Free The Crystal Frontier by Carlos Fuentes Page B

melancholy on futile reflections. California was his inevitable zone of operations, and there he spent a season passing time in Los Angeles observing the flow of cars through that headless city’s freeway system, imagining it as the modern equivalent of a medieval joust, each driver a flawless knight and each car an armor-covered charger. But his concentrated observation aroused suspicion, and the police arrested him for loitering near the highways: Was he a terrorist?
    American oddities began to command his attention. He was pleased to discover that beneath the commonplaces about a uniform, robotic society devoid of culinary personality (article of faith), there roiled a multiform, eccentric world, quasi-medieval in its corrosive ferment against an order once imposed by Rome and its Church and now by Washington and its Capitol. How would the country put itself in order when it was full of religious lunatics who believed beyond doubt that faith, not surgery, would take care of a tumor in the lungs? How, when the country was full of people who dared not exchange glances in the street lest the stranger turn out to be an escaped paranoid authorized to kill anyone who didn’t totally agree with his ideas, or a murderer released from an overcrowded mental hospital or jail, or a vengeful homosexual armed with HIV-laden syringes, a neo-Nazi skinhead ready to slit the throat of a dark-skinned person, a libertarian militiaman prepared to finish off the government by blowing up federal buildings, a country where teenage gangs were better armed than the police, exercising their constitutional right to carry rocket launchers and blow off the head of a neighbor’s child?
    Sliding along the streets of America, Dionisio happily gave to that single country the name of an entire continent, gladly sacrificing in favor of a name with lineage, position, history (like Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Nicaragua …) that name without a name, the ghostlike “United States of America,” which, his friend the historian Daniel Cosío Villegas said, was a moniker like “The Neighborhood Drunkard.” Or, as Dionisio himself thought, like a mere descriptor, like “Third Floor on the Right.”
    A good Mexican, Dionisio conceded all the power in the world to the gringos except that of an aristocratic culture: Mexico had one, paying the price, it was true, with abysmal, perhaps insurmountable inequality and injustice. Mexico also had conventions, manners, tastes, subtleties that confirmed her aristocratic culture: an island of tradition increasingly whipped and sometimes flooded, though, by storms of vulgarity and styles of commercialization that were worse, because grosser, cheaper, more disgusting, than those of North Americans. In Mexico even a thief was courteous, even an illiterate was cultured, even a child knew how to say hello, even a maid knew how to walk gracefully, even a politician knew how to behave like a lady, even a lady knew how to behave like a politician, even the cripples were acrobats, and even the revolutionaries had the good taste to believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe.
    None of that consoled him in his ever longer moments of middle-aged tedium, when classes were over, when the lectures had come to an end, the girls had left, and he had to return to the hotel, the motel …
    It was perhaps these curious shelters that led Dionisio “Baco” Rangel to his latest way of amusing himself in California. He spent weeks sitting outside the places that most tested his patience and good taste—McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, and, abomination of abominations, Taco Bell—so he could count the fat people who came to and left from those cathedrals of bad eating. He was armed with statistics. Forty million persons in the United States were obese, more than in any other country in the world. Fat—seriously fat—people: pink masses, souls lost under rolls and