It was there I received the foreseeable lesson. One afternoon, the girl I was traveling with casually left a letter on the bed in our hotel room. She was writing to another of her boyfriends, arranging a date for New Year’s Eve, which, of course, she refused to spend with me. “Writers only for a little while, because they give me brain food so I can make better love with you, darling. Besides, the oldtimers have their own kind of kicks … like drinking champagne all day. It just gives me heartburn. Put some sodas on ice for me, baby. Remember, if there’s no Coke, I just don’t celebrate …”
I pretended not to notice, but when I got back to Mexico City, I went to see my wife and asked her to spend New Year’s Eve with me and to end a separation that had lasted almost a year. Once again, she would be my total victory over transitory loves.
III
Luisa Guzmán had been — still was — a woman of exceptional beauty. Dark-haired, with pale, crepuscular, luminous skin that glowed brightly instead of darkening in the light of her huge black eyes, which were slanted, almost Oriental, resting above the twin continents of her high, Asiatic, tremulous cheekbones. There was a reverie in her eyes, a languor, as if while searching for herself she had been stricken with a resigned, culpable sadness. She was an actress who wanted more than the Mexican movie industry could give her. She had made her debut at the age of fifteen, an aspirant to the pantheon of Mexican film goddesses, all dark-haired like her, all tall, with sleepy eyes and the cheekbones of an immortal skull.
She never got the parts, the stories, or the directors that could have brought about the tiny miracle called stardom. She avidly searched for the best, both in film and on stage; she loved her profession so much that, paradoxically, it destroyed her. Just like Diana Soren, she made only two or three good films. Later, just to keep working, she would take any part that came along. Time and wear took away her voice, denied her starring roles, made her prematurely old; she looked for character-actor parts, opportunities to shine that no one understood because they were so eccentric.
When we met, Luisa was married and I was emerging from a failed attempt at “decent” marriage. One after another, the proper young ladies my family’s status brought me into contact with would end up abandoning me, obeying their parents’ ironclad rules: I wasn’t rich, and even though I came from a good family, I didn’t belong to a grand political or financial clan. Besides, my talent was yet to be proven. In the best of cases, writing is a risky profession, especially in Latin America: in our countries, who lives off his books?
From my amatory youth, all I had left was the taste of many young and fresh lips and, over the years, questions: What have they said? When did they lose their freshness? When will they be cracks instead of lips? I loved none of them so much as I loved a dead girlfriend burned to cinders in an air crash; there was no girl in my life with fresher lips. But her ashes were also those of the lips of another woman I was on the verge of marrying. She rejected me because I wasn’t Catholic enough; I was, her parents said, an atheist and a Communist. She married a gringo with enormous feet, a belly swollen from too many beers, and a string of Texaco stations in the Midwest.
But the girlfriends were also part of an unknown sign, part of that horror I evoked at the start of my story, which consists in trying to penetrate the powerful mystery of what has yet to show itself. There is no greater melancholy than this: not knowing all the beings we might have loved, to die before we know them. My girlfriends — kissed, touched, desired, only occasionally possessed — all belonged, ultimately, to that magma of the unknown or unsaid. They all returned to the vast field of my possibility, my ignorance.
I met Luisa Guzmán before the success of my first novel. I think she loved me for myself, and I loved her for her beauty, which was obvious, and for her simplicity, which was disguised by a whirl of furs, rumors, images. More often than in her films, I had seen her in newspapers, ascending or descending airplane gangways clutching a huge plush panda. It was her trademark. An infantile image but closer to the truth than any publicity story could be.
Luisa’s childhood was miserable: a father who was absent or, rather, exiled by her mother’s aristocratic pride. The mother, a rebellious writer from a “good” Puebla family, always put her sexual or literary egoism before any family obligation. One day, Luisa’s father, tall, Indian, coarse, found the door of his wife and daughter’s home locked and he disappeared forever in the high mist and piquant scent of our mountains. Luisa, a child then, was sent to an orphanage and reemerged, an adolescent, only when her beauty and her mother’s profession came into a favorable conjunction in her mother’s little brain.
Damaged, Luisa came to me like a wounded bird, flying from a theater set on Sullivan Street into my waiting arms, which yearned for her, to fill a solitude that was creative but also stupid. The months of discipline and dissipation during which I had distanced myself forever from my family’s social world and struggled to finish my book had left me with empty arms. She came to fill them with her passion and tenderness but also with a sadness in her captive eyes. That sadness was an early disquiet for my own joy. I finished a book; I love a woman.
It took me a long time to understand that the melancholy in Luisa’s eyes was not temporary but consubstantial with them. It came, who knows, from her father’s misty, spicy mountains, from the faded sadness of those Puebla houses and their inhabitants, often querulous and hypocritical, as is appropriate to that region — a hotbed of warlords and nuns, of cruelly ambitious men and cruelly devout women. But more than anything, in my wife’s mestizo beauty I recognized her father’s foggy, piquant mountains, where patience and goodness accumulate along with rancor and revenge.
IV
Now Luisa and I were together again at the New Year’s Eve party Eduardo Terrazas was throwing, and Luisa was more beautiful than ever — dark, tall, showing lots of cleavage in a black dress that reflected the brilliance of her teased hair, of her eyebrows and lashes, almost of her dark skin that shone like some Aztec moon, sculpted, fighting to make visible its secret interior light devoid of color; or perhaps she offered her color in a spectrum of emotions, situations, and accidents that reconciled the profound solidity and the tremendous insecurity of this woman: between those two poles, her destiny took on its own form.
She felt she was permanent, and she was. She forgave me everything; I’d always come back to her. She was the safe haven, the peaceful lagoon where I could write. She knew my truth. Literature is my real lover, and everything else — sex, politics, religion (if I had one), death (when it comes) — passes through literary experience, which is the filter of all the other experiences of my life. She knew it. She prepared and maintained the home of my writing like a perpetual flame, always waiting for me, come what may. My friends knew it, and the most generous among them, if they were friends of my lovers, would warn them: “He’ll never leave Luisa. You have to understand that. On the other hand, you’ll always have a friend in me.”
Which is to say, the hard and fast rule for the Don Juans of all times is summed up in this Mexican adage: “Let’s see if she’s like chewing gum and sticks.” I was no exception. They all brought their chewing gum and tried to stick, sometimes successfully, other times not. Some wives would never stand for that; others would simply pretend not to see. Luisa and I had an express pact. Even if my chewing gum stuck, I’d come back. I would always come back. That was the worst blackmail. I was always in danger of having her pay me back in the same coin. Maybe she did. Women — the best women — know how to keep secrets, unlike stereotypical gossips. The most interesting women I know never tell anyone about their sexual lives. Not even their best friends. And nothing intrigues and excites a man more than a woman who keeps secrets better than he does. But Don Juan, by definition, proclaims his triumphs, wants to have them known, wants to be envied. Luisa was secret. I — a contemptible clown, a sexual tourist — didn’t deserve the loyalty, solidity, and constantly renewed faith of a woman like Luisa. That was her strength. That’s why she put up with everything. That’s why I was with her once again that night. She was stronger than I was.