The lady resolved my father’s dilemmas by sensually stretching her arm, wrapped in an atrocious blouse of violet crepe, and resting her sympathetic face on one of her wrists ablaze with jewels. “Don’t forget to come over at the usual time, now,” she said, withdrawing her hand just before Angel could touch it, and then proceeding to play peekaboo with her napkin.
Brunilda gave my father a look of double warning that he could read easily because she said everything with looks: “You’re not only ruined financially, but you publicly two-time me with this parrot who seems to have escaped from the Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
Angel got up with his bowl of soup in his hands and emptied all of it—checks, clippings, and catalogues—over Doña Luminosa Larios’s head. Brunilda got up impetuously, her mouth wide open.
“It’s a frame-up! This lady is making up a romance!”
“Don’t you dare follow me,” she said to Angel. “I’ve got lots of options. This one just died.”
For two weeks he didn’t see her. Of course, he was not deprived of female companionship, since there were lots of girls eager for pleasure, especially the pleasure of escaping from the plague of their families.
“I’ll tell you what’s goin’ on with this ’flation,” one of these bonbons summarized. “There’s no jobs and no megabucks, so we all gotta stay home, Angel baby, the power elite is takin’ it out on us women, man, ya’oughtta see, they’ve got us back in their Tyrone Power.”
“Who’s got the power?” asked my dad at the door, as always inventing useless passwords to protect his chaste and pure dwelling, knowing full well that pirating music and videotapes was the hottest business in town, especially because the city lacked both entertainment and contact with the outside world. Seeing old movies on videocassettes was the supreme form of entertainment in the Mexico of the nineties.
“Who’s got the power?”
“Mischa Auer,” answered a cinephilic teenybopper’s voice. There was nothing left to do but open the door and fall into the Felliniesque arms of María de Lourdes, María Cristina, Rosa María, María Concepción, Maricarmen, or María Engracia.”
“Who’s got the air?”
“Fred Astaire, baby.”
“Who’s got the marbles?”
“Greta Garbles.”
“Who set the table?”
“Esther Fernández.”
He didn’t open the door.
Brunilda didn’t know this new set of passwords, so she never got Behind the Green Door to Deep Trope. She telephoned, but the mythomaniacal yet astute Grandmother Susana happily sent Angel on a hypothetical one-way trip to Chile. Next came letters, some love letters, some despair letters, but all unanswered letters. Brunilda was torn apart by the anxieties of sex and vanity, emotions both linked and compulsive, to say nothing of her horrible suspicion about a future devoid of inheritance.
Because one fine morning Grandfather Rigoberto Palomar appeared in my father Angel’s coach house with a ream of documents, turned a blind eye to the naked piece of ass who squealed as she went to get dressed (later she complained to Angel that Grandpa had caressed her ass), and confirmed to him that Uncle Homero Fagoaga, as the documents stated it, had brought suit against his nephew Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, accusing him of being a spendthrift, irresponsible, and incapable of administering the estate of forty million gold pesos which, according to the last will and testament of his deceased parents, he was to have inherited on his twenty-second birthday—the new age for adulthood, according to the law, which Angel would reach on July 14, 1991.
Angel understood the shrug and the challenging expression on his grandfather’s face: one meant fatalism, the other meant freedom, a mixture appropriate to an old man as wise as this one, who was always saying to his grandson that even though he could help him—although now there was little he could do, true enough—Angel ought to use his imagination and his own resources.
“But you know so much, Grandfather.”
“No matter how much I know, I am not your age and I can’t sniff out everything you can. Your intuition is definitely better than my knowledge.”
Freedom is everything, everything, Angelillo, said the old man, handing him the documents. Even fatalism, he said, is a way of being free. Sometimes our will is not enough, see? if we don’t know that things can go wrong for no good reason. Then we aren’t free. We’re deluded. You can count on my support, but manage your affairs freely, with imagination, and without fear, Angelillo.
