He knew of a Polynesian tribe for whom all deaths were murders. The shock of death did not violate our lives but rather our immortality.
They stayed there worshipping the little mountain of poop for an hour, breathing deeply, and then, in perfect discipline, the children first, followed by the women, then the young men, and finally the oldest (ninety-two altogether, counted my Uncle Fernando, the same number of people as years had been used up in the century), they all went to the mound, dropped their trousers or raised their skirts—if they had them; if not, they shit right through the holes in their garments—and gave their offering to nature, giving back to their absent gods their treasure. Thus they added to the height of that olfactory monument, the temple dedicated to the living senses of this tribe of sleepwalkers.
Night fell fatally, and the Indians, once again leaning on their plows, had to return to their domestic chores, eat hunkered down next to their dying fires, all in silence, alien to my uncle now as always, my uncle who for them had never been there, this man who traveled and wrote books invisibly, that’s how he felt it that afternoon on the dry plateau in the uplands: they never saw him or greeted him. The invisible author.
He approached them without touching them, one after another, afraid he would awaken them from an ancient dream (and some felt the nearness of his breath, they grunted, walked away, dropped a piece of blue tortilla, some drew together, embraced as if fearing the nearness of an implacable ending; one grabbed up a burning branch and began to beat the shoulders of the wind, to burn the eyes of the darkness). Up until then, my uncle, with his mannish humors, his breath, his distant cosmetics, did not approach any of them; no sooner did he do so than he disrupted everything. They smelled all the difference, they extinguished the hostile fires, unnecessary in any case for seeing things at this hour of the day, got into single file, hands on each other’s shoulders, as if they’d been practicing this rite (or defense) forever, each Indian with his hand on the shoulder of the one in front of him, forming a circle that would capture my uncle as if he were a wild animal. They smelled him. They knew how to use their sense of smell. Nothing was stronger than smell for them, nothing more venerable, nothing more certain as a fact of the world beyond the shadows. No odor was stronger than that of shit. Not even the smell of creole historian.
Noise displaced smell, the helicopter blades overwhelmed the olfactory presence of my uncle, even that of the scatological mound. No animal had ever dared to climb up here. Pumas or ocelots knew what awaited them here. Did anyone give better beatings than these people? On the other hand, today, twice, an eagle … Nothing was faster or stronger than the machine piloted by the man from the NII, who descended to the confusion of the tribe, opened the door—never ceasing to chew his gum—and told my uncle that he was sorry to have disobeyed him, but that he had had to inform his superiors that Professor Benítez intended to spend the night in the mountains with an unknown group of Indians, that the information reached President Paredes, and the President himself gave him the order to go back and get him. How had it gone? asked the pilot as his helicopter, which never again landed on the lands of that tribe, levitated.
In the air, flying toward Palenque, under the aegis of a special permit that allowed them to fly over and land in the Chiapas–Tabasco–Campeche Trusteeship, my Uncle Fernando felt afraid of himself, afraid of his historical curiosity: he had the anguishing feeling that he had interrupted something, perhaps a sacred cycle that sustained the life of that lost tribe on that mountain which was like an island on the moon; he feared a catastrophe. His own was sufficient. His own fear was enough for him.
The permit granted by the Trusteeship administered by the Five Sisters stipulated that the Mexican national Fernando Benítez could land in Chitacam territory for the purpose of interviewing the last Lacandon Indian, before, as the document put it, “it was too late.” He feared, as he flew over the mountains of Oaxaca, that today he had just precipitated the disappearance of the last ninety-two members of the tribe of eternal night.
Could it be, he wondered, staring at the inglorious sunset, that from now on each year there would be one Indian less in that tribe of hereditarily, willfully blind people who were born with the sense of sight but who had it devoured by the larvae of those flies which were their only company, all victims of their isolation? He could not find out; but from now on he would imagine it. An invisible author for an imaginary day.
Mexico—what remained of Mexico after the Partition—was dying without Mexicans—those locked within the confines of the emaciated Republic—ever getting to know each other. Without ever getting to know what was left of the fragmented fatherland.
The tribes separated by the canyon never shook hands. But one tribe could see the other, and one would never see its brothers.
Don Fernando Benítez was on the verge of vomiting out of the helicopter window, but a strange vacillation, one that secretly seemed to warn him against the horror of symmetry, calmed him.
“Do you believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe?” he asked the pilot.
“The what?” the pilot answered (the racket, the earphones).
“I say that only a miracle like another manifestation of the Virgin of Guadalupe can save Mexico.”
“No, we’re going to Palenque,” shouted the pilot. “Not to Mexico City … The Presi…”
Fernando Benítez closed his eyes and patted the shoulder of the young pilot.
Incredible! All solutions seem irrational except one: believing in the Virgin. Our only rationality!
Then something extraordinary occurred: afternoon renounced night and on both sides of the canyon there exploded in midair, as if they were trying to reach the helicopter, race with it, or damage it, bouquets of skyrockets, green and blue fireworks, hysterical, colorless lights, luminous sheets and then bunches of liquid silver and castles made of piercing air: a night full of red, acrid, and miraculous gunpowder: my Uncle Fernando, his eyes closed, did not see the night of the Mexican fiesta, that astonishing night and that astonishing fiesta, born of plundering and absence: fans of fire, towers of liquid metal, the wealth of poverty, rockets and castles that came out of who knows what invisible hiding place, out of who knows what savage squandering of money; harvests and carpentry, pottery, masks, looms and saddles: all of it set on fire here at the instant of the communication between the two shores, a communication he either could not or did not know how to accomplish, savings wiped out in a blast of powder; wealth existed only for that: to dazzle the eyes of the white, nostalgic village, for the glory of the sense of smell of the blind, ragged village: finally they had shaken hands, surrendered all their wealth to one instant of irreparable loss: the fiesta.
He opened his eyes, and the sun had still not set.
He looked outside the cabin and found eyes identical to his own. He shook his head; it was not a reflection. It was a bird. It was an eagle with the head of an owl, and a collar of rainbow-colored feathers, tied up like a chignon, as flowery as a ruff; the harpy eagle that was flying throughout the entire New World, from Paraguay to Mexico, celebrating all by itself the discovery of which the Indians were ignorant. Fernando Benítez saw those eyes and the dogged flight of the eagle, parallel to that of the helicopter: flying like two arrows, both of them together that afternoon in the Sierra Madre. In its powerful talons, the harpy eagle was carrying a living monkey, its shrieks drowned out by the noise of the motors.
2
There are two movements, my mother says her Platonic tome says: that of all things, which eternally revolve around themselves without changing place, and that of things that wander eternally, things that move, Angel my love, far from this secluded shore where I already shine one month after my conception in the immobile center of my mother, and I concentrate in myself the two movements of which they speak outside of me. They are desperate to understand what has happened between January and February, I who arrived in the impetuous gush of my father’s errancy, and I now feel that I am hanging on for all I’m w
orth to a wet, hot cave from which I never ever want to leave, Mommy, I beg of you, don’t say what you’re saying, let everything spin endlessly around you and me, both of us together, not errant, not displaced, not …
The two of them cuddle in Uncle Homero’s grand, uninhabited, and silent mansion on Peachy Tongue Beach, and each one agreed with the other, never again would so many significant occasions come together at one time, New Year’s Eve parties, the beginning of the year of the Quincentennial, the Literature Congress, Uncle Homero’s vacation, the vacation of the military and diplomatic high command in Washington—a break before masterminding the destabilization of the new enemy, Colombia—and Penny López’s vacation, eh? My mother winked and my father feigned ignorance, self-confidently adding Ada and Deng’s disco. It’s better to prepare things with a will, is what I say (said my mom), than to leave them to that Mexican, weeeelll, let’s see how it falls and if it does happen, good thing (she said, interpreting my father’s will). She decided to contradict him only in order to maintain a modicum of independence within her willing acceptance of her tight union with my father. Which is why she said:
“I want to enjoy the supreme availability. I don’t want to earn money, organize a trip, or even plan what we do in a single day. I’ll bet you someone will do it for me.”
