III
LIFE ON EARTH
The most accomplished aeronauts of all are flies.
David Attenborough
When she was a child, Mónica wanted to be a scientist or a doctor. A woman in a white coat. As her mother is an anthropologist and her father a lawyer, it took her many years to realize she could be an astronomer or a marine biologist; she was only ever encouraged to take an interest in the humanities. I’m not complaining. Quite the opposite: I’m grateful to those people who skewed her vocation. If Mónica hadn’t been an artist, it’s unlikely we would have met. We’re antipodean symbols: she’s from the capital, and is descended from good Creole stock on both sides of the family, all bankrupt to a greater or lesser extent.
One of the treasures we have in our library is David Attenborough’s Life on Earth, a paperback copy published by the Fondo Educativo Interamericano in 1981. The front cover has a photograph of what appears to be a titi monkey perching on some green spikes. I say “appears” because I don’t know much about animals, and, what’s more, the creature’s face isn’t visible: it’s covered by a cut-out velvet-paper bat my sister-in-law Pau stuck there when she was in elementary school.
Mónica has read Life on Earth so many times she almost knows it by heart; that book was, along with her parents’ divorce, one of those events that formed a division in her childhood.
On our first night living together in our new apartment, we made love on a mattress on the floor. We’d just gotten through a god-awful move: I traveled the eight hundred kilometers separating Saltillo from Mexico City by bus and, almost as soon as I’d gotten there, climbed into the car with Mónica and Maruca—our Irish wolfhound—to make the return journey, driving behind the truck with her belongings. I was wiped out, and euphoric. I wanted to share something special with my woman, a very intimate confession that would mark our wedding night with a metal heavier than that of rings. I didn’t have the courage to tell her about my mamá’s profession. Instead, I talked to her about David Durand’s death. About the eviction. About my friend Adrián, who once accompanied me to Puerta Vallarta to meet my father. About how Saíd and I used to chase after the cardboard roof of our house when it blew away down the street.
When I finally shut up, Mónica said very softly, still lying on my chest:
“You’re a beautiful sea cucumber.”
I told her I didn’t understand. She got up and, walking naked through the shadows, easily located Attenborough’s book among a heap of volumes piled on the floor. She leafed through the pages for a moment until she found the one she was looking for. Then she leaned toward the large window of our new bedroom to capture a little illumination from the street lamps and read aloud:
The sausage-like sea cucumbers that sprawl on sandy patches in the reef are also echinoderms, which lie neither face-up nor face-down, but on their sides. At one end is an opening called the anus, though this term is not completely appropriate for the animal uses it not only for excretion but for breathing as well, sucking water gently in over tubules inside the body. The mouth at the other end is surrounded by tube feet that have been enlarged into short tentacles.… If you pick up a sea cucumber, do so with care, for they have an extravagant way of defending themselves. They simply extrude their internal organs. A slow but unstoppable flood of sticky tubules pours out of the anus, fastening your fingers together in an adhesive tangle of threads. When an inquisitive fish or crab provokes them to such action, it finds itself struggling in a mesh of filaments while the sea cucumber slowly inches itself away on the tube feet that protrude from its underside. Over the next few weeks it will slowly grow itself a new set of entrails.
She closed the book, returned, and embraced me.
“Come on, cucumber. Don’t be afraid of me. Tell me a happy memory now.”
Adrián Contreras Briseño is my best friend. We haven’t seen each other for twenty years. This is the only loss I regret when I think about my adolescence.
He recently called me. I don’t know how he got the number. He asked after my mother’s health. I told him she’d died. He replied sincerely:
“I’m real sorry, Favio.” He doesn’t know I’m not called that now. Then he added, “Pop’s left us too.”
I gave him my condolences, as sincere as his.
Don Gonzalo Contreras had been a man with a strange skill: he was able to injure a person without hurting him too much. Whenever one of the AHMSA foundry workers needed a few days paid leave for a trip, or to pick up another job to supplement his household income, he’d seek out Don Gonzalo, who would effect a calculated sprain or burn that, though minor, merited temporary disability leave. The union guys and reliable workers hated him for this.
Adrián and I talked for a couple of hours. We were perfectly comfortable: it was as if our last chat had taken place the day before. After catching up on the past two decades of each other’s lives, we said good-bye with the same mocking, swaggering phrases we used when we were fourteen. I guess the next time we’re together, when we’re sixty or so, we’ll go back to being children again. Friendship is one of the great mysteries of life on Earth.
Mónica and I often exchange a slightly macabre gesture of affection. One of us stretches out on the bed while the other shakes out the sheets over the one lying there, and lets them fall gently. It’s an erotic, childish game: the sensation of lightness; the fantasy of floating. But it’s also a bittersweet renewal of our vows: I am the one who will cover your face in that hour.
News comes from my siblings.
Diana is mad about chocolate and suffers daily from a youthful mistake: she ceded custody of her eldest daughter to her husband. They can see each other only on weekends.
Jorge has turned one of the bedrooms of his house in Yokohama (it’s a small house) into a music room for his two sons and daughter. All three of them are named after European painters: Runó, Miró, and Moné. The room contains an upright piano, two guitars, and an electronic drum kit. He showed it to me on Skype.
Saíd was in serious trouble: the Zetas worked him over because one of his friends was late paying for a few grams of cocaine. He got off easy: they didn’t beat him with planks etched with the letter Z, or shoot him. I gave him a little money (as much as I could) to see if it would help him sort out the situation.
Sometimes fraternity has no streets: just blind alleys. And a traffic cop standing in the blood saying, “Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving.”
I don’t know now if the country decided to go definitively down the drain after my mother’s death, or if it was simply that Juan Carlos Bautista’s prophecy was more literal and powerful than my mourning could bear: “Heads will rain down on Mexico.”
Saltillo was no longer a peaceful town.
First someone knocked on the door of Armando Sánchez Quintanilla, the state director of libraries. The moment he opened up, he was shot at point-blank range. Then a sicario got mad when he found his wife with another man; he organized a shoot-out along the length of the Bulevar Venustiano. They say he took out a couple of agents before being brought down in a hail of bullets. Neither the press, the state, nor federal governments said a single word about the matter. Not long afterward, they executed a North American government official on Highway 57, near San Luis Potosí. The imperial machinery was set in motion with a vengeance, and, just days later, one of the culprits was apprehended in my native city. That put us in the thick of it.
Last Friday, Leonardo and Mónica were driving back from the supermarket along one of the main avenues when a police officer stepped out in front of the car and, pistol in hand, made them turn off onto a side street. They could hear gunshots in the distance. As they were coming up from an underpass, Mónica saw two military tanks on the highway above her with machine guns at the ready, pointed toward the flow of traffic; that is to say, toward her and our baby. After that, there were three days of gunfire. Federal agents and cartel sicarios died in a confrontation on the Luis Echeverría beltway around the La
Torrelit exit. At the gates of a kindergarten, a stray bullet killed a woman who was picking up her nephew. We took our EcoSport in for its six-thousand-mile service and then weren’t able to collect it: a nonexistent—according to Governor Jorge Torres—narcoblockade got in the way. There’s talk of grenades being thrown at the Sixth Military Zone, civilians dead and wounded, talk of narcomantas bearing messages or threats from the cartels. And again: neither the press nor the government issuing any information, and this despite the existence of photos, videos, and dozens of witnesses. If you want to know what’s going on you have to follow along on Twitter. And worse still: in a fit of unmitigated naïveté, the governor declared that a fine or imprisonment would be imposed on “anyone spreading rumors.”
(I hope when they come to arrest me, Jorge Torres will understand that what I’m writing is a work of fiction: Saltillo is, as he describes it in his stupid stuttering speeches, a safe place.)
We’re always hearing about what a headache the frontier is for the United States because of the drug trafficking. No one mentions how dangerous the United States frontier is for Mexicans because of the trafficking of arms. And, when the subject does come up, the neighboring attorney general points out: “It’s not the same thing: the drugs are of illegal origin, the arms aren’t.” As if there was a majestic logic in considering that in comparison with the destructive power of a marijuana joint, an AK-47 is just a child’s toy.
Heads will rain down on Mexico.
On the return leg of our second trip to Berlin, we had a long, tedious stopover in Heathrow airport. We walked from one end of the terminal to the other. Mónica’s feet were badly swollen and the fetus Leonardo was kicking away in her belly, but sitting down would have been worse: we were too anxious to get home. In a bookstore, Mónica found a small section of popular science books. She bought two: Elephants on Acid by Alex Boese and Frank Ryan’s Virolution. Boese’s book (which we read together) is a quasi-Rabelaisian satire of science: it tells, by means of episodes written with virtuous ill intent, of some of the most bizarre, comical, cruel, and absurd scientific experiments ever conducted.
Ryan’s book contains harder science and pays homage to an old philosophical conceit: the human condition is a disease. Man is an abomination of nature. If I remember correctly, Lichtenberg summed up this conviction in one of his aphorisms. The twentieth century simply identified and popularized this point of view, exemplified by Agent Smith’s monologue in The Matrix.
“I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed, and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is …? A virus. Human beings are a disease. A cancer.”
The difference between the view of the Zombie in the software and Ryan’s text is that the latter is based on something more than a moralistoid metaphor:
When, in 2001, the human genome was sequenced for the first time, we were confronted by several surprises. One was the sheer lack of genes: where we had anticipated perhaps 100,000 there were actually as few as 20,000. A bigger surprise came from analysis of the genetic sequences, which revealed that these genes made up a mere 1.5 per cent of the genome. This is dwarfed by DNA deriving from viruses, which amounts to roughly 9 per cent. On top of that, huge chunks of the genome are made up of mysterious virus-like entities called retrotransposons, pieces of selfish DNA that appear to serve no function other than to make copies of themselves. These account for no less than 34 per cent of our genome. All in all, the virus-like components of the human genome amount to almost half of our DNA.
