The Crystal Frontier

7. The Crystal Frontier

Don Leonardo Barroso was in the first-class section of Delta’s nonstop flight from Mexico City to New York. With him was an incredibly beautiful woman with a mane of long black shiny hair. The hair was like a frame for the striking cleft in her chin, her face’s star. Don Leonardo, in his fifties, felt proud of his female companion. Seated by the window, she was imagining herself in the irregularity, the variety, the beauty, and the distance of the landscape and the sky. Her lovers had always told her she had cloudlike eyelids and a slight storm in the shadows under her eyes. Mexican boyfriends speak in serenades.

Michelina was looking at much the same sight from the sky, recalling the periods in her adolescence when her boyfriends serenaded her and wrote her syrupy letters. Cloudlike eyelids, slight storm in the shadows under her eyes. She sighed. You can’t be sixteen forever. Why, then, did this unwanted nostalgia suddenly return — for her youth, for when she went to dances and was wooed by all the rich boys in Mexico City?

Don Leonardo preferred sitting on the aisle. The idea of being stuck in an aluminum pencil at 30,000 feet, with no visible support, still made him nervous, even if he was used to it. By the same token, he was enormously satisfied that the trip was the product of his own doing.

As soon as the North American Free Trade Agreement had gone into effect, Don Leonardo had begun lobbying intensively to have the migration of Mexican workers to the United States classified as “services,” even as “foreign trade.” The dynamic promotor and businessman explained, in Washington and Mexico City, that Mexico’s principal export was not agricultural or industrial products, not assembly-line products, not even capital to pay the external debt (the eternal debt) but labor. Mexico was exporting more labor than cement or tomatoes. He had a plan to keep labor from becoming a conflict. Very simple: simply avoid the frontier. Prevent illegality.

“They’ll still come,” he explained to Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, “and they’ll keep on coming because you need them. Even if there were too many jobs in Mexico, you’d still need Mexican workers.”

“Legal workers,” said the secretary. “Legals yes, illegals no.”

“You can’t believe in the free market and then suddenly close the doors to the flow of labor. It’s like closing off investments. What happened to the magic of the marketplace?”

“We have an obligation to protect our borders,” Reich went on. “It’s a political problem. The Republicans are exploiting the growing anti-immigrant sentiment.”

“You can’t militarize the border,” said Don Leonardo, scratching his chin irritably, seeking the same cleft that was the beauty of his daughter-in-law. “It’s too long, too much of a desert, too porous. You can’t be lax when you need workers and tough when you don’t.”

“I’m in favor of everything that contributes to the U.S. economy,” said Reich. “That’s the only way we can contribute to the world economy — and vice versa. So what do you propose?”

What Don Leonardo proposed was already a reality, and it — or rather he — was traveling in tourist class. His name was Lisandro Chavez, and he was trying to look out the window, but the man sitting to his right, staring at the clouds intently, as if recovering a lost homeland, blocked his view. The brim of the man’s lacquered straw hat covered the window. To Lisandro’s left, another laborer slept with his hat pulled down over the bridge of his nose. Only Lisandro traveled hatless, and he ran his hand through his soft black curly hair, then stroked his thick, well-trimmed moustache and rubbed his heavy, oily eyelids.

Boarding the jet, he had immediately recognized the famous businessman Leonardo Barroso in first class. Lisandro’s heart skipped a beat. He also recognized, next to Barroso, a girl he knew when he was young and went to parties and dances in posh parts of Mexico City — Las Lomas, Pedregal, and Polanco. It was Michelina Laborde, the girl everyone wanted to dance with. In reality, what they wanted was to take advantage of her a bit.

“She’s got a good name but she doesn’t have a cent,” the other boys said. “Watch it. Don’t marry her. No dowry.”

Lisandro danced with her once and now no longer recalled if he actually told her or simply thought that the two of them were poor, that they had that in common, that she was invited to these parties because her family had class and he because he went to the same school as the rich kids. But there was more that made them alike than made them different, didn’t she think?

He couldn’t remember what Michelina’s answer was, couldn’t even remember if he actually said those things to her or simply thought them. Then other boys danced with her, and he never saw her again. Until today.

