Christopher Unborn

by Carlos Fuentes

“So you doubted the probity of Viceroy Revillagigedo? Ingrate!”

  These arguments were received with stupefaction by the guests, who had never said a word about the viceroy, but Capitolina was once again on the attack:

  “They make jam in Celaya and sugar candy in Puebla. Are you going to deny it! I dare you!”

  The shock of the guests was not assuaged by Farnesia, who interrupted her sister’s conversation with verbal inconsequentialities of all sorts:

  “It doesn’t matter. We shall never accept an invitation from you, sir, but we will give you the pleasure of receiving you in our salon. We are not cruel.”

  “Now that you mention tacos,” Capitolina pronounced, “I can’t talk about tacos without thinking of tortillas.”

  “But I…” the guest would say.

  “Never mind, never mind, you are a Jew and a Bulgarian, judging by your appearance, don’t try to deny it,” Capitolina would assert, one of her manias being to attribute to others whatever religion and nationality came into her head.

  “No, the truth is that…”

  “Ah!” Farnesia sighed, on the verge of fainting on the shoulder of the man sitting next to her. “We understand the pleasure it must give you just to have met us.”

  “Who is that ugly old dumb woman you brought, sir?” Capitolina went on.

  “Miss Fagoaga! She’s my wife.”

  “Damn the parvenu. Who invited her to my house?”

  “You did, miss.”

  “A strumpet, I tell you, and I’ll say it to her face, strumpet, gatecrasher, vulgarian, how could you ever marry her!”

  “Ah, Mauricio, take me home…”

  “Incidentally,” Farnesia commented, “and in the third place, we never…”

  “Miss: your attitude is highly rude.”

  “Isn’t it, though?” Doña Capitolina would say, opening her tremendous eyes.

  “Mauricio, I’m going to faint…”

  “And you just can’t imagine what happened yesterday,” Farnesia would immediately say, one of her other specialties being to accumulate inconsequential information and breathlessly communicate it. “It was just six o’clock in the afternoon and we naturally were getting ready to take care of our obligations because you should never leave for today what you can do tomorrow, the doorbell was ringing so insistently and we remembered the open window and we went running upstairs to find out if from the roof we could see what was going on and our cat walked right in front of us and from the kitchen came a smell of cabbage that, my God, you know we’re getting too old for these surprises and after all either you drink in manners with your mother’s milk or your mother learns manners, we never know and we’re about to go mad!”

  These suppers were discussed by the sisters with great satisfaction. One of their ideas was that only people of their social class should live in Mexico. They cherished the idea that the poor should be run out of the country and the rest of the lower orders be thrown into jail.

  “Oh, Farnecita, je veux un Mexique plus cossu,” Capitolina would say in the French she reserved for grand moments.

  “Cozy, cozy, a cozy little country,” her sister complemented her in English, and when they said these little things, the two of them felt comforted, warm, sure of themselves, just like their quilted tea cozy.

  These enjoyable intermezzi, nevertheless, gave way more and more to tensions my father discovered as he advanced into adolescence: the aunts looked at him in a different way, whispered to each other, and instead of kneeling alone, grabbed him, each one taking an arm at the most unexpected moments, forcing him to kneel with them and strike his chest.

  One night, some horrifying shouts woke him up, and my father ran around in confusion, looking for the source of the noise. He tripped over innumerable bibelots and display cases, knocking them down and breaking things, and then he stopped at the locked door of Capitolina’s room. He tried to look through the keyhole but it was blocked by a handkerchief redolent of cloves. All he could hear were the terrible shouts of the two sisters:

  “Christ, belovèd body!”

  “Brides of the Lord, Farnesia, we are the brides of the Lord!”

  “Husband!”

  “You are a virgin, but I am not!”

  “Isabella our sister was happy to give birth!”

  “Surrounded by respect!”

  “We give birth in secret!”

  “Filled with shame!”

  “How old is the boy today?”

  “The same age as he is!”

  “Oh, my Lord! My holy bridegroom!”

  My father walked away in shock and could not sleep, either that night or any subsequent night he spent under the Fagoaga sisters’ roof. At the age of fourteen, he felt urgent sexual desires, which he satisfied standing before a print of the Virgin offering her breast to the Infant Jesus. He repeated these exercises twice a week and was surprised to see that whenever he did it a sudden ray of light would illuminate his room, as if the Virgin were sending him flashes of gratitude for his sacrifice.

  “A few months later, Uncle Homero walked into the Calle Durango house with all his insolent overbearing, called Servilia an ‘obscene trollop,’ and stood me next to her in the grand salon of the sisters’ house, with both of them present, and accused me and the maid of making love in secret. Servilia wept and swore it wasn’t so, while Capitolina and Farnesia shouted out their denunciations of the two of us and Don Homero accused me of lowering myself with the servants, and the three of them accused the maid of thinking she was their equal, now she’s gone beyond her station, the maids always hate us, they always would like to be and to have what we are and it’s a miracle they don’t murder us in our beds.

  “Servilia was fired, Uncle H. made me take down my trousers, and after caressing my buttocks he spanked me with one of Aunt Capitolina’s shoes, informing me that he would discount from my allowance the broken glass and other damage I’d caused.

  “All this seemed tolerable and even amusing since it put my Christian faith to the test and forced me to think: how can I go on being Catholic after living with the Fagoagas? I have to have faith!”

  “What an incorrigible romantic you are! You have to have faith!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you rationalize everything.”

  “To the contrary, I am merely repeating the oldest article of faith. It’s true because it’s absurd.

  “But I was dying of curiosity. Every night I spied through my aunts’ keyhole, hoping that just once they would forget to block it up.”

  “And what happened?”

  “They shouted, as I told you, we give birth in secret, the lost child, the same age as Angelito, the lost child. One night they forgot the handkerchief.”

  The keyhole was like the eye of God. A pyramid of air carved in the door. A triangle anxious to tell a story. Just the way it is in one of those unexpected openings in old-fashioned fairy tales: the kitchen opens onto the sea, onto the mountain, onto the bedroom. It smelled strongly of cloves. He imagined the bleeding, embroidered handkerchief with silver borders.

  “Did they purposely not put it in, or did they really forget?”

  My father wished he hadn’t seen what he saw that night through the keyhole in the room illuminated only by candlelight.

  “What happened, for God’s sake! Don’t turn this into a suspense story!”

  He wished he hadn’t seen what he saw, but he couldn’t tell it to anyone.

  “Not even me?”

  “Not to you or anyone else.”

  “You say you were consumed by curiosity.”

  “Just imagine.”

  Inebriated by the smell of cloves, blinded by the fantastic theology of the candles burning down, saying I am afraid of myself, he ran out of the house on Avenida Durango and went to live with his grandparents Rigoberto Palomar and Susana Rentería in the house on Calle Génova, but he never told them what he’d seen. He swore it: he would die without saying a word, it was the proof that he
was now a man; he closed his eyes and left his mouth open: a fly landed on the tip of his tongue; he spit, he sneezed.

  4

  “Don’t go yet, Mommy, I want to know how you and Daddy met, that way I’ll know everything about the holy family.”

  “Sorry, sweetie, but we’re only in January and all that happened in April; you’ll have to wait until the right month rolls around.”

  “The cruellest month.”

  “Who said that?”

  “T. S. Shandy, native of San Luis.”

  “San Luis Potosí?”

  “No, San Luis Misurí: T. S. Elote. Fix your genetic information circuits, son, or we’re never going to understand each other. Which leads me directly to the finish of the tale of the wellspring of all confusion in this story and in the world: your uncle, Homero Fagoaga, who baptized you from the air at the instant you were conceived.”

  “Shit!”

