Adam in Eden

Chapter 13

Here are assorted recent events my secretaries have conveyed to me from the Mexicomedy:

An old lady was traveling peacefully on the bus that runs from Salto del Agua to Ciudadela to Rayón. A young man boarded the bus, and, with gun in hand, ordered the passengers to hand over their wallets, rings, and sunglasses. He extended a garishly colored baseball cap to collect the items. When he approached the old lady, she grabbed the cap from him, emptied the contents, and then beat the young robber with that same cap, addressing him as a beggar, a petty thief, a scoundrel, and an insolent brat, as well as a naughty little rascal and other old fashioned expressions that betrayed the lady’s age. The surprised young man first covered his head against the old lady’s onslaught. Then she let go of the cap and beat him with an umbrella until the little thief jumped from the vehicle, stumbled, and fell headfirst. Everyone laughed in relief. Who was the brave little old lady? She said her name was Sara García.

An obscure artist created an inflatable sculpture of Dumbo the elephant on the roof of his Yucatan Avenue house. The statue broke free from its ties and flew over nearby San Martín Park, where it killed an unsuspecting couple. “Elephants are contagious,” the artist said, by way of excusing himself.

Luxury items are being sold at lowered prices: sunglasses, Audis, Porsches, Rolex, Cartier rings, Mont Blanc pens, Prada bags, Zegna shirts, Gucci shoes, Cavalli dresses, and so on. The ad reads: “Better prices for a better image.”

Exports of chilaquiles have risen ninety-two percent. Nobody can explain who, or why anyone, abroad is buying pieces of hard tortilla, but nowadays they come with recipes to make sauces and instructions to season them according to the consumer’s taste. The ad says: “Be patriotic. Export a chilaquil.”

As North American tourism diminishes, Chinese tourism increases. When questioned, the visitors speak about the similarities between Chinese and Mexican cuisine — spicy, small, varied dishes, ideal for each to create a menu to his or her own taste. The surprising truth is that, regardless of what they say, these tourists only eat what they export to us. We asked the minister in charge: Is this good for foreign commerce? We are still waiting for his answer.

Candelaria the Gondolier gives an interview in which she confesses that she was the mistress of some dozen drug traffickers. She was passed from hand to hand. They killed one another. She survived and waited for her next lover. She says that she lived on an islet of Xochimilco, surrounded by flowers and piglets and passing tourist gondolas in the canals. “I guess I’m just bucolic,” she explains.

Yasmine Sulimán, a political refugee who fled from a murderous regime in the Middle East, found work in the José Vasconcelos Library of Mexico City, and moved into a nearby apartment on Mystery Lane (continuation of Reforma). She was murdered yesterday by a crazy library patron who asked her for the complete works of Augusto Monterroso. When he received the book it was so slim that he became enraged and strangled Yasmine.

Sixth grader Jenaro González has admitted to being the Boy-God who preaches on Sundays at the intersection of Insurgentes and Quintana Roo. Our reporters followed him home from the evening assembly then lost him. The next morning they picked up his trail and confronted him at his school on Chapultepec Avenue. The young boy confessed to being the child preacher. All he does is put on a wig of golden curls and a little white robe, and he walks barefoot. In fact, he has porcupine hair and swears that he does what he does following a divine mandate, even if later he can’t remember what he preached. Our clever reporter interviewed him again on Chapultepec this week. The boy with spiky hair repeated this story. But at that precise moment, the Boy-God was preaching to a crowd at the intersection of Insurgentes and Quintana Roo, thus exposing Jenato González as an impostor. Unsolvable mystery?

Our lost cities — of the type called callampas in Chile, villas miseria in Argentina, favelas in Brazil, ranchitos in Caracas, Hoover-villes in the Great Depression — have been baptized Gorozpevilles, (according to the secretaries) an insolent reference to me, Adam Gorozpe, to whom the surrounding poverty of Mexico City is groundlessly attributed, with the obvious aim of slandering and maligning me. There are now similarly lost cities on the outskirts of Guadalajara, Monterrey, Morelia, and Torreón. It is worth noting that centers of organized criminality as notorious as Juárez, Tijuana, and Tampico do not have these shanty towns and tent cities because the drug traffickers in those cities enforce a high degree of discipline that consists in making any non-regulated urban manifestation disappear from one day to the next. “Gorozpevilles damage our image,” said Don Hipólito el de Santa, a blind old pianist and head of the Desert Cartel. Should one assume that the drug traffickers show respect toward a man of such honest reputation as me? It’s an innocent question.