He didn’t dare say hello. How would she remember him? What would he say to her? Remember how we met at a party at Chubby Casillas’s eleven years ago and danced together? She didn’t even look at him. Don Leonardo did. He looked up from reading an article in Fortune that gave figures for the richest men in Mexico but, luckily, once again omitted his name. Neither he nor the rich politicians ever appeared— the politicians because none of their businesses had their names on them: they hid behind the seven veils of multiple partnerships, borrowed names, foundations … Don Leonardo imitated them. It was difficult to attribute to him the wealth he actually possessed.

He looked up because he saw or sensed someone different. When the workers contracted as “services” had begun boarding the plane, Don Leonardo had at first congratulated himself on the success of his lobbying, then had admitted that it made him angry to see so many dark-skinned men in lacquered straw hats parade through first class. He had therefore stopped looking at them. Other planes had two entrances, one forward, the other at the rear. It was slightly irritating to pay for first class and have to put up with a parade of badly dressed, badly washed people.

Something made him look, and it was the passing of Lisandro Chávez, who wasn’t wearing a hat, who seemed to be of another class, who had a different profile, and who came prepared for the cold of a New York December. The others wore light clothing. They hadn’t been told that it’s cold in New York. Lisandro was wearing a red-and-black-checked wool jacket that zipped up to the neck. Don Leonardo went on reading Fortune. Michelina Laborde de Barroso slowly sipped her mimosa.

Lisandro Chávez decided to keep his eyes shut for the rest of the trip. He asked to not be served any food and to be allowed to sleep. The stewardess gave him a puzzled look. Only people in first class made those kinds of requests. She tried friendliness: Our rice pilaf is excellent. In reality, an insistent question, like a steel mosquito, was drilling its way through Lisandro’s forehead: What am I doing here? I shouldn’t be doing this. I’m not the man.

The “I” who wasn’t there had had other ambitions, and even when he was in high school his family had encouraged them. His father’s soda factory was prospering and a hot country like Mexico would always consume soft drinks. The more soft drinks, the easier it was to send Lisandro to private schools, take on a mortgage for the house in Colonia Cuauhtémoc, make the monthly payments on the Chevrolet, maintain the fleet of delivery trucks, and go to Houston once a year, even if just for a couple of days, stroll through the malls, say they’d gone for their annual medical exams … Lisandro was likable, he went to parties, read García M࣎rquez; with luck, he’d stop taking the bus to school next year, he’d have his own Volkswagen.

He didn’t want to look down for fear of discovering something horrible that could be seen only from the air. There was no homeland anymore, no such thing as Mexico; the country was a fiction or, rather, a dream maintained by a handful of madmen who at one time believed in the existence of Mexico … A family like his was not going to be able to withstand twenty years of crisis, debt, bankruptcy, hopes raised only to fall again with a crash, every six years, more and more poverty, unemployment. His father could no longer come up with the dollars to pay his debts and maintain the factory; the soft-drink business became concentrated and consolidated in a couple of monopolies; the independent labels, the small outfits, had to sell out and leave the market. What kind of work will I do now? his father asked himself as he walked like a ghost through the apartment in the Narvarte district when it was no longer possible to pay the mortgage on the Cuauhtémoc house, when it was no longer possible to make the payments on the Chevrolet, when Lisandro’s mother had to put a sign in the window SEWING DONE HERE, when what was left of the savings evaporated first in the inflation of 1985 and then in the devaluation of 1995. The accumulated unpayable debts meant the end of private schools, the end of any illusions about having his own car. Your uncle Roberto has a good voice and earns a few pesos singing and playing the guitar on the corner, but we haven’t fallen that low yet, Lisandro, we don’t yet have to stand outside the cathedral offering our services, tools in hand and a sign saying PLUMBER CARPENTER ELECTRICIAN BRICKLAYER, we haven’t yet fallen as low as the children of our former servants, who have to quit school, walk the streets, dress up as clowns and paint their faces white and toss balls in the air at the corner of Insurgentes and Reforma. Remember Rosita’s son, the one you played with, the one who was born here in the house? Well, I mean in the house we had before, on Rio Nazas. Well, he’s dead. I think his name was Lisandro, like you, of course — they named him that so we would be his godparents. He had to leave his house when he was seventeen and become a fire-eater on street corners; he painted two black tears on his face and ate fire for a year, taking a mouthful of gasoline and sticking a burning wick down his throat until it destroyed his brain, Lisandro, his brain just melted, became like dough, and remember, he was the oldest son, the hope. Now the little ones sell Kleenex, chewing gum — Rosita, our maid— Remember her? — told me. She’s desperate, struggling to keep the little ones from starting to sniff glue to get high after working in the streets with bands of homeless kids as numerous as stray dogs, and just as hungry, and forgotten. Lisandro, what’s a mother going to tell you whose kids walk the streets to keep her alive, to bring something home? Lisandro, look at your city sinking into the oblivion of what it once was but most of all into the oblivion of what it wanted to be. I have no right to anything, Lisandro Chávez said to himself one day, I have to join the sacrifice of all, join the sacrificed nation, ill-governed, corrupt, uncaring. I have to forget my illusions, make money, help my parents, do what humiliates me least, an honest job, a job that will save me from having contempt for my parents, anger toward my country, shame for myself but that will also save me from the mockery of my friends. He spent years trying to tie together loose ends, to forget the illusions of the past, stripping away ambition for the future, inoculating himself with fatalism, defending himself against resentment, proudly humiliated in his tenacious will to get ahead despite everything. For Lisandro Chávez, twenty-six years old, illusions lost, there was now a new opportunity, to go to New York as a service worker, ignorant that Don Leonardo Barroso had said:

“Why are they all so dark, so obviously lower class?”

“It’s the majority, Don Leonardo. The only thing the country can produce.”

“Well, let’s see if you can find me one who looks like a better sort, whiter — I’ll take him. What kind of impression are we going to make, partner?”

And now, as Lisandro passed through first class, Don Leonardo looked at him without imagining that he was one of the contracted workers but wishing instead that all of them were like this working fellow with a decent face and sharp features (although with a big moustache like that of a prosperous member of a mariachi band) and — heavens! — skin lighter than Leonardo Barroso’s own. Different, the millionaire noticed, a different boy, don’t you think, Miche? But his daughter-in-law and lover had fallen asleep.

When they landed at JFK, in the middle of a snowstorm, Barroso wanted to leave the plane as soon as possible, but Michelina was curled up next to the window, covered with a blanket, her head resting on a pillow. She wanted to wait. Let everyone else leave, she asked Don Leonardo.

He wanted to get out and say hello to the agents responsible for recruiting the Mexican workers contracted to clean various buildings in Manhattan over the weekend, when the offices would be empty. The service contract made everything explicit: the workers would come from Mexico to New York on Friday night to work on Saturday and Sunday, returning to Mexico City on Sunday night.

“Everything included, even the airfare — it’s cheaper than hiring workers here in Manhattan. We save between 25 and 30 percent,” his gringo partners explained.

But they’d forgotten to tell the Mexicans it was cold, which was why Don Leonardo, surprised by his own humane spirit, wanted to get out first to warn the agents that these boys needed jackets, blankets, something.

They began to parade by, and the fact was there was a bit of everything. Don Leonardo’s sense of humanitarian, and now national, pride doubled. The country was so beaten down, especially after having believed that it wasn’t; we dreamed we were in the first world and woke to find ourselves back in the third. It’s time to work more for Mexico, not to be discouraged, to find new solutions. Like this one. There was a bit of everything, not only the boy with the big moustache wearing the checked jacket but others, too, whom the investor hadn’t noticed because the stereotype of the wetback, the peasant with a lacquered hat and skimpy beard, had consumed them all. Now he began to distinguish them, to individualize them, to restore their personalities to them, possessing as he did forty years’ experience dealing with workers, supervisors, professional types, bureaucrats, all at his service, always at his service, never anyone above him: that was the motto of his independence, no one, not even the president of the republic, above Leonardo Barroso, or as he put it to his U.S. partners:

“I’m my own man. I’m just like you, a self-made man. I don’t owe nobody nothing.”

He’d never take that privilege away from anyone. Besides the moustachioed, handsome boy, Barroso tried to differentiate the young men from the provinces, who dressed in a certain way and appeared more backward but also more attractive and somewhat grayer than the young men from Mexico City, the chilangos. Even among them he began to distinguish from the herd those who two or three years earlier, during the euphoria of the Salinas de Gortari period, could be seen eating at a Denny’s, taking vacations in Puerto Vallarta, or going to the multiplex cinemas in Ciudad Satélite.

