Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

His glance happened to fall on a photograph taken when they were young. Guy and José Luis side by side, smiling but serious, not embracing, displaying the seriousness of their relationship because it wasn’t demonstrative, it was discreet. It was enough for him to see himself in his twenties, when the relationship was already an irreversible fact, to know that he and Guy always knew how to survive the bad times, and this conviction deflected the irritations found in every shared, intense, prolonged life. They put off explosions of bad temper. They exiled misunderstandings. They banished tedium and indifference. Precisely because all of that was found in the relationship, not because it was missing.

Perhaps the inevitable was treated by the couple not as something not talked about — hypocrisy — but as something just the opposite — imagination. Bad humor saved by an opportune joke. Misunderstandings elevated to the level of vain possibility. Tedium deflected by a reference to the movies, to literature, to art, to everything that, being theirs, should have been everybody’s.

This was the difference. Now it would seem that the roles they had once shared were turning into monologues. José Luis resisted being the actor of jealousy opposite the protagonist of desire in Guy’s distant glance. He was afraid that jealousy would turn into scorn as Guy’s desire disguised itself, ridiculously, as innocence.

The fact is that José Luis, knowing Guy so intimately, could distinguish the temperatures of desire in his lover. What disturbed him was that, after a few days, he could not identify the object of that desire. Because he, José Luis, was not the object or the subject of Guy’s familiar palpitations.

José Luis was in his office at nightfall when Curly phoned to invite him to supper in his penthouse near here, opposite Diana the Huntress. José Luis tried to confirm what the now not very trustworthy Curly had said, but Guy was no longer in the gallery. And he hadn’t returned home. José Luis changed and went to Curly’s supper alone.

“Welcome to the Pink Pantheon,” Curly said with a smile to José Luis. “And remember my slogan: sex copuli, sex dei. . ”

With his forelock tilted like the Tower of Pisa, Curly was wearing his host’s attire. A plush velvet jacket, white ascot, Scottish plaid trousers, and black slippers, one with the image of the sun, the other the moon. He wore no socks.

“Ah,” he said with a sigh. “What can I offer you? You have to drink to put up with me, José Luis. I swear, tonight I feel stranger than a green dog, and I don’t see more in my future than martyrdom with dark glasses.”

“You’re in Technicolor.” José Luis smiled as he took the margarita that Curly served him.

“And in wide screen, love,” said Curly. “Just have a look.” He approached the large picture window in the penthouse and tugged at the cord of the drawn curtains. “There’s no better view of the city,” he remarked as the curtains separated to reveal the terrace and two men embracing, kissing each other, one mature, the other young. Their faces were hidden by the long kiss until light from the living room fell on the lovers’ closed lids, obliged them to open their eyes, turn their heads, and show themselves to Curly and José Luis.

“Courage, José Luis. Don’t worry.” Curly smiled. “Sex is like a hangover: It lasts eight hours.”

If he had seen him in the days that followed, José Luis would have told Guy what he wrote to him in a letter that was never sent.

“Believe me, I understand you. You’ve never lost the need to attract. As I once told you, you’re not a flirt, you simply need to display yourself. Since I understand that, it doesn’t bother me too much that you’ve taken the next step at least once. We always avoided it. We never excluded it. In the end, did we deceive ourselves? Did we let ourselves be poisoned by what we had always evaded — jealousy, disillusionment, accusation? I see our picture taken when we were thirty, and I put myself in the adverse situation. Do you remember Agustín Villarino? He had lost his youth and sought out young men who would return it to him. He infuriated us. We laughed at him. Not death in Venice, you said then, but death in Xochimilco. You’ll say these are cruel words. It isn’t my intention to hurt you. I only want you to understand that I understand you. We managed to grow old together. My request is very simple. Don’t ruin everything. ”

He found out that Curly had taken Guy and the boy to a rented house in Acapulco. José Luis expected a letter. What he received was a phone call.

“Excuse me. I had to. I thought you’d indulge me.”

“I was going to write.”

“I didn’t receive anything.”

“Isn’t my intention enough?”

“I don’t know if you realized it.”

“Realized what?”

“Saffron is just like you.”

“With that name? Don’t make me laugh.”

“Well, it’s the name Curly gave him.”

“Then he can’t be just like me.”

“He’s like you at the age of twenty, José Luis.”

“Please, leave the past in peace.”

“I wasn’t prepared for this.”

“Neither was I.”

“Did we deceive ourselves?”

“Who knows. It’s always too late to know when we move from one phase to the next in our lives. When we realize it, the first act is over, and the play is about to end.”

“I’ll tell you something else, it might be a comfort to you. This boy is unreachable.”

“Excuse me while I laugh. You reached him. Or he reached you.”

“Understand me, José Luis. . I called you humbly. . I need. .”

“You’ve turned into an imbecile. Or a baby.”

“It depends on your preference. We have to endure the bad times.”

“Don’t tell me you’re coming back to me. How? Tenderly, longingly, regretfully?”

“We’re an old couple, José Luis. We’ll overcome the crisis. Didn’t you tell me once that I’m handsome, that I like to display myself, that you enjoy my being like that?”

And after a silence: “Don’t hate me, José Luis.”

“I don’t hate anybody.”

He hung up the phone because he was about to add (he tells me): “I don’t hate anybody. I love you.” And he didn’t want to say those words. Guy’s resonated in his head: “He’s just like you when you were young.”

At nightfall, José Luis went out for a walk. A desire both determining and difficult led him to Avenida Álvaro Obregón and the place where the luxurious movie house Balmori had once been located.

Now it was an empty lot where metal ruins stood. Twilight birds flew over the site as if looking for a nest in memories of yesterday. Greta Garbo. That unrepeatable smell of celluloid, sticky muégano candy, melting chocolates, programs made of pink-colored paper, sounds like a bird’s wings. That first touch of hands watching Fred and Ginger dance against a background of snow falling in Manhattan. Greta, Ginger, Fred. As he looked at the ruined theater, José Luis felt that the models we admire and pursue come out of ourselves. They are not imposed on us. We invent them, and they magically, gracefully appear on a white screen. Except they are our own shadows transformed into light. They are our most satisfactory portrait. They remain young even in death.

“I wander the streets like a ghost. I’ve left my image in a ruined movie house. Come and acknowledge it if you dare. I’ve lost everything but the memory of you. I no longer have a body. What I have is the desire to see you again, to talk to you again.”

Guy: A straight, slightly prognathous profile. Wavy hair, without the thin spots of age. Eyes that show interest in everything they see. He is sure he touched the sky one day.