The Crystal Frontier (10 page)

“You could have been more cruel and less beautiful,” said the Symbolist poet whom Dionisio, to his sorrow although also for his intermittent pleasure, carried within him.

But this time his portable Baudelaire never left the suitcase; the little
charro
's pistol went off again, and the blond waiter unexpectedly set down before him a lemon sherbet that Baco identified as the
trou normand
of French cuisine, the “Norman hole” that cleanses the palate of the main courses and prepares it for new tastes. He was astounded that the American Grill in a commercial center on the outskirts of San Diego would know anything about such subtleties, but he was even more taken aback to find, when he looked up, a woman before him. Without being beautiful, she was radiant—that he saw instantly. Her face, devoid of makeup, both needed and didn't need cosmetics—they were irrelevant. Everything in her immaculate face had meaning. Her eyebrows, with their blond pallor, were like the meeting place of sand and sea; her lips, appropriately thin, were appropriately furrowed by an insinuation of imminent maturity she didn't deign to disguise; her hair was pulled back and gathered in a bun, her first gray hairs of no importance to her, floating like lost clouds over a field of honey; her eyes, her eyes of a deep gray, the gray of good cashmere, of morning rain, as gray as an unexpected encounter, intelligent, slate and chalk, announced her special nature—they were eyes that changed color with the rain. They looked past Dionisio's shoulder toward the television screen.

“I always wished I could play for a baseball team,” she said, smiling, as Baco, lost in the eyes of his new woman, let his lemon sherbet melt away. “It takes a special kind of art to make those low catches.”

“Like Willie Mays,” Dionisio interposed. “He really knew how to pull out those low catches.”

“How do you know that?” she said with genuine amazement, genuine fondness.

“I don't like American cooking, but I do admire American culture—sports, movies, gringo literature.”

“Willie Mays,” said the un-made-up woman, rolling her eyes up toward heaven. “It's funny how someone who does things well never does them just for himself. It's as if he did them for everyone.”

“Who are you thinking of?” asked Dionisio, more and more ravished by this
trou normand
of a woman.

“Faulkner. I'm thinking of William Faulkner. I'm thinking about how a single genius can save an entire culture.”

“A writer can't save anything. You're mistaken there.”

“No, it's you who are mistaken. Faulkner showed the southerners that the South could be something other than violence, racism, the Ku Klux Klan, prejudice, and rednecks.”

“All that came into your head from watching television?”

“It really does intrigue me. Do we watch television because things happen there, or do things happen so they can be seen on television?”

He went on with the game. “Is Mexico poor because she's underdeveloped, or is she underdeveloped because she's poor?”

Now it was her turn to laugh.

“You see, people used to watch Willie Mays play, and the next day they read the paper to make sure he'd played. Now you can see the information and the game at the same time. You don't have to verify anything. That's worrisome.”

“You mentioned Mexico,” she said, questioningly, after a moment in which she lowered her eyes, doubtful. “Are you Mexican?”

Dionisio nodded affirmatively.

“I love and don't love your country,” said the woman with the gray eyes and the clouds crowning her honey hair. “I adopted a Mexican girl. The Mexican doctors who gave her to me didn't tell me she had a serious heart problem. When I brought her here, I took her in for a routine checkup and was told that if she wasn't operated on immediately she wouldn't last another two weeks. Why didn't they tell me that in Mexico?”

“Probably so you wouldn't change your mind and would go ahead with the adoption.”

“But she could have died, she could have … Oh, Mexican cruelty, the abuse, the indifference toward the poor—what they suffer. Your country is a horror.”

“I'll bet the girl's pretty.”

“Very pretty. I really love her. She's going to live,” she said, her eyes transfigured, just before she disappeared. “She's going to live…”

Dionisio could only stare at the melted sherbet he'd had no time to eat; the
charro
genie, impatient to carry out his orders and disappear, had fired his pistol again, and a cute woman appeared with curly hair and a flat nose, nervous, jolly eyes, dimples, and capped teeth. She gave him a big smile, as if she were welcoming him onto a plane, school, or hotel. It was impossible to know what it meant—appearances are deceiving. Her features were so nondescript she could have been anything, even a bordello madam. She wore jogging clothes, a light-blue jacket and sweatpants. She never stopped talking, as if Dionisio's presence were irrelevant to her compulsive discourse, which had neither beginning nor end and seemed directed to an ideal audience of infinitely patient or infinitely detached listeners.

