They say that the mayor of Tearapulco, Dr. Noel Guridi, received the gift of thirty coyotes trained by the governor of the state of Guerrero, General Vicente Alcocer, and he told him, don’t be afraid, you’ve got to work over these rebels, you understand me, work them over.
And the trained coyotes went out at night with their tongues and eyes irritated and burning, bonfires of smoke and blood in their eyes and snouts, the coyotes went out to do some working over, went out with their bodies covered with mangy fur and their muddy claws on the necks of the old and dying, on the necks of the sick and the helpless, whether they were cooling off on the mountains, groaning on their pallets, creaking motionless in their huts. They were the last rebels to remain scratching the mountains with a view of the sea and the bay: the sea and the bay belong to the jet set, not to the squatters, said Governor Vicente Alcocer as he stared at his photo in Paris-Match.
The boy with the long face and the long snout, like that of a plumed coyote, stands up stiff and tall like a banderilla in the center of the dried-out palm grove on the heights of the old communal lands of Santa Cruz, his yellow eyes wide open. He waits patiently for what must come: the dark eyes, the wet muzzles, the copper-dust-colored fur—the nervous howls—the giggles, the animals that laugh, waiting for the full moon: he waits for them with the patience of a brother, shedding his skin, as if the time and anguish of the wait had torn him apart both inside and outside.
The boy with the ragged suit and the snakeskin belt closes his eyes when the full moon appears, so that he can be seen without having to see them: he knows he should not look directly at them, they hypnotize, they misinterpret the stares of others and their own stares are easy to misunderstand: the coyotes believe in nonexistent challenges, or they communicate them.
He closes his eyes and smells them, he sweating and they sweating. They have gathered in a circle, as if they were having a conference. They fall silent. They listen to their leader, who is always the oldest animal. The others imitate him, will imitate him. The boy with long, greasy curls only knows that the coyote is a cowardly animal and that’s why it never comes close to people.
He opens his eyes. He offers them a hand filled with corn fungus. The coyotes come closer. It’s a new moon, and the boy howls. The pack approaches him and eats the corn mushrooms out of his hand. The boy feels their wet muzzles in his open palm, he pets their copper-dust-colored fur, finally looking into their dark eyes.
He takes an old-fashioned car horn out of his pocket and squeezes it: the honks at first scatter the pack, making them walk in nervous circles, until the pack leader identifies the noise with the boy, and the others follow suit.
“A coyote is just as capable of attacking the oppressed as is the oppressor. Give them music, not beatings.”
He tells the people hidden behind the mountains where no one can ever see them, give them food, stop them from being afraid of you, play the jukebox for them, so they won’t be so scared, then take them down to the town so they won’t be afraid of cars, get them used to the noise of the port, the smell of the tourists, one day let one go into a hotel lobby and see what happens …
Desperate, I cling to my mother’s oviduct.
2
The Holy Family
The traditions of all past generations weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
Karl Marx,
The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
1
Later my father and mother emerge from the sea and put their ears to the sand as if to listen for something far off, to listen through walls, depths, to listen for the earthquakes that are coming, to listen for the growth of the grass and the creaking of the graveyards, the noise El Niño makes moving over the sea and the trot of the coyotes coming down the mountains.
I’ve been hearing noises since the beginning—they resound. I dream that: wherever I am I shall be covered, masked, but still resounding, hearing, dreaming, perhaps one day I shall be listened to, but for now I only listen, listening to them through my prenatal filters, like this:
“This is my second question: what will the boy’s name be?”
“Christopher.”
“Don’t be a jerk. I already know that: What else? Which last names!
“Palomar.”
“What else?”
“I don’t know what your other names are. I named you Angeles. Angel and Angeles sound good.”
“Describe me today.”
