The right to information: this only I know. Grandfather knows which day it is in history, Uncle Fernando knows what days those are in the calendar. But my parents, do they know anything?
INLOCOPARENTIS: They must not even be aware that they’ve created me; they just couldn’t be so cruel, such children of their own genes that they have created my death without even acknowledging my life: acid and arid, irritated and insecure, scraping against everything around me, everything that comes to me in this seesawing around (seesaw my eye, something between a gallop and an earthquake!), which in reality is a throbbing racket for one who was conceived on the beach under the palm trees and who now knows he is in another place, savagely transported in one jump to a restless, volcanic, thorny landscape: one day they’ll tell me about it, and I’ll visualize it, even though I know it right now, I know that (it’s my darkest secret) one day I’ll forget it because your mercies should know that no one is willing to give a child the supplementary days to which he has a right: nine months extra, winning the lottery and getting a Christmas bonus all at the same time, nine months more than the adults, but the adults say, how can this be? They think that it’s enough to recognize that
WHEN WE’RE BORN WE ARE ALREADY NINE MONTHS OLD
which means we possess an intolerable advantage, namely that we have the power to impose the laws of our infancy on them and there is nothing they fear more even though they won’t admit it: what I’m dreaming is, what is is what I dream, what I want I touch, I touch what I want, what I desire exists, what exists is what I desire, I have no reason to work, intrigue, screw other people, covet my neighbor’s property, what for, when all I want I have right here at hand, can you see this your mercies idem?
There is nothing more subversive than instantly turning desire into reality, and that’s why they try to surround us unborn types, and later, when we’re children, they limit us, surround us with schools and jails and churches and programmed vacations and calendar holidays and economic whorehouses erected between a child and the object of his desire, which would be Christmas in July and Two-Year Vacations and Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (which, for Julio Cortázar, would be July in Christmas), and the Garden of Delights — no, all pleasures deferred, we have to conquer it all by means of obedience the discipline of work austerity abstinence Calvinistic savings and the banishment of fantasy from the desert of reality instead of the fantasy of banishment from the desert of reality, Satan: look, says my old and interminable chain of genes to me, look where we’ve gotten to since puritanism took over the world, pretty well fucked up since Simon Peter, say my chromosomatic chains, and Saul-Saul-Why-Do-You-Persecute-Me imposed his rules of abstention after abstention, says my father on foot behind my mother trotting along on her burro through the Sierra Madre, riding the burro along the steep, curved, almost virgin paths that go, says Uncle Fernando, who is guiding us, from Acapulco to the Sierra, not even Cortés knew about these routes, adds our uncle, who knows all of them, and says put on your ponchos here comes a cloudburst and the peaks grow gray suddenly, crowns of misty iron, fleeting heart flutter in the sky: my mother’s nearby heart also beats faster and my father recites out loud, almost sings, scolding the storm that whips us and is about to take revenge on us, say I thoroughly saturated by the Acapulco excesses organized by my mom and dad, by the contradictions I already perceive between their condemnations of puritanism and their indiscriminate extermination of vice in Acapulco: did two young homosexual lovers deserve to die merely because they went around wearing mess jackets à la Tyrone Power? Did Egberto deserve to die because he was a fag or because he was a critic? And Emilio, because he was a puritan or because he was intolerant? And the models, because of the pleasure they gave or for the money they earned? Ada and Deng because…?
“What are you talking about?”
“Nothing, nothing at all,” said my father and he looked for an instant at the mask of his Uncle Don Fernando Benítez, who would be turning eighty in a few days and who still walked energetically through the tropical highland storms, leading us on foot through mountains he knew better than the back of his hand, Don Fernando Benítez’s creole mask, his blue eyes blurry from the storm that beats against the lenses of his gold-plated wire-rimmed glasses, his slightly bulbous nose distilling the essence of the squall that drips off the ends of his handlebar mustache bathed in the idem, his mouth a rictus of sad wisdom:
“You two asked me about Pacífica, but do you know where I’ve just been? Doing an interview with the last Lacandon Indian. But guess what happened? The last of the Lacandon Indians interviewed me instead.”
He groaned and furrowed his brow, raising a hand to the imaginary knot of an imaginary tie. He says the Indians are all we have left; they are our ghosts; for thirty years he’s been interviewing them, defending them, going to the most remote places to see them before they disappear, oh of course, saying to Mexicans, we owe loyalty to the world of the Indians, even if we disdain them, exploit them, because it’s the loyalty we owe to death. He gets excited about the idea, he stops a moment, just for theatrical effect, damn but we’ve become just as eccentric, just as fragile, just as condemned to extinction as they have, why don’t we recognize the fact?
“Killing an Indian is like burning down a library.”
He roared out a lament that conquered the storm and echoed through the sierra:
“Oh, God, all of us are Lacandons!”
“So no one in the rest of the country said anything about Acapulco?” asked my mother Angeles, insistently but serenely. I suspect that she hasn’t got the remotest idea that I’m bouncing around like a marble in these boondocks she’s carried me to.
“No.” Uncle Benítez shook his hat-covered head, turning his back on them once again and stubbornly maintaining the pace. “Nobody knows a thing about it.”
Our Uncle Fernando Benítez made his nemesis face, and I registered what happened in the seed of what would soon be my cerebral cortex: “Killing an Indian is like burning down a library,” and we’ve already got more than two hundred pages written, one movie hour, two TV hours (including commercials), several oppressive nightmares because it’s all over, and nevertheless we persist in reliving it every twenty-four hours: Father and Mother, my genes tell me better get used to it, Chris, that’s Mexico for you, live one more day so you can live on that day the seven centuries since the advent of the Heagle and the Herpent.
Please, your discriminatory worships, please do not ask to know what my parents and Uncle Fernando Benítez see at 2 p.m., three days after their climb up the sierra, the southern mommy, in the storm, three days after sleeping in shacks Don Fernando knows and in Indian villages which take him in with astonished recognition, as if they were getting ready to visit him quite soon and don’t bother coming out here to see us, Quetzalcoatclass="underline" cold, high nights I remember (I shall remember), the smell of burned forests, the grunting of hogs running around freely and the soulful laugh of the burro who is sadly, happily sure we don’t understand him simply because he doesn’t speak to us. Now we descend to the flatland, where the sun and shadow are equally long at all hours of the day, sculptures made of air, astonished at their own existence (we are in Guerrero, at the corner of Oaxaca, says my father; let’s go to the market in Igualistlahuaca, I’m hungry and they make delicious grasshoppers in red pepper there and then they say he who eats grasshopper never leaves this place):
Better look at what’s written on the hillsides:
MEXICANS: INDUSTRIALIZE