Burnt Water

by Carlos Fuentes

  In his heart the General knew that, and his veneration for my mother Clotilde pained him, Plutarco, he was like the old saying, he never lost, but if he lost, he took it with him, my mother was part of his war booty, no matter how hard he tried to hide it, she hadn’t loved him, she had had to learn to love him, but Evangelina chose me, I wanted to love, your grandfather wants people to love him, and that’s why he determined that Evangelina should stop loving me, the reverse of what happened to him, do you understand? all day long he compared her to his sainted Clotilde, everything was my dear dead Clotilde wouldn’t have done it that way, when my Clotilde was alive—my Clotilde, may she rest in peace—she knew how to run a household, she was modest, she never raised her voice to me, my Clotilde was so well-mannered, she’d never had her picture taken showing her legs, and the same, even more, when you were born, Plutarco, take my Clotilde, now there was a real Mexican mother, there was a woman who knew how to care for a baby.

  “Why don’t you nurse Plutarco? Are you afraid it’ll ruin those beautiful boobs? Well, what do you want them for? To show the men? Carnival’s over, miss, it’s time to be a decent mother.”

  If my father succeeded in making me hate the memory of my mother Clotilde, imagine how it exasperated Evangelina, it’s no wonder your mother felt isolated, and then driven out of the house, going to the dentist, looking for parties to go to, looking for another man, my Evangelina was so simple, leave your father, Agustín, let’s go live by ourselves, let’s love each other the way we did at first, and the General, don’t let that woman get on your back, you let her get her own way just once and she’ll dominate you forever, but in his heart he was hoping she would stop loving me so I would have to force her to love me, the way it had been with him, so I wouldn’t have any advantage he hadn’t had. So no one would have the freedom he’d missed. If he’d had to work hard for everything, then we’d have to, too—first me and then you, that’s how he sees things, his own way, he gave us everything on a silver platter as he always says, and there wasn’t going to be another Revolution where a man could win at a stroke both love and valor, not any more, now we have to prove ourselves in other ways, why should he pay for everything and us for nothing? he’s our eternal dictator, don’t you see? see if we dare show we don’t need him, that we can live without his memories, his heritage, his tyranny of sentiment. He wants people to love him, General Vicente Vergara is our father, by God, and we’re obliged to love him and emulate him, to see if we can do what he did, now that it’s more difficult.

  You and I, Plutarco, what battles are we going to win? what women are we going to tame? what soldiers are we going to castrate? you tell me. That’s your grandfather’s terrible challenge, realize that quickly or you’ll find yourself broken the way he broke me, he laughs and says, let’s see whether you can do what I did, now that it can’t be done any longer, let’s see whether you can find a way to inherit something more difficult than my money.

  “Violence with impunity.”

  Evangelina was so innocent, so without defenses, that’s what galled me more than anything, that I couldn’t blame her, but I couldn’t forgive her either. Now that’s something your grandfather never lived through. Only with such a feeling could I triumph over him forever, inside myself, though he supported me and went on mocking me. I’d done something more than he’d done, or something different. I still don’t know which. Your mother didn’t know either. She must have felt guilty of everything, except the one thing I blamed her for.

  “Her irritating innocence.”

  My father had been drinking all night. Even more than Grandfather and me. He walked to the hi-fi and turned it on. Avelina Landín was singing something about silver threads among the gold. My father dropped into a chair, like Fernando Soler in the old Mexican film Soulless Woman. I no longer cared whether this, too, was something he’d learned.

  “The medical report said your mother had died by choking on a piece of meat. As simple as that. Those things are easily arranged. Your grandfather and I tied a beautiful scarf around her neck for the funeral.”

  He gulped down the rest of his cognac, put the glass on a shelf, and stood for a long while staring at the palms of his hands, as Avelina sang about the silvery moon reflected on a lake of blue.

