The Crystal Frontier by Carlos Fuentes Page A

Imagine me with a tattoo on my ankle. How am I going to show up at my own daughter’s wedding with a tattoo on my ankle? Even worse, how am I going to go—someday—to my granddaughter’s wedding with a tattoo on my ankle? Maybe it would be better if I had a tattoo on my boob—that way only my lover would see it in secret. Now that I’m about to get a divorce, I was lucky enough to meet this in-cred-ible man. Where do you think his territory is?”
    â€œI don’t know. Do you mean his house or his office?”
    â€œNo, silly. I mean how much territory he covers professionally. Guess! I’d better tell you: the whole world. He buys nonpatented replacement parts. Know what those are? All the parts for machinery, for household appliances, TVs, where no rights have to be paid. What do you think of that? He’s a genius! Even so, I suspect he may be a homosexual. I don’t know if he’d know how to bring up my kids. I toilet trained them very early. I don’t understand why friends of mine toilet trained their kids so late or never bothered…”
    Dionisio quickly ate the salad to get rid of the soon-to-be-divorced lady, and with his last bite, she vanished. Did I cannibalize her or did she cannibalize me? wondered the food critic, overcome by a growing sense of anguish he could not identify. Was all this a gag? It was a fog.
    And it was not cleared away by the arrival of dessert, a lemon meringue pie whose female counterpart Baco was afraid to see, especially because at the beginning of this adventure he’d watched the fat women pass by, desiring them platonically. He was right to be afraid. Seated opposite him, he saw when the noise of the charro ’s shot had faded, was a monstrous woman who weighed 650 if she weighed a pound. Her pink sweatshirt announced her cause: FLM, the Fat Liberation Movement. She couldn’t cross her Michelin man arms over her immense tits, which moved on their own inside her sweatshirt and fell like a flesh Niagara Falls over the barrel of her stomach, the only obstacle blocking one from contemplation of her spongy legs, bare from the thighs down, indifferent to the indecency of her wrinkled shorts. Her moist hands, loathsome, rested on Dionisio’s. The critic trembled. He tried to pull his hands free. Impossible. The fat woman was there to catechize him, and resigned to his fate, he prepared himself to be good and catechized.
    â€œDo you know how many million obese people we have in the USA?”
    â€œAs a matter of fact, I do.”
    â€œDon’t even guess, my boy. Forty million of what others pejoratively call fat people. But I’m telling you, no one can be discriminated against for their physical defects. I walk the streets telling myself, I am beautiful and intelligent. I say it in a low voice, then I shout it, I am beautiful and intelligent! Don’t force me to be perverse! That gets their attention. Then I make our demands. Obese is beautiful. Weight-loss programs should be declared illegal. Movies and airlines should install special seats for people like me. We’ve had enough of buying two tickets just so we can travel in comfort.”
    She raised her voice, hysterical.
    â€œAnd nobody make fun of me! I’m beautiful and intelligent. Don’t make me be perverse. I was cook on a ship registered in San Diego. We were coming from Hawaii. It was a freighter. One day I was walking on deck eating ice cream and a sailor got up, pulled it out of my hand, and threw it overboard. ‘Don’t get any fatter,’ he said, laughing his head off. ‘Your fat disgusts all of us. You’re ridiculous.’ That night, down in the kitchen, I put a laxative in the soup. Then I walked through the passageways shouting over the moans of the crew, ‘I’m beautiful and intelligent. Don’t mess with me. Don’t make me be perverse.’ I lost my job. I hope you’ll want me. Is it true?