“I’m quite certain.”
Six weeks have gone by since my conception; menstruation is more than four weeks late and I’m already floating in all my splendor—I’m fully half an inch long—convinced, deluded that I’m still in the ocean, giver of life and origin of the gods, with no more ties to terra firma than the umbilical cord and with no clouds on my horizon except the dark cloud that will be my circulatory system, still alien to my body, still distanced from, outside of, me, in the placenta, sucking blood and oxygen, filtering out waste; if this is my new ocean, it’s only a sea of blood that threatens to blind me:
My skin is thin and transparent.
My spinal cord is phosphorescent.
These are the lights I use to fight the strange tide of blood that envelops me.
My body is arched forward. The umbilical cord is thicker than my body. My arms are longer than my legs: I would really like to touch, caress, embrace; I don’t really want to run: Where would I go? What place could be better than this one? Have I learned of anything out there better than this place? After all, home is where you hang yourself …
I am my own sculptor: I am shaping myself from within with living, wet, malleable materials: what other artist has ever had available to him as perfect a design as the one possessed by my hammers and chisels: the cells move to the exact spot for building an arm: it’s the first time they’ve ever done it, never before and never again, do your mercies benz understand what I’m saying? I will never be repeated.
Nothing could be more dynamic than my fetal art, ladies and germs, just like that a foot appears, and at the same time five condensations on my hand that will be my bones and fingers: feet and hands detach from the trunk (but I don’t want to run away; I only want to touch); and my cheeks, my upper lip all join in the work: my nasal cavity sinks so it can take part in the development of my palate; my face begins to take shape; the cells on both sides of my trunk start moving in twelve horizontal currents to form my ribs; my future muscle cells emigrate between my ribs and under my chest, the subcutaneous tissue stretches backward and forward, the cells on the external layer of my little body begin to form my epidermis, my hair, sweat glands and sebaceous glands: do your mercies know of any combined action more perfect than this one, one that is more exact than the dancing little feet of the Rockettes, the southern flight of ducks from Canada in October, the perfect rainbow the butterflies form in the hidden valleys of Michoacán, the Wehrmacht goose-step, or the deadly aim of General Rodolfo Fierro: the precision of a parachute battalion, of a triple-bypass cardiac operation, of one of Le Nôtre’s gardens, or of an Egyptian pyramid?
My blood pulsates rapidly, it runs toward the forest of my nascent veins; a tunic falls over me, like the shroud over the city we saw from the air:
My eyes are about to close for the first time!
Can you understand this terror?
Do you even remember it?
Until now, weak and unformed, at least I had my eyes wide open, always wide open: now I feel as if had gone to sleep inside my white thin tunic, as if a weight against which I have no strength were covering my eyes little by little:
My time changes because I don’t know if from now on I will not, deprived though I am of sight, know anything about what’s going on outside, nor will I be able to connect my genetic chain with the simulacrum of vision: I’m going to accelerate a time I thought eternal, mine, malleable, as subject to my desire as are the fragments of information supplied by my genes: now my eyes close and I am afraid of losing time; I’m afraid of turning into a being who only bursts into different times without knowing with whom or with what he’ll meet whenever he makes one of his sudden appearances: I close my eyes, but I am preparing to substitute desiring for looking: I want to be recognized, known, please Mommy, swear you’ll recognize me, Daddy swear that you’re going to recognize me: don’t you see that I have no other weapon but desire, but that there is no desire that achieves that condition if it is not known and recognized by others and without knowing that you know that I am condemned to the unsavory condition of unknowing: I could have been conceived in Untario!
Without my desire reflected in yours, Pop and Mom, I shall succumb to the terror of the fantastic: I shall be afraid of myself until the end of time.
4. The Devil’s Wells
And I begged them: Please give time and tenderness to your little Christopher. Tell him everything that happened in the time between our arrival in the city and the third month of his gestation.
