The Crystal Frontier

1. A Capital Girl

“There is absolutely nothing of interest in Campazas.” The Blue Guide’s categorical statement made Michelina Laborde smile slightly, disturbing for a moment the perfect symmetry of her face. Her “little Mexican mask” a French admirer had called it — the perfect bones of Mexican beauties who seem immune to the ravages of time. Perfect faces for death, added the admirer, which Michelina did not like one bit.

She was a young woman of sophisticated tastes because she’d been educated that way, brought up that way, and refined that way. She was of an “old family,” so even a hundred years earlier her education would not have been very different. “The world has changed, but we haven’t,” her grandmother, still the pillar of the household, would say. Except that there used to be more power behind the breeding. There were haciendas, demurral courts — for throwing out perfectly good lawsuits “that did not warrant legal action”—and Church blessings.

There were also crinolines. It was easier then to cover up the physical defects that modern fashions reveal. Blue jeans accentuate a fat backside or thin legs. “Our women are like thrushes,” she could still hear her uncle (May he rest in peace) say. “Thin shanks, fat asses.”

She imagined herself in crinolines and felt herself freer than she did in jeans. How wonderful, knowing you were imagined, hidden, that you could cross your legs without anyone’s noticing, could even dare to wear nothing under your crinolines, could feel the cool, free breeze on those unmentionable buttocks, on the very interstices of modesty, aware all the while that men had to imagine it! She hated the idea of going topless at the beach; she was a declared enemy of bikinis and only reluctantly wore miniskirts.

She was blushing at these thoughts when the Grumman stewardess came by to whisper that the private jet would soon be landing at the Campazas airport. She tried to find a city somewhere in that panorama of desert, bald mountains, and swirling dust. She could see nothing. Her gaze was captured by a mirage: the distant river and, beyond it, golden domes, glass towers, highway cloverleafs like huge stone bows. But that was on the other side of the crystal frontier. Over here, below — the guidebook was right — there was nothing.

Her godfather, Don Leonardo, met her. He’d invited her after their meeting in the capital just six months earlier. “Come take a look at my part of the country. You’ll like it. I’ll send my private plane to get you.”

She liked her godfather. He was fifty years old — twenty-five years older than she — and robust, half-bald, with bushy sideburns but the perfect classic profile of a Roman emperor and the smile and eyes to go with it. Above all, he had those dreamy eyes that said, I’ve been waiting a long time for you.

Michelina would have rejected pure perfection; she’d never met an extremely handsome man who hadn’t disappointed her. They felt they were better looking than she was. Good looks gave them unbearably domineering airs. Don Leonardo had a perfect profile, but it was offset by his cheeks, his baldness, his age. His smile, on the other hand, said, Don’t take me too seriously — I’m a sexy, fun-loving guy. And yet his gaze, again, possessed an irresistible intensity. I fall in love seriously, it said to her. I know how to ask for everything because I also know how to give everything. What do you say?

“What’s that you’re saying, Michelina?”

“That we met when I was born, so how can you tell me that only six months ago we—”

He interrupted her. “This is the third time I’ve met you, dear. Each time it seems like the first. How many more times do I get?”

“Many more, I hope,” she said, without thinking that she would blush — although, since she’d just spent ten days on the beach in Zihuatanejo, no one would have been able to tell if she was turning red or was simply a little sunburned. But she was a woman who filled the space wherever she happened to be. She complemented places, making them more beautiful. A chorus of macho whistles always greeted her in public places, even in the small Campazas airport. But when the lover boys saw who was with her, a respectful silence reigned.

Don Leonardo Barroso was a powerful man here in the north as well as in the capital. For the most obvious reasons, Michelina Laborde’s father had asked Don Leonardo, the then minister, to be her godfather: protection, ambition, a tiny portion of power.

“Power!”

It was ridiculous. Her godfather himself had spelled things out for them when he was in the capital six months before. Mexico’s health depends on the periodic renewal of its elites. For good or ill. When native aristocracies overstay their welcome, we kick them out. The social and political intelligence of the nation consists in knowing when to retire and leave open the doors of constant renewal. Politically, the “no reelection” clause in the constitution is our great escape valve. There can be no Somozas or Trujillos here. No one is indispensable. Six years in office and even the president goes home. Did he steal a lot? So much the better. That’s the price we pay for his knowing when to retire and never say a word again. Imagine if Stalin had lasted only six years and had peacefully turned power over to Trotsky, and he to Kamenev, and he to Bukharin, et cetera. Today the USSR would be the most powerful nation on earth. Not even the king of Spain gave hereditary titles to Mexican creoles, and the republic never sanctioned aristocracies.

