Burnt Water
Page 8
“And what does Mother say?”
“She’ll cry. It doesn’t matter. She cries about everything, what else would you expect?”
“And what about me, Juan Luis?”
He smiled childishly. “You’ll come to visit me, Claudia. Swear you’ll come see me!”
I not only came to see you; I came to look for you, to take you back to Mexico. And four years ago, when we said goodbye, the only thing I said was: “Think about me. Find a way to be with me always.”
Yes, you wrote me begging me to visit you; I have your letters. You found a room with bath and kitchen in the most beautiful spot in Geneva, the Place du Bourg-de-Four. You wrote that it was on the fifth floor, right in the middle of the old city. From there you could see steep roofs, church towers, small windows and narrow skylights, and in the distance the lake fading from sight toward Vevey and Montreux and Chillon. Your letters were filled with the joy of independence. You had to make your bed and clean and get your own breakfast and go down to the dairy next door for milk. And you had your drinks in the café on the plaza. You talked so much about that café. It is called La Clémence and it has an awning with green and white stripes and anyone who is anyone in Geneva goes there. It’s tiny, six tables facing a bar; waitresses in black serve cassis and say “M’sieudame” to everyone. I sat there yesterday to have a cup of coffee and looked at all those students in their long mufflers and university caps, at Hindu girls with saris askew under winter coats, at diplomats with rosettes in their lapels, at actors who are trying to avoid paying taxes, who take refuge in chalets on the lake shore, at the young Germans, Chileans, Belgians, and Tunisians who work at the ILO. You wrote that there were two Genevas. The ordered conventional city that Stendhal described as a flower without perfume; that’s the one where the Swiss live, the backdrop for the other, the city of transients and exiles, a foreign city of chance encounters, of glances and sudden conversations, without the standards the Swiss have imposed upon themselves that then free their guests. You were twenty-three when you arrived here, and I can imagine your enthusiasm.
“But enough of that [you wrote]. I must tell you that I am taking a course in French literature and that there I met … Claudia, I can’t explain what I feel and I won’t even try, because you have always understood me without needing words. Her name is Irene and you can’t imagine how beautiful and clever, how nice she is. She’s studying literature here, and she is French; strange that she is studying the same things you are. Maybe that’s why I liked her immediately. Ha ha.” I think it lasted a month. I don’t remember. It was four years ago. “Marie-José talks too much, but she amuses me. We spent the weekend at Davos and she made me look ridiculous because she is a formidable skier and I’m not worth a damn. They say you have to learn as a child. I confess I got a little uptight and the two of us returned to Geneva Monday as we had left Friday, except that I had a sprained ankle. Isn’t that a laugh?” Then spring came. “Doris is English and she paints. I think she has real talent. We took advantage of the Easter holidays to go to Wengen. She says she makes love to stimulate her subconscious, and she leaps out of bed to paint her gouaches with the white peaks of the Jungfrau before her. She opens the windows and takes deep breaths and paints in the nude while I tremble with cold. She laughs a lot and says that I am a tropical creature with arrested development, and serves me kirsch to warm me up.” I laughed at Doris the whole year they were seeing each other. “I miss her gaiety, but she decided that one year in Switzerland was enough and she left with her paint boxes and her easels to live on Mykonos. So much the better. She amused me, but the kind of woman who interests me is not a woman like Doris.” One went to Greece and another came from Greece. “Sophia is the most beautiful woman I have ever known, I swear it. I know it’s a cliche, but she looks like one of the Caryatids. Although not in the common sense. She is a statue because she can be observed from all angles; I have her turn around, nude, in the center of the room. But the important thing is the air that surrounds her, the space around the statue, do you understand? The space she occupies that permits her to be beautiful. She is dark, she has very thick eyebrows, and tomorrow, Claudia, she is leaving with some rich guy for the Côte d’Azur. Desolate, but satisfied, your brother who loves you, Juan Luis.”
And Christine, Consuelo, Sonali, Marie-France, Ingrid … The references were ever more brief, ever more disinterested. You became preoccupied with your work and with talking a lot about your friends there, about their national idiosyncrasies, their dealings with you, with meetings and salaries and trips and even retirement benefits. You didn’t want to tell me that that place, like all places, in the end creates its own quiet conventions and that you were falling into the pattern of an international official. Until a postcard arrived with a view of Montreux and your cramped writing telling about a meal in a fabulous restaurant, and lamenting my absence, signed with two signatures, your scrawl, and an illegible—but carefully copied below—Claire.
Oh yes. You were gauging this one carefully. You didn’t present her like the others. First it was a new job you were going to be recommended for. Then that it was involved with the next meeting of the council. Then, after that, how you enjoyed working with your new friends but that you missed the old ones. Then, that the most difficult thing was getting used to the document officials who didn’t know your work habits. Finally, that you had had the luck to work with a “compatible” official, and in the next letter: her name is Claire. And three months before, you had sent me the postcard from Montreux. Claire, Claire, Claire.
I answered: “Mon ami Pierrot.” So you weren’t going to be honest with me any more. How long has it been Claire? I wanted to know everything, I demanded to know everything. Juan Luis, hadn’t we been best friends before we were brother and sister? You didn’t write for two months. Then came an envelope with a snapshot inside. The two of you with the tall jet of a fountain behind you, and the lake in summertime; you and she leaning against the railing. Your arm around her waist. She, so cute, her arm resting on a flower-filled stone urn. But it wasn’t a good snapshot. It was difficult to decide about Claire’s face. Slim and smiling, yes, a kind of Marina Vlady, slimmer but with the same smooth long blond hair. Low heels. A sleeveless sweater. Cut low.
You admitted it without explaining anything. First the letters relating facts. She lived in a pension on the rue Emile Jung. Her father was an engineer, a widower, and he worked in Neuchâtel. You and Claire were going swimming together at the beach. You had tea at La Clémence. You saw old French films in a theater on the rue Mollard. Saturdays you had dinner at the Plat d’Argent and each of you paid his own check. During the week, you ate in the cafeteria of the Palace of Nations. Sometimes you took the tram and went to France. Facts and names, names, names, like a guidebook: Quai des Berges, Gran’ Rue, Cave à Bob, Gare de Cornavin, Auberge de la Mère Royaume, Champelle, Boulevard des Bastions.
Later conversations. Claire’s preference for certain films, certain books, concerts, and more names, that river of nouns in your letters (Drôle de Drame and Les Enfants du Paradis, Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Radiguet, Schumann and Brahms), and then Claire says, Claire thinks, Claire feels. Carné’s characters live their freedom as if it were a shameful conspiracy. Fitzgerald invented the modes, the gestures, and the disillusion that continue to nourish us. The German Requiem celebrates all profane deaths. Yes, I replied. Orozco has died, and there is an enormous retrospective in the Bellas Artes. And so on, round and round, all of it written out, as I had asked you.
“Every time I listen to you, I say to myself that it’s as if we realized that we need to consecrate everything that up till now has been condemned, Juan Luis; to turn things inside out. Who mutilated us, my love? There’s so little time to recover everything that has been stolen from us. No, I’m not suggesting anything, you know. Let’s not make plans. I believe as Radiguet does that the unconscious maneuvers of a pure soul are even more singular than all the possible combinations of vice.”
/> What could I answer? Nothing new here, Juan Luis. Papa and Mama are very sad that you won’t be here with us for their silver wedding anniversary. Papa has been promoted to vice president of the insurance company and he says that’s his best anniversary present. Mama, poor thing, invents some new illness every day. The first television station is broadcasting. I’m studying for finals for my junior year. I dream a little about everything that’s happening to you; I pretend to myself I get it out of books. Yesterday I was telling Federico everything you’re doing and seeing and reading and hearing, and we think perhaps if we pass our exams we could come visit you. Aren’t you planning to come back someday? You could during your next vacation, couldn’t you?
You wrote that fall was different now you were with Claire. On Sundays you often went for walks, holding hands, in silence; the scent of decaying hyacinths still lingered in the parks, but now it was the odor of burning leaves that pursued you during those long walks that reminded you of ours years ago on the beach, because neither you nor Claire dared break the silence, no matter what came to your minds, no matter what the enigma of overlapping seasons with their juxtaposition of jasmine and dead leaves suggested to you. In the end, silence. Claire, Claire—you wrote me—you have understood everything. I have what I always had. Now I can possess it. I’ve found you again, Claire.
I said again in my next letter that Federico and I were studying together for an exam and that we were going to Acapulco for the last days of the year. But I crossed that out before I sent you the letter. In yours you never asked who Federico was—and if you could ask me today, I wouldn’t know how to answer. When vacation came, I said I would not accept his calls any more; I wouldn’t see him at school any more. I went alone, with my parents, to Acapulco. I didn’t tell you anything about that. I didn’t write for several months, but your letters continued to arrive. That winter, Claire came to live with you in the room on Bourg-de-Four. Why think about the letters that came after that? They’re here in my purse. “Claire, everything is new. We had never been together at dawn. Before, those hours meant nothing; they were a dead part of the day, and now I wouldn’t exchange them for anything. We’ve always been so close, during our long walks, at the theater, in restaurants, at the beach, making up adventures, but we always lived in separate rooms. Do you know what I used to do, alone, thinking about you? Now I don’t waste those hours. I spend the whole night close to you, my arms around your waist, your shoulder pressed to my chest, waiting for you to wake. You know that, and you turn toward me and smile with your eyes closed, Claire, as I turn back the sheet, I forget the places you have warmed through the night and I ask myself if this isn’t what we always wanted, from the beginning, when we played and walked in silence, holding hands. We had to sleep beneath the same roof, in our own house, isn’t that true? Why don’t you write me, Claudia? I love you, Juan Luis.”