He picked them out because they were the saddest, though the least resigned as well, those like Lisandro Chávez who asked themselves, What am I doing here? I don’t belong here. Yes, yes, you belong here, Barroso would have answered, you belong here so thoroughly that in Mexico, even if you dragged yourself on your knees to the Basilica of Guadalupe to visit the Virgin, you couldn’t, even with a miracle, earn a hundred dollars for two days’ work, four hundred a month, three thousand pesos — not even the Virgin would give you that.

He looked at them as if they were his — his pride, his sons, his idea.

Michelina kept her eyes closed. She didn’t want to see the parade of workers. They were young. They were dead ducks. But she was getting tired of traveling with Leonardo. At first she had liked it, it gave her cachet, and although it cost her the ostracization of some and left others resigned, her own family understood and were not in the least disgusted, finally, with the comforts Don Leonardo offered them — especially in these times of crisis, what would become of them without Michelina?

What would become of grandmother Doña Zarina who was over ninety and still collecting curios in cardboard boxes, convinced Porfirio Díaz was still president? What would become of her father, the career diplomat who knew all the genealogies of the wines of Burgundy and the cháteaus of the Loire? What would become of her mother, who needed the comforts and money to do the only thing she really liked: to be left alone, to just sit quietly, not doing a thing, with her mouth shut, not even eat because she was ashamed to do it in public? What would become of her brothers, who relied on Leonardo Barroso’s generosity — this little job here, that concession there, this little contract, that agency …? But now she was tired. She didn’t want to open her eyes. She didn’t want to discover those of any young man. Her obligation was to Leonardo. She especially didn’t want to think about her husband, Leonardo’s son, who didn’t miss her, who was happy isolated on the ranch, who didn’t blame her for anything, for going off with his dad …

Michelina began to fear the eyes of any other man.

The men were given blankets, which they used in atavistic style as serapes. Then they were loaded onto buses. All it took was feeling the cold between the terminal exit and the bus for them to be thankful for the providential jacket, the occasional scarf, the heat of other bodies. They sought one another out, sorted one another out, looked for a comrade who might be like himself, might think the same way, share the same territory. With the peasants, with the villagers, there was always a verbal bridge, but its nature was a species of ancient formality, forms of courtesy that couldn’t manage to conceal a hierarchy, although inevitably there are wise-guys who treat the more humble as inferiors, speaking familiarly to them, giving them orders, scolding them. Here, now, that was impossible. They were all beaten down, and being screwed rendered them equal.

An anguished reserve imposed itself on those who did not have rural faces or clothes, a resolve not to admit they were there, that things were going so badly in Mexico, at home, that they had no other recourse but to give in to the three thousand pesos per month for two days a week’s work in New York, an alien city, totally strange, where it wasn’t necessary to be friendly, to risk confession, mockery, and incomprehension in dealing with one’s compatriots.

For that reason, a silence as cold as the air ran from row to row in the bus where ninety-three Mexican workers were squeezing in, and Lisandro Chávez imagined that in reality all of them, even if they had things to tell one another, were silenced by the snow, by the silence snow imposes, by that silent rain of white stars that fall without making noise, dissolving on whatever they touch, turning back into water, which has no color. What was the city like beneath its long veil of snow? Lisandro could barely make out the urban profiles of Manhattan, known to him from movies, the phantoms of the city, the foggy, snow-covered faces of skyscrapers and bridges, of shops and docks …

Tired, the men entered the gymnasium quickly, tossed their bags onto the rickety army-surplus beds Barroso had picked up in an army-navy store, and made for a buffet set up around the corner; the bathrooms were in back. Some of the men began to get familiar, poking one another in the belly, calling one another Bro, Bud and mano. Two or three even sang, out of tune, “The Ship of Gold,” but the others quieted down, wanting to sleep — the day had begun at five. I’m on my way to the port where the ship of gold is waiting to carry me away.

On Saturday morning at six, it was most certainly possible to feel, smell, touch, but not yet see the city. The fog, laden with ice, made it invisible, but the smell of Manhattan entered Lisandro Chávez through his nose and mouth like a steel dagger: it was smoke, acrid, acid smoke from sewers and subways, from enormous twelve-wheel trailers with exhaust pipes and grills at the level of the hard, shiny streets, like patent-leather floors. And on every street, metal mouths opened to eat boxes and more boxes of fruits, vegetables, cans, beers, sodas that reminded him of his dad, suddenly a foreigner in his own Mexico City, just as his son was in New York City, both asking themselves, What are we doing here? Were we perhaps born to do this? Wasn’t our destiny different? What happened?

“Good, upstanding citizens, Lisandro. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. We’ve always been good, upstanding citizens. We did everything properly. We never broke a rule. Why did things go so wrong? Because we were good, upstanding citizens? Why do things always go so wrong? Why doesn’t this story ever turn out well, son?”

In New York, he thought of his father lost in an apartment in Narvarte as if he were walking across a desert with no shelter, no water, no map, transforming his apartment into the desert of his confusion, caught up in a whirlpool of unforeseen, inexplicable events, as if the whole country had gone wild, jumped its tracks, run away from itself, escaping with shouts and bullets from the prison of order, foresight, institutions. Where was he now? What was he? Of what use was he? Lisandro saw corpses, murdered men, dishonest government officials, endless, incomprehensible intrigues, life-and-death struggles over power, money, women, queers … Death, misery, tragedy. His father had fallen into this inexplicable vertigo, giving up in the face of chaos, incapable of standing up to fight, to work. Depending on his son, just as Lisandro the child had depended on him. How much did Lisandro’s mother earn sewing torn clothing, eternally knitting a sweater or shawl?

If only a curtain of snow would fall on Mexico City, covering it, hiding its rancor, its answerless questions, the sense of collective fraud. To look at Mexico’s burning dust, the mask of an indefatigable sun, resigning oneself to the loss of the city, was not the same as to admire the crown of snow that ornamented the gray buildings and black streets of New York. New York: building itself up out of its own disintegration, its inevitable destiny as the city for everyone, energetic, tireless, brutal, murderous city of the entire world, where we all recognize ourselves and see our worst and our best.

This was the building. Lisandro Chávez refused to stare like a hick all the way up the forty floors. He only wondered how they were going to wash the windows in the middle of a snowstorm that at times managed to dissolve the very profile of the building, as if the skyscraper, too, were made of ice. It was an illusion. As the day cleared up a bit, a building completely made of glass became visible, with nothing in it that wasn’t transparent: an immense music box made of mirrors, unified by its own chrome-covered, nickel-plated glass, a palace like a crystal deck of cards, a toy of quicksilver labyrinths.

They were here to clean the inside, it was explained to them, gathered together in the interior atrium, which was like a patio of gray light whose six sides rose like sheer blind cliffs, six walls of pure glass. Even the two elevators were glass. Six times forty floors, two hundred forty interior facades for offices that lived their simultaneously secret and transparent life around a shared agnostic atrium, a cube excavated in the heart of the toy palace, the dream of a child building a castle on the beach, except that instead of sand he was given glass.

The scaffolding was waiting to lift them to the different floors, adjusting to the surface at each level as the building became narrower, like a pyramid, at the top. As if in a Teotihuacán made of glass, the workers began to rise to the tenth, twentieth, thirtieth floor to clean the glass and descend, in ranks of ten, armed with manual cleaning devices and tanks of a special glass cleanser on their backs, like the oxygen tanks worn by underwater explorers. Lisandro ascended to the crystal sky but he felt submerged, descending to a strange sea of glass in an unknown, upside-down world.

“Is that stuff safe?” Leonardo Barroso asked.

“Very safe. It’s biodegradable. Once it’s used, it decomposes into innocuous elements,” his Yankee partners answered.

“It sure better. I put a clause in the contract making you responsible for work-related illnesses. You could die of cancer here just by breathing.”

“Come on, Don Leonardo,” laughed the Yankees. “You’re tougher than we are.”

“Welcome a tough Mexican,” concluded the businessman.

“You’re one tough hombre!” cheered the gringos.

She walked with a feeling of thankfulness from her apartment on East 67th Street to the building on Park Avenue. She had spent Friday night in seclusion, giving orders to the doorman to let no one up, especially not her ex-husband, whose insistent voice she listened to all night on the answering machine as it begged to see her. Listen, sweetheart, let me talk to you, we were very hasty, we should have thought things through more, waited until our wounds healed. You know I don’t want to hurt you, but life sometimes gets complicated, and I always knew, even in the worst moments, that I had you, I could come back to you, you would understand, you would forgive me, because if the situation had been the other way around, I would have forgiven …

“No!” the desperate woman shouted at the telephone, at the voice of her ex-husband, invisible to her. “No! You would have gotten even as cruelly as you could. In your usual selfish way, you’d have enslaved me with your forgiveness.”

