Carlos Fuentes: The Crystal Frontier

To go on being “decent” people, to maintain the style to which they were accustomed, their culture, and even— though this was pure delusion — their name in the world, the family took refuge in the diplomatic corps. In Paris, Michelina’s father was assigned to accompany the young deputy Leonardo Barroso, and with each glass of burgundy, with each monstrous dinner in the Grand Véfour, with each tour of the Loire châteaus, Don Leonardo’s gratitude toward the diplomatic attaché of venerable family grew, eventually extending to the attache’s wife and immediately thereafter to his newborn daughter. They didn’t ask; he himself made the offer: “Let me be the kid’s godfather.”

Michelina Laborde e Ycaza, the young lady from the capital. You all know her because her photo’s been in the society pages so often. A classic creole face: white skin but with a Mediterranean shadow — olive and refined sugar — perfect symmetry in her large black eyes protected by cloudlike eyelids and the slightest of tempests in the shadows beneath, symmetry in her straight, immobile nose, vibrant only in the disquiet of those tempests, on their disquieting wings, as if a vampire had tried to escape from the night enclosed in that luminous body. Also her cheekbones, seemingly as fragile as quail eggs behind her smiling skin, trying almost to open that skin beyond the time allotted and expose her perfect skull. And finally, Michelina’s long black hair, floating, glistening, scented more from shampoo than from hair spray — the wondrous, fatal annunciation of her other, hidden soft hair. Every time, every thing divided: her upper lip, the deep comma in her chin, the separation of her skin.

Don Leonardo thought all this when he saw her grown up, and instantly he said to himself, I want her for my son.

Well-traveled, sophisticated, the young lady from the capital observed the features of Campazas without surprise. Its dusty town square and humble but proud church with broken walls and an erect carved facade that proclaimed, The Baroque came this far, to the very edge of the desert — to this point and no farther. Beggars and stray dogs. Magically supplied and beautiful markets, loudspeakers offering bargains and crooning out boleros. The empire of soft drinks: does any country consume more carbonated water? Smoke from black-tobacco cigarettes, oval and strongly tropical. The smell of sugarcoated peanuts.

“Don’t be surprised at the way your godmother looks,” Don Leonardo was saying, as if to draw her attention away from the ugliness of the city. “She decided to get a face-lift and even went all the way to Brazil to be done by the famous Pitanguy. When she came back, I didn’t recognize her.”

“I don’t remember her very well.” Michelina smiled.

“I almost sent her back. ‘This isn’t my wife. This is not the woman I fell in love with.’”

“I can’t compare her,” said Michelina, in an involuntary tone of jealousy.

He laughed, but Michelina again recalled old-fashioned styles, the crinolines that dissimulated the body and the veil that hid the face, making it mysterious and even desirable. In the old days, lights were low. Veils and candles … There were too many nuns in the family history, but few things fired Michelina’s imagination more than the vocation of the cloister and, once one was safe inside it, the liberation of the powers of imagination — the freedom to love anyone, desire anyone, pray to anyone, confess anything. When she was twelve, she wanted to enter some old colonial convent, pray a lot, flagellate herself, bathe in cold water, and pray some more: “I always want to be a girl. Blessed Virgin, help me. Don’t turn me into a woman.”

The chauffeur honked as they came to an immense wrought-iron gate, the kind she’d seen outside studios in movies about Hollywood. Correct, her godfather said, around here they call our neighborhood Disneyland. People in the north love to make wisecracks, but the fact is, we have to live somewhere, and nowadays you need protection, no way around it. You’ve got to defend yourself and your property.

“What wouldn’t I give to leave the doors wide open the way we used to here in the north. But now even the gringos need armed guards and police dogs. Being rich is a sin.”

Before: Michelina’s gaze wandered from her memory of Mexican colonial convents and French châteaus to the real vision of this group of walled mansions, each one half fortress, half mausoleum, mansions with Greek capitals, columns, and svelte statues of gods wearing fig leaves; Arabian mosques with little fountains and plaster minarets; reproductions of Tara, with its neoclassical portico. Not a single tile, not one adobe brick — only marble, cement, stone, plaster, and more wrought iron, gates behind gates, gates within gates, gates facing gates, a labyrinth of gates, and the inaudible buzz of garage doors that opened with a stench of old gasoline, involuntarily urinated by the herds of Porsches, Mercedes, BMWs that reposed like mastodons within the caves of the garages.

The Barrosos’ house was Tudor-Norman, with a double roof of blue slate, exposed timbers, and leaded glass windows everywhere. The only things missing were the Avon River in the garden and Anne Boleyn’s head in some trunk.

The Mercedes stopped and the driver tumbled out running. He resembled a small cube with the face of a raccoon, a swift die dressed in navy blue who buttoned his jacket as he hurried to open the car door for the patrón and his god-daughter. Michelina and Don Leonardo got out. He offered her his arm and led her to the entrance. The door opened. Doña Lucila Barroso smiled at Michelina (Don Leonardo had exaggerated — the lady looked older than he) and hugged her; behind stood the son, Marianito, the heir, who never traveled, who went out infrequently, whom she’d never met but whom it was high time she did meet, a very withdrawn young man, very serious, very formal, very fond of reading, very given to hiding out on the ranch to read day and night — it was high time he went out a bit, he’d already turned twenty-one. That very night the young lady from the capital and the provincial, the goddaughter and the son, could go out dancing on the other side of the border, in the United States, half an hour away from here, dance, get to know each other, learn about each other. Of course. What could be more logical?

Marianito came home alone, drunk, crying. Doña Lucila heard him stumbling on the stairs and thought the impossible thought: a thief. Leonardo, there’s a robber in the house. It’s impossible — the guards, the gates. The godfather, in his bathrobe, ran and found his son kneeling and puking on a landing. He helped him to his feet, hugged him. A knot formed in the father’s throat, the son stained the beautiful Liberty of London robe with vomit. The father helped him to his dark bedroom, which had no lamps. The boy had asked that it be that way, and the father had made jokes:

You must be a cat. You see in the dark. You’ll go blind.

How can you read in the darkness?

“What happened, son?”

“Nothing, Dad, nothing.”

“What did she do to you? Just tell me what she did to you, son.”

“Nothing, Dad, I swear. She didn’t do anything to me.”

“Wasn’t she nice?”

“Very nice, Dad. Too nice. She didn’t do anything to me. I was the one.”

He was the one. It made him ashamed. In the car, she tried to make pleasant conversation about books and travel. At least the car was dark, the driver silent. The discotheque wasn’t. The noise was unbearable. The lights, harsh, terrible, like white knives, chased him, seemed to look for him, only him, while even the shadows respected her, desired her, shrouded her with love. She moved and danced wrapped in shadows — beautiful, Dad, she’s a beautiful girl.