’clock p.m.: Wake up, children, we have to go to the Revolution.

What do I know?

The day of the great uproar, the blind young Indian, wild from the intensity of the invisible noises and smells, took the virgin girl he’d been sniffing after for over a week with a dizzy delicacy: it was after the girl’s first visit from the sticky sorceress, and the smell of blood both repelled and attracted him. She said nothing, she allowed herself to be touched, and she herself touched the man’s smooth hot cheek with pleasure.

INFOGENES: This only I know: That in the vertigo of my Uncle Fernando Benítez’s visit to the people up on the plateau, a blind boy was created at the same time that I was created in Acapulco.

The right to information: this only I know. Grandfather knows which day it is in history, Uncle Fernando knows what days those are in the calendar. But my parents, do they know anything?

INLOCOPARENTIS: They must not even be aware that they’ve created me; they just couldn’t be so cruel, such children of their own genes that they have created my death without even acknowledging my life: acid and arid, irritated and insecure, scraping against everything around me, everything that comes to me in this seesawing around (seesaw my eye, something between a gallop and an earthquake!), which in reality is a throbbing racket for one who was conceived on the beach under the palm trees and who now knows he is in another place, savagely transported in one jump to a restless, volcanic, thorny landscape: one day they’ll tell me about it, and I’ll visualize it, even though I know it right now, I know that (it’s my darkest secret) one day I’ll forget it because your mercies should know that no one is willing to give a child the supplementary days to which he has a right: nine months extra, winning the lottery and getting a Christmas bonus all at the same time, nine months more than the adults, but the adults say, how can this be? They think that it’s enough to recognize that

WHEN WE’RE BORN WE ARE ALREADY NINE MONTHS OLD

which means we possess an intolerable advantage, namely that we have the power to impose the laws of our infancy on them and there is nothing they fear more even though they won’t admit it: what I’m dreaming is, what is is what I dream, what I want I touch, I touch what I want, what I desire exists, what exists is what I desire, I have no reason to work, intrigue, screw other people, covet my neighbor’s property, what for, when all I want I have right here at hand, can you see this your mercies idem?

There is nothing more subversive than instantly turning desire into reality, and that’s why they try to surround us unborn types, and later, when we’re children, they limit us, surround us with schools and jails and churches and programmed vacations and calendar holidays and economic whorehouses erected between a child and the object of his desire, which would be Christmas in July and Two-Year Vacations and Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (which, for Julio Cortázar, would be July in Christmas), and the Garden of Delights — no, all pleasures deferred, we have to conquer it all by means of obedience the discipline of work austerity abstinence Calvinistic savings and the banishment of fantasy from the desert of reality instead of the fantasy of banishment from the desert of reality, Satan: look, says my old and interminable chain of genes to me, look where we’ve gotten to since puritanism took over the world, pretty well fucked up since Simon Peter, say my chromosomatic chains, and Saul-Saul-Why-Do-You-Persecute-Me imposed his rules of abstention after abstention, says my father on foot behind my mother trotting along on her burro through the Sierra Madre, riding the burro along the steep, curved, almost virgin paths that go, says Uncle Fernando, who is guiding us, from Acapulco to the Sierra, not even Cortés knew about these routes, adds our uncle, who knows all of them, and says put on your ponchos here comes a cloudburst and the peaks grow gray suddenly, crowns of misty iron, fleeting heart flutter in the sky: my mother’s nearby heart also beats faster and my father recites out loud, almost sings, scolding the storm that whips us and is about to take revenge on us, say I thoroughly saturated by the Acapulco excesses organized by my mom and dad, by the contradictions I already perceive between their condemnations of puritanism and their indiscriminate extermination of vice in Acapulco: did two young homosexual lovers deserve to die merely because they went around wearing mess jackets à la Tyrone Power? Did Egberto deserve to die because he was a fag or because he was a critic? And Emilio, because he was a puritan or because he was intolerant? And the models, because of the pleasure they gave or for the money they earned? Ada and Deng because…?

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing, nothing at all,” said my father and he looked for an instant at the mask of his Uncle Don Fernando Benítez, who would be turning eighty in a few days and who still walked energetically through the tropical highland storms, leading us on foot through mountains he knew better than the back of his hand, Don Fernando Benítez’s creole mask, his blue eyes blurry from the storm that beats against the lenses of his gold-plated wire-rimmed glasses, his slightly bulbous nose distilling the essence of the squall that drips off the ends of his handlebar mustache bathed in the idem, his mouth a rictus of sad wisdom:

“You two asked me about Pacífica, but do you know where I’ve just been? Doing an interview with the last Lacandon Indian. But guess what happened? The last of the Lacandon Indians interviewed me instead.”

He groaned and furrowed his brow, raising a hand to the imaginary knot of an imaginary tie. He says the Indians are all we have left; they are our ghosts; for thirty years he’s been interviewing them, defending them, going to the most remote places to see them before they disappear, oh of course, saying to Mexicans, we owe loyalty to the world of the Indians, even if we disdain them, exploit them, because it’s the loyalty we owe to death. He gets excited about the idea, he stops a moment, just for theatrical effect, damn but we’ve become just as eccentric, just as fragile, just as condemned to extinction as they have, why don’t we recognize the fact?

“Killing an Indian is like burning down a library.”

He roared out a lament that conquered the storm and echoed through the sierra:

“Oh, God, all of us are Lacandons!”

“So no one in the rest of the country said anything about Acapulco?” asked my mother Angeles, insistently but serenely. I suspect that she hasn’t got the remotest idea that I’m bouncing around like a marble in these boondocks she’s carried me to.

“No.” Uncle Benítez shook his hat-covered head, turning his back on them once again and stubbornly maintaining the pace. “Nobody knows a thing about it.”

Our Uncle Fernando Benítez made his nemesis face, and I registered what happened in the seed of what would soon be my cerebral cortex: “Killing an Indian is like burning down a library,” and we’ve already got more than two hundred pages written, one movie hour, two TV hours (including commercials), several oppressive nightmares because it’s all over, and nevertheless we persist in reliving it every twenty-four hours: Father and Mother, my genes tell me better get used to it, Chris, that’s Mexico for you, live one more day so you can live on that day the seven centuries since the advent of the Heagle and the Herpent.

Please, your discriminatory worships, please do not ask to know what my parents and Uncle Fernando Benítez see at 2 p.m., three days after their climb up the sierra, the southern mommy, in the storm, three days after sleeping in shacks Don Fernando knows and in Indian villages which take him in with astonished recognition, as if they were getting ready to visit him quite soon and don’t bother coming out here to see us, Quetzalcoatl: cold, high nights I remember (I shall remember), the smell of burned forests, the grunting of hogs running around freely and the soulful laugh of the burro who is sadly, happily sure we don’t understand him simply because he doesn’t speak to us. Now we descend to the flatland, where the sun and shadow are equally long at all hours of the day, sculptures made of air, astonished at their own existence (we are in Guerrero, at the corner of Oaxaca, says my father; let’s go to the market in Igualistlahuaca, I’m hungry and they make delicious grasshoppers in red pepper there and then they say he who eats grasshopper never leaves this place):

Better look at what’s written on the hillsides:

MEXICANS: INDUSTRIALIZE

YOU WON’T LIVE LONGER, BUT YOU WILL LIVE BETTER

The saying that made Don Ulises López, Penny’s father, remember? famous. My mother threw the rebozo that had been covering her head over her shoulders, good old Penny sure does get around.

MIXTEC: ACT RESPONSIBLY!

VOTE DIALECTICALLY!

but my father says look at the farmers on horseback, riding at a controlled pace, wearing grimy straw hats, the bridles black with sweat, the red tulips, the blue sky through the leafy laurels, the burros laden with hay, the light rain, a three-minute sprinkle, the noise of the rivers hidden underground and the vast rose-colored fields, a valley of rolling heather and the sudden end of the rain.

No, says Uncle F., you don’t have to look so far away, just look over there at the gangrenous walls of Igualistlahuaca, Guerrero:

CITIZENS OF GUERRERO STATE

VOTE FOR A MAN WHO’S REALLY GREAT

VOTE FOR PRI, VOTE FOR HOMERO

HE’LL MAKE A FUTURE FOR GUERRERO!

and if any doubts remained

INSTITUTIONAL REVOLUTIONARY PARTY

Today at 2 P.M.