She spent a fearful night pacing back and forth in the small apartment, nicely appointed, even lavish in many details — pacing back and forth between the picture window, whose wool drapes she’d opened to give herself over completely to the sumptuous snow scene, while the distorting eye of the Cyclops at the door protects people from eternal observation, the city’s perpetual threat. The crystal hole in the door that allows the hall to be seen, allows one to see without being seen but to see a distorted, submarine world, as if through the blind eye of a tired shark that can’t allow itself the luxury of rest lest it drown, sink to the bottom of the sea. Sharks have to keep moving eternally to survive.

She felt no fear the following morning. The storm was over and the city had been dusted with white powder, as if for a party. It was three weeks before Christmas and the whole town was decked out, covered with lights, shining like a huge mirror. Her husband never rose before nine. It was seven when she left to walk to the office. She was thankful that the weekend would give her a chance to lock herself away and get something done, catch up with her paperwork, dictate instructions without telephone calls, faxes, the jokes of her office mates, the whole New York office ritual, the obligation to be simultaneously indifferent and witty, to have a wisecrack or joke at the ready, to know how to end conversations and phone calls brusquely, to never touch anyone — especially that, to never touch one another physically, never a hug, not even a social kiss on the cheek, bodies at a distance, eyes avoiding eyes … Good. Her husband would not find her here. He had no idea … He’d go insane calling her, trying to worm his way into her apartment.

That morning, she was a woman who felt free. She’d resisted the outside world. Her husband, too, was now outside her life, expelled from her physical and emotional interior space. She resisted the crowds that absorbed her every morning as she walked to work, making her feel she was part of a herd, individually insignificant, stripped of importance: weren’t the hundreds of people walking down Park from 67th to 66th Street at any moment of the morning doing something as important — or unimportant — as what she was doing, or perhaps even more important or less important.

There were no happy faces.

There were no faces proud of what they were doing.

There were no faces satisfied with their jobs.

Because the faces were also working, squinting, gesticulating, rolling their eyes, feigning horror, expressing real shock, skepticism, false attentiveness, mockery, irony, authority. Rarely, she told herself, as she walked rapidly, enjoying the solitude of the snow-covered city, rarely did she show them or they her a true spontaneous face, without the panoply of acquired gestures to please, convince, intimidate, impose respect, share intrigues.

Alone, inviolable, self-possessed, in control of her whole body and soul, inside and out. The cold morning, the solitude, a sure step, elegant, her own person — she was given all that on the walk from her apartment to her office.

The building was full of workers. She’d forgotten. She laughed at herself. The day she’d chosen to be alone in the office was the day they were going to clean the interior glass. They had given advanced warning. She’d forgotten. Smiling, she went to the top floor without looking at anyone, like a bird who confuses its cage for freedom. She walked through the corridor on the fortieth floor — glass walls, glass doors, they lived suspended in midair; even the floors were made of an opaque glass, the tyrant of an architect having forbidden carpeting in his crystal masterpiece.

She entered her office, located between the glass corridor and the interior atrium. It did not have a view of the street. The polluted air of the street did not circulate here; there was only air-conditioning. The building was sealed, isolated, the way she wanted to feel today. The door opened onto the corridor. But the entire glass wall faced the atrium, and at times she liked to feel that her gaze fell forty stories, transforming on the way into a snowflake, a feather, a butterfly.

Crystal above the corridor. Glass on both sides, so the two offices next to hers were also transparent, obliging her colleagues to be somewhat circumspect in their physical habits while nevertheless maintaining a certain degree of naturalness in their behavior. Taking off their shoes, putting their feet up on the desk — everyone was allowed to do that, but the men could scratch their armpits or between their legs, while the women couldn’t. But the women could look at themselves in the mirror and fix their makeup. The men— with some exceptions — couldn’t do that.

She looked straight ahead at the atrium and saw him.

Lisandro Chávez was alone on the plank they raised to the top floor. They’d asked everyone if they suffered from vertigo, and he’d recalled that he sometimes did — once on a Ferris wheel he’d had the urge to jump into the void — but he’d kept his mouth shut.

