Adam in Eden

Chapter 27

Was it a comet? Or did the ground shake? Adam Gorozpe has a traumatic physical memory of the 1985 earthquake. He still hadn’t married Priscila, and as a young student, he frequented a house on Durango Street called La Escondida, the Hideaway.

As at a cattle ranch, the new client was welcomed by the bell cow who paraded the young calves by lining them up for him in the living room.

“The customer chooses.”

There was the usual variety. Skinny and fat. Young and not so young. With Chiclets and without Adams. Hardened and inexperienced. The young Adam chose the most nubile girl: with light-brown skin, hair long enough to drape her back all the way to her butt, a fake mole next to her mouth, greenish eyes, and a half-open mouth.

“What’s your name?”

“Zoraida.”

She didn’t say, “Yes boss, whatever you say, boss,” the way the maids in the soap operas did even then.

“Zoraida.”

In the young Adam’s mind appeared the image of the beautiful Moorish princess of the Quixote, described by Cervantes as a woman who arrives mounted on an ass, her face veiled and dressed in a brocade hat, with a long coat covering her from shoulders to feet, shouting “No, no Zoraida! María, María! Zoraida macange!” which means not Zoraida, not at all.

To say no. To be free.

To only say yes. Another type of freedom?

The symmetry that mirrored the literary Zoraida and this real live young woman unsettled the mind of Adam Gorozpe — an earlier incarnation of myself, the narrator, and of whom I speak in the third person because to be young is to be another person — to the point of doubting his purpose of sleeping with a woman who, at first sight, seemed ideal, but who was, as a result, untouchable. Or was that only a mirage? Zoraida didn’t look like the other novices in the brothel. Was it only because she was different that she seemed better, and perhaps even a virgin like the character in the book and therefore untouchable? Yes or no?

Adam (who I am or who I was) looked for an answer in the girl’s blue-green eyes and found only virgin wells of stupidity. Then he thought he saw all of those poor women whom Adam, single and lonesome, the lonesome and poor Adam, assuaged his male anxieties by frequenting, without even looking at them, convinced that, whether fat or skinny, ugly or beautiful, when the lights went off, it didn’t matter: Adam sought and achieved a fleeting and instant satisfaction, different from masturbation only because his satisfaction was shared and therefore — despite all the warnings of the priests — less guilt-inducing than the heinous solitary pleasure that could lead to premature madness and eventually to sterility (as the priests taught that other man who was me).

“Don’t pay them any mind,” his teacher, the Colombian friar Filopáter, laughed. “Remember that your name is Adam. You are — you will always be — the first man. Your sin is not Eve. It’s the apple. And the apple is greed, rebellion, and pride. Or your sin is knowledge.”

Filopáter flashed a smile of either, I can’t be certain, sarcasm or irony. The difference would be that sarcasm is stupid and easy, whereas irony is difficult and smart. I am grateful to Filopáter for the teachings I apply to my erotic life, the secret life shared with Zoraida and later with L. These teachings allowed me to feign ignorance, so that I could accept a lie masked as the truth until its eventual unmasking.

How could I apply the philosophical education given me by a teacher of religion to my sexual congress with Zoraida? By admitting that irony is the way to lessen the burden of what we can’t deal with, and what we can’t deal with is truth. Although the game doesn’t end with this trope, nor for that matter begin with it, we use irony to entertain a lie in the guise of truth until it is exposed. Because too many lies are passed off as truth.

I am trying to explain the origin of my personality, which you have observed in action in my office, in my home, and unmasked with L. Now, though, the appearance in my life of the sinister thug Góngora, disguised as an agent of order, enhances my appreciation of irony as a movement of the spirit that I can use to resist that lizard-faced Góngora — with his nasty verbal mobility projected from a kind of inner cement — against whom I must use my own brand of irony, the irony of words that can seem like what Góngora is not, nor can be, irony with no defense against satire: to use language a contrario sensu, destabilizing truth in order to short-circuit life’s absolutes.

Now more than ever I count on my ironic disposition as I confront Góngora’s malice, his coarse winks, and his brazen vulgarity. Can I defeat him with the paradoxical weapon of irony, which subverts any pretense of absolute power — personified by Góngora — without running the risk of identifying myself with him because neither he — malicious — nor I — ironic — take anything too seriously? I trust that my irony will defeat Góngora’s malice by employing, better than he can, three ways of being.

Greed. Rebellion. Pride.

Filopáter’s words echoed in Adam’s (my) mind with the resonance of a moral commandment. Greed, the desire to earn and to keep, didn’t only refer to money, but also to personality, to worldly station. And this, one’s station, was not inherited: it was earned thanks to the revolt against facts, against fate, against the place assigned by the lotteries of family, fortune, race, and geography. Pride consists in overcoming all those hardships to build a world of one’s own, in which success cancels out the sin of greed and forgives the offense of rebellion.

All those ideas certainly crossed the mind of Adam Gorozpe (me, the one who is narrating, the one who is not me, but who I once was) at the speed of thought combined with the speed of the anticipated act of thrusting his (my) penis into the not-sovirginal-as-all-that Zoraida. This mixture of sex and thought was nowhere near as extraordinary as what happened next, without any intervention from Zoraida or (me) Adam.

The earth moved. What happened next was the great earthquake of September 19, 1985, during which a large part of Mexico City was destroyed, mostly the areas built over ancient lakes and canals, which that morning, while I lay with Zoraida, returned and reasserted their buried flow. Lamps, ceilings, and furniture shook; hangers in closets rattled; images of the Virgin of Guadalupe in this room and all the other rooms of this Durango Street bordello crashed to the floor; china and vaginas rumbled; outside the whorehouse, bridges and roads vanished; and beyond, the city awoke astonished with itself, eyes opening to everything that the metropolis was and had been, as if the past were Mexico’s sleeping ghost, the great Water God, who returns to life every so often, but, finding no outlet, no channel, becomes frantic and shakes his body, trapped between cement and adobe, until he slips through drains and rises from sewers, leaving a trail of destruction, which is just a cry of impotence from the memory of his ancient power, and, having completed his destructive work, he returns to his deep riverbed of dusty peace.

The fact is that, while fucking a beautiful young girl with blue-green eyes and loose hair, I, Adam Gorozpe, became trapped inside her vagina.

You heard me: trapped. Zoraida’s vagina tightened out of fear and the basic feeling that something strange was going on, and I became a prisoner locked inside her box.

I don’t know what happened. I felt the twin terror of an earthquake and a prison. I was not the master of my virility. Nor was Zoraida of her femininity. Realizing that my man’s body and the body of a woman were stuck together like those of two stray dogs unable to escape their attachment, I was overcome with dread. Would I be attached forever to the beautiful Zoraida? Would I see her grow old, put on weight, become white-haired, and die before my eyes? Would death be the only possible escape from this carnal union? And Zoraida, would she also watch me grow old until I died in her arms?

Sure, these were macho fantasies. No erection lasts a lifetime.

Yet in that moment, this terror coexisted with a feeling of infinite pleasure, stretched out until the end, not just of the moment, but of time itself. My pleasure inside the woman would be, will be, eternal. Eternity would be pleasure, and who could hope for a better paradise. .?

Then three things happened.

The earth stopped quaking, and our bodies separated with a sigh, I know not whether of relief or regret. Either way, with agony.

I rose from the bed and drew the curtains to see air filled with dust, and to hear wailing sirens and a faraway cry.

Outside I saw that there had been an earthquake, and that now a heavenly body was passing across the sky. The morning had been violated by an earthquake and redeemed by a comet that followed the orbit of the rising sun. The comet’s luminous tail spanned the city, the country, the whole wide world. But it pointed away from the sun in whose orbit it moved. It wanted to free itself from the sun.

I stepped away from the window.

Zoraida had gotten up.

She looked at my naked body, first with a sleepy sort of approval.

Then she screamed.