Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

“What do you think?” She raised her voice without intending to.

“Did they ask you to?”

“Yes, but that wasn’t the reason I turned you down.”

Manuel kept to himself what he knew. Lucila was supposed to marry a rich boy from high society. Manuel was “decent people”—that was what it was called — but with no sizable bank account. That was the real reason, a categorical order, break off with that pauper, this Manuel can’t give you the life you deserve, romantic love ends, you get older, and what you want is security, comfort, a chauffeur, a house in Las Lomas, vacations in Europe, shopping in Houston, Texas.

“Then what was it?”

She sat erect, proud. “ ‘Go. I don’t love you.’ ” She looked straight at him. “I thought I’d keep you that way.”

“I want to understand you. .” Manuel murmured.

Lucila lowered her eyes. “Besides, that excited me. Letting you go. .”

“Like a servant.”

“Yes. And getting excited. To see if you rebelled and refused to believe what I said and pushed me against the wall. .”

“It was your parents’ decision.”

“. . and carried me off, I don’t know, kidnapped me, would not be defeated. . It was my decision. It was my hope.”

Waiters served consommé and biscuits. Manuel sat thinking, self-absorbed and struggling against that undesirable thought: seeing in the separation of two young sweethearts only an episode in the autobiography of an egotist. There had to be something more. He sipped the consommé.

“We made a date, remember?” said Manuel.

“And kept postponing it,” said Lucila.

“How could we lose hope?”

“So much wondering: Whatever happened to him? So many selfrecriminations: Why did I let him go? I wasn’t happy with the husband they forced on me. I was happy with you, Manuel.”

They looked at each other. Two old people. Two old people remembering distant times. Did they both think that when all was said and done, none of it had happened? Or that, given the fact of chance, it could have occurred in very different ways? Looking at each other now as they never had when nostalgia was exiled by presence, both of them thought that if none of it had happened yesterday, it was happening now, and only in this way would they be able to remember tomorrow. It would be an unrepeatable moment in their lives. With its actuality, it would supplant all nostalgia for the past. Perhaps all yearning for the future.

“The sweet sorrow of separation. Who said that?” he murmured.

“The sorrow, the sorrow of losing you,” she said very quietly. “And the obligation to hide my feelings. . Do you know I was dying for you?”

“But why didn’t you tell me so back then?”

Lucila abruptly changed the subject. No, her marriage hadn’t been happy. Though she was, because she had three children. All girls. She smiled. And he? No, he was a die-hard bachelor.

“It’s never too late,” Lucila said with a smile.

He returned the smile. “At the age of sixty, it’s better to marry for the fourth time, not the first.”

She was about to laugh. She restrained herself. There was a superficial but respectable sadness in his words. A sentimentality necessary to both their current lives. Still, Lucila noticed a certain coldness in him as soon as they moved from the evocation of their youth to the destiny of their maturity.

“How was it for you, Lucila?”

“I lived surrounded by people whose company was preferable to their intelligence.”

“Dispassionate people.”

“Yes, decent people. Sometimes I’m grateful not to be young anymore.”

“Why?”

“I don’t have to seduce anymore. And you?”

“Just the opposite. Being an old man means being obliged to seduce.”

“What’s an old bachelor looking for?” Lucila took up the subject again in a playful voice.

“A quiet place to work.”

“Did you find it?”

“I don’t know. I think so. I have no family obligations. I can travel.”

He decided not to say where. He was afraid of compromising this miraculous encounter. Opening the door once more to postponed assignations, as if they were twenty years old again and about to break off their relationship because of external pressures. The imposition of wills that did not understand the love of two young people without the experience to live their lives.

Who understood? Those ignorant of the miracle of lovers who weren’t strangers when they met. Guessed at. Perhaps desired with no name or profile yet. For them, the first time was already the next occasion.

“I imagine you don’t live in Mexico City.”

“No. I go back to Mexico City every once in a while.”

“Why?”

“Before, because of a nostalgia for tranquility. Unhurried schedules. Even slower meals. Everything was so human then. Now I go back because I fear death.”

“What?”

“Yes. I don’t want to die without seeing Mexico City one last time.”

“But these days the city is very unsafe. It’s hostile.”

He smiled. “Not for a romantic, damaged man like—” He stopped and abruptly changed the subject and his tone. “Let me tell you that I foresaw your love. I had always carried it inside me.” He stopped and looked into her eyes. “How could I renounce what already existed before I even saw you? Admitting it could endure only when I lost you?” He stopped on the brink of what he despised most. Self-pity. Perhaps she would think what he wasn’t saying. Damaged by love for the wrong woman and not able to avoid. .

“Loving her. .”

“What?”

“Look at the sea.” He pointed. “Don’t you see some nuns swimming fully dressed?”

Finally, she laughed. “You always amused me, Manuel.”

“I lost the compass. Without you, I had to reorient my entire life.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t even think it.”

“No. And you?”

“I live in New York. Mexico City is too unsafe. They kidnapped the husband of one of my daughters. They killed him. We paid the ransom. Even so, they killed him. My other two daughters are still in the capital because their husbands work there, with bulletproof windows in their cars and armies of bodyguards. I need them. Especially my grandchildren. I visit them. They visit me.” She laughed softly. “Oh, Manuel.”

She sobbed. He embraced her. Between sobs, she said, “I’ve spent years looking sideways at what was approaching and not daring to look at it straight on, not daring to look at what was approaching, now I think it was always you, like a phantom of my youth, why does everything we shouldn’t do exclude exceptions while what we like to do is always exceptional?”

“Not me,” he replied with a kind of growing certainty. “I go on hoping. I go on hearing that noise at my back. I’m not sure about anything. Even before I guessed at you in the next room in Acapulco, I had always carried the anticipated delight of you deep inside me. The only thing needed to dislodge the phantom was you.”

He embraced her tightly. He placed his lips on her temple. “How do you want me to renounce something that has always existed? By admitting it could endure only after you left me?”

He released her, and for a moment both sat looking at the sea, she thinking that there is nothing more melancholy than disillusioned youthful passion, he thinking that when we sacrifice immediate emotion, we gain the serenity of being remote, both of them wondering, without daring to say so, if they had lived nothing but an adolescent fantasy or an act indispensable for growth.

“How good that we met,” Lucila insisted at last with a sincerity she didn’t want. “Each of us could have died without seeing the other again, do you realize that? You know”—her voice modulated—“sometimes I’ve thought with joy and sorrow, both things, about everything we could have done together, you know, read, talk, think. . Go to the movies together, to a restaurant. .”