She would be the hostess. La Desdichada is receiving guests, and she will receive them in her robe, like a grand French courtesan, like a geisha, like a great English lady in her castle, taking advantage of her privilege of eccentricity to act freely.
Bernardo
Who sent these dried flowers an hour before dinner?
Who could it be?
Toño
Not many people came to the dinner. Well, fine, not many people would fit in our apartment, but Bernardo and I felt that a huge party with lots of people, the kind that’s usually given in Mexico (there are so many solitudes to overcome: more than in other places), might give the event an orgiastic tone. Secretly, I would have liked to have seen La Desdichada lost in a restless, even a mean crowd: I nourished the fantasy that, surrounded by a mass of indifferent bodies, hers would cease to be so: moved about, handled, passed from hand to hand, a party animal, she would go on being a mannequin but nobody would know: she would be just like everyone else.
Everyone would greet her, ask her name, what she did, wish her well, and quickly move on to chat with the next person, convinced that she had replied to his questions, how spiritual, how clever!
— My name is La Desdichada. I am a professional model. I’m not paid for my work.
The fact is, only three men accepted our invitation. You had to be curious to accept an invitation like ours on Monday night, at the beginning of the school week. It didn’t surprise us that two of our guests were fellows from aristocratic families whose fortunes had been reduced in those years of tumult and confusion. Nothing lasts longer than half a century in Mexico, except the poor and the priests. Bernardo’s family, which was very influential when the Liberals were in power back in the nineteenth century, does not have an ounce of influence today, and the families of Ventura del Castillo and Arturo Ogarrio, who obtained their power under the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship, had now lost theirs as well. The violent history of Mexico is a great leveler. The person who’s on top one day shows up the next, not on the heights, but in the flats: the mid-level middle-class plateau composed mainly of the impoverished remnants of short-lived aristocracies. Ventura del Castillo, self-proclaimed “new poor,” was more afraid of being middle-class than he was of being poor. The way he escaped was by being eccentric. He was the school clown, something his appearance helped him in. At twenty, he was fat and prim, with a tuft of hair over his lip, red cheeks, and the eyes of a lovesick sheep behind a ubiquitous monocle. His role-playing allowed him to rise above the humiliating aspects of his social decline; his exaggerated style, instead of making him a laughingstock at school, earned him a startled respect; he rejected the melodrama of the fallen family; with less justification he accepted the idea, still in vogue, of the “fallen woman,” and, no doubt, when he walked into our apartment, that’s what he thought Bernardo and I were exhibiting: a cheap Nana, taken from one of the red-light nightclubs that everyone, aristocrat or not, then frequented. Ventura had his commentary ready and the presence of La Desdichada gave him license to say:
— Melodrama is simply comedy without humor.
Our friend was not disturbed by La Desdichada’s appearance, wrapped in her Chinese dressing gown, her unchanging painted face giving her a rather Orozcoan look (Expressionist, we called it then), but it carried his innate sense of the grotesque to new heights. Wherever he went, Ventura became the festive center of attention, eating his monocle at dinner. Everyone suspected that his eyeglass was made of gelatin; when he swallowed it, he made such an outrageous noise that everyone ended up laughing, repelled and pained, until the wag ended his joke by rinsing his mouth with beer and eating, as a sort of dessert, the flower eternally in his buttonhole — a daisy, no less.
For all that, the encounter between Ventura del Castillo and La Desdichada resulted in a sort of unexpected standoff: we were confronting him with someone who was vastly more eccentric than he was. He looked at her and asked us with his eyes, Is she a dummy, or is she a splendid actress? Is she La Duse with an expressionless face? Bernardo and I looked at each other. We didn’t know if Ventura was going to see us, and not La Desdichada, as the eccentrics of the affair, challenging our fat friend’s supremacy.
— Such rakes you chaps are! laughed the lad, who affected the verbal mannerisms of Madrid.
— She’s a paralytic for sure!
Arturo Ogarrio, by contrast, wasn’t as lighthearted about his family’s decline. Having to study with the masses at San Ildefonso Prep annoyed him; he never resigned himself to losing his chance to enroll at Sandhurst in England, as two preceding generations of his family had done. His bitterness showed in his face. He saw everything that took place in this world of “reality” with a kind of poisonous clarity.
— What we left behind was a fantasy — he told me once, as if I were the cause of the Mexican Revolution and he — noblesse oblige — had to thank me for opening his eyes.
Severely dressed, all in dark gray, with a waistcoat, stiff collar, and black tie, bearing the grief of a lost time, Arturo Ogarrio had no trouble seeing what was going on: it was a gag, a wooden dummy presiding over a dinner of prep students where a pair of friends with literary inclinations were throwing down the gauntlet to the imagination of Arturo Ogarrio, new citizen of the republic of reality.
— Are you going to join our game? Yes or no?
His face was extremely pale, thin, without lips, but with the brilliant eyes of the frustrated aesthete, frustrated because he identified art with leisure, and since he didn’t have the one, he couldn’t conceive of having the other. He refused to be a dilettante; perhaps that is all we offered him: a breach of quotidian reality, an unimportant aesthetic diversion. He was almost contemptuous of us. I considered that something I could interpret as his refusal of concessions, like his rejection of dilettantism. He would not take sides — reality or fantasy. He would judge matters on their own merits and respond to the initiatives of the others. He crossed his arms and watched us with a severe smile.
The third guest, Teófilo Sánchez, was the school’s professional bohemian: poet and painter, singer of traditional melodies. He must have seen old engravings or recent films, or simply have heard somewhere that the painter wears a floppy hat and a cape, and the poet long hair and florid neckwear. To be different, Teófilo chose to wear a railroad engineer’s shirt without a tie, and a short jacket, and he went about with his head uncovered (in that age of the obligatory hat, his head appeared offensively naked, it was practically shaved, in a cut that at that time was associated with German schools or the lowest class of army recruits). His careless features, resembling a loaf of rye before it’s put in the oven, his lively raisin eyes, the spontaneous abundance of his poetic language, seemed a commentary on Ventura’s remark, which I had rewarded with a sour smile a moment before: Melodrama is comedy without humor.
Was that remark directed at me, since I was still writing little chronicles of the fait-divers of the capital and the minor poetry, unquestionably vulgar, of the popular dance hall, the tart, and the pimp, the couples of the barrio, jealousy and betrayal, abandoned gardens and sleepless nights? Don’t overlook the classical statues in the gardens and the forgotten idols in the basements, Bernardo commented very seriously. Ventura laughed at Teófilo because Teófilo wanted to provoke laughter. Arturo saw Teófilo as what Teófilo was and would be: a youthful curiosity, but a disappointment as an older man.