… the black neckline open on high breasts constrained like some kind of new animal captured on a new continent …
“… after all, we’re family. You can’t deny your blood. She wanted you and Victor to come to the christening. It’s next Saturday. I helped her pick out the little ashtrays they’re going to give as a remembrance to the guests. Well, as you see, the time got away from us while we chatted, and the tickets went to waste.”
I looked up. Doña Elena was looking at me. She lowered her eyelids and announced that coffee would be served in the living room. Don José excused himself and went to the library, where his electric jukebox plays his favorite records if a slug is put in the slot. We sat down to have our coffee and in the distance the jukebox snorted and began to play “Nosotros” while Doña Elena turned on the television but, placing a finger to her lips, indicated that there would be no sound. We watched the mute images before us: a giveaway program in which a solemn master of ceremonies guided the five contestants—two nervously grinning young girls with beehive hairdos, a very proper housewife, and two dark, mature, melancholy men—toward the check hidden in the crowded studio replete with vases of flowers, fake books, and music boxes.
Elena, sitting next to me in the shadows of this marble-floored, plastic-lilied living room, smiled. I don’t know where she got my nickname or what it has to do with me, but she began playing word games with it as she stroked my hand: “Nibelung. No Belong. Noble Hung. Nip Along.”
The gray, striped, undulating figures searched for the treasure before our gaze and Elena, curling up, dropped her shoes on the carpet and yawned, while Doña Elena, taking advantage of the darkness, looked at me with those wide, wide, dark-circled, questioning black eyes. She crossed her legs, arranging her skirt over her knees. From the library came snatches of the bolero: “Nosotros, que tanto nos quisimos”—We loved each other so—and what was perhaps a grunt or two of digestive stupor from Don José. Doña Elena turned from me to fix her great black eyes on the quavering eucalyptus trees beyond the picture window.
I followed the direction of her glance. Elena yawned and purred, leaning against my knees. I caressed her neck. Behind us, the barranca that crosses Lomas de Chapultepec like a savage wound seemed to glow with hidden light, secretly accentuated by the movement of the night that bent the backs of the trees and loosened their long, pale hair.
“Do you remember Veracruz?” the mother asked the daughter, smiling. But Doña Elena was looking at me. Elena agreed with a murmur, half asleep against my legs, and I answered: “Yes. We’ve been there many times together.”
“Do you like it?” Doña Elena extended her hand and then let it fall in her lap.
“A lot,” I said. “They say it’s the last Mediterranean city. I like the food. I like the people. I like sitting for hours on end under the open arches, eating rolls and drinking coffee.”
“That’s where I’m from,” she said. For the first time I noticed her dimples.
“Yes. I know.”
“But I’ve lost the accent.” She laughed, showing her gums. “I was married when I was twenty-two. After you live in Mexico City awhile, you lose the Veracruz accent. And when you met me, well, I was older.”
“Everyone says you and Elena look like sisters.”
Her lips were thin but aggressive. “No. I was just remembering the stormy nights on the Gulf. How the sun doesn’t want to give up, you know, and gets all mixed up with the storm and everything is bathed in a very pale, very greenish light, and you’re suffocating there behind the shutters, waiting for the rain to end. Rain doesn’t cool things off in the tropics. It simply makes it hotter. I don’t know why the servants had to close the shutters every time a storm was coming. It would have been so beautiful to let it come with the windows open wide.”
I lighted a cigarette. “Yes, the rain brings out some very heady odors. The earth releases its perfumes of tobacco and coffee and ripe fruit…”
“The bedrooms, too.” Doña Elena closed her eyes.
“What?”
“There weren’t any closets in those days.” Her fingers touched the slight wrinkles around her eyes. “There was a wardrobe in every room, and the servants used to place laurel and oregano leaves in among the clothing. Besides, there were some places the sun never reached, that never dried out. It smelled … moldy … how shall I say it, musty…”
“Yes, I imagine so. I’ve never lived in the tropics. Do you miss it?”
And now she rubbed her wrists, one against the other, exhibiting the protruding veins of her hands. “Sometimes. It’s hard to remember. Can you imagine, though I got married when I was eighteen, everyone considered me an old maid already.”
“And that strange light from the barranca reminded you of all those things?”
The woman rose. “Yes. They’re the spotlights Jośe ordered installed last week. They look pretty, don’t you think?”
“I think Elena has gone to sleep.”
I tickled Elena’s nose; she awakened and we returned to Coyoacán in the MG.
“I’m really sorry about those dreadful Sundays,” Elena said as I was leaving for work the following morning. “But what can we do? We have to maintain some link to the family and bourgeois life, even if only for the sake of contrast.”
* * *
“What are you going to do today?” I asked as I rolled up my blueprints and picked up my portfolio.
Elena bit into a fig, crossed her arms, and stuck out her tongue at a cross-eyed Christ we found once in Guanajuato. “I’m going to paint all morning. Then I’m going to Alejandro’s for lunch so I can show him my latest things. At his studio. Yes, it’s finished now. Right over in Olivar de los Padres. In the afternoon I’ll go to my French class. Perhaps I’ll have some coffee and then I’ll wait for you at the film club. They’re showing that classic film of Western mythology: High Noon. I made a date to meet those young blacks tomorrow. They’re Black Muslims and I’m mad to know what they really think. Do you realize that the only thing we know about them is what the newspapers say. Have you ever spoken to a North American Negro, Nibelung? Then tomorrow afternoon you mustn’t think of bothering me. I’m going to shut myself up and read Nerval from cover to cover. Don’t think for a minute that Juan’s going to make a fool of me again with all that jazz about the ‘soleil noir de la mélancolie,’ calling himself a widower, talking about how disconsolate he is … like Nerval. I’ve caught on to him and tomorrow night I’m going to screw him … thinks he knows literature! Oh yes, he’s giving a masquerade party. We all have to go dressed as Mexican murals. Oh well, let’s get all that damned folklore over with, once and for all. Buy me some lilies, Victor, Nibelung-of-my-heart, and, if you wish, dress as the cruel conquistador Alvarado who branded Indian maidens with burning irons before possessing them—Oh, Sade, where is thy whip? Oh yes, and Wednesday Miles Davis is playing at the Bellas Artes. He’s a little passé, but at any rate, he excites me—it’s a hormonorama. Get the tickets. Ciao, love.”
She kissed my neck, and because of the rolls of blueprints in my hands I couldn’t embrace her, but I drove away with the smell of figs on my neck and the image of Elena, in my shirt, unbuttoned but tied at the level of her belly button, tight torero stretch pants, barefoot, preparing to…? was it to read a poem or paint a picture? It occurred to me that we would have to go on a trip together soon. That brought us closer than anything. I reached the Periférico. I don’t know why, but instead of crossing the Altavista overpass toward Desierto de los Leones, I entered the ring road and then accelerated. Yes, I do that sometimes. I want to be alone, and race and laugh when someone roars by, giving me the old “Up yours, buddy!” And too, perhaps I wanted to keep for a half hour Elena’s image as she said goodbye, her naturalness, her golden skin, her green eyes, her endless projects, and to think how happy I am to be with her, how no one could be happier by the side of such a lively, modern woman, one who … who … who complements me so well.
I passed a glass factory,
a baroque church, a roller coaster, a grove of cypresses. Where have I heard that damn word? Complement. I circle the Petróleos fountain and start up the Paseo de la Reforma. All the cars are moving toward the center of the city reverberating there in the distance beyond an impalpable and suffocating veil. I drive to Lomas de Chapultepec, where at this hour only the servants and wives are home, where husbands have gone to work and children to school, where surely my other Elena, my complement, must await me in her warm bed; Elena of the distrustful, shadowy black eyes, and skin as white and ripe and cushiony and perfumed as clothing in a tropical chest.
A Pure Soul
Juan Luis, I am thinking about you as I take my seat on the bus that will carry me to the airport. I came early intentionally. I don’t want to see the people who will actually fly with us until the last minute. This is the bus for the Alitalia flight to Milan; it will be an hour before the Air France passengers to Paris, New York, and Mexico board their bus. I’m just afraid I will cry or get upset or do something ridiculous, and then have to endure glances and whispers for sixteen hours. There’s no reason why anyone has to know anything. You prefer it that way, too, don’t you? I shall always believe it was a private act, that you didn’t do it because … I don’t know why I’m thinking these things. I don’t have the right to explain anything in your name. Nor, perhaps, in mine either. How will I ever know, Juan Luis? Do you think I am going to insult our memories by affirming or denying that perhaps, at such and such a moment, or over a long period of time—I don’t know how or when you decided, possibly when you were a child, why not?—you were motivated by dejection, or sadness, or nostalgia, or hope? It’s cold. That icy wind that passes over the city like the breath of death is blowing from the mountains. I half bury my face in my lapels to retain my body heat, though the bus is heated and now is smoothly pulling away, enveloped in its own vapor. We leave the station at Cornavin through a tunnel and I know I will not see again the lake and bridges of Geneva, since the bus emerges onto the highway behind the station and moves always away from Lake Leman on the road to the airport. We are passing through the ugly part of the city where the seasonal workers live who have come from Italy and Germany and France to this paradise on which not a single bomb fell, where no one was tortured or assassinated or betrayed. Even the bus adds to the sensation of neatness and order and well-being that so attracted your attention from the moment you arrived, and now as I clean the steamy window with my hand and see these wretched houses I think that, in spite of everything, people mustn’t live too badly in them. Switzerland after a while becomes too comfortable, you said in a letter; we lose the sense of extremes that are so blatant and so assaulting in our country. Juan Luis: in your last letter you didn’t need to tell me—I understand without having lived it myself: that was always our bond—that all that external order, the punctuality of the trains, honor in every transaction, planning ahead in one’s job, and saving all of one’s life, demanded an internal disorder as balance. I’m laughing, Juan Luis. Behind a grimace that struggles to hold back the tears, I begin to laugh, and all the passengers turn to look at me and whisper among themselves. This is what I wanted to avoid; at least these people are going to Milan. I laugh when I think how you left the order of our home in Mexico for the disorder of your freedom in Switzerland. Do you understand? From security in the land of bloody daggers to anarchy in the land of the cuckoo clock. Isn’t that funny? I’m sorry. I’m over it now. I try to compose myself by looking at the snow-capped peak of the Jura, the enormous sheer gray cliff that now seeks in vain its reflection in the lake born of its waters. You wrote me that in summer the lake is the eye of the Alps: it reflects them, but it also transforms them into a vast submerged cathedral, and you said that when you plunged into the water you were diving in search of the mountains. Do you know I have your letters with me? I read them on the plane that brought me from Mexico and, during the days I have been in Geneva, in my free moments. Now I will read them on the return trip. Except that on this crossing you will accompany me.
We have traveled so much together, Juan Luis. As children we went every weekend to Cuernavaca when my parents still had that house covered with bougainvillea. You taught me to swim and to ride a bicycle. On Saturdays we cycled into town, where I learned to know everything through your eyes. “Look at the kites, Claudia; look, Claudia, thousands of birds in the trees; look, Claudia, silver bracelets, fancy sombreros, lemon ice, green statues; come on, Claudia, let’s try the wheel of fortune.” And for the New Year’s festivities they took us to Acapulco and you woke me up very early in the morning and we ran to Hornos Beach because you knew that the sea was at its best at that hour. That was the only time the snails and octopus, the dark sculptured driftwood, the old bottles, could be seen hurled forth by the tide, and together we gathered all we could, though we knew they wouldn’t allow us to take it back to Mexico City, and truly, all those useless things would never have fit in the car. Strange that every time I try to remember what you were like at ten, at thirteen, at fifteen, I think of Acapulco. It must be because during the rest of the year we each went to a different school, and only at the shore, and when we celebrated the turning of one year to another, were all the hours of the day ours. We played wonderful games there. On the rock castles where I was a prisoner of the ogres and you scaled the walls with a wooden sword in your hand, yelling and fighting off imaginary monsters to free me. In the pirate galleons—a skiff—where, terrified, I waited for you to end your struggle in the sea with the sharks that menaced me. In the dense jungles of Pie de la Cuesta, where we advanced hand in hand in search of the secret treasure marked on the map we’d found in a bottle. To accompany your actions you hummed background music invented at that very moment: dramatic, a perpetual climax. Captain Blood, Sandokan, Ivanhoe: your personality changed with every adventure; I was always the princess besieged, nameless, indistinguishable from her nebulous prototype.
There was only one hiatus: when you were fifteen and I was only twelve and you were embarrassed to be seen with me. I didn’t understand, because you looked the same as always to me: slim, strong, tanned, your curly chestnut hair reddened by the sun. But we were friends again the next year, going everywhere together, no longer picking up shells or inventing adventures, but seeking now to prolong a day that began to seem too short and a night forbidden to us, a night that became our temptation, symbol of the new possibilities in a recently discovered, recently begun life. We walked along the rocky Farallón after dinner, holding hands in silence, not looking at the groups playing guitar around a bonfire or at the couples kissing among the rocks. We didn’t need to say how painful it was to be around anyone else. As we didn’t need to say that the best thing in the world was to walk together in the evening, holding hands, without a word, in silent communion with our secret, that mystery that between us never gave rise to a joke or a snide remark. We were serious but never solemn, remember? And maybe we were good for each other without knowing it, in a way I’ve never been able to explain exactly, but that had to do with the warm sand beneath our bare feet, with the silence of the sea at night, with the brushing of our thighs as we walked together, you in your new long, tailored white pants, I in my new full red skirt. We had changed our way of dressing, and no longer took part in the jokes, the embarrassment, the violence of our friends. You know, Juan Luis, that most of them still act as if they were fourteen—the kind of fourteen-year-olds we never were. Machismo is being fourteen all one’s life; it is cruel fear. You know, because you weren’t able to avoid it. As we left our childhood behind and you tried out all the experiences common to your age, you began to avoid me. (I would look out at you from my window, I watched you go out in a convertible full of friends and come back late, feeling sick.) And so I understood when, after years of scarcely speaking to me, when I enrolled in Arts and Science and you in Business, you sought me, not at home, which would have been the natural thing, but at school, and you asked me to have a cup of coffee one afternoon in the Mascarones c
ellar café, hot and packed with students.
You caressed my hand and said: “Forgive me, Claudia.”
I smiled and thought that all our childhood was suddenly returning, not to be prolonged, but rather to be brought to an end, to a kind of recognition that would at the same time dissipate those years forever.
“For what?” I replied. “I’m happy we can talk again. That’s all I want. We see each other every day, but each time it was as if the other weren’t there. Now I’m happy we can be friends again, like before.”
“We’re more than friends, Claudia. We’re brother and sister.”
“Yes, but that’s an accident. Because we are brother and sister we loved each other very much when we were children; but we’ve hardly spoken to each other since.”
“I’m going away, Claudia. I’ve already told my father. He doesn’t agree. He thinks I ought to get my degree. But I have to go away.”
“Where?”
“I’ve got a job with the United Nations in Geneva. I can continue my studies there.”
“You’re doing the right thing, Juan Luis.”
You told me what I already knew. You told me you were sick of whorehouses, of learning everything by rote, of the obligation to be macho, of patriotism, lip-service religion, the lack of good films, the lack of real women, girls your own age you could live with … It was quite a speech, spoken quietly across that table in the Mascarones café.
“It’s not possible to live here. I mean it. I don’t want to serve either God or the devil; I want to burn the candle at both ends. And you can’t do it here, Claudia. Just wanting to live makes you a potential traitor; here you’re obliged to serve, to take a position; it’s a country that won’t let you be yourself. I don’t want to be ‘decent.’ I don’t want to be courteous, a liar, muy macho, an ass-kisser, refined and clever. There’s no country like Mexico … thank God! I don’t want to go from brothel to brothel. When you do that, then all your life you are forced to treat women with a kind of brutal, domineering sentimentality because you never learned to really understand them. I don’t want that.”
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