[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Charlotte puts on her apron to cook dinner, and Tarleton, with a profound sense of obligation, sits down to read the number-one book on the New York Times best-seller list, a spy novel that happens to confirm his paranoia about the red menace.3If the city of Ithaca is a kind of suburban Avernus, Cornell University is its Parnassus: a brilliant cream-colored temple with modern, sometimes almost Art Deco lines and vast green and luminous spaces.Given the abrupt nature of the terrain, the campus is linked by beautiful terraces and grand stairways.Both lead to places that are centers of the life of the Mexican student Juan Zamora.One is the student union, which tries to make up for all of Ithaca’s shortcomings with books, a stationery store, movies, theater, clothing, mailboxes, restaurants, and places to meet.Moving among those spaces, his back toward us, Juan Zamora tries to connect with the place.He takes special notice of the extreme sloppiness of the students.They wear baseball caps they don’t even take off indoors or when they greet women.They rarely shave completely.They drink beer straight from the bottle.They wear sleeveless T-shirts, revealing at all hours their hairy underarms.Their jeans have torn knees, and at times they wear them cut off at the thigh and unraveling.They sit down to eat with their caps on and fill their mouths with hamburgers, french fries, and an entire menu pulled out of plastic bags.When they really want to be informal, they wear their baseball caps backward, with the visors cooling the napes of their necks.One day, an athletic boy, blond, with pinched features, ordered a plate of spaghetti and began to eat it with his hands, by the fistful.Juan Zamora felt an uncontrollable revulsion that obliterated his appetite and forced him for the first and perhaps only time to criticize a fellow student.“That’s disgusting! Didn’t they teach you how to eat at home?” “Of course they did.My family’s pretty rich, for your information.” “So why do you eat like an animal?” “Because now I’m free,” said the blond through a mouthful of pasta.Juan Zamora arrived at Cornell not in a sports coat and tie but in blue jeans, a leather jacket, a sweater, and loafers.While alive, his father resigned himself to this scruffiness: “We used to wear suits and ties to class at law school…” Little by little, Juan assumed a more casual wardrobe—sweatshirt, Keds—but he always maintained (with his back turned) a minimal properness.He understood that the shabby disguise worn by the students was a way of equalizing social classes, so no one would ask about family background or economic status.All equal, equalized by sloppiness, the T-shirts, baseball caps, sneakers.Only in his refuge—the residence of the Wingate family—could Juan Zamora say, with impunity and with universal approval, even impressing them: “My family is very old.We’ve always been rich.We have haciendas, horses, servants.Now with the oil, we’ll simply live as we always have, but with even more luxury.If only you could visit us in Mexico.My mother would be so happy to receive you and thank you for your kindness to me.”And Charlotte would sigh with admiration.She was the first platinum-dyed white woman Juan Zamora had ever seen wearing an apron.“How polite Spanish aristocrats are! Learn, Becky.”Charlotte never called Juan Zamora Mexican.She was afraid of offending him.4The other space in the life of the Mexican student was the school of medicine, especially the amphitheater, built on Greek lines and as white as snow, but solid and crowning a hill as if intentionally, so that the smells of chloroform and formaldehyde would not contaminate the rest of the campus.Here the outlandish student outfits were replaced by the white uniform of medicine, although at times hairy legs and (almost always) blackened Keds would appear at the bottoms of the long clinic gowns.Men and women, all in white, gave the place the air of a religious community.Young monks and nuns passed through its sparkling corridors.Juan thought chastity would be the rule in this order of young doctors.Besides, the white uniform (unless the hairy legs stuck out) accentuated the generational androgyny.Some girls wore their hair very short, while some boys wore it very long, so at times it was difficult to tell from behind what sex a person was.Juan Zamora had had a couple of sexual relationships in Mexico.Sex was not his strong suit.He didn’t like prostitutes.His female classmates at the National University were very demanding, very devouring and distracting, talking about having families or being independent, about living this way or that, about succeeding, and they talked with a decisiveness that made him feel out of place, guilty, ashamed of not being, ever, yet, all he could be.Juan Zamora’s problem was that he confused each step of his life with something definitive, finished.Just as there are young people who let things flow and leave everything to chance, there are others who think the world ends every twenty-four hours.Juan was one of the latter.Without admitting it, he knew that his mother’s anguish about their modest means, his father’s upright pride, and his own uncertainties about his father’s morality gave him a feeling of perpetual distress, of imminent doom that was mocked by the gray, implacable flow of daily life.If he had accepted that tranquil march of days, he might perhaps have entered a more or less stable relationship with a girl
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]