The Crystal Frontier (3 page)

Then the northern troupe came in, banging drums and playing trumpets and guitars, and the place filled with men wearing Stetsons and short jackets. The spell was broken and all the women howled with pleasure. No one even noticed when Michelina excused herself, walked to the curtain, and, among its thick folds, found her godfather's burning hand.

5

Only Lucila heard with what a desperate sound, with what a screech of burning rubber, the Lincoln convertible pulled out of the garage. But she paid no attention because, no matter how fast it went, the car would never reach the limits of the red horizon. To Mrs. Barroso, that seemed like a very neat poetic idea—“We shall never reach the horizon”—but she had no words to communicate it to her pals, who, in any case, were all drunk. Perhaps she only imagined the engine's noise, which might have been nothing more than the echo of the guitar in her crazed head.

Leonardo was not drunk. His horizon did have a limit: the border between Mexico and the United States. The night air cleared his head even more, clarified both his ideas and his eyes. He drove with only one hand on the wheel. With his other hand, he squeezed Michelina's. He told her he regretted having to say it to her, but she should understand that she would have anything she wanted. He didn't want to brag, but she would get all the money, all the power; now she was seeing only the naked desert, but her life could be like that enchanted city on the other side of the frontier: golden towers, crystal palaces.

Yes, she said, I know, I accept it.

Leonardo slammed on the brakes, exiting the straight desert highway. In the distance, the monuments of cathedrallike stone, which seemed now like fragile paper silhouettes, watched over them.

He looked at her as if he, too, could read in the dark. The girl's eyes shone brightly enough. At least Marianito and she would have that in common, the gift of penetrating the darkness, of seeing into the night. Perhaps without that penumbra he wouldn't have clearly seen what he recognized in his goddaughter's eyes. Daylight would surely have dazzled his vision. Night was necessary for seeing clearly the soul of this woman.

Yes, she said, I know and accept.

Leonardo held onto the Lincoln's steering wheel as if it were the rock of his most intimate being. He was money. He was power. The desired love, he realized, was his own.

“No, not me.”

“You,” Michelina said. “You are what I want.”

She kissed him with those perfect lips, and against his beard, earlier shaved close but stubbly at that hour, he felt the depth of Michelina's cleft chin. He sank into the open mouth of his goddaughter, as if all light had no other origin but that tongue, those teeth, that saliva. He closed his eyes to kiss and saw all the light of the world. But he never let go of the wheel. His fingers had a voice and shouted to get closer to Michelina's body, to dig among her buttons, to find and caress and stiffen her nipples, the next symmetry of that perfect beauty.

He kissed her for a long time, exploring the girl's perfectly formed, uncleft palate with his tongue, and then God and the devil, once again allies, made him feel he was kissing his own son, that the father's tongue cut itself and bled in the jagged cleft of the palate, broken like a coral reef, that the smoothness of Michelina's mouth had been brutally replaced by his son's swollen, irritated, reddish carnality, wounded, smeared with mucus, dripping thick phlegm.

Is that what she felt when he screwed her last night without wanting to confess it? Why was she telling him now that she wanted him, the father, when it was obvious she was here to seduce the son incapable of seducing anyone? Wasn't she here to conclude the family pact, to acknowledge the unlimited protection the powerful politician Leonardo Barroso gave to the impoverished Laborde e Ycaza family, to thank him for a few marvelous days in Paris—wines, restaurants, monuments? Was that what made working, getting rich, worthwhile? Paris was the reward, and now she was Paris; she incarnated the world, Europe, good taste, and he was offering her the complement to her elegance and beauty, the money without which she would quickly cease to be elegant and beautiful and become merely an eccentric aristocrat like her ancient grandmother, bent over the collectible curios of the past.

He invited her to conclude the pact. He became her godfather in order to single out her family. Now he was offering her his son in matrimony. The gold seal.

“But I've already got a boyfriend in the capital.”

Leonardo stared fixedly until he lost his own eyes in the desert.

“No more.”

“I'm not lying to you, godfather.”

“Everything and everyone has a price. That punk was more interested in money than in you.”

“You did it for me, didn't you? You love me, too, isn't that true?”

“You don't get it. You just don't get it.”

Together with his promise, the invisible line of the frontier passed through his head. He was well-known in the luxury hotels on the other side; they never asked him for identification or baggage and simply rented him the most luxurious suite for a night or a few hours, making sure there was a basket of fruit and a bottle of champagne in the room before he stepped out of the elevator. A sitting room. A bedroom. A bathroom. The two of them showering together, lathering each other up, caressing …

Leonardo turned the key in the ignition, started the car, and headed back to Campazas.

6

Grandmother Doña Zarina agreed with her granddaughter. Michelina would be dressed for her marriage in the old-fashioned way, in authentic clothes the old lady had naturally been collecting for generations. The girl could choose.

A crinoline, said the young woman, I've always dreamed of wearing a crinoline so everyone could wonder about me, could imagine me, and not know clearly what the bride was like. In that case, the grandmother said cheerfully, you'll need a veil.

One night, she tried on her wedding outfit, the crinoline and the veil, and went to bed to sleep alone for the last time. She dreamed she was in a convent, strolling through patios and arcades, chapels and corridors, while the other nuns, locked in, peered out like animals through the bars on their cells, shouted obscenities at her because she was getting married, because she preferred the love of a man to wedding Christ. They insulted her for violating her vows, for leaving her religious order, her social class.

Michelina tried to escape from her dream, whose space was identical to that of the convent, but all the nuns, crowded in front of the altar, blocked her way. The black maids tore the habits off the sisters, stripping them naked to the waist, and then the nuns screamed imploringly for the whip to suppress the devil in the flesh and to give an example for Sister Michelina. Others immodestly menstruated on the tiled floor, then licked their own blood and marked crosses on the icy stone. Others lay next to the prostrate, bleeding, wounded, thorn-pierced Christs, and here Michelina's dream in Mexico City fused with Mariano's in the lightless bedroom in Campazas. The boy, too, dreamed of one of those dolorous Christs in Mexican churches, more dolorous than their Virgin Mothers, the Son laid out in a crystal coffin surrounded by dusty flowers, He Himself turning to dust, disappearing on His homeward journey to the spirit, leaving only the evidence of a few nails, a lance, a crown of thorns, a rag dipped in vinegar … how he longed to leave behind the miseries of this ephemeral body!

That was only for Christ, and how Mariano envied Him! If the suffering, mocked, wounded Christ had been left in holy peace, why not him? All he wanted was to live on his parents' ranch, reading all day with no other company than the Indians, who were natural and indifferent to the perversions of nature, Indians some called Pacuaches and others “erased Indians.” Like him: invisible Indians, beings who copied that great canvas of imitations and metamorphoses, the desert. Was he more confined, more isolated out there on the desert ranch than his family was in Disneyland, out of touch as they were with Campazas, with the nation, ignoring everything that occurred outside their high walls, consuming only imported things, watching only cable television? Why was he denied his solitude, his isolation, when he was indifferent to theirs? He who read so much, things that were so beautiful, worlds as perfect as his imagination could desire, infinitely new pasts, futures foretold and already, already enjoyed.

He dreamed of a hare.

A hare is a wild quadruped with long ears and a short tail.

Its fur is reddish, and its offspring are born hairy.

Its feet are longer than those of the rabbit. It runs very quickly because it is very timid.

It does not dig, as other members of the species do. It makes nests, seeking out a stable, warm, respected space where it will be left in peace.

It's a mammal. It's born from milk, desires it again, wants to suckle in darkness, to be sucked, in a nest with no surprises and no one to watch it enjoy itself.

There wasn't a woman in the world who could tolerate his desire. Mariano only wanted, finally, to live physically where he'd always wanted to live by will and where he'd always lived in spirit. On a ranch. With little money, many books, and a few “erased Indians” as silent as he. Alone, because where in the world was there a woman who could eclipse all space but the bedroom, where space and presence coincided. Was Michelina such a woman? Would she respect his solitude? Would she liberate him forever from ambition, inheritance, social obligations, the need to make public appearances?

