* * *
The distant sea, the entire sea, murmured my father, watching the ships from Pacífica sail away without them, the water revived with a puff of air printed on smoke.
* * *
A country of sad men and happy children.
* * *
A child is being born just as October 12, 1992, is born, on the beach at Acapulco. He comes into the world holding the hand of a little girl whose eyes are closed. The boy has his eyes wide open, as if his eyelids had never formed. He looks fixedly at the earth that awaits him. The boy swims toward the land, softly, carrying the girl with him. He emerges from the belly of his mother as if he were crossing the pacific sea, carrying the girl on his shoulders, saving her from death by water. The light went out; the fire over their heads went out. The boy comes out. From the sky a swift Angel descends, an Angel with a golden helmet and green spurs, a flaming sword in his hand, an Angel escaped from the Indo-Hispanic altars of opulent hunger, from need overcome by sleep, from the coupling of opposites: body and soul, wakefulness and death, living and sleeping, remembering and desiring, imagining: the happy boy who reaches the sad land carries all this on his lips, he bears the memory of death, white and extinguished, like the flame that went out in his mother’s belly: for a swift, marvelous instant, the boy being born knows that this light of memory, wisdom, and death was an Angel and that this other Angel who flies from the navel of heaven with the sword in his hand is the fraternal enemy of the first: he is the Baroque Angel, with a sword in his hand and quetzal wings, and a serpent doublet, and a golden helmet, the Angel strikes, strikes the lips of the boy being born on the beach: the burning and painful sword strikes his lips and the boy forgets, he forgets everything forgets everything, 
Notes
1 The fortunes of President Jesús María y José Paredes can be read about in the novel, The King of Mexico; or, If You Move You Won’t Come Out in the Photo.