It’s called “symbiogenesis” and is, so far, an audacious footnote to Charles Darwin’s theory of the evolution of the species. The implicit notion is that retroviruses (AIDS, for example) and certain forms of cancer or leukemia are, rather than an Evil, simple evolutionary processes; not human death, but viral life: adaptation of the fittest. Nothing is going to stop them. We aren’t going to bequeath the planet to our machines, but to the microscopic undead that live writing the apocalypse of our genetic code. My mother was never my mother. My mother is a walking virus.
Mónica has a brother and a sister: Diego and Paulina. Diego is an architect and Pau a lawyer. Diego is married to Orli, who does market research for an advertising agency. Pau is married to César, a financier who plays soccer and goes to wine tastings in his free time. Diego and Orli have two children: Gal and Yan. Pau and César have one daughter: Regina. I’ve only met Joaquín, my father-in-law, four or five times. By contrast, with my mother-in-law, Lourdes, I’ve been able to form a visceral relationship: a love that goes beyond etiquette. They all live in Mexico City. From time to time we organize trips to the beach together, or they come to spend Christmas with us in Saltillo.
That’s weird: carving the turkey, whacking the piñata, counting candles in the company of close strangers … It’s weird. Not just for me, but for anyone. There’s no way to be human, sufficiently human, without at the same time feeling an urge something like that of the sea cucumber: the desire to escape by hurling your guts at your neighbor. If we manage to prevent this from happening in family situations, it is due to an impulse more radical than fear: love. Fear acts like a mammal. Love, on the other hand, acts like a virus: it injects itself into something; it reproduces without thought; it egotistically takes possession of its host, without consideration for the species, taxonomy, or health; it is symbiotic. Love is a powerful virus.
Leonardo was born on September 25, 2009: two weeks after my mamá’s death. They only just missed meeting. It makes me shudder a little to think of how chance placed these two notches on my life. A touch of superstition must have filtered into my DNA after so many centuries of ritual.
He didn’t want to come out. We had to send in a squadron of doctors to fetch him. We spent over twelve hours walking the hospital corridors, with Mónica hooked up to a large bottle of oxytocin, before the task of giving birth began. And even then, zilch. He had to be removed by caesarean.
He’s a fair-skinned, rosy-cheeked child with light-brown hair and his mother’s deep-blue eyes. When I’m holding him in my arms, and she isn’t there, I get edgy: in my autoracist fantasy, I imagine all the well-bred people who must be looking at me suspiciously, thinking I’ve stolen him. If she’d seen him, Mamá would have thought I’d followed her precept of “improving the species” down to the last detail.
When they first put him in my arms, I clearly heard the most depraved layer of my bestial mantle rip. It was something like (multiplied by ten thousand, by a hundred thousand, by a million) the time when, swimming in a subterranean river, almost running out of air, I made an extra push to dive down to touch the veil of warm, turbulent water flowing very slowly in the opposite direction, at the bottom of a cave.
For years I wondered which of us was the ghost: my father or me. He was also the victim of a civil-register practical joke. As the child of unmarried parents, he was given the two surnames of my grandmother Thelma. His name was Gilberto Herbert Gutiérrez. A short time after my birth, he met his progenitor. As my grandfather (I’ve never known his first name) agreed to recognize him, my father then began to be called Gilberto Membreño Herbert.
When I was twelve, I said to Marisela:
“It’s like my father’s got two faces.”
She explained that the bearded man who used to buy me toys when I was a baby wasn’t my father, but Saíd’s. We hadn’t seen Gilberto Membreño since I was four. The reason for this was that he loved me violently: every time we were together, he tried to kidnap me. He wanted to change my surname. He thought a prostitute was incapable of being a good mother to me. Once, desperate to separate me
from her, he smashed her into the dashboard of an automobile. Mamá and I jumped out and ran. From the sidewalk, I said to him, “When I grow up I’m gonna get you, motherfucker.”
I next saw him when I was fifteen. He paid for a trip to the beach for me and Adrián, my best friend. We met up in Puerto Vallarta. I hadn’t read the Odyssey yet, but I’d just finished Pedro Páramo. The voice of Juan Preciado’s mother echoed in my head:
“Don’t ask him for anything. Demand what’s ours. What he should have given me but never did … The way he abandoned us, my boy, make him pay for that.”
It was a disaster. He had to work ten hours a day (as the manager of the hotel we stayed in) and was dating a dumb gringa whose ditsiness ruined any attempt at melodrama. I couldn’t get over the shock of seeing that his face was different from the father of my childhood memories. And then, worst of all, there were the Guadalajara girls: Adrián and I would have given anything to lose our virginity in the arms of one of those convent school bikinied babes.
The next time I saw him was eleven years later, when he asked me to come to my grandmother Thelma’s house in Atlixco, Puebla State. He wanted to introduce me to Teto, my younger half brother. I was twenty-six and I think Teto was eighteen. We hit it off immediately; I guess we still had some aftertaste of that elemental bond Rousseau talks about. Gilberto Membreño was happy to have a drink in the company of his two male children for the first time. That was when I became aware of the extent of his alcohol dependence: he religiously drank a whole bottle of whiskey or tequila a day. From time to time, he went on the wagon. To achieve this, he had to spend several hours hooked up to a bottle of saline solution.
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