Carlos Fuentes - The Crystal Frontier

Abundance. The society of abundance. Dionisio Rangel wants to be very frank and to admit to you that he’s neither an ascetic nor a moralist. How could a sybarite be an ascetic when he so sensually enjoys a clemole in radish sauce? But his culinary peak, exquisite as it is, has a coarse, possessive side about which the poor food critic doesn’t feel guilty, since he is only — he begs you to understand — a passive victim of U.S. consumer society.

He insists it isn’t his fault. How can you escape, even if you spend only two months of the year in the United States, when wherever you happen to be — a hotel, motel, apartment, faculty club, studio, or, in extreme cases, trailer — fills up in the twinkling of an eye with electronic mail, coupons, every conceivable kind of offer, insignificant prizes intended to assure you that you’ve won a Caribbean cruise, unwanted subscriptions, mountains of paper, newspapers, specialized magazines, catalogs from L. L. Bean, Sears, Neiman Marcus?

As a response to that avalanche of papers, multiplied a thousandfold by E-mail — requests for donations, false temptations — Dionisio decided to abandon his role as passive recipient and assume that of active transmitter. Instead of being the victim of an avalanche, he proposed to buy the mountain. Why not acquire everything the television advertisements offered — diet milkshakes, file systems, limited-edition CDs with the greatest songs of Pat Boone and Rosemary Clooney, illustrated histories of World War II, complicated devices for toning and developing the muscles, plates commemorating the death of Elvis Presley or the wedding of Charles and Diana, a cup commemorating the bicentennial of American independence, fake Wedgwood tea sets, frequent-flyer offerings from every airline, trinkets left over from Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays, the tawdry costume jewelry purveyed by the Home Shopping Channel, exercise videos with Cathy Lee Crosby, all the credit cards that ever were … all of it, he decided, was irresistible, was for him, was available, even the magic detergents that cleaned anything, even an emblematic stain of mole poblano.

Secretly, he knew the reasons for this new acquisitive voraciousness. One was a firm belief that if, expansively, generously, he accepted what the United States offered him— weight-loss programs, detergents, songs of the fifties — it would ultimately accept what he was offering: the patience and taste to concoct a good escabeche victorioso. The other was a plan to get even for all the garbagey prizes he’d been accumulating — again, passively — by going on television and competing on quiz shows. His culinary knowledge was infinite, so he could easily win and not only in the gastronomic category.

Cuisine and sex are two indispensable pleasures, the former more than the latter. After all, you can eat without love, but you can’t love without eating. And if you understand the culinary palate you know everything: what went into a kiss or a crab chilpachole involved historical, scientific, and even political wisdom. Where were cocktails born? In Campeche, among English sailors who mixed their drinks with a local condiment called “cock’s tail.” Who consecrated chocolate as an acceptable beverage in society? Louis XIV at Versailles, after the Aztec drink had been considered a bitter poison for two centuries. Why in old Russia was the potato prohibited by the Orthodox Church? Because it wasn’t mentioned in the Bible and therefore had to be a creation of the devil. In one sense the Orthodox clergy were right: the potato is the source of that diabolical liquor vodka.

The truth is, Rangel entered these shows more to become known among larger audiences than to win the washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and— mirabile visu! — trips to Acapulco with which his successes were rewarded.

Besides, he had to pass the time.

A silver-haired old fox, an interesting man, with the looks of a mature movie star, Dionisio “Baco” Rangel was, at the age of fifty-one, something of a copy of that cinematic model personified by the late Arturo de Córdova, in whose films marble stairways and plastic flamingoes filled the background of neurotic love scenes featuring innocent fifteen-year-old girls and vengeful forty-year-old mothers, all of them reduced to their proper size by the autumnal star’s memorable and lapidary phrase: “It doesn’t have the slightest importance.” It should be pointed out that Dionisio, with greater self-generosity, would say to himself as he shaved every morning (Barbasol) that he had no reason to envy Vittorio De Sica, who moved beyond the movies of Fascist Italy, with their white telephones and satin sheets, to become the supreme neorealist director of shoeshine boys, stolen bicycles, and old men with only dogs for company. But still, how handsome, how elegant he was, how surrounded by Ginas, Sophias, and Claudias! It was to that sum of experience and that smoothness of appearance that our compatriot Dionisio “Baco” Rangel aspired as he stored all his American products in a suburban warehouse outside the border city of San Diego, California.

The problem was that girls no longer flocked to our autumnal star. The problem was that his style clashed badly with theirs. The problem was that as he stared at himself in the mirror (Barbasol, no Brilliantine, no brilliant ideas) he had to accept that after a Certain Age a star must be circumspect, elegant, calm — all so as not to succumb to the maximum absurdity of the aged Don Juan, Fernando Rey, in Buñuel’s Viridiana, who possesses virgins only if he dopes them up first and then plays them Handel’s Messiah.

“Unhandel me, sire.”

Dionisio had therefore to spend many solitary hours, on his lecture tours and in television studios, wasting his melancholy on futile reflections. California was his inevitable zone of operations, and there he spent a season passing time in Los Angeles observing the flow of cars through that headless city’s freeway system, imagining it as the modern equivalent of a medieval joust, each driver a flawless knight and each car an armor-covered charger. But his concentrated observation aroused suspicion, and the police arrested him for loitering near the highways: Was he a terrorist?

American oddities began to command his attention. He was pleased to discover that beneath the commonplaces about a uniform, robotic society devoid of culinary personality (article of faith), there roiled a multiform, eccentric world, quasi-medieval in its corrosive ferment against an order once imposed by Rome and its Church and now by Washington and its Capitol. How would the country put itself in order when it was full of religious lunatics who believed beyond doubt that faith, not surgery, would take care of a tumor in the lungs? How, when the country was full of people who dared not exchange glances in the street lest the stranger turn out to be an escaped paranoid authorized to kill anyone who didn’t totally agree with his ideas, or a murderer released from an overcrowded mental hospital or jail, or a vengeful homosexual armed with HIV-laden syringes, a neo-Nazi skinhead ready to slit the throat of a dark-skinned person, a libertarian militiaman prepared to finish off the government by blowing up federal buildings, a country where teenage gangs were better armed than the police, exercising their constitutional right to carry rocket launchers and blow off the head of a neighbor’s child?

Sliding along the streets of America, Dionisio happily gave to that single country the name of an entire continent, gladly sacrificing in favor of a name with lineage, position, history (like Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Nicaragua …) that name without a name, the ghostlike “United States of America,” which, his friend the historian Daniel Cosío Villegas said, was a moniker like “The Neighborhood Drunkard.” Or, as Dionisio himself thought, like a mere descriptor, like “Third Floor on the Right.”