The Crystal Frontier by Carlos Fuentes

rolls of flesh, to the point of rendering characteristics like eyes, noses, mouths, even their sexes ephemeral. Dionisio watched a 350-pound woman pass by and wondered where her vein of pleasure might be. How, among the multiple slabs along her thighs and buttocks, would you get to the sanctum sanctorum of her libido? Would her male counterpart dare ask, Honey, could you just fart so I can get my bearings here? Dionisio laughed to himself at his vulgarity, celebrated and forgiven, because every Hispanic aristocrat owes something to the scatology of that great poet Don Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas. Quevedo connects our spirit and our excrement: we will be dust, but dust in love. He justifies our enjoyment of the huge dose of profanity that existence offers us, and our compiling, as Quevedo did in the seventeenth century and no one until Kundera did in the twentieth, praises of the asshole’s grace and disgrace.
    The parade Dionisio observed owed more to Fernando Botero and his adipose crews of immense courtesans than to Rubens, who never imagined obese priests, swollen children, generals about to burst … Forty million fat gringos? Was it just the effect of bad food? Why did this happen in the United States and not in Spain, Mexico, or Italy, despite the pork sausages, tamales, and tagliarini that fleshed out those cuisines? In each potbelly that went by Dionisio suspected the presence of millions of paper and cellophane bags zealously safeguarding, in the void that precedes the flood, hundreds of millions of french fries, tons of popcorn, sugar cakes frosted with nuts and chocolate, audible cereals, mountains of tricolored ice cream crowned with peanuts and hot caramel sauce, hamburgers of toughened dog meat, thin as shoe soles, served between tombstones of greasy, insipid, inflated bread, the national American host, smeared with ketchup (This is my blood) and loaded with calories (This is my body) … Spongy buttocks, hands moist and transparent as gelatin, pink skin holding in the mass of pus, blood, and scales … He watched them pass.
    And nevertheless, as Dionisio “Baco” Rangel observed the massive parade of fat women, he began to feel, perversely, inexplicably, a sexual itch. This was like his experience when he had his first erection at thirteen—something sweet, unexpected, and alarming. No, not the first time he masturbated, something he did rationally, as an act of will, but the first flowering of his sex, shocking, unthinkable before it actually happened … The first semen spilled by the young man, eternally, at that moment, the first man, Adam, a man adrift in semen.
    The intuition profoundly disturbed the solitary, itinerant gourmet. True, in Mexico there was no dearth of distinguished ladies of fifty and even forty willing to accompany him to eat at Bellinghausen, to have dinner at the Estoril, to attend one of the concerts at the Historic Center festival organized by Francesca Saldívar, or even to hear lectures by his two old colleagues from the Junior Professors radio show, José Emilio Pacheco and Carlos Monsiváis. True, some of those ladies were also happy to sleep with him from time to time, but it was too late in the day to learn their little habits or instruct them in his. And none of them had any way of knowing that nothing excited him so much as a woman’s hand on the back of his neck, just as he had no way of knowing which of them liked to have their nipples nibbled and which didn’t (ouch! that hurts!). The death of his friend Marcelo Chiriboga, a specialist in fat women, deprived him of the pleasure of comparing notes with that wise, ignored, and sensual Ecuadorian novelist, who now, at the right hand of God, would be reciting the well-known prayer that came from the ancient Inca capital conquered by Sebastián de Benalcázar: “While on earth, Quito, and when in heaven, a tiny hole to see Quito.” At this point, all Dionisio