My father laughed and asked himself if everything that had taken place in Aca a month ago had been merely gratuitous. We can always imagine what could have happened if everything had gone well, but we always had to be sure that chance would get an oar in now and again; that’s why she would like to understand better what she still doesn’t know and not to think that it was only a joke, but by the same token that it was not just an act of perfect will: not even a getting even, she says to him, not even an act of meting out justice, which someday may separate you from me, and deprive us of our love, my love.
Angel: “Why? I really wish jokes or gratuitous acts could be a way to get justice, why not, Angeles?”
Angeles: “Because the twentieth century is soon going to die on us, and I refuse, whatever the justifications, to equate justice with death, what about you?”
Angel: “All I know is that what we had to do here is either all done or should be all done.” My father spoke in muffled tones: he’d put his head between my mother’s legs, as if he were looking for me.
Angeles: “As Tomasito would say, till no see, no berieve.”
Angel: “Unfortunately, everybody in these parts thinks just the opposite. They say that if you want to believe you’re better off not seeing.” My father raises his head. “Why didn’t the Filipino carry out the final part of the plan?”
Angeles: “I have no idea. What was supposed to happen?”
Angel: “At 15:49, Hipi and the Orphan enter Uncle Homero’s house.”
Angeles: “You mean here, where we are right now the day after Candlemas, February 3, 1992.”
Angel: “It was a Tuesday. Tomasito opens the gate for them, knowing that at that time Uncle Homero is always in his sauna next to the pool.”
Angeles: “Then the guys from the band and Tomasito burst in on him, so that Uncle Homero realizes he’s been betrayed.”
Angel: “Homero shouts, ‘You Judas, I never should have confided my security to a scion of that damned colony named after my King Don Felipe, as the universal Argentine genius Don Manuel Mujica Lainez might have said!’”
Angeles: “And perhaps he remembered what Uncle Fernando said to him when Homero offered him a lot here twenty-four years ago: ‘And how do I defend it from guerrillas?’”
Angel: “Perhaps he did. Why not? But perhaps Tomasito had an attack of conscience.”
Angeles: “What do you mean? What are you getting at?”
Angel: “What I mean, Angelucha, is that after all, Tomasito owes his life to Uncle Homero.”
Angeles: “You knew that and you went ahead anyway?”
Angel: “How can there be risk if nothing’s left to chance? Uncle Homero, to prove his humanitarian, philanthropic, and liberal credentials, took in Tomasito when he was a boy, when UNICEF put him up for adoption after Marcos’s last massacre in Manila. Would you like to tell the rest? Please do.”
Angeles: “It was when Ferdinand and Imelda were desperately trying to wipe out the opposition. They couldn’t sleep because they were making up crueler and crueler repressions. Now you pick it up, silver tray. Up and at ’em, oh genius!”
Angel: “Then Lady Imelda goes bananas and announces to Ferdinand: ‘Last night I dreamed that fifteen years ago a boy was born who was going to plocraim himself King of the Luzons: you were Herod and I was Herodias and we went out to kill all the boys born yesterday fifteen years ago to rid ourselves of these redeemers, using the slogan “Better Deads Than Reds.”’ The Mindanao death squads went out to hit all fifteen-year-olds.”
Angeles: “And Tomasito was saved from that death thanks to Uncle Homero, who just happened to be in Manila … Are you kidding?”
Angel: “He just happened to be in Manila because he was funneling a few hundred million Mexican pesos through the Philippine stock market. The money he’d kept from the tax man he’d picked up from the sale of a subsidiary of the International Baby Foods Company that was supposed to bring foreign investment to Mexico and did just the opposite—but it still had to have a Mexican as the majority shareholder. That patriot just happened to be our trusty uncle, who, to be sure, is hard to imagine as a straw man, but he turned up one day with a check from the Mexican branch of INBAFOO, payable to the Philippine branch. The price paid for the Mexican subsidiary was minuscule, but no one in Mexico or the Philippines ever saw a centavo, not the public treasury, not the consumers, not even the brats who eat that shit, but, you guessed it, the Board of Directors and Preferred Stockholders of INBAFOO in the Republic of the Sun Belt, in the capital of the said republic, Dallas, did indeed see some centavos. How’m I doin’, babe?”
Angeles: “Super, Angel. Your uncle’s your major theme.”
Angel: “And that’s how Homero appropriated all that humanitarian publicity and ducked all the attacks on him for being a go-between, but the fact is that Tomasito hates him, too, but he must also love him, because if, on the one hand, Homero did save him from the Herodian fury of the Marcoses, on the other he knows that the kids who didn’t die in the massacre did die of gastric hemorrhages after eating the little bottles of slime distributed in the Philippines by the Mexican branch of the conglomerate.”
Angeles: “So when he heard Hipi and the Orphan knocking on the gate outside Homero’s house, Tomasito began to have doubts.”
Angel: “Just imagine that his fate could have been this one: having his head cut off by a machete in the pay of Imelda.”
Angeles: “And, instead of that, here he is living like a captive prince in a golden tropical cage, so how could his heart not start beating double-time and he not begin to have his doubts?”
Angel: “But it may be that Tomasito, paralyzed by doubts, mulling over his own salvation compared to the death of his little brothers, consumers of the baby food made by Homero, just went back to his room to let things run their own course, just as you say: the supreme availability, someone else will do it for him…”
Angeles: “Or maybe Tomasito, letting his gratitude get the better of his doubts, instead of admitting the Four Fuckups, cuts them off and then the Orphan Huerta gets mad and shoots Tomasito…”
Angel: “I’m telling you we’ve got to calm that boy down. Sometimes he goes too far.”
Angeles: “Aroused by the noise, Homero leaves the sauna naked, puts on his guayabera just when the Orphan was overcoming the resistance of the doubtful Tomasito, overcome this time by an aberrant fidelity…”
Angel: “Then Homero puts on the parachute, gives rapid orders to the man driving the motorboat, and escapes by flying, he passes over our heads, shits on us, and disappears into the thick air of Acapulco.”
Angeles: “If that’s so, then where is Tomasito?”
An
gel: “I don’t know. Where are the Orphan, Hipi, and Egg?”
Angeles: “And the Baby. Don’t ever forget the Baby. I don’t know where she is, either.”
In this and in other sparkling repartee, my mother and father spent the first month after my conception in Uncle Homero Fagoaga’s silent, abandoned house. That adipose Icarus left them, devoting himself to an avian life and, of course, adding his own small contribution to the epidemic in Cacapulco.
Angel and Angeles did not open the doors of the fort. No one, by the by, ever knocked. Tomasito decamped, leaving a full pantry; Uncle Homero had prepared his mansion, since 1968, for a prolonged guerrilla siege.
Thus it was that my father tried to transform the besieged house (in their imagination, of course, nothing beyond that) into a phalanstery = he said to my mother that without discipline they would not survive and that his own conservative revolutionary plans would be frustrated. Punctuality and discipline: my mother made no objection when, at seven o’clock in the morning, they prolonged the postures of their pleasure by going down on all fours and mopping down the tropical terraces of the mansion that belonged to the fugitive Don Homero.
This news was only lived by me and with pleasure during this long month. I communicate them to the readers. You should know that during the first week I floated freely in the secretions of the oviduct until I set up camp permanently in my mother’s uterine cavity. At that time, I, Christopher, was a cluster of well-organized cells, with defined functions, learning the classic lesson, innocent that I was, about the unity of my person—confirmed by the diversity of my functions. Well, if each and every one of the cells that emerged from the fertilized egg has the same genetic structure and therefore each and every one preserves, latent, what my hair color will be, the color of my eyes, not all give these factors equal importance: only the eye- and hair-pigmentation cells concern themselves with a function that is, nevertheless, inscribed in all the other cells.