The Crystal Frontier (4 page)

The lips separated, and Don Leonardo caressed his son's head, kissed him on that disgusting mouth, Normita, while Doña Lucila turned pale and wished she were dead, and then, showing off his daring and his personality—not for nothing is he Leonardo Barroso—with his son's drool still on his lips, he raised again the lowered veil of the bride—a real beauty, Rosalba, you were right!—and gave her a long and terrible kiss that frankly, my dear, had absolutely nothing of the father-in-law (or godfather, for that matter) in it.

What a morning, I tell you, what a morning! I wouldn't have missed it for the world! Campazas will never be the same after this wedding!

8

The Lincoln convertible, this time with its top up, rapidly crossed the cold, silent evening desert, filling it with the noise of tires and motor, frightening the hares, which leapt far away from the straight highway, the uninterrupted line to the frontier—crossed the desert in order to break the illusory crystal divider, the glass membrane between Mexico and the United States, and continue along the superhighways of the north to the enchanted city, temptation in the desert, illuminated, brilliant, with a Neiman Marcus, a Saks, a Cartier, and a Marriott, where a luxury suite awaited the bride and groom: champagne and baskets of fruit, a sitting room, spacious closets, a king-size bed, lots of mirrors in which to admire Michelina, a pink marble bath tub in which to bathe with her—her buttocks were larger than they seemed, her legs thinner, like a thrush's—oh, woman of tempestuous eyes, immobile little nose, and nervous nostrils through which night escapes from you, parted lips, moist, through which my tongue gets lost without finding coral reefs or stalactite caves or ruined Gothic vaults—there is only the tickle of your cleft chin, my precious, the announcement of your other duplicities. Those I know I caress slowly so that nothing fades between us, so that everything lasts amid expectation, surprise, the desire for more and more, yes, Godfather, give me more, nothing can separate us now, Godfather, you said so, remember? Every time you see me I want it to be the first. Oh, Leonardo, it's that I fell in love with your eyes because they said so many things.

“I know how to ask for everything because I also know how to give everything. What do you say to me, capital girl?”

“That same thing, Godfather, that…”

Through the half-opened window came a song sung by Luis Miguel, “I need you, need you a lot, I don't know you…” How could Leonardo and Michelina know that that music was coming from an “erased” Indian village, Pacuaches, where Mariano read books and listened to music and went into ecstasy guessing which birds were singing at four o'clock in the morning. That morning, a jet crossed the heavens, and the birds fell silent forever. She was no longer there …

2

PAIN

For Julio Ortega

1

Juan Zamora asked me to tell this story while he kept his back turned. What he means is that he wants to have his back to the reader the whole time. He says he's ashamed. Or, as he puts it himself, “I'm in pain.” “Pain” as a synonym for “shame” is a peculiarity of Mexican speech, comparable to saying “senior citizens” for “old people”—so as not to offend—or saying “He's in a bad way” to soften the idea that someone's illness is terminal. Shame causes pain; sometimes pain causes shame.

So Juan Zamora will not offer you a view of his face over the course of this story. You'll be able to see only the nape of his neck, his back. I won't say “his ass,” because that, too, is a loaded term in Mexico. Especially in the sense of “offering” your ass to someone, the lowest act of cowardice, a yielding or a type of abject courtesy. That's not the case with Juan Zamora. He wears a big university sweatshirt, size XXL, decorated in front with the emblem of the university in question, the kind of sweatshirt that hangs down to your thighs (though he wears it tucked into his jeans). No, Juan Zamora insists I tell you he won't be offering anything. He only wants to emphasize that his shame is equal to his pain. He doesn't blame anyone. It is true that he touched a world and that the world touched him.

But after all, everything that happened passed through him and happened inside him. This is what counts.

The story takes place during the time of the Mexican oil boom, at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s. Right from the start, that explains part of the pain-shame identification Juan Zamora is talking about. Shame because we celebrated the boom like a bunch of nouveaux riches. Pain because the wealth was badly used. Shame because the president said our problem now was to administer our wealth. Pain because the poor kept on getting poorer. Shame because we became frivolous spendthrifts, slaves of vulgar whims and our comic macho posturing. Pain because we were incapable of administering even our shame. Pain and shame because we were no good at being rich; the only things appropriate for us are poverty, dignity, effort. In Mexico, there have always been corrupt authoritarian figures with too much power. But they are forgiven everything if they are at least serious. (Is there one corruption that's serious and another that's frivolous?) Frivolity is intolerable, unforgivable, the mockery of all those who've been screwed. That's the source of the pain and the shame of those years when we were millionaires for a day, then woke up broke, out in the street, tears of laughter pouring down our faces before we began to laugh with pain.

Juan Zamora has his back to you. When he was twenty-three, he got to study at Cornell, thanks to a scholarship. He was a dedicated pre-med student at the National Preparatory School and then at the National University, and he swears to you that that would have been enough for him if his mother hadn't got it into her head that during the Mexican boom period it was necessary to do some postgrad work at a Yankee university.

“Your father never knew how to take advantage of an opportunity. He was Don Leonardo Barroso's administrative lawyer for twenty years and died without a penny to his name. What could he have been thinking about? Well, not about you or me, Juanito, you can be sure of that.”

“What did he say to you?”

“That honesty is its own reward. That he was an honorable professional. That he wasn't going to betray Mario de la Cueva and his other professors at the law school. That he'd been taught that law is an honorable profession. That you cannot defend the law if you're corrupt yourself. ‘But it's not illegal, Gonzalo,' I'd say to your father, ‘to accept a payment for doing favors. It's no crime drawing a matter to the attention of Minister Barroso. Everyone in government gets rich but you!'

“‘That's called a bribe, Lelia. It's a triple deception, besides being a lie. If the matter develops, it looks as if I was paid to move it along. If it fails, I look like a crook. In either case, I deceive the minister, the nation, and myself.'

“‘A little public-works contract, Gonzalo, that's all I'm asking you to request. You get your commission and bye-bye. No one will find out. With that money we could buy a house in Anzures. And get out of Colonia Santa María. We could send Juanito to a gringo university. What I mean is, the boy's a very good student and it would be a shame for him to go to waste with that riffraff at the National University.'”

Juan tells me to say that his mother recounted those things with a bitter smile on her face, a grimace that her son had only seen, from time to time, on cadavers he studied at school.

His father, Gonzalo Zamora, CPA, had to die for his widow to ask a single favor from Don Leonardo Barroso: would he see if he could get a scholarship for Juanito to study medicine in the United States? With great elegance, Don Leonardo said, Why, of course, he would be delighted to take care of it—why, that's the least the memory of good old Zamora deserved, such an honest lawyer, such a diligent functionary.

2

I'm following Juan Zamora, the Mexican student with his gray sweatshirt, through the sad streets of Ithaca, New York. I have no idea what he's looking for since there's so little to see here. The main street has barely any stores, two or three very bad restaurants, and immediately after that come mountains and gorges. Juanito feels—almost—as if he's in Mexico, in San Juan del Río or Tepeji, places he'd visited from time to time on holiday to breathe the air of forests and gorges, far from the pollution of the capital. The gorge in Ithaca is a deep and forbidding ravine, apparently a seductive abyss as well. Ithaca is famous for the number of suicides committed by desperate students who jump off the bridge spanning the gorge. One joke says that no professor will fail a bad student, for fear he'll dive into the chasm.

Since there isn't much to see around here on Sunday, Juan Zamora is going back to the house where he's living. It's a beautiful place of pale pink brick with a blue slate roof, surrounded by a well-kept lawn that becomes gravel around the house and extends into a tangled, thin, and somber woods behind it. Ivy climbs up the pink brick.

The seasons make up for Ithaca's lack of charm. Now it's late fall, and the forest is denuded, the trees on the mountainsides look like burned toothpicks, and the sky comes two or three steps down to communicate to all of us the silence and pain of God in the face of the fleeting death of the world. But winter in Ithaca gives a voice back to nature, which takes revenge on God by dressing in white, scattering frozen dust and snow stars, spreading large ivory mantles like sumptuous sheets on the earth—and an answer to heaven. Spring explodes, rapid and agonizing, in handfuls of splendid roses that perfume the air and leave a flash of forgotten things before summer takes over, heavy, sleepy, and slow, unlike the swift spring. Idle and lazy summer of stagnant waters, pesky mosquitoes, heavy, humid breathing, and intensely green mountains.

The gorge, too, reflects the seasons, but it also devours them, collapses them, and subjects them to the implacable death of gravity, a suffocating, final embrace of all things. The gorge is the vertigo in the order of this place.

Alongside the gorge, there is a munitions factory, a horrifying building of blackened brick with obscene chimneys, almost an evocation of the ugliness of the Nazis' “night and fog.” The pistols produced by the Ithaca factory were the official side arm of the army of El Salvador, which is why officers and men there called them “itaquitas”—little Ithacas.

Juan Zamora asks me to tell all this while he turns his back on us because he was received as a guest in the residence of a prosperous businessman who in former years was connected with the munitions factory but now prefers to be an adviser to law firms negotiating defense contracts between the factory owners and the U.S. government. Tarleton Wingate and his family, in the days when Juan Zamora comes to live with them, are excited about the triumph of Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter. They watch television every night and applaud the decisions of the new president, his movie-star smile, his desire to put a halt to excessive government control, his optimism in declaring that a new day is dawning in America, his firmness in stopping the advances of Communism in Central America.

Wingate is a likable giant with fewer wrinkles on his fresh, juvenile face than an old saddle. His dull, sandy-colored hair contrasts with the platinum blond of his wife, Charlotte, and with the burnished, reddish-chestnut hair of the daughter of the house, Becky, who is thirteen. When the Wingates all sit down to watch television, they kindly invite Juan to join them. He doesn't understand if they are pained when terrible pictures of the war in El Salvador appear—nuns murdered along the roadside, rebels murdered by paramilitary death squads, an entire village machine-gunned by the army as the people flee across a river.

Juan Zamora turns his back to the screen and assures them that in Mexico they applaud President Reagan for saving us all from Communism, just as much as people do here. He also tells them that Mexico is interested in growing and prospering, as they can clearly see in the massive development of the oil industry by the government of López Portillo.

The gringos smile when they hear that, because they believe that prosperity is an inoculation against Communism. Juan Zamora wants to ask Mr. Wingate how his business with the Pentagon is going but decides he'd better keep quiet. What he insinuates first and then emphatically declares is that his family, the Zamoras, are adapting perfectly to Mexico's new wealth because they have always had lands, haciendas—the word has great prestige in the United States, where they pronounce the silent
h
—and oil wells. He realizes the Wingates don't know that oil is the property of the state in Mexico and are amazed at everything he tells them. Dogmatically but innocently, the Wingates believe that the expression
free world
is synonymous with
free enterprise.

They have received Juan with pleasure, as part of a tradition. For a long time, foreign students have been hospitably taken into private homes near campuses in the United States. It surprises no one that rich young Latin Americans seek out such homes as extensions of their own and use them to accelerate their assimilation of English.

“There are kids,” Tarleton Wingate assures him, “who have learned English spending hours in front of a TV set.”

They all watch Peter Sellers's movie
Being There,
where the protagonist knows nothing except what he learns watching television, which is why he passes as a genius.

The Wingates ask Juan Zamora if Mexican television is good, and he has to answer truthfully that it isn't, that it's boring, vulgar, and censored, and that a very good writer, widely read by young people, Carlos Monsiváis, calls it “the idiot box.” That seemed hilarious to Becky, who says she's going to tell it to her class—the idiot box. Don't put on intellectual airs, Charlotte tells her daughter; “egghead” she calls her, smiling as she tousles her hair. The redhead protests, don't tangle my hair, I'll have to fix it again before I baby-sit tonight. Juan Zamora is amazed at how gringo children work from the time they are young, baby-sitting, delivering papers, or selling lemonade during the summer. “It's to teach them the Protestant work ethic,” Mr. Wingate says solemnly. And him? How did you ever grow up without television? Becky asks. Juan Zamora understands very well what Mr. Wingate is saying. Being rich and aristocratic in Mexico is a matter of land, haciendas, farm laborers, an elegant lifestyle, horses, dressing up as a
charro,
and having lots of servants—that's what being wealthy means in Mexico. Not watching television. And since his hosts have exactly the same idea in their heads, they understand it, praise it, envy it, and Becky goes out to earn five dollars as a babysitter. Charlotte puts on her apron to cook dinner, and Tarleton, with a profound sense of obligation, sits down to read the number-one book on the
New York Times
best-seller list, a spy novel that happens to confirm his paranoia about the red menace.