Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

“All my uncle Agustín’s friends have died. Only you two are left from that time, Guy, José Luis, my dears. You are my seductive perfumes.”

He said it in so childlike and lovable a manner. With his voice and manners, he made you forgive his somewhat outlandish appearance of a fat boy who never finished growing. The baby fat on his cheeks swayed from side to side with the emphatic movement of his pink cherub’s lips, though the fat seraph was contradicted by narrow myopic eyes behind a pair of small eyeglasses in the style of Schubert that, Curly dixit, would eventually replace the oversize aviator’s glasses favored by the deplorable decade of miniskirts, mammoth belts, and bell-bottom trousers.

Curly’s entire spherical existence was crowned by a mass of curls, once blond but now streaked with gray, that resembled the inspired wig of the great Harpo Marx. But if the latter was famously mute, Curly talked incessantly, wittily, and freely. It charmed my friends that when he was introduced, Curly said to them:

“I am not impartial, don’t believe that even for a minute. You two are my classics. And I need a ‘classic’ in order to live and die. I think you” (he looked at them innocently) “are the culmination of the race. You are from mon genre, if such a thing can be repeated. No, seriously. Everything would be perfect if we were immortal. Since we aren’t, let us at least be unending. I mean, let us ask: Why do they tolerate us homos? Answer: in order not to discriminate against us. If we accept this truth, let us admit its consequences. I devote myself only to looking for opportunities that ‘normality’ would deny me.”

And after a long sigh:

“Sometimes I find them, other times no. We are all like submarines that cut through posh marinas checking on whether the yachts have anchors, how many barnacles are clinging to them, if the ship is old or new. Then — I warn you —I attack. I attack in earnest. With torpedoes. I warn you so that no one can call it a deception. If I suspect a couple isn’t getting along, I am going to try to seduce them. .”

Guy and José Luis remarked that Curly was an amiable buffoon, reminiscent of the most notable excesses of another time. Nowadays singular personalities were lost in the sulfurous urban magma, groups disintegrated, and the only recourse was to search the haystack for the brilliant needle of the brilliant eccentricity that once was.

“Do you realize that we’re beginning to talk like a couple of doddering old men?” asked Guy.

José Luis didn’t reveal either melancholy or fatalism. “That’s why we like Curly. He’s young, but he’s in sync with us.”

“We didn’t need clowns before,” Guy said with a frown.

“No, but only because everybody was comical except you and me.”

“Do you feel that self-congratulatory about our behavior?”

“ ‘Self-congratulatory’ isn’t the word. Don’t be pedantic. Perhaps serious, serious in the midst of the circus. ‘Serious’ is the word. We never deceive, and we don’t allow ourselves to be deceived. If you take a good look at our life, Guy, you’ll admit that we were observers but never full participants.”

“You mean we never allowed our private relationship to be confused with our social life?”

“Something better. We were witnesses in order to survive.”

“Do you think we’ve survived? As measured by what?”

“As measured by what we proposed being. A faithful couple, Guy. I believe we both know very well that we’ve never failed in our loyalty. Promiscuity was all around us. We never fell into it.”

“Don’t be so sure,” joked Guy. “There’s still time.”

On the verge of turning sixty, Guy and José Luis had solidified their personal relationship as well as their professional lives and their dealings — increasingly rare — with a society in which they no longer recognized themselves. Rises and falls were too abrupt. Famous names turned infamous. Anonymous people achieved their fifteen minutes of Warholian fame before somersaulting and disappearing. The hateful norms of a hypocritical Catholic morality had disappeared only to be replaced by a no less hypocritical cult of immorality: pleasure, money, consumption hailed as a proof of freedom, and sophisticated indifference behind a mask of sincerity even in those who did not practice it but felt compelled to celebrate it. There were no well-rooted islands left. Everything was like a vast, drifting political and social Xochi-milco crossed by boats with names written in flowers that withered from one day to the next. The men in power changed. The vices of power remained.

Curly, then, was an island of cheer as well as nostalgia for a lost world: the world of Guy’s and José Luis’s youth. He brought them the private pleasure of an audacious joke, a caricatured excess, which the expectant nature of the Furlong — Palma couple demanded, almost as if it were an acquired right. Curly was their show.

Of course the plump young man surpassed himself in word and deed. That is, he alone took the place of several generations from their social past. It was part of his charm. It was inevitable. He was, for Guy and José Luis, a reminiscence. Like a minor Oscar Wilde, Curly fired off paradoxes and bons mots left and right.

“Life would be perfect if I were immortal.”

“Promiscuity is taking pleasure in yourself.”

“Sex doesn’t bring happiness, but it does calm the nerves.”

“Amity is so drunk she’s even drinking from the vases.”

“Nothing’s as exciting as exposing yourself to a man in church.”

“The problem with Rudy is that he’s orthopedic.”

“Gustavito has a bore inside his head.”

These malicious witticisms were received with laughter, Guy’s happier than that of José Luis, who — as he confessed to his lover — was beginning to weary of Curly’s verbal excesses.

“He can be very impertinent. That isn’t our style.”

“Don’t pay attention to him, José Luis. Impertinence only hides his vacuousness. Did you expect profundity from a boy like that?”

“Not profundity. Not impertinence, either.”

“Let it pass. Who would replace this blessed Rigoletto fallen from heaven?”

“Or come up from a sulfurous pit, how can anyone tell. .”

They felt sorry for him one night when they were having supper together in a restaurant on Calle de Havre, and Curly’s eyes became dangerously distracted. Guy’s back was to the dining room. José Luis, beside Curly, could appreciate the obscure object of desire.

A dark-skinned boy went back and forth with ancestral agility, as if a remote ancestor of his had been responsible for bringing fresh fish from the coast to Emperor Moctezuma in his palace on the plateau.

He was nimble, swift, graceful, without an extra gram on his face or body. Curly looked at him with a desire that was increasingly difficult to hide, to the point where he stopped chatting with his friends and absently committed the unforgivable error of sitting with his mouth open, his gaze lost in the waiter’s movements, something that provoked José Luis to laugh and remark that a “closed mouth catches no boys,” which provoked Curly’s irritation followed by this action that revealed, to whomever wishes to measure it, the nature, naturata and naturante, of the witty fat man.

The fact is that Curly, as the young indigenous waiter walked past, dropped his napkin to the floor and looked at the boy with a mixture of indignation and scorn.

“What are you waiting for?” said Curly.

“Excuse me?” responded the waiter.

“Stupid Indian. Pick up the napkin.”

The waiter bent over and picked up the napkin lightly spotted with lipstick, as Guy and José Luis could observe with smiles, but not the servile object of Curly’s wounded contempt. The servant.