Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

“It’s a miracle, Manuel!”

“Chance?”

“Whatever you call it. How wonderful!”

She made a coquettish gesture with her hand, gently patting the reclining chair next to hers and urging Manuel to sit down.

Manuel was afraid of one thing. That information about the present — the current life of a man and a woman in their sixties — would displace the delicious return to his early youth, the young love they both enjoyed so much. He, Manuel. She, Lucila.

“Is it really you, Manolo?”

“Yes, Lucila. Look, touch my hand. Don’t you recognize it?”

She denied it, smiling.

“That doesn’t change. The palm of the hand,” he insisted.

“Ah yes, the lifeline. They say it gets shorter with age.”

“No, it gets deeper.”

“Manuel, Manuel, what a surprise.”

“Like before, like Acapulco in 1949.”

She laughed. She brought a finger to her lips and widened her eyes in feigned alarm.

He laughed. “All right, Acapulco always.”

He felt he had a right to remember, and he asked her to join him. The Adriatic, a calm, high-colored sea, also offered an unrepeatable sky this morning. “Just think, I heard you before I knew you.”

“And when was that?”

“During the holidays in ’49. I was in the room next to yours at the Hotel Anáhuac. I heard you laugh. Well, what they call ‘giggle’ in English, that fresh, youthful, ingenuous laugh. .”

“Deceptive,” Lucila said with a smile, raising an eyebrow mischievously.

But the meeting that same night at the cocktail party was no deception. He saw her approach, ethereal, radiant, with those tones of gold and copper that illuminated her from head to toe, a pretty girl, he saw her come in and said, “That can only be her, the girl in the next room,” and he went up to her and introduced himself.

“Manuel Toledano. Your neighbor, Señorita.”

“That’s too bad.”

He asked why, disconcerted.

“Yes,” the girl went on. “Walls separate us.”

They didn’t separate again during that unforgettable December in the year 1949 that was prolonged, following the festival of San Silvestre, in the January vacation and the tender, astonishing repetition of the first meeting, at the cocktail party, only you and I talked to each other looked at each other the others at the party didn’t exist they were talking nonsense from the first moment only you and I were there Lucila and Manuel Lucy and Manolo.

The days were long. The nights too short.

“We danced on the floor of La Perla, do you remember?”

“Do you remember the music they were playing?”

“I’m taking the tropical way. .”

“The night restless, unquiet. .”

“In the breeze that comes from the sea. .”

“No, you’re wrong. First it says ‘With its perfume of dampness. .’ ”

They both laughed.

“How vulgar,” said Lucila.

A small Acapulco, adolescent like them, half grown, always divided between hills and beach, poor and rich, native and tourist, still possessed, Acapulco, of a clean sea and clear nights, families that loved one another, and first courtships: warm, gentle water at Caleta and Caletilla, wild water at Revolcadero, pounding waves at the Playa de Hornos, silent waves at Puerto Marqués, stone cliffs at La Quebrada, recently opened hotels — Las Américas, Club de Pesca — and very old hotels — La Marina, La Quebrada — but sand castles, all of them.

“Boleros let us dance very close together.”

“I remember.”

“In the breeze that comes from the sea. .”

“We hear the sound of a song. .”

A vacation spot both daring and tranquil, wavering between its humble past and probable heavenly future. There already vibrated in the air at the airport another Acapulco of big planes, big millionaires, big celebrities. In 1949, not yet. Though the domestic calm of that time could not hide a social chasm deeper than the ravine of La Quebrada itself.

“I remember,” Manuel said with a smile.

“It’s true,” Lucy said.

The perfume of two bodies in bloom. The smell of the Acapulco sun. Manuel a contagious perspiration. Lucila a sweet perspiration. Both transformed by the brand-new experience of young love. . A day when Lucy is sometimes with us and sometimes Manolo.

The perfect symmetry of the day and of life during a month’s vacation in Acapulco.

They spoke with preserved emotion, separated from the world by the voyage and joined to the earth by shared memory. Acapulco during the vacation of 1949. Acapulco is the awakening of the new decade of the fifties. A time of peace, illusion, confidence. And the two of them, Lucila and Manuel, embracing at the center of the world. What did they say to each other?

“I don’t remember. Do you?”

“What two puppies say to each other.” Manuel laughed. “What they do. .”

“You know I was never happier in my life, Manolo.”

“Neither was I.”

“It’s wonderful that in five weeks you can live more than in fifty years. . Forgive my frankness. Age authorizes what it was once forbidden to say.”

Detailed memories tumbled out, the beaches back then, Caleta during the day, Hornos at dusk, the children playing in the sand, the fathers walking along the sea wearing long trousers and short-sleeved shirts, the mothers in flowered dresses and straw hats, never in bathing suits, the fathers vigilant, watching the adolescents moving away from the beach, swimming to Roqueta Island where paternal glances did not reach where young love could ally itself with the one visible love young love in heat surrender of the soul more than of the body but senseless uncontrollable pounding of the pulse the flesh the look of closed eyes — do you remember Lucy do you remember Manolo? — the touch uncertain more than experienced and sensual exploratory and auroral, Lucy, Manolo, while from Caleta the fathers look anxiously toward the island and ask only will they be back in time for lunch? and the mothers will open their parasols even wider and the fathers will wave their panama hats asking them to come back come back it’s time. .

“Was it like that, Manolo?”

“I don’t know. The first meeting is always a day without memory.”

“There were many days, a love that seemed very long to me, very long. .”

“No, remember it as a single day, the day we met.”

Lucila was about to take Manuel’s hand. She stopped herself. She said only: “What long fingers. I think that’s what I remember best. What I liked most about you. Your long fingers.”

She stared at him with a cruel gleam that took him by surprise. “So much asking myself, Whatever happened to him? Is he happy, unlucky, poor, rich?” She smiled. “And I had only one certainty left. Manuel has very slender, very long, very lovable fingers. . Tell me, were we so inexperienced back then?”

He returned her smile. “You know that in czarist Russia, couples older than fifty needed their children’s permission to marry.”

She bowed her head. “Forty years later and you still reproach me?”

No, Manuel denied it, no.

“You know I died for you?”

“Why didn’t you tell me so then?”

She didn’t respond directly. She fanned herself wearily, not looking at him. “Perfection is what they expected of me.” She let the fan fall on her lap, next to the fashion magazine. “Who’s perfect? Not even those who demand it of you.”

“You hurt me very much, Lucila.”

“Imagine how hard it was for me to tell you, ‘Go, I don’t love you anymore.’ ”

“Is that what your parents asked you to do?”

She was perturbed. “I had to tell you that so you’d go away, so you wouldn’t love me anymore.”

“No, tell me really, did you believe it?”