The Crystal Frontier

2. Pain

Juan Zamora asked me to tell this story while he kept his back turned. What he means is that he wants to have his back to the reader the whole time. He says he’s ashamed. Or, as he puts it himself, “I’m in pain.” “Pain” as a synonym for “shame” is a peculiarity of Mexican speech, comparable to saying “senior citizens” for “old people”—so as not to offend — or saying “He’s in a bad way” to soften the idea that someone’s illness is terminal. Shame causes pain; sometimes pain causes shame.

So Juan Zamora will not offer you a view of his face over the course of this story. You’ll be able to see only the nape of his neck, his back. I won’t say “his ass,” because that, too, is a loaded term in Mexico. Especially in the sense of “offering” your ass to someone, the lowest act of cowardice, a yielding or a type of abject courtesy. That’s not the case with Juan Zamora. He wears a big university sweatshirt, size XXL, decorated in front with the emblem of the university in question, the kind of sweatshirt that hangs down to your thighs (though he wears it tucked into his jeans). No, Juan Zamora insists I tell you he won’t be offering anything. He only wants to emphasize that his shame is equal to his pain. He doesn’t blame anyone. It is true that he touched a world and that the world touched him.

But after all, everything that happened passed through him and happened inside him. This is what counts.

The story takes place during the time of the Mexican oil boom, at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s. Right from the start, that explains part of the pain-shame identification Juan Zamora is talking about. Shame because we celebrated the boom like a bunch of nouveaux riches. Pain because the wealth was badly used. Shame because the president said our problem now was to administer our wealth. Pain because the poor kept on getting poorer. Shame because we became frivolous spendthrifts, slaves of vulgar whims and our comic macho posturing. Pain because we were incapable of administering even our shame. Pain and shame because we were no good at being rich; the only things appropriate for us are poverty, dignity, effort. In Mexico, there have always been corrupt authoritarian figures with too much power. But they are forgiven everything if they are at least serious. (Is there one corruption that’s serious and another that’s frivolous?) Frivolity is intolerable, unforgivable, the mockery of all those who’ve been screwed. That’s the source of the pain and the shame of those years when we were millionaires for a day, then woke up broke, out in the street, tears of laughter pouring down our faces before we began to laugh with pain.

Juan Zamora has his back to you. When he was twenty-three, he got to study at Cornell, thanks to a scholarship. He was a dedicated pre-med student at the National Preparatory School and then at the National University, and he swears to you that that would have been enough for him if his mother hadn’t got it into her head that during the Mexican boom period it was necessary to do some postgrad work at a Yankee university.

“Your father never knew how to take advantage of an opportunity. He was Don Leonardo Barroso’s administrative lawyer for twenty years and died without a penny to his name. What could he have been thinking about? Well, not about you or me, Juanito, you can be sure of that.”

“What did he say to you?”

“That honesty is its own reward. That he was an honorable professional. That he wasn’t going to betray Mario de la Cueva and his other professors at the law school. That he’d been taught that law is an honorable profession. That you cannot defend the law if you’re corrupt yourself. ‘But it’s not illegal, Gonzalo,’ I’d say to your father,‘ to accept a payment for doing favors. It’s no crime drawing a matter to the attention of Minister Barroso. Everyone in government gets rich but you!’

“‘That’s called a bribe, Lelia. It’s a triple deception, besides being a lie. If the matter develops, it looks as if I was paid to move it along. If it fails, I look like a crook. In either case, I deceive the minister, the nation, and myself.’

“‘A little public-works contract, Gonzalo, that’s all I’m asking you to request. You get your commission and bye-bye. No one will find out. With that money we could buy a house in Anzures. And get out of Colonia Santa María. We could send Juanito to a gringo university. What I mean is, the boy’s a very good student and it would be a shame for him to go to waste with that riffraff at the National University.’”

Juan tells me to say that his mother recounted those things with a bitter smile on her face, a grimace that her son had only seen, from time to time, on cadavers he studied at school.

His father, Gonzalo Zamora, CPA, had to die for his widow to ask a single favor from Don Leonardo Barroso: would he see if he could get a scholarship for Juanito to study medicine in the United States? With great elegance, Don Leonardo said, Why, of course, he would be delighted to take care of it — why, that’s the least the memory of good old Zamora deserved, such an honest lawyer, such a diligent functionary.

