“Hey! Genes are to blame for everything, is what Uncle Fernando Benítez said.”
“Certainly: Hegels are to blame for everything, is what Uncle Homero Fagoaga answers.”
“That’s a fact,” confirmed Uncle Fernando:
Angel, Angeles, bearing all that we are from our very origins, everything is inscribed in him, ay, my dearest DNA, he’s going to find your egg, Angeles, your sperm, Angel, bearing, my God, name of God, nombre de Dios, Hispaniola, my Queen, by God, bearing, Christ, Christ, Christ …
CHRISTOPHER
Now they’ve found one another, he’s swashed and buckled his way through the forest of blood and sweat and throbbing mucosities an’ impatience (and impatience, son, Uncle Homero corrects, with Don Andrés Bello’s grammar book in hand). Now I’ve come out pained and paining, separated forever from the only company I’ve ever known: my packages of cells, my belovèd generations armed with precursory cells, patiently stored in my father’s pouch, regenerating themselves constantly but hopelessly, my true grandfathers and great-grandfathers, my transitory though authentic parents, my internal genealogy, adiós! Ay dios! Out I come, running, crying, borne by the hot blood and inflamed nerves of my new father, leaving behind what up until now I knew and loved, amé, ahimé, oh me, oh my … I lounged God knows how long in my father’s pruny cave, and now my father is tearing me out of my internal genealogy, far from my secret family tree of inside fathers and grandfathers and great-greats and great-great-greats I belonged to up until this moment when this man decided to do what he is doing: throw me off balance, tear me up by the roots, nip me in the bud and ejaculate me, expel me from the peninsula, me ejaculated, she fornicated, dismissed, beginning my voyage in the middle of my true life. No one knows me, they’re having a ball out there and they don’t know that
HERE I COME!
accompanied by the invincible haha armada of my one billion brothers and sisters, little Christophers an’ Isabellas (and Isabellas, shouts Uncle Homero, furious) crackling like whips, in close formation, rolling out of my father’s barrel of fun, then abandoned all to the accidents of the black tunnel, fighting upstream in my mama’s Delaware, her salty mine and truffle war, the swift, lubricious infantries inside my mommy’s Thermópelos, Vulvar boatmen, little heads and long tails. We are legion, said Lucy, whipping and snapping, jumping hurdles, over the walls of the inhospitable mucous cavity that will end up being the walls of my homeland, the steaming baths of acid secretions that dry up our salty juices, Salaam Salamis, lost in the deserts of the wrong cylic exits, Luther’s Turnpike, no exit on this expressway, the Labyrinth of Solitude, ay! I see them die like flies because they’re out of gas, because they have two heads and twelve toes, because la cucaracha cannot walk without grass, they die by millions on the roadside, all around me, my soul brothers and sisters, Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, the Andrews Sisters, and the Hermanitos Brothers, les misérables who did not make it to the goal victorious. Victor who? Go! The millions of sperm fallen into Niagara, oh watery Waterloo of my decimated fraternity, thermopiled, forever separated from our young precursory grandfathers and from all the memories the sexy couple on the beach know nothing of: battles and songs, names and tastes, goodbye forever, you never escaped from the prison pouch of he who is about to become my Lord and Father, and the rest of you have perished in the battle against the juices and the blood and the perverse tunnels of her about to name herself Mamma Mia, we are being beaten up in the dark alleys of the cervical mucosity, no left turn through the unblocked cervix, a river of glass drowns me, I’m slipping and sliding spermatically, only a few of us remain now, whipping and snapping, exhausted, nature is not kind, nature is implacable, nature doesn’t weep for us, my poor agonizing brothers and I, I?
ALONE AT LAST, AT LAST ALONE
……….Terror……….Pain………. and I, alone once more: I the only one who made it to Treasure Island: my mother’s egg awaits me in its hiding place. She on her throne of blood, Queen of the Angels—Isabella, Angeles, opens her arms to me, the Champ, victorious over the millions of soldier boys and girls dead in the useless race to get to where I am, warm and cozy, avid and sad, asking for a room of my own. A sperm for an egg. Mother, there is only one. Now p’tit Christophe is all tangled up in his roots, now no one can save him from his fate, now il piccolo Cristoforo has met his destiny, let him now speak listen know: there he is. He had no time to jump on his horse.
