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? 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, 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, 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—an
d 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.