A green flame I would have wanted to touch when she was a girl, before and before and before, a green flame is what she looks like now, liquid emerald, daughter of the dawn (well, of this dawn: the one we managed to get): well, you’re better than nothing. Tall and slender, fair but trying hard to get a tan. Black hair, cut short, shaved at the neck, raven wing and kissmequick over one eye: very twenties. Both of us dress very twenties. Hippie style’s out of fashion. Today to be a rebel in fashion means to be seriously retro: I wear dark suits, gaiters, hats, scarf pins, ties, starched collars. She wears black bandeaux, gray silk stockings, shoes for dancing the Charleston. Now I’ve made her dress Tehuana-style to fool Uncle Homero: she in Tehuana clothes, me hippie-style; folklore and revolution, things that don’t shock our relative or anyone else.
Angeles: your expression is so hard sometimes, while your flesh is so smooth and soft. I love your perfumed nape, your acid axillas, your naked feet. Angeles, my Angeles: give me things to think about at night. My Engelschen with long legs and breasts that seem immobile they’re so small and so well fixed. Pale, limp, and white (now tanning under the January sun of Acapulco). She commemorated her lack of a past as well as her arrival in Mexico City by going alone one afternoon to the Monument of the Revolution to make wee-wee on the eternal flame and by declaring later in the police station when they arrested her for disrespect:
“That flame doesn’t cost the government a dime. That’s why I put it out.”
Later she confessed to Angel that she only did it to get even, to show that a woman not only can urinate standing up if she so chooses but can even put out the sacred flame of the Mexican Revolution that way. Uncle Fernando Benítez took Angeles in when the girl turned up on his doorstep out of the blue one day in the year ’91, after the national disasters in ’90 that left us bereft of half the territory remaining to us, and many people from the provinces decided to flee from Chitacam, the Yucatán, Mexamerica, from the coast north of Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo, in order to go on being Mexicans. Angeles appeared before Benítez with no suitcase, without even a change of clothes, which Don Fernando liked because he didn’t want to know any more about her; he said he liked to decide things once and for all right on the spot, decide about love or friendship or justice without proof or explanation. She said she’d seen him from a distance in the plaza of her hometown and she liked the way he came right up to people, he spoke to people to whom no one else ever spoke: she liked that and that’s why she’d come. And she’d read his books.
He told the authorities she was his niece and defended her with all the sophistry of a good Mexican lawyer—even if he had no degree, Fernando Benítez, like all literate Mexicans, had a jurist locked in his bosom, just dying to get out into the world. While Angeles was being held, Don Fernando Benítez sent his agile young ally, the Orphan Huerta, to reignite the flame; by the time Angeles appeared before the magistrate, it was impossible to prove that the flame had ever been extinguished, and Benítez could declare the following: Are you saying, your honor, that the flame of the Mexican Revolution can be put out just like that—as declared by these two exemplars of the best police force money can buy, even if they were in all probability a bit tipsy at the time and for all practical purposes merely concupiscent, the miserable nobodies! The truth of the matter is that my niece did feel an urge, that’s so, was seen and chased by these fleet-footed minions of justice, which heightened her nervousness and its effects on her bladder, so she eliminated where she could—but to put out the flame of our permanent revolution? With a mere squirt of
wee-wee? Who could do it? Not her, not me, not even you, your honor!
And Angel? Will you describe him, Mom?
