* The first thing Professor Will Gingerich noted when he arrived at the New Year’s cocktail party on the terrace of the Hotel Sightseer (originally El Mirador) was that all the guests were made of glass.
that of layered terraces:
He didn’t blame his headache for this illusion. Aspirin should be delivered with the Acapulco sun. But now the sun was not shining. Night had fallen. His herd of gringos had met to get to know each other before before beginning tomorrow’s Fun & Sun Toltec Tour.
Each one had stuck a badge on his chest with his name and address on it. Damn! So why weren’t they looking at each other? He observed each of them looking at the badge of the person standing next to him just as that person looked at his, smiling in a happy but absent way and avidly seeking the badge of the next guest. Their eyes pierced the badges as if they were panes of glass framed so they could see the Vermont landscape in winter. But here, behind the glass, there was only more glass. All of them wanted desperately to leave behind the next traveling companion and meet another one, who was also made of glass, all of them waiting, innocent and crystalline.
An Acapulco waiter offered him a Scarlet O’Hara. Will Gingerich took the glass with its brittle stem and felt nauseous as he tasted the cloying liquor flowing around drunken strawberries. He looked into the thick, bovine, impenetrable eyes of the Mexican waiter: his body was as square as a black die, so thick that no glass gaze could ever penetrate it. Professor Gingerich breathed deep and remembered that he ought to be introducing himself and looking after his flock. He slowly strolled across the terrace balanced high over the rocky, sonorous sea that night.
“Hi, I’m your professional guide.”
He didn’t have to tell them his name because he, too, had it written on the chest of his faded windbreaker, which also had Dartmouth College Vox Clamantis in Deserto 1769 inscribed on it. The inscription was too light for anyone to decipher. He would bet on it. No one looked him directly in the eye. No one in fact did read the faded inscription. And he was not going to tell anyone that he had set himself up as a tour guide in Acapulco because Ronald Ranger had destroyed higher education in the United States with the speed of the fastest gun in the West. Among the items the President had certainly read on the hit list for budget cuts were two exotic subjects, Spanish-American Literature and Comparative Mythology. The President had wondered what earthly use they could have and marked them as definite cuts from the federal aid package. Gingerich consoled himself thinking that it was worse for the insane because the President had also eliminated federal aid for mental health: he had appeared on television with a statistical chart which showed beyond the shadow of a doubt that cases of mental imbalance had diminished sharply in the United States during the previous twenty years. Aid for an illness in decline was no longer necessary.
Will Gingerich did not want to think of himself as a victim of America in the eighties or announce it to his heterogeneous flock. Besides, the sixty-year-old couples who comprised it were not looking at him, even if they did squawk their appreciation, Oh, how exciting! as they read his badge. If only they were as excited about the age and prestige of Dartmouth College. But they neither read the inscription nor asked Will to translate the Latin.
“A voice crying out in the desert”—an index finger accompanied by a modulated, serious voice stopped him smoothly.
Will Gingerich stopped his wandering eyes in order to match his interlocutor with a body. Certainly it was something more than a finger and a voice. Gingerich shook his prematurely balding head. He was afraid of falling into the same malaise that possessed his flock. In front of him he saw a person who was not invisible. Will was on the point of introducing himself in a positive fashion: “Yes, I am a professor of mythology and literature at Dartmouth College.” But it seemed an insult to the institution.
He didn’t have to say a word, because his interlocutor had begun a unilateral evocation: “Ah, those white Dartmouth winters. Really a white hell, which is what José Clemente Orozco said when he went up to paint the frescoes in the Baker Library during the thirties. Did you ever see them?”
Gingerich said he had. He realized that the person speaking to him had not started this conversation because he thought Gingerich had bought his jacket at some university souvenir stand out of nostalgia, or a desire to impress.
“That’s why I took a job at Dartmouth. Those murals are a strange presence in the cold and mountains of New England. Orozco would be normal in California because California looks more and more like an Orozco mural. But, in New England, it was a pleasure for me to write and read protected by the murals.”
“For you, the murals were de luxe bodyguards.”
“Yes.” The professor laughed. “Orozco is an artistic bodyguard.”
He could not refrain from carefully scrutinizing the tall, thin man dressed in a tasteful combination of open-necked shirt, sports jacket, white trousers, mahogany belt with heavy buckle, and blucher moccasins, doubtlessly purchased from L. L. Bean. In one hand, and with no sign of nervousness, the man, who introduced himself as D. C. Buckley, held a Panama hat, which from time to time he comically twirled on one finger.
Buckley raised his other hand to a thin, hard-edged face, like the one in the old Arrow shirt ads, and ruffled his hair the color of old honey. He couldn’t be more than thirty-five years old, Gingerich (who, at forty-two, felt old) estimated, but his hair was old, prophetic, as if an ancient Seminole chief had lent it to him.
“Look, old salt,” he said to Professor Gingerich with the immediacy of the eternal frontiersman, “I suspect you’ve satisfied your primary obligations by this point. I’d rather be nonallusive, and I hope you wouldn’t think it illiberal of me (at least) when I assure you that your flock will not be needing your services for the time being.”
He posed and paused, looking at the sheer cliffs of La Quebrada, which were so highly illuminated by spotlights and torches that they ended up looking as if they were made of cardboard.
“First, they’ll numb their tongues and palates with these appalling cocktails until they’re quite immune to any kind of culinary offering. Later on they’ll eat — because they’ve demanded it, and, because they’ve demanded it, the trip organizers have provided food — baby food: pureed things, bottled dressings, vanilla ice cream, and cold water — and after a while they will be ready to fix their distracted gaze on the divers who plunge off the cliffs. The heights they dive from will be the main attraction, not what takes place in the heart of the Acapulco boy who, like you, only does what he must in order to eat. Don’t you agree?”
Gingerich said it wasn’t hard to guess that a university professor working as tourist guide in Mexico had to be doing it out of sheer necessity. “But,” he hastened to add, “at least I’m trying to kill two birds with one stone.
“I came here because I’m finishing a monograph on the universal myth of the vagina dentata.”
“If it’s universal, why did you want to come here specifically?” asked Buckley critically.
“Because this is where the Acapulco Institute is located,” said Will, as if the institute itself were a universal myth. He blushingly realized he’d been talking like a pedant and added, “The Acapulco Institute has amassed all the documentation relevant to this myth, Mr. Buckley.”
“For God’s sake, call me D.C.”
“Sure, D.C. You can understand why this field is not one that gets much support. Government opposes it. And the women who keep the cult alive would have anyone who even hinted anything about it killed.”
“My favorite detective, Sam Spade, says that only a madman would contravene the sentiments of a Mexican woman. The consequences, to put it that way, would be dangerous; illiberal at least.”