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.