You may remember how I teased you. It wasn’t the same thing to love on a beach or in a hotel surrounded by lakes and snow as it was to live together every day. Besides, you were working in the same office. You’d end up boring each other. The novelty would wear off. Waking up together. Actually, it wasn’t very pleasant. She will see how you brush your teeth. You will see her take off her makeup, cream her face, put on her garter belt … I think you’ve done the wrong thing, Juan Luis. Weren’t you searching for your independence? Why have you taken on such a burden? If that’s what you had in mind, you might as well have stayed in Mexico. But apparently it’s difficult to escape the conventions in which we have been brought up. In the long run, although you haven’t followed the formula completely, you’re doing what Mama and Papa and everyone else has always expected of you. You’ve become a man of routine. After all the good times we had with Doris and Sophia and Marie-José. What a shame.
We didn’t write each other for a year and a half. My life didn’t change at all. My studies became a little useless, repetitive. How can they teach you literature? Once they put me in touch with a few things, I knew that I would be going my own way, I would read and write and study on my own. I went on going to class just for the sake of discipline, because I had to finish what I had begun. It’s so foolish and pedantic when they go on explaining things you already know, with phony diagrams and illustrations. That’s the bad thing about being ahead of your teachers, and they’re aware of it but hide it to keep their jobs. We were coming to Romanticism and I was already reading Firbank and Rolfe and I had even discovered William Golding. I had my professors a little scared, and my only satisfaction during that time was the praise I received at college: Claudia has real promise. I spent more and more time locked in my room. I arranged it to my taste, put my books in order, hung my reproductions, set up my record player, and Mama finally got tired of telling me that I should meet boys and go out dancing. They left me alone. I changed my wardrobe a little, from the cotton prints you knew to white blouses and dark skirts, tailored suits—outfits that make me feel a little more serious, more severe, more distant.
It seems we’ve arrived at the airport. The radar antennas are revolving and I stop talking with you. It’s going to be an unpleasant moment. The passengers are stirring. I take my handbag and makeup case and my coat. I sit waiting for the others to get off. It’s humid and cold and the fog conceals the mountains. It isn’t raining, but millions of unformed, invisible droplets hang in the air: I feel them on my skin. I smooth my straight blond hair. I enter the building and walk toward the airline office. I give my name and the clerk nods. He asks me to follow him. We walk along a long, well-lighted corridor and emerge into the icy afternoon. We move across a long strip of pavement that ends at a kind of hangar. I am walking with my fists clenched. The clerk does not attempt to make conversation. He precedes me, a little ceremoniously. We enter the storage room. It smells of damp wood, of straw and tar. There are many crates lined up in orderly fashion, as well as rows of barrels, and even a small dog in a cage, barking. Your box is partly hidden behind some others. The clerk points it out to me, bowing respectfully. I touch the edge of the coffin and for several moments I stand there without a word. My weeping is buried deep inside my belly, but it is as if I were crying. The clerk is waiting, and when he thinks it seemly, he shows me the various papers I have been negotiating for during the last few days, the permits and authorizations from the police, the department of health, the Mexican consulate, and the airline. He asks me to sign the final embarkation documents. I do it, and he licks the gummed back of some labels and affixes them to the coffin, sealing it. I touch the gray lid once more and we go back to the central building. The clerk murmurs his condolences and says goodbye.
After clearing the documents with the airline and the Swiss authorities, I go up to the restaurant, with my boarding pass in my hand, and I sit down and order a cup of coffee. I am sitting next to a large window and I can see the planes appearing and disappearing on the runway. They fade into the fog or emerge from it, but the noise of their engines precedes them or lingers behind like the wake of a ship. They frighten me. Yes, you know I am deathly afraid of them and I don’t want to think what this return trip with you will be like, in the middle of winter, showing in every airport the documents with your name and the permits that allow them to pass you through. They bring my coffee and I take it black; it’s what I needed. My hand does not tremble as I drink it.
Nine weeks ago I tore open your first letter in a year and a half and spilled my cup of coffee on the rug. I stooped hurriedly to wipe it up with my skirt, and then I put on a record and wandered around the room looking at book jackets, my arms crossed; I even read a few lines of poetry slowly, stroking the covers of the book, sure of myself, far removed from your still unread letter concealed in the torn envelope lying on the arm of the chair.
Sweet souvenirs of love now sadly pondered,
Yes, sweet they seemed when God did so assign,
In memory joined and bound, mine not to sunder,
With memory, too, they work my death’s design.