Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

Wanna bet you didn’t know that?

1. You stand at the mirror in your bathroom. You look at yourself in the mirror. You look for D’Artagnan leaping from the balcony to the back of the horse waiting for him in the lane. You hope to see the Black Corsair swinging from the mast of the Folgore at the attack on Maracaibo. You imagine, in your mirror, the Count of Monte Cristo — you yourself, young, with those motionless gray hairs daubed at your temples like a sea of stone — and you see in your mirror Alejandro Sevilla, yourself, filming The Seven Boys from Ecija, and you are all seven of them, you alone are all you need to incarnate the seven generous Spanish bandits of the eighteenth century. You are the hunchback Enrique de Lagardere, the gentleman in disguise to deceive the court of Louis XIII and save the honor of Blanche de Nevers. . except that now, Alejandro, you can’t shake off the imaginary hump, it’s stuck to your body, the deformity isn’t made of rubber anymore, it’s made of bone, and then you shake your head so the mirror will give back to you the dashing figure of the masked Zorro, ready to defend violated justice in Old California.

You no longer are.

No matter how much you shake your head.

Neither Zorro nor the count of Lagardere comes back. You can no longer be the third or fourth musketeer, and the last time you tried to do D’Artagnan, you leaped from the balcony of your beautiful Constance, and instead of landing gallantly in the saddle (as in the old days), your bones dropped like a sack onto the mattress that divine mercy (the film studio Mexigrama) placed there to prevent accidents.

“Alejandro, give up making costume adventure movies.”

You refrained from telling them that you are the star, that the films were the colossal image of your life, and the studio never offered you a production worthy of your person. You are not the producer’s servant or the director’s valet. You are Alejandro Sevilla, the top star of Mexican film. You have been for thirty years. You dubbed the voice of Charles Boyer. You made inroads into Hollywood films. You were famous for having been Marlene Dietrich’s lover, and whether it was true or not doesn’t matter: Marlene has been forgotten, Boyer is dead, and you refuse to believe you have loved a ghost or dubbed the voice of a corpse.

The image makes you believe, Alejandro, that you will always be young and will live forever. . except that in the past, no beginning starlet refused when you asked for her sweet siren’s ass and now even the extras turn you down, or laugh at you, or give you a tremendous slap when you say, “Give me your furry diadem.” And didn’t Peggy Silvester, the Hollywood actress, say she wouldn’t work with you, that you were a has-been, a relic of the past, and besides, you had bad breath?

“We can offer you a mature actor’s roles. You know, the understanding paterfamilias to the younger generation. Or a misunderstood neurotic of the older generation.”

You laughed. The studio depended on you, you didn’t depend on the studio.

You were the first to demand — and obtain — a portable dressing room so you could relax with the sirens and their diadems, rest, memorize lines, drink just a little. . Now they have to put your dialogue on a large placard, and sometimes your movements, the placards, and the cameras don’t coincide, and disconcerted, you look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself, I am D’Artagnan, Zorro, and the Seven Boys of Ecija all in one, and you know you are the great impersonator, a shadow without his own profile, you are Alejandro Sevilla only because you are the Black Corsair, and when in the end you fall from the mast and suspect they are laughing at you behind the scenes, you go to the movies in a scarf and dark glasses to see yourself on the big screen and there it’s true that the audience is laughing out loud, they shout, “Get off, you old bum, go to the home for mummies, vegetate vegetarian,” and the producer of all your pictures since your debut in He Suffers for Love, your longtime friend, does not bite his tongue and tells you, “Alejandro, the actor first has to be in order to seem, but in the end he has to disappear in order to go on being.”

You answer that at least your voice, your voice that is so characteristic, so melodious, so well enunciated (you dubbed for Charles Boyer) could be used, you don’t know, for newsreels, for travelogues like Fitzpatrick’s, no, Alejandro, the voice has wrinkles, too.

Every door was being closed. You weren’t even offered roles as a maître d’hôtel. At least I know how to put on a tuxedo, you contended. Then let a luxury restaurant hire you, was the reply. Today restaurants aren’t what they used to be, you sighed to yourself, because nobody else would understand. The Ambassadeurs closed, its old patrons died. . The 1-2-3 closed, its bartender drowned in Acapulco. . The Rivoli closed, destroyed in the earthquake of 1985. .

“Either you change your generation, or this generation will trade you in for another star who’s younger.”

You leaped from the balcony of Constance Bonacieux, the horse ran off, you contended, the horse should not have moved but it moved, you had a terrible fall, they took you off the picture and your only recourse was to think either you stay inside your mobile dressing room, disguised as a musketeer, mummified forever. . or you go back, after so many years, to your house.

After so many years.

Then your face disappears from the mirror and other faces return to it, as if emerged from the quicksilver, as if born of the mist. .

2. You had all the women, Alejandro. All of them. But you loved only one. Cielo de la Mora. She was very young when she came to the studio. She was from Nicaragua. They were filming The Return of Zorro, and she fit perfectly into the colonial California setting, adorned with a high, elegant comb and ringlets, dressed in a crinoline. And with a birthmark next to her mouth. You took advantage of the romantic scenes to move in with the iron rod (to use your peculiar expression) and gauge the response. Even the most indignant succumbed. Who knows why, but you respected Cielo de la Mora from the very beginning. You dared only to sing into her ear, “that birthmark you have, my sweet heaven, next to your mouth, don’t give it to anyone else. .”

“It belongs to me,” she completed the stanza.

In other words, from that moment on you felt in charge.

There was mystery in her, veiled by a somber though striking beauty, eyes half closed but alert. A look you didn’t dare decipher. The others, yes, they were legible. Actresses accepted your advances in order to advance themselves. They were using you, and you knew it. You gave singular value to each “lay.” Sincere or insincere, unique or unrepeatable, it made no difference. Other women loved you for yourself, for being a leading man, for being handsome (you look in the mirror and give yourself a satisfied pat on the jaw, recalling Alejandro Sevilla at the age of thirty, when a man is in his prime, the irresistible Alejandro Sevilla, magnetic, athletic, magical, poetic, sarcastic, master of the world, the star of Mexico).

You knew how to intuit women, read them, guess their weaknesses, not take them seriously, discard them without mercy. They were your babes, your cuties, broads, dames, in the long run anonymous, forgettable because they were decipherable. Only Cielo de la Mora appeared to you as a mystery, she herself an enigma. You had no illusions. Behind the mysterious eyes of the splendid woman with very black hair and very white skin, was there another mystery that wasn’t simply the mystery of her eyes?