“Ah, dearly beloved niece and nephew, don’t gape at me in such an astonished fashion.” Don Homero laughed musically. “Rather, you should repeat as the sublime poet Don Luis de Góngora said in disquieted contemplation of these Fabio, oh grief, you see before you, fields of solitude, faded hills were once famous Cempoala, or as his worthy successor, the poet Don Octavio Paz, in the same place but three centuries later: Only the fat academic is immortal! Here I am, and as your favorite poet might say (Homero said, wagging his censorious sausage finger), you seek Acapulco in Oaxaca, oh pilgrim! and Acapulco in Oaxaca you do not find because Acapulco turns out to be in Acapulco, and, oh Quevedo, grandfather of terrorist dynamiters, only the ephemeral remains and lasts! Which is to say, niece and nephew, October 12 is coming and with it the Quincentennial of our discovery, or as the Indians of Guanahaní said when they saw the caravels approach, Hurray, hurray, we’ve been discovered! But I, modest man that I am, only desire that the child of our blood, destined to win, if God wills it, the national contest of the little Christophers, come into this world with comforts and auguries worthy of his high destiny, for which I place at your and your comrades’ disposal my humble carriage—and inside the limousine my parents saw with horror Egg seated between Homero’s little sisters Capitolina and Farnesia, they full of smiles, kind, of course, wearing summery flowered dresses and wide-brimmed straw hats with ribbons, Scarlett O’Horror style, beckoning with maternal solicitude to my mother (with their hands) and to my father (with their eyes), and Egg with a gesture that said there’s no way out! shrugging his shoulders and Baby Ba is not there, she is no longer there, SHE IS NO LONGER THERE! I shout from my solar center invisible but no one pays me any mind—in order to travel to Acapulco and await the blessed event in my house, whose rustic comforts you will have to excuse (as my singular friend Don Enrique Larreta said, sipping at the straw in his hierba mate in a smoky little ranch near Paysandú) but whose austere virtues you know only too well.
And since he detected that my parents were somewhat hesitant he imperiously and impatiently tapped them with his walking stick lightly, on the shoulders (the very shoulders my father had been kissing only a few minutes earlier), on the knuckles (the very hands in which my mother had held the water she had offered to my father only a few minutes earlier) (and this gentle rapping reminded my father of the sado-erotic spankings that his uncle had given him with a lady’s shoe when he was a boy), and said come along now, my patience is limited as is my time, my little sisters here, Capitolina and Farnesia, certified virgins both, will gladly play the part of midwife: holy little hands! Acapulco is being reconstructed slowly but surely, under new and more propitious patronage than that of that deplorable petty political boss Ulises López, and it is important for our future (which is also that of your baby, beloved niece and nephew!) that the little Christopher come into the world there, that Acapulco be the site of the Grand Celebration of the Quincentennial, and that our face, which received the Illustrious Navigator, who was coming from his East which was our West, search another East that was still farther off. Let us now turn toward the true, classical Orient, the Pacific, which in reality is our nearest Occident, as we, by God, are their true Orient! But, in a word, I don’t know what I’m saying, except this: that the child be born on October 12 in the port of Acapulco, which faces the new constellation of the Pacific. Let’s declare our faith in the future at this opportune moment, upward and onward, Tomasito, as Our Candidate exclaimed as he raised on high our PRIstine banners in the Far-Off Campaign of 1970, because tonight we must sleep in Pichilinque, on the eve of October 12, and go, all of us, to ask a blessing and to give thanks in the Cathedral of Acapulco.
My parents took their place on the car’s jump seats, staring at the smiling faces of Capitolina and Farnesia as well as the ovoid face of our astonished buddy while Don Homero assumed his place in front next to the chauffeur Tomasito.
