Carlos Fuentes

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Where the Air Is Clear, Carlos Fuentes's first novel, is an unsparing portrayal of Mexico City's upper class. Departing from a traditional linear narrative, Fuentes constructs his novel around a series of encounters with members of this world, including Federico Robles, an ambitious self-made millionaire; Rodrigo Pola, a writer whose father was executed in the Mexican Revolution; and Norma Larragoiti, a social climber striving to erase her humble past. At the center of these events is Ixca Cienfuegos, and enigmatic figure who views the dramas enacted around him with unusual clarity, and who, with the aid of an Indian priestess, plots the destruction of the group.

Overlaying Mexican myths onto comtemporary settings, Fuentes shows that even the rich and powerful must succumb to the indomitable spirit of Mexico, which undermines all institutions and shapes all destinies.

ISBN-10 1-56478-344-8

ISBN-13 9781564783448

Publication Date May 2004

Nb of pages 376

Dimensions 5.5 x 8.5 in.

Onix What's this?

My name is Ixca Cienfuegos. I was born and I live in Mexico City. Which is not so bad: in Mexico City there is only outrage, never tragedy. Outrage at the blood that stings me like maguey thorns. Outraged at the spreading paralysis that stains and clots every dawn. And my endless fatal leap toward tomorrow. The game, action, faith, day after day and not just those days of triumph or defeat; and looking down, I see my dark skin and know that it has held me down against the valley’s floor. Spirit of Anahuac, who crushes hearts, not: who drinks no earthly liquor… your wine is made of courage; you who does not hunt the happy animals … you stalk only yourself, through wet black depths where stone warps and there are jade eyes. Kneeling, crowned with a wreath of cactus, flagellated by your own – by our – hand, your dance is suspended from a feather plume or from a bus fender. Dead in flowery war, a bar fight, at the hour of truth, the only timely hour. Poet without compassion, artist of agony, courteous bum who gambles with my inarticulate prayers and loses: condemn me, me always more than others, for my outrage, my failure never to be known to anyone else, who topples me before unpitying gods forcing me to examine my life with my fellow men; O face of my destruction, countenance of dry earth and gold blood, rough face of strident music and brown mud! warrior in the void, protected by boasts! ... But my head sobs and cannot stop its search for comfort, for a homeland, a clitoris, the sweetness of another skeleton, a soothing canticle that mocks all caged beasts. Life among turned backs, afraid to turn around. Broken body of dissembling fragments blind to the invasions, driven to achieve a freedom that escapes in the net of crossroads: and with the remnants wetting our little brushes, we sit beside the road and play with paints … Dead at birth, you burned your ships that other men could use to decay to build an age; living in death, you disinterred the would which would have tied our tongues in brotherhood. You stopped in the last sun. Then the final conquest stepped through your sponge body, now merely physical, titled, bemedaled. Over the racket of nickelodeons and motorcars, from the sludge where gaudy reptiles crawled, I hear your drumroll. Snakes, those historic creatures, drowse in your urns. In your eyes shine the dog-pack suns of the high tropics and in your body, a halo of feathers. Don’t break, my brother. Don’t yield. Sharpen your knives, deny everything, feeling no pity, without parleying, without even looking. Let go your migrant nostalgia and all your loose ends and every day begin again from birth. And at last recover the flame again in an imperceptible moment amid the sound of guitars on the street when it will seem that all your memories are clear and you ablaze. Recover it alone, for none of your heroes will return to help you. We have met by accident in our plateau of jeweled death. Here we live, you and I. In these streets our smells pass and mingle, sweat and chili, new brick and underground gas, our taut vagabond bodies, but never our eyes. Never have we knelt side by side, together, we die each for himself, isolated. Here we fall, and what someday our fingers touch. Fall with me on our moon-scar city, city scratched by sewers, crystal city of vapor and alkali frost, city witness to all we forget, city of carnivorous walls, city of motionless pain, city of immense brevities, city of fixed sun, ashing city of slow fire, city to its neck in water, city of merry lethargy, city of the three navels, city of twisted sinks, city rigid between air and worms, city ancient in light, old city cradled among birds of omen, city new upon sculptured dust, city in the true image of gigantic heaven, city of dark varnish and cut stone, city beneath glistening mud, city of entrails and tendons, city of violated outrage, city of resigned market plazas, city of anxious failures, city tempested by domes, (missing a complicated, yet important metaphorical image of the poor drawn to Mexico City), city woven by amnesias, bitch city, hungry city, sumptuous villa, leper city. Incandescent prickly pear. Eagle without wings. Here we bide our time. And what are we going to do about it? Where the air is clear.

GLADYS GARCIA (1951)

“Morning!”

The floor-sweeper goosed her and Gladys breathed cold morning. She glanced a last time into the gray cabaret mirror: glasses soggy with butts, Chupamirto yawning over the bongo drum. Yellow light inside translucent palms went out, resorting bark opacity. A cat ran street puddles; its eyes, last night’s brooches. Gladys took her shoes off, rested, puckered her little mouth, gold-sashed teeth, lit her last, new-every-fifteen-minutes cigarette. Guerrero Street was not flooded now, she could put her shoes back on. Bikes were beginning to hiss without shadows along Bucareli; already a few streetcars. The avenue was a cornucopia of refuse: wadded derelict dailies, garbage from Chinese cafes, dead dogs, an old crone poking a boot with a stick, sleeping street children stirring in their nests of magazines and newspapers. Dawn had the palest funeral glow. From the statue of the Little Horse to Colonia los Doctores, the street was one long dragged asphalt coffin, and only a resurrection could give it life and feeling. Would it live, under the light of the sun? From the watching place of Charles IV and his court of insane neons



LOTUSLIKE WE MIX FOUR-FIFTHS OFYOURHIGHBALL GOODRICH OFYOURHIGHBALL GOODRICH

And Gladys could talk about only one-fifth of the city cocktail, most of day was unknown to her: the afternoon rain-hour paper hats of vendors, their stipendiary bellies, the powdery aged air that roils munching convolutions through the modern ruins of an enormous village. She walked on alone, small dumpling body wrapped in violet velvet shine, strung on two toothpicks stuck into platform shoes; yawning, scraping her gold teeth, face bovine, eyes cheerless. What a bore to be walking down Bucareli all by herself at six-fifteen in the morning! She dah-dah-dah-ed the litany taught night after night by the Bali-Hai’s fat pianist.

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