Carlos Fuentes - Adam in Eden

Worn out by the Freudettes, Abelardo sought in contrast the women he met through his work in television. He watched the shows, and despite the insipid dialogue (for which he bore some responsibility) some of the actresses seemed not only attractive, but even smart. However, he chose to associate with a homely one — that is, one who played the part of a homely woman — the little actress who was made up with braces on her teeth and peasant braids, and who usually said, “Yes, boss, whatever you say, boss,” as the cameras rolled. Halfheartedly seduced, the actress in question turned out to be a bossy and foul-mouthed woman, and when Abelardo pointed out this contradiction to her, she treated him as a nincompoop for not understanding that an actress on screen is the opposite of what she is in real life and (as she pronounced the phrase) “vicey-versey.” So if Abelardo wanted to find an angelic girl, he should seduce the muwhahaha -gloating villainess who sported the eye patch.

What a load of crap!

After these two failures, Abelardo, this young man in need of female companionship to compensate for the failure of his literary career, who had taken on the vocation of soap-opera script writer to make a living, felt another need as well: to become closer to God so that he might receive divine assistance and escape the contradictions that consumed him. He began by attending evening mass at the Church of the Sacred Family in front of the Chiandoni ice cream parlor, which is where he’d taken his first communion (in the church, that is, not in the ice cream parlor).

One day, kneeling in the third row from the altar, he scrutinized the place. Only with great effort could he concentrate enough to pray. At that hour there was no service held in the empty church.

There was only a woman, kneeling in the first row.

From behind, he observed a long black veil covering her, from head to waist. The woman didn’t move. Abelardo waited for her to make the slightest movement. She remained still. This worried Abelardo. He felt an impulse to go up to the first row and ask what was wrong. But his natural sense of discretion and the rules of courtesy — raised to the power of the Holy Trinity — stopped him.

He kept watch for five, ten, twelve minutes.

The woman didn’t move at all.

Abelardo made up his mind. He rose from the third row and made his way to the first. He slid in next to the immobile woman. The great veil covered her face. He wondered what he should do? Touch her shoulder? Ask her, Ma’am, are you all right? Or be discreet and wait? To pray together in the otherwise empty church. Only, he didn’t know — he needed to know — what the veiled woman was praying over. He couldn’t hear anything, except for a faraway murmur. Her breath was no more detectable than her movement.

Then the voice of his father Don Celestino Holguín came to him in reproach, coward, wimp, jerk-off, while the invisible Priscila whimpered from behind the empty altar, wine-fortified caramel, the three Magi, Insurgentes at the corner of. .

Abelardo realized, in the half-light of the Holy Family, that he’d unintentionally repeated his father’s and his sister’s phrases out loud, driven to a mysterious imitation that had let itself be heard, as if to substitute for the inaudible murmur of the pious woman kneeling beside him.

But when Abelardo said, “Insurgentes at the corner of. .” the woman in question turned her veiled face toward him and finished his sentence: “at the corner of. . Quintana Roo.”

The rest is history.

Was it a comet? Or did the ground shake? Adam Gorozpe has a traumatic physical memory of the 1985 earthquake. He still hadn’t married Priscila, and as a young student, he frequented a house on Durango Street called La Escondida, the Hideaway.

As at a cattle ranch, the new client was welcomed by the bell cow who paraded the young calves by lining them up for him in the living room.

“The customer chooses.”

There was the usual variety. Skinny and fat. Young and not so young. With Chiclets and without Adams. Hardened and inexperienced. The young Adam chose the most nubile girl: with light-brown skin, hair long enough to drape her back all the way to her butt, a fake mole next to her mouth, greenish eyes, and a half-open mouth.

“What’s your name?”

“Zoraida.”

She didn’t say, “Yes boss, whatever you say, boss,” the way the maids in the soap operas did even then.

“Zoraida.”

In the young Adam’s mind appeared the image of the beautiful Moorish princess of the Quixote , described by Cervantes as a woman who arrives mounted on an ass, her face veiled and dressed in a brocade hat, with a long coat covering her from shoulders to feet, shouting “No, no Zoraida! María, María! Zoraida macange !” which means not Zoraida, not at all.

To say no . To be free.

To only say yes . Another type of freedom?

The symmetry that mirrored the literary Zoraida and this real live young woman unsettled the mind of Adam Gorozpe — an earlier incarnation of myself, the narrator, and of whom I speak in the third person because to be young is to be another person — to the point of doubting his purpose of sleeping with a woman who, at first sight, seemed ideal, but who was, as a result, untouchable. Or was that only a mirage? Zoraida didn’t look like the other novices in the brothel. Was it only because she was different that she seemed better , and perhaps even a virgin like the character in the book and therefore untouchable ? Yes or no?

Adam (who I am or who I was) looked for an answer in the girl’s blue-green eyes and found only virgin wells of stupidity. Then he thought he saw all of those poor women whom Adam, single and lonesome, the lonesome and poor Adam, assuaged his male anxieties by frequenting, without even looking at them, convinced that, whether fat or skinny, ugly or beautiful, when the lights went off, it didn’t matter: Adam sought and achieved a fleeting and instant satisfaction, different from masturbation only because his satisfaction was shared and therefore — despite all the warnings of the priests — less guilt-inducing than the heinous solitary pleasure that could lead to premature madness and eventually to sterility (as the priests taught that other man who was me).

“Don’t pay them any mind,” his teacher, the Colombian friar Filopáter, laughed. “Remember that your name is Adam. You are — you will always be — the first man. Your sin is not Eve. It’s the apple. And the apple is greed, rebellion, and pride. Or your sin is knowledge.”

Filopáter flashed a smile of either, I can’t be certain, sarcasm or irony. The difference would be that sarcasm is stupid and easy, whereas irony is difficult and smart. I am grateful to Filopáter for the teachings I apply to my erotic life, the secret life shared with Zoraida and later with L. These teachings allowed me to feign ignorance, so that I could accept a lie masked as the truth until its eventual unmasking.

How could I apply the philosophical education given me by a teacher of religion to my sexual congress with Zoraida? By admitting that irony is the way to lessen the burden of what we can’t deal with, and what we can’t deal with is truth . Although the game doesn’t end with this trope, nor for that matter begin with it, we use irony to entertain a lie in the guise of truth until it is exposed. Because too many lies are passed off as truth.

I am trying to explain the origin of my personality, which you have observed in action in my office, in my home, and unmasked with L. Now, though, the appearance in my life of the sinister thug Góngora, disguised as an agent of order, enhances my appreciation of irony as a movement of the spirit that I can use to resist that lizard-faced Góngora — with his nasty verbal mobility projected from a kind of inner cement — against whom I must use my own brand of irony, the irony of words that can seem like what Góngora is not, nor can be, irony with no defense against satire: to use language a contrario sensu , destabilizing truth in order to short-circuit life’s absolutes.