  The intrigues against Uncle Homero began one October day more than six years ago, and he didn’t know it, said my father, and he, the most interested party, was completely unaware and told that to my mother when they both walked into the Pacific Ocean to wash off the shit which had rained down on them that midday of my conception, when I had just been admitted into the supreme hostel, bombarded by voices and memories, places and times, names and songs, foods and fucks, memory and oblivion, I who had just abandoned my metaphysical condition, being El Niño Child, to acquire my name, I CHRISTOPHER, but in any case, even though I had my own name, I had to begin as El Niño, look ye well your mercies, if I was going to win the Contest of the Quincentennial of the Discovery of America on the next 12th of October 1992. They said, if it’s a girl we’re dead ducks, so we ditch her straightaway because we’re not entered in the Contest for Coatlicue or Malinche or Guadalupe or Sor Juana or Adelita, who are our national heroines, whose virtues are now for the glory and benefit of the nation incarnate in Our Lady Mamadoc. No way, we’re in the Christopher Contest.

  COLON CRISTOBAL

  CRISTOFORO

  CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

  COLOMBO

  COLOMB CHRISTOPHE

  the same in all languages, see, baby? Christ-bearer and Dove, which is to say, the two persons missing from the Trinity, the Son and the Holy Spirit, our Discoverer, the saint who got his footsies wet crossing the seas and the dove that arrived with a little branch in his beak to announce the nearness of the New Land and the one who broke an egg to invent us, but all this history and all this nomenclature depend, as you all can see, on something over which neither Angel nor Angeles, my parents, has any control, that is, that the data in my father’s spermatozoid and my mother’s reproductive cells divide, separate, give up half of themselves, accept this fatal sacrifice all in order to form a new unity made of two retained halves (but also of the two lost halves) in which I will never be identical to my father or my mother even though all my genes come from them, but for me, only for me, for no one else but me, they have combined in an unrepeatable fashion which shall determine my sex: this unique I Christopher and what they call GENES:

  “Hey, the genes are to blame for everything,” said Uncle Fernando Benítez.

  “Right,” agreed Uncle Homero Fagoaga, “the genius is to blame for everything. Hegel is to blame.”

  Thus did Uncle Fernando, tired of his in-law’s feigning deafness when it suited him and always confusing him in order to wriggle out of the moral definitions proposed by the robust liberalism of the elder uncle, decide to stop speaking to Homero and instead organize the band of Four Fuckups, who at that time, says my father, must have been between fifteen and eighteen years old. All this in order to screw Uncle Homero, dog him day and night, never give him a moment’s peace, follow him through the streets of Makesicko City from dawn till dusk, from door to door, from his penthouse on Mel O’Field Road to his office on Frank Wood Avenue, as if they were hunting him down, don’t cut any corners, boys, my abused lads, set traps and snares for him, hunt him down.

  Don Homero Fagoaga insisted on living in this uncomfortable building on Mel O’Field Road for a very simple reason: all the buildings around his had collapsed during the consecutive earthquakes of 1985, so that Uncle H.’s condo was surrounded by “fields of solitude, dejected downs”: flattened lots, ranches wiped out by the city’s acid rain, but his building was standing, saying to the world that where Homero lived, earthquakes were sparrow farts. This sublime and sublimated lesson did not go unnoticed, he was informed by his public-relations experts, for whom he acquired at astronomical prices the properties in the center of town that the government wanted to transform into gardens but which Ulises López sold through his front man, Dr. Fagoaga.

  “I am twenty years older than you,” Uncle Fernando said to him, “but I’m still on the make.”

  “Did you say quake? Again?” asked Uncle Homero, running to take his place in the nearest doorframe.

  “Twenty years older than you, but harder in the phallus,” Uncle Fernando said.

  “You like Niki de St. Phalle’s art? Terrific!”

  “I still like to screw…”

  “Stew? Only when the weather’s cool…”

  “No, Jimmy Stewart, you old fool,” Uncle Fern exclaimed in despair. And he ordered his boys: “Chase him as if it were hunting season and he were big game, you’ve got to be hard-nosed and hard-assed with this old rhino! Keep an eye on him, my little Fuckups, make a fool of him. Drive the miserable old fart nuts.”

  It all began when the shortest (but the oldest) of the Four Fuckups, the so-called Orphan Huerta, set up his stand of overripe fruit right at the well-guarded door of Uncle Homero’s condo on O’Field, singing out day and night in his soprano twang. Day and night in the shrill voice of a kid from the slums.

