Benítez paid him no attention. He watched the scene with Homero from a window protected by wrought-iron bars: the Santa Claus music, the scattered cadavers, and Colonel Inclán walking around with his riding crop in his hand, okay, spread their legs, laughing, let’s see which ones shit themselves out of fear.
“Homero,” said Don Fernando, “take a good look at what you’ve never wanted to see in your life.”
A bulldozer or a match could end all this, murmured Don Fernando Benítez. The mountains of Mexico are bald, worn away by erosion. Topsoil has become as fleeting as life itself. For him, he said to Homero Fagoaga, trembling behind the bars over the little plaza of Huetámbaro, reality was animated by the past.
Does life become more resilient because of that? A woman wept in the same room from which Fernando and Homero watched the atrocious scene acted out by Colonel Nemesio Inclán and the executed peasants.
“Don’t cry,” Fernando said to the woman. “There’s nothing you can do. Tomorrow…”
“Life’s always been terrible here,” the sobbing woman said. “And besides, who’s going to fight against helicopters?”
How well Benítez knew it. Today’s weapons were no longer those of yesterday’s revolution. Could Zapata have withstood a barrage of white phosphorus or napalm? But how did Ho Chi Minh survive it? How did the Sandinistas manage to topple Somoza? Because their societies were much simpler, much more black-and-white, less complicated, and with fewer complicities than the Mexico of 1992? With what weapons was it possible to fight today without exposing everyone to a useless death? With what weapons, without playing the game of the cynics who control power? With what weapons, so one could say to oneself: I haven’t asked anyone to give more than what I am willing to give? I haven’t ordered anyone to go to his death by asking him to do what I would not be willing to do? I haven’t said to anyone: the only option is armed revolt, romantic suicide? To no one.
“… but, Fernando,” Homero Fagoaga was saying, since he had no reason to listen to the barely murmured thoughts of his relative, “what’s wrong with the kids joining up with Pacífica? Things are hopeless here, you can see that for yourself, if you brought me here to prove it to me, you were certainly successful, Fernando, you’ve scared me to death, don’t you think that as far as shocks are concerned, enough is enough? Listen, and even from the nationalistic point of view, Pacífica is our salvation, we refused to form a common market with the United States and Canada in the seventies, but now Japan and China dominate the United States and Canada. Pacífica is our ace in the hole; we’d be walking into commerce and technology through the front door, plus we wouldn’t owe a thing to the gringos!”
“First we’ve got to finish up what we began here,” Don Fernando Benítez said, through clenched teeth.
“Bah, here and everywhere else the main idea is to make money and get power, the rest is words, words, words,” said Don Homero Fagoaga bluntly, but the words froze on his rose-colored lips: “Fernando, Fernando, what are you doing?” Benítez aimed his rifle through the window bars, shot, and Colonel Nemesio Inclán fell down next to the peasants’ bodies: there was no surprise on his face because it already was a skull. Green slime poured out of his cheek instead of blood. His black glasses smashed against a bullet-riddled wall. The soldiers pointed at the small, three-story building. They surrounded it instantly. Benítez waited with his rifle at the ready. Homero shook like Hegelatine. The imperturbable loudspeakers blared out the bolero “You Have to Know How to Lose.” The music was drowned out by the roar of the helicopters.
4. Land!
Reader: all this is happening in my head, because now I think that the world outside has ceased to exist, and if something does live there, today only my memory or my imagination can bear witness to it. I could be wrong. Or worse: perhaps what I’m saying to myself can escape my own mind and be heard outside. What would happen then? would happen if the voice of an unborn child were heard outside before birth? What witchcraft would they accuse the mother of? Of what traffic with the Holy Spirit would they accuse the father? And me too, of what would (or won’t) I be accused of before I’m born, what would they call me?
Reader, that’s why I need such a web of complications, like the ones I’ve been weaving over the course of my nine months here enumerated. You know that I haven’t narrated anything alone, because you’ve been helping me ever since the first page. Your mediation is my health; just imagine my terror without you: me blind, veiled, enclosed, I would have spent my time going around in circles (vicious, vicos: tight little vicolini), asking myself:
“Where are the people who brought me here? I don’t see them!”
You know, Reader, that without you I would not have done what I want, which is to communicate to the living my nightmares and my dreams: by now they are your nightmares and your dreams. My ghosts accompany me; now I also share my nightmares with them: my genes (my gegels, my gegelatines?) that for each one of the six billion inhabitants of the planet, there are thirty ghosts who accompany him: thirty progenitors, physically disappeared, but alive and kicking, your mercies benz should know, in each one of the 100 billion individual genes that occupy each one of the cells of my imminent little body! and in each one of these cells is written ALL THE INFORMATION necessary to reconstruct every function and every structure in the body: READER, TRY TO UNDERSTAND WHY I CHRISTOPHER KNOW EVERYTHING AND AM AFRAID OF LOSING IT ALL: Ah, Reader, my pact with you is not disinterested — it goes without saying: I’m going to need you more than ever afterwards (will there be an afterwards…?), after I’m born, according to what people say and what they call what is going to happen, shit, it’s as if I were dead already!
Afterwards: when I need you to stretch out your hand to me so that I can recover everything I’m going to lose, I’m certain of it when I abandon my mother. Not yet. My mother is alive and I am inside her on the last day of my gestation, my mother is alive and is lighting the fire over my head and I on the point of being born: the dead dolphins on the Revolcadero beach and a desperate scream from my mother: and as if in response to her scream, the ships appear in the distance, shining on the crepuscular sea, and my mother falls on her knees in the hot sand, Egg and my father Angel run to help her, my God, what’s wrong? What shaking is this? Since when does my house, my pool, my moist, humid, warm cave tremble like this, beyond the boomboomboom rhythm of the rockaztec outside and my mother’s identical heart inside?
Soon, please, you must decide, says the Lost Boy blinded by the light of the ships (the galleon of China? the galleon of the Philippines? how they shine in the night of my death!), and my father looks toward the farthest point on the horizon: Pacífica, the New World of the New World, and in that instant in which I fumble in horror for a handhold in my communication with the world outside, everything that has taken place is passing through my head, and I think that at the same time the world outside has ceased to exist, and if something is going to remain alive of it one day, today only my memory or my imagination can attest to it. I may be wrong. Or worse: what I’m trying to say to myself may escape from my mind and be heard outside. What would happen then? I repeat this fear of mine: what would happen if my voice inside here were heard outside? Would they kill me and kill my mother in the process? Witch doctors, did I say? monsters? But my voice cannot be heard out there, simply because complicity with my father has been reestablished, and my father should think about unborn me, but I’m on the point of saying what we are both saying when the Lost Boy urges us to choose: are you going to stay here or are you coming to Pacífica? New World: eternal obligation to complete the world: New World!