At first, busy arranging his mops and cleaning devices, but most of all concerned about making himself comfortable, he did not see her and did not look in. His objective was the glass. Everyone supposed there would be no one working in the building on Saturday.

She saw him first and took no notice of him. She saw him without seeing him. She saw him the way one sees or no longer sees the people fate assigns one when one rides an elevator, gets on a bus, or takes a seat at the movies. She smiled. Her job as an advertising executive obliged her to take planes to meet clients in a nation the size of the universe. She feared nothing so much as a talkative person seated next to her, the kind who tells you his miseries, his profession, how much money he makes — the kind who ends up, after three Bloody Marys, with his hand on your knee. She smiled again. She’d fallen asleep many times with a stranger next to her, both of them wrapped in their airplane blankets like virginal lovers.

When Lisandro’s and Audrey’s eyes met, she nodded a greeting the way one might, out of courtesy, say hello to a waiter, less effusively, say, than one might to a doorman. Lisandro had carefully cleaned the first window, that of Audrey’s office, and as he removed the light film of dust and ash, she had begun appearing, distant and misty at first, then gradually closer, approaching without moving, thanks to the increasing clearness of the glass. It was like focusing a camera. It was like making her his.

The transparency of the glass restored her face. The light in the office illuminated the woman’s head from behind, giving her blond hair, which fell like a rope down her neck, the smoothness and movement of a wheat field. The light was concentrated on her nape and, as she pushed aside the soft white hair, it emphasized the blond waves of each strand rising from her back like a handful of seeds to find their earth, their thick, sensual fertility, in the mass of braided hair.

She was working with her head bent over her papers, indifferent to him, indifferent to the work of the others, servile, manual work so different from her own, from her efforts to come up with a nice catchy slogan for a Pepsi commercial. He was uncomfortable, afraid of distracting her with the movement of his arms over the glass. If she raised her head, would she do it angrily, annoyed at the intrusion of a worker?

What kind of expression would she have when she looked at him again?

Christ, she thought to herself. They warned me workers were coming. I hope this man isn’t spying on me. I feel spied on. I don’t like this. It’s distracting.

She raised her eyes and found Lisandro’s. She wanted to get mad but couldn’t. There was something in that face that amazed her. At first, she didn’t note the physical details. What seized her attention was something else. Something she never found in a man. She struggled to find a word — she who was a professional with words, slogans— for the attitude, the face of the worker washing the office windows.

It came to her suddenly. Courtesy. What there was in this man — in his attitude, his distance, his way of nodding his head, the strange mixture of sadness and joy in his eyes— was courtesy, an incredible absence of vulgarity.

This man, she said to herself, would never telephone me frantically at two in the morning, begging me to forgive him. He would restrain himself. He would respect my solitude, and I his.

What would this man do for you? she immediately asked herself.

He would invite me to dinner and then take me to my apartment. He wouldn’t let me go home alone in a taxi.

Fleetingly he glimpsed her large, deep chestnut eyes as she looked up, and he became upset, lowering his own. He went on with his work but immediately recalled that she had smiled. Had he imagined it or had it really happened? He dared to look at her. The woman smiled, very briefly, very courteously, before averting her eyes and going back to her work.

That glance was sufficient. He didn’t expect to find melancholy in the eyes of a gringa. He’d been told that Yankee women were strong, very sure of themselves, very professional, very punctual — not that Mexican women were weak, insecure, slapdash, and slow, no, not at all. The point was that a woman who came to work on Saturdays had to be anything but melancholy, perhaps tender, perhaps passionate. That Lisandro saw clearly in the woman’s expression. She had a sorrow, she had a yearning. She yearned for something. That’s what her expression told him: I want something I lack.

Audrey lowered her head farther than necessary in order to lose herself in her papers. This was ridiculous. Was she going to fall in love on the rebound, with the first man to come along, just to make the definitive break with her husband, to teach him a lesson? The worker was handsome, that was the bad part; he had that attitude of unusual, almost insulting gentlemanliness, totally inappropriate, as if he were taking unfair advantage of his inferiority. But he also had shining eyes in which moments of sadness and joy were projected with equal intensity, he had a smooth complexion, olive-toned and sensual, a short, pointy nose, trembling nostrils, black, curly young hair, a thick moustache. He was the complete opposite of her husband. He was — she smiled again — a mirage.

