Adam in Eden

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I don’t understand what happened. Last Christmas everybody was smiling at me, giving me gifts, congratulating me, predicting a new year — yet another year — of success, satisfaction, and just rewards. People nodded approval at my wife as though to tell her she was very lucky to be married to the toast of the town. . Today I ask myself, what does it mean to be “the toast of the town. .?” Or, for that matter, burnt toast? I feel more burnt than toasted. Was this the year when my memory, so subject to illusions, at last grew disillusioned? Did what happened really happen? I don’t really want to know. All I want is to go back to last year’s Christmas: a family affair, comforting in its stark simplicity (in its inherent stupidity) and annual reoccurrence; a prophecy of twelve months to come that would not be as gratifying as Christmas Eve because fortunately they would not be as silly and wretched as Christmas; the holiday that we celebrate in December — just because — as a matter of course — without knowing why — out of custom — because we are Christians — we are Mexicans — war — war against Lucifer — because in Mexico we’re Catholics to a man, not excepting the atheists — because a thousand years of iconography instructs us to kneel before the Nativity scene of Bethlehem even as we turn our backs on the Vatican. Christmas takes us back to the humble origins of faith. There was a time, another time, when to be Christian was to be called an atheist, to be persecuted, to hide, to flee. Heresy: a heroic path. Now, in our sorry age, to be an atheist shocks no one. Nothing is shocking. Nobody is shocked.

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