The salad appeared, accompanied by the waiter's scornful gesture and his muttered censure: “Salad is eaten at the beginning.”

“Think I should get a tattoo? There are two things I've never had. A tattoo and a lover. Think I'm too old for that?”

“No. You look as if you could be between thirty and—”

“When you're a kid, that's when having tattoos is good. But now? Imagine me with a tattoo on my ankle. How am I going to show up at my own daughter's wedding with a tattoo on my ankle? Even worse, how am I going to go—someday—to my granddaughter's wedding with a tattoo on my ankle? Maybe it would be better if I had a tattoo on my boob—that way only my lover would see it in secret. Now that I'm about to get a divorce, I was lucky enough to meet this in-cred-ible man. Where do you think his territory is?”

“I don't know. Do you mean his house or his office?”

“No, silly. I mean how much territory he covers professionally. Guess! I'd better tell you: the whole world. He buys nonpatented replacement parts. Know what those are? All the parts for machinery, for household appliances, TVs, where no rights have to be paid. What do you think of that? He's a genius! Even so, I suspect he may be a homosexual. I don't know if he'd know how to bring up my kids. I toilet trained them very early. I don't understand why friends of mine toilet trained their kids so late or never bothered…”

Dionisio quickly ate the salad to get rid of the soon-to-be-divorced lady, and with his last bite, she vanished. Did I cannibalize her or did she cannibalize me? wondered the food critic, overcome by a growing sense of anguish he could not identify. Was all this a gag? It was a fog.

And it was not cleared away by the arrival of dessert, a lemon meringue pie whose female counterpart Baco was afraid to see, especially because at the beginning of this adventure he'd watched the fat women pass by, desiring them platonically. He was right to be afraid. Seated opposite him, he saw when the noise of the
charro
's shot had faded, was a monstrous woman who weighed 650 if she weighed a pound. Her pink sweatshirt announced her cause: FLM, the Fat Liberation Movement. She couldn't cross her Michelin man arms over her immense tits, which moved on their own inside her sweatshirt and fell like a flesh Niagara Falls over the barrel of her stomach, the only obstacle blocking one from contemplation of her spongy legs, bare from the thighs down, indifferent to the indecency of her wrinkled shorts. Her moist hands, loathsome, rested on Dionisio's. The critic trembled. He tried to pull his hands free. Impossible. The fat woman was there to catechize him, and resigned to his fate, he prepared himself to be good and catechized.

“Do you know how many million obese people we have in the USA?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

“Don't even guess, my boy. Forty million of what others pejoratively call fat people. But I'm telling you, no one can be discriminated against for their physical defects. I walk the streets telling myself, I am beautiful and intelligent. I say it in a low voice, then I shout it, I am beautiful and intelligent! Don't force me to be perverse! That gets their attention. Then I make our demands. Obese is beautiful. Weight-loss programs should be declared illegal. Movies and airlines should install special seats for people like me. We've had enough of buying two tickets just so we can travel in comfort.”

She raised her voice, hysterical.

“And nobody make fun of me! I'm beautiful and intelligent. Don't make me be perverse. I was cook on a ship registered in San Diego. We were coming from Hawaii. It was a freighter. One day I was walking on deck eating ice cream and a sailor got up, pulled it out of my hand, and threw it overboard. ‘Don't get any fatter,' he said, laughing his head off. ‘Your fat disgusts all of us. You're ridiculous.' That night, down in the kitchen, I put a laxative in the soup. Then I walked through the passageways shouting over the moans of the crew, ‘I'm beautiful and intelligent. Don't mess with me. Don't make me be perverse.' I lost my job. I hope you'll want me. Is it true? Here I am … listen … what's wrong with you?”

