Christopher Unborn (28 page)

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.”

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.”

“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.