Free The Crystal Frontier by Carlos Fuentes Page A

videos with Cathy Lee Crosby, all the credit cards that ever were … all of it, he decided, was irresistible, was for him, was available, even the magic detergents that cleaned anything, even an emblematic stain of mole poblano.
    Secretly, he knew the reasons for this new acquisitive voraciousness. One was a firm belief that if, expansively, generously, he accepted what the United States offered him—weight-loss programs, detergents, songs of the fifties—it would ultimately accept what he was offering: the patience and taste to concoct a good escabeche victorioso. The other was a plan to get even for all the garbagey prizes he’d been accumulating—again, passively—by going on television and competing on quiz shows. His culinary knowledge was infinite, so he could easily win and not only in the gastronomic category.
    Cuisine and sex are two indispensable pleasures, the former more than the latter. After all, you can eat without love, but you can’t love without eating. And if you understand the culinary palate you know everything: what went into a kiss or a crab chilpachole involved historical, scientific, and even political wisdom. Where were cocktails born? In Campeche, among English sailors who mixed their drinks with a local condiment called “cock’s tail.” Who consecrated chocolate as an acceptable beverage in society? Louis XIV at Versailles, after the Aztec drink had been considered a bitter poison for two centuries. Why in old Russia was the potato prohibited by the Orthodox Church? Because it wasn’t mentioned in the Bible and therefore had to be a creation of the devil. In one sense the Orthodox clergy were right: the potato is the source of that diabolical liquor vodka.
    The truth is, Rangel entered these shows more to become known among larger audiences than to win the washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and— mirabile visu! —trips to Acapulco with which his successes were rewarded.
    Besides, he had to pass the time.
    A silver-haired old fox, an interesting man, with the looks of a mature movie star, Dionisio “Baco” Rangel was, at the age of fifty-one, something of a copy of that cinematic model personified by the late Arturo de Córdova, in whose films marble stairways and plastic flamingoes filled the background of neurotic love scenes featuring innocent fifteen-year-old girls and vengeful forty-year-old mothers, all of them reduced to their proper size by the autumnal star’s memorable and lapidary phrase: “It doesn’t have the slightest importance.” It should be pointed out that Dionisio, with greater self-generosity, would say to himself as he shaved every morning (Barbasol) that he had no reason to envy Vittorio De Sica, who moved beyond the movies of Fascist Italy, with their white telephones and satin sheets, to become the supreme neorealist director of shoeshine boys, stolen bicycles, and old men with only dogs for company. But still, how handsome, how elegant he was, how surrounded by Ginas, Sophias, and Claudias! It was to that sum of experience and that smoothness of appearance that our compatriot Dionisio “Baco” Rangel aspired as he stored all his American products in a suburban warehouse outside the border city of San Diego, California.
    The problem was that girls no longer flocked to our autumnal star. The problem was that his style clashed badly with theirs. The problem was that as he stared at himself in the mirror (Barbasol, no Brilliantine, no brilliant ideas) he had to accept that after a Certain Age a star must be circumspect, elegant, calm—all so as not to succumb to the maximum absurdity of the aged Don Juan, Fernando Rey, in Buñuel’s Viridiana, who possesses virgins only if he dopes them up first and then plays them Handel’s Messiah.
    â€œUnhandel me, sire.”
    Dionisio had therefore to spend many solitary hours, on his lecture tours and in television studios, wasting his