Read Online Christopher Unborn by Carlos Fuentes - Free Book Online

what’s that young economist doing there, Robles what’s-his-name, what? digging? he’s looking for his mother, ha ha, I didn’t know he had one! The eyes of Ulises López in his Shogun model limousine, of Federico Robles Chacón with a smashed piece of Sheetrock in his hands, and those of my father with his ridiculous poster against Acapulco, all met.
    6
    And where was I? Tell me right away before I forget, O mighty Breeder: my parents have just conceived me, surrounded by blazing beaches and crumbling towers and peaks as white as bones and the miserable hillsides, where, says my father, the human ivy of Acapulchritude used to live, hanging on like ticks to the sumptuous body, he says, although by now gone soft, wormy, of old Acapulcra, O my nubile fisher-girl whose limp hair once hung down to her waist (he says in the name of all the children of the past who went to spend happy, prepollution vacations in Acapulco), in yesteryear busy with your nets and your brightly painted boats, now betrothed to death, a courtesan in exhausted sands: Look, Angeles, look at your Acapulco like a Cleopatra about to nest the scorpion in your breasts, a Messalina ready to drink the cup of sewage, a Pompadour bewigged to camouflage the cancers on her hairy skin, ugh …
    The Army kicked their asses out of the mountains around the bay, even out of the mountains not visible from the white half-moon of hotels, restaurants, and McDonald’s (which, the upstanding citizens claimed, the guerrillas wanted, horror of horrors, to rename Marxdonald’s and force to sell chalupas filled with caviar instead of that classic Mexican dish cheeseburgers and catsup). All a matter of aesthetics, said a television talk-show host, because (though he didn’t say this) no one meddled with the invisible, squat neighborhoods of repair shops, dust, food stands, and tents behind the barrier of skyscrapers that came, more and more, to resemble sand: but, since they’d kicked their asses out of the visible and invisible mountains, everyone said that it wasn’t a matter of public health or aesthetics but self-interest: the mountains were to be parceled off, the Icacos Navy base was sold to a consortium of Japanese hotel owners, and the inhabitants of the mountains resisted for months and months, squatting there challenging, refusing with the swollen stomachs of their children, their trichinosis, their water filled with revenge, their eyes so clouded over with grief and glaucoma that they couldn’t see the magic carpet at their feet, the Acapulco diamonds over a velvety night, an aquamarine day, a blond sunset, the opulent asphyxia of toasted bodies and pink jeeps and pale condominia, and gangrenous lunch counters, and cadaveric discotheques and crab-infested motels, and neon signs turned on at midday because
    MEXICO HAS ENERGY TO BURN
    says my mom to my dad the afternoon of my conception: those who were displaced to the hidden lands—points out my mother from the water—behind the mountains where no offended tourist could see them, much less hear them and much less smell them, found that the promises of new homes were just words: they were screwed perfectly by being sent from the mountains facing the sea to a swamp called Florida City because the only thing there was a cesspool with no electricity, plumbing, or roof, just some piles of lumber and prefab Sheetrock, which turned out to have been bought by the municipal president of Acapulco from the company of a brother-in-law who was cousin to the governor, who sat next to Minister Ulises López in school, who was owner of the aforementioned cement factory, uncle of the administrator of the aforementioned cesspool, may God keep him in the cabinet of our incumbent President Jesús María y José Paredes, and who will, God willing (the important people in Kickapulco support this) (moral support, you understand), within fewer than four years comply with the huge