Carlos Fuentes - The Crystal Frontier

For the record, Dionisio said he wasn’t anti-Yankee in this matter or in any other, even though every child born in Mexico knew that in the nineteenth century the gringos had stripped us of half our territory — California, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. The generosity of Mexico, Dionisio would habitually say, shows in its not holding a grudge for that terrible despoiling, although the memory lingered on, while the gringos didn’t even remember that war, much less know its unfairness. Dionisio spoke of “the United States of Amnesia.”

From time to time he thought humorously about the historical irony that caused Mexico to lose all that territory in 1848 through abandonment, indifference, and a sparse population. Now (the elegant, well-dressed, distinguished silver-haired critic smiled roguishly), we were on the way to recovering it, thanks to what could be termed Mexico’s chromosomal imperialism. Millions of Mexicans worked in the United States, and thirty million people in the United States spoke Spanish. But at the same time, how many Mexicans spoke decent English? Dionisio knew of only two, Jorge Castañeda and Carlos Fuentes, for which reason both seemed suspicious to him. For the same reason, the exclamation of the Spanish bullfighter Cagancho seemed admirable to him: “Speak English? God help me!” Since the gringos had screwed Mexico in 1848 with their “manifest destiny” so now Mexico would give them a dose of their own medicine, reconquering them with the most Mexican of weapons, linguistic, racial, and culinary.

And Rangel himself, how did he communicate with his English-speaking university audiences? In an accent he learned from the actor Gilberto Roland, born Luis Alonso in Coahuila, and with a profusion of literal translations that delighted his listeners:

“Let’s see if like you snore you sleep.”

“Beggars can’t carry big sticks.”

“You don’t have a mom or a dad or even a little dog to bark at you.”

All this just so you’ll understand with what conflicted feelings Dionisio “Baco” Rangel carried out, twice a year, the tours that took him from one U.S. university to another, where the horror of sitting down to dinner at five in the afternoon was nothing compared with the terror he felt when he realized what, at an hour when Mexicans were barely finishing their midday meal, was being served at the academic tables. Generally, the banquet would begin with a salad of fainting lettuce crowned with raspberry jam; that touch, he’d been told several times in Missouri, Ohio, and Massachusetts, was very sophisticated, very gourmet. The well-known rubber chicken followed, uncuttable and unchewable, served with tough string beans and mashed potatoes redolent of the envelope they had just recently abandoned. Dessert was a fake strawberry shortcake, more a strawberry bath sponge. Finally, watered-down coffee through which you could see the bottom of the cup and admire the geological circles deposited there by ten thousand servings of poison. The best thing, Dionisio told himself, was a furtive sip of the iced tea served at all hours and on any occasion; it was insipid, but at least the lemon slices were tasty. Rangel sucked them avidly so he wouldn’t come down with a cold.

Was it because they were cheap? Was it because they lacked imagination? Dionisio Rangel decided to become a Sherlock Holmes and investigate what passed for “cuisine” in the United States by secretly carrying out an informal survey of hospitals, mental asylums, and prisons. What did he discover was served in all those places? Salad with raspberry jam, rubbery chicken, spongy cake, and translucent coffee. It was, he concluded, a matter of generalized institutional food, exceptions to which would probably be surprising, if not memorable. Professors, criminals, the insane, and the sick set the tone for U.S. menus — or was it perhaps that the universities, madhouses, jails, and hospitals were all supplied by the same caterer?

Dionisio smiled as he shaved after his morning bath — his best ideas always came to him then. Rubbing Barbasol onto his cheeks, he imagined a historical explanation. National cuisines are great only when they arise from the people. In Mexico, Italy, France, or Spain, you need have no fear when you walk into the first roadside restaurant, the humblest bistro, the busiest tavola calda, because you’re certain of finding something good to eat there. It’s not the rich, Rangel would say to anyone who cared to listen, who dictate culinary taste from above; it’s the people, the worker, the peasant, the artisan, the truck driver who, from below, invent and consecrate the dishes that make up the great cuisines. And they do it out of intimate respect for what they put in their mouths.

Patience, time, Dionisio would explain in his classes, standing in front of an uncomprehending herd of young people with chewing gum in their mouths and baseball caps on their heads. You need time and patience to prepare a lapin faisandé in France, need to let the rabbit spoil to the point when it attains its tastiest, most savory tartness (ugh!); you need love and patience to prepare a buitlacoche soufflé in Mexico, using the black, cancerous corn fungus that in other, less sophisticated latitudes is fed to the hogs (yuck!).

By the same token, you can’t have time or patience when you’re trying to fry a couple of eggs in a covered wagon and you’re attacked by redskins and must pray for the cavalry to arrive and save you (whoopee!). Dionisio would be speaking to dozens of Beavis and Butt-head wanna-bes, the offspring of Wayne’s World, legions of young people convinced that being an idiot is the best way to pass through the world recognized by no one (in some cases) or everyone (in others). Masters always of an anarchic liberty and a stupid natural wisdom redeemed by an imbecility devoid of pretensions or complications. Knowing consisted in not knowing. The depressing lesson of the movie Forrest Gump. To be always available for whatever chance may bring …

How could the successors of Forrest Gump understand that, when a single Mexican city, Puebla, can boast of more than eight hundred dessert recipes, it is because of generations and generations of nuns, grandmothers, nannies, and old maids, the work of patience, tradition, love, and wisdom? How, when their supreme refinement consisted in thinking that life is like a box of chocolates, a varied pre-fabrication, a fatal Protestant destiny disguised as free will? Beavis and Butt-head, that pair of half-wits, would have finished off the nuns of Puebla by pelting them with stale cake, the grandmothers they would have locked in closets to die of hunger and thirst, and of course they would have raped the nannies. And finally, a favor of the highest order for the leftover young ladies.

Baco’s students stared at him as if he were insane and sometimes, to show him the error of his ways and with the air of people protecting a lunatic or bringing relief to the needy, would invite him to a McDonald’s after class. How were they going to understand that a Mexican peasant eats well even if he eats little? Abundance, that’s what his gringo students were celebrating, showing off in front of this weird Mexican lecturer, their cheeks swollen with mushy hamburgers, their stomachs stuffed with wagon-wheel pizzas, their hands clutching sandwiches piled as high as the ones Dagwood made in his comic strip, leaning as dangerously as the Tower of Pisa. (There’s even an imperialism in comic strips. Latin America gets U.S. comics but they never publish ours. Mafalda, Patoruzú, the Superwise Ones, and the Burrón family never travel north. Our minimal revenge is to give Spanish names to the gringo funnies. Jiggs and Maggie become Pancho and Ramona, Mutt and Jeff metamorphose into Benitín and Eneas, Goofy is Tribilin, Minnie Mouse becomes Ratoncita Mimi, Donald Duck is Pato Pascual, and Dagwood and Blondie are Lorenzo and Pepita. Soon, however, we won’t even have that freedom, and Joe Palooka will always be Joe Palooka, not our twisted-around Pancho Tronera.)