3
If the city of Ithaca is a kind of suburban Avernus, Cornell University is its Parnassus: a brilliant cream-colored temple with modern, sometimes almost Art Deco lines and vast green and luminous spaces. Given the abrupt nature of the terrain, the campus is linked by beautiful terraces and grand stairways. Both lead to places that are centers of the life of the Mexican student Juan Zamora. One is the student union, which tries to make up for all of Ithaca’s shortcomings with books, a stationery store, movies, theater, clothing, mailboxes, restaurants, and places to meet. Moving among those spaces, his back toward us, Juan Zamora tries to connect with the place. He takes special notice of the extreme sloppiness of the students. They wear baseball caps they don’t even take off indoors or when they greet women. They rarely shave completely. They drink beer straight from the bottle. They wear sleeveless T-shirts, revealing at all hours their hairy underarms. Their jeans have torn knees, and at times they wear them cut off at the thigh and unraveling. They sit down to eat with their caps on and fill their mouths with hamburgers, french fries, and an entire menu pulled out of plastic bags. When they really want to be informal, they wear their baseball caps backward, with the visors cooling the napes of their necks.
One day, an athletic boy, blond, with pinched features, ordered a plate of spaghetti and began to eat it with his hands, by the fistful. Juan Zamora felt an uncontrollable revulsion that obliterated his appetite and forced him for the first and perhaps only time to criticize a fellow student. “That’s disgusting! Didn’t they teach you how to eat at home?” “Of course they did. My family’s pretty rich, for your information.” “So why do you eat like an animal?” “Because now I’m free,” said the blond through a mouthful of pasta.
Juan Zamora arrived at Cornell not in a sports coat and tie but in blue jeans, a leather jacket, a sweater, and loafers. While alive, his father resigned himself to this scruffiness: “We used to wear suits and ties to class at law school…” Little by little, Juan assumed a more casual wardrobe—sweatshirt, Keds—but he always maintained (with his back turned) a minimal properness. He understood that the shabby disguise worn by the students was a way of equalizing social classes, so no one would ask about family background or economic status. All equal, equalized by sloppiness, the T-shirts, baseball caps, sneakers. Only in his refuge—the residence of the Wingate family—could Juan Zamora say, with impunity and with universal approval, even impressing them: “My family is very old. We’ve always been rich. We have haciendas, horses, servants. Now with the oil, we’ll simply live as we always have, but with even more luxury. If only you could visit us in Mexico. My mother would be so happy to receive you and thank you for your kindness to me.”
And Charlotte would sigh with admiration. She was the first platinum-dyed white woman Juan Zamora had ever seen wearing an apron. “How polite Spanish aristocrats are! Learn, Becky.”
Charlotte never called Juan Zamora Mexican. She was afraid of offending him.
4
The other space in the life of the Mexican student was the school of medicine, especially the amphitheater, built on Greek lines and as white as snow, but solid and crowning a hill as if intentionally, so that the smells of chloroform and formaldehyde would not contaminate the rest of the campus. Here the outlandish student outfits were replaced by the white uniform of medicine, although at times hairy legs and (almost always) blackened Keds would appear at the bottoms of the long clinic gowns.
Men and women, all in white, gave the place the air of a religious community. Young monks and nuns passed through its sparkling corridors. Juan thought chastity would be the rule in this order of young doctors. Besides, the white uniform (unless the hairy legs stuck out) accentuated the generational androgyny. Some girls wore their hair very short, while some boys wore it very long, so at times it was difficult to tell from behind what sex a person was.
Juan Zamora had had a couple of sexual relationships in Mexico. Sex was not his strong suit. He didn’t like prostitutes. His female classmates at the National University were very demanding, very devouring and distracting, talking about having families or being independent, about living this way or that, about succeeding, and they talked with a decisiveness that made him feel out of place, guilty, ashamed of not being, ever, yet, all he could be. Juan Zamora’s problem was that he confused each step of his life with something definitive, finished. Just as there are young people who let things flow and leave everything to chance, there are others who think the world ends every twenty-four hours. Juan was one of the latter. Without admitting it, he knew that his mother’s anguish about their modest means, his father’s upright pride, and his own uncertainties about his father’s morality gave him a feeling of perpetual distress, of imminent doom that was mocked by the gray, implacable flow of daily life. If he had accepted that tranquil march of days, he might perhaps have entered a more or less stable relationship with a girl. But girls saw in Juan Zamora a boy who was too tense, frightened, insecure. A young man with his back turned, in pain.
“Why are you always looking behind you? Do you think someone’s following us?”
“Don’t be afraid to cross the street. There are no cars coming.”
“Listen, stop ducking. No one’s swinging at you.”
Now, at Cornell, he put on his white robe and carefully washed his hands. He was going to perform his first autopsy, he and another student. Would it be a man or a woman? The question was important because it applied as well to the cadaver he would be studying.
The auditorium was dark.
Juan Zamora felt his way to the barely visible autopsy table. Then his back rubbed against someone else’s. The two of them laughed nervously. In a flash, the blinding, implacable lights went on, like some vengeful Jehovah, and the janitor apologized for not getting there on time. He always tried to be more punctual than the students, he exclaimed, laughing, ashamed.
Which one would Juan Zamora look at first? The student or the cadaver? He looked down and saw the body covered by a sheet. He looked up and found that a very blond person with long hair and not very wide shoulders was looking away from him. He looked down again and uncovered the cadaver’s face. It was impossible to know if the cadaver was a man or woman. Death had erased not only its time but its sexual personality. The only thing certain was that it was old. It was made of wax. You always had to think that the cadavers were made of wax. It made them easier to dissect. This one’s eyes weren’t closed tightly, and Juan was shocked to think they were still crying. But the thin nose stuffed with cotton balls, the rigid jaw, the sunken lips were no longer the cadaver’s or ours. Death had stripped the individual of pronouns. It was no longer he or she, yours or mine. The other gloved hand held out a scalpel to him.
They worked in silence. They were masked. The blond person working with him, small but decisive, knew the guts of a dead person better than Juan did and guided him in the incisions he would have to make. He or she was an expert. Juan dared to look into the eyes opposite his own. They were gray, that hazel-tinted gray that sometimes appears in the most beautiful Anglo-Saxon eyes, where the unusual color is almost always accompanied by dreamy eyelids, depths of desire, fluidity, but also intensity.
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.
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nbsp; 5
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.
6
Once again they are together, wearing their white masks, their gloves, dissecting another woman’s body, this time an old one’s. Lord Jim asks Juan to remember that place, the palace of the Inquisition in Mexico that became the medical school. He’s amused by the idea of the same building’s being used for torture one day and to bring relief to bodies the next. The Mexican student subtly changes the subject and tells him about the Plaza de Santo Domingo and the ancient tradition of the “evangelists,” old men with old typewriters who sit in the doorways and type out the dictation of the illiterates who want to send letters to their parents, lovers, friends.
“How do they know these scribes are reliable?”
“They don’t. They have to have faith.”
“Confidence, Juan.”
“Right.”
Jim took off his mask and Juan gestured for him to be careful—they had to take precautions. Once before, the first time, they had kissed next to a cadaver, but the bacteria of the dead have killed more than one careless doctor. Jim gave him a strange look. He asked Juan to tell him the truth. About what? About his family, his house. Jim knew what people said around the university, that Juan was the scion of a rich family, hacienda owners, and so forth. Juan had never told Jim that, because they never talked about the past. Now Jim asked him to send a spoken letter, as if he, the gringo, were the “evangeli
st” in the plaza and Juan the illiterate.
“It’s all lies,” said Juan. His back was turned once again, but he spoke without hesitation. “Pure lies. We live in a very modest apartment. My father was a very honorable man who died penniless. My mother always threw it in his face. She’ll die reproaching him. I feel pain and shame for the two of them. I feel pain for my father’s useless morality, which no one remembers or values and which wasn’t worth shit. On the other hand, people certainly would have celebrated him if he’d been rich. I’m ashamed that he didn’t steal, that he was a poor devil. But I’d be just as ashamed if he were a thief. My dad. My poor, poor dad.”
He felt relieved, clean. He’d been faithful to Lord Jim. From now on, there wouldn’t be a single lie between them. He thought that and fleetingly he felt ill at ease. Lord Jim could be sincere with him as well.
“Explain to me ‘pain and shame,’ as you call them—which would be something like ‘pity and shame’ in English,” said the American.
“My mother causes me pain, always complaining about what never was, heartsick about her life, which she should accept because it will never be different. I’m ashamed of her self-pity, you’re right, that horrible sin of inflicting pain on yourself all day long. Yes, I think you’re right. You’ve got to have compassion to cover the pain and shame you feel toward others.”
He squeezed Lord Jim’s hand and told him they shouldn’t talk about the past because they understood each other so well in the present. The American shot him a strange look that he almost associated with the dead woman who would not resign herself to closing her eyes, the woman they never finished dissecting.
“I feel awful saying this to you, Juan, but we have to talk about the future.”
The Mexican student made an involuntary but dramatic gesture, two swift and simultaneous, though repeated, movements, one hand raised to his mouth, as if he were begging silence and another extended forward, denying, stopping what was coming.