“In that case, I swear,” said Gingerich serenely.
“And if you don’t”—Matamoros Moreno smiled through his knife-sharp teeth—“may the fatherland call you to account.”
He blew his nose noisily, then looked at Gingerich, his handkerchief still covering his nose and mouth.
“And if the fatherland doesn’t call you to account, rest assured, my professorial friend, that your humble servant will.”
Gingerich swallowed hard in order to be able to say, “And the second point, Mr. Matamoros?”
“No, pal, it’s not a point, it’s a condition.”
Gingerich could not withstand Matamoros Moreno’s stare. He concentrated on the mustache of the director of the Acapulco Institute: it was not merely a bushy mustache; it was a bush. Matamoros soaked his mustache and covered his ears — it was the only way (said the professor) he could free himself from the din out on the terrace. Was he blind as well? Gingerich then realized that Buckley was no longer in the room.
The citizen of New York and Adjacent Islands was not looking at or listening to this supposed exchange between mythographers. Buckley had stealthily followed the doe’s eyes, which slowly but surely had withdrawn from behind the door with glass panels.
“Condition, of course, Mr. Moreno,” Gingerich agreed, swallowing again.
“This is it: once my work has been published in North America, you personally will take a copy, with the cover, The Myth of the Notched Cunt by Matamoros Moreno, clearly visible, and you will seek out, wherever he may be, a certain Angel Palomar y Fagoaga, Mexican citizen, resident of the capital. You will find him, Professor, somehow and you will force him, in your presence, to eat the paper on which my ideas are printed.”
“Page by page?”
“Ground up like confetti,” answered Matamoros with a truculent gesture.
“But I don’t know this Angel Palomar person.”
“You’ll find him.”
“May I delegate this function? Umm, to my assistant, for example? (Where are you when I need you, you Gothamite bastard?!)”
“You have to do it yourself. You have to be there.”
“What if I’m not.”
“There are other professors willing to accept my conditions. Here’s a letter from the University of El Paso, for instance…”
“I accept,” said Professor Gingerich hurriedly, his mind on the honor of Dartmouth College.
D. C. Buckley followed the little doe in the darkness, smelling her, stepping on the coffee-colored clothing she tossed onto the tiles, while Will Gingerich avidly read the document Matamoros Moreno set before him like some special treat. Despite his impatience, Matamoros’s eyes never left the professor. Buckley touched the girl’s shoulder. It was as smooth as a glass of eggnog with cinnamon. He touched her face. He dared to bring his finger to her mouth. She nipped Buckley’s finger and laughed. The New Yorker got used to the darkness. The naked girl got into a barrel, and invited him to join her. She opened her mouth until it was incredibly wide and cleansed the sky of storm clouds. Buckley lowered himself into the barrel next to her.
“And you are like the bored maguey; you are like the maguey; soon you will have no juices,” Gingerich read hastily. “You men have impetuously ruined yourselves; you are empty. In us, the women, there is a cave, a canyon, whose only function is to wait for what is given us. We only receive. You, what will you give us?”
“That’s enough,” interrupted Matamoros. “This is only a taste. Now read my things. But you must think I’m a boor. Colasa! Pour the gentleman a cup of coffee!”
But Colasa did not answer, and Matamoros laughed and said that the girl had suddenly taken up star counting as a hobby. Gingerich looked around for D. C. Buckley, but said nothing about his absence; Matamoros Moreno had forgotten about the assistant. Had he really forgotten about him, wondered the professor as he walked back down to Christopher Columbus Street with the sample of the myth in one back pocket and Matamoros Moreno’s manuscript in the other. D. C. Buckley’s Akutagawa was still there.
“I saw you dancing last night at the Divan,” whispered Buckley into the girl’s ear. “You looked as if you’d been dipped in tea.”
Colasa Sánchez brought her warm dark body closer to the gringo’s white cold body.
“Why don’t you say anything?” asked D.C.
The girl sang, My heart’s delight’s this little ranch/ Where I live content/ Hidden among the mountains blue/ With rainbows heaven sent, and stared at D.C. for a long time. Finally she told him that there was a boy at the disco, tall with green eyes, dressed Hippieteca style. His wife was in Tehuana costume and they were with their fat uncle. Didn’t he see them?
“I have the vague impression that there were lots of people there.”
Oh, she thought that place was like a club; the owners, the frog and the chink, were giving out free tickets to poor boys and girls to promote class confrontation, that’s how they explained it to her so she would go. It was terrific that the gringo had noticed her, now he was on top of her, it was terrific that she could count the stars, he couldn’t, he had his back to the sky down at the bottom of this barreclass="underline" couldn’t they both go find that boy she was talking about?
“What do you want to tell him? What do you want to give him?”
Just what I’m giving you, said Colasa Sánchez seriously, come on now, gringo, I’m moist and ready for you, come inside your sweet little girl, I’ve just had my thirteenth tropical birthday and all for you.
D. C. Buckley unbuttoned his fly, and Colasa opened her legs as if they were tea leaves and stared at him with the eyes of an anxious deer. D. C. Buckley’s member slowly felt around the entrance to Colasa Sánchez’s body, took aim like a bullfighter’s sword about to make the kill, and pushed its way in with strength and a single, brutal motion. The white teeth in Colasa Sánchez’s vagina shattered on D. C. Buckley’s infinitely hard phallus. The gringo laughed with pleasure, while Colasa wept for the same reason.
Later he took her brusquely by the nape of the neck, twisted her black hair, and said all right now count all the stars, and don’t leave out a single one.
6. This is the novel I am imagining inside my mother’s egg
This is the novel I am imagining inside my mother’s egg. I was certainly not going to be put in the shade by my parents’s buddy Egg. Of course, little Christopher: if the earth is round, why shouldn’t a narrative also be round? A straight line is the longest distance between two words. But I know that I am calling in the desert and that the voice of history is always about to silence my voice. But that’s all over with, and anyone might think I’m telling all this twenty years after my birth. But if the reader is my friend and collaborator, as I wish and am sure that … he will not stop to figure out whether this novel is narrated by me ab ovo or twenty years after (either in Horace’s fashion or à la Dumas). Whatever his premise, he will contribute something of his own, he will be an auxiliary, an external, respectful chronicler of the conscientious inquiry into my internal gestation and of what happened before it, because no event comes without its accompaniment of memories: in this you and I, Reader, resemble each other; we both remember, I with the syntony of my genetic chain, in the world exterior to my own: what I don’t know how to remember, you can remember for me; you know what happened, you will not let me lie, you remember and tell me that …
7. Gingerich returned to the Sightseer on foot
Gingerich returned to the Sightseer on foot and found a small group from his flock still drinking at the bar decorated with ship helms and dolphins next to the sea cliff. The tourists looked even more faded than they had before; as they age, North Americans lose color, even those with Mediterranean blood turn as white as talcum powder, their faces white as sheets until they die.