  “Oranges, pears, an’ figs,” chanted Orphan Huerta in his intolerable voice whenever Uncle Homero walked through the building’s revolving door, a miraculous fact in itself, according to my dad, because Uncle Homero’s mass should not by rights have been able to pass through any door, revolving or stationary, open or closed, screened or screenless:

  “Condomed door.”

  “Cuntdemned door, did you say?”

  “Like the Doors without Jim Morrison, sans issue.”

  “I see, I see.”

  “You see nothing, you old fart, so stop pretending.”

  The fact is, they don’t make them (doors, that is) that huge anymore. Uncle Homero can only get through a revolving door the way jelly gets into a jar—adapting himself to the circumstances, in a word.

  “I do so love belly dancers,” said Uncle Fernando.

  “You love jelly doughnuts, at your age?” observed Uncle Homero incredulously.

  “No, you fat slob, hegelly doughnuts,” retorted Uncle Fernando, getting up and knocking his chair over backwards.

  Or perhaps Uncle Homero is rehearsing to get into heaven through the eye of a needle every time he enters or leaves his house, says my mom, floating in the sea just as I float inside her in the fetal sea.

  “Through the needle of an eye?” Don Homero feigned surprise.

  The Orphan Huerta never allowed himself to be intimidated by the contrast between the narrowness of the door and the generous dimensions of Don Homero Fagoaga, LL.D. As soon as he saw him, he burst into his hideous chant, which sounded like a rusty knife being dragged across a plate.

  “Oranges, pears, an’ figs; oranges, pears, an’ figs.”

  Uncle Homero begins to shake (like a bowlful of jelly) and offers the poor Orphan a five-cent coin from the times of Ruiz Cortines, at the same time that he corrects him:

  “Oranges, pears, and figs, my boy.”

  He was offering him something more than five cents from the fifties, inestimable era in which the Mexican Revolution was going to celebrate its Golden Anniversary and when the peso was devalued to twelve-fifty, and even so they went on loving each other for a little while longer (the Revolution and the peso). Uncle Homero is offering the poor Orphan something more tha
n five cents, he is awarding him a verbal mother and father, he is offering him education, without which (Don Homero says to the Huerta boy) there is neither progress nor happiness but only stagnation, barbarism, and disgrace.

  “Oranges, pears, and figs, my boy.”

  Proper speech, that’s what he offers him, the Castilian tongue in all its pristine, puritan purity, the Gothic Virgin and her pudgy acolyte: the Castilian Tongue and Homero Fagoaga LL.D.: the Ideal Couple: Don Homero nothing more than a servant of the Spanish Language, Hispaniae Lingua. He hones it, he fixes it, he gives it splendor, and he offers to the future, to the potential, to the possible Don Orphan Huerta LL.D. the possibility of being, finally, in the following order, Mother’s Day Poet, Orator of National Holidays, Declaimer of the Sexagesimal Campaign, at worst a Congressman, people’s tribune and at the same time elitist Demosthenes, owner of the Language: Uncle Homero licks his lips imagining the destiny of the Orphan Huerta if the boy would only give his tongue to the old man, if he’d allow him to educate it, sentence it, diphthong it, vocalize it, hyperbatonize it.

  Uncle drops the Classic Tongue like a golden pill on the savage tongue of the Orphan Huerta, who stood there astonished with his mouth as open as a mailbox, filthy, the poor devil, his face darker from the grime than from his infamous genes, the scum and the dust and the mud of the no-man’s-land from which the kid emanated with his head crowned with a helmet of gray felt, the ruin of a quondam borsalino, emblazoned with beer or soda bottle caps. The Orphan Huerta.

  “Oranges, pears, an’ figs.”

  Uncle Homero adjusted his balloon trousers, which were held up by yellow suspenders (one side bearing the image of the Holy Father repeated along its full length, thus holding in place the whitish softness of the lawyer’s right bosom; the other side bearing the image of Emiliano Zapata, alternately wearing expressions of shock and heart failure, on his left bosom); he buttoned the only button on his Barros Jarpas (as our Chilean lady friend enigmatically refers to these striped trousers) and dropped the coin of verbal gold on the bottle-capped head of the Orphan Huerta.

  “Oranges, pears, and figs, son.”