Carlos Fuentes - The Crystal Frontier

Tired, the men entered the gymnasium quickly, tossed their bags onto the rickety army-surplus beds Barroso had picked up in an army-navy store, and made for a buffet set up around the corner; the bathrooms were in back. Some of the men began to get familiar, poking one another in the belly, calling one another Bro, Bud and mano. Two or three even sang, out of tune, “The Ship of Gold,” but the others quieted down, wanting to sleep — the day had begun at five. I’m on my way to the port where the ship of gold is waiting to carry me away.

On Saturday morning at six, it was most certainly possible to feel, smell, touch, but not yet see the city. The fog, laden with ice, made it invisible, but the smell of Manhattan entered Lisandro Chávez through his nose and mouth like a steel dagger: it was smoke, acrid, acid smoke from sewers and subways, from enormous twelve-wheel trailers with exhaust pipes and grills at the level of the hard, shiny streets, like patent-leather floors. And on every street, metal mouths opened to eat boxes and more boxes of fruits, vegetables, cans, beers, sodas that reminded him of his dad, suddenly a foreigner in his own Mexico City, just as his son was in New York City, both asking themselves, What are we doing here? Were we perhaps born to do this? Wasn’t our destiny different? What happened?

“Good, upstanding citizens, Lisandro. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. We’ve always been good, upstanding citizens. We did everything properly. We never broke a rule. Why did things go so wrong? Because we were good, upstanding citizens? Why do things always go so wrong? Why doesn’t this story ever turn out well, son?”

In New York, he thought of his father lost in an apartment in Narvarte as if he were walking across a desert with no shelter, no water, no map, transforming his apartment into the desert of his confusion, caught up in a whirlpool of unforeseen, inexplicable events, as if the whole country had gone wild, jumped its tracks, run away from itself, escaping with shouts and bullets from the prison of order, foresight, institutions. Where was he now? What was he? Of what use was he? Lisandro saw corpses, murdered men, dishonest government officials, endless, incomprehensible intrigues, life-and-death struggles over power, money, women, queers … Death, misery, tragedy. His father had fallen into this inexplicable vertigo, giving up in the face of chaos, incapable of standing up to fight, to work. Depending on his son, just as Lisandro the child had depended on him. How much did Lisandro’s mother earn sewing torn clothing, eternally knitting a sweater or shawl?

If only a curtain of snow would fall on Mexico City, covering it, hiding its rancor, its answerless questions, the sense of collective fraud. To look at Mexico’s burning dust, the mask of an indefatigable sun, resigning oneself to the loss of the city, was not the same as to admire the crown of snow that ornamented the gray buildings and black streets of New York. New York: building itself up out of its own disintegration, its inevitable destiny as the city for everyone, energetic, tireless, brutal, murderous city of the entire world, where we all recognize ourselves and see our worst and our best.

This was the building. Lisandro Chávez refused to stare like a hick all the way up the forty floors. He only wondered how they were going to wash the windows in the middle of a snowstorm that at times managed to dissolve the very profile of the building, as if the skyscraper, too, were made of ice. It was an illusion. As the day cleared up a bit, a building completely made of glass became visible, with nothing in it that wasn’t transparent: an immense music box made of mirrors, unified by its own chrome-covered, nickel-plated glass, a palace like a crystal deck of cards, a toy of quicksilver labyrinths.

They were here to clean the inside, it was explained to them, gathered together in the interior atrium, which was like a patio of gray light whose six sides rose like sheer blind cliffs, six walls of pure glass. Even the two elevators were glass. Six times forty floors, two hundred forty interior facades for offices that lived their simultaneously secret and transparent life around a shared agnostic atrium, a cube excavated in the heart of the toy palace, the dream of a child building a castle on the beach, except that instead of sand he was given glass.

The scaffolding was waiting to lift them to the different floors, adjusting to the surface at each level as the building became narrower, like a pyramid, at the top. As if in a Teotihuacán made of glass, the workers began to rise to the tenth, twentieth, thirtieth floor to clean the glass and descend, in ranks of ten, armed with manual cleaning devices and tanks of a special glass cleanser on their backs, like the oxygen tanks worn by underwater explorers. Lisandro ascended to the crystal sky but he felt submerged, descending to a strange sea of glass in an unknown, upside-down world.

“Is that stuff safe?” Leonardo Barroso asked.

“Very safe. It’s biodegradable. Once it’s used, it decomposes into innocuous elements,” his Yankee partners answered.

“It sure better. I put a clause in the contract making you responsible for work-related illnesses. You could die of cancer here just by breathing.”

“Come on, Don Leonardo,” laughed the Yankees. “You’re tougher than we are.”

“Welcome a tough Mexican,” concluded the businessman.

“You’re one tough hombre!” cheered the gringos.

She walked with a feeling of thankfulness from her apartment on East 67th Street to the building on Park Avenue. She had spent Friday night in seclusion, giving orders to the doorman to let no one up, especially not her ex-husband, whose insistent voice she listened to all night on the answering machine as it begged to see her. Listen, sweetheart, let me talk to you, we were very hasty, we should have thought things through more, waited until our wounds healed. You know I don’t want to hurt you, but life sometimes gets complicated, and I always knew, even in the worst moments, that I had you, I could come back to you, you would understand, you would forgive me, because if the situation had been the other way around, I would have forgiven …

“No!” the desperate woman shouted at the telephone, at the voice of her ex-husband, invisible to her. “No! You would have gotten even as cruelly as you could. In your usual selfish way, you’d have enslaved me with your forgiveness.”

She spent a fearful night pacing back and forth in the small apartment, nicely appointed, even lavish in many details — pacing back and forth between the picture window, whose wool drapes she’d opened to give herself over completely to the sumptuous snow scene, while the distorting eye of the Cyclops at the door protects people from eternal observation, the city’s perpetual threat. The crystal hole in the door that allows the hall to be seen, allows one to see without being seen but to see a distorted, submarine world, as if through the blind eye of a tired shark that can’t allow itself the luxury of rest lest it drown, sink to the bottom of the sea. Sharks have to keep moving eternally to survive.

She felt no fear the following morning. The storm was over and the city had been dusted with white powder, as if for a party. It was three weeks before Christmas and the whole town was decked out, covered with lights, shining like a huge mirror. Her husband never rose before nine. It was seven when she left to walk to the office. She was thankful that the weekend would give her a chance to lock herself away and get something done, catch up with her paperwork, dictate instructions without telephone calls, faxes, the jokes of her office mates, the whole New York office ritual, the obligation to be simultaneously indifferent and witty, to have a wisecrack or joke at the ready, to know how to end conversations and phone calls brusquely, to never touch anyone — especially that, to never touch one another physically, never a hug, not even a social kiss on the cheek, bodies at a distance, eyes avoiding eyes … Good. Her husband would not find her here. He had no idea … He’d go insane calling her, trying to worm his way into her apartment.