Inez: A Novel

by Carlos Fuentes

  “You’re saying there is no destiny without instinct?”

  “No. Without instinct you can be beautiful, but you will also be petrified, like a statue.”

  “The opposite of you.”

  “I don’t know. Where does inspiration come from, energy, the unexpected vision you need for singing, composing, conducting? Do you know?”

  “No.”

  Gabriel opened his eyes with mocking amazement. “And I who always believed that every woman is born with more innate experience than a man can acquire in a lifetime.”

  “That’s called instinct?” said Inés, more calmly.

  “No!” exclaimed Gabriel. “I assure you that a chef d’orchestre needs more than instinct. He needs more personality, more strength, more discipline, precisely because he isn’t a creator.”

  “And your brother?” Inés insisted, with no fear now of a forbidden suspicion.

  “Elsewhere,” Gabriel answered simply.

  This affirmation opened a broad horizon of free associations for Inés. She kept to herself the most secret one, which was about the boy’s physical beauty. She gave voice to the most obvious ones: France, the lost war, the German occupation.

  “Hero or traitor, Gabriel? If he stayed in France—”

  “Oh, a hero, obviously. He was too noble, too committed. He didn’t think about himself, he thought about serving … even if simply to resist, without acting.”

  “Then I can imagine him dead.”

  “No, I imagine him a prisoner. I would rather think he’s been captured. Yes. You know, as boys we were fascinated with maps of the world, and globes, and we’d throw dice to see who won Canada or Spain or China. When one of us won some territory or other, we’d yell and shout, you know, Inés, like those terrible cries in Faust I was demanding from all of you yesterday, we’d scream like animals, like screeching monkeys marking their territory and communicating its boundaries to the other monkeys in the jungle. Here am I. This is my land. This is my space.”

  “Then maybe your brother’s space is a cell.”

  “Or a cage. Sometimes I imagine him in a cage. I’ll go further. Sometimes I imagine that he chose the cage himself and has confused it with freedom.” Gabriel’s dark eyes looked toward the other side of the Channel.

  The retreating sea was gradually giving up the land it had won. It was a cold, gray afternoon. Inés was cross with herself for not having brought a muffler.

  “I hope that like a captive animal my brother defends his space—by that I mean the territory and the culture of France. Against Nazi Germany. An alien and diabolical enemy.”

  Winter birds flew by. Gabriel looked at them with curiosity. “Who teaches a bird to sing? Its progenitors? Or are its instincts randomly organized? It inherits nothing, and has to learn everything from scratch?”

  Again he put his arms around her, this time roughly, a disagreeable roughness she read as fierce machismo, the decision not to take her back alive to the corral … The worst of it was that he disguised it, masked his sexual appetite as artistic zeal and fraternal feeling.

  “It’s possible to imagine anything. Where did he go? What was his fate? He was the brilliant one. Much more so than me. Then why am I the one to triumph and he the one to lose, Inés?” Gabriel was squeezing her harder, pressing his body against hers but avoiding her face, avoiding her lips. Finally he touched his lips to her ear.

  “Inés, I’m telling you all this so you will love me. Understand that. He exists. You’ve seen his photograph. That proves that he exists. I’ve seen your eyes when you look at the photo. You like that man. You want that man. Except that he isn’t here. I’m the one who’s here. Inés, I’m telling you all this so—”

  Calmly, she moved away from him, hiding her disgust. He did not restrain her.

  “If he were here, Inés, would you treat him the way you’re treating me? Which of us would you prefer?”

  “I don’t even know his name.”

  “Scholom, I told you.”

  “Stop making things up,” she said, now without hiding the bitter taste the situation left in her mouth. “You’re exaggerating terribly. Sometimes I wonder whether men really love us; what they want is to compete with other men and best them … You still wear your war paint, you men. Scholom, Solomon, Hearth, Chaim … You take advantage.”

  “Imagine, Inés.” Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara became decidedly insistent. “Imagine that you threw yourself off a cliff rising four hundred feet above the sea—would you be dead before you hit the waves?”

  “Were you what he couldn’t be? Or was he everything you couldn’t be?” Inés fired back, angry now, her instinct liberated.

  Gabriel’s fist was clenched from intense emotion and intense anger. Inés pried open his hand and deposited an object on the open palm. It was a crystal seal, with a light of its own and illegible inscriptions.

  “I found it in the attic,” Inés said. “I had the impression that it wasn’t yours. That’s how I got the nerve to offer it to you as a gift. A gift from a dishonest guest. I went into your attic. I looked at the photographs.”

  “Inés, pictures sometimes lie. What happens to a photograph over time? Do you think a photo doesn’t live and die?”

  “That’s what you said before. With time, our portraits lie. They aren’t us anymore.”

  “How do you see yourself?”

  “I see myself as a virgin.” She laughed uncomfortably. “A good daughter. Mexican. Bourgeois. Immature. Learning. Discovering my voice. That’s why I don’t understand why memory comes back when I least desire it. It must be that I have a very short memory. My uncle the diplomat always said that our memory of most things lasts no longer than seven seconds or seven words.”

  “Didn’t your parents teach you anything? To put it a better way, what did your parents teach you?”

  “They died when I was seven.”

  “To me the past is the other place,” said Gabriel, staring toward the far shore of the English Channel.

  “I don’t have anything to forget.” She moved her arms in a way that wasn’t hers, that felt strange. “But I feel an urgency to leave the past behind.”

  “I, on the other hand, sometimes want to leave the future behind.”

  The sand absorbed their footsteps.

  He left abruptly, without saying goodbye, abandoning her, in wartime, on a lonely coast.

  Gabriel raced back through Yarbury Forest and the heath of Durnovaria, until he stopped at a high, square, clod-filled field near the river Frome. From there the coast was no longer visible. The land was like a protective frontier, an unfenced boundary, an outdoor sanctuary, a deserted ruin with no obelisks or sandstone columns. The sky of England moves so swiftly that you can stop but still think you are moving as fast as the heavens overhead.

  Only there could he tell himself that he had never learned to distinguish the distance between a woman’s abject submission and her absolute purity. He wanted her forgiveness. Inés would remember him as misguided, whatever he did … He didn’t deny that he wanted her or that he had to abandon her. If only she wouldn’t remember him as a coward or a traitor. If only she wouldn’t give flesh to the other in the person of Atlan-Ferrara, the companion, the brother, the one who was elsewhere … He prayed that the young Mexican girl’s intelligence, so superior to the concept she seemed to have of herself, would always know to distinguish between him and the other—for he was in today’s world, forced to fulfill obligations, to travel, to establish order, while the other was free, could make choices, could give all his attention to her. Love her—maybe even that: love her … He was elsewhere. Gabriel was here.

  But maybe she saw in Gabriel what he saw in her: an avenue to the unknown. Making a supreme effort to think clearly, Atlan-Ferrara realized why Inés and he should never have sex. She rejected him because she saw another woman in his gaze. But, equally, he knew that when she looked at him she was seeing someone else. And yet couldn’t they, servants of time, be him and be her, be t
hemselves and be others in each other’s eyes?

  I won’t usurp my brother’s place, he said to himself as he drove off toward the burning city.

  His mouth tasted bitter. He murmured: “Everything seems primed for the farewell. Road, sea, memory, wooden death stools, crystal seals.”

  He laughed. “The stage set for Inés.”

  Inés made no effort to return to London. And she did not return to rehearsals for The Damnation of Faust. Something held her here, as if she were condemned to live in this house facing the sea. She walked along the seashore and was afraid. With ancestral fury, a battle among the winter birds erupted in the sky. The savage birds were fighting over something, something she couldn’t see, but something sufficiently prized to justify pecking each other to death.

  The spectacle terrified her. The wind scattered her thoughts. Her head felt like a crystal worn smooth.

  The ocean terrified her. She remembered, with terror …

  The little island terrified her, more clearly defined every time she saw it outlined between the coasts of England and France, beneath a flat-ceilinged sky.

  It terrified her to think of starting down the deserted road, lonelier than ever—worse, with its murmuring woods, than the silence of the tomb.

  What a strange sensation, to walk beside a man along the shore, each attracted to, each frightened of, the other … Gabriel had left, but the nostalgia he had sown in her remained. France, the beautiful blond youth, France and the youth united in the nostalgia Gabriel was able to express openly. Not she. She felt bitter toward him. Atlan-Ferrara had left her with the image of something she could never have. A man that from this time forward she would desire but could never know. Atlan-Ferrara did know him. The face of the beautiful blond youth was his heritage. A lost country. A forbidden country.

  Her instinct communicated to her an insurmountable separation. A prohibition now stood between her and Atlan-Ferrara. Neither wanted to violate it. But prohibition violated Inés’s instinct. Alone, mulling over these things, on the way back to the house, she felt trapped between two temporal boundaries that neither of them wanted to cross.

  She went into the house and heard the stairs creaking, as if someone were going up and down, impatiently, uninterruptedly, not daring to show himself.

  Then, once back in the house facing the sea, she lay down between the two funerary stools, stiff as a corpse, her head on one support and her feet on the other, and upon her breast the photograph of the two friends, comrades, brothers, signed To Gabriel, with all my affection. Except that the beautiful blond youth had disappeared from the photo. He was no longer there. Gabriel, bare-chested, one arm held open, was alone. That arm wasn’t embracing anyone. Inés placed two crystal seals on her transparent eyelids.

  After all, it wasn’t difficult to lie there, stiff as a corpse, between the two funerary stools, buried beneath a mountain of dream.

  3

  You will stop and look at the sea. You will not know how you got here. You will not know what you are supposed to do. You will run your hands over your body and it will feel sticky, smeared from head to toes with the same viscous substance that will coat your face. You will not be able to clean yourself with your hands because they too will be covered. Your hair will be a tangled, filthy nest and a thick paste will dribble down into your eyes, blinding you.

  When you wake you will be perched among the branches of a tree with your face cradled against your knees and your hands covering your ears to block out the screeches of the capuchin monkey that will club to death the serpent that will never reach the leafy branches where you will be hiding. The capuchin will be doing what you would like to do yourself. Kill the serpent. Now the serpent will not prevent you from climbing down from the tree. But the strength the monkey will reveal as it kills the serpent will frighten you as much as the threat of the snake, or maybe more.

  You will not know how long you will have been here, fem, living alone beneath the jungle canopy. There will be moments when you will not be able to think clearly. You will put a hand to your forehead every time you try to weigh the difference between the threat of the serpent and the violence with which the capuchin will kill it but not kill your fear. You will make a great effort to think that first the serpent will threaten you, and that that will happen before, before, and the capuchin monkey will club it and kill it, but that will happen after, after.

  Now the monkey will lope away with an air of indifference, dragging the heavy stick and making noises with its mouth, moving its tongue the color of salmon. The salmon will swim upriver, against the current: that memory will illuminate you, you will feel happy because for a few instants you will have remembered something—although the next instant you will believe that you have only dreamed, imagined, foreseen it. The salmon will swim against the current to give and to win life, to leave their eggs, to await their hatch … But the capuchin will kill the serpent, that will be certain, as it will also be certain that the monkey will make noises with its mouth as it completes its work, and the serpent will be able to do no more than hiss something with its forked tongue, and it will also be certain that now the animal with spiky bristles will approach the motionless serpent and begin to strip away its jungle-colored skin and devour its moon-colored flesh. It will be time to climb down from the tree. There will be no danger now. The forest will protect you forever. You will always be able to return here and hide in the thicket where there is no sun …

  Sun …

  Moon …

  You will try to articulate words that serve what you see. The words are like a circle of regular movements that hold no surprise but have no center. One moment when “jungle” will be identical to itself and will be covered with darkness and only the changing sphere the color of the wild boar’s back will penetrate some branches. And that other moment when the jungle will fill with rays like the swift wings of birds.

  You will close your eyes in order better to hear the one thing that will be with you if you continue to live in the forest, the murmurs of birds and hissing of serpents, the meticulous silence of insects and chattering voices of monkeys. The terrifying incursions of the boars and the porcupines in search of carcasses to strip.

  This will be your refuge and you will abandon it reluctantly, crossing the frontier of the river that separates the forest from the flat, unknown world, which you will move toward pushed by something that is not anxiety, lethargy, or remedy, but the impulse to know what is around you while maintaining the absence of before and after, you who will live now, now, now …

  You who will swim across the turbulent, muddy river, washing off the second skin of the dead leaves and ravenous fungi that will cover you as long as you live in the branches of the tree. You will come out of the water coated with the dark mud of the riverbank, to which you cling desperately, battling the trembling of the earth and the force of the river in your struggle until you find yourself, on all fours, totally spent, on the opposite shore, where you will fall asleep without ever having stood.

  The earth’s trembling will wake you.

  You will look for a place to hide.

  There will be nothing beneath the dingy sky, a sky like a level, opaque ceiling of reverberating stone. There will be nothing but the plain before you and the river behind you and the jungle on the other side of the river and on the plain the herd of gigantic hairy quadrupeds making the earth ring with their hooves and scattering in every direction the troops of panicked reindeer that will abandon the field to the aurochs until the earth grows still and it is dark and the plain sleeps.

  This time the incessant scrabbling of the ugly small creature with the pointed nose will wake you as it pokes into the ground rooting out and devouring all the crawling, wiggling little things it can cram into its mouse-spider snout. Its shriek is nearly inaudible, but it is joined by many just like it, until there is a sea of milling, restless, dissatisfied shrews, prophets of a new trembling that will shake the plain.

  Perhaps the shrews will hi
de and the reindeer will return, tranquil now, first displaying themselves, circling on the plain but marking it out into spaces, which other antlered hordes approach only to be aggressively chased off by the lord of that piece of earth. A ferocious battle will take place between the proprietary deer and those disputing its territory. You, hidden, invisible and unimportant to them, will watch that combat of bloodied antlers and penises engorged in the frenzy of combat until one animal establishes itself as master of that space and expels the bleeding vanquished, and in every neighboring space only the beast with the greatest rack and the greatest penis will take possession of the field where now, tame and indifferent, the females of the herd will come to graze and be mounted by the triumphant deer, never lifting their heads or interrupting their grazing, the males puffing and snorting like the accursed heavens that will damn them to eternal combat in order to enjoy this instant, the females silent to the end …

  And at the end, you alone in the following darkness, crying out alone, as if the antlered herd and their females were still occupying the plain as solitary as you, fem, will be, sensing that you will have to flee from this place, go far away from here, obscurely fearful that an enormous antlered beast will surprise you calmly eating plants by the riverbank and will be confused by your strange scent and your red mane and your four-footed, loping gait …

  Suns later … You will stop and look at the sea. You will not know what to do now. You will feel yourself and find your body sticky, smeared from head to toes with the same viscous substance that will be coated on your face and on hands that will not clean you because they will be coated too and your head will be a tangled, filthy nest, and a thick paste will dribble down into your eyes and blind you. You will wish and not wish to see.