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 Angeclass="underline" “Victor, morality is everything that gives life, and immorality everything that refutes it, isn’t that right?”