The Crystal Frontier

by Carlos Fuentes

  “I’m not suggesting you go to a senior citizens’ residence,” explained her nephew, a lawyer determined to deck himself out with all the clothes and accoutrements he imagined to be his profession’s height of elegance: blue shirts with white collars, red ties, Brooks Brothers suits, oxfords, never loafers on workdays, God forbid! “But if you’re going to stay in this big old house, you’ll need domestic help.” Miss Amy was about to say something nasty, but she bit her tongue. She even showed the whitish tip of that organ. “I hope you make an effort to hold onto your servants, Aunt Amy. The house is huge.”

  “It’s that they’ve all left.”

  “You’d need at least four people in service here just to take care of you the way it was in the old days.”

  “Those were the young days. These are the old days, Archibald. And it wasn’t the staff who left. It was the family. They left me alone.”

  “Of course, Aunt Amy. You’re right.”

  “As always.”

  Archibald nodded.

  “We’ve found a Mexican lady willing to work for you.”

  “Mexicans are supposed to be lazy.”

  “That’s not true. It’s a stereotype.”

  “I forbid you to touch my clichés, young man. They’re the shield of my prejudices. And prejudices, as the word itself indicates, are necessary for making judgments. Good judgment, Archibald, good judgment is prejudgment. My convictions are clear, deep rooted, and unshakable. At this point in my life, no one’s going to change them.” She allowed herself a deep, slightly lugubrious breath. “Mexicans are lazy.”

  “Try her out. These people are eager to serve and accustomed to obeying.”

  “You’ve got your own prejudices, see?” Miss Amy laughed a little as she arranged her hair, which was so white and so old that it was turning yellow, like papers exposed to light for a long time. Like a newspaper, said her nephew Archibald. All of her has become like an old newspaper, yellowed, wrinkled, and full of news no longer interesting to anyone.

  Archibald went to the Mexican section of Chicago frequently because his firm defended a lot of cases involving trade, naturalization, people without green cards—a thousand matters having to do with immigration and labor from south of the border. He also went because at the age of forty-two he was still a bachelor, convinced that before embarking on marriage he had to drink the cup of life to the dregs, with no ties, no family, no children, no wife. Chicago was a city where many cultures mixed, so Miss Amy Dunbar’s only nephew chose his girlfriends according to ethnic zones. He’d already gone through the Ukrainian, Polish, Chinese, Hungarian, and Lithuanian sectors. Now the happy conjunction of business and amatory curiosity brought him to Pilsen, the Mexican neighborhood with the Czechoslovakian name of a beer-producing city in Bohemia. The Czechs had left and the Mexicans were taking over little by little, filling the neighborhood with markets, luncheonettes, music, colors, cultural centers, and, of course, beer as good as Pilsen’s.

  Many people came to work as meatpackers, some legal, others not, but all respected for their dexterity in cutting and packing the meat. Miss Amy’s nephew, the lawyer, started going out with one of the girls in a huge family of workers, almost all of whom came from the Mexican state of Guerrero and all of whom were linked by blood, affection, and solidarity, and occasionally by name.

  They were extremely helpful to one another. Like a great family, they organized parties and, like all other families, they fought. One night, there was trouble and the result was two deaths. The police didn’t waste time. There were four killers, one of them named Pérez, so they rounded up four Pérezes and charged them. As they barely spoke English, they couldn’t explain themselves or understand the charges, but one of them, visited in jail by Archibald, claimed that the charges were unfair, based on false testimony intended to protect the real murderers. The idea was to sentence the suspects as soon as possible and close the case; they didn’t know how to defend themselves. Archibald took them on, and that’s how he met the wife of the defendant he’d visited in jail.

  Her name was Josefina and they’d just been married—about time, too, since they were both forty-one. Josefina spoke English because she was the daughter of an ironworker named Fortunato Ayala, who’d fathered her and then abandoned her in Chicago. But she’d been in Mexico when everything happened so she hadn’t been able to help her husband.

  “He could learn English in jail,” suggested Archibald.

  “He could,” said Josefina without really agreeing. “He wants to study English and become a lawyer. Can you make him a lawyer?”

  “Sure, I can give him classes. And what about you, Josefina?”

  “I have to get a job so I can pay you for the lawyer classes.”

  “No need for that.”

  “Well, I have the need. It’s my fault Luis María is in jail. I should have been with him when everything happened. At least I speak English.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. In any case, we’re going to fight to save your husband. Meanwhile, he’s got the right to study, to keep himself busy, while he’s in jail. I’ll look after that. But tell me why Mexicans rat on other Mexicans.”

  “The ones who come first don’t like the ones who come later. Sometimes we’re unfair among ourselves. It isn’t enough that others treat us badly.”

  “I thought you were like one big family.”

  “The worst things happen in families, sir.”

  In the beginning, Miss Amy wouldn’t even look at Josefina. The first time she saw her confirmed all her suspicions. Josefina was an Indian. Miss Amy couldn’t understand why people who were in no way different from the Iroquois insisted on calling themselves “Latinos” or “Hispanics.” Josefina did have one virtue. She was silent. She entered and left the old lady’s bedroom like a ghost, as if she didn’t have feet. The rustle of the maid’s skirts and aprons could be confused with that of the curtains when the breeze blew off the lake. Autumn was coming, and soon Miss Amy would be closing the windows. She liked the summer, the heat, the memory of her hometown, so French …

  “No, Aunt Amy,” said the nephew when he wanted to argue with her, “the architecture of New Orleans is completely Spanish, not French. The Spaniards were here for almost a century and gave the city its shape. The French part is a varnish for tourists.”

  “Taisez-vous,” she would say to him indignantly, suspecting that this time Archibald was involved with some Latina or Hispanic or whatever these Comanches who had come too far north were called.

  Josefina knew the old lady’s routine—Archibald explained it in detail—and opened the bedroom curtains at 8:00 a.m., had breakfast ready on a small table, and came back at noon to make the bed. The old lady insisted on getting dressed by herself. Josefina went off to cook and Miss Amy came down to eat a Spartan solitary lunch of lettuce, radishes, and cottage cheese. In the afternoon she sat in front of the television set in the living room and gave free rein to her perverse energy, commenting on everything she saw with sarcasm, insults, and disdain for blacks, Jews, Italians, Mexicans. She delivered it all out loud, whether anyone heard or not, but she alternated these disagreeable comments that paralleled the picture on the television with sudden, unexpected orders to Josefina, as to Bathsheba and the others before her. My plaid blanket for my knees. The Friday tea should be Lapsang souchong, not Earl Grey. How many times do I have to … See here, who told you to move my glass marbles? Who else could have moved them but you, dummy? You’re useless, lazy, like all the black women I’ve ever known. Where is the photograph of my husband that was on the night table last night? Who put it in that drawer? I didn’t do it, and there’s no other “person” here but you, absentminded, useless. Do something to earn your pay. Have you ever worked hard a single day in your life? What am I saying? No black has ever done anything but live off the work of whites.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she spied on the new Mexican maid. Would she say the same things to her that she did to the fragile and weepy Bathsheba, or
would she have to invent a new repertoire of insults to wound Josefina? Would she hide the photo of her husband in a drawer again so she could accuse Josefina of moving it? She spied on her. She licked her chops. She prepared her offensive. Let’s see how long she lasts, this fat solid woman with a delicate face and fine features that seem more Arabian than Indian, an ash-colored woman with liquid, very black eyes and very yellow corneas.

  For her part, Josefina decided three things. The first, to be thankful for having a job and bless every dollar that came in for the defense of her husband, Luis María. The second, to carry out to the letter the instructions of the lawyer, Don Archibaldo, as to his aunt’s care. And the third, to risk making her own life inside the big house facing the lake. This was the most dangerous decision, and the one Josefina recognized she could not avoid if she intended to endure. Flowers, for instance. The house needed flowers. To her cramped maid’s room, she brought the violets and pansies she always kept on her dresser, along with the lamp and the religious pictures that were her most important companions after Luis María.

  For Josefina, there was an intensely mysterious but real relationship between the life of images and the life of flowers. Who could deny that flowers, though they don’t speak, still live, breathe, and one day wither and die? Well, the images of Our Lord on the cross, the Sacred Heart, the Virgin of Guadalupe were like flowers: even if they didn’t speak, they lived, breathed. Unlike the flowers, they never withered. The life of flowers, the life of images. For Josefina, they were two inseparable things, and in the name of her faith she gave to flowers the tactile, perfumed, sensual life she would have liked to give to the religious pictures as well.

  “This house smells musty,” Miss Amy exclaimed one night as she ate dinner. “It smells like a storage closet, as if there’s no air, musty. I want to smell something nice,” she said to Josefina in an insulting tone, sniffing for a kitchen odor as the maid laid the plates and served her vegetable soup, staring at Josefina’s armpits for a telltale stain, an offensive whiff. But the maid was clean. Every night, Miss Amy heard the water running for Josefina’s punctual bath before bed; if anything, she felt more like accusing Josefina of wasting water, but she was afraid Josefina would laugh at her, pointing toward the immense lake, like an inland sea.

  Josefina placed a bouquet of tuberoses in the living room, a room it had never occurred to Miss Amy to decorate with flowers. When the old lady came in to watch her evening television after dinner, she first sniffed the air like an animal surprised by an enemy presence. Then she fixed her gaze on the tuberoses; finally she exclaimed with concentrated rage: “Who’s filling my house with flowers for the dead?”

  “No, these are fresh flowers, they’re alive,” Josefina managed to say.

  “Where did you get them?” growled Miss Amy. “I bet you stole them! You can’t touch other people’s gardens around here! Around here we have something called private property, capisce?”

  “I bought them,” Josefina said simply.

  “You bought them?” repeated Miss Amy, for once in her life bereft of arguments or words.

  “Yes.” Josefina smiled. “To brighten up the house. You said it smelled musty, closed up.”

  “And now it smells like the dead! What kind of joke is this?” Miss Amy shouted, thinking about the photograph of her husband hidden in the drawer, the misplaced glass marbles: she, not the maids, was responsible for those things, she offended herself to offend the maids—no maid must take the initiative. “Remove your flowers immediately.”

  “Certainly, ma’am.”

  “And tell me, how did you pay for them?”

  “With my own money, ma’am.”

  “You spend your salary on flowers?”

  “They’re for you. For the house.”

  “But the house belongs to me, not you. Who do you think you are? Are you sure you didn’t steal them? The police aren’t going to come to find out where you robbed the flowers?”

  “No. I have a receipt from the florist, ma’am.”

  Josefina left the room, though behind her lingered the scent of mint and coriander that she caused to emanate from the kitchen, having taken to heart her mistress’s complaint that the house smelled like a storage closet. Miss Amy, uncertain as to how she should attack her new employee, imagined for a moment lowering herself to the indignity of spying, something she’d never done with her other servants, convinced it would mean giving them a weapon against her. It was her greatest temptation, she admitted it to herself, to enter the maid’s room secretly and poke around in her possessions, perhaps discover a secret. Of course, that would mean showing her hand, losing her authority, the authority of prejudice, lack of proof, irrationality. Others had to come and tell her things, that the room was a pigsty, that the plumber had to come unplug the toilet, which was blocked up with filth—what could you expect from a black, a Mexican?

  Lacking the pretext of the plumber, she had made use of her nephew Archibald. “My nephew informs me you never make your own bed.”

  “He can make my bed when he gets in it to screw me,” said a sharp-tongued young black woman who left without saying good-bye.

  Miss Amy wanted to lure Josefina into her own territory—the living room, the dining room, the bedroom—force her to reveal herself there, to make a big mistake there, to see herself there, in the bedroom after breakfast, in the ornate hand mirror that Miss Amy suddenly turned so as to banish her own reflection and force Josefina to look at herself. “You’d like to be white, wouldn’t you?” asked Miss Amy abruptly.

