Carlos Fuentes - Adam in Eden

“Why so secretive?” I ask myself and, to my surprise, say out loud.

L stares at me dumbfounded. I beg L not to repeat my phrase so we don’t get back to the Rorschach test that this cursed encounter has become.

Curs-èd. Curs-ing. Un-helpful. What is the matter with me? Why did I need to announce to L that we had to “take a break for a while”? Have my circumstances rendered me an idiot? Why am I saying (L is right) these stupid things ? Has Mr. Góngora with his borrowed haircut won the match before the game has even begun?

Am I so meek? Such a fool?

I was about to take it all back, to say, “No L, it’s a joke, everything’s just like it was before, nothing’s happened, just like before, okay?”

But I can’t. Nobody can take back an idiotic statement that was supposed to be honest.

I don’t understand what has happened. I don’t know why I have come to say to L: “We need to take a break for a while.”

I forgot that for a lover the phrase a break elides the preposition up , that a while means while we’re alive : I won’t be seeing you anymore because we’re breaking up. The lover cannot take this injunction as anything other than a deadly serious matter. I only wanted to shelter L from an attack on me, an exercise of Góngora’s power that might have left L collateral damage. I understand this too late. I’ve already put my foot in my mouth.

L’s words flow like a cascade of bile.

“For a while , you say? Liar. Tell the truth. Forever .

“Forever? No problem. I have no shortage of men.

“No shortage. Take the list of phone numbers. Call them, asshole. Go on, you can set up my dates.

“My dates? You’re so naïve. Take a look at my calendar so that you can see how I manage my time when you’re not with me.

“With me. Do you think that while you’re in your office or celebrating a birthday with your stupid family, I sit around watching Luismi concerts?

“Luismi? Does Luismi make you jealous, you poor devil? Are you jealous of a handsome singer who is admired by thousands of us human beings but with whom we thousands would never in a million years have any contact?

“Con-tact, tact. You can achieve anything with tact. What went wrong with you, Adam? How can you treat me like this? You and I, we’re not like that.”

The only sentence L said was, “You and I, we’re not like that.” The rest of the argument I invent, I imagine, because L’s reaction is so unexpected to a suggestion that, seen in hindsight, was absolute assholishness on my part.

“You have to understand, we need to take a break for a while.”

I told L because we tell each other everything. And now I realize that everything we say to each other is not only pleasant , but shareable . That’s it: L and I share everything, and an important aspect of the “society” we’ve created, is that we tell each other everything, but everything that we tell each other brings us closer together.

Only today, only this time, faced for the first time with L’s anger, I realize the truth.

I tell L everything : my business, my family, Abelardo left, Góngora showed up, and so on.

Everything .

And L tells me nothing .

What do I know about L?

Nothing .

Absolutely nothing .

L lives in the present and is my present .

L has never told me: I was born in this place , my parents were such and such . . or I do this and that all day when you’re not around, aside from watching TV and going to concerts at the National Auditorium.

I slam on my mental brakes.

And I? Have I told L that I was born in this place , my parents were such and such , where and how I grew up?

I haven’t, have I?

In a certain sense, we’re in the same position.

I know nothing about L’s past. L knows nothing of mine.

Is that why we get along so well? Because we live only in the present, for the present? Because L knows everything I do today, and I know everything that L does at the same time?

Lovers of the present moment.

Lovers without a past.

Lovers who tell each other everything.

Only that until today, everything was the usual . There was nothing new. My business operates with certain special advantages, not of particularly fair- or free-market natures. In general, few fortunes grow, most people keep living in poverty, it’s God’s Law, and we’ll always have our unanimous devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe, who transcends ideologies and political parties, class distinctions, and bank accounts (or lack thereof).

My family is what it is, nothing new about that. The King of Bakery. The Queen of Spring. And what else? What do I know about L’s past tense? What does L know about Adam’s past perfect? Nothing, we choose the happiness of the present tense. We reject the traps of biography, psychoanalysis, gossip, and “what will people think.” Our relationship goes back a long time, but it always begins now , in the moment. .

But suddenly Abelardo runs away from The King of Bakery’s house to become a “writer.” And that damn Adam Góngora invades my life, poses riddles to me, conspires behind my back (his visit to my office confirmed this), and, to top it all off, plays footsie with my wife, Doña Priscila, the Queen of Carnival!

I reproach myself for my stupidity. This is not me. Everything that’s happened has made me lose my bearings. I must recover control of the situation. The events at the office (Góngora’s visit) and at home (Abelardo ran off, Priscila plays footsie with a police-executioner, an ill-mannered tyrant who speaks with his mouth full and lets food dribble down his chin) have diverted me from the road I follow, from the person I am. And from my privileged relationship with L, whom I’ve contaminated with my problems at home and at work, goddamn it!

I have to get myself together.

And why do my associates go around in dark sunglasses anyway?

“I am not about to let your persona consume mine,” L says, cold as a Kelvinator. “I have my own life. Don’t you try to change my personality. I always run from lovers who try to impose their will on me. Don’t you even try it, you son of a bitch.”

“There’s no need to explain the changes in our personalities aloud,” I argue, as I’m leaving.

Then L says something terrible. “If I kill you it’s because I love you. And if I don’t kill you, it’s because I fear you.”

And even though I am dressed, L gazes at my belly with fear, and, in an uncharacteristic way, with a lowered head, says: “Don’t think that your personality is going to consume mine. I am not your consommé Adam. I can only be your rib.”

Abelardo requests an appointment. At my office? No way, I answer, nobody from my family may enter the place where I work. That’s the fundamental law of the well-organized life: separation of home and office.

At The Danube restaurant on Republic of Uruguay Street, we will eat shellfish, we will drink a nice bottle of Undurraga, and nobody will bother us now that the restaurant has been divided into small rooms to accommodate its Chinese clientele.

My brother-in-law tells me his troubles. He expresses them with a sensibility so poetic that I ask myself again, how did this orchid bloom in the midst of that cactus field? After having attended the Faculty of Arts and Ignacio Braniff ’s lectures, he fled the writer’s tyrannical and closed circle and found asylum with Rodrigo Pola in the soap-opera universe. But that intellectual exile, he tells me, did not fill the great void in his heart. His heartache had begun at the Faculty, where the women surrounding the philosopher belonged to the Freudian Generation: they all wanted to match their lives with the experience of the psychiatrist’s sofa, and their conversation aspired to the level of a psychoanalytic treatise; everything that wasn’t psychoanalysis was banality, and the man who didn’t take such monomaniacal anxiety seriously would not only be considered frivolous, but suspected of being — the horror — good in bed. They’d have nothing to do with virility. They feared being dominated. They wanted to tame the impotent man, treating him with enormous affection, searching for the secret reasons of his sexual malfunction: Father? Mother? Oedipus? King Laius? Don’t lay us, Eddypus, Oedi Allan Poe? Blame it on the raven or being prematurely buried in the wrong coffin — or did the black cat choose to be sealed in the wall?