Carlos Fuentes - Adam in Eden

An obscure artist created an inflatable sculpture of Dumbo the elephant on the roof of his Yucatan Avenue house. The statue broke free from its ties and flew over nearby San Martín Park, where it killed an unsuspecting couple. “Elephants are contagious,” the artist said, by way of excusing himself.

Luxury items are being sold at lowered prices: sunglasses, Audis, Porsches, Rolex, Cartier rings, Mont Blanc pens, Prada bags, Zegna shirts, Gucci shoes, Cavalli dresses, and so on. The ad reads: “Better prices for a better image.”

Exports of chilaquiles have risen ninety-two percent. Nobody can explain who, or why anyone, abroad is buying pieces of hard tortilla, but nowadays they come with recipes to make sauces and instructions to season them according to the consumer’s taste. The ad says: “Be patriotic. Export a chilaquil .”

As North American tourism diminishes, Chinese tourism increases. When questioned, the visitors speak about the similarities between Chinese and Mexican cuisine — spicy, small, varied dishes, ideal for each to create a menu to his or her own taste. The surprising truth is that, regardless of what they say, these tourists only eat what they export to us. We asked the minister in charge: Is this good for foreign commerce? We are still waiting for his answer.

Candelaria the Gondolier gives an interview in which she confesses that she was the mistress of some dozen drug traffickers. She was passed from hand to hand. They killed one another. She survived and waited for her next lover. She says that she lived on an islet of Xochimilco, surrounded by flowers and piglets and passing tourist gondolas in the canals. “I guess I’m just bucolic,” she explains.

Yasmine Sulimán, a political refugee who fled from a murderous regime in the Middle East, found work in the José Vasconcelos Library of Mexico City, and moved into a nearby apartment on Mystery Lane (continuation of Reforma). She was murdered yesterday by a crazy library patron who asked her for the complete works of Augusto Monterroso. When he received the book it was so slim that he became enraged and strangled Yasmine.

Sixth grader Jenaro González has admitted to being the Boy-God who preaches on Sundays at the intersection of Insurgentes and Quintana Roo. Our reporters followed him home from the evening assembly then lost him. The next morning they picked up his trail and confronted him at his school on Chapultepec Avenue. The young boy confessed to being the child preacher. All he does is put on a wig of golden curls and a little white robe, and he walks barefoot. In fact, he has porcupine hair and swears that he does what he does following a divine mandate, even if later he can’t remember what he preached. Our clever reporter interviewed him again on Chapultepec this week. The boy with spiky hair repeated this story. But at that precise moment, the Boy-God was preaching to a crowd at the intersection of Insurgentes and Quintana Roo, thus exposing Jenato González as an impostor. Unsolvable mystery?

Our lost cities — of the type called callampas in Chile, villas miseria in Argentina, favelas in Brazil, ranchitos in Caracas, Hoover-villes in the Great Depression — have been baptized Gorozpevilles , (according to the secretaries) an insolent reference to me, Adam Gorozpe, to whom the surrounding poverty of Mexico City is groundlessly attributed, with the obvious aim of slandering and maligning me. There are now similarly lost cities on the outskirts of Guadalajara, Monterrey, Morelia, and Torreón. It is worth noting that centers of organized criminality as notorious as Juárez, Tijuana, and Tampico do not have these shanty towns and tent cities because the drug traffickers in those cities enforce a high degree of discipline that consists in making any non-regulated urban manifestation disappear from one day to the next. “ Gorozpevilles damage our image,” said Don Hipólito el de Santa, a blind old pianist and head of the Desert Cartel. Should one assume that the drug traffickers show respect toward a man of such honest reputation as me? It’s an innocent question.

When we move from our bed to the world at large (from the bedroom to the boardroom in my case), we become aware of the price we must always pay for any joy we’ve experienced in our love life. Nobody willingly deprives himself of love (except, to an extent, masochists, who, after all, love their proud singularity; and sadists, who take their pleasure to extremes that might be harmful to others). Sometimes, love happens naturally without abuse or hardship. We have been together since forever. Both our families predetermined our love. Who else would I marry but the saint of a girlfriend I’ve gone out with forever? Through my Holguín connections, I know of marriages reminiscent of traditional Hindu practice, arranged when the bride and groom were still children. There are ugly young women who supposedly arrive at the wedding altar as virgins. There are others — I’ve surprised them behind curtains, in the backseats of cars, camouflaged by trees — usually with their official boyfriends, sometimes with men I don’t know, who introduce themselves, sometimes proud, sometimes embarrassed, all of whom rush into nuptials and marry with their fictitious virginity intact.

Because a woman is supposed to be a virgin, whereas a man is not. The stud who shows up at his wedding as a virgin is more of a dud. We suspect him of being impotent, or of being gay and passing, or of convincing himself that he’s straight; he could be latent, he could be a mama’s boy. He could simply be chaste, shy, or unaware of a priestly vocation. On the other side of the aisle, the young woman who does not arrive a virgin is a shameless hussy. There are no excuses. The double standard is the standard. In any case, there are arranged marriages and love-matches that are paid for with undesirable consequences in social life. The horny teenager sleeps with the maid, but it never occurs to him — nor would he be allowed — to marry her. Besides, she would not be comfortable around people she was accustomed to serving, although there are cases, oh yes, there are cases. . There are “distinguished” men married to women who are un-. When asked, they give carnal excuses — she satisfies him like no other woman can — but rarely social ones — she grew up poor, but thanks to me she has been elevated to a higher class.

In a conventional marriage like mine, there are no surprises. As I’ve already pointed out, Priscila is clueless; she says things she shouldn’t say when she should say something else, or to play it safe, remain silent. I have already given enough examples to establish her lack of a compass. And whoever is listening to me already knows that my life with Priscila is a masquerade that I put on in order to become, in my public life, what I am not — nor do I care to be — in my private life. In a moment though, you’ll learn how such a reliable situation can lead to unreliable situations.

Then, to repeat what you already know, there is my life with L, an extended pleasure that can be interrupted by spontaneous speeches that return me to non-erotic reality.

For example, L returns stoked from a Luismi concert at the National Auditorium. L’s admiration for the singer is at once singular and plural. What L tells me about Luismi — he’s so handsome, he sings so well, he sure can move — is all the more significant because ten thousand spectators felt the same way. I understand these collective frames of mind, they are also part of politics, and if in a Luismi concert they are harmless, they become dangerous when instead of a singer, there is a politician holding forth from a balcony and offering a crowd hopes as illusory as those Luismi whispers: