Free The Crystal Frontier by Carlos Fuentes

city, Puebla, can boast of more than eight hundred dessert recipes, it is because of generations and generations of nuns, grandmothers, nannies, and old maids, the work of patience, tradition, love, and wisdom? How, when their supreme refinement consisted in thinking that life is like a box of chocolates, a varied pre-fabrication, a fatal Protestant destiny disguised as free will? Beavis and Butt-head, that pair of half-wits, would have finished off the nuns of Puebla by pelting them with stale cake, the grandmothers they would have locked in closets to die of hunger and thirst, and of course they would have raped the nannies. And finally, a favor of the highest order for the leftover young ladies.
    Baco’s students stared at him as if he were insane and sometimes, to show him the error of his ways and with the air of people protecting a lunatic or bringing relief to the needy, would invite him to a McDonald’s after class. How were they going to understand that a Mexican peasant eats well even if he eats little? Abundance, that’s what his gringo students were celebrating, showing off in front of this weird Mexican lecturer, their cheeks swollen with mushy hamburgers, their stomachs stuffed with wagon-wheel pizzas, their hands clutching sandwiches piled as high as the ones Dagwood made in his comic strip, leaning as dangerously as the Tower of Pisa. (There’s even an imperialism in comic strips. Latin America gets U.S. comics but they never publish ours. Mafalda, Patoruzú, the Superwise Ones, and the Burrón family never travel north. Our minimal revenge is to give Spanish names to the gringo funnies. Jiggs and Maggie become Pancho and Ramona, Mutt and Jeff metamorphose into Benitín and Eneas, Goofy is Tribilín, Minnie Mouse becomes Ratoncita Mimí, Donald Duck is Pato Pascual, and Dagwood and Blondie are Lorenzo and Pepita. Soon, however, we won’t even have that freedom, and Joe Palooka will always be Joe Palooka, not our twisted-around Pancho Tronera.)
    Abundance. The society of abundance. Dionisio Rangel wants to be very frank and to admit to you that he’s neither an ascetic nor a moralist. How could a sybarite be an ascetic when he so sensually enjoys a clemole in radish sauce? But his culinary peak, exquisite as it is, has a coarse, possessive side about which the poor food critic doesn’t feel guilty, since he is only—he begs you to understand—a passive victim of U.S. consumer society.
    He insists it isn’t his fault. How can you escape, even if you spend only two months of the year in the United States, when wherever you happen to be—a hotel, motel, apartment, faculty club, studio, or, in extreme cases, trailer—fills up in the twinkling of an eye with electronic mail, coupons, every conceivable kind of offer, insignificant prizes intended to assure you that you’ve won a Caribbean cruise, unwanted subscriptions, mountains of paper, newspapers, specialized magazines, catalogs from L. L. Bean, Sears, Neiman Marcus?
    As a response to that avalanche of papers, multiplied a thousandfold by E-mail—requests for donations, false temptations—Dionisio decided to abandon his role as passive recipient and assume that of active transmitter. Instead of being the victim of an avalanche, he proposed to buy the mountain. Why not acquire everything the television advertisements offered—diet milkshakes, file systems, limited-edition CDs with the greatest songs of Pat Boone and Rosemary Clooney, illustrated histories of World War II, complicated devices for toning and developing the muscles, plates commemorating the death of Elvis Presley or the wedding of Charles and Diana, a cup commemorating the bicentennial of American independence, fake Wedgwood tea sets, frequent-flyer offerings from every airline, trinkets left over from Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays, the tawdry costume jewelry purveyed by the Home Shopping Channel, exercise