AT THE FRONTIER

NINE LINKED STORIES BY CARLOS FUENTES EXPLORE

THE FAULT LINE BETWEEN MEXICO AND THE UNITED STATES

Author: By Jason Weiss

Date: SUNDAY, November 16, 1997

Page: L1

Section: Books

Set mostly along the border but also in New York and Chicago, the stories intersect only through the inflated figure of Leonardo Barroso, former government minister and proud owner of a television assembly plant across the river from El Paso. As he reassures his Texas investors, who are conscience-stricken over conditions in the plant, the region is undergoing dynamic economic growth that reflects the progress of the nation. In the past quarter-century, well over 100,000 such plants have sprung up on the border. Barroso lives with his family in a Tudor-Norman mansion, but like others of the newly wealthy who have transformed their edge of the desert into a garish enclave, he seeks his pleasures on the American side, in the enchanted city with its high-end shops.

The first story, ``A Capital Girl,'' shows how far Barroso will go to get what he wants. From Mexico City, the beautiful Michelina Laborde, daughter of impoverished aristocrats and also his goddaughter, comes to visit at his invitation. They have met just once in her life, but seeing her grown up he decides he must have her, ostensibly for his son. The son wants only to live out on his parents' ranch, surrounded by books and some ``erased Indians'' who will leave him alone. Recognizing her advantages, Michelina accepts the arrangement and, after an elaborate wedding whose pretense is obvious, she departs with her new father-in-law for the bridal suite in El Paso.

Barroso's power affects many lives, so in subsequent stories his appearances are peripheral. ``Pain'' tells of the medical student Juan Zamora whose father died penniless, an honest lawyer for Barroso; the businessman has financed Juan's scholarship to Cornell. There Juan pretends to be rich for his conservative hosts, who have no clue about Mexico's reality, and he finds the culture difficult to comprehend. But it is his well-off male lover, another med student, who reminds him that denial is inherent to a certain advancement: Their relationship must be just an educational experience, it cannot extend into real life. ``The Line of Oblivion'' portrays Barroso's brother Emiliano, a blacklisted union organizer, now old and disabled. Abandoned at the border, he tries to remember who he is and what he struggled for, amid a family that has chosen to forget its past.

In the title story, Barroso has brokered his latest business scheme: the importing of cheap labor as ``service workers'' to clean Manhattan office buildings on weekends. Among them, Lisandro Chavez seems not to belong, having grown up with higher ambitions until the Mexican economy ruined his family. On the top floor in an empty building all of glass, he is cleaning an inner atrium when he notices an advertising executive at her desk; to the woman, he is a mirage, a mysterious soulmate in solitude, and their singular meeting ends with their kiss through the glass.

Throughout, Fuentes achieves an admirable range of style and form, though he tends to overwrite. Even the surreal ``Spoils,'' about a famous Mexican food critic who lectures widely in the United States only to flee at all costs the crassness and overabundance of American culture, feels strained with too many ironic jibes and winks to the author's friends. But the novel inadvertently raises a curious question: Whom did he write it for? Nearly every story buckles somewhat under the weight of its didactic passages, explanations of history usually that help illuminate the present -- as if without them the reader couldn't be trusted to understand all that was at stake. Indeed, Alfred Mac Adam's fluid translation seems to have rendered the novel its true audience. Yet even for an American public that might need such explanations, it does not serve the art of Fuentes's narratives. Moreover, while the Mexican characters show plenty of nuance, so as to grant better access to their experience, the few gringos who populate the novel come off more as caricatures.

Nonetheless, in the final story, ``Rio Grande, Rio Bravo,'' Fuentes partly manages to redeem these excesses by weaving together many previous threads in a moving last encounter at the border even as he presents new characters. Among these is the Chicano poet Jose Francisco, who recognizes his identity in a fusion of the two cultures, crossing the border back and forth on his motorcycle to distribute his contraband, that victory over silence: literature. There at the crossing Juan Zamora arrives with a new dedication, to become a ``walking hospital'' for the Mexican immigrants now denied health care in California and elsewhere. Barely does he reach the other side when he is confronted with an emergency, and an unexpected victim more aligned with the enemy. In this story, Fuentes commands a more lyrical voice to intone history and to plead as well, summoning every character: ``We want to enter to tell the story of the crystal frontier before it's too late, let everyone speak . . . let the words fly, poor Mexico, poor United States, so far from God, so near to one another.''