“Christ, belovèd body!”
“Brides of the Lord, Farnesia, we are the brides of the Lord!”
“Husband!”
“You are a virgin, but I am not!”
“Isabella our sister was happy to give birth!”
“Surrounded by respect!”
“We give birth in secret!”
“Filled with shame!”
“How old is the boy today?”
“The same age as he is!”
“Oh, my Lord! My holy bridegroom!”
My father walked away in shock and could not sleep, either that night or any subsequent night he spent under the Fagoaga sisters’ roof. At the age of fourteen, he felt urgent sexual desires, which he satisfied standing before a print of the Virgin offering her breast to the Infant Jesus. He repeated these exercises twice a week and was surprised to see that whenever he did it a sudden ray of light would illuminate his room, as if the Virgin were sending him flashes of gratitude for his sacrifice.
“A few months later, Uncle Homero walked into the Calle Durango house with all his insolent overbearing, called Servilia an ‘obscene trollop,’ and stood me next to her in the grand salon of the sisters’ house, with both of them present, and accused me and the maid of making love in secret. Servilia wept and swore it wasn’t so, while Capitolina and Farnesia shouted out their denunciations of the two of us and Don Homero accused me of lowering myself with the servants, and the three of them accused the maid of thinking she was their equal, now she’s gone beyond her station, the maids always hate us, they always would like to be and to have what we are and it’s a miracle they don’t murder us in our beds.
“Servilia was fired, Uncle H. made me take down my trousers, and after caressing my buttocks he spanked me with one of Aunt Capitolina’s shoes, informing me that he would discount from my allowance the broken glass and other damage I’d caused.
“All this seemed tolerable and even amusing since it put my Christian faith to the test and forced me to think: how can I go on being Catholic after living with the Fagoagas? I have to have faith!”
“What an incorrigible romantic you are! You have to have faith!”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you rationalize everything.”
“To the contrary, I am merely repeating the oldest article of faith. It’s true because it’s absurd.
“But I was dying of curiosity. Every night I spied through my aunts’ keyhole, hoping that just once they would forget to block it up.”
“And what happened?”
“They shouted, as I told you, we give birth in secret, the lost child, the same age as Angelito, the lost child. One night they forgot the handkerchief.”
The keyhole was like the eye of God. A pyramid of air carved in the door. A triangle anxious to tell a story. Just the way it is in one of those unexpected openings in old-fashioned fairy tales: the kitchen opens onto the sea, onto the mountain, onto the bedroom. It smelled strongly of cloves. He imagined the bleeding, embroidered handkerchief with silver borders.
“Did they purposely not put it in, or did they really forget?”
My father wished he hadn’t seen what he saw that night through the keyhole in the room illuminated only by candlelight.
“What happened, for God’s sake! Don’t turn this into a suspense story!”
He wished he hadn’t seen what he saw, but he couldn’t tell it to anyone.
“Not even me?”
“Not to you or anyone else.”
“You say you were consumed by curiosity.”
“Just imagine.”
Inebriated by the smell of cloves, blinded by the fantastic theology of the candles burning down, saying I am afraid of myself, he ran out of the house on Avenida Durango and went to live with his grandparents Rigoberto Palomar and Susana Rentería in the house on Calle Génova, but he never told them what he’d seen. He swore it: he would die without saying a word, it was the proof that he was now a man; he closed his eyes and left his mouth open: a fly landed on the tip of his tongue; he spit, he sneezed.
4. “Don’t go yet, Mommy
“Don’t go yet, Mommy, I want to know how you and Daddy met, that way I’ll know everything about the holy family.”
“Sorry, sweetie, but we’re only in January and all that happened in April; you’ll have to wait until the right month rolls around.”
“The cruellest month.”
“Who said that?”
“T. S. Shandy, native of San Luis.”
“San Luis Potosí?”
“No, San Luis Misurí: T. S. Elote. Fix your genetic information circuits, son, or we’re never going to understand each other. Which leads me directly to the finish of the tale of the wellspring of all confusion in this story and in the world: your uncle, Homero Fagoaga, who baptized you from the air at the instant you were conceived.”
“Shit!”
The intrigues against Uncle Homero began one October day more than six years ago, and he didn’t know it, said my father, and he, the most interested party, was completely unaware and told that to my mother when they both walked into the Pacific Ocean to wash off the shit which had rained down on them that midday of my conception, when I had just been admitted into the supreme hostel, bombarded by voices and memories, places and times, names and songs, foods and fucks, memory and oblivion, I who had just abandoned my metaphysical condition, being El Niño Child, to acquire my name, I CHRISTOPHER, but in any case, even though I had my own name, I had to begin as El Niño, look ye well your mercies, if I was going to win the Contest of the Quincentennial of the Discovery of America on the next 12th of October 1992. They said, if it’s a girl we’re dead ducks, so we ditch her straightaway because we’re not entered in the Contest for Coatlicue or Malinche or Guadalupe or Sor Juana or Adelita, who are our national heroines, whose virtues are now for the glory and benefit of the nation incarnate in Our Lady Mamadoc. No way, we’re in the Christopher Contest.
COLON CRISTOBAL
CRISTOFORO
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
COLOMBO
COLOMB CHRISTOPHE
the same in all languages, see, baby? Christ-bearer and Dove, which is to say, the two persons missing from the Trinity, the Son and the Holy Spirit, our Discoverer, the saint who got his footsies wet crossing the seas and the dove that arrived with a little branch in his beak to announce the nearness of the New Land and the one who broke an egg to invent us, but all this history and all this nomenclature depend, as you all can see, on something over which neither Angel nor Angeles, my parents, has any control, that is, that the data in my father’s spermatozoid and my mother’s reproductive cells divide, separate, give up half of themselves, accept this fatal sacrifice all in order to form a new unity made of two retained halves (but also of the two lost halves) in which I will never be identical to my father or my mother even though all my genes come from them, but for me, only for me, for no one else but me, they have combined in an unrepeatable fashion which shall determine my sex: this unique I Christopher and what they call GENES:
“Hey, the genes are to blame for everything,” said Uncle Fernando Benítez.
“Right,” agreed Uncle Homero Fagoaga, “the genius is to blame for everything. Hegel is to blame.”
Thus did Uncle Fernando, tired of his in-law’s feigning deafness when it suited him and always confusing him in order to wriggle out of the moral definitions proposed by the robust liberalism of the elder uncle, decide to stop speaking to Homero and instead organize the band of Four Fuckups, who at that time, says my father, must have been between fifteen and eighteen years old. All this in order to screw Uncle Homero, dog him day and night, never give him a moment’s peace, follow him through the streets of Makesicko City from dawn till dusk, from door to door, from his penthouse on Mel O’Field Road to his office on Frank Wood Avenue, as if they were hunting him down, don’t cut any corners, boys, my abused lads, set traps and snares for him, hunt him down.