Carlos Fuentes - The Crystal Frontier

That morning, she was a woman who felt free. She’d resisted the outside world. Her husband, too, was now outside her life, expelled from her physical and emotional interior space. She resisted the crowds that absorbed her every morning as she walked to work, making her feel she was part of a herd, individually insignificant, stripped of importance: weren’t the hundreds of people walking down Park from 67th to 66th Street at any moment of the morning doing something as important — or unimportant — as what she was doing, or perhaps even more important or less important.

There were no happy faces.

There were no faces proud of what they were doing.

There were no faces satisfied with their jobs.

Because the faces were also working, squinting, gesticulating, rolling their eyes, feigning horror, expressing real shock, skepticism, false attentiveness, mockery, irony, authority. Rarely, she told herself, as she walked rapidly, enjoying the solitude of the snow-covered city, rarely did she show them or they her a true spontaneous face, without the panoply of acquired gestures to please, convince, intimidate, impose respect, share intrigues.

Alone, inviolable, self-possessed, in control of her whole body and soul, inside and out. The cold morning, the solitude, a sure step, elegant, her own person — she was given all that on the walk from her apartment to her office.

The building was full of workers. She’d forgotten. She laughed at herself. The day she’d chosen to be alone in the office was the day they were going to clean the interior glass. They had given advanced warning. She’d forgotten. Smiling, she went to the top floor without looking at anyone, like a bird who confuses its cage for freedom. She walked through the corridor on the fortieth floor — glass walls, glass doors, they lived suspended in midair; even the floors were made of an opaque glass, the tyrant of an architect having forbidden carpeting in his crystal masterpiece.

She entered her office, located between the glass corridor and the interior atrium. It did not have a view of the street. The polluted air of the street did not circulate here; there was only air-conditioning. The building was sealed, isolated, the way she wanted to feel today. The door opened onto the corridor. But the entire glass wall faced the atrium, and at times she liked to feel that her gaze fell forty stories, transforming on the way into a snowflake, a feather, a butterfly.

Crystal above the corridor. Glass on both sides, so the two offices next to hers were also transparent, obliging her colleagues to be somewhat circumspect in their physical habits while nevertheless maintaining a certain degree of naturalness in their behavior. Taking off their shoes, putting their feet up on the desk — everyone was allowed to do that, but the men could scratch their armpits or between their legs, while the women couldn’t. But the women could look at themselves in the mirror and fix their makeup. The men— with some exceptions — couldn’t do that.

She looked straight ahead at the atrium and saw him.

Lisandro Chávez was alone on the plank they raised to the top floor. They’d asked everyone if they suffered from vertigo, and he’d recalled that he sometimes did — once on a Ferris wheel he’d had the urge to jump into the void — but he’d kept his mouth shut.

At first, busy arranging his mops and cleaning devices, but most of all concerned about making himself comfortable, he did not see her and did not look in. His objective was the glass. Everyone supposed there would be no one working in the building on Saturday.

She saw him first and took no notice of him. She saw him without seeing him. She saw him the way one sees or no longer sees the people fate assigns one when one rides an elevator, gets on a bus, or takes a seat at the movies. She smiled. Her job as an advertising executive obliged her to take planes to meet clients in a nation the size of the universe. She feared nothing so much as a talkative person seated next to her, the kind who tells you his miseries, his profession, how much money he makes — the kind who ends up, after three Bloody Marys, with his hand on your knee. She smiled again. She’d fallen asleep many times with a stranger next to her, both of them wrapped in their airplane blankets like virginal lovers.

When Lisandro’s and Audrey’s eyes met, she nodded a greeting the way one might, out of courtesy, say hello to a waiter, less effusively, say, than one might to a doorman. Lisandro had carefully cleaned the first window, that of Audrey’s office, and as he removed the light film of dust and ash, she had begun appearing, distant and misty at first, then gradually closer, approaching without moving, thanks to the increasing clearness of the glass. It was like focusing a camera. It was like making her his.

The transparency of the glass restored her face. The light in the office illuminated the woman’s head from behind, giving her blond hair, which fell like a rope down her neck, the smoothness and movement of a wheat field. The light was concentrated on her nape and, as she pushed aside the soft white hair, it emphasized the blond waves of each strand rising from her back like a handful of seeds to find their earth, their thick, sensual fertility, in the mass of braided hair.

She was working with her head bent over her papers, indifferent to him, indifferent to the work of the others, servile, manual work so different from her own, from her efforts to come up with a nice catchy slogan for a Pepsi commercial. He was uncomfortable, afraid of distracting her with the movement of his arms over the glass. If she raised her head, would she do it angrily, annoyed at the intrusion of a worker?

What kind of expression would she have when she looked at him again?

Christ, she thought to herself. They warned me workers were coming. I hope this man isn’t spying on me. I feel spied on. I don’t like this. It’s distracting.

She raised her eyes and found Lisandro’s. She wanted to get mad but couldn’t. There was something in that face that amazed her. At first, she didn’t note the physical details. What seized her attention was something else. Something she never found in a man. She struggled to find a word — she who was a professional with words, slogans— for the attitude, the face of the worker washing the office windows.

It came to her suddenly. Courtesy. What there was in this man — in his attitude, his distance, his way of nodding his head, the strange mixture of sadness and joy in his eyes— was courtesy, an incredible absence of vulgarity.

This man, she said to herself, would never telephone me frantically at two in the morning, begging me to forgive him. He would restrain himself. He would respect my solitude, and I his.

What would this man do for you? she immediately asked herself.

He would invite me to dinner and then take me to my apartment. He wouldn’t let me go home alone in a taxi.

Fleetingly he glimpsed her large, deep chestnut eyes as she looked up, and he became upset, lowering his own. He went on with his work but immediately recalled that she had smiled. Had he imagined it or had it really happened? He dared to look at her. The woman smiled, very briefly, very courteously, before averting her eyes and going back to her work.

That glance was sufficient. He didn’t expect to find melancholy in the eyes of a gringa. He’d been told that Yankee women were strong, very sure of themselves, very professional, very punctual — not that Mexican women were weak, insecure, slapdash, and slow, no, not at all. The point was that a woman who came to work on Saturdays had to be anything but melancholy, perhaps tender, perhaps passionate. That Lisandro saw clearly in the woman’s expression. She had a sorrow, she had a yearning. She yearned for something. That’s what her expression told him: I want something I lack.