Also green, very much a gypsy. Tall, a boy from this new generation of skinny, tall Mexicans. Both of us are dark and green, me with black eyes and he with lime-green eyes. We looked at each other: he’s shortsighted, knows how to whistle all of Don Giovanni, and says that I would have been a perfect courtesan in an opera if I’d been born a hundred years ago, and if I hadn’t begun reading the complete works of Plato. The set with green covers. Vasconcelos. The National Autonomous University of Mexico. God, it’s the only thing that lets me look at myself in the mirror and say to myself: There you are. Your name is Angeles. You love Angel. You are going to have a baby. What makes you think I won’t read the whole Cratylus, which is a book about names: Angel, Angeles, Christopher: Are they the names that really belong to us (my love, my man, my name, my son)? Or are the names ourselves, are we the names? Do we name or are we named? Are our names a pure convention? Did the gods give us our names, but by saying them (our own and the others) do we wear them out and pervert them? When we name ourselves, do we burn ourselves? None of this matters to me: I intuit that if I have a name and I name you (Angel/Angeles) it’s so I can discover little by little your nature and my own. Isn’t that what’s most important? What does it matter then that I have no past or that I don’t remember it, which is the same thing. Take me as I am, Angel, and don’t ask me any more questions. This is our pact. Name me. Discover me. I am going to have a son and I’m going to read Plato. What makes you think I won’t, despite all the accidents that in Mexico make intellectual endeavor impossible, all the distractions, the pleasant climate, the deteriorating environment, let’s take a walk, the coffee klatches, the gossip, the parties, there isn’t a real summer, the winter is invisible, politics are taken care of for us every six years, nothing works but everything survives, you was born, you dies, you don’ reads, you don’ write nothin’. What makes you think I won’t? Do you understand why I’m memorizing Plato? Those books are those men, Angel, the others, the people, the ones who did something, read, spoke, listened: Angel, I have no other connection with the others, not even with a past, not even with a family or anyone else. I have no past, Angel my love, that’s why everything that falls on me sticks to me, all causes, all ideas, feminism, the left, third world, ecology, ban-the-bomb, Karl and Sigi, liberation theology, even traditional Catholicism as long as it goes against conformity, everything sticks to me and whatever sticks to me has to be good, my love, because the only thing that doesn’t stick to me is respect for authority, faith in the chief, superior races, the murder or oppression of anyone in the name of an idea, history, the nation, or the leader, none of the above. I am a good receptacle, Angel, a white wall without memories or my own past, my love, but a place where only pretty things can be written and ugliness has no place. Now I leave it to you to write there with me, but don’t force me into anything, my love; I need you, but don’t chain me up; I follow you, but don’t order me to follow you; let me make the life I never had or don’t remember with you, Angel, and one day we can remember together, but I’ll have no memory of anything but my life with you: please, let’s share everything. Pardon my habitual silence. I’m not absent. I observe and absorb, my love. This is our pact.
Your father Angel says I feel superior to him because since I have no past I’ve had to enter today’s universality in a flash, the universality of violence, haste, cruelty, and death. But his parents died comically, eating tacos.
What did Grandpa and Grandma do, Dad?
Your grandparents, Diego and Isabella Palomar, were inventors, Chris: in the tabloids of the period they were called the Curies of Tlalpan. I’m telling you this so you know right from the start that in this country anything you do will be pardoned as long as it serves in one way or another to justify and legitimize the status quo. Your uncles, Homero and Fernando, who detest each other, have at least that in common. Don Homero’s illegal trafficking is pardoned because he does his job as Defender of the Castilian Tongue. Don Fernando’s critical gibes are forgiven because he is the Defender of the Indians. My grandpa General Rigoberto Palomar’s eccentricities are forgiven because he is the only person who believes body and soul that the Mexican Revolution triumphed. And my parents were given official protection for their inventions because they were the Curies of Tlalpan: two inventive and daring scientists during the period, my boy, when Mexico thought it could be technologically independent. One illusion less! For thirty years we were buying obsolete technology at high prices; every five or six years we had to turn our decrepit machinery in for new obsolete machinery, and so on and so on and so on … And thus the techniques for robotics and cryogenics, biomedicine, fiber optics, interactive computers, and the entire aerospace industry passed us by. One day, when you’ve grown up, I’ll take you to see the ruins of the investments in the oil boom, son, when we spent forty billion dollars to buy junk. I’ll take you to see the ruins of the nuclear plant in Palo Verde, next to which Chichén-Itzá looks like a brand-new Coca-Cola and hot-dog stand. I’ll take you, my dear son, to see expensive, rusting machinery sitting in the useless industrial Gulf ports. And if you want to take a ride on an ultramodern Japanese bullet train, well, maybe it would be better for you to take a ride on the kiddy train in Chapultepec Park instead of trying the paralyzed inter-ocean train that according to its Mexican designers was going to knock the crap out of the Panama Canal. Seek in vain, my boy, the rapid shipment of barrels of oil from Coatzacoalcos to Salina Cruz, the shortest route from Abu Dhabi to San Francisco and Yokohama: seek it, sonny, and all you’ll see are the cold rails and the hot illusions of insane Mexican oil-grandeur: no immortal spring, only these, Fabio, oh grief: the blasted heath between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. Mountains of sand and the cadaver of a spider monkey. Long live the Opepsicoatl Generation!
