The Crystal Frontier (19 page)

That night, Miss Amy asked Josefina to help her undress and put on her nightgown. She was going to wear the woolen nightgown. The autumn air was beginning to make its presence felt. The maid helped her get into bed. She tucked her in as if she were a child. She arranged the pillows and was about to leave, wishing her good night, when Miss Amelia Ney Dunbar's two tense, old hands took the strong, fleshy hands of Josefina. Miss Amy brought her maid's hands to her lips, kissed them, and Josefina embraced the almost transparent body of Miss Amy, an embrace that while never repeated would last an eternity.

7

THE CRYSTAL FRONTIER

For Jorge Bustamante

1

Don Leonardo Barroso was in the first-class section of Delta's nonstop flight from Mexico City to New York. With him was an incredibly beautiful woman with a mane of long black shiny hair. The hair was like a frame for the striking cleft in her chin, her face's star. Don Leonardo, in his fifties, felt proud of his female companion. Seated by the window, she was imagining herself in the irregularity, the variety, the beauty, and the distance of the landscape and the sky. Her lovers had always told her she had cloudlike eyelids and a slight storm in the shadows under her eyes. Mexican boyfriends speak in serenades.

Michelina was looking at much the same sight from the sky, recalling the periods in her adolescence when her boyfriends serenaded her and wrote her syrupy letters. Cloudlike eyelids, slight storm in the shadows under her eyes. She sighed. You can't be sixteen forever. Why, then, did this unwanted nostalgia suddenly return—for her youth, for when she went to dances and was wooed by all the rich boys in Mexico City?

Don Leonardo preferred sitting on the aisle. The idea of being stuck in an aluminum pencil at 30,000 feet, with no visible support, still made him nervous, even if he was used to it. By the same token, he was enormously satisfied that the trip was the product of his own doing.

As soon as the North American Free Trade Agreement had gone into effect, Don Leonardo had begun lobbying intensively to have the migration of Mexican workers to the United States classified as “services,” even as “foreign trade.” The dynamic promotor and businessman explained, in Washington and Mexico City, that Mexico's principal export was not agricultural or industrial products, not assembly-line products, not even capital to pay the external debt (the eternal debt) but labor. Mexico was exporting more labor than cement or tomatoes. He had a plan to keep labor from becoming a conflict. Very simple: simply avoid the frontier. Prevent illegality.

“They'll still come,” he explained to Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, “and they'll keep on coming because you need them. Even if there were too many jobs in Mexico, you'd still need Mexican workers.”

“Legal workers,” said the secretary. “Legals yes, illegals no.”

“You can't believe in the free market and then suddenly close the doors to the flow of labor. It's like closing off investments. What happened to the magic of the marketplace?”

“We have an obligation to protect our borders,” Reich went on. “It's a political problem. The Republicans are exploiting the growing anti-immigrant sentiment.”

“You can't militarize the border,” said Don Leonardo, scratching his chin irritably, seeking the same cleft that was the beauty of his daughter-in-law. “It's too long, too much of a desert, too porous. You can't be lax when you need workers and tough when you don't.”

“I'm in favor of everything that contributes to the U.S. economy,” said Reich. “That's the only way we can contribute to the world economy—and vice versa. So what do you propose?”

What Don Leonardo proposed was already a reality, and it—or rather he—was traveling in tourist class. His name was Lisandro Chávez, and he was trying to look out the window, but the man sitting to his right, staring at the clouds intently, as if recovering a lost homeland, blocked his view. The brim of the man's lacquered straw hat covered the window. To Lisandro's left, another laborer slept with his hat pulled down over the bridge of his nose. Only Lisandro traveled hatless, and he ran his hand through his soft black curly hair, then stroked his thick, well-trimmed moustache and rubbed his heavy, oily eyelids.

Boarding the jet, he had immediately recognized the famous businessman Leonardo Barroso in first class. Lisandro's heart skipped a beat. He also recognized, next to Barroso, a girl he knew when he was young and went to parties and dances in posh parts of Mexico City—Las Lomas, Pedregal, and Polanco. It was Michelina Laborde, the girl everyone wanted to dance with. In reality, what they wanted was to take advantage of her a bit.

“She's got a good name but she doesn't have a cent,” the other boys said. “Watch it. Don't marry her. No dowry.”