“But there have always been differences,” interrupted Grandmother Laborde, who was seated across from her cases of curios. “I mean, there have always been ‘decent’ people. But just think: there are people who presume to be of the Porfirio Díaz-era aristocracy — all because they lasted thirty years in power. Thirty years is nothing! When our family saw Porfirio Diaz’s supporters enter the capital after the Tuxtepec revolution, we were horrified. Who were these disheveled men from Oaxaca and these Spanish grocers and French sandal makers. Porfirio Díaz! Corcueras! Nonsense! Limantours! An arriviste! In those days, we decent people followed Lerdo de Tejada.”

Michelina’s grandmother is eighty-four years old and is still going strong. Lucid, irreverent, and anchored by the most eccentric of powers. Her family lost influence after the revolution of 1910-20, and Doña Zarina Ycaza de Laborde took refuge in the curious hobby of collecting junk, bits and pieces of things, and, most of all, magazines. Every single doll (male or female) that enjoyed popularity — whether it was Mamerto the Charro or Chupamirto the Tramp, Captain Shark, or Popeye — she would rescue from oblivion, filling an entire armoire with those cotton-stuffed figures, repairing them, sewing them up when their innards spilled out.

Postcards, movie posters, cigar boxes, matchboxes, bottlecaps, comic books — Doña Zarina collected all of them with a zeal that drove her children and even her grandchildren to despair, until an American company specializing in memorabilia bought her complete collection of Today, Tomorrow, and Always magazines for something like $50,000. Then they all opened their eyes: in her drawers, in her armoires, the old lady was stashing away a gold mine, the silver of memory, the jewels of remembrance. She was the czarina of nostalgia (as her most cultured grandson aptly put it).

Doña Zarina’s gaze clouded over as she looked out from her house on Rio Sena Street. If the city had been taken care of as well as she had maintained the Minnie Mouse doll… But it was better not to speak of such things. She had remained and witnessed the paradoxical death of a city that as it grew bigger diminished, as if it were a poor being who was born, grew, and inevitably died. She plunged her nose back into the sets of bound volumes of Chamaco Chico and did not expect anyone to hear or understand her lapidary phrase: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”

To go on being “decent” people, to maintain the style to which they were accustomed, their culture, and even— though this was pure delusion — their name in the world, the family took refuge in the diplomatic corps. In Paris, Michelina’s father was assigned to accompany the young deputy Leonardo Barroso, and with each glass of burgundy, with each monstrous dinner in the Grand Véfour, with each tour of the Loire châteaus, Don Leonardo’s gratitude toward the diplomatic attaché of venerable family grew, eventually extending to the attache’s wife and immediately thereafter to his newborn daughter. They didn’t ask; he himself made the offer: “Let me be the kid’s godfather.”

Michelina Laborde e Ycaza, the young lady from the capital. You all know her because her photo’s been in the society pages so often. A classic creole face: white skin but with a Mediterranean shadow — olive and refined sugar — perfect symmetry in her large black eyes protected by cloudlike eyelids and the slightest of tempests in the shadows beneath, symmetry in her straight, immobile nose, vibrant only in the disquiet of those tempests, on their disquieting wings, as if a vampire had tried to escape from the night enclosed in that luminous body. Also her cheekbones, seemingly as fragile as quail eggs behind her smiling skin, trying almost to open that skin beyond the time allotted and expose her perfect skull. And finally, Michelina’s long black hair, floating, glistening, scented more from shampoo than from hair spray — the wondrous, fatal annunciation of her other, hidden soft hair. Every time, every thing divided: her upper lip, the deep comma in her chin, the separation of her skin.

Don Leonardo thought all this when he saw her grown up, and instantly he said to himself, I want her for my son.

Well-traveled, sophisticated, the young lady from the capital observed the features of Campazas without surprise. Its dusty town square and humble but proud church with broken walls and an erect carved facade that proclaimed, The Baroque came this far, to the very edge of the desert — to this point and no farther. Beggars and stray dogs. Magically supplied and beautiful markets, loudspeakers offering bargains and crooning out boleros. The empire of soft drinks: does any country consume more carbonated water? Smoke from black-tobacco cigarettes, oval and strongly tropical. The smell of sugarcoated peanuts.

“Don’t be surprised at the way your godmother looks,” Don Leonardo was saying, as if to draw her attention away from the ugliness of the city. “She decided to get a face-lift and even went all the way to Brazil to be done by the famous Pitanguy. When she came back, I didn’t recognize her.”

“I don’t remember her very well.” Michelina smiled.

“I almost sent her back. ‘This isn’t my wife. This is not the woman I fell in love with.’”