“How easy it is to see that our brother is of the same blood as we”—Farnesia sighed—“just as we call all our maids Servilia, he calls all his drivers Tomasito…”
“Enough of these vagaries, Farnesita,” Capitolina interrupted her. “Better make the Sign of the Cross quickly because this is indeed a cardinal sin, being out of our house two days in a row, and traipsing around these mountains, filled with who knows what dangers, and ending up as midwives in Acapulco, that capital of vice, the Babylon of the Pacific coast…”
“Oh, Capitita, they were right in the convent, no doubt about it, and in the first place…”
My father Angel brutally dropped the silver bracelet with the initials FF and FB separated by a heart he’d saved from the Veracruz jungle into Farnesia’s lap.
Miss Farnesia Fagoaga’s eyes almost jumped out of her head; she trembled and then wept with her head hung low. Capitolina bit her lip and hugged her, little sister, little sister … My mother raised her thaumaturgical eyes and looked at my father. I know what she thought:
Angel Palomar, you finally learned to use your violence to humanize your fellow man.
Girls were strolling around the plaza hand in hand, with a resignation overflowing with rage. Night fell suddenly on that city of greens and blacks and golds, which is eternally sculpting itself.
2. I Love You Not As a Myth
(The three of us alone back in Acapulco: She, I, He.)
I searched for Agueda and I did not find her.
I searched for the Sweet Fatherland and I did not find it.
I found Angeles, your mother.
I found her in the same way I lost Agueda.
“Let’s never hurt each other. We’re all here together.”
And when you met him, Mom, when you found out who he really was, when you followed him to Acapulco, to Oaxaca, to Mamadoc’s contest in Mexico City, when you played the passive part in his adventure, the destruction of Aca, Uncle Homero’s campaign, the encounter with Matamoros Moreno, the return to Maksicko City, the search for the city in the city, the Boulevard, the conch-shaped chariot, the contest offices, the … When you finished up living all of it, then what, Mom, what remained of your first impression or your first illusion, what did you say to yourself, Mom?
This is what I said to myself, Christopher. From the moment I met your father I never again doubted: I have a body, my son, look touch me, I have two breasts bursting with milk, I have hard, heavy buttocks, touch them, son, caress my neck, son, feel how it pulses my waist exists, it’s flesh and movement and heat, touch my navel, son, caress my sex and hold your little hand over the hot lock of the uterus through which you will leave: go ahead, son, I’m your mother, it’s your last chance to be inside your mother, look upward, from your position, now that you’re about to be born, tell me what you see, tell me, please.
Who are we? Who are you, Mom? Angeles? Agueda?
Both of them, son, both. I learned to be both.
How many of us are there, Mom?
Just three, son, the three of us, reconciled, with fewer illusions but with infinitely more tenderness.
Where are we, Mom?
Back in Acapulco, son, giving thanks because you are going to be born.
When, Mom, when?
Right now, son, between Sunday, October 11 (we are on the beach), and Monday, October 12 (we are in Acapulco), 1992.
Who is with us, Mom?
Our friend Egg, the Orphan Huerta, and Tomasito, the second Tomasito, the chauffeur who drove us from Oaxaca and who turned Uncle Homero over to Uncle Fernando, who was waiting for us in the Chilpancingo airport, where that day they were holding the funerary ceremonies for a local favorite son, Don Ulises López, and his family, who etc. etc., loading Don Homero forcibly into the broken-down two-motor plane of the Institute for Indian Studies with Don Fernando and heading for new horizons while Tomasito took charge of the Shogun and headed for Acapulco.
And the little sisters?
An albino trucker picked them up at the Chilpancingo exit. He said he would bring them to Mexico City. He told them to
sit in the rear, where they’d be much cooler.
And us?
Mom, I see a lamp, a burning light above my head, here inside your stomach, a light bathes me and says: Thanks to me you know everything, everything, everything, Chris,
Christopher
Christopher Critic
Christicritic
Christopher Crisis
Christopher Crime
Christopher Incriminated
Chri Chri Christopher
Mother! that light has been there for how long, from when you conceived me, above my little head, and I never saw it until now, Mother, hurry up, don’t let that light go out yet, give me a few minutes more of that wisdom, don’t take it away from me yet, how it shines, how it shines, how right you were to teach me everything here inside, how right it was for me to learn everything here inside, a burning fire above my little head, that’s the origin of the light, a fire that shines and that is consumed inside your plexus and that illuminates my little head, telling me also, Mother:
“Let’s never hurt each other. We’re all here together.”
