Happy Families (17 page)

As for youth, it was being transformed into a solitary avenue that José Luis and Guy stopped walking with the impression that they were ghosts. It was difficult for them to abandon the obligation to be the representatives of
a
youth. What was left was the dejection of losing—abandonment, death, lack of will—the people who, half in self-congratulation, called themselves “our crowd,” “our set.” These compliments were not, however, the requiem for Guy’s and José Luis’s constant certainty: We didn’t let ourselves go with a group of dispensable people, we weren’t interchangeable, we were
irreplaceable
as a couple.

In the midst of these changes, both kept the friends who hadn’t succumbed to violence or been liberated into death. A man needs sad friends to whom he can tell what he doesn’t say to his lover. A man needs patient friends who give him the time that a lover denies him. A man needs the friend who talks to him about his lover and evokes a kind of shared warmth that requires the presence of a third person, a special confidant. And above all, a man must respect the relationship with the friend who isn’t his lover and gives the assurance that passion could overwhelm him.

For Guy and José Luis, their relationship with friends secretly established an obligation, which was to avoid promiscuity. It was implicit that a friendship, no matter how close, would never cross the frontier of physical love. In their youth and early maturity, Guy and José Luis proposed taking part in everything but in moderation, without vulgarity, without failures in respect. They told each other that a couple needs others but ought to reserve to itself the dialogue between you and me, never surrendering intimacy to the group, to others. And above all, it must respect the relationship with the friend who isn’t a lover and gives the assurance that passion could overwhelm him.

Both Guy and José Luis, now lagging behind the avant-garde, believed that this friend was Curly Villarino, a bridge between our couple’s sixty years and the thirtysomething of everybody else. Guy and José Luis suffered the feeling of having lost the group, the circle that accompanied them between the ages of twenty and fifty, decimated now by age, death, indolence, the loss of a center, and the move to the outskirts of a Dantesque city: the wild forest.

In short, each group brings with it the question: “What impression are we making?” The Jockey’s aristocrats, L’Aiglon’s gilded youth, the Rosa district’s artists and intellectuals. All of them wanted to make an impression, and in this aspiration lay the defeat or triumph of its members. Both transitory, except that those who failed had to choose between returning to their families or, following André Gide’s proclamation—families, I detest you—give themselves over to a bohemia that was sad, poor, solitary, scruffy, and as dependent on what they could beg as the most “subjugated” son at home. Only a few stayed afloat in the heavy seas of yesterday’s groups, asserting their talent thanks to the hard exigencies of indiscipline, the purges of monogamy (sometimes serial), and carefully measured-out absences from the ravenous homeland. Mexico City threatened to devour alive each one of its inhabitants, whether victim or victimizer.

Instead of a single center—between the Zócalo and Angel—the capital spread in concentric circles increasingly distant from what Guy and José Luis considered the “heart” of the city. The Rosa district would end up prostituted and brothelized, exiling its mobile geography of restaurants, cafés, and boutiques to Avenida Masaryk, from where it would soon move to the center, expelled now by gangs of car thieves, pilferers of watches, entire families of crooks who specialized in breaking into houses, robbing banks, handling burglary tools, murdering for pay, beating with clubs, stabbing, pimping, and prostituting. Old pensioners without a pension, fugitives from justice, con artists . . . What remained of the ancient City of Palaces? A huge supermarket filled with cans of blood and bottles of smoke? Blood and hunger, basic necessities of the city-monster.

“The consumer society,” wrote Georges Bataille in
La Part maudite,
“was invented by the Aztecs. They consumed hearts.”

Guy and José Luis believed they had saved their hearts from Mexican ritual cannibalism. At the age of fifty-six, they could look with nostalgic apprehension at their youthful meeting in the Balmori movie theater and tell each other, “I think we saved ourselves, we think we haven’t been touched by undesirable emotions, we think that by this time nothing can disturb us . . .” They condemned the city to death.

They did not count on the opposition of Curly Villarino, committed to reviving the days of an aristocratic freedom reserved, at this point in history, only for a handful of multimillionaires and members of European and Arabic royal houses. That is what Curly’s calling card was: a summons to the nostalgia of Guy and José Luis for their youth, a sweet evocation of a lost time that he, Curly Villarino, seemed to or pretended to reincarnate for the exclusive benefit of the two friends.

“All my uncle Agustín’s friends have died. Only you two are left from that time, Guy, José Luis, my dears. You are my seductive perfumes.”

He said it in so childlike and lovable a manner. With his voice and manners, he made you forgive his somewhat outlandish appearance of a fat boy who never finished growing. The baby fat on his cheeks swayed from side to side with the emphatic movement of his pink cherub’s lips, though the fat seraph was contradicted by narrow myopic eyes behind a pair of small eyeglasses in the style of Schubert that, Curly
dixit,
would eventually replace the oversize aviator’s glasses favored by the deplorable decade of miniskirts, mammoth belts, and bell-bottom trousers.

Curly’s entire spherical existence was crowned by a mass of curls, once blond but now streaked with gray, that resembled the inspired wig of the great Harpo Marx. But if the latter was famously mute, Curly talked incessantly, wittily, and freely. It charmed my friends that when he was introduced, Curly said to them:

“I am not impartial, don’t believe that even for a minute. You two are my classics. And I need a ‘classic’ in order to live and die. I think you” (he looked at them innocently) “are the culmination of the race. You are from
mon genre,
if such a thing can be repeated. No, seriously. Everything would be perfect if we were immortal. Since we aren’t, let us at least be unending. I mean, let us ask: Why do they tolerate us homos? Answer: in order not to discriminate against us. If we accept this truth, let us admit its consequences. I devote myself only to looking for opportunities that ‘normality’ would deny me.”

And after a long sigh:

“Sometimes I find them, other times no. We are all like submarines that cut through posh marinas checking on whether the yachts have anchors, how many barnacles are clinging to them, if the ship is old or new. Then—I warn you
—I attack.
I attack in earnest. With torpedoes. I warn you so that no one can call it a deception. If I suspect a couple isn’t getting along, I am going to try to seduce them . . .”

Guy and José Luis remarked that Curly was an amiable buffoon, reminiscent of the most notable excesses of another time. Nowadays singular personalities were lost in the sulfurous urban magma, groups disintegrated, and the only recourse was to search the haystack for the brilliant needle of the brilliant eccentricity that once was.

“Do you realize that we’re beginning to talk like a couple of doddering old men?” asked Guy.

José Luis didn’t reveal either melancholy or fatalism. “That’s why we like Curly. He’s young, but he’s in sync with us.”

“We didn’t need clowns before,” Guy said with a frown.

“No, but only because everybody was comical except you and me.”

“Do you feel that self-congratulatory about our behavior?”

“ ‘Self-congratulatory’ isn’t the word. Don’t be pedantic. Perhaps serious, serious in the midst of the circus. ‘Serious’ is the word. We never deceive, and we don’t allow ourselves to be deceived. If you take a good look at our life, Guy, you’ll admit that we were observers but never full participants.”

“You mean we never allowed our private relationship to be confused with our social life?”

“Something better. We were witnesses in order to survive.”

“Do you think we’ve survived? As measured by what?”

“As measured by what we proposed being. A faithful couple, Guy. I believe we both know very well that we’ve never failed in our loyalty. Promiscuity was all around us. We never fell into it.”

“Don’t be so sure,” joked Guy. “There’s still time.”

On the verge of turning sixty, Guy and José Luis had solidified their personal relationship as well as their professional lives and their dealings—increasingly rare—with a society in which they no longer recognized themselves. Rises and falls were too abrupt. Famous names turned infamous. Anonymous people achieved their fifteen minutes of Warholian fame before somersaulting and disappearing. The hateful norms of a hypocritical Catholic morality had disappeared only to be replaced by a no less hypocritical cult of immorality: pleasure, money, consumption hailed as a proof of freedom, and sophisticated indifference behind a mask of sincerity even in those who did not practice it but felt compelled to celebrate it. There were no well-rooted islands left. Everything was like a vast, drifting political and social Xochi-milco crossed by boats with names written in flowers that withered from one day to the next. The men in power changed. The vices of power remained.