  “There are lots of güeritos in Mexico,” said Josefina impassively, without lowering her eyes.

  “Lots of what?”

  “Blond people, ma’am. Just as there are lots of blacks here. We’re all God’s children,” she concluded plainly and truthfully but without sounding impolite.

  “Know something? I’m convinced Jesus loves me,” said Miss Amy, pulling the covers up to her chin, as if she wanted to deny her own body and be like one of those cherubs who are all face and wings.

  “Because you’re a good person, ma’am.”

  “No, stupid, because he made me white. That’s proof God loves me.”

  “As you say, ma’am.”

  Wouldn’t this Mexican woman ever answer back? Would she ever get mad? Would she ever retaliate? Did she think she’d beat Miss Amy that way, by never getting mad?

  She expected everything except that Josefina would retaliate that very night after dinner as Miss Amy watched a news program to prove to herself that the world was hopeless.

  “I put your husband’s picture in the drawer, the way you like to do it,” said Josefina. Miss Amy sat there open-mouthed, indifferent to Dan Rather’s commentary on the situation of the universe.

  “What does she have in her bedroom?” she asked her nephew Archibald the next day. “How has she decorated it?”

  “The way all Mexican women do. Pictures of saints, images of Christ and the Virgin, an old ex-voto giving thanks, and God knows what else.”

  “Idolatry. Sacrilegious papism.”

  “That’s the way it is, and nothing can change it,” said Archibald, trying to pass along a little resignation to Miss Amy.

  “Don’t you find it disgusting?”

  “To her, our empty, undecorated, Puritan churches seem disgusting,” said Archibald, inwardly savoring the excitement of sleeping with a Mexican girl in Pilsen who covered the image of the Virgin with a handkerchief so the Virgin wouldn’t see them screw. But she left the candles burning—the girl’s delicious cinnamon body shone … It was useless to ask tolerance of Miss Amy.

  “By the way, where is Uncle’s photo, Aunt Amy?” Archibald asked with some sarcasm. But the lady pretended not to hear, as she knew that the next day she wouldn’t be able to tell Archibald that the maid had put the photo away.

  “What do you think of my husband?” she asked Josefina as she took the photo out of the drawer to put it on the night table.

  “Ver
y handsome, ma’am, very distinguished.”

  “You’re lying, you hypocrite. Take a good look. He was at Normandy. Look at the scar crossing his face like a bolt of lightning splitting a stormy sky.”

  “Don’t you have pictures of him before he was wounded, ma’am?”

  “Do you have any pictures of Christ on the cross without wounds, blood, just nailed, dead, crowned with thorns?”

  “Yes, of course. I have pictures of the Sacred Heart and the Christ Child, very beautiful ones. Would you like to see them?”

  “Bring them to me some day.” Miss Amy smiled mockingly.

  “Only if you promise to show me your husband when he was young and handsome.” Josefina smiled tenderly.

  “Impertinent,” Miss Amy managed to mutter when the maid left with the tea tray.

  The Mexican made a mistake—Miss Amy almost cackled with pleasure when she saw Archibald again—the idolater made a mistake. The day after the conversation about Christ and the wounded husband, Josefina brought the old lady her breakfast as usual, placed the bed tray over her lap, and instead of leaving as she usually did, rearranged the pillows for her and touched her head, stroking the old lady’s forehead.

  “Don’t touch me!” shouted Miss Amy, hysterical. “Don’t you ever dare touch me!” she shouted again, upsetting the bed tray, spilling tea on the sheets, knocking the croissants and jam over the bedclothes.

  “Don’t judge her harshly, Aunt Amy. Josefina has her sorrows, just as you do. It’s possible she wants to share them.”

  “Sorrows, me?” Miss Amy raised her eyebrows all the way to where her hair, arranged that afternoon to give her a youthful, renewed look, began. A white inverted question mark adorned her forehead, like this: ¿