Lisandro danced with her once and now no longer recalled if he actually told her or simply thought that the two of them were poor, that they had that in common, that she was invited to these parties because her family had class and he because he went to the same school as the rich kids. But there was more that made them alike than made them different, didn't she think?

He couldn't remember what Michelina's answer was, couldn't even remember if he actually said those things to her or simply thought them. Then other boys danced with her, and he never saw her again. Until today.

He didn't dare say hello. How would she remember him? What would he say to her? Remember how we met at a party at Chubby Casillas's eleven years ago and danced together? She didn't even look at him. Don Leonardo did. He looked up from reading an article in
Fortune
that gave figures for the richest men in Mexico but, luckily, once again omitted his name. Neither he nor the rich politicians ever appeared—the politicians because none of their businesses had their names on them: they hid behind the seven veils of multiple partnerships, borrowed names, foundations … Don Leonardo imitated them. It was difficult to attribute to him the wealth he actually possessed.

He looked up because he saw or sensed someone different. When the workers contracted as “services” had begun boarding the plane, Don Leonardo had at first congratulated himself on the success of his lobbying, then had admitted that it made him angry to see so many dark-skinned men in lacquered straw hats parade through first class. He had therefore stopped looking at them. Other planes had two entrances, one forward, the other at the rear. It was slightly irritating to pay for first class and have to put up with a parade of badly dressed, badly washed people.

Something made him look, and it was the passing of Lisandro Chávez, who wasn't wearing a hat, who seemed to be of another class, who had a different profile, and who came prepared for the cold of a New York December. The others wore light clothing. They hadn't been told that it's cold in New York. Lisandro was wearing a red-and-black-checked wool jacket that zipped up to the neck. Don Leonardo went on reading
Fortune.
Michelina Laborde de Barroso slowly sipped her mimosa.

Lisandro Chávez decided to keep his eyes shut for the rest of the trip. He asked to not be served any food and to be allowed to sleep. The stewardess gave him a puzzled look. Only people in first class made those kinds of requests. She tried friendliness: Our rice pilaf is excellent. In reality, an insistent question, like a steel mosquito, was drilling its way through Lisandro's forehead: What am I doing here? I shouldn't be doing this. I'm not the man.

The “I” who wasn't there had had other ambitions, and even when he was in high school his family had encouraged them. His father's soda factory was prospering and a hot country like Mexico would always consume soft drinks. The more soft drinks, the easier it was to send Lisandro to private schools, take on a mortgage for the house in Colonia Cuauhtémoc, make the monthly payments on the Chevrolet, maintain the fleet of delivery trucks, and go to Houston once a year, even if just for a couple of days, stroll through the malls, say they'd gone for their annual medical exams … Lisandro was likable, he went to parties, read García Márquez; with luck, he'd stop taking the bus to school next year, he'd have his own Volkswagen.

He didn't want to look down for fear of discovering something horrible that could be seen only from the air. There was no homeland anymore, no such thing as Mexico; the country was a fiction or, rather, a dream maintained by a handful of madmen who at one time believed in the existence of Mexico … A family like his was not going to be able to withstand twenty years of crisis, debt, bankruptcy, hopes raised only to fall again with a crash, every six years, more and more poverty, unemployment. His father could no longer come up with the dollars to pay his debts and maintain the factory; the soft-drink business became concentrated and consolidated in a couple of monopolies; the independent labels, the small outfits, had to sell out and leave the market. What kind of work will I do now? his father asked himself as he walked like a ghost through the apartment in the Narvarte district when it was no longer possible to pay the mortgage on the Cuauhtémoc house, when it was no longer possible to make the payments on the Chevrolet, when Lisandro's mother had to put a sign in the window
SEWING DONE HERE
, when what was left of the savings evaporated first in the inflation of 1985 and then in the devaluation of 1995. The accumulated unpayable debts meant the end of private schools, the end of any illusions about having his own car. Your uncle Roberto has a good voice and earns a few pesos singing and playing the guitar on the corner, but we haven't fallen that low yet, Lisandro, we don't yet have to stand outside the cathedral offering our services, tools in hand and a sign saying
PLUMBER CARPENTER ELECTRICIAN BRICKLAYER
, we haven't yet fallen as low as the children of our former servants, who have to quit school, walk the streets, dress up as clowns and paint their faces white and toss balls in the air at the corner of Insurgentes and Reforma. Remember Rosita's son, the one you played with, the one who was born here in the house? Well, I mean in the house we had before, on Río Nazas. Well, he's dead. I think his name was Lisandro, like you, of course—they named him that so we would be his godparents. He had to leave his house when he was seventeen and become a fire-eater on street corners; he painted two black tears on his face and ate fire for a year, taking a mouthful of gasoline and sticking a burning wick down his throat until it destroyed his brain, Lisandro, his brain just melted, became like dough, and remember, he was the oldest son, the hope. Now the little ones sell Kleenex, chewing gum—Rosita, our maid—Remember her?—told me. She's desperate, struggling to keep the little ones from starting to sniff glue to get high after working in the streets with bands of homeless kids as numerous as stray dogs, and just as hungry, and forgotten. Lisandro, what's a mother going to tell you whose kids walk the streets to keep her alive, to bring something home? Lisandro, look at your city sinking into the oblivion of what it once was but most of all into the oblivion of what it wanted to be. I have no right to anything, Lisandro Chávez said to himself one day, I have to join the sacrifice of all, join the sacrificed nation, ill-governed, corrupt, uncaring. I have to forget my illusions, make money, help my parents, do what humiliates me least, an honest job, a job that will save me from having contempt for my parents, anger toward my country, shame for myself but that will also save me from the mockery of my friends. He spent years trying to tie together loose ends, to forget the illusions of the past, stripping away ambition for the future, inoculating himself with fatalism, defending himself against resentment, proudly humiliated in his tenacious will to get ahead despite everything. For Lisandro Chávez, twenty-six years old, illusions lost, there was now a new opportunity, to go to New York as a service worker, ignorant that Don Leonardo Barroso had said:

“Why are they all so dark, so obviously lower class?”

“It's the majority, Don Leonardo. The only thing the country can produce.”

“Well, let's see if you can find me one who looks like a better sort, whiter—I'll take him. What kind of impression are we going to make, partner?”

And now, as Lisandro passed through first class, Don Leonardo looked at him without imagining that he was one of the contracted workers but wishing instead that all of them were like this working fellow with a decent face and sharp features (although with a big moustache like that of a prosperous member of a mariachi band) and—heavens!—skin lighter than Leonardo Barroso's own. Different, the millionaire noticed, a different boy, don't you think, Miche? But his daughter-in-law and lover had fallen asleep.

2

When they landed at JFK, in the middle of a snowstorm, Barroso wanted to leave the plane as soon as possible, but Michelina was curled up next to the window, covered with a blanket, her head resting on a pillow. She wanted to wait. Let everyone else leave, she asked Don Leonardo.

He wanted to get out and say hello to the agents responsible for recruiting the Mexican workers contracted to clean various buildings in Manhattan over the weekend, when the offices would be empty. The service contract made everything explicit: the workers would come from Mexico to New York on Friday night to work on Saturday and Sunday, returning to Mexico City on Sunday night.

“Everything included, even the airfare—it's cheaper than hiring workers here in Manhattan. We save between 25 and 30 percent,” his gringo partners explained.

But they'd forgotten to tell the Mexicans it was cold, which was why Don Leonardo, surprised by his own humane spirit, wanted to get out first to warn the agents that these boys needed jackets, blankets, something.

They began to parade by, and the fact was there was a bit of everything. Don Leonardo's sense of humanitarian, and now national, pride doubled. The country was so beaten down, especially after having believed that it wasn't; we dreamed we were in the first world and woke to find ourselves back in the third. It's time to work more for Mexico, not to be discouraged, to find new solutions. Like this one. There was a bit of everything, not only the boy with the big moustache wearing the checked jacket but others, too, whom the investor hadn't noticed because the stereotype of the wetback, the peasant with a lacquered hat and skimpy beard, had consumed them all. Now he began to distinguish them, to individualize them, to restore their personalities to them, possessing as he did forty years' experience dealing with workers, supervisors, professional types, bureaucrats, all at his service, always at his service, never anyone above him: that was the motto of his independence, no one, not even the president of the republic, above Leonardo Barroso, or as he put it to his U.S. partners: