The Crystal Frontier Read Online Free PDF

which my tongue gets lost without finding coral reefs or stalactite caves or ruined Gothic vaults—there is only the tickle of your cleft chin, my precious, the announcement of your other duplicities. Those I know I caress slowly so that nothing fades between us, so that everything lasts amid expectation, surprise, the desire for more and more, yes, Godfather, give me more, nothing can separate us now, Godfather, you said so, remember? Every time you see me I want it to be the first. Oh, Leonardo, it’s that I fell in love with your eyes because they said so many things.
    â€œI know how to ask for everything because I also know how to give everything. What do you say to me, capital girl?”
    â€œThat same thing, Godfather, that…”
    Through the half-opened window came a song sung by Luis Miguel, “I need you, need you a lot, I don’t know you…” How could Leonardo and Michelina know that that music was coming from an “erased” Indian village, Pacuaches, where Mariano read books and listened to music and went into ecstasy guessing which birds were singing at four o’clock in the morning. That morning, a jet crossed the heavens, and the birds fell silent forever. She was no longer there …

2
    PAIN
    For Julio Ortega
    1
    Juan Zamora asked me to tell this story while he kept his back turned. What he means is that he wants to have his back to the reader the whole time. He says he’s ashamed. Or, as he puts it himself, “I’m in pain.” “Pain” as a synonym for “shame” is a peculiarity of Mexican speech, comparable to saying “senior citizens” for “old people”—so as not to offend—or saying “He’s in a bad way” to soften the idea that someone’s illness is terminal. Shame causes pain; sometimes pain causes shame.
    So Juan Zamora will not offer you a view of his face over the course of this story. You’ll be able to see only the nape of his neck, his back. I won’t say “his ass,” because that, too, is a loaded term in Mexico. Especially in the sense of “offering” your ass to someone, the lowest act of cowardice, a yielding or a type of abject courtesy. That’s not the case with Juan Zamora. He wears a big university sweatshirt, size XXL, decorated in front with the emblem of the university in question, the kind of sweatshirt that hangs down to your thighs (though he wears it tucked into his jeans). No, Juan Zamora insists I tell you he won’t be offering anything. He only wants to emphasize that his shame is equal to his pain. He doesn’t blame anyone. It is true that he touched a world and that the world touched him.
    But after all, everything that happened passed through him and happened inside him. This is what counts.
    The story takes place during the time of the Mexican oil boom, at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s. Right from the start, that explains part of the pain-shame identification Juan Zamora is talking about. Shame because we celebrated the boom like a bunch of nouveaux riches. Pain because the wealth was badly used. Shame because the president said our problem now was to administer our wealth. Pain because the poor kept on getting poorer. Shame because we became frivolous spendthrifts, slaves of vulgar whims and our comic macho posturing. Pain because we were incapable of administering even our shame. Pain and shame because we were no good at being rich; the only things appropriate for us are poverty, dignity, effort. In Mexico, there have always been corrupt authoritarian figures with too much power. But they are forgiven everything if they are at least serious. (Is there one corruption that’s serious and another that’s frivolous?) Frivolity is intolerable, unforgivable, the mockery of all those who’ve been screwed. That’s the source of the pain and the shame of those years when we were millionaires for a