Read Online The Crystal Frontier by Carlos Fuentes - Free Book Online Page B

afternoon was nothing compared with the terror he felt when he realized what, at an hour when Mexicans were barely finishing their midday meal, was being served at the academic tables. Generally, the banquet would begin with a salad of fainting lettuce crowned with raspberry jam; that touch, he’d been told several times in Missouri, Ohio, and Massachusetts, was very sophisticated, very gourmet. The well-known rubber chicken followed, uncuttable and unchewable, served with tough string beans and mashed potatoes redolent of the envelope they had just recently abandoned. Dessert was a fake strawberry shortcake, more a strawberry bath sponge. Finally, watered-down coffee through which you could see the bottom of the cup and admire the geological circles deposited there by ten thousand servings of poison. The best thing, Dionisio told himself, was a furtive sip of the iced tea served at all hours and on any occasion; it was insipid, but at least the lemon slices were tasty. Rangel sucked them avidly so he wouldn’t come down with a cold.
    Was it because they were cheap? Was it because they lacked imagination? Dionisio Rangel decided to become a Sherlock Holmes and investigate what passed for “cuisine” in the United States by secretly carrying out an informal survey of hospitals, mental asylums, and prisons. What did he discover was served in all those places? Salad with raspberry jam, rubbery chicken, spongy cake, and translucent coffee. It was, he concluded, a matter of generalized institutional food, exceptions to which would probably be surprising, if not memorable. Professors, criminals, the insane, and the sick set the tone for U.S. menus—or was it perhaps that the universities, madhouses, jails, and hospitals were all supplied by the same caterer?
    Dionisio smiled as he shaved after his morning bath—his best ideas always came to him then. Rubbing Barbasol onto his cheeks, he imagined a historical explanation. National cuisines are great only when they arise from the people. In Mexico, Italy, France, or Spain, you need have no fear when you walk into the first roadside restaurant, the humblest bistro, the busiest tavola calda, because you’re certain of finding something good to eat there. It’s not the rich, Rangel would say to anyone who cared to listen, who dictate culinary taste from above; it’s the people, the worker, the peasant, the artisan, the truck driver who, from below, invent and consecrate the dishes that make up the great cuisines. And they do it out of intimate respect for what they put in their mouths.
    Patience, time, Dionisio would explain in his classes, standing in front of an uncomprehending herd of young people with chewing gum in their mouths and baseball caps on their heads. You need time and patience to prepare a lapin faisandé in France, need to let the rabbit spoil to the point when it attains its tastiest, most savory tartness (ugh!); you need love and patience to prepare a huitlacoche soufflé in Mexico, using the black, cancerous corn fungus that in other, less sophisticated latitudes is fed to the hogs (yuck!).
    By the same token, you can’t have time or patience when you’re trying to fry a couple of eggs in a covered wagon and you’re attacked by redskins and must pray for the cavalry to arrive and save you (whoopee!). Dionisio would be speaking to dozens of Beavis and Butt-head wanna-bes, the offspring of Wayne’s World, legions of young people convinced that being an idiot is the best way to pass through the world recognized by no one (in some cases) or everyone (in others). Masters always of an anarchic liberty and a stupid natural wisdom redeemed by an imbecility devoid of pretensions or complications. Knowing consisted in not knowing. The depressing lesson of the movie Forrest Gump. To be always available for whatever chance may bring …
    How could the successors of Forrest Gump understand that, when a single Mexican