Igualistlahuaca Arena

DON’T MISS THE BIG WRESTLING MATCH

His Honor, Homero Fagoaga, Senatorial Candidate

Mass Meeting Outside Igualistlahuaca Church

ROBIN VERSUS BATMAN

Eight O’clock Sharp

A five-fall match

It all begins at 2:00, right in front of the church

Citizens Unite Behind Homero

Fagoaga, He’s Our Man

Bluedevils versus Ungrateful Pussy

FAGOAGA, HE’S OKAY!

HIT A HOMER WITH HOMERO!

CITIZENS OF IGUALISTLAHUACA: WAKE UP!

GET BEHIND THE INTERNATIONALIST SOCIALIST PARTY

LUXEMBURGIST FACTION OF

LIEBKNECHT TENDENCY

OAXACA PLEKHANOV CHAPTER

FIGHT FOR THE VICTORY OF THE DICTATORSHIP OF

THE PROLETARIAT!

ALL UNITE AGAINST HOMERO!

HOMERO: THE LANGUAGE CANDIDATE

Yes, I, Homero, am your homer, I win the game and save hometown honor for the forgotten masses of hometown Mexico, intoned His Honor Homero Fagoaga, from the bandstand set up in front of the Igualistlahuaca church. He insisted on it, my debut, my maiden speech, if you’ll allow me to play the coquette with you, brother Delegate of the PRI, maiden speech in the language of Shakespeare means a virgin speech, ha ha, see, just imagine for a moment, after all that this tongue, bequeathed to me by the glorious hand mutilated at the battle of Lepanto, has been through! By which I mean, metaphorically, you’ve got to understand the subtleties of our maiden-spain prosody, that is, you’ve got to understand the language of Spain, Mr. Delegate, made in pain, because Pain Is Spain, Mr. Delegate, the Spanish tongue taken as a perpetual and painful wedding night of proper discourse, and since the local Delegate, a bucktoothed, myopic lawyer from Cuajincuilapa, baptized, of all things, Elijo Raíz, was staring at him in incomprehension, Homero said to himself, humm, out in these boondocks there isn’t a single shyster, graduated from some music school or other, who doesn’t think he’s potential Benito Juárez: now they’re going to see what it means to use language to fascinate the multitudes, right now! He demanded and was granted permission by the local PRI to give his first speech, his virgin speech, his maidenspich made in Spain maiden’s pain Maiden Spain and Mad in Spain in the plaza outside the Igualistlahuaca church, with the street and the market in front of him and the altars behind, demonstrating in that way, candidate Fagoaga explained to his crosseyed interlocutor, that in the Party of Revolutionary Institutions all Mexicans should coexist, rich and poor, chauvinist and xenophile, reactionaries and progressives, after all Mr. Delegate, what was the meaning of our national political system if not to overcome, once and for all, the fratricidal confrontations between liberals and conservatives which in their nineteenth-century avatars condemned us, as they did our sister republics of Bolivaresque destiny, to swing back and forth between anarchy and dictatorship, self-perpetuating despotism and savage hatred, worthy of Shakespeare’s Verona: the Mexican Revolution, Mr. Delegate, reconciled the Masonic Montagues of the Scottish Rite with the Capulets of the Yorkish Rite, it overcame Mexico’s Sicilian weaknesses and the Balkanic lethargy of Latin America and only erred in its rhetorical opposition to the banners of Christ.

“But now,” said Uncle H. as he swallowed an armadillo in green mole sauce in one of the incomparable culinary retreats lining the Igualistlahuaca plaza, “it falls to us to reconcile secular faith with divine faith, the sacred with the profane.”

Who could forget the visit of the Polish Pope to Mexico fourteen years before, the most spectacular entrance into the capital since that of Hernán Cortés, when, sotto voce, the most prudent strategists in national politics said to themselves, as they peeked out from behind the thick brocade curtains at the Seat of Executive Power at the seven million souls who awaited, who followed, and who surrounded the Vicar of Christ in the Zócalo and the Cathedral:

“All the Holy Father would have to do is order them to seize the National Palace. They would do it, your honor, and nothing could stop them. Am I right?”

“Well,” Uncle Homero directed his beautifully enunciated prose against the difficulties of a bit of crackling (overcoming that recalcitrant tidbit, of course), “the time has come for us to reconquer the sacred for the Revolution. Let us stop, Mr. Delegate, being fools and playing at anticlericalism. We’ve recaptured everything in order to achieve our heart’s desire, National Unity: left and right, bankers and field hands, now also, thanks to our August National Guide, even our Ancestral Matriarchy. I warn you, let us capture the world of the sacred before it captures us. I warn you, Mr. Delegate from the state of Guerrero, Coreligionist in PRI, Don Elijo Raíz: there is an Ayatollah in our Future. Now let’s finish up this crackling!”

A parrot squawked on the shadowed portal of the plaza, and Homero, flying on metaphoric wings, swallowed his plum dessert in one gulp, eagerly thinking about the Mixtec-Zapotec homeland.

5. And so it was that at midday Don Homero Fagoaga

5

And so it was that at midday Don Homero Fagoaga ascended the bandstand erected in front of the old rose-colored church in Igualistlahuaca, equidistant, our budding national figure, from the two towers and from the bell towers worked in pale cut stone and watered-down marble. Uncle H. standing before his microphone, surrounded by sixty-three local PRI hierarchs, the tribunal festooned with banners that repeated the slogans of the day, Don Homero surrounded by small-town orators eager to be seen with the future Senator but also with the sixty-three hierarchs, one for each year the Party had been in power, to think there are men sixty-three years old who have never seen any other party in power, murmured Uncle Fernando indignantly as he led my parents Angel and Angeles (and, as a bonus, me as well, though none of them knew about it at the time, they’ll only remember me retroactively, retroattractively — really acting retro is what I understand it to be), who were now entering the crowded square, she on the burro, he wrapped in his poncho, heading toward the tribunal where Uncle H., saved from the Acapulco furies right under the noses of my impotent parents Angel and Angeles, lets himself be loved by the PRI ephebocracy, the young men who make sure his microphone is set at the proper angle, who smile at him by smiling at the sun, and who seek their own rapid, not to say meteoric, rise through the hierarchy of our civil church, the P — R–I, their black eyes already shining with the dream of being Pope, cardinal at least, what about archbishop? okay, bishop would be enough, deacon if there’s nothing better to be had, sacristan sounds good, altar boy’s better than nothing, Swiss Guard, whatever, whatever your mercies say as long as they’re not left out in the cold, and his honor Homero Fagoaga glowing amid the ambition of the young men and the fatigue of the old ones, ayyy the survivors of heighty campaigns like this one, height million height hundred heighty-height glasses of Hi-C, mountains of black mole, horse meat, barbecued pork with everything on it, skin and hair, civic parades and social nights dancing polkas with fat ladies, in town after town, village after village, survivors of phantasmagoric campaigns — the sexennial Mexican presidential nonrace — for president and senator, the triennial races for the Congress, biennial races for local legislators and municipal presidents, all of them bewitched by this need to campaign, to become president, as if they were going up against the Italian Communists, the English Tories, and the French Gaullists: bah! exclaims Uncle Fernando, whose speech my mom is recording amid the Mixtec Mass this morning for the future reference of my collective unconsciousness, only the gringos beat us out with a single party that pretends to be two parties. The only truly authentic slogan should be:

ELECTIONS COME EVERY SIX YEARS,

BUT MISFORTUNE IS ALWAYS WITH US

Sixty-three years, my dear niece and nephew, what do you think of that, and no end in sight, said Uncle Fernando: not Hitler, not Perón, not even Franco, only the U.S.S.R. beats us and now not even them because now we have a PAN president, which allows the PRI to blame the opposition for everything and to govern with more power than ever, and for that very reason Don Homero Fagoaga adjusts the microphone to the height of his multiple chins, warms up his delivery, the crowds gather, curious, trucked in, bribed, a hundred pesos, a taco, lemonade, a beer, a brass band, you name it, things might get screwed up if you don’t come, let’s see now about your property-line suit, let’s see, let’s sue, let’s sewer: with a great sense of satisfaction, Homero scanned the multitude of Mixtec citizens spread out in front of him, standing there on the pavement stones next to the sickly pines and laurels near the church and beyond the gates out to the unpaved street and the market tents of opulent misery. He looked at the heads of the multitude of varnished straw hats, the heads of the women crowned with green, blue, and scarlet silk, their tresses tied up with orange and lilac wool, four thousand, five thousand heads carrying traditional offerings, with earthenware pots balanced on their heads, heads offering tomatoes and herbs, grasshoppers and onions, and the nervous little heads of the children, first running like porcupines but finally they too, the happy children in the land of sad grownups, captured by the sinuous words of Don Homero Fagoaga, who was comparing the Guerrero sierra “to Italic Latium and Hellenic Attica, glorious sites of humanistic honor, cradles of democracy, crucibles of society where a metaphysical tremor made men and mountains, children and stones all speak in one voice to repeat with the immortal tribune, quaestor, and consul, my model in action and speech, Don Marcus Tullius Cicero, of Arpino, mens cuisque is est quisque, which in the glorious language we speak thanks to the Hispanic Motherland, to, of course, no discredit to the Autochthonous Motherland, which I see here exemplified in its roots of impassioned telluric tremor, means the spirit is the true being and where, oh citizens of Guerrero, would that truth be more profoundly true and scientifically rational and precise than here in the Mixtec homeland, ever fertile cradle of the glorious motherland — MEEXXXIIICCCOOO: Civis Romanum sum, the glorious tribune exclaimed with pride but without arrogance and here we can repeat, Civis Guerrerensis sum, because if indeed the uncle of Augustus declared his modest and for being modest moving preference to be first a son of his village and second a son of Rome, it was not merely for that reason that he stood a model for legions of his admirers then and now, but above all looking forward to, anticipating, the Mexican meritocracy that our Revolutionary Institutional Party offers with equal opportunities for all, for each and every one of you, to rise, as the Well-Deserving Don Benito Juárez rose, from illiterate shepherd to the Presidential Throne, from being first in place of honor in Rome and saying to his people: You have Caesar and his fortune with you!”

He cleared his throat, was offered a turbid glass of tepache, his microphone, which the vibrations of his mighty word and the pulsation of his potbelly had pushed far away, was readjusted, a little old drunk raised his bottle of Corona Extra and shouted out Long Live Don Porfirio Díaz and Homero: oh, fellow sons and daughters of Guerrero, let it at least be said of Homero Fagoaga that he serves both you and Our Lord in Heaven (pregnant pause): there is, fellow voters, fellow citizens, friends, brothers in the Lord (significant pause), and coreligionists of the Revolution (hasty conclusion: con brio), no corner of the world that smiles on us more than this one, as the ancient bard Horace said of his native Venosa.

Uncle Homero paused with a distant but fierce blaze in his eyes: irritated at the stupidity of the people hired to plaster the walls of Igualistlahuaca with posters and how they’d confused the hour, the name, the theme, and the message of his sacrorevolutionary oratory with a vulgar wrestling match between Batman and Robin, and what, by the way, could be further from his five thousand listeners, Homero suddenly said to himself, the Match or Cicero? No matter, he sighed: a Mexican can make do with anything because he can be anything: the PRI not only allows it but makes certain he can. But in that briefest of instants in which the local Party hierarchs thought some things and the candidate thought others and Uncle Fernando, my dad, and my mom, and I inside her (a mere figment of the collective unconscious inside the spirals of history, the vicious circle) felt ourselves pushed, first pressured secretly, then little by little pressed by a human, incomprehensible power that could not be located in any one individual and even less attributable to that grand no one which is everyone, finally trampled, tossed by the multitude of Mixtecs who moved forward with impassive faces, devoid of laughter, devoid of hatred, devoid of tears, with their unmoving terra-cotta features, as Uncle H. would say from his bandstand, with a blind determination and an enthusiasm that was frightening precisely because of its silence, a quiet horde of Mixtec Maenads moving toward the bandstand occupied by Uncle Homero and the Sixty-three Hierarchs: can you guess what happened next? They didn’t applaud, they didn’t throw tomatoes or grasshoppers at the distinguished personages on the dais: they just moved, advanced, my father later said, in the same way the waves, the clouds, all the beautiful and terrible things in this world, move, as Homero opened his arms to receive the love of the masses which would waft him on to a senatorial bench, from this dump to SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW! oh, my Uncle H., in what moment did you realize what the Sixty-three PRI Hierarchs had begun to guess, the worst, seeing that silent mass, hardhearted, devoid of emotion, moving toward him with the fatality of the six-year term, with an imperturbable resolution that was open to any and all interpretations, and Homero asked the young coffee-cup-sized orator on his left, whose name was Tezozómoc Cuervo, LL.D.:

“Did they like it?”

“My dear sir, see for yourself.”

Homero sighed in the face of this native political dexterity and turned to the hierarch on his right, an old man with a pear-shaped body and loose suspenders, famous in local circles as the first and foremost supporter of President Calles in the state of Guerrero, Don Bernardino Gutiérrez:

“Tell me: why don’t they clap?”

“They don’t know how.”

“Then why don’t they throw tomatoes and onions if they don’t like my speech?”

“It isn’t a matter of their liking it or disliking it. To the contrary.”

“You mean they didn’t understand my Latin allusions, is that it?”

“No, sir. They didn’t understand anything. Not one of these Indians speaks Spanish.”

Don Homero had no time to show shock, fury, or disdain, much less to get on his horse and hightail it; impossible to know if it was excessive hatred, outrage, or fascination, or perhaps a love incapable of showing itself in any other way, that was moving five thousand Mixtec men, women, and children from the Guerrero mountains who, beyond communication, incapable of communication, reached the bandstand, stretched out their hands, pulled down the tricolor paper flags, the tricolor rosettes, and the PRI posters, then the eyeglasses belonging to the state delegate from Cuajinicuilapa, buck-toothed and myopic, the daisy in the lapel of the m.c. and the old politico’s suspenders, which snapped back against his feeble chest, and that’s when the panic began: the hierarchy turned its back on the people and went running into the church, shouting sanctuary, sanctuary!: the trembling candles were extinguished by their stampeding feet and their screams and my father, still wearing his rain poncho and with his face covered by four days’ growth of beard, led my mother, still on her burro and wrapped in a blue shawl and with me in the center of the universe, and the Indians gave way, they let us pass and my father made a sign with his hand and said come here Homero, you shall pass through the eye of a needle because that’s exactly how wide our mercy is: but virtue is measured in magnitude, not things, and of course our Uncle Don Fernando translated these holy words into Mixtec and all of them stood aside without uttering a word, like the waters of the watermelon-colored sea while the sixty-three hierarchs locked the church doors, and braced themselves against them to add to the bolts the weight of each one of their sixty-three years of political predominance, and Don Bernardino Gutiérrez, first and foremost supporter of President Calles in the state of Guerrero, exclaimed that you can’t get milk from an ox but that when it’s time to fry beans what you need is grease, and Elijo Raíz, LL.D., who came in in 1940 with Avila Camacho, added that it all had to end the way it began, in the bosom of the Holy Mother Church, hallelujah, amen, push, pull, and national unity!

6. Curiously enough, the first things we feel

Curiously enough, the first things we feel, even as mere monozygotes inside the maternal womb, are the fluctuations in the exterior dynamics that surround us and in which our mothers participate; for instance, the apprehensions entailed in our flight from the holy places of Igualistlahuaca when we were going against the tide of the masses who listened to my Uncle Homero’s discourse as they pressed up against the locked doors of the rose-colored church with its double cut-stone towers, against which doors sixty-three leaders of the Revolutionary Institutional Party of Guerrero were pushing with all their might, shoulders, hands, hips, and backsides to keep the aforesaid masses from entering, since those masses had just scared them out of their wits by moving without them and they didn’t understand (nor did we, the group running away) whether what the citizens, the faithful, the plebes, the helots, the great unwashed, the redskins (each of the sixty-three was muttering what he really thought about them as he pushed against the splintering door), wanted to show was a great love, a concentrated hatred, or an explosive despair devoid of hatred or love.

The first things we feel: the bustle, the ambition, the obstacles — other bodies — that impede our own movement, my mom’s and mine for instance, our tensions, our fear of everything around us that moves with or against us, said my mother and I. Don’t, your worships, jump to conclusions because I was there and you weren’t, as we were once again on burro or on foot heading for the hills and the mountains that Uncle Fernando knows like the back of his hand, as he heads for Malinaltzin, he tells us, because there is very little landscape left and even less land left in this land of ours: where are we Mexicans going to walk around? North of the Temazcal is off-limits because there’s a war on there, east of Perote is out of bounds because that’s where the oil is, north of the Infiernillo is out of bounds because that’s where …

“Pacífica is…” says my father in a low voice, but Uncle H. was not listening, neither to my father nor to my Uncle Fernando, as he snorted in rage astride the longest-suffering burro in burrodom: the rotund personage whines and regurgitates, not even listening to what my father and my other uncle, Don Fernando, are saying.

“Oh, Lord, what could I have done to deserve this humiliation, I, saved twice in the same year by my nephew Angel to whom I have done so much evil? Oh, I beg forgiveness, a thousand times I beg forgiveness.”

Homero Fagoaga slipped off his burro as they went down a mountainside and kissed the feet of my father — ramrod-straight, bearded, green-eyed, and Guelfish. Forgive me, nephew, I am in your hands, you saved me from the Acapulco mob by sending Tomasito to warn me in time so I could escape by speedboat and parachute instead of using the minisub I had prepared (they didn’t take my etc. into account) …

“It was Tomasito who warned you?” groans my mother.

“Precisely. And because of his loyalty the heroic son of the archipelago died, died, I say, at the hand of pimpish types whose faces and manners I seemed to recognize,” said Uncle H., staring at us with eyes that said I’m holding a royal flush too, but we’re all pals here, right? “Who will ever be able to explain what makes some people completely loyal?” he added, wagging his tremendous Tartuffesque jowls. “Tomasito is dead!”

“And you are alive, Uncle.”

“Thanks to you. And I had time to prepare my campaign and call my plane from Mexico City, so that I could keep my appointment with our well-beloved Mexican soil. Now you have saved me from those monolingual aborigines, oh how can I ever pay you for doing me such favors?”

“You miserable fat slob,” interrupted Uncle Fernando, “what are you running away from?”

“My best speech, dear oh dear, the one I’d worked over most, the one I’d virtually chiseled out of Parian marble, the most eloquent, the most erudite, my most heartfelt one as well, lost in the face of five thousand sandal-wearing plebes who didn’t understand a word! Mexico in a nutshell, my dear, dear relatives! Everything for nothing and nothing for everyone! But doubt, doubt is what’s consuming me! Did they love me? Did they hate me? Please, don’t take my doubt away from me!” said Homero, standing up with dignity.

“The one thing there can be no doubt about is what your buddies from the PRI will be thinking about you, you pudding on legs,” Uncle Fernando declared.

“Bah, after all that confusion they’ll understand my reasons just as I’ll understand theirs,” said Uncle H. with diminishing haughtiness, as he mounted his burro with bizarre agility.

“Well, my dear Uncle, it seems to me that even as we speak the tribe has probably already chopped up the hierarchs who vainly sought refuge in the religious sanctuary. Dear me, yes, Uncle. The purest tamale. Just you think about that.”

“All sixty-three, nephew?”

“But of course, Uncle.”

“Elijo Raíz, the delegate born in Cuajinicuilapa?”

“Ground up fine.”

“Don Bernardino Gutiérrez, first and foremost supporter of President Calles in the state of Guerrero?”

“Ground up fine.”

“But just yesterday, as we were leaving the airport for the hotel, I asked him, listen, Don Bernardino, you who’ve been in national politics since the days of General Calles, how have you managed to survive and adapt yourself to so many changes, fluctuations, and shake-ups? Think of me as a humble apprentice and let your experience illuminate my hope. Then Don Bernardino stuck his index finger in his mouth and stuck it out of the car window to tell which way the wind was blowing.”

“That’s how to do it, son.”

“Gelded like a hog.”

“And the young Tezozómoc Cuervo, pristine orator, formed like a jug and of coffeeish hue?”

“That boy, as Don Bernardino would say: now he’s a busted jug.”

“Good God, what have I set into motion?” whined Homero Fagoaga.

“The beginning of the end, you miserable swine,” interjected our guide, Don Fernando, without bothering to turn around to look at him as he drove the mules back the way we came.

“The end of the PRI?” asked Homero, about to fall off again.

“You look pale.”

“Deflated.”

“Oh! Ah!” The burro bucked, sending the not so future Senator flying through the air.

Homero hung on my father’s neck, who later said it was like being hugged by a gigantic vanilla ice-cream cone with chocolate sauce on the verge of melting.

“Hide me,” said this would-be Senator Fagoaga, desperately but alertly: “Don’t let them take their revenge on me, I’ll do anything you ask, but don’t abandon me to the revenge of the PRI!”

He stretched out his arm. “Fernando, my friend.”

“Will you be quiet, you miserable swine?” Our Uncle Fernando turned to face him. “You are going down in history as the man who destroyed the PRI! Damned if that isn’t historical irony! You, Homero Fagoaga, illustrious member of the PRI…”

“At your service!” exclaimed Homero, almost standing up, like one listening to the national anthem, but then fell instantly on his knees and begged to be hidden in the old house in Tlalpan that had belonged to my father’s parents, the house of bright colors near the Church of St. Peter the Apostle, the house the wicked fat man had ordered seized and sealed in his lawsuit against his nephew’s prodigality, but which was, said the finicky creep, the last place anyone would think to look for him. Hide me there, no one would ever think to look for me there, the enmity between him and his relatives was well known, and thus he could respect the devout modesty of his sisters, Capitolina and Farnesia, the last two certified virgins in Mexico. Sure, and put up with Uncle H. in the house in Tlalpan, which would remain sealed, cut off from profane eyes, where no one would look for him, in such proclaimed modesty, within such a frugal space …

“And what do we get out of it?”

Uncle Homero, on his knees, spread his arms like a penitent.

“I’ll stop the suit that would declare you, my nephew, Don Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, prodigal and irresponsible, I’ll pay all court costs and damages, I will return the Tlalpan property to you, I will free up the gold pesos legitimately inherited by my aforesaid nephew after the perfectly legitimate, sudden, and undeniably accidental death of his parents, Don Diego Palomar and Doña Isabella Fagoaga de Palomar, my sister, the couple who came to be known as the Mexican Curies before the accursed taco crossed their scientific path. What else do you want? More?”

“You are going to resign publicly from the PRI, Homero.”

From then on, my mommy is going to tell to anyone who might care to listen that the shock of our Uncle Homero Fagoaga was eclipsed and simultaneously magnified by the afternoon glow in the mountains, that shock of the earth as it looked at the clouds, the shock of the clouds as they looked at the cut stone, and the shock of the stone as it contemplated itself in the light, and the shock of the light as it found the flashing expanse of the field of heather. Nothing in all that could match the historical shock painted on our uncle’s face.

In the oleaginous eyes of the man kneeling before his detested saviors, in his equally oily syllables, in the very posture of his defeudalized abjection, which contrasted with the indifferent splendor of invisible nature, my mother managed to distinguish a plea for compassion, destroyed, of course, in the act by Homero’s words:

“But, Fernando … Fernando … I was born with the PRI, it’s the source of my national pride and my personal destiny, Fernando: I can’t conceive of life without the PRI, I am oriented, synchronized, plugged into the Party, I owe my language, my thoughts, my ideals, my deals, my schemes, my opportunities, my excuses, my acts of daring, Fernando: my entire existence, right down to my most intimate fibers, I swear to you, to the PRI and its system, I am Catholic because I believe in the hierarchy and the sweet dogmas of my political church; but I am a revolutionary because I believe in its slogans and its most archaic proofs of legitimacy; I am conservative because without the PRI we head directly to communism; I am liberal because without the PRI we head directly to fascism, and I am a Catholic, revolutionary, progressive, and reactionary millionaire all at the same time and for the same reasons: the PRI authorizes it. Without the PRI I wouldn’t know what to say, think, even how to act. Just think: when I was born, the Party was only three years old; it’s my brother! We grew up together; I don’t know anything else! Without the PRI I’d be an orphan of history! Can you really ask me to give that up? Have mercy! Without the PRI I don’t exist! The PRI is my cradle, my roof, my soup, my language, the nose I smell with, the palate I taste with, my eardrum, the pupil of my eyes!”

Homeric pause.

“Can you really ask me to give that up? What else?”

Don Fernando Benítez, wrapped in his corn-husk mantle, with his head bare and his old, muddy, scuffed boot resting on the lowered nape of this conquered Gaul, our Uncle Don Homero Fagoaga Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca, LL.D.

“Yes, you filthy barnacle bloodsucker, there is something more.”

“More, more?” whined Homero.

“This you will have to do and confess, Homero, to pay for your sins. You shall believe in liberty and democracy, Homero. You will go forth to fight for them whenever I order you to do so, Homero. You will have faith in your fellow citizens, the faith no one has ever wanted to have in them. You will give this disdained land the chance to be democratic, Homero.”

“But it has never been democratic!” exclaimed the hollow-eyed Don Homero as Don Fernando ground his cheek into the mud with his boot.

“You will have to do it despite all evidence to the contrary, you coward. The important thing is that you believe it without proving it, that you confess it, admire it, and defend it: Mexico can be a democratic country! With your powerful arm on our side, Homero, we shall undo all the wrongs of our history in order to proclaim to all, blessed age and blessèd century.”

I’m inside my mother, but my mother can’t know it yet, and nevertheless one day I’ll know that she doesn’t say anything out loud that afternoon because in a strange way she feels that she’s trying to confer an impossible dignity on things with her silence, my mother says in secret, staring at Uncle Homero, submissive to the insane demands of Uncle Fernando, who stands, as small and nervous as a prancing fighting cock, bald and pink, with his handlebar mustache and his blue eyes, his tiny glasses in a creolized Franz Schubert style, expert on Indians, and author.

“Get down off that burro, Homero, and do me the honor of leading me to Malinaltzin!”

7. Don Fernando paused triumphantly

Don Fernando paused triumphantly and told the humiliated Don Homero and my parents (and me, hanging on as best I could, unrecognized by them just as they are not recognized by Nature) that in memory of this victorious campaign for democracy we would all take refuge in the baroque beauty of the Malinaltzin church, which the Indians had built, and thus unite — this was our Uncle Fernando’s permanent intention — tradition and modernization, culture and democracy. He turned his steps and his trots toward the church, but soon they discovered that the sacristan wasn’t there, that he’d gone to the state capital (Chilpancingo) to drink up a good tip given him by a tourist who’d come yesterday, and so who had the keys? Don Fernando asked one of the locals, So-and-so, and where might this person be? well, working on the highway, breaking rock and laying asphalt, why didn’t they get someone to stand in for the sacristan? who knows, go ask him yourself, and they walked and trotted toward the highway under construction on the outskirts of the village, this miserable hamlet, which is a vast brown hole dotted with puddles, which were its only amenity and distraction. Its walls were made of sad mud, a lament of dry adobe, and on them the opposition had plastered slogans denouncing Don Homero and his party.

MIXTEC PEOPLE, AWAKE!

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

MEANS VICTORY FOR THE PROLETARIAT

cheek by jowl with:

CHRISTIANS YES! COMMIES NO!

VOTE WITH THE SYNARCH FALANGE AND

CROSS OUT THE ATHEISTS!

and just beyond the usual fucked-over faces, my mother sends me effluvia of vibrant acid, all to this drop of tremulous life, this tiny Mercury without wings that I am, beyond the walls and among the puddles and dogs are the men, women and children, the mass of fleas, hunger, sickness, self-centered pride, and abysmal ignorance of what really matters in the modern world and equally abysmal knowledge of what no one can any longer touch, listen to, understand. My mother orders me to say, not you Homero, not you Fernando, not you Angel, not I, not you, Reader, not even you, my own future offspring.

From a distance, they caught sight of the workers busily paving a stretch of the access road to the highway: the mounds of gravel, the barrels of tar, sieves, and an ancient leveler that ecumenically announced its passage in a series of steam hiccups.

“The time has come!” exclaimed Don Fernando Benítez, sitting astride his burro, to Don Homero Fagoaga, who was docilely leading him along by the reins just as my father Angel was leading my mother Angeles through the rose-colored fields of heather in this provincial place where he had learned to love a land which he had not given up for lost, doubtless because between strolling through the garden and sitting immobile in church he’d learned to talk to himself and in doing that he’d heard for the first time: don’t give me up for lost; wipe off my makeup; I know how to endure.

“The time has come!” repeated Uncle Fernando energetically.

“The time for what?” Homero asked in consternation.

“The time for you to prove your loyalty, villain.”

“I don’t understand what you mean,” said Uncle Homero, regaining a measure of his tottering conceit.

“You most certainly do: you are going to go up to that group of workers we see in the distance and you are going to speak to them, Homero, not in official jargon but in the language of democratic truth.”

“What do you want me to tell them?” asked Homero with less irony than resignation.

Don Fernando scanned the horizon.

“I’m willing to bet they’re not unionized. In these parts, they subcontract some jobs and the worker is not protected in any way. Bah, the economic philosophy of that skunk Ulises López has spread and now people think that the democratic way to do things is for each worker to make his own contract with the boss. You must convince them in socialist-style talk of their need to join together and bargain from a position of strength about salaries. Get going, you rat.”

Don Homero’s protests were useless; the group made up by my two uncles, my father, and my mother (and I, bouncing along without anyone but your worships knowing anything about it) went trotting along in the classic style toward the workers, who stopped working when they saw them; someone whistled, laughter rang out, and a huge, powerful, dark man got down from the leveler. The machine ground to a halt, either as if the man had been pedaling it and simply stopped or as if it simply refused to go if he weren’t driving it: the image was that the man, who was wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat pulled down over his eyes, its brim turned downward so that his face was always in the shadow, was consubstantial with the machine he drove. A centaur of our national machinery.

The other workers were all wearing old khaki, as if they were in uniform. And, just like the man who got off the leveler, they, too, wore old hats to protect themselves from the sun. My mother squeezed my father’s hand, trying to tell him something’s going to happen, I have a feeling, this is no joke, I swear I suddenly feel more afraid than I did in Acapulco, as if all that had been a joke and now being here with these people was not.

But there was no time for any more hunches. Uncle Homero, following Uncle Fernando’s irrevocable command and showing the agility he only revealed on grand occasions, ran toward the leveler recently abandoned by the somber, powerful man, who was walking as if he were dragging a chain and cannonball. Still agog, Uncle H. clambered up the leveler, on the side facing a row of dried-out agave, slipping and sliding, squeezing himself over under and around the driver’s seat and finally posing on the outside stair.

Two things happened: first, our admirable relative, as soon as he realized he was once again on a speaker’s platform, recovered all his flatulent self-confidence; second, his traditional lordly bearing was comically undermined by his having to cling to the iron handle on the outside of the leveler so he wouldn’t fall into the fresh tar above which he was swinging while the members of the work squad nudged each other. Don Homero launched into the second speech of his nerve-racking electoral campaign: he always knew to whom he was speaking; in his bosom and in his tongue all opposites came into harmony; Fagoaga never loses, so: Comrades!:

“Just one look at your callused proletarian hands tells me that only a divisive, murderous faction could detour you away from the route of workers’ internationalism. But I am here to remind you that in the proletarian struggle the real enemy is the enemy within, always the one inside us.”

He glowered in a sinister way at the workers; one of them put his index finger to his temple and made a circle with it. My father tried to interrupt with a shout, as if he’d been impelled to do so by Angeles’s foreboding: “We’ve come about the keys! Who’s got the keys to the church?” he shouted, trying to speed things to their conclusion.

But Don Homero Fagoaga, master of distraction and fraud, would not allow himself to be distracted or defrauded, especially after what had happened in Igualistlahuaca.

He went on intrepidly: “The front line of the left-wing parties is made up of groups so divergent that they will never manage to form a single party unless we first search our bosoms for the vermin hidden there whose divisiveness will ultimately succeed in chaining us to the chariot of the upper classes who, even though they have been conquered, nevertheless cannot resign themselves to disappearing forever from the stage of history. But as soon as you unite, expel the turncoats, discover and break up the network of traitors and provocateurs that exists right here among you”—and here Uncle Homero’s ill-fated rhetorical impulse caused him to point his finger at this man, that man, the other man, all of whom raised their eyes from their tacos, left their bottles in peace, and wiped their mouths (which were smeared with dark plums) on their sleeves—“because, comrade, we don’t know if you, or you, or even you, comrade, have the perverted intention of sniping against the working class and the revolutionary movement.” And now the first plum splattered against Uncle Homero Fagoaga’s already ill-used jacket, another plum to the stomach, plum to the knees, plum to the backside when Homero uselessly tried to retreat. A final plum caught Uncle Homero right in the face, a black flower splattered along his nose and cheeks while our brave Uncle Fernando walked right up to the man standing with his arms crossed and his face covered by the brim of his hat, the man Fernando had intuitively singled out as the leader of the group.

“Tell this bunch of jerks to knock it off. All we came to ask you to do is form a union if you haven’t already done so, so you can better defend the rights you should enjoy under a democracy.”

“We don’t need any union,” said the man slowly.

“You work by subcontract and for a lump sum, so don’t let yourselves be exploited.”

“Now listen up, you old jerk,” said the chief impatiently, “get off our backs.”

Barely had he spoken these fierce words to my bantam-rooster Uncle Fernando when Fernando was all over him with two punches that were so well delivered to the aforementioned leader that the surprise of the attack knocked off his hat and revealed his face, which looked like a photo of a guerrillero. Surprised and angry, my father instantly recognized the face as that of his literary pursuer, the frustrated author Matamoros, father of Colasa Sánchez. However, that discovery was itself obliterated by a rapid series of events: first, the plums were replaced by stones and Uncle Homero did a belly flop into the freshly poured tar; this was followed by an outcry from the twelve workers, who cursed Homero up and down for ruining their day’s work; then some of them picked up sticks to defend their leader Matamoros and beat Uncle Fernando; still others were busy kicking Uncle Homero out of the mud pond the tar they had poured and leveled that morning had become, which tar was to have been the road President Jesús María y José Paredes would have driven over two days later, thinking that a highway had been built linking Chilpancingo to Malinaltzin, even though the President knew full well that the funds allotted to the project had been divided in not precisely even lots among the state governor (50 %), Minister Ulises López (20 %), the contractor (another 20 %), and a few other local officials (5 %), leaving only 5 % for actually building the national highway. So the President will certainly be the most surprised of all to see, when they point it out to him from the governor’s swift Fujiyama limousine, that a highway really does exist, but these poor workers, what do they know about all this; all they know is that their job won’t be finished on time and all because of this miserable, fat, progressive or synarchist or sonofabitchist tub of shit, and others are looking at my father, who has rushed to defend the octogenarian Don Fernando, who is shouting to Matamoros and his gang:

“Calm down, boys, I swear I never slept with your sisters.”

“It’s only because you’re an old asshole that I don’t beat you to death,” said Matamoros Moreno truculently. “I wouldn’t care even if you were my father, damned old fool.”

“I could have been your father, but I didn’t choose to be,” said Don Fernando Benítez, at the crest of a wave of sarcastic dignity, all of which only made the men beat him all the harder, while the others were tugging Uncle Homero out of his lake of pitch and then tossing him, all three hundred pounds of him, until they let him fall in a death cry that blended with Uncle Fernando’s peremptory threats, just as my father arrived to rescue them like a knight in shining armor. He and Matamoros glared at each other, eyeball to eyeball, as they used to say about nuclear confrontations, and Don Fernando blared out:

“Unions! Democracy! Justice!”

To which the workers, laughing their heads off, responded:

“Food, Clothing, Shelter, wherever they come from, wherever they are, a place to sleep, a girl to sleep with!

All eyes turned toward my mother sitting on her burro; then they saw Don Fernando stumbling blindly along the highway looking for his glasses and shouting, Miserable rats, all we did was bring you a democratic message, left-wing pep talk, poor lost people, degraded people, foul mongrels, scarecrow beggars, and poor Homero was lying black and sticky in the tar.

The eyes of the work team turned toward their leader and Matamoros gave them permission with his eyes. Four of the workers pinioned my father, the rest grabbed my mother. A red, foreign light, unrecognizable, alien, belligerent, so strong and so horrible, so without even a by-your-leave, so long and oiled and without ears like a garrotted worm, as ruddy as someone totally drunk, that only I could shout to my own inner self, I don’t know you, I don’t know you, you are not the same one who approached Guanahaní, who upset Fernandina, who took Veragua, who took Honduras, who collared Tabasco, who landed in Puerto Rico and tossed me into my first voyage of discovery, into my infinite sailing in the uterine sea, twinkle, twinkle little star / how I wonder what you are, but she didn’t care whether I felt like a foreigner in the bosom of my own gestation, I exiled within the womb of my own mother, my golden age: kaput, my noble savage: ciao, ciao! my happy age all fucked up: this is where the age of iron took its toll, and the bubble of my conception was burst by these detestable times of ours and the enclosure law closed up throughout my refuge, pushing me inside, until I hit my head against a wall: this was a refuge no longer; it was a desert; no longer a cloister; it was an avenue passed first by a strong man who seemed to push me, my mother, and the world as if we were cannonballs; then the rest, less strong but more avid, each one taking his turn to visit little Chris: my debut in society, 1992 style, the reminder that we are not alone, see? the bastard solidarity of my destiny if by chance I still believed in the illustrious solitude of my destiny: welcome to Christopher’s egg, afflicted working masses of Mexico!

Matamoros Moreno released my father Angel Palomar and buttoned his fly.

“To make up for what you did to me, bastard. For having laughed at my literary first steps. For having refused to help me get published. For having snubbed my precious little girl Colasa. You didn’t give a shit about me, right? Well, let’s see if you forget me now! All that’s left now is for the gringo to make you eat my book on the vagina dentata, that’s the last detail, stuck-up bastard shitass!”

Then he made a gesture that my father be beaten until he stopped moving, until he lay there in the middle of the highway that would never be finished because tomorrow the President would see the paved strip from a distance and appearances are enough because in Mexico appearances are not deceiving: my father stretched out there with his trousers tangled around his knees, a burning pain, and the feeling that he was talking by himself, dreaming by himself, walking by himself.

Matamoros and his gang tramped noisily away along the road to Malinaltzin. One of the workers took the time to throw the church keys to Don Fernando: “So you can cleanse yourself of your sins, you shitassed redeemers!”

My father remained lost in his own thoughts, his eyes closed, not daring to look at his Angeles. Don Fernando, on the other hand, still searching the field for his glasses, could still shout: “Miserable bastards! Save yourselves, then!” and Don Homero could only groan, making an obscene gesture with his finger: “Take your democracy.”

It began to get dark and I suppose that everything calmed down. I held on with something like a desperate fatigue to my mother’s flesh, she watched Angel get up in silence and pull up his trousers. But without knowing that I inside her, more than ever intimately bound to her, listened to her, she wondered what Angel would or could say out loud. What could anyone say out loud now, in this year, in this land?

It was nighttime in Malinaltzin and the village seemed asleep; but a presence that could not be silenced, more eternal than the Creator himself, continued to dominate the air: the loudspeaker in the plaza in front of the church, a copied tape that copied itself over day and night without stopping filling the infinite silence of the town with noise. The loudspeaker became the second nature of the abandoned villages of Mexico. Angeles my mother wondered if someone heard it or if it were by now as natural as breathing. Who tries to hear the beat of his own heart?

The mariachi band was playing furiously when Uncle Fernando, with his broken but recovered glasses, opened the doors of the Malinaltzin church.

My happy little ranch, my jolly little nest,

My little perfumed nest of garden flowers

Where dwells the one that I love best,

Her black cherry eyes glow in my little bower.

“What can anyone say out loud?” repeated my mother.

