Family and friends had gathered during the days of the wake for Doña Felícitas Fernández de Silva, and her burial. Discreet, distinguished people everyone else referred to as aristocrats, as if, Federico Silva mused, an aristocracy were possible in a colony settled by fugitives, petty clerks, millers, and swineherds.
“Let us content ourselves,” he used to tell his old friend María de los Angeles Negrete, “with being what we are, an upper middle class that in spite of the whirlwinds of history has managed through time to preserve its very comfortable personal income.”
The oldest name in this assemblage had acquired its fortune in the seventeenth century, the most recent before 1910. An unwritten law excluded from the group the nouveaux riches of the Revolution, but admitted those damaged by the civil strife who’d then used the Revolution to recover their standing. But the customary, the honorable, thing was to have been rich during the colonial period, through the empire and the republican dictatorships. The ancestral home of the Marqués de Casa Cobos dated from the times of the Viceroy O’Donojú, and his grandmother had been a lady-in-waiting to the Empress Carlota; Perico Arauz’s ancestors had been ministers to Santa Anna and Porfirio Díaz; and Federico, on the Fernández side, was descended from an aide-de-camp to Maximilian, and through the Silvas from a magistrate to Lerdo de Tejeda. Proof of breeding, proof of class maintained in spite of the political upheavals of a country known for its surprises, somnolent one day, in tumult the next.
Every Saturday Federico joined his friends to play Mah-Jongg, and the Marqués always told him, “Don’t worry, Federico. No matter how it shocks us, we must admit that the Revolution tamed Mexico forever.”
He hadn’t seen the resentful eyes, the caged tigers lurking in the nervous bodies of the youths sitting watching the smog drift by.
II
The day he buried his mother he really began to remember. Moreover, he realized that it was because of her disappearance that detailed memories were returning which had been buried beneath Doña Felícitas’s formidable weight. That was when he remembered that once mornings could be perceived at midnight, and that he’d gone out on his balcony to breathe them, to collect the anticipated gift of the day.
But that was only one memory among many, the one most closely resembling a revived instinct. The fact is, he told himself, that the memory of old people is stimulated by the deaths of other old people. So he found that he was waiting for the death of some uncle or aunt or friend to be announced, secure in the knowledge that new memories would attend the rendezvous. In the same way, some day, they would remember him.
How would he be remembered? Meticulously grooming himself every morning before the mirror, he knew that he had changed very little over the last twenty years. Like Orientals, who, once they begin to age, never change until the day they die. But also because all that time he’d kept the same style of dress. No denying it, in hot weather he was the only person he knew who still wore a boater like the one made famous by Maurice Chevalier. With delight, savoring the syllables, he enunciated several foreign names for that hat: straw hat, canotier, paglietta. And in winter, a black homburg with the obligatory silk ribbon imposed by Anthony Eden, the most elegant man of his epoch.
Federico Silva always rose late. He had no reason to pretend that he was anything other than a wealthy rent collector. His friends’ sons had fallen prey to a misplaced social consciousness, which meant they must be seen up and in some restaurant by eight o’clock in the morning, eating hotcakes and discussing politics. Happily, Federico Silva had no children to be embarrassed by being wealthy, or to shame him for lying in bed till noon, waiting for his valet and cook, Dondé, to bring him his breakfast so he could drink his coffee and read the newspapers with tranquillity, shave and dress with calm.
Through the years he’d saved the clothes he’d worn as a young man, and when Doña Felícitas died he gathered up her extraordinary wardrobe and arranged it in several closets, one corresponding to the styles that predated the First World War, another for the twenties, and a third for the hodgepodge style she’d dreamed up in the thirties and then affected until her death: colored stockings, silver shoes, boas of shrieking scarlet, long skirts of mauve silk, décolleté blouses, thousands of necklaces, garden-party hats, and pearl chokers.
Every day he walked to the Bellinghausen on Londres Street, where the same corner table had been reserved for him since the era of the hand-tailored suits he wore. There he ate alone, dignified, reserved, nodding to passing acquaintances, picking up the checks of unaccompanied ladies known to him or his mother, none of this backslapping for him, no vulgarity, shouting, What’s new! What-a-sight-for-sore-eyes! or You’ve-made-my-day! He detested familiarity. An almost tangible aura of privacy surrounded his small, dark, scrupulous person. Let no one attempt to penetrate it.
His familiarity was reserved for the contents of his house. Every evening he took delight in looking at, admiring, touching, stroking, sometimes even caressing his possessions, the Tiffany lamps and ashtrays, the Lalique figurines and frames. These things gave him particular satisfaction, but he enjoyed equally a whole room of Art Deco furniture, round mirrors on silvered boudoir tables, tall lamps of tubular aluminum, a bed with a headboard of pale burnished metal, an entirely white bedroom: satin and silk, a white telephone, a polar-bear skin, walls lacquered a pale ivory.
Two events had marked his life as a young man. A trip to Hollywood, when the Mexican consul in Los Angeles had arranged a visit to the set of Dinner at Eight, where he’d been shown Jean Harlow’s white bedroom and even seen the actress from a distance: a platinum dream. And in Eden Roc he’d met Cole Porter, who’d just composed “Just One of Those Things,” and Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, who was writing Tender Is the Night. He’d had his picture taken with Porter that summer on the Riviera, but not with the Fitzgeralds. A photograph with a box camera that didn’t need a flash. And in his room in the Hotel Negresco he’d had an adventure with a naked woman in the darkness. Neither knew who the other was. Suddenly the woman had been illuminated by moonlight as bright as day, as if the moon were the sun, a prurient, blinding spotlight stripped of the fig-leaf effect of the silver screen.
The visit to the Côte d’Azur was a constant topic of nostalgic reminiscences during the Saturday-afternoon reunions. Federico was a skilled Mah-Jongg player, and three of the habitual players, María de los Angeles, Perico, and the Marqués, had been with him that summer. It had all been memorable but that one event, the incident of the blond girl who resembled Jean Harlow. If one of the friends felt that another was about to venture into that forbidden territory, he warned him with a heavily charged look. Then everybody changed the subject, avoided talking about the past, and turned to their usual discussions of family and money.
“The two cannot be separated,” Federico said as they played. “And as I have no immediate family, when I’m gone my money will be dispersed among distant branches of the family. Amusing, isn’t it?”
He apologized for talking about death. But not about money. Each of them had had the good fortune to appropriate a parcel of the wealth of Mexico at an opportune time — mines, forests, land, cattle, farms — and the luck to convert it quickly, before it had passed out of their hands, into the one secure investment: Mexico City real estate.
Half daydreaming, Federico Silva thought about the houses that so punctually produced his rents, the old colonial palaces on Tacuba, Guatemala, and La Moneda Streets. He’d never visited them. He was totally ignorant about the people who lived there. Perhaps one day he would ask one of his rent collectors to tell him who lived in the old palaces. What were the people like? Did they realize they were living in the noblest mansions of Mexico?