Happy Families (24 page)

No, Lavinia. Please go on. Just think that with any man, love is like inspiration. Nothing but hard work.

You talk the way they do in one of your soap operas.

That’s what I live on, Lavinia.

And the inheritance from your aunt Lucila Casares.

That’s true. My aunt in heaven peeks out to watch me enjoy myself.

What was the lady like, your aunt Lucila?

Watch my soap
The Sweethearts.
She’s the protagonist.

That vulgar old woman sighing for her adolescent loves?

The same. All I did was transcribe what she said in her diary.

And the little boyfriend from Acapulco, who was he?

I don’t know. She calls him Manuel, that’s all.

A reject. A guy without will.

Do you even watch my soaps?

I don’t. My maids tell me about them. This Manolo is vulgar, he’s
cursi.

Well, our Spanish word
cursi
comes from “courtesy” and from “curtsy.” Being well bred.

Then I prefer being a savage, Leo.

Just go outside. But never forget that love is hard work.

With any man?

Yes. With him. With Cristóbal.

Or with you?

With me, too.

Even though the days go by, one after the other, always the same, an endless procession until one day your life is only a little sand at the bottom of a bottle tossed into the sea?

Yes.

Isn’t there anything to do?

Yes. Change the game all the time. It’s the only way to hold on to a man.

Is that why I have you?

Yes. Do the same with Cristóbal. Constantly change the game. You’ve let yourself fall into the very routine you reproach him for. You’re too faithful, too passive, pining for the first moment of love. You have to realize it won’t come back. Invent some new first moments.

Ah, are you saying that for yourself?

You have me forever. With me, you don’t need any tricks of love or fate. You’ll never be able to leave me.

Are you, beside everything else, my best friend?

I think so, Lavinia. As long as you remember this: There’s nothing more seductive than a friend. You know all his secrets, what he likes, what he dislikes. That’s why you shouldn’t tell your friends everything.

What does friendship have to do with happiness? In any case, what does love have to do with happiness?

Don’t look for a definitive answer to anything. Don’t keep asking yourself where we’re going. Let yourself go, Lavinia. We’ve spent five years loving each other.

It never should have happened.

Our love?

Never.

Your marriage?

Yes. It was inevitable.

Believe that, Lavinia. Continue with Cristóbal. I swear that our being the lovers we are depends on it. Be faithful to your husband.

Faithful?

In the deepest sense. Continue with him faithfully so you and I can always love each other in secret, with the excitement of the first hour.

Poor Cristóbal . . . I don’t know. I don’t know if . . .

Don’t finish the sentence, Lavinia. You and I don’t need to finish sentences.

It was a mistake for us to meet.

Suspension points . . .

Forget it . . .

Chorus of the Daughter Who Killed Herself

The girl went to the cemetery with the pistol that belonged to her papa who

abused her the pistol was blacker and harder than her father’s cock

I hope he understood that after the

girl put a bullet through her head and then

(just like in the movies)

stood up revived

(just like daffy duck road runner the crazy bird and tom the cat who falls from a skyscraper smashes into a mountain is folded into an accordion is flattened into a tortilla is shit on and always revives resumes his usual form pursues pursues pursues the mouse jerry)

just like in the movies

to tell him what’s up you old prick you thought I wasn’t capable of

killing myself killing myself

look at me dead and learn your lesson daddy and don’t punish your

little girl because she broke the vase and hung from the towel rack

and don’t fight anymore papa and mama because then papa comes in

with smoke coming from his nostrils and drool from his mouth to take his revenge

on me for his argument with mama

don’t fight anymore because I swear I’ll throw myself off the roof

don’t make me desperate anymore daddymommy do you think I’m made of wood?

I touch my skin I pinch myself I feel don’t you know that I feel?

there are four hundred of us kids who kill ourselves every year in the Rep Mex

Wanna bet you didn’t know that?

The Star’s Son

1. You stand at the mirror in your bathroom. You look at yourself in the mirror. You look for D’Artagnan leaping from the balcony to the back of the horse waiting for him in the lane. You hope to see the Black Corsair swinging from the mast of the
Folgore
at the attack on Maracaibo. You imagine, in your mirror, the Count of Monte Cristo—you yourself, young, with those motionless gray hairs daubed at your temples like a sea of stone—and you see in your mirror Alejandro Sevilla, yourself, filming
The Seven Boys from Ecija,
and you are all seven of them, you alone are all you need to incarnate the seven generous Spanish bandits of the eighteenth century. You are the hunchback Enrique de Lagardere, the gentleman in disguise to deceive the court of Louis XIII and save the honor of Blanche de Nevers . . . except that now, Alejandro, you can’t shake off the imaginary hump, it’s stuck to your body, the deformity isn’t made of rubber anymore, it’s made of bone, and then you shake your head so the mirror will give back to you the dashing figure of the masked Zorro, ready to defend violated justice in Old California.

You no longer are.

No matter how much you shake your head.

Neither Zorro nor the count of Lagardere comes back. You can no longer be the third or fourth musketeer, and the last time you tried to do D’Artagnan, you leaped from the balcony of your beautiful Constance, and instead of landing gallantly in the saddle (as in the old days), your bones dropped like a sack onto the mattress that divine mercy (the film studio Mexigrama) placed there to prevent accidents.

