Buckley signaled that the dialogue was coming to an end by twirling his Panama hat: “If you agree, my dear professor, we can kill one stone with two birds, ha ha. I’ll accompany you to the Acapulco Institute if you go with me to investigate vaginas, dentatae or otherwise, to be found here in Acapulco, ha ha!”
And he clapped his Panama hat on his head at a rakish angle.
In D. C. Buckley’s swift Akutagawa coupé, they drove down the steep and twisted road from La Quebrada to the bananafied stench of the seawall road. Gingerich consulted his faithful Filofax with the seal of Dartmouth College embossed on its cover: the Acapulco Institute was on Christopher Columbus Street, between Prince Henry the Navigator and Ferdinand and Isabella Street, in the — the only name missing — Magellan district. The Mexicans were exploiting the didactic aspect of street names to the maximum, the professor noted, and then dared to ask D. C. Buckley what brought him to visit this country.
“You know, old salt. It’s possible, as Henry James wrote, to be faithful without being requited.”
Buckley said all that without taking his narrow and always unperturbed eyes off the twists and turns of the highway.
“No, no,” said Gingerich, amicably shaking his head. “Don’t think I’m some romantic gringo looking for the golden age and the noble savage.”
“It would be illiberal of me to think anything of the sort, old salt,” said Buckley. “I’m a native of New York and Adjacent Islands. I’m a member of the Anar Chic Party of the North American Nations. And though you might not believe in primitive man, that’s what I’m looking for here: an immersion in primigenial sensations, but with primitive woman, ha ha. And you, to which of the nations do you belong?”
“I left Mexamerica when it became independent. I’m too frugal to be from New York and the Islands, and too liberal to be a Dixiecrat. I think I have too much imagination to be part of the Chicago-Philadelphia Steel Axis, and I know I have too much of a sense of humor to sink into the hyperbole of the Republic of Texas, so I joined up with New England.”
“Have you ever heard of Pacífica?” Buckley twisted his mouth.
“I don’t know if I have any right to. In any case, I’m afraid.”
“Well, here we are. But there’s no sign of your Acapulco Institute anywhere.”
“No, they don’t exactly advertise. You have to go straight in.”
“It’s open at night?”
“Only at night. That’s what the pamphlet says. I’ve never been here before.”
They got out of the Akutagawa. The Acapulco night smelled of dead fruit. They stopped in front of a decayed building. They walked up some stairs, holding on to the rusted railings for support.
“At least the ventilation’s good,” said Buckley, brushing the reddish dust off his hands.
Buckley was alluding to the fact that the stairs went up past stucco pilasters badly in need of painting and windows devoid of glass; but then the deep blue of the windows made the night seem even darker. They stopped in a hallway whose only light came from a solitary, immobile bulb that hung over a nondescript door.
“Nothing worthwhile in Mexico is announced anymore,” Will Gingerich explained. “But the institute does send its pamphlets abroad.”
He knocked at the door, involuntarily letting himself be carried away by a forgotten jazz phrase.
“Is this proof that the institute is not worthwhile?” insisted D.C. courteously.
The door opened, and a man of perhaps thirty-two years of age, tall, powerful, wearing a large mustache, with eyes like the chief of an unconquered tribe photographed by Mathew Brady c. 1867, stared at them with no expression whatsoever on his face. Because of the heat, he was wearing Bermuda shorts. Despite the heat, he wore a thick turtleneck sweater. The professor gave his name and introduced D. C. Buckley as his assistant.
“Matamoros Moreno, pleased to serve Quetzalcoatl and you.” He nodded his huge head, and D. C. Buckley felt a tremor run down his spine: he, who had come to Mexico following the tracks of D. H. Lawrence, to receive this gift … and so out of nowhere! He thanked the professor for his liberality with a glance — thanks, old salt!
But he had no time to say anything because Matamoros Moreno ushered them in with a gesture of hospitality, closed the rachitic door of the Acapulco Institute, and shuffled into the naked space as if he were wearing a ball and chain. He slumped his gorilla shoulders and sat in a metal chair facing an ocote table finished in red lacquer.
The professor sat down in the other metal chair, with D.C., modestly adapting to his role as assistant, standing behind him, tall and distant from the terrestrial eyes of Matamoros, who even when sitting seemed to be pushing a cannon uphill. With no preamble, Matamoros said, “As you know, the ancient myth of the vagina dentata only survived in sixteenth-century texts thanks to the missionaries who took the time to listen to the oral histories of the conquered and wrote them down to use them in the Indian colleges. But those texts were soon destroyed by the colonial authorities, both civil and ecclesiastical, because they were deemed lascivious and impure.”
He paused, perhaps to show himself under the light of another bulb that deepened the shadows on a face that was threatening in its immobile simplicity. That face, D. C. Buckley said to himself, merely announces the danger of his body: anyone who doesn’t avoid those eyes runs the risk of not avoiding the body and of being demolished by it. Buckley decided to avoid both.
“The text and the illustration I possess”—now he looked only and terribly at Gingerich—“are the only ones on the vaginal myth saved from the estate of Don Fernando de Alva Ixtilxóchitl, the Indian prince transformed into a writer in the Spanish language, even though he descended from Prince Nezahualpilli of Texcoco.”
Like a cobra about to strike, Matamoros stared fixedly at Will Gingerich. The professor made a face of the kind he only remembered making at muggers in obscure residential streets in Cambridge, Mass., where he was assaulted sometime around 1985. Matamoros’s face simply expressed one thing: that payment was required for his information. But Gingerich said nothing — even a fish wouldn’t get into trouble if he learned to keep his mouth shut. Buckley, too, remained silent. His eyes had wandered a few minutes before from Mr. Moreno and were seeking the swift, hidden eyes lurking in the darkness of the Acapulco Institute.
“I make two conditions for showing you the documents, Professor,” said the president of the aforementioned institute in very grand, very Mexican style.
Gingerich did not ask; he merely waited.
“The first is that you try to publish what I’ve written in some prestigious magazine in the neighboring republics to the north.”
Matamoros’s eyes were nothing compared with his tremendous teeth, which he was now showing. Buckley did not see them because he was looking at the doe-like eyes of a woman in the darkness, behind a door with opaque glass panels, a door that led to…?
“I will certainly try to do that, Mr. Moreno.”
The professor cleared his throat and then went on in the face of Don Matamoros’s obstinate silence, “Of course, the publishing crisis in North America even affects the most powerful publishers, as you no doubt know. It will be very difficult…”
“I don’t give a fuck about any crisis,” said the fearsome Matamoros. “You figure out how to publish my stuff — with a powerful publisher or a weak one, I don’t care. You swear you’ll get me published, my dear professor, or you will never find out about the myth of the vagina dentata in Fernando Ixtilxóchitl.”