Carlos Fuentes - Burnt Water

… the plump arm, the translucent skin, the veins like a second skeleton, of glass, outlined beneath the smooth whiteness.

“… I invited your cousin Sandrita and went by to pick her up in the car, but we started playing with the new baby and lost track of time. He’s simply precious. She’s very hurt that you haven’t even called to congratulate her. It wouldn’t be any effort to call, Elenita…”

… 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.