“‘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.