Adam in Eden

Chapter 5

When things turn out badly for me, as happened today, January 6, I take refuge in reflections on my father-in-law, Don Celestino Holguín, remembered (and forgotten) as the King of Bakery and father of my wife, the Queen of Spring (as I already explained). The Bakery and the Spring are kept apart from each other by the same device that kept the cruel winter from the Virgin of Guadalupe: a miracle.

From the moment we were introduced, I’ve been amazed that Don Celestino built his fortune on a pile of sweet breads. They say that man does not live by bread alone, but my father-in-law had disproved this saying: he had lived very well by bread, and bequeathed his bread rolls to his children and then to me, his soon-to-be son-in-law. Don Celes turned the curse with which God cast Adam and Eve out of Paradise—“You shall earn your bread by the sweat of your brow”—into a blessing, even more so in a country like Mexico that takes great pride in the variety and deliciousness of its breads, in tough competition with France and Central Europe, where nevertheless no bakery produces such beautiful and varied goods as our dinner rolls and sandwich rolls, our poetically named frogs, ears, sugar-freckled buns, conch-shells, brides, as well as our mixed-layer puff pastries and the powdery shortbreads that are sweetened, stick-like, monochrome glazed pastries. . We live a paradox in our poor country with its rich cuisine. Beginning with breakfast: huevos rancheros and divorced eggs (legally separated by two salsas), tamales and bean casserole, chilaquiles and enchiladas, quesadillas and sopes, preceded by papayas and oranges, sapodillas (or black sapote), mamey sapotes (on a pink-to-orange spectrum), water- and other melons, bananas (jamaica, silk, horn plantain, and sucrier), soursops (white with black seeds), and prickly pears (green as envy).

Sometimes I wonder if Mexico is a poor country because it wastes so much time preparing sumptuous meals, followed by long hours savoring them.

“Look at the gringos,” I indoctrinate the ingrates of my Board when they ask me for permission to take a two-hour lunch. “The gringos eat at noon standing on their feet like horses, quick, then get on with their work. .” I pause for effect. “And they eat dinner at six in the evening: lettuce with strawberry jam, dry chicken, and for dessert Technicolor Jell-O.”

“Would you like us to bring our lunches to the office, sir?” asks a smart ass.

I smile with leniency:

“No, my friend. Have a hearty breakfast of beans and empanadas to keep your stomach from growling.”

They all laugh.

Or, rather, they all used to laugh.

My father-in-law was one of a kind. His vocation of baker seemed to have given him a sense of fulfillment larger than a wedding cake. Don Celes’s work was sanctioned by the biblical command—“you shall eat your bread,” and so on — which for him was more blessing than reproach.

“I bet you that Jehovah didn’t say,” Don Celes offered, “you shall eat your steaks or you shall eat your omelet or you shall eat your salpicón or you shall sip your broth by the—”

“Sweat of your face?” I said, anticipating his biblical exegesis.

“Exactly,” Don Celes agreed, approving of my lucidity and all but congratulating himself that his little girl, Priscila, had chosen a husband as great as me, to whom Don Celes could delegate the running of the business and who could shepherd the transition from baking to more lucrative, if less necessary, activities.

“They call you Adam. Adam, after all, is your name,” my father-in-law elaborated. “So you have the same name as the first man who, instead of loafing around Eden, had to labor for his daily bread, to earn his bread—does everybody understand me? — by the sweat of his face.”

And turning to his daughter:

“You chose your husband well, Priscila. Who would have thought that this penniless bum you married would become a thousand times wealthier than his father-in-law, me, and by the sweat of his face alone?”

“Now, Daddy, you know that bread doesn’t sweat,” Priscila answered before taking a glass of watermelon juice from the maid, whom she thanked with a slap across the face.

But Don Celes had already turned his attention to the other person at the table, his son Abelardo.

“Come on, Abelardo, can’t you be more like your brother-in-law? Why not emulate him just a little, huh?”

