Carlos Fuentes - The Crystal Frontier

“You make me feel different, Encarnita. I’m not fighting it out with the world anymore.”

“I thought that if you found me here, barefaced, in the middle of the mud, you’d no longer like me.”

“Let’s grow old together, what do you say?”

“Okay. But I’d rather we always be young together.”

She made him laugh without shame, without machismo, without anxiety, without resentment or skepticism. She took his hand tenderly and said, as if intending never to speak of the other Leandro again, “All right, I’ve understood it all.”

She feared that he’d be disillusioned seeing her here, in her own element, as she was now, with the blanket over her shoulders, her wool stockings on, wearing thick-soled shoes to go stoke the fire. She remembered the sweetness of Cuernavaca, its warm perfumes, and now she saw herself in this land where people wore galoshes and houses rose on stilts, right here where she lived, a granary built on stilts to keep out the moisture, the mud, the torrential rain, the “hecatomb of water,” as she called it.

He invited her to spend the weekend in Madrid. Mr. Barroso, his boss, and Michelina, Mr. Barroso’s daughter-in-law, were flying to Rome. He wanted to take her around, show her the Cybeles fountain, the Gran Vía, Alcalá Street, and the Retiro park.

They looked at each other and didn’t have to declare their agreement out loud. We’re two solitary people, and now we’re together.

The old man dressed in black, his black hat pulled down to his hairy ears, is driving the van and doesn’t ever look at you; he just wants to be sure that you’re next to him and that you’ll carry out your part of the bet.

He doesn’t look at you but he does talk to you. It’s as if only his voice recognizes you, never his gaze. His voice makes you afraid; you could bear his eyes better, however terrible, imprisoned, righteous they are. Inside your chest, something unthought until this moment is talking to you, as if there, in your held breath, you could speak with your jailer, the prisoner who, having finished serving his sentence, has come out into the world and immediately made you his prisoner.

You and your friends also didn’t look at one another. They were afraid of offending one another with a glance. Eye contact was worse, more dangerous than the contact of hands, sexes, or skin. It had to be avoided. All of you were manly because you never looked at one another; you walked the streets of the town staring at the tips of your shoes and always you gave other people ugly looks, disdainful, challenging, mocking, or insecure. But Paquito did look at you, looked directly at you, frightened to death but direct, and you never forgave him that — that’s why you beat him up, beat the shit out of him.

A hundred, two hundred deer the color of ripe peaches pass, running toward Extremadura, as if seeking the final reinforcement of their numbers. The old man sees the deer and tells you not to look at them, to look instead at the buzzards already circling in the sky, waiting for something to happen to one.

“There are wild pigs too,” you say, just to say something, to start up the conversation with the father, the executioner, the avenger of the idiot Paquito.

“Those are the worst,” the old man answers. “They’re the biggest cowards.”

He says that, before coming down to drink, the old wild pigs send the piglets and females, the young males and females, that, guided by the wind and their sense of smell, communicate to the old hog that the path to the water is safe. Only then will the old hog come down.

“The young males that go first are called squires,” the old man says seriously before he is gradually overcome by laughter. “The young squires are the ones that get hunted, the ones that die. But the old hog knows more and more just because he’s old. He lets the piglets and the females be sacrificed for him.”

Now indeed, now indeed he looks at you with a red burning gaze like a coal brought back to life, the final coal in the middle of the ashes that everyone thought were dead.

“When they’re old they get gray. The hogs. They only come out at night, when the young have already been hunted or have come back alive to say that the path is clear.”

He laughed heartily.

“They only come out at night. They get gray with time. Their tusks twist around. Old hog, twisted tusk.”

He stopped laughing and tapped a finger against his teeth.

He hired you a car on this side of the tunnel. He didn’t have to tell you he was counting on your sense of honor. He left you alone to drive to the other side. It took exactly fourteen minutes to cross the tunnel of Barrios de la Luna. He would start counting the minutes as soon as you pulled away. After fifteen minutes, you would turn around to enter the tunnel again and he, the old man, would begin to drive in the opposite direction.

“Good-bye,” said the old man.

Surrounded by smoke from the power station and mist from the high mountains, they were leaving the highway that ran by abandoned coal pits slowly healing in the earth. Kids were playing soccer. Old women were bent over their gardens. The concrete, the poles, the blocks of cement, and the retainer walls progressively split the earth to make way for the highway and the succession of tunnels that penetrated the Sierra Cantábrica, conquering it. It was a splendid highway and Leandro drove his boss’s Mercedes quickly, with one hand. With the other he squeezed his Encarna’s, and she asked him to slow down, Jesus, not to scare her — let’s get to Madrid alive. But no matter how she softened him, he had his macho habits and responses he wasn’t going to give up over night; besides, the Mercedes was purring like a cat, it was a pleasure to drive a car that slid over the highway like butter over a roll. He smiled as they entered the long tunnel of Barrios de la Luna, leaving behind a landscape of snowy peaks and patchy fogs. Leandro turned on lights like two cats’ eyes. Behind him was an old van driven by a man dressed in black, his black hat pulled down to his huge ears and his gray whiskers prickling the top of his white collarless shirt. He scratched the lobe of his hairy ear. He took care not to change lanes or pass on the left and risk a crash. Better to follow at a distance, safely, follow that elegant Mercedes with Madrid license plates. He guffawed. Honor was for assholes. He was going to avenge his poor son.

You were doing sixty miles an hour, ashamed to think you were doing it so a highway patrolman would pull you over and keep you from entering the tunnel, which was coming up. The rapid transition from the hard sun to the blast of smoke, the breath of black fog inside the tunnel, made you dizzy. With great assurance, you took the left lane, driving against traffic, telling yourself that you were going to leave that village of stone, that language of stone. It was better to go to America — that was the real thing — to be yourself, take a risk to win a bet, and what a bet, two hundred thousand pesetas in one shot. You were risking your life, but with luck you’d be rich in one shot. Now you’d see if luck was protecting you. If you didn’t put everything on the line now, you never would — luck was destiny and everything depended on a bet. It was like being a bullfighter, but instead of the bull what was rushing toward you was a pair of headlights, blinding you, two luminous horns. You took the bet: would it be the old son of a bitch, the father of his faggot sons? Who was the person, who were the people you were going to give a great embrace of stone, you with your shining bull horns, like the starry ones that support the virgin, all the virgins of Spain and America? You thought about a woman before smashing into the car coming in the opposite direction, the right direction; you thought about the bread of the virgins, the bride’s bread of the whole world, pan de chourar, the bread of tears transformed into stone.