I’m following Juan Zamora, the Mexican student with his gray sweatshirt, through the sad streets of Ithaca, New York. I have no idea what he’s looking for since there’s so little to see here. The main street has barely any stores, two or three very bad restaurants, and immediately after that come mountains and gorges. Juanito feels — almost — as if he’s in Mexico, in San Juan del Rio or Tepeji, places he’d visited from time to time on holiday to breathe the air of forests and gorges, far from the pollution of the capital. The gorge in Ithaca is a deep and forbidding ravine, apparently a seductive abyss as well. Ithaca is famous for the number of suicides committed by desperate students who jump off the bridge spanning the gorge. One joke says that no professor will fail a bad student, for fear he’ll dive into the chasm.

Since there isn’t much to see around here on Sunday, Juan Zamora is going back to the house where he’s living. It’s a beautiful place of pale pink brick with a blue slate roof, surrounded by a well-kept lawn that becomes gravel around the house and extends into a tangled, thin, and somber woods behind it. Ivy climbs up the pink brick.

The seasons make up for Ithaca’s lack of charm. Now it’s late fall, and the forest is denuded, the trees on the mountainsides look like burned toothpicks, and the sky comes two or three steps down to communicate to all of us the silence and pain of God in the face of the fleeting death of the world. But winter in Ithaca gives a voice back to nature, which takes revenge on God by dressing in white, scattering frozen dust and snow stars, spreading large ivory mantles like sumptuous sheets on the earth — and an answer to heaven. Spring explodes, rapid and agonizing, in handfuls of splendid roses that perfume the air and leave a flash of forgotten things before summer takes over, heavy, sleepy, and slow, unlike the swift spring. Idle and lazy summer of stagnant waters, pesky mosquitoes, heavy, humid breathing, and intensely green mountains.

The gorge, too, reflects the seasons, but it also devours them, collapses them, and subjects them to the implacable death of gravity, a suffocating, final embrace of all things. The gorge is the vertigo in the order of this place.

Alongside the gorge, there is a munitions factory, a horrifying building of blackened brick with obscene chimneys, almost an evocation of the ugliness of the Nazis’ “night and fog.” The pistols produced by the Ithaca factory were the official side arm of the army of El Salvador, which is why officers and men there called them “itaquitas”—little Ithacas.

Juan Zamora asks me to tell all this while he turns his back on us because he was received as a guest in the residence of a prosperous businessman who in former years was connected with the munitions factory but now prefers to be an adviser to law firms negotiating defense contracts between the factory owners and the U.S. government. Tarleton Wingate and his family, in the days when Juan Zamora comes to live with them, are excited about the triumph of Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter. They watch television every night and applaud the decisions of the new president, his movie-star smile, his desire to put a halt to excessive government control, his optimism in declaring that a new day is dawning in America, his firmness in stopping the advances of Communism in Central America.

Wingate is a likable giant with fewer wrinkles on his fresh, juvenile face than an old saddle. His dull, sandy-colored hair contrasts with the platinum blond of his wife, Charlotte, and with the burnished, reddish-chestnut hair of the daughter of the house, Becky, who is thirteen. When the Wingates all sit down to watch television, they kindly invite Juan to join them. He doesn’t understand if they are pained when terrible pictures of the war in El Salvador appear— nuns murdered along the roadside, rebels murdered by paramilitary death squads, an entire village machine-gunned by the army as the people flee across a river.

Juan Zamora turns his back to the screen and assures them that in Mexico they applaud President Reagan for saving us all from Communism, just as much as people do here. He also tells them that Mexico is interested in growing and prospering, as they can clearly see in the massive development of the oil industry by the government of López Portillo.

The gringos smile when they hear that, because they believe that prosperity is an inoculation against Communism. Juan Zamora wants to ask Mr. Wingate how his business with the Pentagon is going but decides he’d better keep quiet. What he insinuates first and then emphatically declares is that his family, the Zamoras, are adapting perfectly to Mexico’s new wealth because they have always had lands, haciendas — the word has great prestige in the United States, where they pronounce the silent h—and oil wells. He realizes the Wingates don’t know that oil is the property of the state in Mexico and are amazed at everything he tells them. Dogmatically but innocently, the Wingates believe that the expression free world is synonymous with free enterprise.

They have received Juan with pleasure, as part of a tradition. For a long time, foreign students have been hospitably taken into private homes near campuses in the United States. It surprises no one that rich young Latin Americans seek out such homes as extensions of their own and use them to accelerate their assimilation of English.

“There are kids,” Tarleton Wingate assures him, “who have learned English spending hours in front of a TV set.”

They all watch Peter Sellers’s movie Being There, where the protagonist knows nothing except what he learns watching television, which is why he passes as a genius.

The Wingates ask Juan Zamora if Mexican television is good, and he has to answer truthfully that it isn’t, that it’s boring, vulgar, and censored, and that a very good writer, widely read by young people, Carlos Monsiváis, calls it “the idiot box.” That seemed hilarious to Becky, who says she’s going to tell it to her class — the idiot box. Don’t put on intellectual airs, Charlotte tells her daughter; “egghead” she calls her, smiling as she tousles her hair. The redhead protests, don’t tangle my hair, I’ll have to fix it again before I baby-sit tonight. Juan Zamora is amazed at how gringo children work from the time they are young, baby-sitting, delivering papers, or selling lemonade during the summer. “It’s to teach them the Protestant work ethic,” Mr. Wingate says solemnly. And him? How did you ever grow up without television? Becky asks. Juan Zamora understands very well what Mr. Wingate is saying. Being rich and aristocratic in Mexico is a matter of land, haciendas, farm laborers, an elegant lifestyle, horses, dressing up as a charro, and having lots of servants — that’s what being wealthy means in Mexico. Not watching television. And since his hosts have exactly the same idea in their heads, they understand it, praise it, envy it, and Becky goes out to earn five dollars as a babysitter. Charlotte puts on her apron to cook dinner, and Tarleton, with a profound sense of obligation, sits down to read the number-one book on the New York Times best-seller list, a spy novel that happens to confirm his paranoia about the red menace.

If the city of Ithaca is a kind of suburban Avernus, Cornell University is its Parnassus: a brilliant cream-colored temple with modern, sometimes almost Art Deco lines and vast green and luminous spaces. Given the abrupt nature of the terrain, the campus is linked by beautiful terraces and grand stairways. Both lead to places that are centers of the life of the Mexican student Juan Zamora. One is the student union, which tries to make up for all of Ithaca’s shortcomings with books, a stationery store, movies, theater, clothing, mailboxes, restaurants, and places to meet. Moving among those spaces, his back toward us, Juan Zamora tries to connect with the place. He takes special notice of the extreme sloppiness of the students. They wear baseball caps they don’t even take off indoors or when they greet women. They rarely shave completely. They drink beer straight from the bottle. They wear sleeveless T-shirts, revealing at all hours their hairy underarms. Their jeans have torn knees, and at times they wear them cut off at the thigh and unraveling. They sit down to eat with their caps on and fill their mouths with hamburgers, french fries, and an entire menu pulled out of plastic bags. When they really want to be informal, they wear their baseball caps backward, with the visors cooling the napes of their necks.

One day, an athletic boy, blond, with pinched features, ordered a plate of spaghetti and began to eat it with his hands, by the fistful. Juan Zamora felt an uncontrollable revulsion that obliterated his appetite and forced him for the first and perhaps only time to criticize a fellow student. “That’s disgusting! Didn’t they teach you how to eat at home?” “Of course they did. My family’s pretty rich, for your information.” “So why do you eat like an animal?” “Because now I’m free,” said the blond through a mouthful of pasta.

Juan Zamora arrived at Cornell not in a sports coat and tie but in blue jeans, a leather jacket, a sweater, and loafers. While alive, his father resigned himself to this scruffiness: “We used to wear suits and ties to class at law school …” Little by little, Juan assumed a more casual wardrobe— sweatshirt, Keds — but he always maintained (with his back turned) a minimal properness. He understood that the shabby disguise worn by the students was a way of equalizing social classes, so no one would ask about family background or economic status. All equal, equalized by sloppiness, the T-shirts, baseball caps, sneakers. Only in his refuge — the residence of the Wingate family — could Juan Zamora say, with impunity and with universal approval, even impressing them: “My family is very old. We’ve always been rich. We have haciendas, horses, servants. Now with the oil, we’ll simply live as we always have, but with even more luxury. If only you could visit us in Mexico. My mother would be so happy to receive you and thank you for your kindness to me.”

And Charlotte would sigh with admiration. She was the first platinum-dyed white woman Juan Zamora had ever seen wearing an apron. “How polite Spanish aristocrats are! Learn, Becky.”

Charlotte never called Juan Zamora Mexican. She was afraid of offending him.

The other space in the life of the Mexican student was the school of medicine, especially the amphitheater, built on Greek lines and as white as snow, but solid and crowning a hill as if intentionally, so that the smells of chloroform and formaldehyde would not contaminate the rest of the campus. Here the outlandish student outfits were replaced by the white uniform of medicine, although at times hairy legs and (almost always) blackened Keds would appear at the bottoms of the long clinic gowns.

Men and women, all in white, gave the place the air of a religious community. Young monks and nuns passed through its sparkling corridors. Juan thought chastity would be the rule in this order of young doctors. Besides, the white uniform (unless the hairy legs stuck out) accentuated the generational androgyny. Some girls wore their hair very short, while some boys wore it very long, so at times it was difficult to tell from behind what sex a person was.

Juan Zamora had had a couple of sexual relationships in Mexico. Sex was not his strong suit. He didn’t like prostitutes. His female classmates at the National University were very demanding, very devouring and distracting, talking about having families or being independent, about living this way or that, about succeeding, and they talked with a decisiveness that made him feel out of place, guilty, ashamed of not being, ever, yet, all he could be. Juan Zamora’s problem was that he confused each step of his life with something definitive, finished. Just as there are young people who let things flow and leave everything to chance, there are others who think the world ends every twenty-four hours. Juan was one of the latter. Without admitting it, he knew that his mother’s anguish about their modest means, his father’s upright pride, and his own uncertainties about his father’s morality gave him a feeling of perpetual distress, of imminent doom that was mocked by the gray, implacable flow of daily life. If he had accepted that tranquil march of days, he might perhaps have entered a more or less stable relationship with a girl. But girls saw in Juan Zamora a boy who was too tense, frightened, insecure. A young man with his back turned, in pain.

“Why are you always looking behind you? Do you think someone’s following us?”

“Don’t be afraid to cross the street. There are no cars coming.”

“Listen, stop ducking. No one’s swinging at you.”

Now, at Cornell, he put on his white robe and carefully washed his hands. He was going to perform his first autopsy, he and another student. Would it be a man or a woman? The question was important because it applied as well to the cadaver he would be studying.

The auditorium was dark.

Juan Zamora felt his way to the barely visible autopsy table. Then his back rubbed against someone else’s. The two of them laughed nervously. In a flash, the blinding, implacable lights went on, like some vengeful Jehovah, and the janitor apologized for not getting there on time. He always tried to be more punctual than the students, he exclaimed, laughing, ashamed.

Which one would Juan Zamora look at first? The student or the cadaver? He looked down and saw the body covered by a sheet. He looked up and found that a very blond person with long hair and not very wide shoulders was looking away from him. He looked down again and uncovered the cadaver’s face. It was impossible to know if the cadaver was a man or woman. Death had erased not only its time but its sexual personality. The only thing certain was that it was old. It was made of wax. You always had to think that the cadavers were made of wax. It made them easier to dissect. This one’s eyes weren’t closed tightly, and Juan was shocked to think they were still crying. But the thin nose stuffed with cotton balls, the rigid jaw, the sunken lips were no longer the cadaver’s or ours. Death had stripped the individual of pronouns. It was no longer he or she, yours or mine. The other gloved hand held out a scalpel to him.

They worked in silence. They were masked. The blond person working with him, small but decisive, knew the guts of a dead person better than Juan did and guided him in the incisions he would have to make. He or she was an expert. Juan dared to look into the eyes opposite his own. They were gray, that hazel-tinted gray that sometimes appears in the most beautiful Anglo-Saxon eyes, where the unusual color is almost always accompanied by dreamy eyelids, depths of desire, fluidity, but also intensity.

Isolated by the latex, the masks, the robes, their gloved hands touched with the same feeling as when a man wears a condom. Only their eyes saw each other. Now Juan Zamora faces us, he turns to look at us, pulls off his mask, reveals his mestizo face, young, dark, with prominent, chiseled bones, his skin like some dessert — brown sugar, cinnamon candy, café con leche—his smooth, firm chin, his thick lower lip, his liquid black eyes that find the hazel-gray eyes. Juan Zamora no longer has his back turned. Instinctively, passionately, he turns his face toward us, he brings it close to the lips of the other, they join in a liberating, complete kiss that washes away all his insecurities, all his solitude, all his pain and shame. The two boys urgently, tremulously, ardently kiss in order to conquer death, if not for all time, then at least for this moment.

Jim was twenty-two, thin and refined, serious and studious, interested in politics and art: the other students called him Lord Jim. His blond head, his hazel-tinged eyes, and his small physique were accompanied by good muscles, good bones, a nervous agility, and, especially, extremely agile hands and long fingers. He would be a great doctor — Juan Zamora would say — though not because of his fingers and hands but because of his vocation. He was a little bit — Juan, despite the distance, orders us to say — like Juan’s father, Gonzalo, a dedicated man, solid, though not worthy of compassion.

The two young men, a contrast of light and dark, looked good together. At first they attracted attention on campus, then they were accepted and even admired for the obvious affection they showed for each other and the spontaneousness of their relationship. In terms of love, Juan Zamora finally found himself satisfied, his feelings identified; at the same time, he was surprised. He really had had no idea about his homosexual tendencies, and to feel them revealed in this way, with this man, so completely and so passionately, with such satisfaction and understanding, filled him with a calm pride.

They continued studying and working together. Their conversation and their life had an immediacy, as if Juan Zamora’s problem — the fear that each day would be the last, or at least the definitive, day — had become, thanks to Lord Jim, a blessing. For several weeks, there was no before and no after. Shared pleasure filled their days, kept other concerns and other times at bay.

One afternoon, as they were working together on an autopsy, Jim asked Juan for the first time about his studies in Mexico. Juan explained that he’d studied in the University City but that occasionally he’d passed through the old School of Medicine, located in the Plaza de Santo Domingo. It was a very beautiful colonial building that had housed the offices of the Inquisition. Lord Jim responded with a nervous laugh: it was the first time Juan had left him for a time that was not only remote but even forbidden and detested by the Anglo-Saxon soul. Juan persisted. There were no women doctors in Mexico until 1873, and the first one, Matilde Montoya, was allowed to do autopsies only in empty auditoriums, with the cadavers fully clothed.

Jim’s nervous laugh was a small break in the tension or the distance (were they the same thing?) which that simple reference to the Holy Inquisition had introduced into the way they were together, the first irruption of a past into a relationship that the two boys lived only for the present. Juan Zamora had the ungraspable but desolating feeling that at that precise moment an even more dangerous perspective was also opening — the future. They slowly covered the cadaver of a beautiful girl who’d committed suicide and whose body no one had claimed.

Juan Zamora carefully timed his meetings with Lord Jim for the afternoons so he could return to the Wingates on time, have dinner with them, watch television, and make comments. Reagan was beginning his dirty secret war against Nicaragua, which was starting to annoy Juan Zamora, though he did not understand why. Tarleton, on the other hand, celebrated Reagan’s decision to put a limit to Marxist expansion in the Americas. Perhaps that was the reason for the growing coolness of Charlotte and Tarleton Wingate and for the rather comic confusion of Becky, who was dispatched to her room as soon as Juan appeared, as if his mere appearance announced a plague. Did Juan Zamora look like a guerrilla and a Sandinista?

Of course, the Mexican student understood immediately that rumors of his homosexual association had filtered down from Parnassus to Suburbia — the community was small. But he decided not to give in and to go on normally, because his relationship was exactly that, normal, for the only people who had anything to say about it — he and Jim.

Jim was sensitive, he had good antennae, and he noticed a certain nervous malaise in his lover. He knew it had nothing to do with their relationship. In Jim’s dormitory bed, wrapped in each other’s arms, Juan tried to excuse himself because that afternoon he had not been able to perform. Jim, caressing Juan’s head as it rested against his shoulder, told him it was normal, it happened to everyone. Both of them were doctors and were well acquainted with the stereotyped ideas surrounding sexual activity of all kinds, from masturbation, which supposedly drove adolescents insane, to the perfectly normal use of pornographic material by older people. But the myths of homosexuality were the worst. He understood. The Wingates would not tolerate a gay couple. It wasn’t the racial or the social difference that bothered them. But Juan never played the role of rich boy with Jim. He said nothing. Jim wasn’t interested in the past.

Juan tried to kiss Jim, but Jim stood up, naked, enraged, and said it was he who couldn’t stand the repugnant Puritanism of these people, their disgusting disguise of goodness and their perpetual, inviolable sanctity in politics and sexuality. He turned to Juan in a fury.

“Do you know what your landlord, Mr. Tarleton Wingate, does for a living? He inflates the budgets of companies doing business with the Pentagon. Do you know how much Mr. Wingate charges the air force for lavatories for its planes? Two hundred thousand dollars each. Almost a quarter of a million dollars so someone can shit comfortably in midair! Who pays the expenses of the Defense Department and the earnings of Mr. Wingate? I do. The taxpayer.”

“But he says he adores Reagan because he’s eliminating government and lowering taxes.”

“Just ask Mr. Wingate if he wants the government to stop defense spending, stop saving failed banks, or stop subsidizing inefficient farmers. Ask him and see what he says.”

“He’d probably call me a Communist.”

“They’re a bunch of cynics. They want free enterprise in everything, except when it comes to weapons and rescuing thieving financiers.”

It’s hard for Juan Zamora to accept Jim’s statements, accept something that breaks his rule about ingratiating himself with the Wingates, being accepted by them and, through them, by American society. But the criticism is coming from his lover, the being Juan loves most in the world, and his lover proclaims it in an implacable, angry tone, not caring how anyone, even Juan, reacts.

The Mexican student had feared something like this, something that would break their perfect, cloistered intimacy, the self-sufficiency of lovers. He hates the world, the busybody world, the cruel world, which gains nothing by poking its nose into the lives of lovers except that — the malicious pleasure of distancing them from each other. Could they ever enjoy the same sense of fullness they experienced before this little incident? Juan was confident they could, and he multiplied the proofs of his affection and loyalty to Lord Jim, his little pamperings, his attention. Perhaps the desire to reconstruct something so perfect it had to crack one day was all too obvious.

Once again they are together, wearing their white masks, their gloves, dissecting another woman’s body, this time an old one’s. Lord Jim asks Juan to remember that place, the palace of the Inquisition in Mexico that became the medical school. He’s amused by the idea of the same building’s being used for torture one day and to bring relief to bodies the next. The Mexican student subtly changes the subject and tells him about the Plaza de Santo Domingo and the ancient tradition of the “evangelists,” old men with old typewriters who sit in the doorways and type out the dictation of the illiterates who want to send letters to their parents, lovers, friends.

“How do they know these scribes are reliable?”

“They don’t. They have to have faith.”

“Confidence, Juan.”

“Right.”

Jim took off his mask and Juan gestured for him to be careful — they had to take precautions. Once before, the first time, they had kissed next to a cadaver, but the bacteria of the dead have killed more than one careless doctor. Jim gave him a strange look. He asked Juan to tell him the truth. About what? About his family, his house. Jim knew what people said around the university, that Juan was the scion of a rich family, hacienda owners, and so forth. Juan had never told Jim that, because they never talked about the past. Now Jim asked him to send a spoken letter, as if he, the gringo, were the “evangelist” in the plaza and Juan the illiterate.

“It’s all lies,” said Juan. His back was turned once again, but he spoke without hesitation. “Pure lies. We live in a very modest apartment. My father was a very honorable man who died penniless. My mother always threw it in his face. She’ll die reproaching him. I feel pain and shame for the two of them. I feel pain for my father’s useless morality, which no one remembers or values and which wasn’t worth shit. On the other hand, people certainly would have celebrated him if he’d been rich. I’m ashamed that he didn’t steal, that he was a poor devil. But I’d be just as ashamed if he were a thief. My dad. My poor, poor dad.”

He felt relieved, clean. He’d been faithful to Lord Jim. From now on, there wouldn’t be a single lie between them. He thought that and fleetingly he felt ill at ease. Lord Jim could be sincere with him as well.

“Explain to me ‘pain and shame,’ as you call them— which would be something like ‘pity and shame’ in English,” said the American.

“My mother causes me pain, always complaining about what never was, heartsick about her life, which she should accept because it will never be different. I’m ashamed of her self-pity, you’re right, that horrible sin of inflicting pain on yourself all day long. Yes, I think you’re right. You’ve got to have compassion to cover the pain and shame you feel toward others.”

He squeezed Lord Jim’s hand and told him they shouldn’t talk about the past because they understood each other so well in the present. The American shot him a strange look that he almost associated with the dead woman who would not resign herself to closing her eyes, the woman they never finished dissecting.

“I feel awful saying this to you, Juan, but we have to talk about the future.”

The Mexican student made an involuntary but dramatic gesture, two swift and simultaneous, though repeated, movements, one hand raised to his mouth, as if he were begging silence and another extended forward, denying, stopping what was coming.

“I’m sorry, Juan. It really pains me to say this. It even shames me. You understand that no one controls his destiny absolutely.”

Juan turned his back — this time literally — on Cornell. He stopped studying and courteously said good-bye to the Wingates, who were surprised and upset, asking him why, did it have anything to do with them, with the way they’d treated him? But there was relief in their eyes and secret certainty: this had to end badly. He hoped to see them again someday. He would love to take them on a tour of the hacienda on horseback. Look me up if you come to Mexico.

The American family felt relieved but also guilty. Tarleton and Charlotte discussed the matter several times. The boy must have noticed the change in his hosts’ attitude when he started to go out with Jim Rowlands. Had they broken the rules of hospitality? Had they allowed themselves to succumb to irrational prejudice? They certainly had. But prejudices could not be removed over night; they were very old, they had more reality — they did — than a political party or a bank account. Blacks, homosexuals, poor people, old people, women, foreigners: the list was interminable. And Becky— why expose her to a bad influence, a scandalous relationship? She was innocent. And innocence should be protected. Becky listened to them whisper while they imagined she was watching television, and she tried to keep a straight face. If they only knew. Thirteen years old and in a private school. How could they blame anything on her? What was money for? Day after day, all day, every day, the litany of the Me Generation was entitlement to every caprice, every pleasure; there was only one value: Me. Weren’t her parents that way? Weren’t they successful because they were that way? What did they want from her? For her to be a Puritan from the days of the Salem witch hunts? Then the girl immersed herself in what was happening on the screen so she wouldn’t hear the voices of her parents, who didn’t want to be heard, and she asked herself a question that confused her greatly: How can you enjoy everything and still seem a very moral, very puritanical person? Her blood tickled her, her body was changing, and Becky was anguished not to have answers. She hugged her stuffed rabbit and dared to ask him: What about you, Bunny, do you understand anything?

Up in the clouds, Juan, en route to Mexico City in his tourist-class seat on Eastern Airlines, tried to imagine a future without Lord Jim and accepted it with bitterness, desolation, as if his life had been canceled. The bad thing was to have admitted first the past, then the future. It was the painful act of leaving the moment when they loved each other without explanations, possessors of a single time, a single space, the Eden of a loving youth that excluded parents, friends, professors, bosses. But not other lovers.

Suspended in midair, Juan Zamora tried to remember everything, the good and the bad, once more and then to cancel it forever, never again think about what happened. Never again feel hatred, pain, shame, compassion for the past his poor parents lived. And never feel pity, shame for himself or for Lord Jim, for the future they were both going to live, separated forever: Juan Zamora’s desolate future, Lord Jim’s happy, comfortable, secure one, his marriage having been arranged since God knows when, since before he knew Juan. That was what the families of the rich professional class did in Seattle, on the other side of the continent, where it was expected that a young doctor with a future would marry and have children — things that would inspire respect and confidence. And anyway, in the Anglo-Saxon tradition a homosexual experience was an accepted part of a gentleman’s education — there wasn’t an Englishman at Oxford who hadn’t had one, he’d say, if something about them should leak out. Cornell and Seattle were far apart, the country was immense, loves were fragile and small.

“And we rich people, I’ll tell you by quoting a good writer, are not like other people,” said Lord Jim, pounding in the final nail.

Juan remembered Jim’s being angry only once, over Tarleton Wingate’s hypocrisy. That’s the Lord Jim he wanted to remember.

He pressed his burning head against the frozen window and turned his back on everything. Below, the Cornell gorge seemed insignificant to him, it didn’t say anything to him, was not for him.

Four years later, the Wingates decided to take a vacation in Cancún. They stopped over in Mexico City so Becky could visit the marvelous Museum of Anthropology. Becky, now seventeen, was rather colorless even though she imitated her mother by dyeing her hair blond. Very curious, even liberated, she found herself a little Mexican boyfriend in the hotel lobby, and they went to spend a day in Cuernavaca. He was a very passionate boy, which seemed to annoy the driver, an angry, insecure man who tried to terrify tourists by taking curves at top speed.

It was Becky who encouraged her parents to pay a surprise visit on Juan Zamora, the Mexican student who’d lived with them in 1981. Did they remember him? How could they not remember Juan Zamora? And since Tarleton and Charlotte Wingate were still ashamed about the way in which Juan left their house, they accepted their daughter’s idea. Besides, Juan Zamora himself had invited them to visit him.

Tarleton called Cornell and asked for Juan’s address. The university computer instantly provided it, but it was not a country address. “But I want to see a hacienda,” said Becky. “This must be his town house,” said Charlotte. “Should we call him?” “No,” Becky said excitedly, “let’s surprise him.” “You’re a spoiled brat,” answered her father, “but I agree. If we call him, he might figure out a way not to see us. I have the feeling he was angry when he left us.”

The same driver who brought Becky to Cuernavaca now drove her along with her parents. The driver had a huge mocking smile on his face. If they’d only seen her the day before, kissing her face off with that low-life slob. Now, quite the young lady, the hypocrite, with that pair of distinguished gringos — sometimes even weirder things happen— searching for an impossible place.

“Colonia Santa Maria?” asked the driver, almost laughing. Leandro Reyes, Tarleton read on the chauffeur’s license and noted mentally — just in case. “This is the first time anyone’s ever asked me to take them there.”

They crossed the densest urban spaces, spaces swirling around them noisy as a river made entirely of loose stones; they cut through the brown crust of polluted air; and they also crossed the time zones of Mexico City, disordered, anarchic, immortal — time overlapping its past and its future, like a child who will be father to his posterity, like a grandson who will be the only proof that his grandfather walked through these streets; they moved steadily north, along Mariano Escobedo to Ejército Nacional, to Puente de Alvarado, and Buenavista station, beyond San Rafael, which was increasingly underneath everything, uncertain if under construction or in collapse. What is new, what’s old, what is being born in this city, what’s dying — are they all the same thing?

The Wingates looked at one another, shocked, pained.

“Perhaps there’s been a mistake.”

“No,” said the driver. “This is it. It’s that apartment house right over there.”

“Maybe it would be better if we just went back to the hotel,” said Tarleton.

“No,” Becky practically shouted. “We’re here. I’m dying of curiosity.”

“In that case, you can go in by yourself,” said her mother.

They waited a while outside the lime-green building. Three stories high, it was in dire need of a good coat of paint. Clothes were hanging on the balconies to dry, and there was a TV antenna. At a soft-drink stand by the entrance, a red-cheeked girl wearing an apron but also sporting a permanent was busy putting bottles in the cooler. A wrinkled little old man in a straw hat poked his head out the door and stared at them curiously. On either side, a repair shop. A tamale vendor passed by shouting, Red, green, with chile, sweet, lard. The driver, Leandro Reyes, went on and on in English about debts, inflation, the cost of living, devaluations of the peso, pay cuts, useless pensions, everything messed up.

Becky reappeared and quickly got back in the car. “He wasn’t there, but his mother was. She said it’s been a long time since anyone’s visited her. Juan’s fine. He’s working in a hospital. I made her swear she wouldn’t tell him we were here.”

Every night, Juan Zamora has exactly the same dream. Occasionally he wishes he could dream something else. He goes to bed thinking about something else, but no matter how hard he tries, the dream always comes back punctually. Then he gives up and concedes the power of the dream, turning it into the inevitable comrade of his nights: a lover-dream, a dream that should adore the person it visits because it won’t allow itself to be expelled from that second body of the former student and now young doctor in the social security system, Juan Zamora.

Night after night, it returns until it inhabits him, his twin, his double, the mythological shirt that can’t be taken off without also pulling off the dreamer’s skin. He dreams with a mixture of confusion, gratitude, rejection, and love. When he wishes to escape the dream, he does so by intensely desiring to be possessed again by it; when he wants to take control of the dream, his daily life appears with the bitter smile of all of Juan Zamora’s dawns, sequestering him in the hospitals, ambulances, and morgues of his urban geography. Kidnapped by life, hostage of the dream, Juan Zamora returns each night to Cornell and walks hand in hand with Lord Jim toward the bridge over the gorge. It’s fall, and the trees again look as bare as black needles. The sky has descended a bit, but the gorge is deeper than the firmament and summons the two young lovers with a false promise: heaven is down here, heaven is here, face up, breathing underbrush and brambles; its breath is green, its arms spiny. You have to earn heaven by giving yourself over to it: paradise, if it does exist, is in the very guts of the earth, its humid embrace awaiting us where flesh and clay mix, where the great maternal womb mixes with the mud of creation and life is born and reborn from its great reproductive depth, but never from its airy illusion, never from the airlines falsely connecting New York and Mexico, Atlantic and Pacific, in fact separating the lovers, breaking the marvelous unity of their perfect androgyny, their Siamese identity, their beautiful abnormality, their monstrous perfection, casting them to incompatible destinies, to opposite horizons. What time is it in Seattle when night falls in Mexico? Why does Jim’s city face a panting sea while Juan’s faces nervous dust? Why is the coastal air like crystal and the air of the plateau like excrement?

Juan and Jim sit on the bridge railing and look at each other deeply, to the depth of the Mexican’s black eyes and the American’s gray ones, not touching, possessed by their eyes, understanding everything, accepting everything, without rancor, without illusions, disposed nevertheless to have everything, the origin of love transformed into the destiny of love with no possible separation, no matter how daily life may split them apart.

They look at each other, they smile, they both stand at the edge of the bridge, they take each other by the hand, and they jump into the void. Their eyes are shut but they know that all the seasons have gathered to watch them die together — winter scattering frozen dust, autumn mourning the fleeting death of the world with a red and golden voice, slow, lazy, green summer, and finally another spring, no longer swift and imperceptible but eternal. A gorge replete with roses, a soft, fatal fall into the dew that bathes them as they still hold hands, their eyes closed, Lord Jim and Juan, brothers now.

Juan Zamora, that’s right. He asked that I tell you all this. He feels pain, he feels shame, but he has compassion. He’s turned his face toward us.