Which is to say, once we’d moved into the one-story, rainbow-hued house whose balcony faces the plaza and a hospital of the Porfirio Díaz period, near the symmetrical stairways of the Church of San Pedro Apóstol, the Campidoglio of underdevelopment, the Place Vendôme of the Parvenus, the Signoria of the Third World, our basic situation was this:
First, Uncle Homero Fagoaga, whose political instincts were infallible, decides to hide out in my parents’ house until he finds out what the official reaction is to the events surrounding the electoral riot in Igualistlahuaca; it’s likely he’ll be blamed for that outburst, which could be confused with either love or hate, depending, but in Mexican politics you’re better off not depending on depending—Don Homero pontificates, having seated himself, as if by divine right, at the head of the table during all three daily meals, with a view of the aforementioned hospital, wolfing down pastry after pastry—and should only skate on thick ice, like that old supporter of President Calles, Don Bernardino Gutiérrez, who wouldn’t make a move without finding out which way the wind was blowing. In other words, don’t take a step without having your sandals on, especially if you’re in scorpion country, and he fully intended to spend two months in retreat here, at least until the beginning of May, when the combined festivities of the Virgin Mary and the Martyrs of Chicago might just allow him to show himself in public with the assurance that the politicos would recognize his liberal merits, which would shine once more, while his conservative defects would be forgotten. Was there anyone in our political world who hadn’t at one time or another done the same thing?
When my incredulous and gaping father and mother stopped listening to him in order to eat a slice of coffee cake, they noticed that Uncle Homero, who never stopped talking for an instant, had devoured the mountain of powder cakes my mother had delicately arranged on a blue platter of Talavera ware. Now Don Homero was dunking the last bit in his hot chocolate and was asking my mother Angeles if she would be so kind as to make him another cup—but it had to be freshly ground chocolate, comme il faut, to give the Aztec nectar its aromatic foaminess. A chocolate stain occupied the place once reserved for Don Homero Fagoaga’s mustache, only now beginning to reappear.
My parents, malgré their recovered lovemaking, and despite as well their happy certitude that I was on the way and could compete in the national Little Christophers Contest, had a secret fissure in each of their souls, one they preferred not to reveal. It was no longer the Matamoros Moreno horror; I think that event actually drew them closer together. It was, rather, the terrible suspicion that in this country at this time and in this history everyone was being used. The Spanish tongue, lawyer Fagoaga admitted during the long meals in which he made his domestic appearances, did not possess expressions as well-wrought to indicate in laconic fashion a colossal joke as did that lapidary French possessive:
Tu m’as eu
or its no less terse Anglo-Saxon equivalent:
We’ve been had.
You just can’t say these things because in Spanish (gigantic wink from Uncle Homero) they have an excessively sexual charge: Don Homero strongly suggested they not comment in public about the events that transpired in Guerrero, in return for which he would himself keep silent: he had seen nothing at the highway construction site; they had seen nothing at the Igualistlahuaca riot and the events that followed: Don Homero was not tossed in a blanket; they weren’t raped. Everything that happened in Acapulco resulted from the government’s clever maneuvers.
&nb
sp; Thus, the increasingly infrequent visits by Uncle Fernando Benítez to remind Don Homero of his promise to sally forth and defend the honor of Lady Democracy as soon as his retreat was over were deflated not only by the obese academic’s understandable desire not to be the object of a routine extermination at the hands of the uncontrollable and ignorant police force run by Colonel Inclán but by my parents’ lack of support:
“But are you really going to let this beached whale rot here for another month?” exclaimed Benítez. “If you keep this up, I’m going to disown you.”
Whenever he bothered to notice the look on their faces, Uncle Homero would tell them not to worry, that he would keep his promise to withdraw his suit about Angel’s prodigality, so they could live in luxury until the end of their days. Ah! in life everything was exchange, give to receive, receive to give, according to the law of convenience, and when my parents sat down at the table, they found there was nothing to eat: Fagoaga had swallowed, as if his mouth were a rapid, cannibalistic straw, the chicken in red sauce my mother had prepared with her own dainty little hands. All that was left were the bones and a sigh of satisfaction made by Don Homero as he wiped his lips with a king-size napkin. My parents were still afraid, given the absolute whimsicality of Mexican public decisions, of an unexpected change in the rules of the Little Christophers Contest; but no, the national contests sponsored by Mamadoc followed one on the other, undisturbed. During the month of March, for instance, quiz shows called the Last of the Last were broadcast almost every day: at the end of the show, a representative of Mamadoc would personally hand a prize (a sugar skull with the name of the winner written in caramel over the forehead) to the Last Fan of Jorge Negrete, a decrepit gentleman who in his wicker-seat wheelchair would pedomaniacally play the first bars of “Ay Jalisco Never Give In,” or to the Last Supporter of President Calles in Mexico (a title won, foreseeably, by Don Bernardino Gutiérrez, previously mentioned as the First Supporter of President Calles. Don Bernardino took advantage of the prize ceremony to hurl veiled accusations against the Cristeros who might be hiding in the ranks of the Revolution, nefarious types who with their intention to reconcile things that were simply unreconcilable—the flowing, crystalline water of the temporal with the heavy, priestish oil of the eternal—undermined the foundation of the Party of Revolutionary Inst …). Uncle Homero nervously turned the television off, taking Don Bernardino’s words as a direct allusion and a certain index of the officially low fortune of our relative, who sighed and pulled a tea cozy over his head.
