Lorenzo was making a miserly salary after he left Harvard, but he was a frugal man. When one pair of shoes wore out, he always had enough to buy another. “It doesn’t take a lot to live.”
“When are you going to own your own car?” Chava asked him. “Don’t tell me you’ve developed a liking for public transportation.”
“I have, Chava. I’m in touch with the people.”
“You like the smell of the people?”
Lorenzo shook his fist at Chava’s jeering face.
“Don’t you ever plan to marry, Lencho?”
“Yes, when I find a woman who will let me work. That’s all I would ask of her: that she let me work.”
“If you planned it right, you could have it good.”
“I want to do science, Chava, be useful to my poor country.”
“Things will be much better for your brother Santiago than they are for you. He’s more realistic. It looks like you and Juan are both unable to adapt to the world. What planet do you two orbit?”
The mention of Juan shook him. Now free, Juan had knocked at the door of his apartment on calle Tonalá. “Lorenzo, you’re the only one I can turn to. Lend me 579 pesos, or they’re going to turn off my phone.”
“What did you do to owe that much?”
“I made long-distance calls through Ericsson on a rush order for some conductors that you can’t get in Mexico.”
The mention of Ericsson reminded him of his father, who would ask his guests, “Do you have Mexicana or Ericsson phone service?” If they had Mexicana, he thought less of them.
Juan was excited; he was on the verge of success with his Mexican refrigerator.
“Why are you doing this if we already import General Electrics?”
“Mine will be much cheaper and will be the best. It’s the invention of the century. All I need is your support while I finish it.”
Lorenzo couldn’t believe it. Juan was going from bad to worse.
He pleaded like a beggar. “Lencho, can’t you sell a piece of Aunt Tana’s furniture?”
“What? I didn’t keep any.”
“Leticia told me that you might have the armoire.”
“Leticia is a liar, and you know that as well as I do.”
“You could ask for a loan from one of your buddies.”
“Which one, brother? Which one? Unlike you, I do have some pride.”
“Ask Diego Beristain—579 pesos is like a fifty-cent piece to him.”
Because he had accused the officials of nepotism and clamored for a law that prohibited employing a relative, Lorenzo had to shut the door on his brother, and he began to resent Juan’s presence. Each time he saw him approach, he’d say to himself, Here comes the sponger. He was even more horrified when he saw how Juan lived. He had gone to see his brother’s invention. On a vacant lot, inside a cave made of sheet metal walls and roof, Juan not only reigned over the refrigerator, but also over fragments of all kinds of tools. Balcony railings he had designed and soldered were beautiful.
Lorenzo held the railing up in the air. “Brother, this is really something.” He walked between the stove, the refrigerator, the disassembled motor, and the turbine on the floor, not knowing what to say. But he was certain that most of Juan’s inventions didn’t have a chance, because no one would finance a Mexican automobile when it was cheaper to import one. In the middle of the patio, a little car, as red as a hemorrhage, caught his eye. “It’s electric, brother; it doesn’t use gasoline,” Juan said. The stoves were electric too. Three boys worked with Juan—his “assistants,” who listened to him attentively. “One day I’m going to discover the origin of the universe before you do,” he told Lorenzo, slapping him on the back. “I’m going to beat you, brother.”
Lorenzo held back. He didn’t want to tell Juan that it was too late for him to discover anything. He felt like crying. They had once been able to discuss abstract astrophysical problems for hours.
Juan had much more to say than Luis Enrique Erro. But what was there to say about this trash heap of old iron? Cardboard boxes were filled with worn-out books—one about Edison, a calculus book called The Semat, Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” a pile of papers with mangled corners covered with his nervous scribbling, three celestial maps probably taken from Tonantzintla.
Lorenzo had also obsessively reread Swift. It was because of Swift, and not James Joyce, that he had wanted to go to Ireland. Of course, Joyce had wonderful pages about astronomy in Ulysses, but Joyce’s work—he was sure—would not have existed without “A Modest Proposal.” Nor without A Tale of a Tub. Lorenzo was still impressed with Gulliver’s Travels, and he often compared the Mexicans to the Lilliputians. The fact that Swift was among his brother’s old books saddened him. We read the same thing at the same time, he thought. Who could Juan discuss Swift with besides him? How big was the hell of his solitude? He, Lorenzo, had Diego. But Juan, who did he have?
Juan’s young assistants didn’t leave him even for a minute. None of them understood the equations he scribbled on sheets and sheets of paper, but their devotion made him feel respected. He shared breakfast, lunch, and dinner with them. Chufa’s mother washed his clothes. What clothes? Lorenzo wondered. He looked so lost. And his entertainment, if you could call it that, was drinking beer on the sidewalk on Sunday afternoons. Lorenzo left with a disconcerting sensation that Juan had become a mad scientist. Once he totally lost his bearings, would he throw himself headlong into vice, in spite of his sparks of genius? Lorenzo would have offered for them to live together, but his brother had adapted to that marginalization; he was in his element. Living day by day, realizing at night that he had not eaten, was tolerable when he was young, but what would happen as the years passed? Juan dressed like an indigent; he had a poor man’s face—scars of a poor man, hands of a poor man, eyes of a poor man. Prematurely worn out, he looked much older than his elder brother. It wasn’t as if Lorenzo had money. Barely a year ago he was still living with the Toxquis in the town of Tonantzintla. But Juan’s permanent poverty terrified him. If I’m out of touch with reality, as my friends say, my brother revolves
in an unknown orbit, Lorenzo thought. Maybe the de Tenas had a touch of madness. Leticia and her inconsistency, Juan and his irresponsibility, he and his obsessions. What a mistake my mother made by dying on us, he repeated to himself, because when she left, she took our stability. There were the three of them to prove it. The ones saved from dementia were Emilia and Santiago.
He finally decided to turn to his eldest sister. “Write to her, Juan. She can save us,” Lorenzo said.
Maybe Juan was impressed that his brother spoke in the plural. They didn’t have to wait long for Emilia’s response. With the generous intervention of her husband, she would send a money order. Within two months Juan needed another loan, and Lorenzo began to feel as if Juan were a constant threat. He was uneasy whenever Juan showed up, because Juan only appeared when the noose was already tight around his neck. “Brother, even Leticia is more responsible than you are,” Lorenzo said to him.
“Leticia is a woman; she’s taken care of.”
When Lorenzo got together with his buddies, Diego’s enthusiasm about the country’s future exasperated him. “We’re rich; we have oil, minerals, forests, water, kilometers of coastline, and a past more ancient than that of most of the countries of the Southern Cone, not to mention the United States. It all indicates that we are the leader of Latin America. Our popular heroes are more original and creative than those of any other country on these continents.”
“Diego, please! Zapata has been appropriated by the PRI, the politicians, the parasites, not those to whom he truly belonged. And they have soiled and degraded him, using him for their dirty business. This Zapatista demagoguery in the PRI speeches makes me sick. They’ve done the same with Juárez. They’ve used him as a great historical reference, although while he was president, he and his cabinet lived a double life, which was evident in the newspaper society pages. They died and were buried with a papal benediction and the patronage of the Holy Church, their daughters were married in cathedrals, they visited the Vatican, and their hypocrisy permeated all their actions. It’s such a great shame!”
“The displaced Europeans will come to Mexico as a result of the
war,” Diego said. “You wait and see the progress we’re going to experience from this economic dispersion, the employment it will create. The age of iron will bring triumph. Fundidora de Monterrey and La Consolidada feed their ovens with mineral coal rather than vegetal coal. Both Tamsa and American Smelting yield high returns.”
“High returns for whom, Diego? Corruption is an inherent part of public management. The PRI is a monopoly. It never loses an election because it doesn’t have any opponents. If it did, the opposition would give us extraordinary power. We need fresh air. And although you say that they will create millions of jobs, for the time being, the poorest Mexicans have no purchasing power. I just keep seeing the same poverty.”
“I’m dealing with Harold Pape, and in the meetings with the Altos Hornos de Mexico steel mill I’ve seen measures being taken to increase the acquisition power of the poor. We’re going to reach the same level as the United States and will be able to rationalize a tax system—”
Lorenzo interrupted. “Oh, come on. The truth is that here the rich are exempt, and the PRI government hangs the poor. How will they acquire purchasing power if they are barely surviving?”
“We have to liberalize commercial practices, and that can only be achieved with the fomentation of foreign investment. You should have met Gómez Morín, an exceptional financier, the founder of the Mexican bank. We’re going to be swimming in foreign currency.”
“And social discontent.”
Lorenzo insisted on declaring himself a Republican, a socialist, a materialist, and an atheist.
“He’s possessed!” Chava laughed. The gang didn’t share the fury with which Tena defended his ideas. When Chava alleged that the eight-hour work shift was sufficient, just as in the United States, Lorenzo’s indignation bordered on hysteria. “How are we going to push this country forward? How can we compare ourselves with industrialized nations? We need double shifts to overcome our backwardness, to train ourselves, to become competitive. If everyone else walks, we have to run.”
“Lorenzo, were you at Harvard or in Japan?”
“If only we had Japanese mysticism to drive us ahead. The ideas of Japan shake me to the core. When I think about the amount of land they have reclaimed from the sea, I ask myself, Why don’t we Mexicans, who have so much land, ever get ahead?”
Chava then launched into a story about the geishas and how he took a taxi on Meiji Avenue in Tokyo that looked like a honeymoon suite. The seats were covered in white lace, the backrests immaculate; the driver’s head emerged, virginal, like a fluffy white meringue. “From the moment you get into the taxi, there’s an insinuation that you’re going to get laid. Eroticism on wheels, and the bed sure isn’t as hard as stone, as in Mexico. You should find yourself a geisha, Lenchito.”