Free Christopher Unborn by Carlos Fuentes Page A

liberation theology, even traditional Catholicism as long as it goes against conformity, everything sticks to me and whatever sticks to me has to be good, my love, because the only thing that doesn’t stick to me is respect for authority, faith in the chief, superior races, the murder or oppression of anyone in the name of an idea, history, the nation, or the leader, none of the above. I am a good receptacle, Angel, a white wall without memories or my own past, my love, but a place where only pretty things can be written and ugliness has no place. Now I leave it to you to write there with me, but don’t force me into anything, my love; I need you, but don’t chain me up; I follow you, but don’t order me to follow you; let me make the life I never had or don’t remember with you, Angel, and one day we can remember together, but I’ll have no memory of anything but my life with you: please, let’s share everything. Pardon my habitual silence. I’m not absent. I observe and absorb, my love. This is our pact.
    Your father Angel says I feel superior to him because since I have no past I’ve had to enter today’s universality in a flash, the universality of violence, haste, cruelty, and death. But his parents died comically, eating tacos.
    What did Grandpa and Grandma do, Dad?
    Your grandparents, Diego and Isabella Palomar, were inventors, Chris: in the tabloids of the period they were called the Curies of Tlalpan. I’m telling you this so you know right from the start that in this country anything you do will be pardoned as long as it serves in one way or another to justify and legitimize the status quo. Your uncles, Homero and Fernando, who detest each other, have at least that in common. Don Homero’s illegal trafficking is pardoned because he does his job as Defender of the Castilian Tongue. Don Fernando’s critical gibes are forgiven because he is the Defender of the Indians. My grandpa General Rigoberto Palomar’s eccentricities are forgiven because he is the only person who believes body and soul that the Mexican Revolution triumphed. And my parents were given official protection for their inventions because they were the Curies of Tlalpan: two inventive and daring scientists during the period, my boy, when Mexico thought it could be technologically independent. One illusion less! For thirty years we were buying obsolete technology at high prices; every five or six years we had to turn our decrepit machinery in for new obsolete machinery, and so on and so on and so on … And thus the techniques for robotics and cryogenics, biomedicine, fiber optics, interactive computers, and the entire aerospace industry passed us by. One day, when you’ve grown up, I’ll take you to see the ruins of the investments in the oil boom, son, when we spent forty billion dollars to buy junk. I’ll take you to see the ruins of the nuclear plant in Palo Verde, next to which Chichén-Itzá looks like a brand-new Coca-Cola and hot-dog stand. I’ll take you, my dear son, to see expensive, rusting machinery sitting in the useless industrial Gulf ports. And if you want to take a ride on an ultramodern Japanese bullet train, well, maybe it would be better for you to take a ride on the kiddy train in Chapultepec Park instead of trying the paralyzed inter-ocean train that according to its Mexican designers was going to knock the crap out of the Panama Canal. Seek in vain, my boy, the rapid shipment of barrels of oil from Coatzacoalcos to Salina Cruz, the shortest route from Abu Dhabi to San Francisco and Yokohama: seek it, sonny, and all you’ll see are the cold rails and the hot illusions of insane Mexican oil-grandeur: no immortal spring, only these, Fabio, oh grief: the blasted heath between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. Mountains of sand and the cadaver of a spider monkey. Long live the Opepsicoatl Generation!
    But, Daddy, when did they make