Dionisio liberated his hands and swallowed the pie so the fat woman would disappear. But she understood his contempt and managed to shout: “You were tricked, you jerk! My name is Ruby, and I'm involved with a Chilean novelist named José Donoso. I will only be his!”

Dionisio stood up in horror, left an outrageous hundred-dollar bill on the table, and ran from the American Grill. Once again he felt that terrible anguish, felt it turn into a feeling of something lost, of something he had to do, though he didn't know what.

He stopped running when he came to the window of an American Express office. A dummy representing a typical Mexican, in a wide sombrero, huaraches, and the clothes of a peon, was leaning against a cactus, taking his siesta. The cliché infuriated Dionisio. He stormed into the travel agency and started to shake the dummy. But the dummy was made not of wood but of flesh and blood, and exclaimed, “Damn it to hell, they don't even let you sleep around here.”

The employees were shouting, too, telling him to leave their “pee-on” alone, let him do his job, we're promoting Mexico. But Dionisio pushed him out the door, took him by the shoulders, shook him, and asked him who he was, what he was doing there. And the Mexican model (or model Mexican) respectfully removed his sombrero.

“There would be no way for you to know it, but I've been lost here for ten years.”

“What are you saying? Ten what? What?”

“Ten years, boss. I came over one day and got lost in the shopping mall and never got out. And then they hired me here to take siestas in windows, and if there's no work, I can sneak in and sleep on cushions or beach chairs. There's more than enough food—they just leave it, they throw it away. If you only saw—”

“Come, come with me,” said Dionisio, taking the peon by the sleeve, electrified by the word
food,
awake, alert to his own emotions, to the memory of the woman with gray eyes, the woman who adopted the Mexican girl, the woman who read Faulkner—that's the one he should have chosen. Providence had arranged things. None of the other women mattered, only that one, that sensitive little gringa, who was strong, intelligent. She was his, had to be his. He was fifty-one and she was forty—they'd make a fine couple. What was this perverse game all about? The
charro
genie, his kitschy alter ego, that bastard, that picturesque asshole, that skirt chaser, that total opposite of his Symbolist, Baudelairean, French alter ego, was also his double, his brother, but the little guy was Mexican and was always pulling a fast one, teasing him, offering him the moon but handing him shit, devaluing his life, his love, his desire. The genie didn't tell him that when he ate a steak or a shrimp cocktail or a lemon meringue pie he was also eating the woman who was the incarnation of each dish, and here he was, delirious, going mad, dragging a poor hungry man through a California mall until they reached the restaurant called the American Grill and he was illuminated, convinced now it was all true. He'd eaten everything but the lemon sherbet: she was alive, she had not been devoured by his other Aztec ego, his pocket-sized Huitzilopochtli, his national Minimoctezuma.

“Sorry,” said the waiter who'd taken care of him, “we throw away the leftovers. Your melted sherbet went down the drain a while ago.”

Saying it evidently gave him pleasure, and he licked his down-covered lips. Ready to weep with sadness, Dionisio screamed. He was still dragging the peon along by the hand, and lost in the labyrinth of consumerism, the Mexican became alarmed and said, I've never gotten beyond this place, this is where I get lost, I've been captive here for ten years! But Dionisio paid no attention and pushed him into the rented Mustang. The peon suffered the tortures of the damned as they raced through the tangled nets of highways, the vertebrae of a cement beast, sleeping but alert. They arrived at the storage center north of the city.

Here Dionisio stopped.

“Come along. I need you to help me.”

“Where we going, boss? Don't take me away from here! Don't you realize what it costs us to enter Gringoland? I don't want to go back to Guerrero!”

“Try to understand. I have no prejudices.”

“It's that I like all this—the shopping center where I live, the television, the abundance, the tall buildings…”

“I know.”

“What, boss? What do you know?”

“None of this we're seeing here would exist if the gringos hadn't stolen all this land from us. In Mexican hands, this would be a huge wasteland.”

“In Mexican hands—”

“A big desert, this would be a big desert, from California to Texas. I'm telling you this so you won't think I'm unfair.”