He said he wanted to have a son (me, zero years) with her because if I were conceived on Twelfth Night, with a bit of luck I’d come into the world on Columbus Day. My mother sat up as if she were on springs, covering her breasts with the university classic. A boy conceived on the beach January 6 might show up on time on October 12?
“And what if he’s born in September?”
“He’d win the Independence Day Contest, but it isn’t the same.”
“Of course not. Hey, where were we on the 15th of September last year?”
“Facing the palace balcony in the Zócalo, watching the first apparition of the apparition.”
“And October 12 last, where were we — bet you can’t remember.”
“Standing in front of the monument to Columbus on Reforma.”
“She was carried in a sedan chair through the streets to the Columbus monument in order to proclaim…”
“She never speaks. She only cries once a year.”
“You’re right.”
“And don’t talk about her in that tone of abject admiration. Instead, answer these three little questions right off the top of your head.”
“Shoot.”
“Here goes. First: what are we going to name the baby?”
“What is the matter with you, you stoned? Christopher!”
“And if it’s a girl?”
“Okay, okay. Isabella. The Chaotic.”
“Second question: what language will the baby speak?”
“Spanish, of course.”
“And all those new slangs, what about them? Spanglish and Angloñol, and the Anglatl invented by our buddies the Four Fuckups and…”
“And the language of our Chilean girlfriend Concha Toro, and the frog-speak of the French chanteuse Ada Ching. Adored Angeles: please realize that we live in an arena where all languages fight it out.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“Shoot.”
“And third: in what country will our son be born?”
“Easy: in the Sweet Fatherland. You go on reading Plato, Angeles. I read Ramón López Velarde.”
“Ramón who?”
“López Velarde, Ramón. Born June 15, 1888, in Jerez de Zacatecas. Dead at the age of thirty-three for having strayed from the old park of his provincial heart and wandered into the noisy concourse of the sunken-eyed and made-up metropolis in order to die. These days a shot of penicillin would have saved him from his minor but in those days fatal infection. On a June morning in 1921, the poet Ramón died with his pockets full of papers without adjectives.”
“Who did he look like?”
“It seems he looked like me. Just a bit, so they tell me. Olive skin, almond-shaped eyes. But he wore a mustache and had pouting lips.”
“What did he write?”
“The fatherland is impeccable and adamantine,” said my father.
“Impeccable and…” My mother stopped, clearly disconcerted. “Is this where our son will be born?”
2. Fatherland, Your Mutilated Territories
On the day of my conception, Don Fernando Benítez is flying toward the forest of the Lacandons along the border bound by the Usumacinta River. At a given moment, his eyes cloud over, he feels a premonition of darkness, and tries to imagine the nearness of a volcano, a village, a river. He wants to give them names so he can say them to himself and to tell to the young helicopter pilot flying him to the Frontera Corazos airport:
“Young man, show me from up here the territories of the fatherland. Tell me, what remains of Mexico?”
He is asking the pilot to help him see from the air the totality of the newly mutilated Sweet Fatherland. He could almost see, beyond the Lacandonan forest, the territory of the Yucatán, ceded exclusively to the Club Méditerranée in order to create the Peninsular Tourism Trust (PENITT), free of any meddling by the federal government, in order to pay the interest on the external (eternal) debt, which this year would reach, according to calculations, $1,492 billion — a pretty sum to celebrate the five centuries since Columbus’s arrival and our division and conquest. And right now they are flying by special permission over the CHITACAM TRUSTEESHIP (Chiapas — Tabasco — Campeche), ceded to the U.S. oil consortium called the Five Sisters until the principal of that external debt is paid. Of course the debt only grows, assuring the foreign companies a possession in perpetuity. And he didn’t want to see, beyond that cloud bank, the besieged half-moon of Veracruz, along the coast from Tampico to Cotzacoalcos, and inland from Veracruz to the foothills of the Malinche, lands ceded to an incomprehensible war, an agrarian revolution according to some, a U.S. invasion according to others: it all depends, gentlemen, on which television channel you watch in the evening. The fact is that no one can communicate with Veracruz, so what’s so strange about the fact that suddenly no one can communicate with Acapulco? It’s impossible to fathom those mysteries. What are you saying, Don Fernando? You can’t hear over the noise of the motor. I said that Veracruz has become materially impenetrable because a line of soldiers, shoulder to shoulder, helicopters, right, this is a helicopter, Don Fernando, no, you don’t get what I’m saying, and antiaircraft guns have closed to invaders the whole strip along the Perote Ridge to the Lakes Tamiahua and Catemaco. And Don Fernando has no desire to turn his eyes toward that atrocious nation on the northern border: Mexamerica, independent of Mexico and the United States, in-bond factories, smuggling, contraband, Spanglish, refuge for political fugitives, and free entry for those without papers from the Pacific Coast to the Gulf Coast, one hundred kilometers to the north and one hundred to the south from the old frontier, from Sandy Ego and Auntyjane to Coffeeville and Killmoors: independent without the need of any declaration, the fact is that there no one pays the slightest attention to the government in Mexico City or Washington. And Don Fernando would also have wanted to look toward the Pacific and understand just exactly what had happened to the entire coast to the north of Ixtapa — Zihuatanejo, the whole thing, including the coastal zones of Michoacán, Colima, Jalisco, and Nayarit, Sinaloa, Sonora, and Baja California: why didn’t anyone ever talk about those lands, to whom did they belong, why were there no explanations, why was the Republic of Mexico only a kind of ghost of its ancient cornucopia-shaped self?