Sitting immobile for an entire month in front of nationalized television, my parents and their Uncle Homero Fagoaga resembled catatonics awaiting the reliable news that would galvanize them and pull them out of this TV-induced hypnosis.
Uncle Homero Fagoaga, his Turkish slippers resting on an old telephone book, drowsily pointed out that the government was constantly creating false news items they broadcast as live action: just look, he said, languidly pointing one morning, at that police agent, caught by the cameras just at the precise moment he is refusing to accept a serious bribe from a North American tourist arrested for drunk driving, who is now compounding the felony by trying to bribe a representative of the police force; look now at those pictures of retroactive justice being meted out to government functionaries who got rich under past regimes; look now at that auction of bibelots, paintings, and racing cars for the benefit of the people, look at these ceremonies for the transfer of private parks to public schools and the return of tropical golf courses to members of rural collectives: every single event is false, it’s all made up, nothing of what you’re seeing is really happening, but it’s all presented as a fact freshly caught by the camera. Now look, Mamadoc in person just dove into Lake Pátzcuaro to save a group of pure-hearted girls who were bringing little headache poultices of onion and rose petals to the statue of Father Morelos in Janitzio because, in their gay naïveté, they thought he suffered from perpetual migraines—after all, didn’t he have a handkerchief tied around his head all the time? Well, in the enthusiasm of their ingenuous fantasy they capsized their canoe, which, by the way, dear niece and nephew, allows us to admire the cathedrallike figure of Our Mother and National Doctor in her lacy bathing costume of Copacabana design, and this, dear niece and nephew, is happening right now, at 12 noon, March 18, 1992, as President Paredes enters the Azcapotzalco refinery to celebrate fifty-six years of nationalized oil production—switch to the other channel, Angelito—and to remind us that our lack of sovereignty over the black gold is transitory. By paying the nation’s debts, oil is still serving Mexico, and Mexico faithfully keeps her currently pawned word to the International Monetary Fund: it doesn’t matter who administers the devil’s wells, as long as Mexico gets the benefits; and now a word about the construction of the famous dome which is to purify the atmosphere of our capital and distribute the pure air fairly among its thirty million inhabitants, but you, dear niece and nephew, already know by experience that this is just one more trick to give a longed-for distraction to our people, and when some innocent demands an explanation about the construction from some functionary, that bureaucrat knows just what he has to answer:
“As the Lady says, it’s part of a Strategic Beautification Plan.”
* * *
They sit there for a month watching TV. My mom makes trips to the market to buy the food my Uncle Homero gobbles down. We are visited, infrequently but cathartically, by Uncle Fernando Benítez, who would often arrive at around 5 a.m., pounding on the door. My alarmed parents would discover Don Fernando on the threshold, dressed in a trench coat, a Stetson pulled over his eyes, and pointing a flashlight into my parents’ bleary eyes:
“Proof that we live in a democracy: if someone’s knocking at your door at five in the morning, would you think it was the milkman?” At other times these visits would end with a heated exchange of noncommunication between Fernando and Homero:
“Immanuel Kant.”
“But Cesare Cantù.”
But the sign just doesn’t come. What is not a contest is a news flash, and what is not a news flash is a subliminal ad, which runs for a fraction of a second every fifteen minutes: the defining motto of Mamadoc’s regime:
UNION AND OBLIVION
UNION AND OBLIVION
UNION AND OBLIVION
And then the television goes back to running contests and celebrations, because, as our Mother and Doctor reminds us, not a day goes by, not a second passes, without something worthy of being celebrated in it, Bach is born, Nietzsche dies, the sun comes up, Tenochtitlán is conquered, black thread is invented, the last time it rained in Sayula, finally we hit a whole new level of
UNION AND OBLIVION:
They created a brand-new prize for the parvenu poet Mambo de Alba for Not Having Written Anything during the year 1991: Literature Is Thankful; the contest about the Last Mexican Revolutionary was voided because there were no contestants; President Jesús María y José Paredes, from the PAN party, impulsively declared that the PRI, after recent local events (our Uncle H.’s heart if not his dessert almost flew out of his mouth), reaffirmed its respect for the most absolute pluralism and admitted the existence of splinter groups in its very bosom which, if the citizens of Mexico so desired, could become authentic political parties.
