* * *
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:
Come with us, said the two brothers, and my parents, turning to look at each other, marveled as, in the renewed Acapulco dusk, the memorious port of his childhood, the happy scale of his vacations, was reborn in my father’s eyes: my parents saw themselves splendid as they saw the tongues of fire on the horizon like a literal message from the ocean: the distance of the voices of the other side came closer in the presence of the magician who came from the sea, the Orphan Huerta’s brother: the Lost Boy now found them, he returned on the voyage opposite to that of the Europeans, not Columbus’s caravel but the China galleon, not Cortés’s brigantine but the Philippines galleon: the other half of our face, our blind eye, seeing once again: we have two horizons and a single face and the Lost Boy was saying: No one can catch up to us technologically, we’ve gone beyond the fifth generation of computers, what your parents wanted without knowing it, Angel, we’ve left behind the four serial, arithmetic generations of computers that simply added up one operation after another, in order to enter the generation of computers that process various currents of information simultaneously: Look — said the Orphan Huerta with a strange return to his habitually nasal voice — before, it was only possible to put one tortilla at a time on the fire, heat it, flip it, and toss it into the basket: now, see? we can heat up all the tortillas at the same time, all at once, flip them all over at once, and put them all in the basket at the same time
the multitrack mind of Mamma Mia
reading Plato getting my old man hot in Aca
the inconsumable taco of my Grandparents Palomar
the Curies of Tlalpan
antimatter: life not death
Federico Robles Chacón wants to dictate two letters at the same time
In Pacífica we’ve already won the technological race, and for that very reason we do not want power: we offer well-being: whoever dominates computers dominates the economy dominates the world: we don’t want to dominate but to share: come with us, Angel, Angeles, Christopher yet-to-be-born, leave the corruption and death of Mexico behind, leave the interminable misery and the ageless vices of your fatherland in order to save it someday, pulling it little by little, piece by piece, out of its corrupt stupidity and its historical madness: the two reunited brothers spoke in chorus, now our buddy as well, and with them my father and mother: and I on the point of being born.
3. Fatherland, unto You I Give the Key of Your Good Fortune
As they were crossing from Guerrero into Michoacán, a group of armed peasants demanding the restitution of their lands — stolen by a lumber company — were cornered in the hills: hungry, weak, they were hunted down and summarily shot in the town of Huetámbaro, under the naked flanks of the deforested mountain. Colonel Inclán, under orders after the night of the Ayatollah to restore order wherever and however necessary in the Mexican Republic, pronounced these peremptory words:
“Bury them without coffins. They were fighting for land, right? So give them land until they choke on it.”
The loudspeaker in the Huetámbaro plaza blared out “Jingle Bells,” drowning out the shots.
Homero Fagoaga shook with fear watching the peasants fall one after another because instead of shots all he could hear was “Jingle Bells,” as if Christmas had killed them.
“Look, you wretch, look straight in front of you,” said Benítez to Uncle Homero, digging the muzzle of his rifle into the rolls of fat hanging off Homero’s ribs. “Take a good look.”
“Fernando, I was having a good time in my Acapulco house, protecting my niece and nephew … right, our niece and nephew…”
“You were taking advantage of them to set up a new scam, Homero you con man, you know that the child will be born exactly at midnight tonight, October 11, and you want to have him in your power so you can walk into Pacífica carrying him in your arms: that’s what you want, you miserable tub…”
“So what’s wrong with that?” Don Homero got upset, then calmed down instantly when he felt the Mauser digging into his lard. “What’s wrong with that, I ask you?”—His voice now a whisper—“That’s why I went about having myself kidnapped by another unfaithful Filipino. I can be useful to our niece and nephew and to the baby, I have contacts in the Philippines, I know the…”