You’ll see, Angel, my mom told my dad when they separated and rolled on the hot sand and then embraced once more and then he licked her elbows while I lodged myself singular and triumphant in the uterus of Isabella of the Angels, who told my father once more: “You’ll see, he’ll be born when you want, I swear to you my love, I’ll have him for you on time, sure I will, God I love you, ever since I met you, I couldn’t sleep all night long I was so damn happy, what does it matter, I swear I’ll give you a son because that’s what the rules say, that’s it, I’m no longer demanding the kid be a girl, no Isabella, only Christopher, just as long as you go on whispering into my ear what you’ve always said to me, honey:
“In Mexico, the whole problem is one of attitude—toward men with power and toward women without power.”
“Come back.”
“I never went anywhere.”
“Come here.”
“I was waiting for you.”
The two of them here lying on the burning sand in the Acapedro calderoon where life is a dream, happy, a land of sad men but happy children, but before time runs out for happiness but in Mexico where everything turns out badly for us but now only you and I holding hands, naked, exhausted, on our backs, with our eyes closed against the sun but with my halo spilled all over the sand like liquid stars. And from the heavens it rains, the sun is just a tiny bit clouded over, the wings of the big bad bumblebee cover us and from up above it rains on us, butterflies? petals? plumes? tropical clouds? You bet.
“Look,” said my dad, “it’s coming from up there.”
“Smell,” said my mommy. “It’s shit.”
Over their heads flew a pair of buttocks like the trembling wings of an uncertain bat, white and bland, drained of blood by the vampires of the sun: a man was flying across the wide Mexican sky, hanging from a blue-and-orange-striped parachute, tugged over Acapulco Bay by a roaring motorboat, kept aloft by hanging on to a tightrope in the thick air was our Uncle Homero (sixty years old), clad in a yellow guayabera, without his pants on, dripping the skyborne revenge of Montezuma, fleeing from the guerrillas in Guerrero, fearful and trembling, fleeing diarrheic with terror, followed by a sign written by a skywriter:
WELCOME TO SUNNY ACAPULCO
Homer, oh mère, oh mer, oh madre, oh merde origin of the gods: Thalassa, Thalassa.
“Now what are you going to do?”
“Tomorrow’s another day.”
“When? When will it be that kind of day?”
“The boy has to be born, understand?”
“But he’s so all alone. Nine months alone. With whom will he talk?”
“With your mercies benz.”
“Who?”
“The reader, just the reader.”
WELCOME TO LIFE, CHRISTOPHER PALOMAR
1
The Sweet Fatherland
The fatherland is impeccable and adamantine …
Ramón López Velarde
The Sweet Fatherland
1
El Niño comes running up from Easter Island, tepid and sickly, the offspring of death by water, beating against the Peruvian coast, suffocating the anchovies and algae in its hot embrace, kidnapping the vital equatorial nitrates and phosphates, breaking the vast food chain as well as the procreation of the great sea fish: heavy and sweating El Niño swims, hurling dead fish against the walls of the continent, stupefying and putrefying it all, water sinking water, the ocean asphyxiated in its own dead tide, the cold ocean drowned by the hot ocean, the winds driven mad and pushed off-course. Destr
uctive and criminal, El Niño flattens the coasts of California, dries out the plains of Australia, floods the Ecuadoran lowlands with mud. My uncle, Fernando Benítez (eighty years of age), is flying toward the Usumacinta River, weeping for his lost fatherland, at the very moment that my Uncle Homero Fagoaga flies over Acapulco, in diarrheic fear, fleeing from the guerrillas. And so my father recapitulates, while I make frantic efforts to hang on to solid ground in the uterine oviduct as I head for the cavity of this woman who is preparing to be my cave for who knows how long, the space which she and I are supposed to share for who knows how long a time (I hope they—it’s the least they can do—inform me about the meaning of this word “time,” which I’m starting to think is of capital importance if I am to understand what the fuck is happening to me, how I am to live with and without them, inside and outside of myself and of them), and they should get busy and tell me when I was conceived, how much “time” I have to spend here inside, if I’m going to get out someday or not and where, if the answer is affirmative, I’m going, what all this means, “place,” “space,” “earth,” my new home now that I’ve left (or was thrown out of) my old house of skin and sperm between my father’s legs (he threw me out, the miserable bastard, just for a fleeting moment of pleasure, right? oh! how ever to forget that deed, how ever to forgive him?) where I was so comfortable with my secret genealogies, one big happy family now scattered, scattered to the four winds, and all these questions I have (time? what is it? how much is there? when do I begin to count the days of my life? inside my father’s testicles? inside my mother’s egg? inside of outside? now that I’ve passed into my mother’s possession just because of my father’s pleasure? I ask in despair: for how much “time”?), all my previous security and serenity completely destroyed by the lusts of Mr. Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, Esq. (twenty-four years of age—but we already said that), about five feet ten inches tall (descriptive news for your Mercies Bends), with yellow, panther-like but shortsighted eyes (this we knew) and olive, gypsy-like complexion (this we did not know), who before the entire world will attempt and presume to be my father; okay, I have to tell you I love you, Dad, that despite everything I adore you and that from now on I will live in imaginary complicity with you and that I depend on you to tell me where I am, where I come from. Once you’ve told me my name and given me my time—they say this is my time, tell me what country this is, where are we? where do you want me to be born? Is it true what my genetic code is telling me?: that there is no other land like this one? and that it’s either a blessing or a curse that there is no other land like this one? that it’s true that someone (He, She) never did to any nation what he or she did here, that now our problem is to administer our wealth? that we’re not really ready yet for democracy? that the Tlaxcaltecas are to blame for everything? that you’ve got to admit the Indian is right, even if he isn’t? that we should go out and lynch some lousy Spaniards? that you are foolish men, foolish men, you who accuse women unjustly? that we have not come to live but to dream? that there is a Ford in your Future? that in a crisis we rise to meet the challenge? that God denied us talent for journalism and movies but made us geniuses at survival? that: why doesn’t my father want me to be a girl? just on account of that fucking contest? because of the little Christophers?
He said he wanted to have a son (me, zero years) with her because if I were conceived on Twelfth Night, with a bit of luck I’d come into the world on Columbus Day. My mother sat up as if she were on springs, covering her breasts with the university classic. A boy conceived on the beach January 6 might show up on time on October 12?
“And what if he’s born in September?”
“He’d win the Independence Day Contest, but it isn’t the same.”
“Of course not. Hey, where were we on the 15th of September last year?”
“Facing the palace balcony in the Zócalo, watching the first apparition of the apparition.”
“And October 12 last, where were we—bet you can’t remember.”
“Standing in front of the monument to Columbus on Reforma.”
“She was carried in a sedan chair through the streets to the Columbus monument in order to proclaim…”
“She never speaks. She only cries once a year.”
“You’re right.”
“And don’t talk about her in that tone of abject admiration. Instead, answer these three little questions right off the top of your head.”
“Shoot.”
“Here goes. First: what are we going to name the baby?”
“What is the matter with you, you stoned? Christopher!”
“And if it’s a girl?”
“Okay, okay. Isabella. The Chaotic.”
“Second question: what language will the baby speak?”
“Spanish, of course.”
“And all those new slangs, what about them? Spanglish and Angloñol, and the Anglatl invented by our buddies the Four Fuckups and…”
“And the language of our Chilean girlfriend Concha Toro, and the frog-speak of the French chanteuse Ada Ching. Adored Angeles: please realize that we live in an arena where all languages fight it out.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“Shoot.”
“And third: in what country will our son be born?”
“Easy: in the Sweet Fatherland. You go on reading Plato, Angeles. I read Ramón López Velarde.”
“Ramón who?”
“López Velarde, Ramón. Born June 15, 1888, in Jerez de Zacatecas. Dead at the age of thirty-three for having strayed from the old park of his provincial heart and wandered into the noisy concourse of the sunken-eyed and made-up metropolis in order to die. These days a shot of penicillin would have saved him from his minor but in those days fatal infection. On a June morning in 1921, the poet Ramón died with his pockets full of papers without adjectives.”
“Who did he look like?”
“It seems he looked like me. Just a bit, so they tell me. Olive skin, almond-shaped eyes. But he wore a mustache and had pouting lips.”
“What did he write?”
“The fatherland is impeccable and adamantine,” said my father.
“Impeccable and…” My mother stopped, clearly disconcerted. “Is this where our son will be born?”
2. Fatherland, Your Mutilated Territories
On the day of my conception, Don Fernando Benítez is flying toward the forest of the Lacandons along the border bound by the Usumacinta River. At a given moment, his eyes cloud over, he feels a premonition of darkness, and tries to imagine the nearness of a volcano, a village, a river. He wants to give them names so he can say them to himself and to tell to the young helicopter pilot flying him to the Frontera Corazos airport:
“Young man, show me from up here the territories of the fatherland. Tell me, what remains of Mexico?”
He is asking the pilot to help him see from the air the totality of the newly mutilated Sweet Fatherland. He could almost see, beyond the Lacandonan forest, the territory of the Yucatán, ceded exclusively to the Club Méditerranée in order to create the Peninsular Tourism Trust (PENITT), free of any meddling by the federal government, in order to pay the interest on the external (eternal) debt, which this year would reach, according to calculations, $1,492 billion—a pretty sum to celebrate the five centuries since Columbus’s arrival and our division and conquest. And right now they are flying by special permission over the CHITACAM TRUSTEESHIP (Chiapas–Tabasco–Campeche), ceded to the U.S. oil consortium called the Five Sisters until the principal of that external debt is paid. Of course the debt only grows, assuring the foreign companies a possession in perpetuity. And he didn’t want to see, beyond that cloud bank, the besieged half-moon of Veracruz, along the coast from Tampico to Cotzacoalcos, and inland from Veracruz to the foothills of the Malinche, lands ceded to an incomprehensible war, an agrarian revolution according to some, a U.S. invasion according to others: it all depends, gentlemen, on which television channel you watch in the evening. The fact is that no one
can communicate with Veracruz, so what’s so strange about the fact that suddenly no one can communicate with Acapulco? It’s impossible to fathom those mysteries. What are you saying, Don Fernando? You can’t hear over the noise of the motor. I said that Veracruz has become materially impenetrable because a line of soldiers, shoulder to shoulder, helicopters, right, this is a helicopter, Don Fernando, no, you don’t get what I’m saying, and antiaircraft guns have closed to invaders the whole strip along the Perote Ridge to the Lakes Tamiahua and Catemaco. And Don Fernando has no desire to turn his eyes toward that atrocious nation on the northern border: Mexamerica, independent of Mexico and the United States, in-bond factories, smuggling, contraband, Spanglish, refuge for political fugitives, and free entry for those without papers from the Pacific Coast to the Gulf Coast, one hundred kilometers to the north and one hundred to the south from the old frontier, from Sandy Ego and Auntyjane to Coffeeville and Killmoors: independent without the need of any declaration, the fact is that there no one pays the slightest attention to the government in Mexico City or Washington. And Don Fernando would also have wanted to look toward the Pacific and understand just exactly what had happened to the entire coast to the north of Ixtapa–Zihuatanejo, the whole thing, including the coastal zones of Michoacán, Colima, Jalisco, and Nayarit, Sinaloa, Sonora, and Baja California: why didn’t anyone ever talk about those lands, to whom did they belong, why were there no explanations, why was the Republic of Mexico only a kind of ghost of its ancient cornucopia-shaped self?
He saw a narrow, skeletal, and decapitated nation, its chest in the deserts of the north, its infarcted heart in the exit point of the Gulf at Tampico, its belly in Mexico City, its suppurating, venereal anus in Acapulco, its cut-off knees in Guerrero and Oaxaca … That’s what was left. That was what the federal government, its PANist president, its PRIist apparatus, its financial bourgeoisie now totally addicted to the public sector (or was it the other way around? It was all the same now), its police imposed on an army that had disbanded out of discontent and demoralization, its new symbols of legitimization, its August Founding Mothers and its National Contests, and its thousands of unreadable newspapers …