But, Daddy, when did they make you?
* * *
(His parents conceived my father the night of October 2, 1968, as a response against death. At times they’d thought of not having children, of dedicating themselves totally to science. But the night of the student massacre at the Plaza de Tlateloco, they said that if at that instant they didn’t affirm the right to life so brutally trampled on by an arrogant, maddened, and blind power, there would never be any science in our country: they had seen the troops destroy entire laboratories in University City, steal typewriters, dismantle the work of four generations of scholars. As my grandparents made love they could not shut out the noise of sirens, ambulances, machine guns, and fires.
My father was born on July 14, 1969. Thus, his intrauterine life took place between two symbolic dates. In that fact he sees a good omen for my own conception: between Twelfth Night and Columbus Day. But my mother balances this abundance of symbols: she doesn’t even know when she was born, much less when she was conceived.)
But my grandparents, Dad, tell me about my grandparents.
I don’t know if what my parents, Diego and Isabella, invented in the basement of their house in Tlalpan (where I was born) was useful or not. In any case, whatever it was, it hurt no one, except, as it turned out, themselves. They believed in science with all the love of novelty and all the fury of liberal, emancipated Mexicans and rejected both inquisitorial shadows and the sanctimoniousness of the past. So their first invention was a device to expel superstition. Conceived on a domestic scale and as easy to use as a vacuum cleaner, this manual, photostatic device made it possible to transform a black cat into a white cat the instant the feline crossed your path.
The apparatus’s other accomplishments were, my boy, as follows: it reconstituted broken mirrors instantaneously by magnetizing the pieces. They used it to leap Friday the 13th gracefully and to close automatically the portable ladders under which it was possible to walk the streets (a supplemental movement deflected the paint cans that might, for that very reason, fall on one’s head). It even caused hats carelessly tossed on be
ds to float indefinitely in the air.
They even invented the salt-jumper, which, when someone spilled salt, caused it immediately to bounce over the left shoulder of the person who made the mess. But their most beautiful invention, without a doubt, was the one that created a delightful space in the sky and clouds above any umbrella opened inside a house. And the most controversial was the one that permitted any hostess to summon instantaneously a fourteenth guest when at the last moment she found herself with thirteen at table. My own parents never understood if that saving guest was a mere specter created by lasers or if the invention actually created a new guest of flesh and blood whose only vital function was to eat that one meal and disappear forever without leaving a trace, or if there existed an unfathomable complicity between the device and certain living—and hungry—persons who, on finding out about the dilemma of protocol and superstition, turned up to get a free meal, convoked by some message between computer and consumer which escaped the control or intention of my diligent parents.
The invention of the Fourteenth Guest led in its turn to two more inventions, one metaphysical, the other, alas! all too physical. My mother Isabella, no matter how modern and scientific she might be, especially because she was rebelling against her family, the Fagoagas, could never manage to free herself from an ancient female terror: whenever she saw a mouse, she would scream and jump up on a chair. Unhappily, she caused several accidents by jumping up on rickety stools and improvised platforms, breaking test tubes and occasionally ruining ongoing experiments. By the same token, there was no way to reconcile this attitude of hers with my parents’ declared purpose; namely, to transform superstition into science. The fact is that the basement of their house in Tlalpan was full of rodents; but so was the rest of the city, my father, Diego Palomar, pointed out, and if Diego and Isabella had enough money to invest in pieces, even slices of cheese to put in their mousetraps, what could the garbageman or the ragpicker put in theirs?
Christopher Unborn Page 6