8. What? What, indeed?

What? What, indeed? I try to answer her, I who am gestating right along with language because if I weren’t I wouldn’t be able to say any of the things I’m saying: language gestates and grows with me, not one minute, not one centimeter before or after or less or more than I myself. You, selective readers, have no more proof of my existence than my words here, growing with me: my words grow eyes and eyelids, fingernails and eyebrows, just as my body does. I want to be understood; for that to happen, I myself must understand. I want to understand what’s being said here, outside of me: language, invoked so much by Uncle Homero, applied so much by Uncle Fernando, used so much by all. What I do is share it: what my genes tell me is that you are language. But what kind of language am I? This question is my vicohistoricoribonucleic spiral: I am vicoized, in flagrante devictus, convict: St. John the Baptist Vico, the only saint I pray to. Everything, before any anecdote lived or heard or repeated here (Who knows the order these things should be in? You do, sublime Reader, father and son of mine, oh!), is language, but the languages I listen to, that of Uncle Homero as well as that of his enemy Uncle Fernando as well as that of my father, are, how shall I put it? preallocated languages (is that the right way to say it? located beforehand? locos from birth? ideological or ideolocos?), that is they are languages and they are always already there, not only do they precede me, unborn as I am, but they precede as well those who speak them, they are languages that precede themselves and in the very act of speaking them (which, for that very reason, is the act of repeating them): they are official idioms, my Uncle H.’s is unabashedly official, and he brags about it; but the moving democratic discourse of my nice old Uncle F., and the reasoning in three verbal tempos of my belovèd father A. (before: Sweet Fatherland; today: hard fatherland; later on: new fatherland), aren’t they also, in a certain sense, preestablished modes of discourse, preestablished by their liberal or conservative tradition, by their blind necessity (which is their tender summons) to be shared by others? But when they are, won’t they also turn into official discourse? Isn’t every language approved, applauded, understood by many people, because of that, what I call official discourse: but doesn’t the mere idea of official discourse signal an immediate need for another language, one that is not directed at many but at the few, to one of you and not only to all of you, to me and not only to us, when the balance of language tilts more to the plural than to the singular, and more to us than to me, to all of you and not only to one of you, when the opposite occurs? My mother speaks very little: gentle Readers, you may have noticed it, and if her silence continues, my progenitrix will break the world silence record. She’s simply devoid of language. She’s empty of words (she communicates me in silence or communicates it in silence, but it turns out that I, mere sleepyhead that I am, happen to be bedded down in her soft womb, whether she knows it or not: I listen to her, I hear her marvelous silence: her silence speaks to the other, the one who is absent; she receives what the world prints on her language, but a marvelous compensation leads her always to find the antonym of the word given her: her discourse shares my father’s discourse, but it completes it as well). She does not speak. I only listen. It isn’t the same. But something links us. She creates me, but I create myself as well. She comes toward me. I go toward her. Her son. My mother. I see the world through the life she gives me. But she also sees it through the life I give back to her. We will never be the same, we will never be a union, we shall always be a difference: mother and child, we shall celebrate not our union but our alterity! We are the mirror of our languages. I shall be within hers to say what she cannot say. She shall say what I cannot say. Gentle Readers: pray for me, pray that I do not forget (as I shall forget so many other things the instant I am born) the lesson of language I’ve learned in my mother’s womb. Allow me on being born to know not only my language but the language I leave behind, so that for ever and ever in my life I can always say not only what I say but what she says: the other: the others: what I am not. And I hope to God the same thing happens to them! Today I am accusing no one. I know as well as they (Homero, Fernando, Angel, and Angeles) that all languages have antecedents (as Egg proved in his egg), that before ceding, on being said they become present: I sail away from my mother’s verbal softness! What’s dis, Cadiz, the port of departure? Enough is enough. Throughout this, my monologue (involuntary, I assure you), I should allow all exterior voices to clash like storms within my solitary discourse (listen: here you can hear the politico, the lover, the ideologue, the comic, the powerful, the weak, the child, the intellectual, the illiterate, the sensual, the vengeful, the charitable, the personage, but also history, society, language itself: the barbarous, the corrupt, the Gallic, the Anglic, the latic, the pochic, the unique, the provincial, and the Catholic: listen your mercies, please, pay attention!), I request the presence of this blast of voices in the chamber of my own echo in the hope that one day, today and tomorrow (or yesterday: who knows?), my own voice will cross the verbal universe like a storm, the dialogues and monologues that belong to them, to YOU, out there, others and yet nevertheless here as well, inside, equal: I shall send these messages from my fleshly catacomb, I shall communicate with those who do not hear me and I shall be, like all minority, silenced authors, the rebellious voice, censured and silent in the face of the reigning languages, which are, not those of the other, not those that belong to us, but those of the majority. I’m telling them to you, as silent as a fish on the bottom of the sea. Silent and not only from a minority but, God help me! a minor! Think then, oh sublime, sublimating, sublimated Reader, that, having said what I just said, this person speaking with you will not hesitate, within seven tiny little months, to keep the silence of the absolute, catacombish minority of infancy (in-fancy) and that, instead of those high genetic intentions, he will be reduced to saying goo-goo, if he’s lucky be/a: ba and, now at the apex of his eloquence, here comes the A, with its little feet spread wide, here comes the U, like a little umbilical cord for you to skip rope with, tell me if all this isn’t enough to drive a person mad! What iniquities we children must suffer!

9. Uncle Fernando Benítez, a Catholic in his youth

Uncle Fernando Benítez, a Catholic in his youth, can’t remember if in fact that night was the first time in sixty years that he’d prayed; in any case, just talking (even to oneself) was a prayer in this, the last Indian church in Mexico: Malinaltzin, fruit of a desperate nostalgia in the soul of a conquered people: a temple of aboriginal dreams transformed into forms and colors.

Kneeling below the lemon-and-gold garlands in the vaults and clutching the gold-and-green carved railings with both hands; wrapped in this vast mirage of flowers, our uncle closed his myopic eyes: the earth seemed as fleeting as life itself. For Fernando Benítez, reality was animated by the past. He stared at the eternal season of flowers created by the Indians in this church. Our ancestors die on us before we are ready to live without them. Then they come back as ghosts, because the gods have fled. The Indians are our ghosts: these are the sentences he repeated in my mother’s ear, and this is her question:

Does life become stronger because of that?

Because they don’t know what to say to each other after what happened, she speaks to me: this for me is the important thing: she knows her period is now four weeks late, she knows that in a couple of days she will know for certain, but she doesn’t know that my body, arched forward, my great big head, which is all forehead and brain, the curved tube which is my heart, the sprouting buds that are my legs and hands, and my constantly open eyes — I still have no eyelids, are focused on her, trying to hear her and understand her, just as she, at a distance, hears and understands her Uncle Fernando, in exactly the way I would like to hear her, more than ever in this night in which I have convinced myself that I don’t yet exist outside her no matter how different I am from her; she saved me from the thick lances that came in to smash against my half-finished little head with their own blind and hungry sconces; the fact is that she spoke to me and said that she didn’t know how to tell Angel that what he’d heard here today was old and useless; the ideas were blockaded by an outmoded vocabulary (blockabulary?), and that all the speakers, from both sides, were talking in terms of absolutes because only in the absolute could beauty, the good, and politics get mixed up together; but only art can really tolerate the absolute; the common good and politics cannot: when the good and politics aspire to be absolutes they demand our blind, romantic, unconditional commitment, with no criticism allowed, and that, she told me, me a more powerful imminence than many realities, was the same for both factions: being absolute, well, that was easy; what was hard was to be relative in everything, as relative as the world, science, love, memory, life, and death: who is alive? my mother Angeles asks me, because tonight she does not know how to ask my father, who is silently holding her, lulling her, and soothing her.

At the risk of being misinterpreted, she only tells my father the same thing she told him the first day they met: “Let’s never hurt each other. We’re all here together.”

And she took him by the hand. He had the impression (he told her later) that she was talking to herself. Who could hear her? he wondered.

“And I said to myself that with you I could be apart.”

“I said we failed, Angel.”

“I can’t hear you, baby.”

“What a pair. You aren’t supposed to scream in church.”

“But there’s nobody here but us.”

“Are you sure? What a pair. We’ve been together for ten months. I’ve gone along with you in everything. You said the system is a total chaos, and that we’re going to answer it first with tiny chaoses.…”

“What else can you do in the kingdom of Mamadoc but create chaos, honey?”

“We failed.”

“What’s that?”

“I said we failed, Angel.”

“What’s become of your halo? It went out, Angeles. They really worked it over.”

“Angel, listen to me: Don Homero Fagoaga the millionaire never committed any crime against us like the one that proletarian, the head of the work gang, committed. What do you say to that, Angel? Are we going to kill the proletarian?”

My father did not answer, but she closed her eyes and squeezed his hand. It was the moment in which she had to confess the lateness of her period to admit that I existed: she had to do it in that instant or she would have lost my father and me: whose son would I be, if in that instant, in the Indian church of Malinaltzin, she didn’t recognize me: of what member of Matamoros’s crew? I had to have been made before that: on the beach at Aca, on Twelfth Night, Year of Our Lord 1992, so I could win the Christophers Contest, so I could not be the product of a rape in the Guerrero sierra: I had to be born for her, in her mind, in her voice, from that moment on, in that instant which is the instant in which she recognizes me: she recognizes me because she desires me and she desires me because she needs me and she needs me because she imagines me. It was there she mysteriously found out about me, poor little me who was still between being and not being, conceived for barely two weeks, freely floating in my mother’s secretions, in the depths of the uterine cave, but no longer just any old lump but an organized system of extremely active cells that are dividing up the job. And you desire me, imagine me, even name me, Mom, although you cannot know if I’m going to be a stranger who will be cast out in your next menstruation and in that case ciaoaufwiedersehenseeyoulaterbyebyesalutututut and then on to another pleasure bout and once more bambambam let’s see if now yes but I don’t want to get lost, Mommy, after all we’ve been through together, after what’s been set in my genes, what you’ve had me learn, do something so I won’t be lost, now that you’ve just recognized me in this instant while a spark of fiery blood flies from your womb to what someday will be my brain, and from my existence, which already is and is not yours, to yours, which already is and is not mine.

MOMMY!

