“It belongs to me,” she completed the stanza.
In other words, from that moment on you felt in charge.
There was mystery in her, veiled by a somber though striking beauty, eyes half closed but alert. A look you didn’t dare decipher. The others, yes, they were legible. Actresses accepted your advances in order to advance themselves. They were using you, and you knew it. You gave singular value to each “lay.” Sincere or insincere, unique or unrepeatable, it made no difference. Other women loved you for yourself, for being a leading man, for being handsome (you look in the mirror and give yourself a satisfied pat on the jaw, recalling Alejandro Sevilla at the age of thirty, when a man is in his prime, the irresistible Alejandro Sevilla, magnetic, athletic, magical, poetic, sarcastic, master of the world, the star of Mexico).
You knew how to intuit women, read them, guess their weaknesses, not take them seriously, discard them without mercy. They were your babes, your cuties, broads, dames, in the long run anonymous, forgettable because they were decipherable. Only Cielo de la Mora appeared to you as a mystery, she herself an enigma. You had no illusions. Behind the mysterious eyes of the splendid woman with very black hair and very white skin, was there another mystery that wasn’t simply the mystery of her eyes?
As a screen star, you had in your favor what an actor in the theater doesn’t have. The great close-up, the approach to your face and especially your eyes. You believed you were — you told yourself — a specialist in “a woman’s glances.” You would intone, with a slight change in lyrics, the famous bolero while you shaved first in the morning and again at eight at night, to avoid five o’clock shadow, as the Gillette commercial called it.
A woman’s glances
that I saw
close to me. .
Some were shamelessly flirtatious, the glance of “come close, what are you waiting for?” and there were some, equally shameless, as chaste as a nun’s. Glances that announced an experience their owners hadn’t had and glances that feigned an innocence that wasn’t theirs, either. Rarely, very rarely, indifferent glances. The opposite sex was never indifferent to Alejandro Sevilla. And at times the masculine gender paid you homage, Alejandro, imitating your postures, your words, the clothes you wore on the street when you stopped being a musketeer.
“Your ambiguous attitudes kindle the flame of my jealousy.”
“Frankly, darling, you leave no mark on my personality.”
“I suffer from a twilight love.”
“It’s of no importance.”
“Keep the change, waiter.”
Cielo de la Mora was different. It isn’t that she had no mystery (for you, all women have it, and if not, you invent it for them) but that she maintained an imperturbable calm in the face of your advances and amatory acrobatics. It isn’t that she didn’t take you seriously. And you couldn’t say she was mocking you. She was your normalcy. Serene, worthy of her luminous name, she was completely blue inside and out. No siren’s ass or furry diadem. She was attractive because of her contemplative serenity, a seriousness and sobriety in her manner.
She didn’t resemble any other woman.
That’s why you fell in love with her.
Cielo didn’t ask for matrimony, and neither did you. Marriages between film actors were only for publicity, and you didn’t need promotion or have a reason to give any to Cielo. In the end, you wanted her, with her face of a waning moon, to depend only on you, her sun. You would take care of giving her parts in your movies. With high combs for Zorro, crinolines for D’Artagnan, high Napoleonic breasts for Monte Cristo, red shawls for the Black Corsair: Cielo de la Mora was your chromatic partner. She obeyed you in everything, letting it be known that a prior agreement existed between you and her.
She disobeyed you only twice.
She decided to have a child with you. Surprised, you weighed the pros and cons of paternity. The most favorable part was increasing your following, both feminine and masculine. Irresistible images for both sexes. The doting father carrying a baby, showing him off proudly, lifting him high in the midst of the flashbulbs of the boys in the press.
Besides, Cielo would be out of action for five months. Eliminated from the cast and offering you a magnificent excuse to take up again the conquests your celebrated union with Cielo implicitly denied to you. You’d be careful to keep your adventures discreet. You’d threaten talkative starlets with a sudden end to their careers.
“You know, gorgeous, my word will always be worth more than yours. Sex and silence or sex and being fired. It’s up to you, babe. .”
It wasn’t that Cielo de la Mora would have been upset to learn about another of Alejandro Sevilla’s infidelities. After all, they weren’t married. And in the end, who else had decided to have the baby? Who else had stopped using birth control? Who else had taken the sedative for her nerves?
“I really was very nervous, even though I didn’t show it.”
Which was why, when the baby was born, the mother blamed only herself. She tried to assimilate her horror by watching Roman Polanski’s film Rosemary’s Baby over and over again and trying to imitate Mia Farrow’s maternal feelings. Each gesture of maternal love, however, repelled Cielo de la Mora in the deepest part of her being, obliged her to falsify her desire for serene distance before the world, to openly choose the mother’s love expected of her or the sexual repugnance that had returned to the place of conception. To love or hate. Cielo felt cornered, obliged to make drastic resolutions, abandoning her preferred role as serene (and even submissive) observer of the world.
“Forgive me, Alejandro. Don’t touch me.”
“Control yourself, Señora. That little problem won’t be repeated.”
“Don’t touch me, I’m telling you.”
“Let’s give time a little time.”
The national film industry brought her to you. The national film industry separated her from you. Once she had recuperated from the birth, though not from her melancholy, you included Cielo in the cast of your first contemporary movie. You gave in to the pleas of the producer, the public wants to see you dressed in ordinary clothes, by now they think that even at home you walk around like a musketeer, don’t fuck around, Alejandro, you owe it to your public. .
One scene in the movie took place in an opera house. Cielo de la Mora was sitting in a box. You looked at her with your binoculars, and she looked away. She was wearing a very low-cut strapless lamé gown. When the performance was over, you approached her on the street. You were wearing a heavy overcoat in addition to the indispensable gray felt hat. But she appeared without a coat, with her bare shoulders and Olympic diver’s neckline. The director hit the ceiling and shouted. Where was the mink, the fur coat the actress was supposed to be wearing?
“It’s very hot,” Cielo said.
“It doesn’t matter. The script says, ‘She comes out carefully buttoned up against the cold north wind on a wintry night.’ ”
“It’s ridiculous. It’s hot. Only in Nicaragua do women wear fox to the opera in spite of the heat.”
“Darling,” you intervened, carefully buttoned up, “it’s precisely to give the impression that Mexico isn’t a tropical country, a banana republic, but that it’s cold here, like in Europe.”
She laughed at you, turned, and got into a taxi while you murmured: “It’s to show that we’re civilized—”
“It’s to hide what we really are,” she said from the taxi.
3. In her goodbye letter, Cielo de la Mora said things like these. She had fallen in love with a photograph. “Even before I met you, even before I had seen you on the screen. An actor has to be admired from a distance. The truth is, fame muddies ordinary affection. At least let’s save the child from our quarrels. From hostility. From humiliations.”