Carlos Fuentes - Burnt Water

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.

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 cellar café, hot and packed with students.