Carlos Fuentes - Burnt Water

His features were so markedly Oriental that they obscured the Indian mask underlying them. It happens with a lot of Mexican faces. The stigmas and accidents of known history recede to reveal the primal face, the face that goes back to Mongolian tundra and mountains. In this way Federico Silva was like the lost perfume of the ancient lake of Mexico: a sensitive memory, practically a ghost.

The hair of the man who wore this immutable mask was still so black it looked dyed. But because of the changes in the national diet he lacked the strong, white, enduring teeth of his ancestors. Black hair, in spite of the changes. But the essential benefits of chili peppers, beans, and tortillas, which contain sufficient calcium and vitamins to make up for a limited diet, were no longer present in the bodies of those generations that had forsaken them. Now in that wretched cup-shaped plaza he watched the young people eating junk — carbonated drinks and synthetic caramels and potato chips in cellophane bags, the garbage food of the North added to the leper food of the South: the trichina, the amoeba, the omnipotent microbe in every slice of pork, tamarind-flavored soft drink, and wilting radish.

In the midst of so much ugliness it was only natural that he maintain his little oasis of beauty, his personal Eden which nobody envied him anyway. Voluntarily, consciously, he had remained on the edge of the mainstream. He’d watched the caravans of fashion pass him by. He preserved a few fashions, it was true. But what he chose and he preserved. When something went out of style he continued to wear it, he cultivated it and saved it from the vagaries of taste. So his style was never out of style, his suits, his hats and canes and Chinese dressing gowns, the elegant ankle-high boots for his tiny Oriental feet, the suave kid gloves for his tiny Mandarin hands.

He had been this way for years, since the forties, all the time he was waiting for his mother to die and leave him her fortune, and now, in turn, he would die, at peace, in any way he wished, alone in his house, freed finally from the burden of his mother, so extravagant and at the same time so stingy, so vain, so painted, powdered, and bewigged till her dying day. The attendants at the funeral parlor had outdone themselves. Feeling an obligation to bestow in death a more colorful and lavish appearance than life, they presented Federico Silva, with great pride, with a raving caricature, an enameled mummy. The moment he saw her he’d ordered the casket sealed.

Family and friends had gathered during the days of the wake for Doña Felícitas Fernández de Silva, and her burial. Discreet, distinguished people everyone else referred to as aristocrats, as if, Federico Silva mused, an aristocracy were possible in a colony settled by fugitives, petty clerks, millers, and swineherds.

“Let us content ourselves,” he used to tell his old friend María de los Angeles Negrete, “with being what we are, an upper middle class that in spite of the whirlwinds of history has managed through time to preserve its very comfortable personal income.”

The oldest name in this assemblage had acquired its fortune in the seventeenth century, the most recent before 1910. An unwritten law excluded from the group the nouveaux riches of the Revolution, but admitted those damaged by the civil strife who’d then used the Revolution to recover their standing. But the customary, the honorable, thing was to have been rich during the colonial period, through the empire and the republican dictatorships. The ancestral home of the Marqués de Casa Cobos dated from the times of the Viceroy O’Donojú, and his grandmother had been a lady-in-waiting to the Empress Carlota; Perico Arauz’s ancestors had been ministers to Santa Anna and Porfirio Díaz; and Federico, on the Fernández side, was descended from an aide-de-camp to Maximilian, and through the Silvas from a magistrate to Lerdo de Tejeda. Proof of breeding, proof of class maintained in spite of the political upheavals of a country known for its surprises, somnolent one day, in tumult the next.

Every Saturday Federico joined his friends to play Mah-Jongg, and the Marqués always told him, “Don’t worry, Federico. No matter how it shocks us, we must admit that the Revolution tamed Mexico forever.”

He hadn’t seen the resentful eyes, the caged tigers lurking in the nervous bodies of the youths sitting watching the smog drift by.

II

The day he buried his mother he really began to remember. Moreover, he realized that it was because of her disappearance that detailed memories were returning which had been buried beneath Doña Felícitas’s formidable weight. That was when he remembered that once mornings could be perceived at midnight, and that he’d gone out on his balcony to breathe them, to collect the anticipated gift of the day.

But that was only one memory among many, the one most closely resembling a revived instinct. The fact is, he told himself, that the memory of old people is stimulated by the deaths of other old people. So he found that he was waiting for the death of some uncle or aunt or friend to be announced, secure in the knowledge that new memories would attend the rendezvous. In the same way, some day, they would remember him.

How would he be remembered? Meticulously grooming himself every morning before the mirror, he knew that he had changed very little over the last twenty years. Like Orientals, who, once they begin to age, never change until the day they die. But also because all that time he’d kept the same style of dress. No denying it, in hot weather he was the only person he knew who still wore a boater like the one made famous by Maurice Chevalier. With delight, savoring the syllables, he enunciated several foreign names for that hat: straw hat, canotier, paglietta. And in winter, a black homburg with the obligatory silk ribbon imposed by Anthony Eden, the most elegant man of his epoch.

Federico Silva always rose late. He had no reason to pretend that he was anything other than a wealthy rent collector. His friends’ sons had fallen prey to a misplaced social consciousness, which meant they must be seen up and in some restaurant by eight o’clock in the morning, eating hotcakes and discussing politics. Happily, Federico Silva had no children to be embarrassed by being wealthy, or to shame him for lying in bed till noon, waiting for his valet and cook, Dondé, to bring him his breakfast so he could drink his coffee and read the newspapers with tranquillity, shave and dress with calm.

Through the years he’d saved the clothes he’d worn as a young man, and when Doña Felícitas died he gathered up her extraordinary wardrobe and arranged it in several closets, one corresponding to the styles that predated the First World War, another for the twenties, and a third for the hodgepodge style she’d dreamed up in the thirties and then affected until her death: colored stockings, silver shoes, boas of shrieking scarlet, long skirts of mauve silk, décolleté blouses, thousands of necklaces, garden-party hats, and pearl chokers.

Every day he walked to the Bellinghausen on Londres Street, where the same corner table had been reserved for him since the era of the hand-tailored suits he wore. There he ate alone, dignified, reserved, nodding to passing acquaintances, picking up the checks of unaccompanied ladies known to him or his mother, none of this backslapping for him, no vulgarity, shouting, What’s new! What-a-sight-for-sore-eyes! or You’ve-made-my-day! He detested familiarity. An almost tangible aura of privacy surrounded his small, dark, scrupulous person. Let no one attempt to penetrate it.

His familiarity was reserved for the contents of his house. Every evening he took delight in looking at, admiring, touching, stroking, sometimes even caressing his possessions, the Tiffany lamps and ashtrays, the Lalique figurines and frames. These things gave him particular satisfaction, but he enjoyed equally a whole room of Art Deco furniture, round mirrors on silvered boudoir tables, tall lamps of tubular aluminum, a bed with a headboard of pale burnished metal, an entirely white bedroom: satin and silk, a white telephone, a polar-bear skin, walls lacquered a pale ivory.