  Of course, the business matters were resolved. My father’s friends in Los Angeles covered the hundred-million-peso debt so the fields in Sinaloa would remain untouched. Grandfather took to his bed for a month after the binge we’d had together, but he was back in good form for the tenth of May, Mother’s Day, when the three of us men who lived in the huge house in Pedregal went together, as we did every year, to the French Cemetery to leave flowers in the crypt where my grandmother Clotilde and my mother Evangelina are buried.

  The marble crypt is like our mansion in miniature. They are both sleeping here, said the General in a broken voice, head bowed, sobbing, his face hidden in a handkerchief. I stand between my father and my grandfather, clasping their hands. My grandfather’s hand is cold, sweatless, like a lizard’s skin. My father’s hand blazes like fire. My grandfather sobbed again, and uncovered his face. If I’d looked at him closely, I’m sure I would have asked myself for whom he wept so bitterly, and for whom he wept more, his wife or his daughter-in-law. But at that moment I was simply trying to guess what my future would be. We’d gone to the cemetery without mariachis this time. I would have liked a little music.

  The Two Elenas

  “I don’t know where Elena gets those ideas. That’s not the way she was brought up. Nor you either, Victor. The truth is that marriage has changed her. Yes, there’s no doubt. I thought she was going to give my husband a heart attack. Those ideas are completely indefensible, and especially at the dinner table. My daughter knows very well that her father needs to eat in peace. If not, his blood pressure goes up immediately. That’s what the doctor has told us. And, after all, this doctor knows what he’s talking about. He doesn’t charge two hundred pesos a visit for nothing. I beg you to talk with Elena. She pays no attention to me. Tell her we’ll put up with everything. That it doesn’t matter to us that she neglects her home to learn French. That it doesn’t matter that she goes to those weird films in dens filled with bushy-haired freaks. And that we don’t mind those clownish red stockings. But when she tells her father at dinnertime that by living with two men a woman can better complement herself … Victor, for your own sake, you ought to get ideas like that out of your wife’s head.”

  When she’d seen Jules and Jim at a film club, Elena had gotten the devilish idea that she should carry the battle to the Sunday dinners with her parents—the only obligatory gathering of the family. When we came out of the theater we took the MG and went to get something to eat at the Coyote Flaco in Coyoacán. Elena looked, as always, very beautiful in her black sweater and leather skirt and the stockings her mother didn’t like. She was wearing, in addition, a gold chain with a carved jadeite pendant that, according to an anthropological friend, describes the Mixtec prince Uno Muerte. Elena, who is always so happy and carefree, looked intense that night: the color had risen to her cheeks and she barely spoke to the friends who ordinarily get together in that rather elite restaurant. I asked her what she wanted to eat and she didn’t answer: instead, she took my closed hand in hers and stared at me intently. I ordered two garlic steak sandwiches as Elena shook out her pale pinkish hair and rubbed her neck.

  “Victor, Nibelung, for the first time I realize that you men are right in being misogynists and that we are born for you to detest. I’m not going to pretend any longer. I’ve discovered that misogyny is the condition of love. I know now that I’m mistaken, but the longer I express certain needs, the more you are going to hate me and try to satisfy me. Victor, Nibelung, you must buy me an old-fashioned sailor suit like Jeanne Moreau’s.”

  I told her that she seemed perfect to me as long as she continued to expect everything of me. Elena stroked my hand and smiled.

  “I know you don’t feel completely
free, darling, but have faith. After you have given me everything I ask of you, you yourself will beg that another man share our lives. You yourself will ask to be Jules. You yourself will ask that Jim live with us and bear the load. Didn’t the Little Blond Jesus say it? Let us love one another … Why not?”

  I thought that Elena might be right as far as the future was concerned; I knew that with her, after four years of marriage, all the moral rules learned from childhood tended simply to fade away. That’s what I have always loved about her: her naturalness. She never rejects one rule to replace it with another, but only to open a kind of door, like those in children’s stories where every illustrated page announces a garden, a cave, an ocean one reaches through the secret opening on the previous page.

