Carlos Fuentes - The Crystal Frontier

“Labor problems? Unions aren’t allowed.”

“Problems with worker loyalty, Len. I’ve always tried to maintain the loyalty of my workers. Here the women last six or seven months and then move to another factory.”

“Sure, they all want to work with the Europeans because they treat them better. They fire or punish abusive supervisors, feed them fancy lunches, and God knows what else. Maybe they even send them on vacation to see the tulips in Holland … You do that and earnings will plummet, Ted.”

“We don’t do things that way in Michigan. The workers leave, the cost for services — water, housing — go up. Maybe those Dutch have the right idea.”

“We all change jobs,” chimed in Barroso merrily. “Even you. If we enforce work-safety rules, they move on. If we’re strict about applying the Federal Labor Law, they move on. If there’s a boom in the defense industry, they move on. You talk to me about job rotation? That’s the law of labor. If the Europeans prefer quality of life to profits, that’s their decision. Let the European Community subsidize them.”

“You still haven’t answered my question, Len. What about the loyalty factor?”

“Anyone who wants to hold onto a loyal labor force should do what I do. I offer bonuses to workers so they’ll stay. But the demand for labor is huge, the girls get bored, they don’t move up, so they move sideways, and that way they fool themselves into thinking they’re better off for changing. That does generate some costs, Ted, you’re right, but it avoids other costs. Nothing’s perfect. The plant isn’t a zero-sum situation. It’s a sum-sum one. We all end up making money.”

They laughed a little, and a man with graying long hair pulled back in a ponytail came in to serve coffee.

“No sugar for me, Villarreal,” said Don Leonardo to the servant.

“Look here, Ted,” Barroso went on. “You’re new at this game, but your partners in the States must have told you what the real business is here.”

“Running a national business that sells to one guaranteed buyer doesn’t seem like a bad idea to me. We don’t have that in the States.”

Barroso asked Murchinson to look outside, beyond the little group of workers drinking Pepsis, to look at the horizon. Yankee businessmen have always been men of vision, he said, not provincial chile counters the way they are in Mexico. It’s a huge horizon you see from here, right? Texas is the size of France; Mexico, which looks so small next to the U.S. of A., is six times larger than Spain— all that space, all that horizon, what inspiration! Barroso almost sighed.

“Ted, the real business here isn’t the plants. It’s land speculation. The location of the plants. The subdivisions. The industrial park. Did you see my house over in Campazas? People laugh at it. They call it Disneyland. But I’m the one laughing. I bought all those lots for five centavos per square meter. Now they’re worth a thousand dollars per square meter. That’s where the money is. I’m giving you good advice. Take advantage of it.”

“I’m all ears, Len.”

“The girls have to travel for more than an hour, on two buses, to get here. What we should do is set up another center due west of here. Which means we should be buying land in Bellavista. It’s a dump. Shitty shacks. In five years, it’ll be worth a thousand times more.”

Ted Murchinson was in favor of supplying money, with Leonardo Barroso as the front man — the Mexican constitution prohibits gringos from owning property on the border. There was talk about trusts, stocks, and percentages while Villarreal served the coffee, watered-down the way the gringos like it.

“What my husband wants is for me to leave the plant and work with him in a business. That way we’d see each other more and take turns with the kid. It’s the only brave idea he’s ever suggested to me, but I know that deep down he’s just as big a coward as I am. The plant is a sure thing, but as long as I work here, he’s tied to the house.”

Something Rosa Lupe said upset Dinorah terribly, to the point that she became violently sick and asked to go to the bathroom. Wanting to avoid any new conflict, the supervisor, Esmeralda, did not object. Sometimes she made vulgar comments when the women asked.

“What’s with her?” said Candelaria. Instantly she was sorry she’d opened her mouth. It was an unwritten law among them not to probe inside one another. What was going on outside could be seen and therefore discussed, especially in a joking spirit. But the soul, what songs called the soul…

Candelaria sang, and Marina and Rosa Lupe joined in:

Your ways drove me mad,

You’re so selfish, so solitary,

A jewel in the night,

While Ym so ordinary…

They laughed, then turned sad, and Marina thought about Rolando, wondering what he was up to in the streets of Juárez and El Paso, a man with one foot on that side and the other on this, a man connected to both places by his cellular phone.

“Don’t call me at my place at night. It’s better to call me in the car. Call my cellular phone,” he told Marina at the beginning. But when she asked for the number, Rolando wouldn’t give it to her. “They’ve got a tap on my cellular,” he explained. “If they pick up one of your calls, I might get you in trouble.”

“So how will we see each other?”

“You know. Every Thursday night at the courts on the other side …”

But what about Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays? We all work, Rolando said, life’s tough, it’s not a free ride. A night of love, can’t you see? Some people don’t even have that… And Saturdays and Sundays? My family, Rolando would say, weekends are for my family.

“But I don’t have one, Rolando. I’m all alone.”

“And Fridays?” he shot back with the speed of light. Rolando was fast, no one could take that away from him, and he knew that Marina would get flustered as soon as he mentioned Friday.

“No. Fridays I go out with the girls. It’s our day to be together.”

Rolando didn’t have to say another word, and Marina would anxiously wait for Thursday so she could cross the international bridge, show her green card, take a bus that left her three blocks from the motel, stop at the soda fountain for an ice-cream soda with a cherry on top (the kind they knew how to make only on the gringo side), and, fortified in her body, sleepy in her soul, fall into the arms of Rolando, her Rolando …

“Your Rolando? Yours? Every woman’s Rolando.”

The jokes the girls made echoed in her ears as she braided the black, blue, yellow, and red wires, an interior flag that announced the nationality of each television set. Made in Mexico — there’s something to be proud of. When would they put a label on the sets that said “Made by Marina, Marina Alva Martínez, Marina of the Assembly Plants”? But she didn’t have that pride in her work, that fleeting feeling she was doing something worthwhile, not useless, something that erased the jealousy Rolando made her feel, Rolando and his conquests. All the girls insinuated it, sometimes they said it: every woman’s Rolando. Well, if that was the way it was, at least she got her little piece of the action from a real star, well-dressed, with suits that were silvery like an airplane and shone even at night, nicely cut black hair (no sideburns), not like a hippy’s, a perfectly combed little moustache, an even olive-colored complexion, dreamy eyes. And his cellular phone stuck to his ear — everyone had seen him, in fancy restaurants, outside famous shops, on the bridge itself, with his phone to his ear, taking care of biznez, connecting, making deals, conquering the world. Rolando, with his Hermès tie and his jet-piane-colored suit, arranging the world, how could he afford to give more than one night a week to Marina, the new arrival, the simplest, the humblest? He, someone so lusted after, the main man?