Curly, then, was an island of cheer as well as nostalgia for a lost world: the world of Guy’s and José Luis’s youth. He brought them the private pleasure of an audacious joke, a caricatured excess, which the
expectant
nature of the Furlong–Palma couple demanded, almost as if it were an acquired right. Curly was their show.

Of course the plump young man surpassed himself in word and deed. That is, he alone took the place of several generations from their social past. It was part of his charm. It was inevitable. He was, for Guy and José Luis, a reminiscence. Like a minor Oscar Wilde, Curly fired off paradoxes and bons mots left and right.

“Life would be perfect if I were immortal.”

“Promiscuity is taking pleasure in yourself.”

“Sex doesn’t bring happiness, but it does calm the nerves.”

“Amity is so drunk she’s even drinking from the vases.”

“Nothing’s as exciting as exposing yourself to a man in church.”

“The problem with Rudy is that he’s orthopedic.”

“Gustavito has a bore inside his head.”

These malicious witticisms were received with laughter, Guy’s happier than that of José Luis, who—as he confessed to his lover—was beginning to weary of Curly’s verbal excesses.

“He can be very impertinent. That isn’t our style.”

“Don’t pay attention to him, José Luis. Impertinence only hides his vacuousness. Did you expect profundity from a boy like that?”

“Not profundity. Not impertinence, either.”

“Let it pass. Who would replace this blessed Rigoletto fallen from heaven?”

“Or come up from a sulfurous pit, how can anyone tell . . .”

They felt sorry for him one night when they were having supper together in a restaurant on Calle de Havre, and Curly’s eyes became dangerously distracted. Guy’s back was to the dining room. José Luis, beside Curly, could appreciate the obscure object of desire.

A dark-skinned boy went back and forth with ancestral agility, as if a remote ancestor of his had been responsible for bringing fresh fish from the coast to Emperor Moctezuma in his palace on the plateau.

He was nimble, swift, graceful, without an extra gram on his face or body. Curly looked at him with a desire that was increasingly difficult to hide, to the point where he stopped chatting with his friends and absently committed the unforgivable error of sitting with his mouth open, his gaze lost in the waiter’s movements, something that provoked José Luis to laugh and remark that a “closed mouth catches no boys,” which provoked Curly’s irritation followed by this action that revealed, to whomever wishes to measure it, the nature,
naturata
and
naturante,
of the witty fat man.

The fact is that Curly, as the young indigenous waiter walked past, dropped his napkin to the floor and looked at the boy with a mixture of indignation and scorn.

“What are you waiting for?” said Curly.

“Excuse me?” responded the waiter.

“Stupid Indian. Pick up the napkin.”

The waiter bent over and picked up the napkin lightly spotted with lipstick, as Guy and José Luis could observe with smiles, but not the servile object of Curly’s wounded contempt. The servant.

“Learn to serve,” Curly continued. “Learn to differentiate.” And stressing the two words, he concluded: “I am
a gentleman.
”

He said it with an insufferable arrogance that mortified Guy and José Luis, whose glances, one directed at Curly and the other at the waiter, were both filled with someone else’s excuses and sorrow. The boy bowed gravely to Curly and withdrew to continue his work.

“They’re our only aristocrats,” José Luis commented when the waters had calmed.

“Who?” asked a red-faced Curly.

José Luis did not respond, and in Curly’s eyes, this registered as a serious offense.

“Did you realize?” said José Luis, holding a
New Yorker
when they were back home. “Since he couldn’t punish you for seeing him turned into an imbecile with his mouth hanging open, he turned on the weak one, the waiter.”

Guy buttoned his pajamas and said nothing.

“He’s a shameful coward” was José Luis’s judgment. “I don’t know if it’s worthwhile to keep cultivating him.”

“Yes,” Guy said with a yawn. “Probably he’s already served his purpose.”

“Which was?” suggested José Luis, setting aside the magazine.

Guy shrugged. “Frankly, it’s all the same to me if we see him or not.”

“Ah,” exclaimed José Luis, accustomed to less ambiguous or contradictory answers from his companion. “Then you think it’s a matter of one of those
surmountable
incidents.”

It wasn’t a question. It was a statement.