Christopher Unborn

  I declare that he is frightened because he sees the burning seal on my mother’s forehead.

  I declare that he asks her, Did you see, Angeles? and each time he does it he swears he sees my mother’s eyes change: they change color or place or perhaps they only change intention, which is like changing color or place: each time he embraces her, an icy, blue, clear, foamy splinter of ice passes through my mother’s eyes.

  I declare that my father takes my mother’s hand in order to resist the temptation to kiss her perfumed nape, the acidity of her underarms, the oven of her tiny feet.

  I declare that my father says to her, Angeles, give me time to get to know you.

  I declare that when he touches her she screams: Death is a long way off!

  3

  Behind Deng Chopin he emerged, hahaing and hungry, Uncle Homero Fagoaga, just when the dance was breaking up in exhaustion; Don Homero collapsed listlessly onto a curule chair screwed to the deck opposite the table covered with a paper tablecloth where Angel and Angeles were sitting. Behind him, as rigid as a statue, Tomasito took up his place. Uncle turned his veiled, febrile eyes, like those of a wise tortoise, upward, where the scarlet sails decorated with Chinese ideograms were fluttering in the ominous silence of the tropical night; peering through the masts, he could see the Byzantine cupolas that marked the dominions of Ada and Deng.

  Let’s get cracking! Mrs. Ching imperiously ordered the musicians, I pay them more than anyone so they think they have the right to rest between sets, no way! see what the gentlemen and the lady want: no, Homero imperiously said to Hipi Toltec, who was arranging the table, no, not a fourth seat: don’t sit down, Tomasito, fan, Tomasito, you shall dine when we get back to the house.

  “Yes, master.”

  “Io non voglio più servir.”

  Our buddy Egg looked under the table, asking in a complaining voice, “Baby Ba, where are you? Don’t hide anymore, sweetie, come out so we can give you some candy…”

  Our homeric uncle looked at this bizarre waiter, who was as white as an egg, as hairless as an egg, depilated to the point of avarice, depilated till death us do part, and then he looked at the other waiter: he was shredding, his skin was peeling off right before their very eyes. When the waiter with the porcupine hair and the bottle-capped hat approached the table of our suspicious Uncle Homero, Uncle H. simply did not look at him: he smelled him, he smelled the sweat and grime the boy had had the misfortune to possess since birth. Where? Tell us now, little orphan boy, little boy lost, an irrepressible tide of repulsion seemed to drown our uncle’s eyes: “Why is it that we have to be served by these stinking inferiors?” he exclaimed, his rage, his age, this page at its highest pitch. “What we’re paying for here in crisp dollar bills is a fine meal beautifully served by people as elegant as we are! Why do we have to go on putting up with being served by our inferiors? Don’t we have enough power to be served by our equals?” he shouted in a delirium to which the imperturbable chanting of the waiter with the bottle-capped hat served as a musical accompaniment, while his peeling colleague went on setting the table, while the fat one was down on all fours looking for the girl, and while the selfsame bottle-capped Ganymede waited patiently to take the order of the Palomar y Fagoaga family.

  “Now then, boy,” said Uncle Homero, lolling on the curule seat opposite my parents, perpendicular to the nocturnal breeze fanned by Tomasito, and beneath the rubber cupolas floating on the rolling sea.

  “Wha’ chu’ wan’, sir?” said the boy in a nasal, whining voice.

  “Wha’ chu’ wan’, sir?” he who gives purity and splendor to our tongue mimicked him in atrocious disdain. “Now then, boy, bring me a dry, straight-up twist of lemon.”

  “Oliver Twist?” inquired my father.

  “This is no time for silly jokes,” said the President of the Academy severely, focusing his eyes ambivalently on the waiter/crooner. “Don’t mess around, you damned darky.” (The waiter with the sleepy eyes and the whisk-broom hair, naturally, screwed up his order completely, bringing him a lemonade and straw along with a Canada Dry, instead of a dry martini. Uncle Homero swept the lot off the table onto the floor, scattering cherries and olives to the four winds, and said to the waiter, “Down on your knees, slavey, mop up that slime, you mountain monkey, then come back, use your brain, if you can, cretin, and then bring me, let’s see if you can get it right this time, what I ordered, you poor illiterate donkey, and learn how to serve a gentleman!”)

