The Crystal Frontier

by Carlos Fuentes

  Dionisio smiled as he shaved after his morning bath—his best ideas always came to him then. Rubbing Barbasol onto his cheeks, he imagined a historical explanation. National cuisines are great only when they arise from the people. In Mexico, Italy, France, or Spain, you need have no fear when you walk into the first roadside restaurant, the humblest bistro, the busiest tavola calda, because you’re certain of finding something good to eat there. It’s not the rich, Rangel would say to anyone who cared to listen, who dictate culinary taste from above; it’s the people, the worker, the peasant, the artisan, the truck driver who, from below, invent and consecrate the dishes that make up the great cuisines. And they do it out of intimate respect for what they put in their mouths.

  Patience, time, Dionisio would explain in his classes, standing in front of an uncomprehending herd of young people with chewing gum in their mouths and baseball caps on their heads. You need time and patience to prepare a lapin faisandé in France, need to let the rabbit spoil to the point when it attains its tastiest, most savory tartness (ugh!); you need love and patience to prepare a huitlacoche soufflé in Mexico, using the black, cancerous corn fungus that in other, less sophisticated latitudes is fed to the hogs (yuck!).

  By the same token, you can’t have time or patience when you’re trying to fry a couple of eggs in a covered wagon and you’re attacked by redskins and must pray for the cavalry to arrive and save you (whoopee!). Dionisio would be speaking to dozens of Beavis and Butt-head wanna-bes, the offspring of Wayne’s World, legions of young people convinced that being an idiot is the best way to pass through the world recognized by no one (in some cases) or everyone (in others). Masters always of an anarchic liberty and a stupid natural wisdom redeemed by an imbecility devoid of pretensions or complications. Knowing consisted in not knowing. The depressing lesson of the movie Forrest Gump. To be always available for whatever chance may bring …

  How could the successors of Forrest Gump understand that, when a single Mexican city, Puebla, can boast of more than eight hundred dessert recipes, it is because of generations and generations of nuns, grandmothers, nannies, and old maids, the work of patience, tradition, love, and wisdom? How, when their supreme refinement consisted in thinking that life is like a box of chocolates, a varied pre-fabrication, a fatal Protestant destiny disguised as free will? Beavis and Butt-head, that pair of half-wits, would have finished off the nuns of Puebla by pelting them with stale cake, the grandmothers they would have locked in closets to die of hunger and thirst, and of course they would have raped the nannies. And finally, a favor of the highest order for the leftover young ladies.

  Baco’s students stared at him as if he were insane and sometimes, to show him the error of his ways and with the air of people protecting a lunatic or bringing relief to the needy, would invite him to a McDonald’s after class. How were they going to understand that a Mexican peasant eats well even if he eats little? Abundance, that’s what his gringo students were celebrating, showing off in front of this weird Mexican lecturer, their cheeks swollen with mushy hamburgers, their stomachs stuffed with wagon-wheel pizzas, their hands clutching sandwiches piled as high as the ones Dagwood made in his comic strip, leaning as dangerously as the Tower of Pisa. (There’s even an imperialism in comic strips. Latin America gets U.S. comics but they never publish ours. Mafalda, Patoruzú, the Superwise Ones, and the Burrón family never travel north. Our minimal revenge is to give Spanish names to the gringo funnies. Jiggs and Maggie become Pancho and Ramona, Mutt and Jeff metamorphose into Benitín and Eneas, Goofy is Tribilín, Minnie Mouse becomes Ratoncita Mimí, Donald Duck is Pato Pascual, and Dagwood and Blondie are Lorenzo and Pepita. Soon, however, we won’t even have that freedom, and Joe Palooka will always be Joe Palooka, not our twisted-around Pancho Tronera.)

  Abundance. The society of abundance. Dionisio Rangel wants to be very frank and to admit to you that he’s neither an ascetic nor a moralist. How could a sybarite be an ascetic when he so sensually enjoys a clemole in radish sauce? But his culinary peak, exquisite as it is, has a coarse, possessive side about which the poor food critic doesn’t feel guilty, since he is only—he begs you to understand—a passive victim of U.S. consumer society.

  He insists it isn’t his fault. How can you escape, even if you spend only two months of the year in the United States, when wherever you happen to be—a hotel, motel, apartment, faculty club, studio, or, in extreme cases, trailer—fills up in the twinkling of an eye with electronic mail, coupons, every conceivable kind of offer, insignificant prizes intended to assure you that you’ve won a Caribbean cruise, unwanted subscriptions, mountains of paper, newspapers, specialized magazines, catalogs from L. L. Bean, Sears, Neiman Marcus?

  As a response to that avalanche of papers, multiplied a thousandfold by E-mail—requests for donations, false temptations—Dionisio decided to abandon his role as passive recipient and assume that of active transmitter. Instead of being the victim of an avalanche, he proposed to buy the mountain. Why not acquire everything the television advertisements offered—diet milkshakes, file systems, limited-edition CDs with the greatest songs of Pat Boone and Rosemary Clooney, illustrated histories of World War II, complicated devices for toning and developing the muscles, plates commemorating the death of Elvis Presley or the wedding of Charles and Diana, a cup commemorating the bicentennial of American independence, fake Wedgwood tea sets, frequent-flyer offerings from every airline, trinkets left over from Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays, the tawdry costume jewelry purveyed by the Home Shopping Channel, exercise videos with Cathy Lee Crosby, all the credit cards that ever were … all of it, he decided, was irresistible, was for him, was available, even the magic detergents that cleaned anything, even an emblematic stain of mole poblano.

  Secretly, he knew the reasons for this new acquisitive voraciousness. One was a firm belief that if, expansively, generously, he accepted what the United States offered him—weight-loss programs, detergents, songs of the fifties—it would ultimately accept what he was offering: the patience and taste to concoct a good escabeche victorioso. The other was a plan to get even for all the garbagey prizes he’d been accumulating—again, passively—by going on television and competing on quiz shows. His culinary knowledge was infinite, so he could easily win and not only in the gastronomic category.

  Cuisine and sex are two indispensable pleasures, the former more than the latter. After all, you can eat without love, but you can’t love without eating. And if you understand the culinary palate you know everything: what went into a kiss or a crab chilpachole involved historical, scientific, and even political wisdom. Where were cocktails born? In Campeche, among English sailors who mixed their drinks with a local condiment called “cock’s tail.” Who consecrated chocolate as an acceptable beverage in society? Louis XIV at Versailles, after the Aztec drink had been considered a bitter poison for two centuries. Why in old Russia was the potato prohibited by the Orthodox Church? Because it wasn’t mentioned in the Bible and therefore had to be a creation of the devil. In one sense the Orthodox clergy were right: the potato is the source of that diabolical liquor vodka.

  The truth is, Rangel entered these shows more to become known among larger audiences than to win the washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and—mirabile visu!—trips to Acapulco with which his successes were rewarded.

  Besides, he had to pass the time.

  A silver-haired old fox, an interesting man, with the looks of a mature movie star, Dionisio “Baco” Rangel was, at the age of fifty-one, something of a copy of that cinematic model personified by the late Arturo de Córdova, in whose films marble stairways and plastic flamingoes filled the background of neurotic love scenes featuring innocent fifteen-year-old girls and vengeful forty-year-old mothers, all of them reduced to their proper size by the autumnal star’s memorable and lapidary phrase: “It doesn’t have the slightest importance.” It should be pointed out that Dionisio, with greater self-generosity, would say to himself as he shaved every morning (Barbasol) that he h
ad no reason to envy Vittorio De Sica, who moved beyond the movies of Fascist Italy, with their white telephones and satin sheets, to become the supreme neorealist director of shoeshine boys, stolen bicycles, and old men with only dogs for company. But still, how handsome, how elegant he was, how surrounded by Ginas, Sophias, and Claudias! It was to that sum of experience and that smoothness of appearance that our compatriot Dionisio “Baco” Rangel aspired as he stored all his American products in a suburban warehouse outside the border city of San Diego, California.

  The problem was that girls no longer flocked to our autumnal star. The problem was that his style clashed badly with theirs. The problem was that as he stared at himself in the mirror (Barbasol, no Brilliantine, no brilliant ideas) he had to accept that after a Certain Age a star must be circumspect, elegant, calm—all so as not to succumb to the maximum absurdity of the aged Don Juan, Fernando Rey, in Buñuel’s Viridiana, who possesses virgins only if he dopes them up first and then plays them Handel’s Messiah.

  “Unhandel me, sire.”

  Dionisio had therefore to spend many solitary hours, on his lecture tours and in television studios, wasting his melancholy on futile reflections. California was his inevitable zone of operations, and there he spent a season passing time in Los Angeles observing the flow of cars through that headless city’s freeway system, imagining it as the modern equivalent of a medieval joust, each driver a flawless knight and each car an armor-covered charger. But his concentrated observation aroused suspicion, and the police arrested him for loitering near the highways: Was he a terrorist?

  American oddities began to command his attention. He was pleased to discover that beneath the commonplaces about a uniform, robotic society devoid of culinary personality (article of faith), there roiled a multiform, eccentric world, quasi-medieval in its corrosive ferment against an order once imposed by Rome and its Church and now by Washington and its Capitol. How would the country put itself in order when it was full of religious lunatics who believed beyond doubt that faith, not surgery, would take care of a tumor in the lungs? How, when the country was full of people who dared not exchange glances in the street lest the stranger turn out to be an escaped paranoid authorized to kill anyone who didn’t totally agree with his ideas, or a murderer released from an overcrowded mental hospital or jail, or a vengeful homosexual armed with HIV-laden syringes, a neo-Nazi skinhead ready to slit the throat of a dark-skinned person, a libertarian militiaman prepared to finish off the government by blowing up federal buildings, a country where teenage gangs were better armed than the police, exercising their constitutional right to carry rocket launchers and blow off the head of a neighbor’s child?

  Sliding along the streets of America, Dionisio happily gave to that single country the name of an entire continent, gladly sacrificing in favor of a name with lineage, position, history (like Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Nicaragua …) that name without a name, the ghostlike “United States of America,” which, his friend the historian Daniel Cosío Villegas said, was a moniker like “The Neighborhood Drunkard.” Or, as Dionisio himself thought, like a mere descriptor, like “Third Floor on the Right.”

  A good Mexican, Dionisio conceded all the power in the world to the gringos except that of an aristocratic culture: Mexico had one, paying the price, it was true, with abysmal, perhaps insurmountable inequality and injustice. Mexico also had conventions, manners, tastes, subtleties that confirmed her aristocratic culture: an island of tradition increasingly whipped and sometimes flooded, though, by storms of vulgarity and styles of commercialization that were worse, because grosser, cheaper, more disgusting, than those of North Americans. In Mexico even a thief was courteous, even an illiterate was cultured, even a child knew how to say hello, even a maid knew how to walk gracefully, even a politician knew how to behave like a lady, even a lady knew how to behave like a politician, even the cripples were acrobats, and even the revolutionaries had the good taste to believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe.

  None of that consoled him in his ever longer moments of middle-aged tedium, when classes were over, when the lectures had come to an end, the girls had left, and he had to return to the hotel, the motel …

  It was perhaps these curious shelters that led Dionisio “Baco” Rangel to his latest way of amusing himself in California. He spent weeks sitting outside the places that most tested his patience and good taste—McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, and, abomination of abominations, Taco Bell—so he could count the fat people who came to and left from those cathedrals of bad eating. He was armed with statistics. Forty million persons in the United States were obese, more than in any other country in the world. Fat—seriously fat—people: pink masses, souls lost under rolls and rolls of flesh, to the point of rendering characteristics like eyes, noses, mouths, even their sexes ephemeral. Dionisio watched a 350-pound woman pass by and wondered where her vein of pleasure might be. How, among the multiple slabs along her thighs and buttocks, would you get to the sanctum sanctorum of her libido? Would her male counterpart dare ask, Honey, could you just fart so I can get my bearings here? Dionisio laughed to himself at his vulgarity, celebrated and forgiven, because every Hispanic aristocrat owes something to the scatology of that great poet Don Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas. Quevedo connects our spirit and our excrement: we will be dust, but dust in love. He justifies our enjoyment of the huge dose of profanity that existence offers us, and our compiling, as Quevedo did in the seventeenth century and no one until Kundera did in the twentieth, praises of the asshole’s grace and disgrace.

  The parade Dionisio observed owed more to Fernando Botero and his adipose crews of immense courtesans than to Rubens, who never imagined obese priests, swollen children, generals about to burst … Forty million fat gringos? Was it just the effect of bad food? Why did this happen in the United States and not in Spain, Mexico, or Italy, despite the pork sausages, tamales, and tagliarini that fleshed out those cuisines? In each potbelly that went by Dionisio suspected the presence of millions of paper and cellophane bags zealously safeguarding, in the void that precedes the flood, hundreds of millions of french fries, tons of popcorn, sugar cakes frosted with nuts and chocolate, audible cereals, mountains of tricolored ice cream crowned with peanuts and hot caramel sauce, hamburgers of toughened dog meat, thin as shoe soles, served between tombstones of greasy, insipid, inflated bread, the national American host, smeared with ketchup (This is my blood) and loaded with calories (This is my body) … Spongy buttocks, hands moist and transparent as gelatin, pink skin holding in the mass of pus, blood, and scales … He watched them pass.

  And nevertheless, as Dionisio “Baco” Rangel observed the massive parade of fat women, he began to feel, perversely, inexplicably, a sexual itch. This was like his experience when he had his first erection at thirteen—something sweet, unexpected, and alarming. No, not the first time he masturbated, something he did rationally, as an act of will, but the first flowering of his sex, shocking, unthinkable before it actually happened … The first semen spilled by the young man, eternally, at that moment, the first man, Adam, a man adrift in semen.

  The intuition profoundly disturbed the solitary, itinerant gourmet. True, in Mexico there was no dearth of distinguished ladies of fifty and even forty willing to accompany him to eat at Bellinghausen, to have dinner at the Estoril, to attend one of the concerts at the Historic Center festival organized by Francesca Saldívar, or even to hear lectures by his two old colleagues from the Junior Professors radio show, José Emilio Pacheco and Carlos Monsiváis. True, some of those ladies were also happy to sleep with him from time to time, but it was too late in the day to learn their little habits or instruct them in his. And none of them had any way of knowing that nothing excited him so much as a woman’s hand on the back of his neck, just as he had no way of knowing which of them liked to have their nipples nibbled and which didn’t (ouch! that hurts!). The death of his friend Marcelo Chiriboga, a specialist in fat women, deprived him of the pleasure of comparing notes wi
th that wise, ignored, and sensual Ecuadorian novelist, who now, at the right hand of God, would be reciting the well-known prayer that came from the ancient Inca capital conquered by Sebastián de Benalcázar: “While on earth, Quito, and when in heaven, a tiny hole to see Quito.” At this point, all Dionisio wanted was a tiny hole to see the tiny hole of some chubby woman.

  Thus did the parade of fat women have its singular, entirely novel effect on Dionisio. He began by imagining himself in the arms of one of these immense women, lost in a leafiness like that of a forest of fleshy ferns, searching for secret jewels, diamond-hard points, hidden velvet, mother-of-pearl smoothness, invisible moistures of The Fat Woman. But Dionisio, being Dionisio (a discreet, elegant, recognized Mexican gentleman), did not dare to act simply on the impulse of his imagination and his body, to approach the obese object of his desire and thereby leave himself open to rejection or even—with luck—acceptance. Rejection, no matter how brutal, would be less painful than her consent to an afternoon of love: having never made love to a fat woman, he didn’t know which end to work from, what he should say, what he shouldn’t say, what the erotic protocol was when dealing with the very obese.

  For instance, how could he offer them something to eat without, perhaps, offending them? What love talk would a fat woman expect that wouldn’t diminish or mock her? Come here, my little honey, what cute little eyes you have? “Little” would be offensive, but your great big eyes, your huge tits—augmentatives were equally verboten. Afraid he’d lose his unaffected style and, with it, his effectiveness, Dionisio resigned himself to not making a pass at any of the fat women leaving the Kentucky Fried Chicken, but the very abundance of those women whom he desired for the first time made him think—by way of obvious association—about food, about compensating for the erotic impossibility with culinary possibility, about eating what he couldn’t screw.