But, Daddy, when did they make you?
* * *
(His parents conceived my father the night of October 2, 1968, as a response against death. At times they’d thought of not having children, of dedicating themselves totally to science. But the night of the student massacre at the Plaza de Tlateloco, they said that if at that instant they didn’t affirm the right to life so brutally trampled on by an arrogant, maddened, and blind power, there would never be any science in our country: they had seen the troops destroy entire laboratories in University City, steal typewriters, dismantle the work of four generations of scholars. As my grandparents made love they could not shut out the noise of sirens, ambulances, machine guns, and fires.
My father was born on July 14, 1969. Thus, his intrauterine life took place between two symbolic dates. In that fact he sees a good omen for my own conception: between Twelfth Night and Columbus Day. But my mother balances this abundance of symbols: she doesn’t even know when she was born, much less when she was conceived.)
But my grandparents, Dad, tell me about my grandparents.
I don’t know if what my parents, Diego and Isabella, invented in the basement of their house in Tlalpan (where I was born) was useful or not. In any case, whatever it was, it hurt no one, except, as it turned out, themselves. They believed in science with all the love of novelty and all the fury of liberal, emancipated Mexicans and rejected both inquisitorial shadows and the sanctimoniousness of the past. So their first invention was a device to expel superstition. Conceived on a domestic scale and as easy to use as a vacuum cleaner, this manual, photostatic device made it possible to transform a black cat into a white cat the instant the feline crossed your path.
The apparatus’s other accomplishments were, my boy, as follows: it reconstituted broken mirrors instantaneously by magnetizing the pieces. They used it to leap Friday the 13th gracefully and to close automatically the portable ladders under which it was possible to walk the streets (a supplemental movement deflected the paint cans that might, for that very reason, fall on one’s head). It even caused hats carelessly tossed on beds to float indefinitely in the air.
They even invented the salt-jumper, which, when someone spilled salt, caused it immediately to bounce over the left shoulder of the person who made the mess. But their most beautiful invention, without a doubt, was the one that created a delightful space in the sky and clouds above any umbrella opened inside a house. And the most controversial was the one that permitted any hostess to summon instantaneously a fourteenth guest when at the last moment she found herself with thirteen at table. My own parents never understood if that saving guest was a mere specter created by lasers or if the invention actually created a new guest of flesh and blood whose only vital function was to eat that one meal and disappear forever without leaving a trace, or if there existed an unfathomable complicity between the device and certain living — and hungry — persons who, on finding out about the dilemma of protocol and superstition, turned up to get a free meal, convoked by some message between computer and consumer which escaped the control or intention of my diligent parents.
The invention of the Fourteenth Guest led in its turn to two more inventions, one metaphysical, the other, alas! all too physical. My mother Isabella, no matter how modern and scientific she might be, especially because she was rebelling against her family, the Fagoagas, could never manage to free herself from an ancient female terror: whenever she saw a mouse, she would scream and jump up on a chair. Unhappily, she caused several accidents by jumping up on rickety stools and improvised platforms, breaking test tubes and occasionally ruining ongoing experiments. By the same token, there was no way to reconcile this attitude of hers with my parents’ declared purpose; namely, to transform superstition into science. The fact is that the basement of their house in Tlalpan was full of rodents; but so was the rest of the city, my father, Diego Palomar, pointed out, and if Diego and Isabella had enough money to invest in pieces, even slices of cheese to put in their mousetraps, what could the garbageman or the ragpicker put in theirs?
Moved by this scientific and humanitarian concern, which distanced them so greatly from my mother Isabella’s family, they proceeded to invent a mousetrap for the poor in which the owner would put, instead of a piece of real cheese, the photograph of a piece of cheese. The photograph was an integral part of the invention, which would be sold (or distributed) with the color photo of a magnificent piece of Roquefort cheese standing upright in the trap. Excited, your grandparents set about testing the device at home, as they always did. They left the trap in the basement one night and eagerly returned in the morning to see the results.
The trap had worked. The photograph of the cheese had disappeared. But in its place my grandparents found the photo of a mouse.
They didn’t know whether to treat this result as a success or a failure. In any case, they did not lose hope; instead, they derived the following corollary: if the representation of matter, its reproduction, is complemented by an opposite term, it must be possible to isolate this relationship within matter itself, seeking within each object in the universe the principle of antimatter, the potential twin of the object. To make the antimatter materialize at the instant matter disappears became the concentrated, obsessive avenue of your grandparents’ genius, Christopher.
They began by taking simple, organic objects — a bean, a piece of celery, a lettuce leaf, a jalapeño pepper — and submitting them to a kind of infinite race between Achilles and the turtle. By keeping each one of those objects connected to its vital source — the root that supplies nutrition — my parents tried to accelerate the process by which the bean, the lettuce, the pepper, and the celery were ingested, while at the same time they were replaced by the accelerated reproduction of other identical objects. From integrating the process of growth with the process of consumption there was only one revolutionary step: to introduce within each pepper, lettuce, bean, or celery a principle of reproduction that would be inherent in but separate from the object in question: the Achilles of consumption would be caught every time and more and more by the turtle of reproduction acting as an active principle of antimatter.