Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

Will Gingerich did not want to think of himself as a victim of America in the eighties or announce it to his heterogeneous flock. Besides, the sixty-year-old couples who comprised it were not looking at him, even if they did squawk their appreciation, Oh, how exciting! as they read his badge. If only they were as excited about the age and prestige of Dartmouth College. But they neither read the inscription nor asked Will to translate the Latin.

“A voice crying out in the desert”—an index finger accompanied by a modulated, serious voice stopped him smoothly.

Will Gingerich stopped his wandering eyes in order to match his interlocutor with a body. Certainly it was something more than a finger and a voice. Gingerich shook his prematurely balding head. He was afraid of falling into the same malaise that possessed his flock. In front of him he saw a person who was not invisible. Will was on the point of introducing himself in a positive fashion: “Yes, I am a professor of mythology and literature at Dartmouth College.” But it seemed an insult to the institution.

He didn’t have to say a word, because his interlocutor had begun a unilateral evocation: “Ah, those white Dartmouth winters. Really a white hell, which is what José Clemente Orozco said when he went up to paint the frescoes in the Baker Library during the thirties. Did you ever see them?”

Gingerich said he had. He realized that the person speaking to him had not started this conversation because he thought Gingerich had bought his jacket at some university souvenir stand out of nostalgia, or a desire to impress.

“That’s why I took a job at Dartmouth. Those murals are a strange presence in the cold and mountains of New England. Orozco would be normal in California because California looks more and more like an Orozco mural. But, in New England, it was a pleasure for me to write and read protected by the murals.”

“For you, the murals were de luxe bodyguards.”

“Yes.” The professor laughed. “Orozco is an artistic bodyguard.”

He could not refrain from carefully scrutinizing the tall, thin man dressed in a tasteful combination of open-necked shirt, sports jacket, white trousers, mahogany belt with heavy buckle, and blucher moccasins, doubtlessly purchased from L. L. Bean. In one hand, and with no sign of nervousness, the man, who introduced himself as D. C. Buckley, held a Panama hat, which from time to time he comically twirled on one finger.

Buckley raised his other hand to a thin, hard-edged face, like the one in the old Arrow shirt ads, and ruffled his hair the color of old honey. He couldn’t be more than thirty-five years old, Gingerich (who, at forty-two, felt old) estimated, but his hair was old, prophetic, as if an ancient Seminole chief had lent it to him.

“Look, old salt,” he said to Professor Gingerich with the immediacy of the eternal frontiersman, “I suspect you’ve satisfied your primary obligations by this point. I’d rather be nonallusive, and I hope you wouldn’t think it illiberal of me (at least) when I assure you that your flock will not be needing your services for the time being.”

He posed and paused, looking at the sheer cliffs of La Quebrada, which were so highly illuminated by spotlights and torches that they ended up looking as if they were made of cardboard.

“First, they’ll numb their tongues and palates with these appalling cocktails until they’re quite immune to any kind of culinary offering. Later on they’ll eat — because they’ve demanded it, and, because they’ve demanded it, the trip organizers have provided food — baby food: pureed things, bottled dressings, vanilla ice cream, and cold water — and after a while they will be ready to fix their distracted gaze on the divers who plunge off the cliffs. The heights they dive from will be the main attraction, not what takes place in the heart of the Acapulco boy who, like you, only does what he must in order to eat. Don’t you agree?”

Gingerich said it wasn’t hard to guess that a university professor working as tourist guide in Mexico had to be doing it out of sheer necessity. “But,” he hastened to add, “at least I’m trying to kill two birds with one stone.

“I came here because I’m finishing a monograph on the universal myth of the vagina dentata.”

“If it’s universal, why did you want to come here specifically?” asked Buckley critically.

“Because this is where the Acapulco Institute is located,” said Will, as if the institute itself were a universal myth. He blushingly realized he’d been talking like a pedant and added, “The Acapulco Institute has amassed all the documentation relevant to this myth, Mr. Buckley.”

“For God’s sake, call me D.C.”

“Sure, D.C. You can understand why this field is not one that gets much support. Government opposes it. And the women who keep the cult alive would have anyone who even hinted anything about it killed.”

“My favorite detective, Sam Spade, says that only a madman would contravene the sentiments of a Mexican woman. The consequences, to put it that way, would be dangerous; illiberal at least.”

Buckley signaled that the dialogue was coming to an end by twirling his Panama hat: “If you agree, my dear professor, we can kill one stone with two birds, ha ha. I’ll accompany you to the Acapulco Institute if you go with me to investigate vaginas, dentatae or otherwise, to be found here in Acapulco, ha ha!”

And he clapped his Panama hat on his head at a rakish angle.

In D. C. Buckley’s swift Akutagawa coupé, they drove down the steep and twisted road from La Quebrada to the bananafied stench of the seawall road. Gingerich consulted his faithful Filofax with the seal of Dartmouth College embossed on its cover: the Acapulco Institute was on Christopher Columbus Street, between Prince Henry the Navigator and Ferdinand and Isabella Street, in the — the only name missing — Magellan district. The Mexicans were exploiting the didactic aspect of street names to the maximum, the professor noted, and then dared to ask D. C. Buckley what brought him to visit this country.

“You know, old salt. It’s possible, as Henry James wrote, to be faithful without being requited.”

Buckley said all that without taking his narrow and always unperturbed eyes off the twists and turns of the highway.

“No, no,” said Gingerich, amicably shaking his head. “Don’t think I’m some romantic gringo looking for the golden age and the noble savage.”

“It would be illiberal of me to think anything of the sort, old salt,” said Buckley. “I’m a native of New York and Adjacent Islands. I’m a member of the Anar Chic Party of the North American Nations. And though you might not believe in primitive man, that’s what I’m looking for here: an immersion in primigenial sensations, but with primitive woman, ha ha. And you, to which of the nations do you belong?”

“I left Mexamerica when it became independent. I’m too frugal to be from New York and the Islands, and too liberal to be a Dixiecrat. I think I have too much imagination to be part of the Chicago-Philadelphia Steel Axis, and I know I have too much of a sense of humor to sink into the hyperbole of the Republic of Texas, so I joined up with New England.”

“Have you ever heard of Pacífica?” Buckley twisted his mouth.

“I don’t know if I have any right to. In any case, I’m afraid.”

“Well, here we are. But there’s no sign of your Acapulco Institute anywhere.”

“No, they don’t exactly advertise. You have to go straight in.”

“It’s open at night?”

“Only at night. That’s what the pamphlet says. I’ve never been here before.”

They got out of the Akutagawa. The Acapulco night smelled of dead fruit. They stopped in front of a decayed building. They walked up some stairs, holding on to the rusted railings for support.