MRS. ISABEL DE LOS ANGELES PALOMAR

HOME ADDRESS:

TLALPAN, MEXICO, D.F.

WE ARE PLEASED TO INFORM YOU THAT YOU ARE PREGNANT, AND THAT WITHIN EIGHT MONTHS, GOD WILLING, YOU WILL GIVE BIRTH TO A SON

STOP CONGRATULATIONS STOP

SIGNED

Christopher Unborn

10. As rubicund as a rose

As rubicund as a rose, Uncle Homero woke them up. The light was pouring through the high cupolas, illuminating the sumptuous nave of the grand Indian church made of wood and polychromed stucco.

There were no authorities around because yesterday, throughout the state of Guerrero, the masses had seized control of the local offices of the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI).

Here in Malinaltzin they took over the van with the two huge loudspeakers attached to it the Party used for propaganda purposes — it was a U. S.-style van translated into Mexican by decoration: a setting sun glowing between two volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl.

In their hysteria, the masses knocked off one of the loudspeakers. A matter of slight importance. In order to bring himself into harmony with the group, Homero decided that the van, deprived of one of its ears, would henceforth be named vango.

They would return to the capital.

The van stood outside the church, and Angel would drive it.

Uncle Homero approached the representatives of the Mixtec community as they were eating an early and frugal breakfast, but this time he abstained from speaking to them in Latin or hyperbaton. He asked for the Indian who spoke Spanish and told him — winking an ironic eye and licking his sweaty lips, that’s our unc — who was with us and in what battered condition: he identified Don Fernando Benítez, the Protector of the Indian — a Bartolomé de las Casas who traveled by helicopter — and then asked if they would lend them the van, not a great deal to ask for a person of the importance of Don Fernando Benítez!

Who, in person, got up, put on the glasses broken during the skirmish with Matamoros and his men, looked at Uncle Homero in a neutral fashion, and declared before exiting the sacred space: travel is broadening but constipating.

Homero’s eyes filled with pious sweetness and he knelt down at the altar, where he buried his face in his hands, as if in profound prayer. The light in the church changed. An intense perfume spread from the stucco flowers; a mist of incense drove away the kneeling figure of Uncle Homero and pushed Angel’s body closer to Angeles’s, both covered by this sacred fog — a ceremonious mourning — which did not prevent my father from kissing my mother’s nape and feeling a desire to weep on her shoulder: a copious, liquid weeping. She took my father’s hand and told him just what she said the first time they’d touched, I couldn’t sleep all night, because I was so happy I’d met you.

It all happened in a flash; Homero approached my parents and lowered his voice to a whisper; now they, who had lived under his protection in Acapulco, had to know the whole truth — he said — before they returned to the capital and protected him.

“It’s a very serious matter,” said Uncle Fagoaga, playing the part, so natural to all Mexicans, of political conspirator. “It is imperative,” he went on after a hiatus punctuated by penetrating looks and pregnant pauses, “that the three of us, relatives after all and all well-born, that we all come to an understanding.”

He took a deep breath and let the cat out of the bag: the federal government wanted to kill off Acapulco in order to clean it out; if it didn’t, it could never touch its vested interests, drugs, alcohol, the peasants pushed off the communal lands, the squatters expelled from the peaks, the unlicensed condominia, the graft involved in contracts arranged with foreign companies that excluded members of the federal government, and all of it flowing into the pockets and building the power of Don Ulises López.

That was the first thing.

Second, the federal government was at odds with the mayor of Acapulco and the governor of the state of Guerrero, who were rabid separatists. The myth of Acapulco, the tide of dollars that rolled into it, our most important source of foreign exchange since we lost our oil, the value of land, all of it: the federal government was not going to allow all that to go on slipping through its fingers just so it would finance a separatist stunt. The only problem was that even though the mayor and the governor wanted to separate from the Republic of Mexico (or what remained of it) they had nothing to join.

The third — Uncle Homero was now going full tilt — is that it was the police, who took orders only from their chief, Colonel Inclán, who had put Operation Knockapulco into action. They let the revolutionaries out in the hills and, according to what they’ve told me, a gang from the capital set a pack of hungry coyotes on the city and poisoned a few tourists. Which was of no importance. The troublemakers and the gang, whoever they may have been, unwittingly did the job of the federal police. On their own, the poor jerks wouldn’t have been capable of poisoning a parrot. The important thing is that, under the pretext of reestablishing order, the Armed Forces entered the city and saw to it that both the rebels and the local authorities were taken care of.

“A brilliant maneuver!” snorted the ineffable Uncle Homero. “No one knows for whom he works, as the intrepid labor leader Don Fidel Velázquez once said in the marble halls of the IOO in Geneva. The central government, once again, liquidated the local leaders, and Minister Robles Chacón, to whom I tip my hat, practically eliminated his rival, Minister Ulises López, who until now I esteemed highly. But as Don Bernardino Gutiérrez, first supporter of President Calles in the state of Guerrero, says, every once in a while you’ve got to wet your thumb and stick it out the window to see which way the wind’s blowing!”

But the last straw was this: our government is such a benevolently back-stabbing government that it never told a soul about anything.

Acapulco has disappeared from the face of the earth, and there is no information available. Or, as Minister Ulises López said in better times: Information Is Power. No Information Is More Power.

That’s the whole story: anyone who tries to find out anything gets stonewalled.

CBS could air a program in New York called “Whatever Happened to Beautiful Acapulco?” and it would never be seen in Mexico.

In these parts, anyone who has questions knows he’ll never get answers. And no one’s going to dig too deeply: after all, there’s something comforting (even though we might not want to admit it) about knowing that something no longer exists or no longer is where it was or where it existed. The same thing happens in our collective conscience: unexplained disappearances weigh lightly on our individual consciences. Ruperto the canary, our sickly Aunt Doloritas, or, for that matter, the sunny port of Acapulco. Bravo!

And since no one except you and me — alas! not even faithful Tomasito, who died doing his duty, fighting against that lowlife mob — no one, not to mention the canary or poor Aunty, survived the Acapulco catastrophe, on this radiant Mixtec morning, as the Colombian bard León de Grieff said during a fleeting visit, I am authorized to tell you that if you keep your mouths shut about what you know or have guessed about this matter, you may return in peace to Mexico City with me, all three of us, it goes without saying, keeping a low profile in terms of our activities, our notoriety, our very presence, as Senator Patrick Moynihan said when — Ireland in the clutches of Luther — he stood in as social coordinator at the White House during the term of President Dickson Danger, before the Watergate Waterloo!”

He took a breath of air and gazed in puzzled joy at his niece and nephew. Then, sighing, he lit a candle to St. Anthony.

“But why are you so down in the mouth, children?” he asked, turning his back to them. “You look as though you’d seen a ghost! Come on now, let’s forget our little differences, remember your promise to put me up until sufficient time passes for my merits again to outshine my possible defects, just think that the tropical paradise of our dreams, Acapulco, where we had such a wonderful time, has not disappeared and that it will return in all its former splendor in such a way that it will benefit the federal government and not a mafia of local bosses and that, as you know full well after having spent almost two months there, my tropical Fort Zinderneuf was not and will not be affected by mobs of soldiers, or gangs of chain-swinging delinquents from Mexico City; and so, up, up, and away, as the ebony-hued singer Dionne Warwicke, with her opulent figure and her silky voice, said as she boarded a TWA L1011. Don’t lose your serenity!”

At that moment, Don Fernando Benítez rejoined them, zipping his fly, catching Don Homero Fagoaga’s last word, and noting Angel’s and Angeles’s gray faces:

“I don’t know what this mound of flesh told you, but don’t let yourselves be taken in by his siren song.”

“La Serena,” responded Homero with equanimity, “is the capital of the province of Coquimbo, as Don Miguel Cruchaga y Tocornal moderately asserted.”

“The Siren!”

“La Sirena”

“Lazaretto!”

“Lazarillo!”

“The chippy!”

“The cherry!”

“The cheerio?”

“The cherry-nose!”

“Santa Claus?”

“Satan’s Claws!”

“An insanity clause?”

“An Oedipus rex!”

“An Eddy Poe nose?”

“No Goody Two-shoes!”

“Las Sirenas!”

“Las Serenas!”

In these and other delightful torts and retorts Uncle Homero and Uncle Fernando whiled away the hours as our Van Gogh rattled out of Guerrero toward (you guessed it) what was once the place where the air was clear, city of palaces, and the marvel dreamed of in the stories of Amadis of Gaul.

But that will be the matter of my next chapter.