  He paused as if to congratulate himself—you’ve rarely been in such great form, Homero—and then stared with redoubled fury at the waiter, who was bent down, picking up the cherries and olives: where did you stick your fingers before you put your cherries in my lemonade, slimebag? Just as I thought, as that great Argentine educator Hugo Wast remarked to his intimates, implacably remarked as he took his place in the Argentine military cabinet, this is no time for modesty, there can be no doubt, I repeat, no doubt that he’s scratched his testicles or picked his nose or wiped his tushy before he touched and served my food. Don’t you ever think about things like that when you eat in a restaurant?

  He raised his voice so that everyone could hear him clearly, above all the filthy boy, who was now bringing him a sumptuously arranged pineapple sorbet.

  “The boss lady sends it to you,” said the boy, trying to overcome the powerful chortles of our robust Uncle H. “Compliments of the house, is what she said.”

  “Learn how to serve a gentleman, you grimy slavey!” intoned Uncle Homero. “Hold on there, servant, you used condom, you demented lollipop!”

  Don Homero looked the waiter up and down: he was no longer sporting his bottle-cap hat, just his tangled broom, as if he wanted to upset everyone’s concept of zoology by wearing a sea urchin as a toupee, standing there with his arms crossed after serving our uncle his sorbet, while Homero surveyed the chaos the floating disco had become that New Year’s Eve.

  He raised his spoon to attack the sorbet: “People like me are used to living with beggars but not with proles. No one has a greater sense of honor than a Mexican beggar. When you offer a nickel to an authentic beggar, he responds by refusing to take it: ‘A man’s hunger is his castle.’ An authentic beggar is a poor man in the classic style, that is, with no place in the world to rest his head, but possessing the whole Spanish-American code of honor intact.”

  With his nervously avid nails, Don Homero incised the poor tablecloth, on which alternated pop icons and the faces of Steely Joe and Mighty Mao.

  “These waiters, you see, and this one in particular, are crooks, thieves who work by night and lurk in the shadows, bandits disguised as waiters. They don’t ask you for money honorably the way beggars do, certainly not! they mug you, my dear niece. They’re con men, they rile up the people who are happy in honorable poverty and organize them into unions. They embitter them with their utopian ideas, and they end up by stealing private estates, saying they were communal lands during the times of King Cuauhtémoc. They produce nothing, they scare off tourists, they ruin the nation, and they should be jailed, the sooner the better. This is my social philosophy, as we are entering, my dear niece and nephew, 1992, which promises to be quite a turbulent year. For ages now, we, the gentry, have defended ourselves from the Indians and the peasants—after all, we’ve been in charge of them since 1521. But these filthy brutes who pop up out of nowhere, how are we going to dominate them?” he asked with some anxiety.

  “What I mean to say”—he was going into high gear—“is that we have to kill these scorpions, as the poet Horace says, ab ovo, that is, in the egg, before they can do any damage, and destroy the crows in their nest before they peck our eyes out: look right over there at that lost boy (he stabbed at the Orphan Huerta with his spoon). In him you can see the arrogant bureaucrat, the demagogic redeemer, the implacable ideologue, the Salvador Allende in potentia, why have you stopped fanning, you Luzon poltroon? Look at him and suffocate him, as the martial statesman from Chile, General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte,
said recently, and he is a man who, by fair means or foul—but in either case to our great relief—continues to be the supreme leader of that southern nation.”

  Having said that, Uncle Homero finally stuck his spoon into the pineapple sorbet, as if it were a mound of frozen gold: even his desserts were Klondikes over which he assumed he could exercise a patrimonial right of conquest: he sucked and slavered noisily, belching, until he actually seemed likable, after all, doesn’t all the world love a fat man?

  Nevertheless, the noises Don Homero made drowned out the lovable innocence of the archetypal glutton because they sounded like erotic provocations, with all kinds of uncontrollable squints and lip-licking directed either toward my mother Angeles or toward the sullen boy with tangled hair and golden legs, legs now adored by Uncle Homerosexual. But damn it all to hell, where the devil had he seen that boy before? How beautiful his niece was! Angeles, bah! There was nothing angelic about her, and she only went by that name because Angel decided they would both have the same name, because Angel and Angeles sound good together, but our fat uncle knew something better: at night he’d crept to the window of the bungalow where the two slept and he heard them screwing, so, as far as being angelic was concerned, well, for him she was a devil and that was that.

  Diabolical Angeles, he whimpered hopelessly, seriously attacking the ice cream, and how deliciously the velvety sorbet stood in for other pleasures, other tongues!

  Only in the instant in which he finished the ice, eating mechanically but with his eyes fixed on his dreams, did Don Homero look down. It was then he realized that the dessert was resting on an artifact which was not a pineapple hollowed out to receive the cold joy of his palate, nor was it a crystal vessel cut with elegant, starry facets in imitation of a pineapple made of ice; no, it wasn’t even a vulgar tub of the kind used for the washing of plates (oh, how Don Homero wished he could be excused from the disaster he felt to be so imminent by exercising his oratorical skills, by using language, divine language, his reason for being). No, it was what now shone metallically and tasted acridly, and sagged soddenly: he had eaten pineapple sorbet ladled into the brimless, bottle-cap-encrusted hat of, of, of this waiter! Of that bastard boy who befouled his life night and day! The Orphan Huerta emerged triumphantly from the drawer of forgotten things where Uncle H. stored every disagreeable event that had occurred during his exceptional life, oranges, limes, and lemons, or was it apples, figs, and pears? Don H. stood up trembling with rage, but the waiter with porcupine hair had already scampered out of range, while Tomasito reproached him, “Say ‘yes, master,’” and Orphan Huerta shouted from a safe distance ‘Yes, Mother, yes, Mother,’ and lawyer Fagoaga clutched his hands to his throat, shouting for help, poisoned, his windpipe blocked, old Coca-Culo caps, rusty metal Orange Crotch, Cerveza XX—like my potential genes—rows of lances like those I have on my beach to defend me from intruders, especially mounted cavalry, especially surly servants, nouveaus who think they have the right to be there, Indians in revolt, HOLY JESUS, oh, my poor tongue pierced by bottle caps, my reason for being and the being of my reason: my tongue cut to ribbons! my palate cleft by base metals which will cause me to speak in a high-pitched nasal twang like that odious runt, oh my good taste, my savoir faire, ruined forever!

  Tomasito fanned his master with his usual tenacious patience; Deng Chopin, immutable, appeared through a hatch to see what was going on; Uncle Homero slipped off the curule seat to the deck and the owner Ada Ching approached to calm, to thank him—it was an honor for the floating discotheque Divan the Terrible to receive the President of the Academy of the Language as well as Angel and Angeles, whom she counted among her most favored guests. This was no time for anger, because in a few minutes it would be time to celebrate the New Year of 1992, perhaps the year chosen for the renewal of alliances, the Third Rome and the Middle Kingdom, culture wresting control from ideology, ha! only culture would survive the ups and downs of politics, and culture was dancing, carnival, Saturnalia, it was the moment to celebrate. Uncle Homero only wanted to throw himself on the Orphan Huerta, to embrace him, to kiss him, to kill him, to fuck him, to beat him, Orphan Huerta once again on the bandstand with Egg and Hipi Toltec. Suddenly, a drunken D. C. Buckley but sat down on Uncle Homero’s lap, Buckley arguing in a high-toned Massachusetts accent, Let us hang on foah deah lahf to the planks left aftah the sinking of the Anglo-Saxon Pequod, which has dragged us with its bloody hahpoons into a hunt foah all the illusions of the twentieth century: it is impossible to save ouahselves in this rush to disastah, impossible to be modahn without participating in Annglo-Sexon populah cultcha. Uncle Homero, despite the weight of the ultratall gringo, groped for a napkin wide enough for his belly and resigned himself in despair to using the edge of the tablecloth: thrust now between the African white hunter’s stained blue tunic and his smoked Hamingwegg stomach.

  “Be ernest about that,” said D. C. Buckley … or about a cetacean implacably hunted down by the furious Ahab …

  “Oh, you movie dick,” said Buckley, tickling Don Homero’s sleeping little dicky bird, whose proclivities lay in another direction …

  “W. C. Fields forever,” sand the rockaztec band of the Four Fuckups.

  “Bathroom Campos!” giggled the drunken Buckley, inebriated with English and Spanish calambours, punnish the spinning spunning Spanish language! while Don Homero sighed in resignation, telling his niece and nephew that he in no way opposed the myriad puns they might create because he hoped that the Castilian language would digest them all and emerge triumphant from this test, that it would reach the beach of the twenty-first century alive, overcoming, digesting, excreting the Anglo-Saxon universe, and he remained there staring, embracing the unknown D. C. Buckley, staring at the bikinis of the musical waiters and the white buttocks of Ada Ching.

  They would never remember in which moment the sad year 1991 ended and slipped away unnoticed, undesired like a thief in the night as Don Homero would say, the certainly fateful 1992 of our five Christophercolonized centuries:

  My mother Angeles looked uneasily at my father Angel looking at the cinnamon-colored little girl who was dancing between Decio and Marianito made into brothers in their desire for classist intermingling and racist risk and partying with the people, the Acapulco Slumming Party, desperately seeking ménage à trois with innocent and telluric Mexican girly bathed in tea,

  who only had eyes, nevertheless, for my dad,

  who looked with a desire my mother wished to deflect (which she could not) to the sweet-sixteen dancer Penny López,

  who looked at no one: she was dancing.

  4

  And that first dawn of the New Year, which arrived amid a premonitory silence, while the diminutive Sino-Pole delicately licked the foyer of her vagina while with tiny, equally delicate nibbles he removed the odd pubic hair and then dug in like a playful kitten to sniff her clitoris, Ada Ching said yes, Shorty, time for fucky-fucky, who knows, it could happen any time, the world may change forever, and we’ll be celebrating Russian Easter and Chinese New Year again. I don’t want to miss my chance if it comes around, my naughty little chinky, yes, my little golden nugget, yes my little yellow pearil, I’ve been waiting for it for twenty-three years, just imagine, when I was a girl of twenty-three and we got the terrible news that Moscow and Beijing had broken off relations, that’s right, make love to your Ada, your Sada, Bada, attaboy, that was a long time ago, I’ll make myself a beauty for the soirees to come, but now you see: no one even remembered to celebrate the New Year, it came and no one noticed, but come on now, make me remember my tongue with your tongue, goose tongue, your Ada of Provence the sea the sun, your final flower of the Albigensian tree, your heretical survivor of the criminal crusades of Gaston de Foix Gras, lick my culo you dirty little coolie, stick your tongue up my anus, you polack peking piggy, you and I we sure are going to celebrate the Year Four Twenties and Twelve, so that I am cleansed of all mortal desires, so that I am empty of all lust and so that there remains nothing of my bo
dy drained by your yellow tongue except my spirit, my words, my purified ideology, and a body white at last, clean at last, washed spotless, my dengchowprick, all my garbage swept away by the broom of your tongue, my chinaboy, and I finally free of the sin of the evil God who gave me guts and tubes and blood and excrement and the lewd buttocks that I show up onstage every night to that mob des cons, but without ever renouncing my political principles, all that in order thanks to you and your immense sex—as big as you are small, my putto—to reach the good God of justice, name of a name of a Lenin, name of a name of a Chou, Albigensian of a Marx who are waiting for me at the end of the long tunnel of my impatient, bored flesh, century after blasted century that finally join together in the telescope of pleasure, in the telescunt of history, yesterday’s millennia and today’s millionaires, apocalypse in the tenth century and pocky lips in the twentieth, you and I the last of the Albigensians, long-fingered dwarf, yes, try to screw me so you can be pure and we two can reconstruct the last chance for the proletariat, who’ve been dragging themselves from millennium to millennium, through the mud of history, that’s the way, just with your hands and tongue, I’m coming, I’m coming …

  “What did you say to the fat old man, my little cabbage?”

  “That it possible we all inside nightmare of bat.”

  “And to Angeles?”

  “Brind man no flaind snakes.”

  “And to the garçon Angel?”

  “You know where is Pacífica?”

  “Do you think that it was enough for them to see the fat uncle humiliated?”

  “No, no. They want kir him, not him suicide serf.”

  “Well then, my little Papa-God, we won’t get out of this one alive.”

  “Wolk of priest to save humanity, not save humble skin.”

  Ada Ching looked at herself in the cabin mirror with a sense of misgiving and of having lost her way.