Happy Families (30 page)

Amador Zuleta

done

“Amador Zuleta” left the civil registry in Arcos de Belén renewed, breathing deeply, with a roll of bills in his pocket and a ticket on the Red Arrow line that would take him far from his former life, far from the capital, to the north, to a new life, an unknown family, loved for the mere fact that it was different and distinct from all the habits and phrases repeated ad infinitum of the family he was abandoning Mexico City–Ciudad Victoria– Monterrey–Nuevo Laredo

Amador Zuleta stood at the beginning of the longest highway in the republic and began to run to run to run

Conjugal Ties (2)

1. Leo Casares delights in the contemplation of his own space. The apartment on the top floor of an office building on Calle de Schiller. Leo chose it because by day the place is occupied by transitory employees, and by night the most absolute solitude reigns. Leo in his penthouse. Where he lives. His habitat. The private space of a bachelor with no family. The place where times meet freely. The past and the future in the present. The present in the past. The future of the present. Leo proposed to have the apartment reflect a constant will: to convoke all the moments of his life in a current of actual sensations. He spent years choosing furniture, lamps, curtains, tables, mirrors, and above all,
paintings
to give the sensation of permanent flow.

He would have liked each thing to be its own present on the condition of recalling and foretelling. A space like a crystal ball. Among all the objects in the apartment, Leo has chosen a painting as representative of his will. It is a work by the Japanese painter Katsushika Hokusai. It occupies an entire wall of Leo’s bedroom. It is a portrait of a changing landscape. A wave rises, hiding the fogbound line of the coast. Or perhaps it is the coast that clouds the reality of the wave. The shore is incorporated into the surf. The sea disguises itself as shore. The elements fuse and are confused. The gray of the sea might reflect the green of the coast. The dawn of the dunes might nullify the chiaroscuro of the sky.

Leo contemplates the painting for hours. He is convinced that he sees in it what he wishes to see, not what the painting attempts to represent. He wonders if Hokusai has the same power over other viewers. How do women see it? “My women,” says Leo in a quiet voice. “My two women.” How?

2. The good thing about a mobile phone is that it allows you to lie, let us say, with mobility. You’re not tied to the umbilical cord of a precise place. If your husband suspects, he answers the mobile; my husband leaves the message or I, the liar, answer it. Not a soul can find out. I was with you but told him I’m in the car on the way to the hairdresser.

Adultery was never so easy, Lavinia.

Don’t use that ugly word.

What, then?

The
affaire.
You know, you just say the
affaire.

My
affaire,
our
affaire
? And what will happen on the day when not only the number you’re calling from but your face appears on the screen of your husband’s telephone?

Shut up! I’ll have to wear makeup even in the shower! But that isn’t the point, Leo. Do you think Cristóbal will care if he finds out?

Please don’t play with me. The danger is that he will care, and then he’ll decide to conquer you.

Reconquer me, you mean.

Lavinia, forget about the arithmetic of coitus. A modern woman ought to deceive her husband as many times as he deceives her. Do you care?

I don’t know. I’d like to take the lead. You understand.

What’s stopping you?

You, my love. I’m unfaithful to you only with Cristóbal, no one else. Why am I telling you that! I’m unfaithful to you, and that’s the truth.

Am I enough for you?

Look, Leo, a woman is always prepared to be adored. What counts is the intensity of the adoration, not the number of adorers. What a mess! You and my husband are more than enough for me, I swear.

Still, he and I give you different things.

Don’t tempt me, Leo. I’m here in your arms, and the only thing that makes me feel I’m right is everything I despise in my husband. It’s clear as crystal.

It’s not very exciting to know you’re the better-than-nothing of a discontented wife.

Don’t be an idiot. Listen to me. You know how to talk. You know how to seduce with your tongue, aha! Cristóbal is the master of flat conversation. “What did you say?” “Why didn’t you tell me?” “What were you going to say?” It’s exasperating. To be waiting for a dialogue that never happens.

Does your husband make up for his silences in some way?

It isn’t silence. It’s repetition.

