In the darkness, he saw in his mind a black whiplash and thought that in reality it was the dark ghost of a perfect spermatozoon like the one that might give life to his own son or that of his friend Angel Palomar, or those of his buddies the Orphan Huerta, Hipi Toltec, and the Baby Ba, and directly below the Reader would be able to wonder, wherever he might be reading a book apocryphally entitled
Christopher Unborn
by
CARLOS FUENTES
years after the events narrated there took place, that is, as it always happens, the most rejected books end up being the most accepted books (mentally wrote the pudgy rock-and-roller), the most obscure books become the clearest, the most rebellious become the most docile, and that’s the way it goes, Reader. The most likely thing is that You are a poor adolescent girl in the Sacred Heart Secondary School busily copying down in your crabbed hand some classic passage from this novel which you have stuck between your missal and a joint and that perhaps you have opened to the page where in this instant you find Yourself and I find Myself and deprived of any other guide you begin to write My Novel as if it were Your Novel, copying not the one you are reading here, that is, a new novel that begins with these words:
Prologue: I Am Created
I am a person no one knows. In other words: I have just been created. She doesn’t know it. Neither does he. They still haven’t named me. No one knows my face. What will my sex be? I am a new being surrounded by a hundred million spermatozoa like this one:
imagination engendered me first, first language: it created the black, chromosomic, heraldic snake of ink and words that conceives everything, unique delectable repetition, unique riveting that never fatigues: I’ve known it for centuries, it’s always the same and always new, the serpent of spiral sperm, the commodius vicus of history, narrow gate of vicogenesis, vicarious civilization that God envies us: phallus and semen, conduct and product, my parents and I, serpent and egg
rather a novel in which the possibilities of all the participants are comparable: the possibilities of the Author (who obviously has already finished the novel the Reader has in his hands) and those of the Reader (who obviously still doesn’t know the totality of this novel, barely its first months), as well as those of the Author-Reader, that is You when you finish reading the novel, possessor of a knowledge the potential Reader as yet does not have, the Reader who may one day read the novel or perhaps never read it, or who may know of it and intend to read it — just to distinguish the potential Reader from the kind who know it exists but who refuse to read it because they disdain the Author, are bored by him, and turn down his invitation to a ludic read, and also to distinguish the potential Reader from those completely ignorant of the existence of this book and who will never have this knowledge, those, possibly, who are already dead or as yet unborn, those who, should they be born, will never find out about, or find out about but not want to, or want to but be unable to read it; or, simply, the sinister novel, its earthly function accomplished, may forever be out of print, out of circulation or excluded from libraries because of its obscenity, its offenses against reigning good taste, or because of its political impossibility: in any case, Fatty, big feet and all, hanging in his unwanted aviary, consoles himself, the limit to what a person can read is not the same as the limit to what that person can say, nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last possibility is the possibility of literature, our pudgy friend smiled without witnesses, his superiority over the accidents and contingencies of life or over the strict propositions, so demanding of being tested, of science and philosophy: infinite possibility, common possibility of the Reader and the Reader, common possibility of Life and Death, Past and Present, of a Man and his unborn Son: to recognize themselves in the same book, symbolized by a spurt of black sperm, a spark of sinuous ink: life and opinions, peau de chagrin that consume themselves in desire and thus articulate the certainty that we all have to die our lives and live our deaths.
Thanks to this symbol our big-footed, shiny-maned Fatty could imagine everything, a son for his new friend Angel Palomar, the child’s mother a beautiful, slender, dark girl who walks through a park, hidden sometimes by a tree, at other times by a balloon, come closer in the flutter of her skirts and the rhythm of her waist: a girl with … with a halo!: Angel and Angeles, parents of a child yet to be born, what shall we name the child? what language will the child speak in Makesicko Dee Eff, what air will the child breathe here where the air is queer? will the child find his little chromosomatic brothers and with them reconstruct their X’s and Z’s, probing to the very root of their chain of genetic information? well, wrote Pudgy, in the same way, a novel seeks out its novels, the ascent and descent of its spermatozoon of black ink: like the child, the novel is no orphan, it did not spring from nothingness, it needs a tradition just as the child needs a family tree: no one exists without something, there is no creation without tradition, no descendence without ascendence. CHRISTOPHER UNBORN philadelphically seeks its novelistic brothers and sisters: it extends its paper arms to convoke and receive them, just as the recently conceived child misses its lost brothers and sisters (he even misses the girl he might have been, which I give him straightaway: the girl named Baby Ba) and convokes them all blindly with a movement of his hands. This is his genealogy:
Erasmus: Appearances are deceptive
Don Quijote: Windmills are giants
Tristram Shandy: Digressions are the sunshine of reading
Jacques Le Fataliste: Let’s talk about something else
Christopher Unborn: Okay, while the captive fat boy decided without thinking to triumph over boredom by means of these concerns, rewarding himself despite the situation, but resigned to writing an overly pessimistic novel whose only repetitive element would be “It was the worst of times. It was the worst of times. It was the worst of,” the salon was filling up with waiters, bartenders, guests, the guest of honor — my father because he was Angel Palomar y Fagoaga happily twenty-one years of age, and his grandparents (my greats in that case) Don Rigoberto Palomar and Doña Susana Rentería, the members of the new band, still incomplete but which, nevertheless (the prisoner in the iron egg felt almost as a posthumous homage), played and sang the hit song he’d composed: “Come Back, Captain Blood”
From the masthead you wave to us
Sailing toward the sunset
Fatso listened, half suffocated, already with a taste in his mouth that said: Baby, you’re turning blue: half crazy inside the metal egg, now smelling himself, now smelling the exudates from the silver-plated copper: on the verge of shouting Help! Au Secours? Help! Aiuto! I Need Somebody! but, in the first place, no one would have heard him with all the noise of the party and, second, he was no crybaby; he was a tough little man who neither gave nor accepted explanations, just like his hero from the pirate movies:
Bye-bye, Captain Blood,