I HEAR WHAT IS GONE, WHAT I STILL DO NOT TOUCH
We are facing the sea, at Revolcadero beach, facing the Pacific Ocean. There are twelve dead dolphins on the beach: a perfect dozen dolphins murdered by the contamination in the bay and the insane swirling of El Niño sent from Peru.
Twelve white dolphins implacably turning purple as if they were losing their innocence, which was identical to their beauty: their tender eyes, marine brothers of paschal sweetness; their smooth bodies, changing color; and their open jaws: naïve sharks. At our feet.
The Oriental boy turns his back on the setting sun. He has taken off his chauffeur’s cap, revealing a youthful head and straight hair, he wears a black uniform that gives him an air somewhat like that of an admiral in the Japanese Navy on the eve of Pearl Harbor and he tenderly takes the hand of Orphan Huerta, naked at his side, both of them looking at my father and mother (and me inside her belly!) and at Egg barefoot with his trousers rolled up and his shirt open, revealing his hairless, almost feminine breasts, Egg does not look at us nor does he look at the couple made up of the boy dressed in black and the naked Orphan: Egg looks toward the ocean, where one day the other Tomasito sailed, dead. He thinks perhaps about the symmetry of the speared destinies: the first Tomasito in the sea Grandfather Rigoberto in the mountains, and Hipi Toltec incinerated in the upland, and the bombs of Reverend Payne in the Gulf: the end of the world that came to die there, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, cradle and prison, mother and stepmother of the world for five centuries: now they do not look toward the Gulf, the Antilles, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean: now they look toward the Pacific, and the Oriental boy takes the hand of his brother the Orphan Huerta, my brother, my brother he calls him again and again, I could not come for you until the right moment, I knew that my brother had to carry out his destiny and that his destiny was inseparable from that of all of you and your child: you had to reunite, you and your child, who were separated, so that all of us could be together on this beach and so that I could reveal myself to you:
“He’s my lost brother,” said Orphan Huerta with an astonished seriousness. “The lost boy I told you about … He’s come back for me …
And for you, said the Oriental boy, whom it was difficult to imagine, as my parents were trying to do, in a nameless slum, a lost city in the D.F. adipose, eddyfeet calcified running from the settlement of squatters burned down by Doña Lucha Plancarte de López: and it was he, vomited out by the subway on the corner of Calle Génova and Liverpool; nevertheless, it was from there he emerged and now it was this: and he gave his hand to his brother: and he extended his other hand to my parents (and to me), come with us, let’s go to Pacífica, the New World is no longer here, it’s always elsewhere, celebrate the Quincentennial by leaving behind your Old World of corruption, injustice, stupidity, egoism, arrogance, disdain, and hunger, we’ve come for you: here is our hand, the child will be born at midnight, as was written, quickly one day, very soon the ships will come for us and we will leave for Pacífica, Pacífica awaits you, there you are necessary, here you are superfluous, said Orphan Huerta’s brother, don’t hand your about-to-be-born son over to the unsalvageable horror of Mexico, save him, save yourselves: come to a better world of which a part of Mexico already belongs, the whole Pacific coast from Ixtapa north, the whole Pacific basin from California to Oregon, Canada and Alaska, all of China and Japan, the peninsulas, the archipelagos, the islands, Oceania: a basin of 108 million square miles, three billion inhabitants, half the world’s population, working together, three-fourths of the world’s commerce, almost all of the world’s advanced technology, the maximum conjunction of labor, technical know-how, and political will in human history, said the Lost Boy, found boy, intoning all this as if it were a psalm, using his hands with their long fingers, come with us to the New World of Pacífica, turn your backs on the tyrannical Atlantic which fascinated and dominated us for five centuries: end your foolish fallacious fascistic fascination with the Atlantic world, turn your backs on that past look to the future because it’s there we men and women are triumphing who simply said this to ourselves, only this: Behind the mask of glory is the face of death; let us renounce glory, force, domination, let us save the West from itself by teaching it once again to deny power to power, to stop admiring force, to open its arms to the enemy (yes, sweetie, look at him now), to choose life over death: We have enough to be moderately happy, in the name of what are we going to sacrifice