Carlos Fuentes: The Crystal Frontier

“I know how to ask for everything because I also know how to give everything. What do you say to me, capital girl?”

“That same thing, Godfather, that…”

Through the half-opened window came a song sung by Luis Miguel, “I need you, need you a lot, I don’t know you …” How could Leonardo and Michelina know that that music was coming from an “erased” Indian village, Pacuaches, where Mariano read books and listened to music and went into ecstasy guessing which birds were singing at four o’clock in the morning. That morning, a jet crossed the heavens, and the birds fell silent forever. She was no longer there …

Juan Zamora asked me to tell this story while he kept his back turned. What he means is that he wants to have his back to the reader the whole time. He says he’s ashamed. Or, as he puts it himself, “I’m in pain.” “Pain” as a synonym for “shame” is a peculiarity of Mexican speech, comparable to saying “senior citizens” for “old people”—so as not to offend — or saying “He’s in a bad way” to soften the idea that someone’s illness is terminal. Shame causes pain; sometimes pain causes shame.

So Juan Zamora will not offer you a view of his face over the course of this story. You’ll be able to see only the nape of his neck, his back. I won’t say “his ass,” because that, too, is a loaded term in Mexico. Especially in the sense of “offering” your ass to someone, the lowest act of cowardice, a yielding or a type of abject courtesy. That’s not the case with Juan Zamora. He wears a big university sweatshirt, size XXL, decorated in front with the emblem of the university in question, the kind of sweatshirt that hangs down to your thighs (though he wears it tucked into his jeans). No, Juan Zamora insists I tell you he won’t be offering anything. He only wants to emphasize that his shame is equal to his pain. He doesn’t blame anyone. It is true that he touched a world and that the world touched him.

But after all, everything that happened passed through him and happened inside him. This is what counts.

The story takes place during the time of the Mexican oil boom, at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s. Right from the start, that explains part of the pain-shame identification Juan Zamora is talking about. Shame because we celebrated the boom like a bunch of nouveaux riches. Pain because the wealth was badly used. Shame because the president said our problem now was to administer our wealth. Pain because the poor kept on getting poorer. Shame because we became frivolous spendthrifts, slaves of vulgar whims and our comic macho posturing. Pain because we were incapable of administering even our shame. Pain and shame because we were no good at being rich; the only things appropriate for us are poverty, dignity, effort. In Mexico, there have always been corrupt authoritarian figures with too much power. But they are forgiven everything if they are at least serious. (Is there one corruption that’s serious and another that’s frivolous?) Frivolity is intolerable, unforgivable, the mockery of all those who’ve been screwed. That’s the source of the pain and the shame of those years when we were millionaires for a day, then woke up broke, out in the street, tears of laughter pouring down our faces before we began to laugh with pain.

Juan Zamora has his back to you. When he was twenty-three, he got to study at Cornell, thanks to a scholarship. He was a dedicated pre-med student at the National Preparatory School and then at the National University, and he swears to you that that would have been enough for him if his mother hadn’t got it into her head that during the Mexican boom period it was necessary to do some postgrad work at a Yankee university.

“Your father never knew how to take advantage of an opportunity. He was Don Leonardo Barroso’s administrative lawyer for twenty years and died without a penny to his name. What could he have been thinking about? Well, not about you or me, Juanito, you can be sure of that.”

“What did he say to you?”

“That honesty is its own reward. That he was an honorable professional. That he wasn’t going to betray Mario de la Cueva and his other professors at the law school. That he’d been taught that law is an honorable profession. That you cannot defend the law if you’re corrupt yourself. ‘But it’s not illegal, Gonzalo,’ I’d say to your father,‘ to accept a payment for doing favors. It’s no crime drawing a matter to the attention of Minister Barroso. Everyone in government gets rich but you!’

“‘That’s called a bribe, Lelia. It’s a triple deception, besides being a lie. If the matter develops, it looks as if I was paid to move it along. If it fails, I look like a crook. In either case, I deceive the minister, the nation, and myself.’

“‘A little public-works contract, Gonzalo, that’s all I’m asking you to request. You get your commission and bye-bye. No one will find out. With that money we could buy a house in Anzures. And get out of Colonia Santa María. We could send Juanito to a gringo university. What I mean is, the boy’s a very good student and it would be a shame for him to go to waste with that riffraff at the National University.’”

Juan tells me to say that his mother recounted those things with a bitter smile on her face, a grimace that her son had only seen, from time to time, on cadavers he studied at school.

His father, Gonzalo Zamora, CPA, had to die for his widow to ask a single favor from Don Leonardo Barroso: would he see if he could get a scholarship for Juanito to study medicine in the United States? With great elegance, Don Leonardo said, Why, of course, he would be delighted to take care of it — why, that’s the least the memory of good old Zamora deserved, such an honest lawyer, such a diligent functionary.

I’m following Juan Zamora, the Mexican student with his gray sweatshirt, through the sad streets of Ithaca, New York. I have no idea what he’s looking for since there’s so little to see here. The main street has barely any stores, two or three very bad restaurants, and immediately after that come mountains and gorges. Juanito feels — almost — as if he’s in Mexico, in San Juan del Rio or Tepeji, places he’d visited from time to time on holiday to breathe the air of forests and gorges, far from the pollution of the capital. The gorge in Ithaca is a deep and forbidding ravine, apparently a seductive abyss as well. Ithaca is famous for the number of suicides committed by desperate students who jump off the bridge spanning the gorge. One joke says that no professor will fail a bad student, for fear he’ll dive into the chasm.

Since there isn’t much to see around here on Sunday, Juan Zamora is going back to the house where he’s living. It’s a beautiful place of pale pink brick with a blue slate roof, surrounded by a well-kept lawn that becomes gravel around the house and extends into a tangled, thin, and somber woods behind it. Ivy climbs up the pink brick.

The seasons make up for Ithaca’s lack of charm. Now it’s late fall, and the forest is denuded, the trees on the mountainsides look like burned toothpicks, and the sky comes two or three steps down to communicate to all of us the silence and pain of God in the face of the fleeting death of the world. But winter in Ithaca gives a voice back to nature, which takes revenge on God by dressing in white, scattering frozen dust and snow stars, spreading large ivory mantles like sumptuous sheets on the earth — and an answer to heaven. Spring explodes, rapid and agonizing, in handfuls of splendid roses that perfume the air and leave a flash of forgotten things before summer takes over, heavy, sleepy, and slow, unlike the swift spring. Idle and lazy summer of stagnant waters, pesky mosquitoes, heavy, humid breathing, and intensely green mountains.