Adam in Eden

Chapter 36

My brother-in-law Abelardo Holguín would not likely deny me a favor. We’d interrupted the conversation when it had come to the question, “What will become of our soul?” but I’d promised to resume with the answer, “The soul of Mexico. .”

Abelardo can’t shut me out. I don’t know whether that is because he always relied on a sole friendship — mine — in his father’s hostile house, or because I have followed him each step of the way since he left the family prison of Lomas Virreyes, tried his literary luck and failed, met with Rodrigo Pola, became a soap opera writer, and now. .

He’d asked to meet at a restaurant, and he spoke to me about the soul. I’d called the television network and they’d told me, “He doesn’t work here anymore.”

I’d had the excellent idea of giving him the latest Palm Pre when he left home so that I wouldn’t lose touch with the only lucid member of that family of dunces. The Palm Pre is a next-generation smartphone created by some three thousand top-notch engineers. It is the most advanced model in the world. The advantage for me is that it still hasn’t arrived in Mexico, which gives me a secret ability to communicate without official or unofficial interference. It encrypts all communications. I’d chosen to give one of my Palm Pres to Abelardo without worrying about the consequences.

“I’m calling you to arrange a meeting,” I say to him over his rare Palm Pre. “We need to talk, you and I.”

“You and I and she,” he clarifies.

“And she,” I agree, though I have no patience for any mysteries other than my own. “Where?”

“The Chapultepec Park Zoo.”

I haven’t been to the zoo since I was a kid, even though I drive past it every day on my commute from the house in Virreyes to the office on Reforma Avenue, passing far enough away that those deep and concentrated animal smells don’t reach me the way they do now when I walk into the jungle vegetation.

I had forgotten the pungent smell of the metropolitan zoo. This mother of all smells comes from the combination of all the animals that live there side by side but separated from each other and from the public by gates, bars, and pits, insurmountable borders. I am well aware that there are animals that attack other animals by instinct as well as by necessity. With notable exceptions, the big ones eat the smaller ones. And the big ones — gorillas, bears, lions, tigers — coexist. But they would attack us, not because we are small, but because we are different, we are bipeds, allegedly rational, and able in any case to talk. If they could see us.

Because, more than anything, we are onlookers. We come to the zoo, and we stare at them. We toss some of them peanuts. We make faces at others. We imitate their roars. We joyfully scratch ourselves: seeing monkey/doing monkey. We flap our arms as if they were the wings of a bird, and we realize that we alone stare at the birds and the beasts. They don’t look at each other. They never look at us. We are of no great concern to them. And we are their jailers. The tiger moves nimbly. He makes the air tremble. He paces his cell as though no one alive could block his way.

The two of them wait for me in front of the tigers’ big cage.

I recognize Abelardo.

But not the woman who accompanies him.

She stands with her back to me, absorbed in contemplating the tiger. Abelardo extends his hand to me. Even when the woman turns around to look at me, I can’t see her. A thick veil conceals her face. The impenetrable veil reveals nothing. Her voice has to penetrate a curtain to tell me her name and, in the provincial manner, assure me of her gracefulness.

“Sagrario Guadalupe, at your service.”

Sagrario Guadalupe or Guadalupe Sagrario? What is the reason for the widespread custom of giving the last name first and the first name last, mimicking the alphabetical order of the phone book?

Sagrario Guadalupe. Guadalupe Sagrario.

She is dressed in black. Not just the veil. She’s wearing a monk’s, or I suppose a nun’s, well, actually a monk’s robe, black stockings, and black flats. Her gloveless hands alone give her away. They are the hands of an old woman. Bony hands, protruding blue veins, arthritic fingers that take my hand for just a second, as though she fears that with a touch everything about her would be revealed.

We gaze at the animals. There are more than three thousand of them in the Chapultepec Zoo. A city unto itself.