He returned her smile. He had strong white teeth. Lisandro thought he’d avoided all the jobs that would have humiliated him in the eyes of the people he knew when he was a boy with ambition. He’d taken work as a waiter in Focolare, and the situation had became painful when he’d had to serve a table of his old friends from high school. All of them had prospered except him. He embarrassed them, they embarrassed him. They didn’t know how to address him, what to say to him. Remember the goal you scored against the Simón Bolívar team? That was the nicest thing he heard, followed by an embarrassed silence.

He was no good as an office worker. He’d left high school after his third year and didn’t know shorthand or how to type. Being a taxi driver was even worse. He envied those of his fares who were richer and disdained those who were poorer, Mexico City and its tangled traffic drove him insane, infuriated him, made him shoot his mouth off, curse people out, be everything he didn’t want to be. Store clerk, gas station attendant — whatever there was, sure. Unfortunately, not even those jobs existed. Everyone was out of a job; even professional beggars were officially classified as “unemployed.” He was thankful for this job in the United States. He was thankful for the eyes of the woman who was now looking directly at him.

He didn’t know that she wasn’t simply looking at him. She was imagining him. She was one step ahead of him. She imagined him in all kinds of situations. She bit her pencil. What sports would he like? He looked very strong, very athletic. Movies, actors — did he like film, opera, some television program, what? Was he one of those people who tell how pictures end? Of course not. That you could see immediately. He smiled directly at her. She wondered if he was the kind of man who could put up with a woman like her, who couldn’t resist telling the man she was with how the picture turned out, how the murder mystery ended, everything but her personal story — no one knew how that would turn out.

Perhaps he guessed something of what was going on in her mind. He wished he could tell her frankly, I’m different. Don’t judge by appearances, I shouldn’t be doing this, I’m not this, I’m not what you imagine. But he couldn’t speak to the glass, he could only fall in love with the light of the windows, which most certainly could penetrate her, touch her; they shared the light.

He wanted badly to have her, touch her, even if only through the glass.

Distressed, she got up and left the office.

Had something offended her? Some gesture? Had some sign he’d made been inappropriate, had he gone too far because he didn’t know gringo manners? He was angry with himself for feeling so much fear, so much disappointment, so much insecurity. Perhaps she had gone away for good. What was her name? Was she wondering about his? What did they have in common?

She came back with her lipstick in her hand.

She held it there, open, pointing upward, and stared at Lisandro.

They spent several minutes looking at each other that way, in silence, separated by the crystal frontier.

Between the two of them an ironic community was being created, a community in isolation. They were recalling their own lives, imagining each other’s lives, the streets they walked, the caves where they took refuge, the jungle that their cities, New York and Mexico City, were — the dangers, the poverty, the menace of their towns, the muggers, the police, the beggars, the thieves, the horror of two big cities full of people like them, people too small to defend themselves from so many threats.

I’m not this man, he said to himself stupidly, not knowing that she wanted him to be himself, like this, as she had discovered him that morning when she woke up and said to herself, My God, whom have I been married to? How is it possible? Whom have I been living with? And then she found him and attributed to him everything that was the opposite of her husband — courtesy, melancholy, indifference when she told him how pictures ended.

He and she alone.

He and she, inviolable in their solitude.

Separated from the others, she and he face-to-face on an unusual Saturday morning, imagining each other.

What were their names? Both had the same idea. I can give this man the name I like best. And he: Some men have to imagine the woman they love as a stranger; he was going to have to imagine a stranger as a lover.

It wasn’t necessary to say yes.

She wrote her name on the glass with her lipstick. She wrote it backward, as if in a mirror: YERDUA. It looked like an exotic name, the name of an Indian goddess.

He hesitated to write his, such a long name, so unusual in English. Blindly, without reflecting, stupidly perhaps, full of uncertainty — he doesn’t know even today why he did it— he wrote only his nationality: NACIXEM.

She made a gesture as if to ask for more, two hands held apart, open — something more?

No, he shook his head, nothing more.

From down below they began to shout to him, What’s taking you so long up there, aren’t you finished, don’t be so lazy, hurry up, it’s already nine o’clock, we have to get on to the next building.

Something more? asked the gesture, Audrey’s silent voice.

He placed his lips on the glass. She didn’t hesitate to do the same. Their lips united through the glass. Both closed their eyes. She didn’t open hers for several minutes. When she did, he was no longer there.