Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

This was what we needed. This was the necessary step toward the unknown, toward what comes next. The meeting of land and sea and sky. Would Lavinia and Cordelia understand that from this moment on, both were hostages to the man’s desire? Would they dare to consummate that desire, or would they frustrate it and consequently break everything, erase the image of the painting, return to a situation not only earlier than the couples Leo-Lavinia, Leo-Cordelia, but also solely conjugal, Lavinia-Cristóbal, Cordelia-Álvaro, since he, Leo, would disappear forever from the lives of both women if they did not advance toward him now?

He avoided looking at them. That was what Hokusai’s painting was there for. To fix Leo’s attention on a work of art untouchable by sex, barely caressable by fingers, though destructible by hands. To distance Leo, at that moment, from an unhealthy curiosity to see the two women, observe their attitudes, guess at their intentions, judge Lavinia’s young body in contrast to Cordelia’s mature one, see how the two women saw each other or know if they even looked at each other, if they avoided looking at each other, if they had eyes only for their austere, distant, perhaps incomprehensible, perhaps seductive or seducible lord and master and voluntary slave Leo Casares.

Would the two women read Leo’s thoughts? Would they realize that this mise-en-scène eliminated jealousy, extinguished envy, exiled banal prejudices? Who would dare, here and now, in the bedroom elevated to a personal sanctuary for Leo, who would dare offend the other two? Whoever gives offense, loses. And if one leaves, the couple remains. And if yesterday’s couple doesn’t remain, a new couple will be found tomorrow. A new game, always beginning, culminating now or never.

“It’s a win-win situation,” Leo murmured, summarizing what he knew they also knew, because after all, in fragments, here and there, over time, each couple (Leo-Lavinia, Leo-Cordelia) had said it or intuited it or thought it. Except that even in the most perfect geometry of joy deferred or premeditated cruelty, the demon of pleasure puts in an appearance, and Leo was doing battle with him now in order to stare at the painting and avoid looking at or being looked at by them.

“Of course beauty exists,” he said in a very quiet voice. “But only for a moment.”

The imperfect actuality of the beautiful had to be sacrificed. He thought about it. Did they know? Leo felt on the verge of an almost supernatural happiness and of too physical a misfortune. He felt doubts. The women revealed nothing. It had been easy to concentrate on each one separately. Would it be difficult to pay attention to both at the same time? In what order would the pleasures of each occur, the inevitable couple, the potential trio? Was the orgasm the little death or a transitory suicide? At that moment suicide and death attempted to personalize themselves in the feverish yet lucid mind of Leo. What did he want? To be rid of the husbands, Cristóbal and Álvaro? Or of the wives, Lavinia and Cordelia? Leo had prepared this scene in order to take the next step, to put to the test not the conjugal fidelity he knew had been overcome but the intensity of emotions, which he imagined had been postponed. He did not have to look at Lavinia (naked?) or Cordelia (caftan?) to know that the situation did not eliminate the villain of the piece, the green monster of jealousy. He did not need to see them to know this because he felt it in his own heart.

This was what alarmed him. That he imagined the step following the ménage à trois. It was the step toward reconstituting the couples. Not the return to conjugal ties. Not even the permanence of the trio but an alliance of the two women against him, against Leo, the two of them alone against the solitary man who proposed tonight to make love to both women only to reach the culminating point and abort the ecstasy, interrupt the pleasure in order to exasperate both and oblige them to desire once more, again, and again, and again. .

He did not want to look at them just then. He would have liked to tell them that blind distance maintains the mystery, that he wanted them both far from him in order to continue to read them. He realized he had already said that. That instead of advancing in his purpose, he was moving backward, like a crab. That his imagination obliged him to go forward in order to overthrow any habit past, present, or future, to move toward perhaps unreachable possibilities without understanding that his desire for them could be a desire to begin all over again in order to love better.

Knowing what he already knows?

Forgetting everything?

What was the next step?

Everything configured an imperfect duel. Leo refused to look at them. He prayed that this scene would not make them tired of him, of themselves, of the irretrievable earlier situation. All of this flashed through his head; accepting habit was the greatest defeat, unacceptable to him. True, in the end, it was all an imperfect duel between desire and its consummation: repeatable or unrepeatable. Leo, with almost Edenic innocence (that’s right, with fragile compassion for himself, he thought), wanted only today’s satisfaction to leave us unsatisfied so we could desire and achieve the next day’s satisfaction.

Would the women understand it this way? Why didn’t they say anything? Why didn’t they move? Would one of them — Cordelia or Lavinia — dare to destroy the proposed trio, tacitly believing that in this way they would return to the earlier couple? Or had he, Leo, destroyed forever all possible relations with them? Did they (Lavinia, Cordelia) realize that Leo had done them the favor of showing each one that her life was false, that the artifice offered by Leo was the truth, in spite of the artifice, just as in the Japanese painting?

“Everything I’ve done is for the sake of happy families.”

How was he going to say this if he himself was incapable of believing it? Of believing anything ? Even that these women might be happier with their husbands than with him?

This idea provoked irrepressible laughter in him. He decided to face them, laughing, gauging them, the two women. He, triumphant. This would be the propitious moment to bring the situation to a head. A laugh to absolve them and absolve himself, dispelling everything as a huge joke, an exquisite corpse of Leo’s surrealist spirit. Or perhaps dazzling, almost diabolical laughter, defying the women’s imagination, a fatal invitation to a shared copulation that would renew and even exceed relations among the three. The great pact, euphoric, gallant, transgressive, of Leo, Lavinia, and Cordelia.

He let them look at the Japanese painting. He turned on his heel to face the two women he had just imagined behind him, immobile, each one coming out of a bathroom, walking toward the bed they would share. Or moving away from the bed, returning to the bathrooms, disappearing. .

“You need to have a great lack of imagination to break off an amorous relationship,” Leo said to himself in a very low voice.

9. Sitting on the sofa in front of the picture of the turbulent sea and the immobile cliff, Leo smoked a light-tobacco cigarette, breaking his New Year’s resolution: to give up all secondary vices. He allowed the spirals to add a transparent, fleeting coat to the painting. Why was the sea turbulent if the cliff did not move? Why was the physical world so capricious? In Leo’s desire, on that night everything had to be transformed, crossed, multiplied. The sea would become calm. The coast would rise up murmuring, trembling, to culminate in a vast barren plain populated with unknown bodies that would advance naked but wrapped in transparent black veils, like the figures of Manuel Rodríguez Lozano in the main room of the apartment on Calle de Schiller.