“I can’t compare her,” said Michelina, in an involuntary tone of jealousy.

He laughed, but Michelina again recalled old-fashioned styles, the crinolines that dissimulated the body and the veil that hid the face, making it mysterious and even desirable. In the old days, lights were low. Veils and candles … There were too many nuns in the family history, but few things fired Michelina’s imagination more than the vocation of the cloister and, once one was safe inside it, the liberation of the powers of imagination — the freedom to love anyone, desire anyone, pray to anyone, confess anything. When she was twelve, she wanted to enter some old colonial convent, pray a lot, flagellate herself, bathe in cold water, and pray some more: “I always want to be a girl. Blessed Virgin, help me. Don’t turn me into a woman.”

The chauffeur honked as they came to an immense wrought-iron gate, the kind she’d seen outside studios in movies about Hollywood. Correct, her godfather said, around here they call our neighborhood Disneyland. People in the north love to make wisecracks, but the fact is, we have to live somewhere, and nowadays you need protection, no way around it. You’ve got to defend yourself and your property.

“What wouldn’t I give to leave the doors wide open the way we used to here in the north. But now even the gringos need armed guards and police dogs. Being rich is a sin.”

Before: Michelina’s gaze wandered from her memory of Mexican colonial convents and French châteaus to the real vision of this group of walled mansions, each one half fortress, half mausoleum, mansions with Greek capitals, columns, and svelte statues of gods wearing fig leaves; Arabian mosques with little fountains and plaster minarets; reproductions of Tara, with its neoclassical portico. Not a single tile, not one adobe brick — only marble, cement, stone, plaster, and more wrought iron, gates behind gates, gates within gates, gates facing gates, a labyrinth of gates, and the inaudible buzz of garage doors that opened with a stench of old gasoline, involuntarily urinated by the herds of Porsches, Mercedes, BMWs that reposed like mastodons within the caves of the garages.

The Barrosos’ house was Tudor-Norman, with a double roof of blue slate, exposed timbers, and leaded glass windows everywhere. The only things missing were the Avon River in the garden and Anne Boleyn’s head in some trunk.

The Mercedes stopped and the driver tumbled out running. He resembled a small cube with the face of a raccoon, a swift die dressed in navy blue who buttoned his jacket as he hurried to open the car door for the patrón and his god-daughter. Michelina and Don Leonardo got out. He offered her his arm and led her to the entrance. The door opened. Doña Lucila Barroso smiled at Michelina (Don Leonardo had exaggerated — the lady looked older than he) and hugged her; behind stood the son, Marianito, the heir, who never traveled, who went out infrequently, whom she’d never met but whom it was high time she did meet, a very withdrawn young man, very serious, very formal, very fond of reading, very given to hiding out on the ranch to read day and night — it was high time he went out a bit, he’d already turned twenty-one. That very night the young lady from the capital and the provincial, the goddaughter and the son, could go out dancing on the other side of the border, in the United States, half an hour away from here, dance, get to know each other, learn about each other. Of course. What could be more logical?

Marianito came home alone, drunk, crying. Doña Lucila heard him stumbling on the stairs and thought the impossible thought: a thief. Leonardo, there’s a robber in the house. It’s impossible — the guards, the gates. The godfather, in his bathrobe, ran and found his son kneeling and puking on a landing. He helped him to his feet, hugged him. A knot formed in the father’s throat, the son stained the beautiful Liberty of London robe with vomit. The father helped him to his dark bedroom, which had no lamps. The boy had asked that it be that way, and the father had made jokes:

You must be a cat. You see in the dark. You’ll go blind.

How can you read in the darkness?

“What happened, son?”

“Nothing, Dad, nothing.”

“What did she do to you? Just tell me what she did to you, son.”

“Nothing, Dad, I swear. She didn’t do anything to me.”

“Wasn’t she nice?”

“Very nice, Dad. Too nice. She didn’t do anything to me. I was the one.”

He was the one. It made him ashamed. In the car, she tried to make pleasant conversation about books and travel. At least the car was dark, the driver silent. The discotheque wasn’t. The noise was unbearable. The lights, harsh, terrible, like white knives, chased him, seemed to look for him, only him, while even the shadows respected her, desired her, shrouded her with love. She moved and danced wrapped in shadows — beautiful, Dad, she’s a beautiful girl.

“Not half good enough for you, son.”

“You should have seen how everyone there admired her, how jealous they were of me for being with her.”

“We all feel good when that happens, right, Mariano? We feel on top of the world when people envy us because of the woman we have, so what happened? What happened? Did she treat you bad?”

“No, she’s got the best manners — too good, I’d say. She does everything well, and you can see right away she’s from the capital, that she’s traveled, that she’s got the best of everything. So why didn’t the disco lights chase her instead of me?”

“But she let you, right?”

“No, I walked out. I took a gringo taxi. I left the Mercedes and the driver for her.”

“No, I didn’t say left, I said let—she let you do what you wanted, right?”

“No, I bought a bottle of Jack Daniels and drank it right down. I felt as if I was dying. I took a gringo cab, I tell you. I came back over the border. I can’t be sure I know what I’m telling you.”

“She humiliated you, isn’t that so?”

He told his father she hadn’t, or perhaps she had: Michelina’s good manners did humiliate him. Her compassion offended him. Michelina was like a nun in an Yves St. Laurent habit; instead of a surplice she carried one of those Chanel evening bags, the ones with a gold chain. She danced in the shadows, she danced with the shadows, not with him — him she turned over to the slashes of the strobe lights, dawn, frozen, where everyone could see him better and laugh at him, feel repulsion, ask that he be thrown out. He ruined parties. How could they have let him in? He was a monster. He only wanted to get together with her in the shadow, take refuge in the individuality that had always protected him. I swear, Dad, I didn’t want to take advantage of her, I only asked her for the thing she was giving me, a touch of pity, in her arms, with a kiss — what could a kiss mean to her? You give me kisses, Dad, I don’t scare you, do I?

Don Leonardo patted his son’s head, envying the boy his bronzed, lion-colored hair. He himself had gone bald so early. He kissed him on the forehead and helped him settle down in bed, rocked him as he did when Mariano was a little boy, did not bless him because he didn’t believe in that stuff, but was on the verge of lulling him to sleep with a song. It seemed ridiculous to sing him a lullaby. The truth was, he only remembered boleros, and all of them talked about humiliated men and hypocritical women.

“You screwed her, right? Tell me you did.”

The welcome party for Michelina was a complete success, especially because Doña Lucila ordered the men of the house — Don Leonardo and Marianito — to make themselves scarce.

“Go out to the ranch and don’t come back until late. We want a party just for us girls, so we can relax and gossip to our heart’s content.”

Leonardo girded his loins. He knew Michelina wouldn’t be able to take the drivel that pack of old bitches spewed whenever they got together. Marianito was in no condition to travel, but his father said nothing to Lucila; anyway, the kid never let himself be noticed. He was so discreet, he was a shadow … Don Leonardo went alone to have dinner with some gringos on the other side of the border. Dinner at six o’clock in the afternoon, how crude. When he got back, the party was in full swing, so he put his finger over his lips to tell the young Indian servant to say nothing. It didn’t matter: the boy was a Pacuache who didn’t speak Spanish, which was why Doña Lucila had hired him, so the ladies could say whatever they liked without eavesdroppers. Besides, this little Indian boy was as slim and handsome as a desert god, made not of white marble but of ebony instead, and when the highballs had gone to their heads, the ladies would collectively undress him and make him walk around naked with a tray on his head. They were soul sisters, completely uninhibited, or did the ladies in the capital think that just because they were from the north they had to be hicks? No way! With the border a mere step away, you could be in a Neiman Marcus, a Saks, a Cartier in half an hour. What right did these women from the capital have to brag, when they were condemned to buy their clothes at Perisur? Okay now, keep it down — Dona Lucila put her finger to her lips — here comes Leonardo’s goddaughter. They say she’s really conceited, that she’s traveled a lot, and that she’s very chic (as they say), so just be yourselves, but don’t offend her.

Michelina was the only one who didn’t have a face-lift. She sat down, smiling and amiable, among the twenty or so rich and perfumed women, all of them outfitted on the other side of the border, bejewelled, most with mahogany-tinted locks, some wearing Venetian fantasy glasses, others watery-eyed trying out their contact lenses, but all liberated. And if this girl from the capital wanted to join them, fine, but if she turned out to be a tight-ass, they’d just ignore her … This was the girls’ gang, and they drank supersweet liqueurs because they got you stoned faster and were tastier, as if life were an eternal dessert (desert? dessert? postre? desierto?). They would drink sweet anise on ice, a so-called nun, a cloudy drink that got you drunk fast. (Oh, Lucilita, how I’m screwing up — and it’s only my first little nun …) Like drinking the sky, girls, like getting drunk on clouds. They began singing: You and the clouds have driven me crazy, you and the clouds will be my death …

They all laughed and drank more nuns and someone told Michelina to loosen up, that she really looked like a nun sitting there in the middle of the room on a puff covered in lilac brocade, all symmetrical. But isn’t your goddaughter crooked anywhere, Lucilita? Hey, she’s only my husband’s goddaughter, not mine. Anyway, what perfection, her eyes along one line, her nose another straight line, her chin cleft, her lips so …! Some laughed because they were sorry for Lucila, staring at her and blushing, but Lucila let it all go by, turned inward; their comments rolled off her like water off a duck, as if nothing had happened. They were here celebrating the absence of men — well, except for that little Indian boy who doesn’t count. And there’s my husband’s goddaughter, who’s oh so refined and courteous. Now, don’t make her uncomfortable. Let her be just as she is and let us be the way we are. After all, we all came from the convent, don’t forget. All of us went to school with the nuns and one day we all got liberated, so don’t make Michelina feel funny. But come on, we’re all back in the convent, Lucilita, said a lady whose glasses were encrusted with diamonds, all alone, without men, but sure thinking about them!

This set off a verbal Ping-Pong game about men, their evils, their cheapness, their indifference, their adeptness at avoiding responsibility (work the usual pretext), their fear of physical pain (I’d like to see a single one of those bastards give birth just once), their limited sexual skill (so how could they not look for lovers?). Hey, hey, what do you know, Rosalba? Don’t be a bunch of jerks now — all I know is what you all tell me, and me, well, I’m a saint, my saint. And they sang a little again, and then they started laughing at men once more (“Ambrosio’s gone nuts: he makes the maid shave under her arms and wear perfume. Can you beat that? The poor bitch’s going to start thinking she’s someone”; “He makes out that he’s so generous because we have a joint account in New York, but I found out about the secret account in Switzerland. I got the number and everything. I seduced the lawyer. Let’s see that wiseass Nicolás pull a fast one on me”; “They all think we shouldn’t get the cash until they kick off. You’ve got to know all the bank accounts and have access to all the credit cards just in case they dump you”; “In one shot, I ripped off my first husband’s Optima card for $100,000 before he knew what hit him”; “We have to watch porno films together for that little thing to happen”; “First it’s ‘The president called me,’ then it’s ‘The president told me, confided in me, distinguished me with an embrace.’ ‘So why don’t you marry him?’ I said.”) But they didn’t have the nerve to strip the Pacuache with Michelina there. She went along politely with their laughter, toying with her pearl necklace and nodding sweetly at the jokes the women made; her position — not distant yet not right in among them — was perfect, though she was fearful it would all end in the usual group embrace, the great unbosoming of feelings, the sweat, the tears, the repentance, the desire, vibrant and suppressed, the terrible admission: there is absolutely nothing of interest in Campazas for anyone, outsider or native, city person or northerner. Lord, how they wanted to get in the Grumman and fly off to Vail right now. But why? Just to run into more dissatisfied Mexicans, horrified at the idea that all the money in the world isn’t worth shit because there’s always something more, and more, and more, something unattainable — to be the queen of England, the sultan of Brunei, be a piece like Kim Basinger or have a piece like Tom Cruise. They started giggling, imitating the movements of skiers, but they weren’t on the Colorado slopes but in the desert of northern Mexico, which suddenly exploded in the firmament at sunset and passed through the leaded windows of the Tudor-Norman mansion, illuminating the faces of the twenty women, painting them satanic red, blinding the contact-lens wearers, and forcing all of them to look at the daily spectacle of the sun disappearing amid the fire, carrying their treasures into the underworld, exhibiting them one last time on the bald mountains and rocky plains, leaving only the prickly pears as the crowns of the night, carrying everything else away: life, beauty, ambition, envy, fortune. Would the sun rise again?

All eyes concentrated on the sunset. Except those of two people.

Leonardo Barroso watched everything from behind a scarlet curtain.

Michelina Laborde e Ycaza watched him until he saw her.

Their eyes met at the exact instant when no one had any interest in seeing where the young lady from the capital was looking or finding out if Leonardo had returned. The twenty women silently watched the sunset as if, in tears, they were attending their own funerals.

Then the northern troupe came in, banging drums and playing trumpets and guitars, and the place filled with men wearing Stetsons and short jackets. The spell was broken and all the women howled with pleasure. No one even noticed when Michelina excused herself, walked to the curtain, and, among its thick folds, found her godfather’s burning hand.

Only Lucila heard with what a desperate sound, with what a screech of burning rubber, the Lincoln convertible pulled out of the garage. But she paid no attention because, no matter how fast it went, the car would never reach the limits of the red horizon. To Mrs. Barroso, that seemed like a very neat poetic idea—“We shall never reach the horizon”—but she had no words to communicate it to her pals, who, in any case, were all drunk. Perhaps she only imagined the engine’s noise, which might have been nothing more than the echo of the guitar in her crazed head.