Angel had been going out with Brunilda for quite a while and preferred ending a relationship which had no more to it than a pleasure which, if solid, was always the same. The additives Brunilda used to try to diversify normal sexuality—unilateral jealousy, inopportune encounters with other occasional lovers, letters from one boyfriend left for no good reason in the bed of another—wore Angel out: a romantic relationship was nothing if it wasn’t a means whereby one man could be set aside from all the rest. Brunilda imbued all her relationships with analogies in order to avoid the harmony of tedium; her diversions frustrated Angel’s romantic intentions.
Three weeks after the break with Brunilda, my father, on a whim, decided to go out on the town in disguise. He put on a toga and a Quevedesque mustache and walked unnoticed by anyone from Calle Génova to Río Mississippi, where traffic was heavier. There a boy of unusual whiteness (accentuated by his shiny pitch-black hair) was putting on a spectacular performance of bullfighting with cars and trucks; his agility momentarily disguised his thick, soft body and the fact that he resembled nothing so much as a pear.
Angel, for his part, watched with openmouthed admiration as the boy executed a twirl around a bloody-minded taxi, a left feint in front of an irate heavy truck driven by an albino in black glasses, a rapid-fire series of veronicas in the face of a ferocious squad of motorcyclists. But when the fat young man posed on his knees in the path of a Shogun limousine without license plates but with darkened windows—which accelerated down the wide street as soon as it saw the boy on his knees—Angel leapt to rescue the erstwhile torero and dragged him to safety.
“You nuts, man?” asked Angel.
“What about you, goin’ around dressed like the Masked Avenger!?” panted the pudgy lad.
“If it bothers you, I’ll take it off.”
“Who said you should take off?”
“No, not me, it. My disguise, I’ll take it off.”
My father pulled the cape off his shoulders and the huge glasses off his nose.
“Actually, I did all that to get your attention,” panted the fatty. “Brunilda told me to tell you that if you don’t call her this afternoon, tonight she’ll kill herself. Swear to God.”
They walked along Paseo de la Reforma to the flower market at the entrance to Chapultepec Park. Fatso explained that he was a composer; perhaps Angel knew his last hit, “Come Back, Captain Blood”?; well, he wrote that number along with the new group he was putting together, because the group he’d belonged to before, Immanuel Can’t, did not respect the individual personality of its artists, required everything to be group experience, collective expression; that was their categorical imperative, laughed the overweight conversationalist as he raised the dust on the Reforma sidewalks with his big feet. He was not in agreement, he said, with that philosophy, which was too sixties; he wanted to be conservative, romantic post-punk conservative, and his motto was REWARD YOURSELF!
“Reward yourself, that’s what I say. You never know what tomorrow may bring.”
They reached the flower market. As Angel placed an order, Fatty recited a few stanzas of his rockaztec hit:
Wontcha come back, Captain Blood?
You’re a great big iron stud,
And we all need what you’ve got
Adventure, honor: HOT!
You gave it to our dads:
Now what about the lads?
They liked each other and agreed to meet the next day for coffee. Fatty then told him that the funeral wreaths had begun to arrive at Br
unilda’s apartment in Polanco at four in the afternoon, one after another, purple and white, violets and tuberoses, some shaped like horseshoes, others plain wreaths, still others artistic diaphragms; suffocating, perfumed, permutated, indefatigable dead man’s flowers to celebrate her announced suicide, truckloads of flowers that invaded the apartment of the girl with immense eyes and clown mouth: she wept. She tore apart her sky-blue satin robe, she threw herself on the bed, she tried to keep any more wreaths from entering the house, she dramatically fainted off the bed and onto the floor, revealing one exuberant breast, all of which only convinced the messengers they should bring her more flowers than those Angel had ordered, so they tossed a whole cartload of flowers on her, only looking for a glimpse of that trembling antenna of Brunilda’s pleasures.
“When I left her, she was crying with rage. She said she’d get even by marrying your rival tomorrow. They’ll be on their honeymoon starting tomorrow night in the Hotel Party Palace and they’ll drink to your death.”