  “I don’t want to have children for six years,” she said one night, resting against my legs in the big dark room of our house while we listened to Cannonball Adderley records, that same house in Coyoacán that we’ve decorated with colonial woodcarvings of polychrome saints and virgins and hypnotic-eyed colonial masks: “You never go to Mass and nobody says a word. I’m not going either, they can say whatever they please.” And in the attic that serves us as a bedroom, bathed on clear mornings in the light from the distant volcanoes: “I’m going to have coffee with Alejandro today. He’s a great artist and he would feel inhibited if you were there, and I need him to explain a few things to me alone.” And as she follows me across the boards connecting the unlaid floors in the houses I’m building in Desierto de los Leones: “I’m going to be gone for ten days, taking a train around the country.” And as we have a hurried cup of coffee one midafternoon in the Tirol, fluttering her fingers in greeting to some friends passing by on Hamburgo: “Thanks for taking me to the brothel, Nibelung. It seemed straight out of the time of Toulouse-Lautrec, as innocent as a Maupassant story. And you know? Now I’ve found out that that’s not where sin and depravation are, but elsewhere.” And after a private showing of Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel: “Victor, morality is everything that gives life, and immorality everything that refutes it, isn’t that right?”

  And now she repeated, nibbling a sandwich: “Aren’t I right? If a ménage à trois gives us life and happiness and makes for better personal relations among the three of us than the relationship between the two of us, then isn’t that moral?”

  I nodded as I ate, listening to the sputtering of the meat cooking on the raised grill. Several friends were watching that their cuts were done just the way they like them, and then came to sit with us, and Elena began to laugh again and be her usual self. Unfortunately, I was inspired to scan the faces of our friends in turn, imagining each of them installed in my house, giving Elena the portion of affection, stimulus, passion, or intelligence that I, exhausted beyond my limits, was incapable of granting her. As I observed the nearest face, avidly disposed to listen to her (and at times I grow weary of hearing her), another amiably offering to fill in the lacunae in her reasoning (I prefer that her conversation not be logical or consistent), yet another, more inclined to formulate precise and, according to him, revealing questions (and I never use words—rather, gestures or telepathy to set Elena in motion), I took some consolation from telling myself that, after all was said and done, what little they could give her would be given beyond a certain boundary of my life with her, like dessert or a cordial, an appendage. That one, the one who combed his hair like Ringo Starr, asked her precisely and revealingly why she continued to be faithful to me, and Elena replied that today infidelity is mandatory, just as Communion every Friday used to be, and turned away from him. The nearer one, the one in a turtleneck shirt, interpreted Elena’s reply, adding that, doubtlessly, my wife meant that fidelity was becoming the attitude of the rebel. And the one here by me, the one in the perfect Edwardian frock coat, merely invited Elena with an intensely oblique glance to continue speaking: he would be the perfect audience. Elena raised her arms and asked the waiter for an espresso.

  We walked beneath the ash trees through the cobbled streets of Coyoacán, holding hands, experiencing the contrast of the day’s heat still clinging to our clothing and the moist coolness of the night that, following the afternoon shower, brought a glow to our eyes and color to our cheeks. Silently, our heads bowed, holding hands, we like to walk through the ancient streets that have been since the beginning a point of encounter, a common meeting ground of our inclination to assimilate what is around us. I think we have never spoken of this, Elena and I. Nor do we need to. What I do know is that it pleases us to collect old things, as if we were rescuing them from painful oblivion, or as if by touching them we gave them new life, or as if in seeking the right place, light, and ambience in our home we were in reality defending ourselves against a similar future oblivion. We still have the lion’s-maw handle we found in a hacienda in Los Altos that we caress every time we open the door to our home, knowing that every caress consumes it; illuminated by a yellow light in the garden, we have the stone cross representing the four converging rivers of hearts torn out, perhaps, by the same hands that later worked the stone; and we have the black horses from some long-ago dismantled carrousel, like figureheads from the prows of brigantines that would lie forever on the ocean floor unless their wooden skeletons came to rest on some distant shore of solemn cockatoos and dying turtles.

