Carlos Fuentes - Burnt Water

Two events had marked his life as a young man. A trip to Hollywood, when the Mexican consul in Los Angeles had arranged a visit to the set of Dinner at Eight, where he’d been shown Jean Harlow’s white bedroom and even seen the actress from a distance: a platinum dream. And in Eden Roc he’d met Cole Porter, who’d just composed “Just One of Those Things,” and Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, who was writing Tender Is the Night. He’d had his picture taken with Porter that summer on the Riviera, but not with the Fitzgeralds. A photograph with a box camera that didn’t need a flash. And in his room in the Hotel Negresco he’d had an adventure with a naked woman in the darkness. Neither knew who the other was. Suddenly the woman had been illuminated by moonlight as bright as day, as if the moon were the sun, a prurient, blinding spotlight stripped of the fig-leaf effect of the silver screen.

The visit to the Côte d’Azur was a constant topic of nostalgic reminiscences during the Saturday-afternoon reunions. Federico was a skilled Mah-Jongg player, and three of the habitual players, María de los Angeles, Perico, and the Marqués, had been with him that summer. It had all been memorable but that one event, the incident of the blond girl who resembled Jean Harlow. If one of the friends felt that another was about to venture into that forbidden territory, he warned him with a heavily charged look. Then everybody changed the subject, avoided talking about the past, and turned to their usual discussions of family and money.

“The two cannot be separated,” Federico said as they played. “And as I have no immediate family, when I’m gone my money will be dispersed among distant branches of the family. Amusing, isn’t it?”

He apologized for talking about death. But not about money. Each of them had had the good fortune to appropriate a parcel of the wealth of Mexico at an opportune time — mines, forests, land, cattle, farms — and the luck to convert it quickly, before it had passed out of their hands, into the one secure investment: Mexico City real estate.

Half daydreaming, Federico Silva thought about the houses that so punctually produced his rents, the old colonial palaces on Tacuba, Guatemala, and La Moneda Streets. He’d never visited them. He was totally ignorant about the people who lived there. Perhaps one day he would ask one of his rent collectors to tell him who lived in the old palaces. What were the people like? Did they realize they were living in the noblest mansions of Mexico?

He would never invest in a new building like those that had blocked out his sun and made his house list to one side. That much he’d sworn to himself. Smiling, he repeated his oath as they walked to the dining table that Mah-Jongg Saturday in his home. Everyone knew that to be received by Federico Silva was a very special honor. Only he entertained with such detail, the seating plan in a red leather holder, the places set in accord to the strictest protocol — rank, age, former posts — and the card with the name of each guest at its precise place, the menu written out in the host’s own hand, Dondé’s impeccable service at the table.

That night as he glanced around the table, counting the absent, the friends who had preceded him in death, there was scarcely a flicker of expression on Federico Silva’s Oriental mask. He rubbed his tiny porcelain Mandarin hands together: ah, there was no protocol as implacable as death, no priority more strict than that of the tomb. High overhead, the Lalique chandelier shed a vertical beam, perversely illuminating the Goyaesque faces of his table companions, the flesh of curdled custard, the deep fissures at the corners of the mouths, the hollow eyes of his friends.

Whatever became of the nude blond girl of that night in my room in the Hotel Negresco?

A Mayan profile thrust between Federico Silva and the lady seated at his right, his friend María de los Angeles Negrete, as Dondé began to serve the soup. The bridge of Dondé’s nose began in the middle of his forehead and his tiny eyes were crossed.

“Isn’t it extraordinary,” Federico Silva commented in French. “Do you realize that this type of profile and crossed eyes was a mark of physical beauty among the Mayas? To achieve it they bound the infants’ heads when they were born and forced them to follow the pendulum motion of a marble suspended on a thread. How is it possible that centuries later those artificially imposed characteristics continue to be transmitted?”

“It’s like inheriting a wig and false teeth.” María de los Angeles whinnied like a mare.

Dondé’s profile between the host and his guest, his arm holding the soup tureen, the brimming soup ladle, the unexpected offense of Dondé’s sweat, he’d warned him for the last time, bathe after you finish in the kitchen and before you begin to serve, sometimes it isn’t possible, señor, there isn’t enough time, señor.

“Yours, or my mother’s, María de los Angeles?”

“What, Federico?”

“The wig. The teeth.”

Someone jarred the ladle, Federico Silva, Dondé, or María de los Angeles, who knows, but steaming chickpea soup disappeared into the woman’s bodice, screams, how could that have happened, Dondé, I’m sorry, señor. I swear, I didn’t do it, ay! the curds-and-whey breasts of María de los Angeles, ay! the scalded tits, go take a bath, Dondé, you offend me, Dondé, my mother’s wig and false teeth, the naked blonde, Nice …

He awakened with a fearful start, the anguish of a desperate effort to remember what he’d just dreamed, the certainty he would never recapture it, another dream lost forever. Drunk with sadness, he put on his Chinese dressing gown and walked out on the balcony.

He breathed deeply. He sniffed in vain for odors of the morning to come. The mud of the Aztec lake, the foam of the Indian night. Impossible. Like his dreams, the lost perfumes refused to return.

“Is anything the matter, señor?”

“No, Dondé.”

“I heard the señor call out.”

“It was nothing. Go back to sleep, Dondé.”

“Whatever you say, señor.”

“Good night, Dondé.”

“Good night, señor.”

III

“As long as I’ve known you, you’ve been a real stickler about what you wear, Federico.”

He’d never forgiven his old friend María de los Angeles, who had once made fun of him by addressing him as Monsieur Verdoux. Maybe there was something Chaplinesque in antiquated elegance, but only when it disguised a diminishing fortune. And Federico Silva, as everyone knew, was not down on his luck. It was just that, like every person of true taste, he had the good sense to choose things that lasted. A pair of shoes, or a house.

“Save electricity. Go to bed early.”

He would never, for example, wear spats and carry a cane at the same time. In his daily stroll down Córdoba Street to the Bellinghausen restaurant, he was careful to offset the showy effect of a brick-colored jacket with a Buster Brown belt he’d had made in 1933 by draping a nondescript raincoat over his arm with studied insouciance. And only on the infrequent days when it was really cold did he wear the derby, the black overcoat and white muffler. He was well aware that behind his back his friends whispered that the way he hung on to his clothes was really the most humiliating proof of dependence. With what Doña Felícitas had put him through, he had to make things last twenty or thirty years.

“Save electricity. Go to bed early.”

But why after Doña Felícitas’s death did he continue to wear the same old outfits? That was something they’d never asked him, now that he’d inherited the fortune. You could say that Doña Felícitas had deformed him, and he had turned necessity into a virtue. No, that wasn’t it. His mother only pretended to be stingy. It all began with that sacred sentence — save electricity, go to bed early — said as if it were a sarcastic joke one night when she wanted to conceal her real intent, to save face, to pretend she didn’t know her son was grown up, that he went out at night without asking her permission, that he dared leave her by herself.