The Crystal Frontier Read Online Free PDF Page B

day, then woke up broke, out in the street, tears of laughter pouring down our faces before we began to laugh with pain.
    Juan Zamora has his back to you. When he was twenty-three, he got to study at Cornell, thanks to a scholarship. He was a dedicated pre-med student at the National Preparatory School and then at the National University, and he swears to you that that would have been enough for him if his mother hadn’t got it into her head that during the Mexican boom period it was necessary to do some postgrad work at a Yankee university.
    â€œYour father never knew how to take advantage of an opportunity. He was Don Leonardo Barroso’s administrative lawyer for twenty years and died without a penny to his name. What could he have been thinking about? Well, not about you or me, Juanito, you can be sure of that.”
    â€œWhat did he say to you?”
    â€œThat honesty is its own reward. That he was an honorable professional. That he wasn’t going to betray Mario de la Cueva and his other professors at the law school. That he’d been taught that law is an honorable profession. That you cannot defend the law if you’re corrupt yourself. ‘But it’s not illegal, Gonzalo,’ I’d say to your father, ‘to accept a payment for doing favors. It’s no crime drawing a matter to the attention of Minister Barroso. Everyone in government gets rich but you!’
    â€œâ€˜That’s called a bribe, Lelia. It’s a triple deception, besides being a lie. If the matter develops, it looks as if I was paid to move it along. If it fails, I look like a crook. In either case, I deceive the minister, the nation, and myself.’
    â€œâ€˜A little public-works contract, Gonzalo, that’s all I’m asking you to request. You get your commission and bye-bye. No one will find out. With that money we could buy a house in Anzures. And get out of Colonia Santa María. We could send Juanito to a gringo university. What I mean is, the boy’s a very good student and it would be a shame for him to go to waste with that riffraff at the National University.’”
    Juan tells me to say that his mother recounted those things with a bitter smile on her face, a grimace that her son had only seen, from time to time, on cadavers he studied at school.
    His father, Gonzalo Zamora, CPA, had to die for his widow to ask a single favor from Don Leonardo Barroso: would he see if he could get a scholarship for Juanito to study medicine in the United States? With great elegance, Don Leonardo said, Why, of course, he would be delighted to take care of it—why, that’s the least the memory of good old Zamora deserved, such an honest lawyer, such a diligent functionary.
    2
    I’m following Juan Zamora, the Mexican student with his gray sweatshirt, through the sad streets of Ithaca, New York. I have no idea what he’s looking for since there’s so little to see here. The main street has barely any stores, two or three very bad restaurants, and immediately after that come mountains and gorges. Juanito feels—almost—as if he’s in Mexico, in San Juan del Río or Tepeji, places he’d visited from time to time on holiday to breathe the air of forests and gorges, far from the pollution of the capital. The gorge in Ithaca is a deep and forbidding ravine, apparently a seductive abyss as well. Ithaca is famous for the number of suicides committed by desperate students who jump off the bridge spanning the gorge. One joke says that no professor will fail a bad student, for fear he’ll dive into the chasm.
    Since there isn’t much to see around here on Sunday, Juan Zamora is going back to the house where he’s living. It’s a beautiful place of pale pink brick with a blue slate roof, surrounded by a well-kept lawn that becomes gravel around the house and extends into a tangled, thin, and somber woods behind it. Ivy climbs up the pink brick.
    The seasons