In other words, it’s silence with noise.

Sometimes I don’t follow you, Leo. All I know is that Cristóbal is an excessive, arrogant, pedantic man who thinks he’s the papa of all jokesters. Let me tell you. If I want to take him to a party and he doesn’t want to go, I say, “Come on, Cristóbal, everybody’s going,” and he just gives me an icy look and says: “No, I’m not going.” Do you believe his petulance? Another thing: I’m so tired of the phrases he repeats over and over again. “I’m not asking you to believe me, Lavinia.” “It would be better for you, Lavinia.” “It’s all right with me, Lavinia.” “Seeing is believing, Lavinia.” “Just in case, Lavinia.” “The man hasn’t been born, Lavinia.” He’s a balloon of self-esteem. Tarzan’s papa. Let me tell you.

Why don’t you deflate him?

I don’t think he’s deflatable.

Make him think it would be cruelty on your part to resist him.

Shall I tell you how he’d respond? He’d treat me with contempt in public. He’s already done it. If he thinks I’m doing well with him, he becomes irritated inside and waits for the opportunity to humiliate me in front of others. Then he feels victorious.

Of course, you don’t dare attack him in public.

You know I don’t. My upbringing wouldn’t let me.

And in private? Don’t you ever break your rule of conjugal perfection to criticize him in private?

I can’t. Cristóbal has a terrible weapon against me. He threatens to make me a witness of what I can’t see. That silences me.

Do you suspect?

I imagine. I imagine something intolerable that I don’t want to be exposed to. Leo, I don’t know anymore what I should feel, being married. With you, I do know what I feel.

Well, instead of matrimonial red tape, I give you love and admiration.

But you can’t make them public.

In your heart, what do you reproach your husband for, Lavinia?

For not being able to hold me. There it is. The truth, what do you think? He could only oblige me. Understand? I’m tied to obligation. Pure and simple.

Can’t you break off your relationship to your husband?

Don’t be cynical, Leo. I’ve proposed leaving him and living with you. You’ve told me a thousand times not to, that living together would ruin what we have—

A perfect
affaire
!

That’s what you say. How can you ask me now to leave my husband if I know you wouldn’t accept me as your wife?

Darling, who told you to leave your husband and marry me?

Who’s talking about marrying? Living together, that’s all, my love.

You don’t understand, Lavinia. I’m talking about you leaving your husband, not for me but for another husband.

Then what about you and me?

The same as always, darling. You married to Monsieur Quelconque, Mr. Nobody, and you and I free lovers forever after, with no domestic deadweight.

Really, just like now.

Except with a different
partenaire.

Does that excite you, you cynic?

We’d be lovers and not create problems for anybody.

We wouldn’t gain anything.

We wouldn’t lose anything, either.

Then tell me what we gain if we don’t lose.

Being apart so we want each other more. Distance increases desire. It’s almost a Church dogma. Abelard and Heloise. Tristan and Isolde. You know.

I say we already have that. Explain what we would gain if I change husbands but continue as your lover.

I’ll tell you later.

You’re pushing me, Leo.

Toward what?

I’m just letting you know. Don’t push me too much, my love.

3. Leo looks intently at the painting by Hokusai. That Oriental sea—the rougher it becomes, the more cold it gives off. A white sail rises from the waves, which are so intense, and the sail so fragile, that one would doubt the existence of anything else: the undiscovered country, said the Bard, from whose bourn no traveler returns. Is that sail tossed on the agitation of the elements an act of mercy? Does it keep us from seeing the imaginary land hidden by the fog? Not to mention landing on it? Is the mist a friendly invitation to remain where we are, not to go
beyond,
to that
làbas
of the imagination where temptation and danger, satisfaction and disappointment, the life of death tremble like flames? Beyond. Taking the next step. Not settling for the crooning hush of the sea and its white sirens. Hush: crush. Crush the song of the sirens with drowned resonances and hostile foam. Hush the streams that come down from the sierra looking for the way to the sea. Crush the sirens so they don’t daze us. Daze and detain. Leo would have liked to set foot on the coast. Would he dare? Had he lived his life so far as a delicious conjuring trick, not daring to take the next step, the step from game to life, from shadow to wall, from appearance to touch, from touch to true absence? From observation of the sea to the certainties of terra firma, where all imaginary dangers are transformed into the greatest danger: no longer sensing any danger at all?

4. It’s all true, Leo. Álvaro insults me, abuses me, doesn’t appreciate me, mistreats me, but at the same time he complains violently that the world insults him, people abuse him, injustice victimizes him, and destiny mistreats him. That’s his posture. He’s simply giving me what the world, destiny, and people have given him. The worst thing is that deep inside, he believes this identifies us and, in a way, makes us partners in misfortune, so to speak. He makes us depend on each other in unhappiness. He and I. He creates an effect filled with blame.

Except that he can make you miserable, and you don’t know how to harm him, Cordelia.

Are you insisting I abandon him completely?

I said no such thing. I’m not asking you to leave him. I’m asking you to do him harm.

Isn’t it enough that he knows about us?

No. And I’ll tell you why. Forgive me, Cordelia. Yesterday I went to visit your husband.

You saw Álvaro? Why? What happened?

First of all let me clarify: He called me. He reached out to me.

I don’t understand. What did he want?

To require my presence.

Why?

To clarify my relationship with you.

And what did you tell him?

That it is reflection in absence that makes a husband undesirable, not his proximity.

Did he understand you? Because I don’t really understand you.

Let both of you understand me, then. The great romantic rule is that distance stimulates desire. Tristan and Isolde. Abelard and Heloise.

I know. You always refer to those couples.

It’s the great romantic rule. Unacceptable to modern promiscuity. We want immediate satisfaction. And we get it. Except that what is gotten right away is consumed quickly and then thrown in the trash. I don’t know how a society can be called conservative when it doesn’t conserve anything. We are engaged in an imperfect duel with the world.

Don’t leave for the hills of Úbeda.

I mean that if the consumer society is the way it is, Abelard and Heloise are impossible. The rule takes a leap to tell us that absence separates us and makes us undesirable. We want to consume each other. If we can’t, we don’t hate each other, we simply ignore each other. Whoever isn’t immediately available becomes old and decayed forever. Love has an expiration date, too, just like a bottle of milk. Everything conspires to disenchant us.

You forget that one can love somebody without that somebody knowing it.

Ah. That’s the case with your husband.

It may be, if you insist.

Naturally. I insist. Of course I do.

Nothing you’ve told me includes my case.

Tell me.

Being the object of love that is ignorant of the fact.

I don’t follow.

Álvaro doesn’t know that even if I leave him for you, I’ll go on loving him. And even though he hates me because of you, I don’t know if Álvaro will go on loving me.

You know and he doesn’t?

He doesn’t know that I know.

Why?

Because he doesn’t have an imagination for the good. He thinks and feels only in darkness.

Why does he bring me into it, Cordelia?

Because Álvaro doesn’t love or hate. He fears vulnerability. He wants to know he’s protected.

I repeat: Why me? I believe I’m the least qualified to give your husband protection.

You’re thinking sentimentally. Remember who gave him a job at the Department of the Interior.

The secretary.

Who recommended him?

I did, because you asked me to.

Who are you?

Adviser to the secretary.

Who dismissed my husband?

The secretary, because Álvaro was insubordinate.

Did you approve the dismissal?

There was nothing else I could do. It was a bureaucratic decision. Don‘t think it was on account of you. Besides, it isn’t that he was insubordinate. He simply didn’t measure up. I’m sorry.

It doesn’t matter. For my husband, you’re the
factotum.
You hire. You fire. You seduce the wives of your employees. And just as you seduce them, you can abandon them. And then, Leo, then he would be there, ready to receive me with feigned anger, with disguised tenderness, he, Álvaro Meneses, who is who he is only because of favors received, becomes the giver, do you understand? The Good Samaritan, the sentimental Midas, oh, I don’t know! He receives. He gives to me. That’s his well-being.