Leonardo was not drunk. His horizon did have a limit: the border between Mexico and the United States. The night air cleared his head even more, clarified both his ideas and his eyes. He drove with only one hand on the wheel. With his other hand, he squeezed Michelina’s. He told her he regretted having to say it to her, but she should understand that she would have anything she wanted. He didn’t want to brag, but she would get all the money, all the power; now she was seeing only the naked desert, but her life could be like that enchanted city on the other side of the frontier: golden towers, crystal palaces.

Yes, she said, I know, I accept it.

Leonardo slammed on the brakes, exiting the straight desert highway. In the distance, the monuments of cathedrallike stone, which seemed now like fragile paper silhouettes, watched over them.

He looked at her as if he, too, could read in the dark. The girl’s eyes shone brightly enough. At least Marianito and she would have that in common, the gift of penetrating the darkness, of seeing into the night. Perhaps without that penumbra he wouldn’t have clearly seen what he recognized in his goddaughter’s eyes. Daylight would surely have dazzled his vision. Night was necessary for seeing clearly the soul of this woman.

Yes, she said, I know and accept.

Leonardo held onto the Lincoln’s steering wheel as if it were the rock of his most intimate being. He was money. He was power. The desired love, he realized, was his own.

“No, not me.”

“You,” Michelina said. “You are what I want.”

She kissed him with those perfect lips, and against his beard, earlier shaved close but stubbly at that hour, he felt the depth of Michelina’s cleft chin. He sank into the open mouth of his goddaughter, as if all light had no other origin but that tongue, those teeth, that saliva. He closed his eyes to kiss and saw all the light of the world. But he never let go of the wheel. His fingers had a voice and shouted to get closer to Michelina’s body, to dig among her buttons, to find and caress and stiffen her nipples, the next symmetry of that perfect beauty.

He kissed her for a long time, exploring the girl’s perfectly formed, uncleft palate with his tongue, and then God and the devil, once again allies, made him feel he was kissing his own son, that the father’s tongue cut itself and bled in the jagged cleft of the palate, broken like a coral reef, that the smoothness of Michelina’s mouth had been brutally replaced by his son’s swollen, irritated, reddish carnality, wounded, smeared with mucus, dripping thick phlegm.

Is that what she felt when he screwed her last night without wanting to confess it? Why was she telling him now that she wanted him, the father, when it was obvious she was here to seduce the son incapable of seducing anyone? Wasn’t she here to conclude the family pact, to acknowledge the unlimited protection the powerful politician Leonardo Barroso gave to the impoverished Laborde e Ycaza family, to thank him for a few marvelous days in Paris — wines, restaurants, monuments? Was that what made working, getting rich, worthwhile? Paris was the reward, and now she was Paris; she incarnated the world, Europe, good taste, and he was offering her the complement to her elegance and beauty, the money without which she would quickly cease to be elegant and beautiful and become merely an eccentric aristocrat like her ancient grandmother, bent over the collectible curios of the past.

He invited her to conclude the pact. He became her godfather in order to single out her family. Now he was offering her his son in matrimony. The gold seal.

“But I’ve already got a boyfriend in the capital.”

Leonardo stared fixedly until he lost his own eyes in the desert.

“No more.”

“I’m not lying to you, godfather.”

“Everything and everyone has a price. That punk was more interested in money than in you.”

“You did it for me, didn’t you? You love me, too, isn’t that true?”

“You don’t get it. You just don’t get it.”

Together with his promise, the invisible line of the frontier passed through his head. He was well-known in the luxury hotels on the other side; they never asked him for identification or baggage and simply rented him the most luxurious suite for a night or a few hours, making sure there was a basket of fruit and a bottle of champagne in the room before he stepped out of the elevator. A sitting room. A bedroom. A bathroom. The two of them showering together, lathering each other up, caressing …

Leonardo turned the key in the ignition, started the car, and headed back to Campazas.

Grandmother Doña Zarina agreed with her granddaughter. Michelina would be dressed for her marriage in the old-fashioned way, in authentic clothes the old lady had naturally been collecting for generations. The girl could choose.

A crinoline, said the young woman, I’ve always dreamed of wearing a crinoline so everyone could wonder about me, could imagine me, and not know clearly what the bride was like. In that case, the grandmother said cheerfully, you’ll need a veil.

One night, she tried on her wedding outfit, the crinoline and the veil, and went to bed to sleep alone for the last time. She dreamed she was in a convent, strolling through patios and arcades, chapels and corridors, while the other nuns, locked in, peered out like animals through the bars on their cells, shouted obscenities at her because she was getting married, because she preferred the love of a man to wedding Christ. They insulted her for violating her vows, for leaving her religious order, her social class.

