Carlos Fuentes - Burnt Water

“If I support you, the least I can expect is that you won’t leave me here all alone, Feddie. I could die at any moment, Feddie. I know Dondé’s here, but I am not thrilled at the idea of dying in the arms of a servant. Very well, Feddie. I suppose it must be, as you say, a very, very important engagement to cause you to abandon your own mother. Abandon, yes, that’s the word. I pray to God you make up for the hurt you’ve caused me, Feddie. You know how. You promised me this year you’d follow Father Tellez’s spiritual exercises. Please do that little favor for me, Feddie. I’m going to hang up now. I’m feeling very tired.”

She replaced the white receiver. Sitting in the bed with the burnished metal headboard, surrounded with white cushions, covered with white furs, a great ancient doll, a milk-white Punchinella, lavishing powder on a floury face in which her blazing eyes, orange mouth, and red cheeks were obscene scars, flourishing with panache the white puff, enveloping herself in a choking, perfumed cloud of rice powder and aromatic talcum, her bare skull protected by a white silk cap. At night the wig of tight, shiny black curls reposed on a cotton-stuffed head on the silver boudoir table, like the wigs of ancient queens.

Sometimes Federico Silva liked to interject a touch of the fantastic into the Saturday conversations. Nothing more satisfying than an appreciative audience, and inevitably it was easy to frighten María de los Angeles. Federico Silva found this flattering. María de los Angeles was older than he, and he’d been in love with her as a boy; he’d wept when the precious little sixteen-year-old had chosen to go to the Country Club ball with older boys, not with him, the devoted little friend, the humble admirer of her blond perfection, her rose-colored skin, the filmy tulle and silken ribbons that veiled and encircled her desirable flesh. Oh, beautiful María de los Angeles. Now she looked like Goya’s Queen María Luisa. He realized that in frightening her Federico Silva was still paying homage, just as he had at fifteen. But was the only possible homage gooseflesh?

“Supposedly, the guillotine was invented to spare the victim pain, you see. But the result was precisely the opposite. The speed of the execution actually prolongs the victim’s agony. Neither the head nor the body has time to adjust. They feel they are still joined together, and the awareness that they are not takes several seconds to be comprehended. For the victim those seconds are centuries.”

Did she understand? this long-toothed woman with the horse laugh and curds-and-whey breasts; the cruel overhead light from the Lalique chandelier could favor only a Marlene Dietrich, exaggerated shadows, funereal hollows, hallucinatory mystery. Beheaded by light.

“Without a head the body continues to move, the nervous system continues to function, the arms jerk and the hands implore. And the severed head, stimulated by a rush of blood to the brain, experiences extreme lucidity. The bulging eyes stare at the executioner. The accelerated tongue curses, remembers, denies. And the teeth clamp ferociously on the basket. Every basket at the foot of a guillotine looks as if it had been gnawed by an army of rats.”

María de los Angeles exhaled a swooning sigh; the Marqués de Casa Cobos felt her pulse, Perico Arauz offered her a handkerchief dampened in cologne water. At two in the morning, after everyone had left, Federico Silva walked out onto his bedroom balcony wondering whose would be the next corpse, whose the next death, that would allow him to reclaim a bit more of his memories. One could also be a landlord of memory, but the only way to collect that rent was through another’s death. What memories would his own death unleash? Who would remember him? He closed the French windows of his balcony and lay down on the white bed that had been his mother’s. He tried to go to sleep by counting the people who would remember him. They might be the “best” people, but they were very few.

After the death of Doña Felícitas, Federico Silva began to worry about his own death. He instructed Dondé: “When you discover my body, before you notify anybody, put this record on the record player.”

“Yes, señor.”

“Look at it carefully. No mistakes, I’m putting it right on top.”

“Don’t worry, señor.”

“And open this book on the table beside my bed.”

“As you wish, señor.”

He wanted to be found to the strains of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, with Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood open beside him. This was the least elaborate of his fantasies about his death. He decided to write four letters. In one he would describe himself as a suicide; in another, as a man condemned to death; in the third, as incurably ill; and in the fourth, as a victim of a human or natural disaster. This was the letter that presented the greatest difficulties. How could he synchronize the necessary three factors: his death, mailing the letter, and the disaster, an earthquake in Sicily, a hurricane in Key West, a volcanic eruption in Martinique, an air crash in…? He could send the other three letters to people in places scattered around the world asking them please to mail the letters written and signed by him and addressed to his friends as soon as they learned of his death: the suicide letter to María de los Angeles, the condemned-man letter to Perico Arauz, and the incurable-illness missive to the Marqués de Casa Cobos. Confusion. Uncertainty. Eternal doubt. The man about whose body we’ve gathered, the man we are burying, was he actually our friend Federico Silva?

Nevertheless, the predictable confusion and uncertainty of his friends were as nothing compared to his own. As he reread the three letters, Federico realized that he knew whom to send them to, but no one who would do him the favor of mailing them. He had never again traveled abroad following that trip to the Côte d’Azur. Cole Porter had died smiling, the Fitzgeralds and Jean Harlow, weeping. To whom would he send the letters? In his mind’s eye he saw his bathing-suited young friends, Perico, the Marqués, and María de los Angeles, in Eden Roc forty years ago. Where was the girl now who looked like Jean Harlow? She was his only secret ally. In death she could atone for the pain and humiliation she had caused him in life.

“And who the hell are you?”

“I myself don’t know as I look at you.”

“Sorry! I’m in the wrong room.”

“No. Don’t go. I don’t know who you are.”

“Let me go. Let me go or I’ll scream.”

“Please…”

“Let me go. Not even if you were the last man on earth. Filthy Chink!”

The last man. Carefully, he folded the letters before replacing them in their envelopes. A heavy hand fell on his fragile shoulder: a clatter of bracelets and chains, metal striking against metal.

“What’s in the envelopes, old man? Your dough?”

“Is it him?”

“Sure it’s him. He goes by the snack bar every day.”

“I didn’t recognize him in his darling Fu Manchu bathrobe.”

“You’d know him with his cane.”

“Or the cute little bibs over his shoes. Shit!”

“Hey, old man, don’t get nervous. These are my buddies, the Barber, and Pocahontas. They call me Artist, at your service. We won’t hurt you, I promise.”

“What do you people want?”

“Only a lot of stuff you don’t need.”

“How did you get in here?”

“Ask the little fruit when he wakes up.”

“What ‘little fruit’?”

“The one who runs your errands.”

“We put him out for a while. Like a light.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint you. I don’t keep any money in the house.”

“I told you, we didn’t come for your fucking money. Screw the money, old man.”