“I was really beautiful. When no one loved me. Not this painted-up, fiftyish old monster. Ooooh, they called me La Fellini when I was young. Until they finally understood the task I’d taken on and respected me.”
Deng Chopin looked at her with supplicating eyes. She caught the reflection of that glance and began a vigorous brushing of her red hair—almost burned to a crisp, Was it by Breton hot combs? Norman ones? Or Provençal?
“Don’t look at me that way. Throughout my childhood I had to put up with the humiliation my parents suffered after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Then in the sixties I myself had to say that it just wasn’t so. Beijing and Moscow have not had a fight, they are the bastions of the proletarian revolution. If Beijing and Moscow separate, there will be no revolution, no proletariat. No one could sacrifice that power, Sacred Blue!”
She put down the brush. Deng stared at her intensely.
“Well, what do you say, chinaboy?”
He shook his head in the negative and sadly looked at the sheets.
“And to the world then, what do you say to the world, my sublime dwarf?”
“When people talk you about it, paladise, when you living there, it hell. I tell it to you, World. But you undersand it, Universe.”
“And to me what do you recount, my adored rekeket?”
“With one hair from woman possible to lift elephant.”
“Papa-God!”
“Papa-papa, papagoda!”
“Ayy, now my little yellow pearil, wouldn’t you like me to take you inside, my dove, my dive, my divinity?”
“Yes, Ada Ching.”
“Well, how does it feel to want? Put your glasses back on and read something from the Palace of Pleasure and stop screwing around because you know very well that you don’t get into my pussycat until the Sino-Soviet alliance is reestablished. That’s that.”
“Tomollow maybe we dead.”
“That’s no reason to throw out one’s principles.”
“Nothing glow ’less seed planted, even death.”
“Alors, a fallen bud never returns to its branch. Bon soir, mon Chou.”
5
Well now, we were saying that sexual cells enter the sea to meet, to fertilize each other, without all the complications (my genes have been warning me about them for eons) that surround the simple conception of a human being and the philosophicomoralhistoricoreligious ceremony of copulation (I know all about whole eras of genes but only a little about gentlemen and ladies, after all): coral and jellyfish enter the sea to fertilize themselves and to peer through the corrupt water of the hotel drain and the turbulence caused by El Niño at the mountains where the people can no longer live, available now only to tourists and unsleeping advertisements: All the neon lights in Aca are lit, wasted during daylight hours:
WE HAVE ENERGY TO BURN!
Nobody else. Never again. Around here, yes, the coral and the jellyfish reproduce by external fertilization (listen, Reader, I’m going to talk about something your honor knows nothing about: about what I am: a sperm that left its ancestors behind and defeated his little brothers in the race of the charros of ire and who now has found the hot egg and is distributing his X’s and Z’s) and the sexual cells (I’m talking about my family history, living now and certainly external, which for me is a short, secret history unless your mercies deign to inform me starting now and from the outside, to which purpose I concede exactly one page to add whatever you might want, now or never, before I take up my discourse again, recapitulating, as follows):
Reader’s List
on seeing her from a dark balcony, without even daring to think of her as a human being: his statue, his bronze Galatea with wig and tricolor skyrocket
* (Ulises López nervously choosing between consulting his Hindustani guru at Oxford University or defending himself against the plots of Secretary Robles Chacón, his political rival, plots which will keep him from becoming president. He finally opts for forgetting economics and politics and thinks only about squash)
* (In the old El Mirador hotel: its shape
Christopher’s List
* (the two of them on Pichipichi beach washing themselves off in the sea after creating me)
* (Uncle Homero flying diarrheically through the skies of Acapulco, fleeing from the guerrillas)
* (Uncle Fernando flying through the skies of the Chiticam Trusteeship in a helicopter toward the Lacandon forest)
* (Mamadoc foaming at the mouth and spitting at the mirrors because she has understood the reason for the Christophers Contest: to deprive her of children and to invent an artificial dynasty for Mexico)
* (Federico Robles Chacón remembers how he saw his creation, the Mother and Doctor, conquer the people and
* (My parents on the beach remembering what happened days before during the New Year’s celebration that led to my conception)
* (I demanding from my new existence, which they don’t even suspect, that they explain to me how and when, the place and the time in which all this takes place, what space is, what happens within the within and outside the outside and within outside and outside within)
* (They answering my demands before I make them by pure intuition. I already adore them!)
* The first thing Professor Will Gingerich noted when he arrived at the New Year’s cocktail party on the terrace of the Hotel Sightseer (originally El Mirador) was that all the guests were made of glass.
that of layered terraces:
He didn’t blame his headache for this illusion. Aspirin should be delivered with the Acapulco sun. But now the sun was not shining. Night had fallen. His herd of gringos had met to get to know each other before before beginning tomorrow’s Fun & Sun Toltec Tour.
Each one had stuck a badge on his chest with his name and address on it. Damn! So why weren’t they looking at each other? He observed each of them looking at the badge of the person standing next to him just as that person looked at his, smiling in a happy but absent way and avidly seeking the badge of the next guest. Their eyes pierced the badges as if they were panes of glass framed so they could see the Vermont landscape in winter. But here, behind the glass, there was only more glass. All of them wanted desperately to leave behind the next traveling companion and meet another one, who was also made of glass, all of them waiting, innocent and crystalline.
An Acapulco waiter offered him a Scarlet O’Hara. Will Gingerich took the glass with its brittle stem and felt nauseous as he tasted the cloying liquor flowing around drunken strawberries. He looked into the thick, bovine, impenetrable eyes of the Mexican waiter: his body was as square as a black die, so thick that no glass gaze could ever penetrate it. Professor Gingerich breathed deep and remembered that he ought to be introducing himself and looking after his flock. He slowly strolled across the terrace balanced high over the rocky, sonorous sea that night.
“Hi, I’m your professional guide.”
He didn’t have to tell them his name because he, too, had it written on the chest of his faded windbreaker, which also had Dartmouth College Vox Clamantis in Deserto 1769 inscribed on it. The inscription was too light for anyone to decipher. He would bet on it. No one looked him directly in the eye. No one in fact did read the faded inscription. And he was not going to tell anyone that he had set himself up as a tour guide in Acapulco because Ronald Ranger had destroyed higher education in the United States with the speed of the fastest gun in the West. Among the items the President had certainly read on the hit list for budget cuts were two exotic subjects, Spanish-American Literature and Comparative Mythology. The President had wondered what earthly use they could have and marked them as definite cuts from the federal aid package. Gingerich consoled himself thinking that it was worse for the insane because the President had also eliminated federal aid for mental health: he had appeared on television with a statistical chart which showed beyond the shadow of a doubt that cases of mental imbalance had diminished sharply in the United States during the previous twenty years. Aid for an illness in declin
e was no longer necessary.
Will Gingerich did not want to think of himself as a victim of America in the eighties or announce it to his heterogeneous flock. Besides, the sixty-year-old couples who comprised it were not looking at him, even if they did squawk their appreciation, Oh, how exciting! as they read his badge. If only they were as excited about the age and prestige of Dartmouth College. But they neither read the inscription nor asked Will to translate the Latin.
“A voice crying out in the desert”—an index finger accompanied by a modulated, serious voice stopped him smoothly.
Will Gingerich stopped his wandering eyes in order to match his interlocutor with a body. Certainly it was something more than a finger and a voice. Gingerich shook his prematurely balding head. He was afraid of falling into the same malaise that possessed his flock. In front of him he saw a person who was not invisible. Will was on the point of introducing himself in a positive fashion: “Yes, I am a professor of mythology and literature at Dartmouth College.” But it seemed an insult to the institution.
He didn’t have to say a word, because his interlocutor had begun a unilateral evocation: “Ah, those white Dartmouth winters. Really a white hell, which is what José Clemente Orozco said when he went up to paint the frescoes in the Baker Library during the thirties. Did you ever see them?”
Gingerich said he had. He realized that the person speaking to him had not started this conversation because he thought Gingerich had bought his jacket at some university souvenir stand out of nostalgia, or a desire to impress.
“That’s why I took a job at Dartmouth. Those murals are a strange presence in the cold and mountains of New England. Orozco would be normal in California because California looks more and more like an Orozco mural. But, in New England, it was a pleasure for me to write and read protected by the murals.”
“For you, the murals were de luxe bodyguards.”
“Yes.” The professor laughed. “Orozco is an artistic bodyguard.”
He could not refrain from carefully scrutinizing the tall, thin man dressed in a tasteful combination of open-necked shirt, sports jacket, white trousers, mahogany belt with heavy buckle, and blucher moccasins, doubtlessly purchased from L. L. Bean. In one hand, and with no sign of nervousness, the man, who introduced himself as D. C. Buckley, held a Panama hat, which from time to time he comically twirled on one finger.
Buckley raised his other hand to a thin, hard-edged face, like the one in the old Arrow shirt ads, and ruffled his hair the color of old honey. He couldn’t be more than thirty-five years old, Gingerich (who, at forty-two, felt old) estimated, but his hair was old, prophetic, as if an ancient Seminole chief had lent it to him.
“Look, old salt,” he said to Professor Gingerich with the immediacy of the eternal frontiersman, “I suspect you’ve satisfied your primary obligations by this point. I’d rather be nonallusive, and I hope you wouldn’t think it illiberal of me (at least) when I assure you that your flock will not be needing your services for the time being.”
He posed and paused, looking at the sheer cliffs of La Quebrada, which were so highly illuminated by spotlights and torches that they ended up looking as if they were made of cardboard.
“First, they’ll numb their tongues and palates with these appalling cocktails until they’re quite immune to any kind of culinary offering. Later on they’ll eat—because they’ve demanded it, and, because they’ve demanded it, the trip organizers have provided food—baby food: pureed things, bottled dressings, vanilla ice cream, and cold water—and after a while they will be ready to fix their distracted gaze on the divers who plunge off the cliffs. The heights they dive from will be the main attraction, not what takes place in the heart of the Acapulco boy who, like you, only does what he must in order to eat. Don’t you agree?”
Gingerich said it wasn’t hard to guess that a university professor working as tourist guide in Mexico had to be doing it out of sheer necessity. “But,” he hastened to add, “at least I’m trying to kill two birds with one stone.
“I came here because I’m finishing a monograph on the universal myth of the vagina dentata.”
“If it’s universal, why did you want to come here specifically?” asked Buckley critically.
“Because this is where the Acapulco Institute is located,” said Will, as if the institute itself were a universal myth. He blushingly realized he’d been talking like a pedant and added, “The Acapulco Institute has amassed all the documentation relevant to this myth, Mr. Buckley.”
“For God’s sake, call me D.C.”
“Sure, D.C. You can understand why this field is not one that gets much support. Government opposes it. And the women who keep the cult alive would have anyone who even hinted anything about it killed.”
“My favorite detective, Sam Spade, says that only a madman would contravene the sentiments of a Mexican woman. The consequences, to put it that way, would be dangerous; illiberal at least.”
Buckley signaled that the dialogue was coming to an end by twirling his Panama hat: “If you agree, my dear professor, we can kill one stone with two birds, ha ha. I’ll accompany you to the Acapulco Institute if you go with me to investigate vaginas, dentatae or otherwise, to be found here in Acapulco, ha ha!”
And he clapped his Panama hat on his head at a rakish angle.
In D. C. Buckley’s swift Akutagawa coupé, they drove down the steep and twisted road from La Quebrada to the bananafied stench of the seawall road. Gingerich consulted his faithful Filofax with the seal of Dartmouth College embossed on its cover: the Acapulco Institute was on Christopher Columbus Street, between Prince Henry the Navigator and Ferdinand and Isabella Street, in the—the only name missing—Magellan district. The Mexicans were exploiting the didactic aspect of street names to the maximum, the professor noted, and then dared to ask D. C. Buckley what brought him to visit this country.
“You know, old salt. It’s possible, as Henry James wrote, to be faithful without being requited.”
Buckley said all that without taking his narrow and always unperturbed eyes off the twists and turns of the highway.
“No, no,” said Gingerich, amicably shaking his head. “Don’t think I’m some romantic gringo looking for the golden age and the noble savage.”
“It would be illiberal of me to think anything of the sort, old salt,” said Buckley. “I’m a native of New York and Adjacent Islands. I’m a member of the Anar Chic Party of the North American Nations. And though you might not believe in primitive man, that’s what I’m looking for here: an immersion in primigenial sensations, but with primitive woman, ha ha. And you, to which of the nations do you belong?”
“I left Mexamerica when it became independent. I’m too frugal to be from New York and the Islands, and too liberal to be a Dixiecrat. I think I have too much imagination to be part of the Chicago-Philadelphia Steel Axis, and I know I have too much of a sense of humor to sink into the hyperbole of the Republic of Texas, so I joined up with New England.”
“Have you ever heard of Pacífica?” Buckley twisted his mouth.
“I don’t know if I have any right to. In any case, I’m afraid.”
“Well, here we are. But there’s no sign of your Acapulco Institute anywhere.”
“No, they don’t exactly advertise. You have to go straight in.”
“It’s open at night?”
“Only at night. That’s what the pamphlet says. I’ve never been here before.”
They got out of the Akutagawa. The Acapulco night smelled of dead fruit. They stopped in front of a decayed building. They walked up some stairs, holding on to the rusted railings for support.
“At least the ventilation’s good,” said Buckley, brushing the reddish dust off his hands.
Buckley was alluding to the fact that the stairs went up past stucco pilasters badly in need of painting and windows devoid of glass; but then the deep blue of the windows made the night seem even darker. They stopped in a hallway whose only light came from a solitary, immobi
le bulb that hung over a nondescript door.
“Nothing worthwhile in Mexico is announced anymore,” Will Gingerich explained. “But the institute does send its pamphlets abroad.”
He knocked at the door, involuntarily letting himself be carried away by a forgotten jazz phrase.
“Is this proof that the institute is not worthwhile?” insisted D.C. courteously.
The door opened, and a man of perhaps thirty-two years of age, tall, powerful, wearing a large mustache, with eyes like the chief of an unconquered tribe photographed by Mathew Brady c. 1867, stared at them with no expression whatsoever on his face. Because of the heat, he was wearing Bermuda shorts. Despite the heat, he wore a thick turtleneck sweater. The professor gave his name and introduced D. C. Buckley as his assistant.
“Matamoros Moreno, pleased to serve Quetzalcoatl and you.” He nodded his huge head, and D. C. Buckley felt a tremor run down his spine: he, who had come to Mexico following the tracks of D. H. Lawrence, to receive this gift … and so out of nowhere! He thanked the professor for his liberality with a glance—thanks, old salt!
But he had no time to say anything because Matamoros Moreno ushered them in with a gesture of hospitality, closed the rachitic door of the Acapulco Institute, and shuffled into the naked space as if he were wearing a ball and chain. He slumped his gorilla shoulders and sat in a metal chair facing an ocote table finished in red lacquer.
The professor sat down in the other metal chair, with D.C., modestly adapting to his role as assistant, standing behind him, tall and distant from the terrestrial eyes of Matamoros, who even when sitting seemed to be pushing a cannon uphill. With no preamble, Matamoros said, “As you know, the ancient myth of the vagina dentata only survived in sixteenth-century texts thanks to the missionaries who took the time to listen to the oral histories of the conquered and wrote them down to use them in the Indian colleges. But those texts were soon destroyed by the colonial authorities, both civil and ecclesiastical, because they were deemed lascivious and impure.”