  While I look for some Cannonball records, Elena takes off her sweater and lights the fire. I serve two glasses of absinthe and lie down on the rug to wait for her. She lies with her head cradled on my legs, smoking, while we both listen to the slow sax of Brother Lateef, whom we met in the Gold Bug in New York, looking like a Congolese witch doctor dressed by Disraeli, his eyes sleepy and swollen like two African boas, a segregated-Svengali beard, his purplish lips joined to the saxophone that silences the black so that he may speak with an eloquence foreign to his surely hoarse everyday stammer: the slow notes are a kind of mournful affirmation that will never say all they want to say, since from beginning to end they are only a seeking, an approximation, muted by a strange shyness; they give joy and direction to the contact of our bodies, which begins to follow the feeling of Lateef’s instrument; pure announcement, pure prelude, limited entirely to the pleasures of foreplay, which, because of the sax, become the act itself.

  * * *

  “What American Negroes are doing is turning the tables on the whites,” Elena says as we take our appointed places at her parents’ enormous Chippendale dining table. “The love, the music, the vitality of the Negroes is forcing the whites to justify themselves. See how the whites are now physically persecuting the blacks, because they have finally realized that, psychologically, the blacks are persecuting them.”

  “Well, I’m just thankful that there’re no Negroes here,” says Elena’s father, helping himself to the potato-leek soup offered him in a steaming porcelain tureen by the Indian servant who during the daytime waters the gardens at the big Lomas house.

  “But what does that have to do with it, Papa? That’s like saying the Eskimos are thankful for not being Mexicans. Everyone is what he is, and that’s that. What’s interesting is watching what happens when we come across somebody who makes us doubt ourselves. Somebody, nonetheless, whom we know we need. Somebody we need because they reject us.”

  “Come along now, eat. These conversations get more idiotic every Sunday. The only thing I know is that you didn’t marry a Negro, did you? Higinio, bring the enchiladas.”

  Don José observes Elena, his wife, and me with an air of triumph. Doña Elena, in an effort to revive the languishing conversation, relates all the past week’s activities. I look around at the brocaded rosewood furniture, the Chinese vases, the billowy curtains and vicuna rugs in the rectilinear house through whose towering windows one sees the eucalyptus trees shivering in the barranca. Don José smiles as Higinio serves the enchiladas topped with rich cream, and his little green eyes fill with an almost patriotic satisfaction, the same satisfaction I have seen when the President waves the flag on the fifteenth of Septembe
r. But not the same that makes them tender when he sits down in front of his private jukebox to smoke a cigar and listen to boleros—they are much more moist then. My eyes stop at the sight of Doña Elena’s pale hand playing with the soft center of her roll as she wearily enumerates all the cares that have kept her busy since we last saw each other. I listen abstractedly to that cascade of comings and goings, canasta games, visits to the poor children’s ward, novenas, charity balls, searches for new curtains, quarrels with the servants, long telephone conversations with her friends, the expected visits to priests, babies, dressmakers, doctors, watch repairmen, pastry cooks, cabinetmakers, and engravers. I am hypnotized by the long, pale, caressing fingers rolling the soft bread into little balls.

  “I told them never to come to ask me for money again, because I don’t make the decisions about anything. That I would gladly send them to your father’s office and his secretary would take care of it…”

  … the languid movements of the slim wrist and the bracelet with the gold and copper medallions of the Christ of the Cubilete, the Holy Year in Rome, and President Kennedy’s visit, that clink against each other as Doña Elena plays with the bread …

  “… enough that one gives them moral support, don’t you agree? I looked for you Thursday to come to the new film at the Diana with us. I even sent the chauffeur on ahead to stand in line, you know what the lines are like on opening day…”

  … the plump arm, the translucent skin, the veins like a second skeleton, of glass, outlined beneath the smooth whiteness.

  “… I invited your cousin Sandrita and went by to pick her up in the car, but we started playing with the new baby and lost track of time. He’s simply precious. She’s very hurt that you haven’t even called to congratulate her. It wouldn’t be any effort to call, Elenita…”