Now my dad Angel ordered a piñata delivered the next night to the bridal suite at the Party Palace. He added a note addressed to Brunilda’s brand-new husband: “At least you’ll have one thing to break, asshole.”
Along with the fat boy, Angel set about making the preparations for the coming-of-age party his grandparents had insisted on throwing for him in the very room where his deceased parents had been married, the traditional Clair-de-Lune Salon on Avenida Insurgentes, where thousands and thousands of sweet-sixteen-party piñatas had done service ever since the forties. The grandparents say that aside from the sentimental value of the place, Uncle Homero will be looking for evidence of Angel’s spendthrift ways (for example: his recent flower purchases at Chapultepec, his numerous girlfriends, his dinners in posh restaurants, his cassette business, or the rumors of his shacking up, according to Aunts Capitolina and Farnesia, in boardinghouses, and, Holy Mother! even in Oaxaca churches after hours), but the whole idea of celebrating his coming-of-age in the Clair-de-Lune is such a cheap idea, so I-wish-I-could-afford-better that it will give you a humble air, Grandson. No, you can’t hold it here in the house because anything private has to be exclusive, luxurious, and criminal.
7
Angel and his new buddy the fat boy (whose original name no one remembered or chose to remember) spent a nervous week preparing the July 14 party. Angel convinced him not to rejoin the snobs in the Immanuel Can’t group while at the same time admonishing him not to fall into the horrible vulgarity of those plebes the Babosos Boys. Instead, the two of them should use their imagination to create a new group that would synthesize those two extremes. Fatty said no problem, that he knew a fabulous guitarist/singer, a protégé of the eminent polymath Don Fernando Benítez, a guy named Orphan Huerta. In his urban rambles, he’d also come upon a grotesque named Hipi Toltec, who walked the broad avenues of the city, his long, greasy locks hanging down, his face thin and long-nosed, like a plumed coyote, wearing rags and a luxurious snakeskin belt that announced in French: “La serpent-à-plumes, c’est moi.”
“He thinks he’s always right in the middle of the conquest of Mexico, that he’s come back and that no one recognizes him; he’s a harmless nut, until he screws up the signifiers.”
“Well then, fat boy, we’ve got to keep his signifiers straight for him.”
“It’s worth the trouble. He’s the best drummer around. But you’ve got to convince him the drums are tom-toms. He sort of disintegrates as he plays. He drives the girls crazy.”
“What do you do, pudgy?”
He played the piano, the maracas, and the piccolo, and—he blushed—he had to include in the group a ten-year-old girl who played the flute, any problem with that?
“It’s your band,” said my dad Angel with a no-problem wave, imagining the girl in that privileged age, between three and thirteen.
“We’re all set, then,” said Fatty. “The four of us are friends and we even have a name, the Four Fuckups. All we needed was someone to get us moving, to provide moral support. Thanks, Angel.”
“You’re welcome. If you like, I could even be your business manager.”
On the afternoon of the birthday party, the fat boy arrived first at the Clair-de-Lune, so he could set things up, arrange the tables, put flowers in vases, clear a space for the musicians, and check out the marvelous metal egg put there by the constantly recharged imagination of the salon’s directors as a spectacular device for introducing the guest of honor: they raised the egg to the ceiling, which was decked out with Styrofoam stars and half-moons, and then, once all the guests were present, lowered the egg with a trumpet fanfare to announce the arrival of the new citizen, the sweet-sixteener, or the daring society debutante.
Fatty’s intention was to make sure things would go well and that my father Angel would be comfortable during the hour or so he’d have to spend in the ovoid prison where he’d wait for all the guests until the moment—11 p.m.—when the signal would be given, the egg would descend, and my dad would pop out of it in the bloom of health.
My dad’s pal was deeply involved in poking a needle through the ventilation holes to make sure nothing was blocking them (not an easy task in the half light of afternoon) when suddenly two hands, not powerful but having the advantage of surprise, pushed him into the improvised sarcophagus, locked him in, and sent him up to the ceiling. It didn’t take Fatty long to understand his situation: no one would get him out of there before eleven. But even that hope faded when through the ventilation holes he heard a pomaded voice say:
“Do not concern yourselves with this ovoid artifact, workers of the manual sort. My nephew has decided not to use such a worn-out symbol. I have convinced him to abandon this ceremony in exchange for a tasty and much to be preferred gift of a million pesos. To you, for acceding to my desires and withdrawing from this locale tonight, I grant a similar sum. Besides, as the Admiral of the Ocean Sea might have said to his mutinous crew: Why should I worry about one ovoid ball, when I need two?”
Then, when the workers left, dividing up those devalued pesos, the same voice shouted to Fatty, locked within the metal egg: “May you rot in there, you irresponsible spendthrift! A Fagoaga never loses, and what he does lose, he snatches back!”
This was followed by the kind of laugh a mad monk makes in his catacomb. Afterwards, hours and hours of silence in which Angel’s chum, feeling rather like one of Dickens’s poor heroes taking the place of his friend at the guillotine, decided to while away his time writing a novel in his head. He said to himself that the principal problem in such a project is knowing how to begin, so, since he’d thought of Dickens first, he began his mental novel with the words “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…” But he shook his head. He felt something was superfluous there and tossed those pages written in the ovoid darkness into the trash heap of his mind before taking up his imaginary pen and making a fresh start. “For a long time I used to go to bed late. Sometimes, my candle still burning, my eyes so firmly open that I had no time, not even for counting burros and cursing my insomnia…” No, no. He began again: “In a place in La Mancha which I remember perfectly, and which is located barely twelve miles to the east of Ciudad Real, in the foothills of the Valdeña Mountains and right on the bank of the Jubalón River…”
No, that wasn’t right either. He tried another beginning: “All unfortunate families resemble each other; happy families are such each in its own manner.” Bah! He thought about the stupid death of his own family or that of his buddy Angel Palomar and wondered if with that story he could at least start a novel. But he left it for another day, because the hours were going by and he was in total darkness. Happy families: “When his father brought him to see ice, Aureliano Buendía thought that one day he would be shot.” Unhappy families: “When he woke up that morning after a restless night, the insect foun
d he’d been transformed into Franz Kafka.”
In the darkness, he saw in his mind a black whiplash and thought that in reality it was the dark ghost of a perfect spermatozoon like the one that might give life to his own son or that of his friend Angel Palomar, or those of his buddies the Orphan Huerta, Hipi Toltec, and the Baby Ba, and directly below the Reader would be able to wonder, wherever he might be reading a book apocryphally entitled
Christopher Unborn
by
CARLOS FUENTES
years after the events narrated there took place, that is, as it always happens, the most rejected books end up being the most accepted books (mentally wrote the pudgy rock-and-roller), the most obscure books become the clearest, the most rebellious become the most docile, and that’s the way it goes, Reader. The most likely thing is that You are a poor adolescent girl in the Sacred Heart Secondary School busily copying down in your crabbed hand some classic passage from this novel which you have stuck between your missal and a joint and that perhaps you have opened to the page where in this instant you find Yourself and I find Myself and deprived of any other guide you begin to write My Novel as if it were Your Novel, copying not the one you are reading here, that is, a new novel that begins with these words:
Prologue: I Am Created
I am a person no one knows. In other words: I have just been created. She doesn’t know it. Neither does he. They still haven’t named me. No one knows my face. What will my sex be? I am a new being surrounded by a hundred million spermatozoa like this one:
imagination engendered me first, first language: it created the black, chromosomic, heraldic snake of ink and words that conceives everything, unique delectable repetition, unique riveting that never fatigues: I’ve known it for centuries, it’s always the same and always new, the serpent of spiral sperm, the commodius vicus of history, narrow gate of vicogenesis, vicarious civilization that God envies us: phallus and semen, conduct and product, my parents and I, serpent and egg