The young man to whom Don Celes spoke was an unusual person for whom, though he was still a boy when we first met, I had immediately felt respect. In all sincerity, I have to admit that nobody else in the Holguín family, neither my wife, her father, nor her deceased mother, God rest her soul, inspired more respect in me than this quiet boy, impervious to his dad’s verbal pressure and to his sister’s eminent silliness. Such is the situation even in the best families. There’s always an exceptional being about whom one asks oneself, where did this person come from? Obviously not from his father or his sister or his deceased Mamacita And-So-On whose bedroom and bathroom were preserved as a kind of shrine to tackiness; because And-So-On so loved pink, everything in her room — curtains, walls, bed, pillows, rugs, comforters, chairs — was that color, and there was even a rose-tinted mirror, as if to give Doña Rosenda back her self-esteem (though I can’t imagine she ever lost it). One detail alone — a white camellia in a vase — clashed with the bedroom’s symphony in pink. There was also an iron bidet, solid enough to resist any and all onslaughts.

“She was romantic,” Don Celes had said, without any further explanation, dogma for his loyal servant, obviously me, concerning the virtues of the household to which I had the honor of being admitted.

The bathroom’s pinkness also included pink toilet paper, and — as I discovered when I pulled a pink chain — pink water. Everything was pink, save that iron bidet and the camellia. And save Doña Rosenda herself who, in preparation for death, had prematurely dyed her hair a natural blonde.

Convinced that the Holguín family practiced a kind of dull and conventional eccentricity, I paid attention to the young Abelardo because he was neither dull nor eccentric, except within the norm of his family. Tall, thin, silent, he seemed to belong to a different species. He was no Holguín.

“Was he adopted?” I asked Priscila one day, in a mocking tone.

“Don’t be rude!” she rebuked me. “You foul-mouthed bastard! Two little trees have grown on my ranch!”

I tried in vain to discern a logical relation between my question and these arboreal insults. That was Priscila. For her no cause led to any effect. Under no circumstances. That is why we did not have any children.

“I love your little tummy,” I told her with much affection. “I want to make it bigger and bigger.”

“Until I’m pot-bellied?” she said, infuriated. “You’d rather I had a pot-belly? Is that what you want, you monster? To see me deformed? Are you that apathetic?”

“Actually that wouldn’t count as a deformity.”

“Oh really? What else do you call ruining my figure? You know who gave me my figure? The Lord God gave it to me, and only He can take it away. .”

“On the day you die,” I said without meaning for it to come out the way it did.

“Oh! So that’s what you want! To kill me! Spineless creep!”

“That’s not what I said. .”

“To fatten me up like a carnival balloon until I explode, you coward, fool, ass-kisser! Out on the big ranch!”

As I said, Priscila’s outbursts were usually delivered out of conversational context.

No, she did not refuse me her “favors.” But she guarded them with so many precautions that in the end I would lose not just my passion, but also my pleasure. Fortunately, everything took place in the dark. Priscila never saw my genitals. Better off that way! I never saw hers. The worse for me!

“Turn off the light.”

“Okay, fine.”

“Don’t look at me.”

“How could I possibly see you? It’s too dark.”

“Touch me with mercy.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Touch my scapulars.”

“You don’t have any scapulars.”

“Dummy.”

“Oh.”

The problem was that she did wear scapulars where she should not have, so my moves felt sacrilegious. How was I to caress the Sacred Heart of Jesus? How was I to suck on the breasts (and whatever else) of Our Lord of Sorrows? How to penetrate, in short, the Holy of Holies covered by the Veil of Veronica? This last one was a temptation of a subtlety scarcely attributable to Priscila, who was perhaps unaware of Veronica’s questionable past, because she confused her with Mary Magdalene; she believed they were both sisters of the Lord, reformed by religion, and therefore stripped the Virgin Mary of her virginity, unless the girls were younger than Jesus, in which case, as they say in roulette, rien ne va plus, and everyone to Bethlehem!

“The wildest Negro I met in Havana,” Priscila sang when I had satisfied her.

All this took place in the dark. So she never saw me naked. Better still.