The Crystal Frontier

by Carlos Fuentes

  He was in a commercial neighborhood north of San Diego, perusing the Yellow Pages in search of a restaurant that wasn’t too vile. An O Sole Mio guaranteed him week-old pasta camouflaged by a Vesuvius tomato sauce. A Chez Montmartre promised horrible food and haughty waiters. A Viva Villa! would condemn him to detestable Tex-Mex with a moustache. He chose an American Grill, which would at least make excellent Bloody Marys and which, from outside, looked clean, even shiny, in its aggressive display of chrome tables, leather seats, a nickel-plated bar, and mirrors—a quicksilver labyrinth, in fact, designed so a diner could see his reflection without looking away from his dinner partner. Or could look at himself the whole time to compensate for the tedium of the food.

  He sat down, and a handsome blond young man, dressed like a waiter from the 1890s, offered him a menu. Dionisio had chosen a secluded corner with a view of a skating rink, but shortly two cross bald men bent with age though still energetic, wearing seersucker caps, white cardigan sweaters, and blue pants, took the table next to his. They sat down noisily, shuffling their Nikes.

  “Let’s see. To start off…” Dionisio read over the menu.

  “Show me the proof,” said one of the bristling old men.

  “I don’t have to. You know it isn’t true,” said his companion.

  “A shrimp cocktail.”

  “You didn’t make a dime on that deal.”

  “I don’t know why I go on arguing with you, George.”

  “No sauce. Just some lemon.”

  “I told you you’d lose your shirt.”

  “I told you, I told you, I’ll tell you—don’t you know any other songs?”

  “What is the soup of the day?”

  “You don’t know a thing.”

  “I could see it coming a long way off, Nathan. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Vichyssoise.”

  “I’m telling you, you don’t know anything.”

  “I don’t know anything? Do you know that half the merchant ships in World War Two were lost?”

  “Prove it. You just made that up.”

  “A steak, but right away.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  “Sure. I always win when I bet against you. You’re ignorant, George.”

  “Medium.”

  “Do you know what gravity is?”

  “No, and neither do you.”

  “It’s a magnetic force.”

  “No, skip the green stuff. Just the steak.”

  “Let’s see now. Is there gravity right at the edge of the ocean?”

  “No, it’s zero there.”

  “Whoa! That’s real learning. No one’s going to pull a fast one on you.”

  “Put up or shut up.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll take the bet.”

  “No, son, I don’t like baked potatoes, with or without sour cream.”

  “We still have to charge you for it.”

  “Charge me, but don’t put it on the same plate with the steak.”

  “Look, they’re going to fire me if I don’t. It’s the rule.”

  “Okay, okay, put it on the same plate.”

  “They were going to charge you for it anyway. The steak costs twenty-two-ninety with or without potato.”

  “Fine.”

  “George, you know a little about a lot, but you don’t know anything important.”

  “I know a bad deal when I see one, a deal that’ll end in failure, Nathan. You can’t deny I know that.”

  “Well, I don’t know anything, but I’m an educated man.”

  “Facts, Nathan, facts.”

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “With the patience of a saint.”

  “I don’t know why we keep talking to each other.”

  “A green salad.”

  “After everything else?”

  “Yes, my boy, salad comes at the end.”

  “Are you a foreigner?”

  “Yes, I’m a really strange foreigner with really strange quirks—like having salad after everything else.”

  “In America, we eat it first. That’s the normal way.”

  “Are you listening to me, George?”

  “Give me facts, Nathan.”

  “Do you know that the annual earnings of the publishing industry in America are the same as the earnings of the hot dog industry? Did you know that?”

  “Where did you get that? Are you trying to insult me?”

  “Since when have you become a book publisher?”

  “I’m not. I make hot dogs, as you know perfectly well, Nathan. Are you listening to me?”

  “And lemon meringue pie. That’s all.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “Give me proof.”

  “You don’t know anything.”

  “I don’t know why we’re still eating together.”

  “Bet.”

  “I’ll make a bet. Is there gravity on the moon?”

  “Facts, facts.”

  “I told you that deal was headed for failure. No doubt about it. You’re broke, George.”

  The one named George gave out a hoarse, tumultuous sob that didn’t seem possible coming from that impassive face.

  There is no fascination that doesn’t also contain its pinch of repulsion. We scold ourselves when we allow ourselves to be seduced by the eye of Medusa, but in the case of this pair of dried-out, bald, long-nosed, arthritic, argumentative old codgers armed with unlit phallic cigars—No smoking, please—repulsion overcame fascination. Dionisio impatiently began to play with a bottle of sauce, rubbing it more and more nervously as the endless debate between George and Nathan went on and on, like insomnia, utterly engrossing for the two old men, unbearable for Dionisio. To save himself from them, the Mexican gastronome began to think about women as he rubbed the bottle, and as he rubbed it, he noticed what it was: Mexican sauce, jalapeño chile sauce. Suddenly, magically, something was unleashed from within, a volcano bursting the ancient crust over its crater and vomiting lava the more the man named after Bacchus rubbed it.

  Except that it wasn’t chile sauce that came out of the bottle but a man, diminutive but recognizable by his charro suit, his mariachi hat, and his Zapata-style moustache.

  “Patrón,” he said, revealing his hairy head, “you’ve saved me from a yearlong imprisonment. No gringo would open me up. Thank you! Your wish is my command!” concluded the tiny charro, caressing the pistol he was carrying on his hip.

  For a moment, Dionisio “Baco” Rangel remembered the joke about the shipwrecked man who’s spent ten years on a desert island and one day sets free the genie in a bottle. When the genie asks him what he wants, the man asks for a really great mama. And what he gets is Mother Teresa.

  Dionisio decided to be frank with the little charro from the bottle, who looked just like a character in Abel Quezada’s cartoons.

  “A woman. No—several women.”

  “How many?” asked the little charro, ready, it seemed, to populate a harem if necessary.

  “No,” explained Dionisio. “One for each course I ordered.”

  “Served with each course, master, or instead of each?”

  “That I leave to you,” said Dionisio “Baco” Rangel, the universal Mexican who is, was, and shall be our protagonist. He said it indifferently, accustomed as always to the unusual. “Like the dish being served, with the dish being served…”

  The little charro made a magician’s wave, shot into the air, and disappeared. In his place, there appeared, simultaneously, the waiter and a thin woman with dark, lank hair and bangs, starved-looking, bony as Popeye’s girlfriend or Modigliani’s models, the total opposite of the fatties Dionisio had so perversely dreamed of. She was armed with a Diet Coke, which she drank by the teaspoonful as she gazed at Dionisio with eyes at once bored, ironic, and tired. The same eyes, with infinite weariness, explored the American Grill as she wondered out loud, in a drawl as long as the Mississippi, what she was doing there and w
hom she was with. He said he’d asked the genie in the bottle for a woman. He didn’t manage to surprise her. Suppressing a yawn, the anorexic gringa answered that she’d asked for the same thing. There’s no luck worse than sharing luck with someone else. She’d asked for a man—she smiled with immense fatigue, infinite hunger—leaving everything to chance because every choice she’d made in the past was a poor one. She’d let someone else choose for her. She was available, completely available.

  “I’m a terrible lover,” she said, almost with pride. “I’m just warning you. But I never take any blame. The man is always the one to blame.”

  “That’s true,” said Dionisio. “There are no frigid women. There are only impotent men.”

  “Or enthusiasts,” ruminated the skinny woman. “I can’t stand enthusiastic lovemaking. It takes all the sincerity out of it. But I can’t stand sincerity either. I can only put up with men who lie to me. Lies are the only mystery in love.”

  She yawned and said they should postpone their sexual encounter.

  “Why?”

  “Because the only important thing about sex for me is being able to erase all trace of my sexual partner. All this is very tiring.”

  Dionisio reached his hand out to touch the skinny woman’s. She pulled hers back with repugnance and laughed a cabaret laugh.

  “How do you act in private, when no one’s watching?” asked the Mexican. She showed her teeth, drank a teaspoon of Diet Coke, and disappeared.

  The shrimp cocktail also disappeared. For an instant, Dionisio wondered if he’d eaten it while he’d chatted with the anorexic New Yorker. (She had to be from New York; it was too pat, vulgar, predictable for her to be from California. At least boredom and fatigue in New York have literary foundations and don’t result from the climate.) Or, thinking he was eating a shrimp cocktail, had he eaten the gringa who had so carefully avoided looking him in the eye? (Was she trying to avoid being discovered or even guessed at?) He couldn’t bear the curiosity of knowing if he’d eaten with her or eaten her or if everything might end up—he trembled with pleasure—in a mutual culinary sacrifice …

  He heard the charro’s shot, the waiter placed the vichyssoise on the table, and opposite him, eating the same thing, appeared a woman, fortyish, but obviously and avidly enamored of her childhood, with a Laura Ashley dress and a red chignon crowning her Shirley Temple curls. These odd accessories could not distract Dionisio from the repertoire of grimaces accompanying the words and noisy soup slurping of this old Shirley counterfeit, who between slurps and grimaces managed to express only excitement and shock: how exciting to be sitting there eating with him, how shocking to know a man so romantic, so sophisticated, so, so, so … foreign. Only foreigners excited her—it seemed unbelievable to her that a foreigner would notice her, she who lived only on dreams, dreaming about impossible, shocking, exciting romances, all her life dreaming of being in the arms of Ronald Colman, Clark Gable, Rudolf Valentino …

  “Do you ever dream about Mel Gibson?”

  “Who?”

  “Tom Cruise?

  “Who’s he?”

  No, she had no complaints about life, she went on, making her faces, rolling her eyes, shaking her curls like a luxury floor mop, raising her eyebrows to her topknot, nodding her head like a porcelain doll—and also hissing like a snake, clucking like a hen, howling like a she-wolf before confessing that when she went to bed she sang lullabies and recited Mother Goose, though through her mind (everything was shocking, exciting, unheard of) passed horrible catastrophes, air and sea disasters, highway mayhem, terrorist acts, mutilated bodies, so the lullabies and pretty verses were to exorcise the horrors—did he, an obviously foreign, exciting, sophisticated, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful gentleman understand?

  As she spoke the word wonderful, this Alice in Blunder-land, blond and pink, faded into a haze. The soup, too, had disappeared. Dionisio gazed at the empty bowl, disconsolate. Again the charro’s shot rang out, the waiter served the steak, and an extremely beautiful and elegant woman appeared, in a black tailored suit, with pearls at her neck and bracelets on her wrists, perfectly coiffed and made-up and showing a considerable amount of cleavage. She stared at him in silence.

  Dionisio cut his meat without saying a word and raised a bloody morsel (he’d requested medium) to his mouth. At that precise instant she began to speak. But not to him. She spoke into a cellular telephone which she held in one hand while she touched the divide between her breasts with the gesture of a woman perfuming that crevice of pleasure before going out to dinner.

  “I’m making an exception and eating sitting down, you understand? I never have time to sit down; I eat standing up. This seems abnormal to me.”

  “But what’s so strange—” interrupted Dionisio, before realizing that the woman was talking not to him but to her telephone.

  “Miss? You think I miss you?”

  “No, I never said—” Dionisio decided to make a mistake. Damnation.

  “Listen,” said the beautiful woman in the black tailored suit showing a considerable amount of cleavage, her breasts barely hidden by the (appropriately) double-breasted jacket. “I get my faxes at one number. I don’t have a name or address. I don’t need secretaries. My computer is with me wherever I am. I have no place. No, I don’t have time either. I’m proving it to you, stupid. What does it matter to me that in Holland it’s midnight if it’s three p.m. in California and we’re here working…?”

  “On a snatch, I mean, a snack.” Dionisio corrected himself but the beauty ignored him, just barely touching herself behind an ear, again as if she were putting on perfume, as if her fingers were a bottle of Chanel.

  “Just think, I don’t even need a doctor anymore. You know my bracelet? Well, let me tell you, it’s not just some frivolous piece of jewelry. It’s my portable hospital. Anywhere I happen to be, it can do a cardiogram, check my blood pressure, and even tell me my cholesterol without wasting time.”

  Dionisio wondered if this beautiful woman was really a nurse in disguise. A hospital would have rewarded her efficiency, but it was haste, not efficiency, that mattered most to this divine creature. Dionisio began to doubt she was speaking to someone in Holland, but there was certainly no way in hell she was speaking to him. Was she talking to herself?

  “So listen, with no time, no address, no name, no place, no office, no vacation, no kitchen, what am I left with?”

  Her voice broke; she was going to cry. Dionisio panicked. He wished he could hug her or at least stroke her hand. She was becoming more hysterical by the minute. For the first time, she looked at him, telling him she was Sally Booth, thirty-six years old, a native of Portland, Oregon, voted in high school most likely to succeed, three husbands, three divorces, no children, occasional lovers, farther and farther away, love by telephone, long-distance orgasms, love with security, without problems, no body fluids, safe. I won’t go to a hospital, I’m going to die at home …

  Abruptly interrupting her emotional flow, her instant biography, she squeezed Dionisio’s hand and said, “What is money good for? To buy people. We all need accomplices.”

  And on that note, she disappeared like the first two, and Dionisio sat there staring at an empty plate where only the juicy traces of a rare steak survived (even though he had explicitly ordered medium).

  “You could have been more cruel and less beautiful,” said the Symbolist poet whom Dionisio, to his sorrow although also for his intermittent pleasure, carried within him.

  But this time his portable Baudelaire never left the suitcase; the little charro’s pistol went off again, and the blond waiter unexpectedly set down before him a lemon sherbet that Baco identified as the trou normand of French cuisine, the “Norman hole” that cleanses the palate of the main courses and prepares it for new tastes. He was astounded that the American Grill in a commercial center on the outskirts of San Diego would know anything about such subtleties, but he was even more taken aback to find, when he looked up, a woman before him. Without bei
ng beautiful, she was radiant—that he saw instantly. Her face, devoid of makeup, both needed and didn’t need cosmetics—they were irrelevant. Everything in her immaculate face had meaning. Her eyebrows, with their blond pallor, were like the meeting place of sand and sea; her lips, appropriately thin, were appropriately furrowed by an insinuation of imminent maturity she didn’t deign to disguise; her hair was pulled back and gathered in a bun, her first gray hairs of no importance to her, floating like lost clouds over a field of honey; her eyes, her eyes of a deep gray, the gray of good cashmere, of morning rain, as gray as an unexpected encounter, intelligent, slate and chalk, announced her special nature—they were eyes that changed color with the rain. They looked past Dionisio’s shoulder toward the television screen.

  “I always wished I could play for a baseball team,” she said, smiling, as Baco, lost in the eyes of his new woman, let his lemon sherbet melt away. “It takes a special kind of art to make those low catches.”

  “Like Willie Mays,” Dionisio interposed. “He really knew how to pull out those low catches.”

  “How do you know that?” she said with genuine amazement, genuine fondness.

  “I don’t like American cooking, but I do admire American culture—sports, movies, gringo literature.”

  “Willie Mays,” said the un-made-up woman, rolling her eyes up toward heaven. “It’s funny how someone who does things well never does them just for himself. It’s as if he did them for everyone.”

  “Who are you thinking of?” asked Dionisio, more and more ravished by this trou normand of a woman.

  “Faulkner. I’m thinking of William Faulkner. I’m thinking about how a single genius can save an entire culture.”

  “A writer can’t save anything. You’re mistaken there.”

  “No, it’s you who are mistaken. Faulkner showed the southerners that the South could be something other than violence, racism, the Ku Klux Klan, prejudice, and rednecks.”

  “All that came into your head from watching television?”

  “It really does intrigue me. Do we watch television because things happen there, or do things happen so they can be seen on television?”

  He went on with the game. “Is Mexico poor because she’s underdeveloped, or is she underdeveloped because she’s poor?”