Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

Except that he can make you miserable, and you don’t know how to harm him, Cordelia.

Are you insisting I abandon him completely?

I said no such thing. I’m not asking you to leave him. I’m asking you to do him harm.

Isn’t it enough that he knows about us?

No. And I’ll tell you why. Forgive me, Cordelia. Yesterday I went to visit your husband.

You saw Álvaro? Why? What happened?

First of all let me clarify: He called me. He reached out to me.

I don’t understand. What did he want?

To require my presence.

Why?

To clarify my relationship with you.

And what did you tell him?

That it is reflection in absence that makes a husband undesirable, not his proximity.

Did he understand you? Because I don’t really understand you.

Let both of you understand me, then. The great romantic rule is that distance stimulates desire. Tristan and Isolde. Abelard and Heloise.

I know. You always refer to those couples.

It’s the great romantic rule. Unacceptable to modern promiscuity. We want immediate satisfaction. And we get it. Except that what is gotten right away is consumed quickly and then thrown in the trash. I don’t know how a society can be called conservative when it doesn’t conserve anything. We are engaged in an imperfect duel with the world.

Don’t leave for the hills of Úbeda.

I mean that if the consumer society is the way it is, Abelard and Heloise are impossible. The rule takes a leap to tell us that absence separates us and makes us undesirable. We want to consume each other. If we can’t, we don’t hate each other, we simply ignore each other. Whoever isn’t immediately available becomes old and decayed forever. Love has an expiration date, too, just like a bottle of milk. Everything conspires to disenchant us.

You forget that one can love somebody without that somebody knowing it.

Ah. That’s the case with your husband.

It may be, if you insist.

Naturally. I insist. Of course I do.

Nothing you’ve told me includes my case.

Tell me.

Being the object of love that is ignorant of the fact.

I don’t follow.

Álvaro doesn’t know that even if I leave him for you, I’ll go on loving him. And even though he hates me because of you, I don’t know if Álvaro will go on loving me.

You know and he doesn’t?

He doesn’t know that I know.

Why?

Because he doesn’t have an imagination for the good. He thinks and feels only in darkness.

Why does he bring me into it, Cordelia?

Because Álvaro doesn’t love or hate. He fears vulnerability. He wants to know he’s protected.

I repeat: Why me? I believe I’m the least qualified to give your husband protection.

You’re thinking sentimentally. Remember who gave him a job at the Department of the Interior.

The secretary.

Who recommended him?

I did, because you asked me to.

Who are you?

Adviser to the secretary.

Who dismissed my husband?

The secretary, because Álvaro was insubordinate.

Did you approve the dismissal?

There was nothing else I could do. It was a bureaucratic decision. Don‘t think it was on account of you. Besides, it isn’t that he was insubordinate. He simply didn’t measure up. I’m sorry.

It doesn’t matter. For my husband, you’re the factotum. You hire. You fire. You seduce the wives of your employees. And just as you seduce them, you can abandon them. And then, Leo, then he would be there, ready to receive me with feigned anger, with disguised tenderness, he, Álvaro Meneses, who is who he is only because of favors received, becomes the giver, do you understand? The Good Samaritan, the sentimental Midas, oh, I don’t know! He receives. He gives to me. That’s his well-being.

You’re the object of love who ought to be unaware of it.

Do you know something? I’m tired of the comedy of pain, devotion, and fidelity. Passion exhausts me. The problem with my husband is that things weren’t as satisfactory as I hoped or as indifferent as he expected.

What did you want, Cordelia? Being a couple is an illness. It’s a sickness. It isn’t true that the couple is the perfect egotism between two people. The couple is shared hell.

You and I?

The exception that proves the rule.

Aren’t there three of us, if we include Álvaro?

Tell me something, Cordelia: At some point in your marriage, did you ever have the feeling that you and your husband were a single person?

Yes. How horrible. As soon as I felt that, I began to step back.

Was I the way to distance yourself from the similarity to your husband?

In part. Not completely. Not always. It doesn’t matter. The more you resemble yourself, the less you resemble your spouse. That’s what I thought then. With you, there are no physical antipathies. Very strange. With you, there are no doubts about the amorous relationship.

Inevitable doubts?

Maybe.

Are you sure? You didn’t break with Álvaro. Not completely, I mean.

I love each one in his own way. You and he.

Would you take the next step?

It depends. I don’t know. What are you talking about?

About egotism disguised as generosity. I’m talking about giving. About giving oneself. About giving oneself completely. About going beyond the couple. .

5. Leo could concentrate on the painting by Hokusai. On the other hand, it was difficult for him to concentrate on the two women, Lavinia and Cordelia. In the painting, he could see what he wanted to. It was a transparent painting, pure glass open to the whim of one’s eyes and the strength of one’s imagination. For example: In the picture, it is raining on the landscape. To Leo’s eyes, the rain is smoke. In the painting, the world floats past. To Leo’s eyes, the world tends to be fixed, immobile, in the most immediate reality. Leo’s daily reality? Or the reality of the imaginary painting? Aren’t they, both of them — everyday reality, the virtual reality of art — permanent flux, everything flows? Leo understands it this way even though he doesn’t feel it. Leo is the victim of a parceling of hours into immobile minutes that, no matter how they follow in succession, are identical among themselves or, at least, to themselves. But Hokusai’s sea, though immobile in the painting (or within the painting), is like the gigantic spirit of the world. That surf along the Japanese coast, enclosed within the four sides of the painting, over-flows them, the sea ascends to the sky, invades the beaches, sinks to the bottom of itself, devours itself in each singular, repeated wave.

The sea, like the figures in Piero della Francesca, looks elsewhere, ailleurs, làbas. Leo knows there are no geographical làbas to flee to, as Gauguin and Stevenson did. Gauguin’s grandchildren receive the Paris papers by plane every day. Stevenson’s grandchildren watch a serialized Treasure Island on television. The làbas, the other place, the great undiscovered country, exists only in each person’s soul, but there are beings with no soul, that is, with no imagination. And even those who have more than enough, which is what Leo thinks about himself, who use it up rapidly, soon become sated with their own fantasy and then feel the need to go beyond, farther than where they have already gone.

An enormous lassitude invades the entire being of Leo Casares when he thinks this, and then he returns to his bedroom and continues to look at the painting. The world is floating by. Grab it!

6. First he spoke with each woman and later with both of them together in the penthouse on Calle de Schiller. He had spoken to each about the other without revealing the nature of their relationships to him. They were friends, barely acquaintances. To each — it was the most difficult point — he explained the particular beauty of the other. He admired each for her beauty — one so different from the other — and when he told this to the other, he did not add what the one listening — Lavinia, Cordelia — wanted to know, each more beautiful than the other. And since they could not say that about themselves, they waited for him to say: “She is very beautiful, but you’re more beautiful.” Or “not as beautiful as you.” Or at least “there’s no comparison to you.” He kept this back. At the most, he told each one: “A woman is interesting not because she’s beautiful but because she’s another beauty.”