He would never invest in a new building like those that had blocked out his sun and made his house list to one side. That much he’d sworn to himself. Smiling, he repeated his oath as they walked to the dining table that Mah-Jongg Saturday in his home. Everyone knew that to be received by Federico Silva was a very special honor. Only he entertained with such detail, the seating plan in a red leather holder, the places set in accord to the strictest protocol — rank, age, former posts — and the card with the name of each guest at its precise place, the menu written out in the host’s own hand, Dondé’s impeccable service at the table.
That night as he glanced around the table, counting the absent, the friends who had preceded him in death, there was scarcely a flicker of expression on Federico Silva’s Oriental mask. He rubbed his tiny porcelain Mandarin hands together: ah, there was no protocol as implacable as death, no priority more strict than that of the tomb. High overhead, the Lalique chandelier shed a vertical beam, perversely illuminating the Goyaesque faces of his table companions, the flesh of curdled custard, the deep fissures at the corners of the mouths, the hollow eyes of his friends.
Whatever became of the nude blond girl of that night in my room in the Hotel Negresco?
A Mayan profile thrust between Federico Silva and the lady seated at his right, his friend María de los Angeles Negrete, as Dondé began to serve the soup. The bridge of Dondé’s nose began in the middle of his forehead and his tiny eyes were crossed.
“Isn’t it extraordinary,” Federico Silva commented in French. “Do you realize that this type of profile and crossed eyes was a mark of physical beauty among the Mayas? To achieve it they bound the infants’ heads when they were born and forced them to follow the pendulum motion of a marble suspended on a thread. How is it possible that centuries later those artificially imposed characteristics continue to be transmitted?”
“It’s like inheriting a wig and false teeth.” María de los Angeles whinnied like a mare.
Dondé’s profile between the host and his guest, his arm holding the soup tureen, the brimming soup ladle, the unexpected offense of Dondé’s sweat, he’d warned him for the last time, bathe after you finish in the kitchen and before you begin to serve, sometimes it isn’t possible, señor, there isn’t enough time, señor.
“Yours, or my mother’s, María de los Angeles?”
“What, Federico?”
“The wig. The teeth.”
Someone jarred the ladle, Federico Silva, Dondé, or María de los Angeles, who knows, but steaming chickpea soup disappeared into the woman’s bodice, screams, how could that have happened, Dondé, I’m sorry, señor. I swear, I didn’t do it, ay! the curds-and-whey breasts of María de los Angeles, ay! the scalded tits, go take a bath, Dondé, you offend me, Dondé, my mother’s wig and false teeth, the naked blonde, Nice …
He awakened with a fearful start, the anguish of a desperate effort to remember what he’d just dreamed, the certainty he would never recapture it, another dream lost forever. Drunk with sadness, he put on his Chinese dressing gown and walked out on the balcony.
He breathed deeply. He sniffed in vain for odors of the morning to come. The mud of the Aztec lake, the foam of the Indian night. Impossible. Like his dreams, the lost perfumes refused to return.
“Is anything the matter, señor?”
“No, Dondé.”
“I heard the señor call out.”
“It was nothing. Go back to sleep, Dondé.”
“Whatever you say, señor.”
“Good night, Dondé.”
“Good night, señor.”
III
“As long as I’ve known you, you’ve been a real stickler about what you wear, Federico.”
He’d never forgiven his old friend María de los Angeles, who had once made fun of him by addressing him as Monsieur Verdoux. Maybe there was something Chaplinesque in antiquated elegance, but only when it disguised a diminishing fortune. And Federico Silva, as everyone knew, was not down on his luck. It was just that, like every person of true taste, he had the good sense to choose things that lasted. A pair of shoes, or a house.
“Save electricity. Go to bed early.”
He would never, for example, wear spats and carry a cane at the same time. In his daily stroll down Córdoba Street to the Bellinghausen restaurant, he was careful to offset the showy effect of a brick-colored jacket with a Buster Brown belt he’d had made in 1933 by draping a nondescript raincoat over his arm with studied insouciance. And only on the infrequent days when it was really cold did he wear the derby, the black overcoat and white muffler. He was well aware that behind his back his friends whispered that the way he hung on to his clothes was really the most humiliating proof of dependence. With what Doña Felícitas had put him through, he had to make things last twenty or thirty years.
“Save electricity. Go to bed early.”
But why after Doña Felícitas’s death did he continue to wear the same old outfits? That was something they’d never asked him, now that he’d inherited the fortune. You could say that Doña Felícitas had deformed him, and he had turned necessity into a virtue. No, that wasn’t it. His mother only pretended to be stingy. It all began with that sacred sentence — save electricity, go to bed early — said as if it were a sarcastic joke one night when she wanted to conceal her real intent, to save face, to pretend she didn’t know her son was grown up, that he went out at night without asking her permission, that he dared leave her by herself.
“If I support you, the least I can expect is that you won’t leave me here all alone, Feddie. I could die at any moment, Feddie. I know Dondé’s here, but I am not thrilled at the idea of dying in the arms of a servant. Very well, Feddie. I suppose it must be, as you say, a very, very important engagement to cause you to abandon your own mother. Abandon, yes, that’s the word. I pray to God you make up for the hurt you’ve caused me, Feddie. You know how. You promised me this year you’d follow Father Tellez’s spiritual exercises. Please do that little favor for me, Feddie. I’m going to hang up now. I’m feeling very tired.”
She replaced the white receiver. Sitting in the bed with the burnished metal headboard, surrounded with white cushions, covered with white furs, a great ancient doll, a milk-white Punchinella, lavishing powder on a floury face in which her blazing eyes, orange mouth, and red cheeks were obscene scars, flourishing with panache the white puff, enveloping herself in a choking, perfumed cloud of rice powder and aromatic talcum, her bare skull protected by a white silk cap. At night the wig of tight, shiny black curls reposed on a cotton-stuffed head on the silver boudoir table, like the wigs of ancient queens.
Sometimes Federico Silva liked to interject a touch of the fantastic into the Saturday conversations. Nothing more satisfying than an appreciative audience, and inevitably it was easy to frighten María de los Angeles. Federico Silva found this flattering. María de los Angeles was older than he, and he’d been in love with her as a boy; he’d wept when the precious little sixteen-year-old had chosen to go to the Country Club ball with older boys, not with him, the devoted little friend, the humble admirer of her blond perfection, her rose-colored skin, the filmy tulle and silken ribbons that veiled and encircled her desirable flesh. Oh, beautiful María de los Angeles. Now she looked like Goya’s Queen María Luisa. He realized that in frightening her Federico Silva was still paying homage, just as he had at fifteen. But was the only possible homage gooseflesh?