It wasn't his fault that inside his mouth there lived a blind, hairy, swift, and voracious hare, nesting permanently on his tongue.

7

On her wedding day, Michelina entered the living room of the Tudor-Norman mansion wearing her beautiful old dress, her crinoline, flat-heeled white velvet slippers, and a heavy white veil that completely hid her features. And above the veil, a crown of orange blossoms. She was on the arm of her father, the retired ambassador Don Herminio Laborde. Michelina's mother was unwilling to make the trip north (gossip had it that she disapproved of the marriage but lacked the means to stop it). The grandmother, old as she was, would have made the trip with pleasure.

“I've seen every type of crossbreeding imaginable, and one more, even if it's between a tigress and a gorilla, much less between a dove and a rabbit, isn't going to shock me.”

Her ailments kept her from traveling; somehow, though, she was present in the crinoline, in the veil … Doña Lucila spent a whole month in Houston outfitting herself as if she were the bride, and today she looked like something from a pastry shop. She embodied the wedding cake itself: triangular like a cream pyramid, she was crowned with a cherry hat, her hair a caramel delight, her face a huge, smiling meringue, her breasts a wave of crème Chantilly. And then the dress: draped over her like a burial shroud, it had all the tones of blackberry jam spread over marzipan.

But she did not offer her arm to her son, Mariano. No, it was Leonardo Barroso himself who wrapped Mariano's shoulders in a big embrace. The young man was simply dressed: a beige suit, a blue shirt, and a string tie. Doña Lucila did not lean on her son until the party, the gathering of a multitude of friends, acquaintances, curiosity seekers, all there to attend the wedding of the son of one of the most powerful men, et cetera. Properties, customs offices, real estate deals, wealth and power provided by control over an illusory, crystal border, a porous frontier through which each year pass millions of people, ideas, products—in short, everything (sotto voce: contraband, drugs, counterfeit money, et cetera).

Was there anyone who didn't have something to do with or didn't depend on or hope to serve Don Leonardo Barroso, tsar of the northern frontier? What a shame about his son. There has to be a balance in this life. The son humanizes the father. But the young lady from the capital sold herself, don't tell me otherwise. Human beings are bought, Don Enrique. Put it this way: the buying and selling are humanized, Don Raúl.

Although in those years every possible concession had been made to the Catholic Church, Don Leonardo Barroso maintained his liberal Jacobinism, the old tradition of nineteenth-century Mexican reform and revolution: “I'm a liberal, but I respect religion.”

In their bedroom (to the horror of Doña Lucila), he had a reproduction of Picasso's
Guernica
instead of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. “What ugly scrawls! A child could draw better than that.” Luckily, by then they were sleeping in separate bedrooms, so they each had their own icons over the bed: Pope Paul VI and Jesus, united in their vision of sacrifice, death, and redemption. Don Leonardo never entered a church and held the civil part of the nuptial ceremony in his own house—of course, where else? Even so, the bride's outfit infused the act with a mysterious severity, sacred rather than ecclesiastical.

“Think she's a witch?”

“No, man, just one of those snooty bitches from the capital who come up here to make us look like hicks.”

“Is that the latest fashion?”

“For moths, yes, the very latest.”

“They say she's a real knockout.”

The guests fell silent. The judge said the usual things and read an abbreviated version of Melchor Ocampos's epistle: Obligations, Rights, Mutual Support. All shared, in sickness and in health, joy and suffering—the bed, time, the times. Bodies. Stares. The witnesses signed. The bride and groom signed. Don Leonardo lifted Michelina's veil and brought Mariano's face close to that of his bride. Michelina could not supress an expression of disgust. Then Leonardo kissed the two of them. First, he held his son's face in his hands and brought those lips so esteemed by Michelina, so sexy and so fickle, close to his son's mouth, kissed him with the same intensity Michelina attributed to the father's eyes: I fall in love seriously, I know how to ask for everything because I also know how to give it.