Michelina tried to escape from her dream, whose space was identical to that of the convent, but all the nuns, crowded in front of the altar, blocked her way. The black maids tore the habits off the sisters, stripping them naked to the waist, and then the nuns screamed imploringly for the whip to suppress the devil in the flesh and to give an example for Sister Michelina. Others immodestly menstruated on the tiled floor, then licked their own blood and marked crosses on the icy stone. Others lay next to the prostrate, bleeding, wounded, thorn-pierced Christs, and here Michelina’s dream in Mexico City fused with Mariano’s in the lightless bedroom in Campazas. The boy, too, dreamed of one of those dolorous Christs in Mexican churches, more dolorous than their Virgin Mothers, the Son laid out in a crystal coffin surrounded by dusty flowers, He Himself turning to dust, disappearing on His homeward journey to the spirit, leaving only the evidence of a few nails, a lance, a crown of thorns, a rag dipped in vinegar … how he longed to leave behind the miseries of this ephemeral body!

That was only for Christ, and how Mariano envied Him! If the suffering, mocked, wounded Christ had been left in holy peace, why not him? All he wanted was to live on his parents’ ranch, reading all day with no other company than the Indians, who were natural and indifferent to the perversions of nature, Indians some called Pacuaches and others “erased Indians.” Like him: invisible Indians, beings who copied that great canvas of imitations and metamorphoses, the desert. Was he more confined, more isolated out there on the desert ranch than his family was in Disneyland, out of touch as they were with Campazas, with the nation, ignoring everything that occurred outside their high walls, consuming only imported things, watching only cable television? Why was he denied his solitude, his isolation, when he was indifferent to theirs? He who read so much, things that were so beautiful, worlds as perfect as his imagination could desire, infinitely new pasts, futures foretold and already, already enjoyed.

He dreamed of a hare.

A hare is a wild quadruped with long ears and a short tail.

Its fur is reddish, and its offspring are born hairy.

Its feet are longer than those of the rabbit. It runs very quickly because it is very timid.

It does not dig, as other members of the species do. It makes nests, seeking out a stable, warm, respected space where it will be left in peace.

It’s a mammal. It’s born from milk, desires it again, wants to suckle in darkness, to be sucked, in a nest with no surprises and no one to watch it enjoy itself.

There wasn’t a woman in the world who could tolerate his desire. Mariano only wanted, finally, to live physically where he’d always wanted to live by will and where he’d always lived in spirit. On a ranch. With little money, many books, and a few “erased Indians” as silent as he. Alone, because where in the world was there a woman who could eclipse all space but the bedroom, where space and presence coincided. Was Michelina such a woman? Would she respect his solitude? Would she liberate him forever from ambition, inheritance, social obligations, the need to make public appearances?

It wasn’t his fault that inside his mouth there lived a blind, hairy, swift, and voracious hare, nesting permanently on his tongue.

On her wedding day, Michelina entered the living room of the Tudor-Norman mansion wearing her beautiful old dress, her crinoline, flat-heeled white velvet slippers, and a heavy white veil that completely hid her features. And above the veil, a crown of orange blossoms. She was on the arm of her father, the retired ambassador Don Herminio Laborde. Michelina’s mother was unwilling to make the trip north (gossip had it that she disapproved of the marriage but lacked the means to stop it). The grandmother, old as she was, would have made the trip with pleasure.

“I’ve seen every type of crossbreeding imaginable, and one more, even if it’s between a tigress and a gorilla, much less between a dove and a rabbit, isn’t going to shock me.”

Her ailments kept her from traveling; somehow, though, she was present in the crinoline, in the veil… Dona Lucila spent a whole month in Houston outfitting herself as if she were the bride, and today she looked like something from a pastry shop. She embodied the wedding cake itself: triangular like a cream pyramid, she was crowned with a cherry hat, her hair a caramel delight, her face a huge, smiling meringue, her breasts a wave of crème Chantilly. And then the dress: draped over her like a burial shroud, it had all the tones of blackberry jam spread over marzipan.

But she did not offer her arm to her son, Mariano. No, it was Leonardo Barroso himself who wrapped Mariano’s shoulders in a big embrace. The young man was simply dressed: a beige suit, a blue shirt, and a string tie. Doña Lucila did not lean on her son until the party, the gathering of a multitude of friends, acquaintances, curiosity seekers, all there to attend the wedding of the son of one of the most powerful men, et cetera. Properties, customs offices, real estate deals, wealth and power provided by control over an illusory, crystal border, a porous frontier through which each year pass millions of people, ideas, products — in short, everything (sotto voce: contraband, drugs, counterfeit money, et cetera).

Was there anyone who didn’t have something to do with or didn’t depend on or hope to serve Don Leonardo Barroso, tsar of the northern frontier? What a shame about his son. There has to be a balance in this life. The son humanizes the father. But the young lady from the capital sold herself, don’t tell me otherwise. Human beings are bought, Don Enrique. Put it this way: the buying and selling are humanized, Don Raúl.

Although in those years every possible concession had been made to the Catholic Church, Don Leonardo Barroso maintained his liberal Jacobinism, the old tradition of nineteenth-century Mexican reform and revolution: “I’m a liberal, but I respect religion.”

In their bedroom (to the horror of Doña Lucila), he had a reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica instead of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. “What ugly scrawls! A child could draw better than that.” Luckily, by then they were sleeping in separate bedrooms, so they each had their own icons over the bed: Pope Paul VI and Jesus, united in their vision of sacrifice, death, and redemption. Don Leonardo never entered a church and held the civil part of the nuptial ceremony in his own house — of course, where else? Even so, the bride’s outfit infused the act with a mysterious severity, sacred rather than ecclesiastical.

“Think she’s a witch?”

“No, man, just one of those snooty bitches from the capital who come up here to make us look like hicks.”

“Is that the latest fashion?”

“For moths, yes, the very latest.”

“They say she’s a real knockout.”

The guests fell silent. The judge said the usual things and read an abbreviated version of Melchor Ocampos’s epistle: Obligations, Rights, Mutual Support. All shared, in sickness and in health, joy and suffering — the bed, time, the times. Bodies. Stares. The witnesses signed. The bride and groom signed. Don Leonardo lifted Michelina’s veil and brought Mariano’s face close to that of his bride. Michelina could not supress an expression of disgust. Then Leonardo kissed the two of them. First, he held his son’s face in his hands and brought those lips so esteemed by Michelina, so sexy and so fickle, close to his son’s mouth, kissed him with the same intensity Michelina attributed to the father’s eyes: I fall in love seriously, I know how to ask for everything because I also know how to give it.

The lips separated, and Don Leonardo caressed his son’s head, kissed him on that disgusting mouth, Normita, while Dona Lucila turned pale and wished she were dead, and then, showing off his daring and his personality — not for nothing is he Leonardo Barroso — with his son’s drool still on his lips, he raised again the lowered veil of the bride — a real beauty, Rosalba, you were right! — and gave her a long and terrible kiss that frankly, my dear, had absolutely nothing of the father-in-law (or godfather, for that matter) in it.

What a morning, I tell you, what a morning! I wouldn’t have missed it for the world! Campazas will never be the same after this wedding!

The Lincoln convertible, this time with its top up, rapidly crossed the cold, silent evening desert, filling it with the noise of tires and motor, frightening the hares, which leapt far away from the straight highway, the uninterrupted line to the frontier — crossed the desert in order to break the illusory crystal divider, the glass membrane between Mexico and the United States, and continue along the superhighways of the north to the enchanted city, temptation in the desert, illuminated, brilliant, with a Neiman Marcus, a Saks, a Cartier, and a Marriott, where a luxury suite awaited the bride and groom: champagne and baskets of fruit, a sitting room, spacious closets, a king-size bed, lots of mirrors in which to admire Michelina, a pink marble bath tub in which to bathe with her — her buttocks were larger than they seemed, her legs thinner, like a thrush’s — oh, woman of tempestuous eyes, immobile little nose, and nervous nostrils through which night escapes from you, parted lips, moist, through which my tongue gets lost without finding coral reefs or stalactite caves or ruined Gothic vaults — there is only the tickle of your cleft chin, my precious, the announcement of your other duplicities. Those I know I caress slowly so that nothing fades between us, so that everything lasts amid expectation, surprise, the desire for more and more, yes, Godfather, give me more, nothing can separate us now, Godfather, you said so, remember? Every time you see me I want it to be the first. Oh, Leonardo, it’s that I fell in love with your eyes because they said so many things.

“I know how to ask for everything because I also know how to give everything. What do you say to me, capital girl?”

“That same thing, Godfather, that…”

Through the half-opened window came a song sung by Luis Miguel, “I need you, need you a lot, I don’t know you …” How could Leonardo and Michelina know that that music was coming from an “erased” Indian village, Pacuaches, where Mariano read books and listened to music and went into ecstasy guessing which birds were singing at four o’clock in the morning. That morning, a jet crossed the heavens, and the birds fell silent forever. She was no longer there …