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.
3. Spoils
For Sealtiel Alatriste