“Alejandro, give up making costume adventure movies.”

You refrained from telling them that you are the star, that the films were the colossal image of your life, and the studio never offered you a production worthy of your person. You are not the producer’s servant or the director’s valet. You are Alejandro Sevilla, the top star of Mexican film. You have been for thirty years. You dubbed the voice of Charles Boyer. You made inroads into Hollywood films. You were famous for having been Marlene Dietrich’s lover, and whether it was true or not doesn’t matter: Marlene has been forgotten, Boyer is dead, and you refuse to believe you have loved a ghost or dubbed the voice of a corpse.

The image makes you believe, Alejandro, that you will always be young and will live forever . . . except that in the past, no beginning starlet refused when you asked for her sweet siren’s ass and now even the extras turn you down, or laugh at you, or give you a tremendous slap when you say, “Give me your furry diadem.” And didn’t Peggy Silvester, the Hollywood actress, say she wouldn’t work with you, that you were a has-been, a relic of the past, and besides, you had bad breath?

“We can offer you a mature actor’s roles. You know, the understanding paterfamilias to the younger generation. Or a misunderstood neurotic of the older generation.”

You laughed. The studio depended on you, you didn’t depend on the studio.

You were the first to demand—and obtain—a portable dressing room so you could relax with the sirens and their diadems, rest, memorize lines, drink just a little . . . Now they have to put your dialogue on a large placard, and sometimes your movements, the placards, and the cameras don’t coincide, and disconcerted, you look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself, I am D’Artagnan, Zorro, and the Seven Boys of Ecija all in one, and you know you are the great impersonator, a shadow without his own profile, you are Alejandro Sevilla only because you are the Black Corsair, and when in the end you fall from the mast and suspect they are laughing at you behind the scenes, you go to the movies in a scarf and dark glasses to see yourself on the big screen and there it’s true that the audience is laughing out loud, they shout, “Get off, you old bum, go to the home for mummies, vegetate vegetarian,” and the producer of all your pictures since your debut in
He Suffers for Love,
your longtime friend, does not bite his tongue and tells you, “Alejandro, the actor first has to be in order to seem, but in the end he has to disappear in order to go on being.”

You answer that at least your voice, your voice that is so characteristic, so melodious, so well enunciated (you dubbed for Charles Boyer) could be used, you don’t know, for newsreels, for travelogues like Fitzpatrick’s, no, Alejandro, the voice has wrinkles, too.

Every door was being closed. You weren’t even offered roles as a maître d’hôtel. At least I know how to put on a tuxedo, you contended. Then let a luxury restaurant hire you, was the reply. Today restaurants aren’t what they used to be, you sighed to yourself, because nobody else would understand. The Ambassadeurs closed, its old patrons died . . . The 1-2-3 closed, its bartender drowned in Acapulco . . . The Rivoli closed, destroyed in the earthquake of 1985 . . .

“Either you change your generation, or this generation will trade you in for another star who’s younger.”

You leaped from the balcony of Constance Bonacieux, the horse ran off, you contended, the horse should not have moved but it moved, you had a terrible fall, they took you off the picture and your only recourse was to think either you stay inside your mobile dressing room, disguised as a musketeer, mummified forever . . . or you go back, after so many years, to your house.

After so many years.

Then your face disappears from the mirror and other faces return to it, as if emerged from the quicksilver, as if born of the mist . . .

2. You had all the women, Alejandro. All of them. But you loved only one. Cielo de la Mora. She was very young when she came to the studio. She was from Nicaragua. They were filming
The Return of Zorro,
and she fit perfectly into the colonial California setting, adorned with a high, elegant comb and ringlets, dressed in a crinoline. And with a birthmark next to her mouth. You took advantage of the romantic scenes to move in with the iron rod (to use your peculiar expression) and gauge the response. Even the most indignant succumbed. Who knows why, but you respected Cielo de la Mora from the very beginning. You dared only to sing into her ear, “that birthmark you have, my sweet heaven, next to your mouth, don’t give it to anyone else . . .”

“It belongs to me,” she completed the stanza.

In other words, from that moment on you felt in charge.

There was mystery in her, veiled by a somber though striking beauty, eyes half closed but alert. A look you didn’t dare decipher. The others, yes, they were legible. Actresses accepted your advances in order to advance themselves. They were using you, and you knew it. You gave singular value to each “lay.” Sincere or insincere, unique or unrepeatable, it made no difference. Other women loved you for yourself, for being a leading man, for being handsome (you look in the mirror and give yourself a satisfied pat on the jaw, recalling Alejandro Sevilla at the age of thirty, when a man is in his prime, the irresistible Alejandro Sevilla, magnetic, athletic, magical, poetic, sarcastic, master of the world, the star of Mexico).

You knew how to intuit women, read them, guess their weaknesses, not take them seriously, discard them without mercy. They were your babes, your cuties, broads, dames, in the long run anonymous, forgettable because they were decipherable. Only Cielo de la Mora appeared to you as a mystery, she herself an enigma. You had no illusions. Behind the mysterious eyes of the splendid woman with very black hair and very white skin, was there another mystery that wasn’t simply the mystery of her eyes?

As a screen star, you had in your favor what an actor in the theater doesn’t have. The great close-up, the approach to your face and especially your eyes. You believed you were—you told yourself—a specialist in “a woman’s glances.” You would intone, with a slight change in lyrics, the famous bolero while you shaved first in the morning and again at eight at night, to avoid five o’clock shadow, as the Gillette commercial called it.

A woman’s glances

that I saw

close to me . . .

Some were shamelessly flirtatious, the glance of “come close, what are you waiting for?” and there were some, equally shameless, as chaste as a nun’s. Glances that announced an experience their owners hadn’t had and glances that feigned an innocence that wasn’t theirs, either. Rarely, very rarely, indifferent glances. The opposite sex was never indifferent to Alejandro Sevilla. And at times the masculine gender paid you homage, Alejandro, imitating your postures, your words, the clothes you wore on the street when you stopped being a musketeer.

“Your ambiguous attitudes kindle the flame of my jealousy.”

“Frankly, darling, you leave no mark on my personality.”

“I suffer from a twilight love.”

“It’s of no importance.”

“Keep the change, waiter.”

Cielo de la Mora was different. It isn’t that she had no mystery (for you, all women have it, and if not, you invent it for them) but that she maintained an imperturbable calm in the face of your advances and amatory acrobatics. It isn’t that she didn’t take you seriously. And you couldn’t say she was mocking you. She was your normalcy. Serene, worthy of her luminous name, she was completely blue inside and out. No siren’s ass or furry diadem. She was attractive because of her contemplative serenity, a seriousness and sobriety in her manner.

She didn’t resemble any other woman.

That’s why you fell in love with her.

Cielo didn’t ask for matrimony, and neither did you. Marriages between film actors were only for publicity, and you didn’t need promotion or have a reason to give any to Cielo. In the end, you wanted her, with her face of a waning moon, to depend only on you, her sun. You would take care of giving her parts in your movies. With high combs for Zorro, crinolines for D’Artagnan, high Napoleonic breasts for Monte Cristo, red shawls for the Black Corsair: Cielo de la Mora was your chromatic partner. She obeyed you in everything, letting it be known that a prior agreement existed between you and her.

She disobeyed you only twice.

She decided to have a child with you. Surprised, you weighed the pros and cons of paternity. The most favorable part was increasing your following, both feminine and masculine. Irresistible images for both sexes. The doting father carrying a baby, showing him off proudly, lifting him high in the midst of the flashbulbs of the boys in the press.

Besides, Cielo would be out of action for five months. Eliminated from the cast and offering you a magnificent excuse to take up again the conquests your celebrated union with Cielo implicitly denied to you. You’d be careful to keep your adventures discreet. You’d threaten talkative starlets with a sudden end to their careers.

“You know, gorgeous, my word will always be worth more than yours. Sex and silence or sex and being fired. It’s up to you, babe . . .”

It wasn’t that Cielo de la Mora would have been upset to learn about another of Alejandro Sevilla’s infidelities. After all, they weren’t married. And in the end, who else had decided to have the baby? Who else had stopped using birth control? Who else had taken the sedative for her nerves?

“I really was very nervous, even though I didn’t show it.”

Which was why, when the baby was born, the mother blamed only herself. She tried to assimilate her horror by watching Roman Polanski’s film
Rosemary’s Baby
over and over again and trying to imitate Mia Farrow’s maternal feelings. Each gesture of maternal love, however, repelled Cielo de la Mora in the deepest part of her being, obliged her to falsify her desire for serene distance before the world, to openly choose the mother’s love expected of her or the sexual repugnance that had returned to the place of conception. To love or hate. Cielo felt cornered, obliged to make drastic resolutions, abandoning her preferred role as serene (and even submissive) observer of the world.

“Forgive me, Alejandro. Don’t touch me.”

“Control yourself, Señora. That little problem won’t be repeated.”

“Don’t touch me, I’m telling you.”

“Let’s give time a little time.”

The national film industry brought her to you. The national film industry separated her from you. Once she had recuperated from the birth, though not from her melancholy, you included Cielo in the cast of your first contemporary movie. You gave in to the pleas of the producer, the public wants to see you dressed in ordinary clothes, by now they think that even at home you walk around like a musketeer, don’t fuck around, Alejandro, you owe it to your public . . .

One scene in the movie took place in an opera house. Cielo de la Mora was sitting in a box. You looked at her with your binoculars, and she looked away. She was wearing a very low-cut strapless lamé gown. When the performance was over, you approached her on the street. You were wearing a heavy overcoat in addition to the indispensable gray felt hat. But she appeared without a coat, with her bare shoulders and Olympic diver’s neckline. The director hit the ceiling and shouted. Where was the mink, the fur coat the actress was supposed to be wearing?

“It’s very hot,” Cielo said.

“It doesn’t matter. The script says, ‘She comes out carefully buttoned up against the cold north wind on a wintry night.’ ”