To add spice to this political pizza, President Paredes, in a master stroke, renounced his membership in the right-wing National Action Party (PAN)—just to set an example—and then declared, in absolute impartiality, that he was joining millions of voters like himself who had to debate very seriously in their heart of hearts a decision pregnant with consequences: to which party do I wish to belong from now on?
This took place at the end of March. Then there was a long silence, until April 2, when President Paredes asked at a joint session of Congress meeting to honor Porfirio Díaz (UNION AND OBLIVION), whose name was inscribed that same afternoon in gold letters in the Congress, why citizens were so slow about massively joining the new parties, upon which R
epresentative Hipólito Zea, deputy from the ninth district of Chihuahuila, stood up to exclaim emotionally, spontaneously, and brilliantly from his place:
“Because we are waiting to see which party you join, Mr. President!”
And that shout was followed by another from Representative Peregrino Ponce y Peón, Senator from Yucatango:
“Your party will be our party, Mr. President. Just tell us which way to go, so we can be with you!” added the peasant leader Xavier Corcuera y Braniff, deputy from the twentieth district of Michoalisco, and “Please stop torturing us, Mr. President,” tearfully whined the deputy from Tamaleón and representative of the actors’ guild, Ms. Virginia Iris de Montoya.
Genuinely moved, the President answered amid an impressive national silence:
“You just can’t make a snap decision in a situation of such transcendence as this one. I cavil. I ponder. I consult the core of my Mexican being. In September I will reveal my decision. But let it not be an impediment to anyone else’s decision: let everyone freely choose the party that’s best for him.”
This time, Uncle Homero rose from his semirecumbent position, the tears in his eyes reflecting those of our President, and from his lips came forth this exclamation, one of his favorites, almost as an involuntary reflex, the essential expression of his political being: “At your service, Mr. President!”
But knowing himself to be excluded, for the moment, from these events of historical transcendence, his candidacy for the Senate suspended (he hoped) but not nipped in the bud, he had to limit himself to lucubrating in the void, like the proverbial man on the street who has no access to well-founded rumors, political breakfasts, high-quality gossip, unnamed sources, and other funds of solid information: what does this declaration mean for the fortunes of the National Action Party (PAN), to which until this very moment President Paredes said he belonged, having won the election under its blue-and-white banner? Might the situation have so bettered that the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) could once again take control of the executive responsibility and symbolism, without piling the blame of all our problems on the back of the opposition? What part would Mamadoc play in all this as the central symbol of unity amid this inter- and intraparty squabbling? Would her creator Minister Federico Robles Chacón lose power because of what happened to her? Does this decision mean a return to power of the most eminent emissary of the past, Minister Ulises López? Enigmas, enigmas that Homero, in despair, could not resolve, which made him once again sink into the contagious languor of pure spectatorship; and what, he mused, were the majority of Mexicans if not spectators for those endless contests served up by national television, betting on every conceivable thing: how many miles is it from Acaponeta to San Blas, how many tortillas were sold in the month of March in the state of Tlaxcala, be the first to call, we will give a prize to the first caller to our studio, the first letter, the first coupon; how many miles are there on the odometer of the Red Arrow Mexico City–Zumpango bus number 1066, manufactured by Leyland and sold to Mexico because it was spewing out clouds of carbon monoxide, nicknamed Here’s My Sword, Follow Me, Men? Hold on! Looks like Leyland’s getting a corner on the prize market: the driver who’s brought most merchandise into the City of Palaces in a single day has also won himself a prize. (There appears on the screen an albino boy dressed in black leather, said to be named Gómez, long-haul trucker; he disappears from the screen as quickly as he appeared.) They all saw the entire nation immersed in prizes, tests, anniversaries, which don’t leave them a free minute, as they await the grand prize, the perpetual superlottery of Makesicko Shitty: useless, exhausted, dead—but about the Mexican middle class we can at least say that it was never bored: this was its solution and its paradox: UNION AND OBLIVION and yet one more subliminal message that each afternoon blinks on all the TV sets and which says, redundantly: