Don Cástulo, to judge by his bone structure, should be skinny, but he possesses the inevitable pot belly of someone who’s eaten bean tortas and peppers and fried pork all his life, washed down with the occasional beer. Doña Serafina works miracles, María del Rosario. She contributes to the household economy by baking cakes and pastries. The kitchen is hers. No one else enters it, and it happens to be the largest room in the apartment.
“That was why we picked it,” she says.
The kitchen has everything, including a long table coated with flour and even a baker’s oven. This is where the good woman prepares her meringues, wedding towers, and all kinds of fanciful concoctions for parties, first communions, and dances, and thanks to this little business, she manages to bring home 1,000 dollars a month — which would be 2,000 if she didn’t have to spend half her earnings on “raw materials,” as she calls them with pride, efficiently wiping her hands on her apron. Picture Andrea Palma at sixty. Picture that slender, languid beauty from the film Woman of the Port, who sold her love “to the men who come back from the sea,” only now with a body that’s less than slender and a bearing that’s anything but languid except in the very deepest recesses of her eyes. And if her husband’s eyes are as opaque as a visor, Serafina’s are as melancholy as a sudden twilight in the middle of the day.
“Businesslike,” the gringos say, don’t they? Well, that’s what Serafina is, my friend — not a minute of rest and not a single complaint, except in those eyes that yearn for something that never was. I repeat. I emphasize. Something that never was. The expression that speaks of a promise unfulfilled gives both the lady of the house and the house itself their melancholy. Nostalgia, lost dreams, what could have been. .
Imagine that expression, my powerful patroness, because I’ve never seen it in your eyes. It’s as if you already had it all — all but the realms unconquered by your ambition. Doña Serafina has eyes that no longer aspire to anything. As I watch her working in her kitchen, I see no ambition, just the pure and simple will to survive. And there’s Cástulo, reading the newspaper in the cramped living room. The television, he tells me, has been pawned, and that’s despite the fact that in Mexico even people from the most squalid slums, the lost cities, have televisions. But he says that he grew up reading newspapers and he isn’t about to give up his slow archivist’s habits for those little pills of information they serve up on TV. Of course now without satellite signals for TV antennae, he couldn’t watch anything even if he wanted to. .
All in the name of God. Or rather in the name of their irrepressible twenty-year-old daughter, Araceli, who spends all day lying on her bed reading ¡Hola! magazine and dreaming, I suppose, of being Charlotte of Monaco or someone like her, and then spends hours beautifying herself for a boyfriend who picks her up in a convertible at nine o’clock to take her out to dinner and then dancing. She’s not out of control, her mother claims. She’s just young, she has a right to have fun, and anyway, she always comes back with a plastic doggie bag filled with leftovers from the restaurants she dines at thanks to Hugo Patrón, her boyfriend from the Yucatán, who runs a travel agency that has been idling lately since the computers aren’t working and the gringos have their doubts about traveling to Mexico these days. Still, the walls of Araceli’s bedroom are covered with the posters Hugo gives her — of the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, Paris, and Venice. He’s a well-intentioned boy, doña Serafina says, even if he is a bit old-fashioned. You see, he refuses to let Araceli work at all; he wants to save up enough money for an apartment and a honeymoon, and he doesn’t ever want his girlfriend — and future wife — to work. My conclusion is that he associates leisure with virginity.
Serafina occasionally pulls herself together and summons the spoiled young lady from her room to deliver cakes when clients don’t send their chauffeurs to pick them up. You should see the scowl that comes over that little girl’s face. She was born to be a princess, with that head full of silly dreams, and quite frankly she even flirts with me when I visit. Yes, I’m a better catch than Hugo Patrón, but the minute I start talking she becomes very shy, and as I play the role of the erudite professional educated in Paris, sprinkling my conversation with French, I can see a mixture of ennui, respect, and detachment come over her pretty, moon-colored face, as if I were the “black cloud of destiny,” a wondrous soul descended from his pedestal to visit the humble of this world — like her, a girl who has no visible prospects in life other than a marriage to the travel agent Hugo Patrón and a honeymoon in Miami.
The apartment has two bedrooms. One for the parents and the other for Araceli. On the roof, in a wooden hut next to a makeshift pigeon loft, lives the son, Ricardo, who very tenderly looks after those birds, reminding me of Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint on the rickety rooftops by New York’s waterfront. He’s an extraordinary young man, María del Rosario, and I’m telling you straight because I know that you fancy yourself a kind of headhunter extraordinaire (please forgive these occasional ironies of mine, I have no other way to tone down the resentment you inspire in me).
Ricardo is exceptional first of all in the physical sense. A son who was very much planned and hoped for by his parents, he must be about twenty-six, very slim without being skinny, with severe but very delicate musculature. He’s taller than me — about five foot eleven — and has the kind of head you only see in Italian museums: every detail finely chiseled, thin lips, sharp nose, high cheekbones, large, almost Asian eyes, broad forehead, and a mane of black hair that reaches his shoulders.
Am I describing an object of desire? In all sincerity, I believe so. You, my beautiful and elusive lady, a woman who has indulged and continues to indulge in so many wonderful delights, surely understand what I mean. This boy is so beautiful that nobody — neither woman nor man — could possibly help desiring him. Tight jeans, short T-shirt, bare feet when he comes out, surprised, to see who’s there, and when I tell him who I am he turns to scatter corn for the pigeons. He knows that I’ve helped his father and he’s grateful to me for that.
He looks me straight in the eye, a bit mocking, a bit skeptical, and says, “I don’t go to the university because it’s been closed down for two years.”