Carlos Fuentes: The Crystal Frontier

All eyes concentrated on the sunset. Except those of two people.

Leonardo Barroso watched everything from behind a scarlet curtain.

Michelina Laborde e Ycaza watched him until he saw her.

Their eyes met at the exact instant when no one had any interest in seeing where the young lady from the capital was looking or finding out if Leonardo had returned. The twenty women silently watched the sunset as if, in tears, they were attending their own funerals.

Then the northern troupe came in, banging drums and playing trumpets and guitars, and the place filled with men wearing Stetsons and short jackets. The spell was broken and all the women howled with pleasure. No one even noticed when Michelina excused herself, walked to the curtain, and, among its thick folds, found her godfather’s burning hand.

Only Lucila heard with what a desperate sound, with what a screech of burning rubber, the Lincoln convertible pulled out of the garage. But she paid no attention because, no matter how fast it went, the car would never reach the limits of the red horizon. To Mrs. Barroso, that seemed like a very neat poetic idea—“We shall never reach the horizon”—but she had no words to communicate it to her pals, who, in any case, were all drunk. Perhaps she only imagined the engine’s noise, which might have been nothing more than the echo of the guitar in her crazed head.

Leonardo was not drunk. His horizon did have a limit: the border between Mexico and the United States. The night air cleared his head even more, clarified both his ideas and his eyes. He drove with only one hand on the wheel. With his other hand, he squeezed Michelina’s. He told her he regretted having to say it to her, but she should understand that she would have anything she wanted. He didn’t want to brag, but she would get all the money, all the power; now she was seeing only the naked desert, but her life could be like that enchanted city on the other side of the frontier: golden towers, crystal palaces.

Yes, she said, I know, I accept it.

Leonardo slammed on the brakes, exiting the straight desert highway. In the distance, the monuments of cathedrallike stone, which seemed now like fragile paper silhouettes, watched over them.

He looked at her as if he, too, could read in the dark. The girl’s eyes shone brightly enough. At least Marianito and she would have that in common, the gift of penetrating the darkness, of seeing into the night. Perhaps without that penumbra he wouldn’t have clearly seen what he recognized in his goddaughter’s eyes. Daylight would surely have dazzled his vision. Night was necessary for seeing clearly the soul of this woman.

Yes, she said, I know and accept.

Leonardo held onto the Lincoln’s steering wheel as if it were the rock of his most intimate being. He was money. He was power. The desired love, he realized, was his own.

“No, not me.”

“You,” Michelina said. “You are what I want.”

She kissed him with those perfect lips, and against his beard, earlier shaved close but stubbly at that hour, he felt the depth of Michelina’s cleft chin. He sank into the open mouth of his goddaughter, as if all light had no other origin but that tongue, those teeth, that saliva. He closed his eyes to kiss and saw all the light of the world. But he never let go of the wheel. His fingers had a voice and shouted to get closer to Michelina’s body, to dig among her buttons, to find and caress and stiffen her nipples, the next symmetry of that perfect beauty.

He kissed her for a long time, exploring the girl’s perfectly formed, uncleft palate with his tongue, and then God and the devil, once again allies, made him feel he was kissing his own son, that the father’s tongue cut itself and bled in the jagged cleft of the palate, broken like a coral reef, that the smoothness of Michelina’s mouth had been brutally replaced by his son’s swollen, irritated, reddish carnality, wounded, smeared with mucus, dripping thick phlegm.

Is that what she felt when he screwed her last night without wanting to confess it? Why was she telling him now that she wanted him, the father, when it was obvious she was here to seduce the son incapable of seducing anyone? Wasn’t she here to conclude the family pact, to acknowledge the unlimited protection the powerful politician Leonardo Barroso gave to the impoverished Laborde e Ycaza family, to thank him for a few marvelous days in Paris — wines, restaurants, monuments? Was that what made working, getting rich, worthwhile? Paris was the reward, and now she was Paris; she incarnated the world, Europe, good taste, and he was offering her the complement to her elegance and beauty, the money without which she would quickly cease to be elegant and beautiful and become merely an eccentric aristocrat like her ancient grandmother, bent over the collectible curios of the past.

He invited her to conclude the pact. He became her godfather in order to single out her family. Now he was offering her his son in matrimony. The gold seal.

“But I’ve already got a boyfriend in the capital.”

Leonardo stared fixedly until he lost his own eyes in the desert.

“No more.”

“I’m not lying to you, godfather.”

“Everything and everyone has a price. That punk was more interested in money than in you.”

“You did it for me, didn’t you? You love me, too, isn’t that true?”

“You don’t get it. You just don’t get it.”

Together with his promise, the invisible line of the frontier passed through his head. He was well-known in the luxury hotels on the other side; they never asked him for identification or baggage and simply rented him the most luxurious suite for a night or a few hours, making sure there was a basket of fruit and a bottle of champagne in the room before he stepped out of the elevator. A sitting room. A bedroom. A bathroom. The two of them showering together, lathering each other up, caressing …

Leonardo turned the key in the ignition, started the car, and headed back to Campazas.

Grandmother Doña Zarina agreed with her granddaughter. Michelina would be dressed for her marriage in the old-fashioned way, in authentic clothes the old lady had naturally been collecting for generations. The girl could choose.

A crinoline, said the young woman, I’ve always dreamed of wearing a crinoline so everyone could wonder about me, could imagine me, and not know clearly what the bride was like. In that case, the grandmother said cheerfully, you’ll need a veil.

One night, she tried on her wedding outfit, the crinoline and the veil, and went to bed to sleep alone for the last time. She dreamed she was in a convent, strolling through patios and arcades, chapels and corridors, while the other nuns, locked in, peered out like animals through the bars on their cells, shouted obscenities at her because she was getting married, because she preferred the love of a man to wedding Christ. They insulted her for violating her vows, for leaving her religious order, her social class.

Michelina tried to escape from her dream, whose space was identical to that of the convent, but all the nuns, crowded in front of the altar, blocked her way. The black maids tore the habits off the sisters, stripping them naked to the waist, and then the nuns screamed imploringly for the whip to suppress the devil in the flesh and to give an example for Sister Michelina. Others immodestly menstruated on the tiled floor, then licked their own blood and marked crosses on the icy stone. Others lay next to the prostrate, bleeding, wounded, thorn-pierced Christs, and here Michelina’s dream in Mexico City fused with Mariano’s in the lightless bedroom in Campazas. The boy, too, dreamed of one of those dolorous Christs in Mexican churches, more dolorous than their Virgin Mothers, the Son laid out in a crystal coffin surrounded by dusty flowers, He Himself turning to dust, disappearing on His homeward journey to the spirit, leaving only the evidence of a few nails, a lance, a crown of thorns, a rag dipped in vinegar … how he longed to leave behind the miseries of this ephemeral body!