“I’m quite certain.”
Six weeks have gone by since my conception; menstruation is more than four weeks late and I’m already floating in all my splendor — I’m fully half an inch long — convinced, deluded that I’m still in the ocean, giver of life and origin of the gods, with no more ties to terra firma than the umbilical cord and with no clouds on my horizon except the dark cloud that will be my circulatory system, still alien to my body, still distanced from, outside of, me, in the placenta, sucking blood and oxygen, filtering out waste; if this is my new ocean, it’s only a sea of blood that threatens to blind me:
My skin is thin and transparent.
My spinal cord is phosphorescent.
These are the lights I use to fight the strange tide of blood that envelops me.
My body is arched forward. The umbilical cord is thicker than my body. My arms are longer than my legs: I would really like to touch, caress, embrace; I don’t really want to run: Where would I go? What place could be better than this one? Have I learned of anything out there better than this place? After all, home is where you hang yourself …
I am my own sculptor: I am shaping myself from within with living, wet, malleable materials: what other artist has ever had available to him as perfect a design as the one possessed by my hammers and chisels: the cells move to the exact spot for building an arm: it’s the first time they’ve ever done it, never before and never again, do your mercies benz understand what I’m saying? I will never be repeated.
Nothing could be more dynamic than my fetal art, ladies and germs, just like that a foot appears, and at the same time five condensations on my hand that will be my bones and fingers: feet and hands detach from the trunk (but I don’t want to run away; I only want to touch); and my cheeks, my upper lip all join in the work: my nasal cavity sinks so it can take part in the development of my palate; my face begins to take shape; the cells on both sides of my trunk start moving in twelve horizontal currents to form my ribs; my future muscle cells emigrate between my ribs and under my chest, the subcutaneous tissue stretches backward and forward, the cells on the external layer of my little body begin to form my epidermis, my hair, sweat glands and sebaceous glands: do your mercies know of any combined action more perfect than this one, one that is more exact than the dancing little feet of the Rockettes, the southern flight of ducks from Canada in October, the perfect rainbow the butterflies form in the hidden valleys of Michoacán, the Wehrmacht goose-step, or the deadly aim of General Rodolfo Fierro: the precision of a parachute battalion, of a triple-bypass cardiac operation, of one of Le Nôtre’s gardens, or of an Egyptian pyramid?
My blood pulsates rapidly, it runs toward the forest of my nascent veins; a tunic falls over me, like the shroud over the city we saw from the air:
My eyes are about to close for the first time!
Can you understand this terror?
Do you even remember it?
Until now, weak and unformed, at least I had my eyes wide open, always wide open: now I feel as if had gone to sleep inside my white thin tunic, as if a weight against which I have no strength were covering my eyes little by little:
My time changes because I don’t know if from now on I will not, deprived though I am of sight, know anything about what’s going on outside, nor will I be able to connect my genetic chain with the simulacrum of vision: I’m going to accelerate a time I thought eternal, mine, malleable, as subject to my desire as are the fragments of information supplied by my genes: now my eyes close and I am afraid of losing time; I’m afraid of turning into a being who only bursts into different times without knowing with whom or with what he’ll meet whenever he makes one of his sudden appearances: I close my eyes, but I am preparing to substitute desiring for looking: I want to be recognized, known, please Mommy, swear you’ll recognize me, Daddy swear that you’re going to recognize me: don’t you see that I have no other weapon but desire, but that there is no desire that achieves that condition if it is not known and recognized by others and without knowing that you know that I am condemned to the unsavory condition of unknowing: I could have been conceived in Untario!
Without my desire reflected in yours, Pop and Mom, I shall succumb to the terror of the fantastic: I shall be afraid of myself until the end of time.
4. The Devil’s Wells
And I begged them: Please give time and tenderness to your little Christopher. Tell him everything that happened in the time between our arrival in the city and the third month of his gestation.
Which is to say, once we’d moved into the one-story, rainbow-hued house whose balcony faces the plaza and a hospital of the Porfirio Díaz period, near the symmetrical stairways of the Church of San Pedro Apóstol, the Campidoglio of underdevelopment, the Place Vendôme of the Parvenus, the Signoria of the Third World, our basic situation was this:
First, Uncle Homero Fagoaga, whose political instincts were infallible, decides to hide out in my parents’ house until he finds out what the official reaction is to the events surrounding the electoral riot in Igualistlahuaca; it’s likely he’ll be blamed for that outburst, which could be confused with either love or hate, depending, but in Mexican politics you’re better off not depending on depending — Don Homero pontificates, having seated himself, as if by divine right, at the head of the table during all three daily meals, with a view of the aforementioned hospital, wolfing down pastry after pastry — and should only skate on thick ice, like that old supporter of President Calles, Don Bernardino Gutiérrez, who wouldn’t make a move without finding out which way the wind was blowing. In other words, don’t take a step without having your sandals on, especially if you’re in scorpion country, and he fully intended to spend two months in retreat here, at least until the beginning of May, when the combined festivities of the Virgin Mary and the Martyrs of Chicago might just allow him to show himself in public with the assurance that the politicos would recognize his liberal merits, which would shine once more, while his conservative defects would be forgotten. Was there anyone in our political world who hadn’t at one time or another done the same thing?
When my incredulous and gaping father and mother stopped listening to him in order to eat a slice of coffee cake, they noticed that Uncle Homero, who never stopped talking for an instant, had devoured the mountain of powder cakes my mother had delicately arranged on a blue platter of Talavera ware. Now Don Homero was dunking the last bit in his hot chocolate and was asking my mother Angeles if she would be so kind as to make him another cup — but it had to be freshly ground chocolate, comme il faut, to give the Aztec nectar its aromatic foaminess. A chocolate stain occupied the place once reserved for Don Homero Fagoaga’s mustache, only now beginning to reappear.
My parents, malgré their recovered lovemaking, and despite as well their happy certitude that I was on the way and could compete in the national Little Christophers Contest, had a secret fissure in each of their souls, one they preferred not to reveal. It was no longer the Matamoros Moreno horror; I think that event actually drew them closer together. It was, rather, the terrible suspicion that in this country at this time and in this history everyone was being used. The Spanish tongue, lawyer Fagoaga admitted during the long meals in which he made his domestic appearances, did not possess expressions as well-wrought to indicate in laconic fashion a colossal joke as did that lapidary French possessive: