Carlos Fuentes - Burnt Water

I answered: “Mon ami Pierrot.” So you weren’t going to be honest with me any more. How long has it been Claire? I wanted to know everything, I demanded to know everything. Juan Luis, hadn’t we been best friends before we were brother and sister? You didn’t write for two months. Then came an envelope with a snapshot inside. The two of you with the tall jet of a fountain behind you, and the lake in summertime; you and she leaning against the railing. Your arm around her waist. She, so cute, her arm resting on a flower-filled stone urn. But it wasn’t a good snapshot. It was difficult to decide about Claire’s face. Slim and smiling, yes, a kind of Marina Vlady, slimmer but with the same smooth long blond hair. Low heels. A sleeveless sweater. Cut low.

You admitted it without explaining anything. First the letters relating facts. She lived in a pension on the rue Emile Jung. Her father was an engineer, a widower, and he worked in Neuchâtel. You and Claire were going swimming together at the beach. You had tea at La Clémence. You saw old French films in a theater on the rue Mollard. Saturdays you had dinner at the Plat d’Argent and each of you paid his own check. During the week, you ate in the cafeteria of the Palace of Nations. Sometimes you took the tram and went to France. Facts and names, names, names, like a guidebook: Quai des Berges, Gran’ Rue, Cave à Bob, Gare de Cornavin, Auberge de la Mère Royaume, Champelle, Boulevard des Bastions.

Later conversations. Claire’s preference for certain films, certain books, concerts, and more names, that river of nouns in your letters ( Drôle de Drame and Les Enfants du Paradis, Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Radiguet, Schumann and Brahms), and then Claire says, Claire thinks, Claire feels. Carné’s characters live their freedom as if it were a shameful conspiracy. Fitzgerald invented the modes, the gestures, and the disillusion that continue to nourish us. The German Requiem celebrates all profane deaths. Yes, I replied. Orozco has died, and there is an enormous retrospective in the Bellas Artes. And so on, round and round, all of it written out, as I had asked you.

“Every time I listen to you, I say to myself that it’s as if we realized that we need to consecrate everything that up till now has been condemned, Juan Luis; to turn things inside out. Who mutilated us, my love? There’s so little time to recover everything that has been stolen from us. No, I’m not suggesting anything, you know. Let’s not make plans. I believe as Radiguet does that the unconscious maneuvers of a pure soul are even more singular than all the possible combinations of vice.”

What could I answer? Nothing new here, Juan Luis. Papa and Mama are very sad that you won’t be here with us for their silver wedding anniversary. Papa has been promoted to vice president of the insurance company and he says that’s his best anniversary present. Mama, poor thing, invents some new illness every day. The first television station is broadcasting. I’m studying for finals for my junior year. I dream a little about everything that’s happening to you; I pretend to myself I get it out of books. Yesterday I was telling Federico everything you’re doing and seeing and reading and hearing, and we think perhaps if we pass our exams we could come visit you. Aren’t you planning to come back someday? You could during your next vacation, couldn’t you?

You wrote that fall was different now you were with Claire. On Sundays you often went for walks, holding hands, in silence; the scent of decaying hyacinths still lingered in the parks, but now it was the odor of burning leaves that pursued you during those long walks that reminded you of ours years ago on the beach, because neither you nor Claire dared break the silence, no matter what came to your minds, no matter what the enigma of overlapping seasons with their juxtaposition of jasmine and dead leaves suggested to you. In the end, silence. Claire, Claire — you wrote me — you have understood everything. I have what I always had. Now I can possess it. I’ve found you again, Claire.

I said again in my next letter that Federico and I were studying together for an exam and that we were going to Acapulco for the last days of the year. But I crossed that out before I sent you the letter. In yours you never asked who Federico was — and if you could ask me today, I wouldn’t know how to answer. When vacation came, I said I would not accept his calls any more; I wouldn’t see him at school any more. I went alone, with my parents, to Acapulco. I didn’t tell you anything about that. I didn’t write for several months, but your letters continued to arrive. That winter, Claire came to live with you in the room on Bourg-de-Four. Why think about the letters that came after that? They’re here in my purse. “Claire, everything is new. We had never been together at dawn. Before, those hours meant nothing; they were a dead part of the day, and now I wouldn’t exchange them for anything. We’ve always been so close, during our long walks, at the theater, in restaurants, at the beach, making up adventures, but we always lived in separate rooms. Do you know what I used to do, alone, thinking about you? Now I don’t waste those hours. I spend the whole night close to you, my arms around your waist, your shoulder pressed to my chest, waiting for you to wake. You know that, and you turn toward me and smile with your eyes closed, Claire, as I turn back the sheet, I forget the places you have warmed through the night and I ask myself if this isn’t what we always wanted, from the beginning, when we played and walked in silence, holding hands. We had to sleep beneath the same roof, in our own house, isn’t that true? Why don’t you write me, Claudia? I love you, Juan Luis.”

You may remember how I teased you. It wasn’t the same thing to love on a beach or in a hotel surrounded by lakes and snow as it was to live together every day. Besides, you were working in the same office. You’d end up boring each other. The novelty would wear off. Waking up together. Actually, it wasn’t very pleasant. She will see how you brush your teeth. You will see her take off her makeup, cream her face, put on her garter belt … I think you’ve done the wrong thing, Juan Luis. Weren’t you searching for your independence? Why have you taken on such a burden? If that’s what you had in mind, you might as well have stayed in Mexico. But apparently it’s difficult to escape the conventions in which we have been brought up. In the long run, although you haven’t followed the formula completely, you’re doing what Mama and Papa and everyone else has always expected of you. You’ve become a man of routine. After all the good times we had with Doris and Sophia and Marie-José. What a shame.

We didn’t write each other for a year and a half. My life didn’t change at all. My studies became a little useless, repetitive. How can they teach you literature? Once they put me in touch with a few things, I knew that I would be going my own way, I would read and write and study on my own. I went on going to class just for the sake of discipline, because I had to finish what I had begun. It’s so foolish and pedantic when they go on explaining things you already know, with phony diagrams and illustrations. That’s the bad thing about being ahead of your teachers, and they’re aware of it but hide it to keep their jobs. We were coming to Romanticism and I was already reading Firbank and Rolfe and I had even discovered William Golding. I had my professors a little scared, and my only satisfaction during that time was the praise I received at college: Claudia has real promise. I spent more and more time locked in my room. I arranged it to my taste, put my books in order, hung my reproductions, set up my record player, and Mama finally got tired of telling me that I should meet boys and go out dancing. They left me alone. I changed my wardrobe a little, from the cotton prints you knew to white blouses and dark skirts, tailored suits — outfits that make me feel a little more serious, more severe, more distant.