the technical means we have now of achieving abundance, peace, intellectual creation, in the name of what? We asked ourselves that and we got no answer: we had it all in our hands, technology, resources, inventiveness, labor, we have what we need to invent a new world—the Orphan Huerta naked with his eyes closed turned away from the sea imitates with his hands the movements of his brother’s hands—beyond the old frontiers separating nations, classes, families, races, sexes: why don’t we use it? What’s stopping us? We decided that all this was possible in a new community, not a utopia, because in Pacífica we never lose sight of the fact that we will never escape destiny, that was the West’s madness, to think they had dominated destiny and that progress would eliminate tragedy (Nietzschevoice); that’s how tragedy became a crime, by taking advantage of the dream of consciousness, sentencing tragedy to take refuge like a hunted animal in a concentration camp and to appear anonymous and bloody in historical massacres, without finding its place in the community and saying to history: there are too many exceptions to progress, happiness is capable of attacking itself (fe-de-rico!), we have to admit what it denies us in order to know we are complete, our face is that of the other, we don’t know ourselves if we don’t know what we aren’t and we admit it: we are unique because we are alike: in Pacífica we helped both the rapid advance of technology and the tragic awareness of life by taking seriously what a novel, a poem, a film, a symphony, a sculpture says: we decided that the works of culture were as real in the world as a mountain or a transistor, that there is no real life without a still life to compensate for it in art, no living present with a dead past, no acceptable future that does not allow exceptions to progress, and no technological progress that does not incorporate the warnings of art:
* * *
My father and my mother saw the two brothers—one dressed as a Japanese chauffeur, the other nude, holding hands—begin to say all these things in unison, in a chorus whose setting was the crepuscular ocean: my parents saw what was behind the brothers: Angel, Angeles: my father and mother looked at each other and their eyes shone, they understood:
Others give us their being.
When I complete you, Angeles.
I complete you, Angel.
They exchanged the gift of their perfectible existence the way the two brothers did and the four of them now sought (the five of them: I inside my mother’s womb; the six of them: Egg stops staring sadly toward the distant horizon and turns toward us, doubtful as to whether
he should join with the brothers or with us: he waits, a big buddy, he waits a bit, we’re coming, we’re understanding):
Come with us to Pacífica, we can’t force you, we merely suggest it, although we can tell you that in all this, friend Angel, friend Angeles, as yet unborn child Christopher, there is something definitive, something inexorable: friend Angel, in your house of bright colors in Tlalpan there are many portraits of men named Rutherford and Planck, Einstein and Pauli, Bohr and Broglie, Heisenberg, above all Heisenberg, your favorite, Angel, isn’t that right?
To observe all phenomena simultaneously is impossible: we must choose a time and place within the vast continuum which it is given us to imagine because it exists in reality: our slice of the global phenomenon is our limit but it is also our liberty: it is what we can affect, for better or for worse: what we can see, touch, it is only one face of reality: the position or the movement of something, one or another, but never both at the same time: that’s our limit, but it’s also our power:
We depend on the vision of others to complete our own vision: we are half eye, half mouth, half brain, half face; the other is I because it completes me:
The two brothers slowly touched each other’s face, each one with his eyes closed, each one speaking now in the sudden tropical night with modulated alternations, a surprising hymn:
Knowing this was understanding at the same time our grandeur and our servitude, our freedom and our dependence, and by knowing them, it was possible for us to attain what our understanding of limits would seem to have forbidden us: precisely because one only knew his position perfectly while the other only knew his movement perfectly. When the two united, each knew what the other didn’t know and they could, complete, be what neither was alone (the Pacific is a horizontal flame; the sky moves quickly to take possession of it, extinguish it: we do not see the light that is born elsewhere when here everything becomes darkness): in that way, we manage in Pacífica to conciliate destiny with technology, unite what we know spiritually with what we know technically and make a new life because we don’t control freedom but we do dominate technology: