“I don’t know. Do you mean his house or his office?”
“No, silly. I mean how much territory he covers professionally. Guess! I’d better tell you: the whole world. He buys nonpatented replacement parts. Know what those are? All the parts for machinery, for household appliances, TVs, where no rights have to be paid. What do you think of that? He’s a genius! Even so, I suspect he may be a homosexual. I don’t know if he’d know how to bring up my kids. I toilet trained them very early. I don’t understand why friends of mine toilet trained their kids so late or never bothered …”
Dionisio quickly ate the salad to get rid of the soon-to-be-divorced lady, and with his last bite, she vanished. Did I cannibalize her or did she cannibalize me? wondered the food critic, overcome by a growing sense of anguish he could not identify. Was all this a gag? It was a fog.
And it was not cleared away by the arrival of dessert, a lemon meringue pie whose female counterpart Baco was afraid to see, especially because at the beginning of this adventure he’d watched the fat women pass by, desiring them platonically. He was right to be afraid. Seated opposite him, he saw when the noise of the charro’s shot had faded, was a monstrous woman who weighed 650 if she weighed a pound. Her pink sweatshirt announced her cause: FLM, the Fat Liberation Movement. She couldn’t cross her Michelin man arms over her immense tits, which moved on their own inside her sweatshirt and fell like a flesh Niagara Falls over the barrel of her stomach, the only obstacle blocking one from contemplation of her spongy legs, bare from the thighs down, indifferent to the indecency of her wrinkled shorts. Her moist hands, loathsome, rested on Dionisio’s. The critic trembled. He tried to pull his hands free. Impossible. The fat woman was there to catechize him, and resigned to his fate, he prepared himself to be good and catechized.
“Do you know how many million obese people we have in the USA?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.”
“Don’t even guess, my boy. Forty million of what others pejoratively call fat people. But I’m telling you, no one can be discriminated against for their physical defects. I walk the streets telling myself, I am beautiful and intelligent. I say it in a low voice, then I shout it, I am beautiful and intelligent! Don’t force me to be perverse! That gets their attention. Then I make our demands. Obese is beautiful. Weight-loss programs should be declared illegal. Movies and airlines should install special seats for people like me. We’ve had enough of buying two tickets just so we can travel in comfort.”
She raised her voice, hysterical.
“And nobody make fun of me! I’m beautiful and intelligent. Don’t make me be perverse. I was cook on a ship registered in San Diego. We were coming from Hawaii. It was a freighter. One day I was walking on deck eating ice cream and a sailor got up, pulled it out of my hand, and threw it overboard. ‘Don’t get any fatter,’ he said, laughing his head off. ‘Your fat disgusts all of us. You’re ridiculous.’ That night, down in the kitchen, I put a laxative in the soup. Then I walked through the passageways shouting over the moans of the crew, Tm beautiful and intelligent. Don’t mess with me. Don’t make me be perverse.’ I lost my job. I hope you’ll want me. Is it true? Here I am … listen … what’s wrong with you?”
Dionisio liberated his hands and swallowed the pie so the fat woman would disappear. But she understood his contempt and managed to shout: “You were tricked, you jerk! My name is Ruby, and I’m involved with a Chilean novelist named José Donoso. I will only be his!”
Dionisio stood up in horror, left an outrageous hundred-dollar bill on the table, and ran from the American Grill. Once again he felt that terrible anguish, felt it turn into a feeling of something lost, of something he had to do, though he didn’t know what.
He stopped running when he came to the window of an American Express office. A dummy representing a typical Mexican, in a wide sombrero, huaraches, and the clothes of a peon, was leaning against a cactus, taking his siesta. The cliché infuriated Dionisio. He stormed into the travel agency and started to shake the dummy. But the dummy was made not of wood but of flesh and blood, and exclaimed, “Damn it to hell, they don’t even let you sleep around here.”
The employees were shouting, too, telling him to leave their “pee-on” alone, let him do his job, we’re promoting Mexico. But Dionisio pushed him out the door, took him by the shoulders, shook him, and asked him who he was, what he was doing there. And the Mexican model (or model Mexican) respectfully removed his sombrero.
“There would be no way for you to know it, but I’ve been lost here for ten years.”
“What are you saying? Ten what? What?”
“Ten years, boss. I came over one day and got lost in the shopping mall and never got out. And then they hired me here to take siestas in windows, and if there’s no work, I can sneak in and sleep on cushions or beach chairs. There’s more than enough food — they just leave it, they throw it away. If you only saw—”
“Come, come with me,” said Dionisio, taking the peon by the sleeve, electrified by the word food, awake, alert to his own emotions, to the memory of the woman with gray eyes, the woman who adopted the Mexican girl, the woman who read Faulkner — that’s the one he should have chosen. Providence had arranged things. None of the other women mattered, only that one, that sensitive little gringa, who was strong, intelligent. She was his, had to be his. He was fifty-one and she was forty — they’d make a fine couple. What was this perverse game all about? The charro genie, his kitschy alter ego, that bastard, that picturesque asshole, that skirt chaser, that total opposite of his Symbolist, Baudelairean, French alter ego, was also his double, his brother, but the little guy was Mexican and was always pulling a fast one, teasing him, offering him the moon but handing him shit, devaluing his life, his love, his desire. The genie didn’t tell him that when he ate a steak or a shrimp cocktail or a lemon meringue pie he was also eating the woman who was the incarnation of each dish, and here he was, delirious, going mad, dragging a poor hungry man through a California mall until they reached the restaurant called the American Grill and he was illuminated, convinced now it was all true. He’d eaten everything but the lemon sherbet: she was alive, she had not been devoured by his other Aztec ego, his pocket-sized Huitzilopochtli, his national Minimoctezuma.
“Sorry,” said the waiter who’d taken care of him, “we throw away the leftovers. Your melted sherbet went down the drain a while ago.”
Saying it evidently gave him pleasure, and he licked his down-covered lips. Ready to weep with sadness, Dionisio screamed. He was still dragging the peon along by the hand, and lost in the labyrinth of consumerism, the Mexican became alarmed and said, I’ve never gotten beyond this place, this is where I get lost, I’ve been captive here for ten years! But Dionisio paid no attention and pushed him into the rented Mustang. The peon suffered the tortures of the damned as they raced through the tangled nets of highways, the vertebrae of a cement beast, sleeping but alert. They arrived at the storage center north of the city.
Here Dionisio stopped.
“Come along. I need you to help me.”
“Where we going, boss? Don’t take me away from here! Don’t you realize what it costs us to enter Gringoland? I don’t want to go back to Guerrero!”
“Try to understand. I have no prejudices.”
“It’s that I like all this — the shopping center where I live, the television, the abundance, the tall buildings …”
“I know.”