Morality”), often considered the most accomplished story of the collection, again echoes the theme of loss and innocence, as it recounts the disruption of an eccentric but happy household by traditionally moral but inwardly corrupt meddlers. The provincial atmosphere, with its moral and sexual hypocrisy, links this story to the novelLas buenas conciencias (1959; The Good Conscience, 1961). In this story, the presentation is much more straightforward than in “The Two Elenas,” and amorality is again seen to be more honest than the “old morality” of the title, although now the old morality is not so much presented as decadent but rather as a form of psychological ignorance. The characters are tortured into perversion and incestuous outlet because of an unreasonable adherence to the old, hypocritical ethics of Mexican Catholicism.

Aura, Holy Place, and Cumpleaños

Aura, Holy Place, and Cumpleaños (birthday) are three novellas comprising a trilogy. In the novella Aura, Fuentes displays less concern with social criticism than in previous works and makes greater use of bizarre images and fantastic developments. The novella’s use of witchcraft and archaic rituals and its defiance of chronological time all contribute to making it one of Fuentes’s most fascinating works. Clearly, it is structured around two sets of doubles, Consuelo de Llorente as Aura and Felipe Montero as the long-dead General Llorente. Through her satanic rituals, Consuelo creates a double, an alternative personality, identical to herself when younger, which she controls and through which she has sexual intercourse with Montero. In a more obscure fashion, however, Montero is also a re-creation of the general. In some way, Montero is identical to Llorente, as Aura is to Consuelo.

This amazing identity cannot be attributed to some sort of ritual practice of Consuelo, as is the case with Aura. Although she conducts an erotic ritual that seems to be akin to a black mass, it is never indicated that Felipe has been altered physically. Possibly he is a reincarnation of the general.

The fragmentation of time is one of Fuentes’s favorite themes, and something close to reincarnation or at least continuing consciousness across time is a major thread in Cumpleaños. There is no real indication, however, of this concept in Aura. One critic suggested that Aura may be a subjective experience, either a dream or something close to it. Another maintains that the story is narrated by an unreliable narrator as madman. Thus, the doubling in the story is not only a structural device but also a thematic one. Aura may be read as the record of one man’s delusion.

Holy Place is, in one sense, a series of scenes from a descent into madness, a graphic voyage into hell. There are a number of resemblances to Aura. Aside from the doubling technique, particularly significant is the mythic structure, here carried to an extreme degree of complexity, embodying both pre-Hispanic and Greek mythological constructions. Also significant is the characteristic flight from chronological time. In addition, the protean structure of the novel reflects the attempts of the characters to re-create and thus perpetuate themselves through constant change. They seek to defy the corrupting course of chronological time that will lead them inevitably toward decay and death.

One of the chief resemblances to Aura is the unreliable narrator, trapped in a destructive Oedipal conflict. His beloved apartment, his sacred place, is something out of a fin-de-siècle dream. The protagonist, Mito, is obsessed by incestuous desires, potentially homosexual; he is a sadist as well. Finally, he is reduced to total dissociation as he adopts the role of a dog, completing the sadomasochistic compulsion that animates him. To accept the version of reality offered by Mito is to ignore the fact that he is incapable of anything resembling objective narration. His tale is hopelessly suspect. His vision is of a disturbed world created by his own psyche.

Of the three novellas, Cumpleaños is the densest and most difficult. Like Aura, the atmosphere is magical, but the narrative does not build toward a climax in the same way. It is rather more fragmented and experimental. A birthday marks the passage of time: The stark one-word title accentuates the work’s abstract focus on time without a mitigating social context. The conspicuous absence of “happy,” most frequently modifying “birthday,” suggests the inexorable rather than the joyful nature of birthdays and reflects the longing for eternal life that appears in the novel. Cumpleaños is a total fiction that abandons rational, chronological, or causal progression in favor of a dreamlike multiplication and conflation of times, places, and figures. Contradictions and paradoxes are often recounted with the dreamer’s mixture of acceptance and puzzlement.

Within the narration, which seems to have no clear beginning or end, times are reversed: George the dreamer/narrator sees himself as an old man—and perhaps also as a boy. The labyrinthine house is simultaneously itself, the city of London, and a Jamesean house of fiction. The whole narration, dreamlike as it is, finds itself confirmed, recorded, in the mind of Siger de Brabant, a polemical thirteenth century philosopher. In this novella, Fuentes has constructed narrative analogues for Siger’s theses, and, like those theses, whose notions of multiple times and souls were heretical, Fuentes’s text with its plurality of times and voices constitutes a kind of narrative heresy.

The Crystal Frontier

Subtitled A Novel in Nine Stories, Fuentes’s next book is a collection of related stories that focus somewhat nebulously on Don Leonardo Barroso, a sort of Mexican millionaire “Godfather,” who symbolizes what Fuentes has called the “scar” of the Mexican/American border. Although the book falls short of the politically complex novel of ideas that Fuentes perhaps intended it to be, it does explore a variety of controversial issues—drug traffic, immigration restrictions, and government corruption—that plague the transparent but inflexible frontier between the two countries.

“A Capital Girl,” which many reviewers recognize as the strongest story in the collection, focuses on Don Barroso’s ruthlessness in getting what he wants, even to the extent of grooming his beautiful young goddaughter to be the wife of his bookish son so that Barroso himself can have her as a lover. Other stories deal with more political issues, such as factory workers on the border, the importing of cheap labor into the United States, and blacklisted union organizers. In some of these “issue” stories, Fuentes’s effort to create a political novel that criticizes both Mexican and American officials, who ignore the real lives of ordinary people, often leads him to didactic excesses, stick-figure stereotypes, and stilted dialogue.

Two stories have been singled out for praise by critics. “Pain” is about a young medical student, Juan Zamora, for whom Barroso has provided a scholarship to Cornell. While there, Juan, whose homosexuality makes him feel doubly alienated, pretends to be rich for his American hosts, who have no idea of the poverty in Mexico. The title story, “Crystal Frontier,” focuses on Lisandro Chavez, a young man from Mexico City who is brought to New York to work as a janitor. To manifest the “crystal frontier” between Mexico and America, Fuentes creates a delicate scene in which Chavez, while washing windows at a Manhattan skyscraper, sees Audrey, an advertising executive, catching up on work alone. After communicating through the window by pantomime, they put their lips to the glass: “Both closed their eyes. She didn’t open hers for several minutes. When she did, he was no longer there.”

The final “chapter” in the collection is Fuentes’s lyrical attempt to pull the various strands of the stories together by presenting a poetic summary of Mexican history, situating himself within the story in the persona of Jose Francisco, a writer stopped by Mexican and American guards for taking literature across the border. The resultant image is a central metaphor for Fuentes’s efforts to create a cultural meeting point between two nations:The manuscripts began to fly, lifted by the night breeze like paper doves able to fly for themselves. They went flying from the bridge into the gringo sky, from the bridge to the Mexican sky and Jose Francisco gave a victory shout that forever broke the crystal of the frontier.