For the first time, staring off as though he was in a sort of trance, Zurinaga had repeated himself. He had only just told me more or less the same thing. I didn’t call attention to this excusable symptom of old age.
“Sir,” I was quick to say, “I have always followed your instructions.”
He stroked my hand. His hand was, in spite of the fire, ice.
“Please, don’t think of this as an order,” he smiled. “It’s more like a happy coincidence. How is Asunción?”
Once again, Zurinaga had disconcerted me. I hadn’t expected him to mention my wife.
“Fine, sir, fine.”
“What a happy coincidence,” the old man repeated. “You are a lawyer in my firm. She has a real estate agency. Huzzah! as they used to say. Huzzah! Between the two of you, my friend’s housing problem is already solved.”
Chapter 2
Asunción and I always breakfast together. First she takes our ten-year-old daughter, Magdalena, to school, and by the time I’ve showered, shaved, and dressed, she’s come back. Because we will be separated until dinnertime, we look forward to breakfast together, and we make it last. Candelaria, our maid and cook, has been with us forever, and before that she was with my wife’s family. Asunción’s father was an honest notary public. Her mother was a woman with no imagination. Candelaria on the other hand has imagination to burn. Nowhere in the world are breakfasts as satisfying as they are in Mexico, and Candelaria confirms this tenet every morning with a tableful of mangoes, sapodillas, papayas, and mamey sapotes, which prepare the palate for a heavenly feast of chilaquiles in green sauce, huevos rancheros, tamales costeños wrapped in banana leaves, and piping-hot coffee, accompanied by a variety of pastries suggestively described as conches, frogs, powdery shortbread, and hammocks.
A breakfast that lasts an hour, as it should, is a luxury nowadays. For me, it lays the foundation for the day. Breakfast is a time of loving stares that contain the unspoken memory of nocturnal love, and which goes beyond — but includes — culinary pleasure, recalling Asunción in the nude, surrendering to me, and glowing in response to the intensity of my love. Asunción with her perfect and beautiful form, supple to the touch, passionate gaze, yes, ice caught fire. .
Asunción is my reverse image. Her hair is long, straight, and dark. My hair is short, curly, and chestnut-brown. Her skin is white and soft; her body, curvaceous. My skin color is cinnamon, and I am trim. Her eyes are pitch black. Mine are blue-green. In her thirties, Asunción preserves the dark and youthful luster of her hair. In my forties, I have premature grays. Our daughter, Magdalena, resembles me more than she does her mother. This is all but a law of inheritance: sons favor their mothers; daughters favor their fathers. The girl’s untamable hair used to irritate my mother-in-law. Magdalena’s nappy hair — her grandmother proclaimed, staring at me with her habitual suspicion — would betray her dark race. The good woman wanted to iron her granddaughter’s hair. She died of apoplexy, although her illness was mistaken for a deep comatose state, and the doctors hesitated before pronouncing her dead. Her husband, my father-in-law, reacted to the doctors’ assessment of his wife as comatose with ill-concealed alarm, then let out a great sigh of relief when he knew for sure that she was indeed gone. He didn’t last long without her, though. As if taking revenge from the other world, Doña Rosalba de la Llave condemned her husband, the notary Don Ricardo, to live, from that day on, in a state of confusion, not knowing where to find his pajamas or his toothpaste, nor knowing what time it was, or even worse, where he’d left his wallet and his briefcase. He was bewildered to death.
Our daughter, Magdalena, has grown up, therefore, having retained her naturally curly hair; her almond-shaped emerald-green eyes strangely flecked with silver; her skin, a mixture of her mother’s and father’s complexions, the pale of the moon; and at the age of ten, a lovely figure, still childlike, neither chubby nor skinny, filled-out, hug-gable, scrumptious. . Her mother doesn’t allow her to wear pants; she insists on plaid skirts, and blue cardigans over white blouses — like the well-educated girls from the French School, the jeune filles, or “fine mares,” of the Mexican upper classes — ankle socks, and patent leather shoes.
All this gives Magdalena an air not exactly doll-like, but old-fashioned, the air of a girl from another time. I see her little classmates dressed in sweatshirts and jeans, and I ask myself whether Asunción is testing our daughter’s adaptability to the modern world. (This tension between the modern and the antique was also a point of contention, this time with my mother. Being French, she insisted we name the girl Madeleine, but Asunción prevailed; her grandmother could call her anything she liked, Madeleine or even the atrocious Madó, but at home she would always be Magdalena or, at least, Magda.) The fact is that Asunción is the keeper of the sacred flame of tradition, she accepts modern fashions with difficulty, and she herself dresses the way she would like our daughter to dress when she grows up: black tailored suit, dark stockings, and medium heels.
This is our everyday life. I need to emphasize, however, that this is not our normal life, because there can be no normal life for a couple that has lost a son. Didier, our little twelve-year-old boy, died four years ago in a moment of irreparable destiny. Brave and adventurous ever since he was a small child, Didier had been a strong swimmer. Because of his talent for all mechanical and practical tasks, from bicycling to mountain climbing — he pleaded for his own motorcycle — he thought the very sea would have to respect his nonchalant expertise. One afternoon in Acapulco, at the Pie de la Cuesta beach, he ran, whooping with joy, into the ocean’s giant waves and strong, invisible undertow.
We never saw him again. The sea never returned him. And so his absence was doubled. Asunción and I do not have any memory, as terrible as it would be, of a dead body. Didier dissolved into the ocean, and I am incapable of hearing the break of a wave without thinking that a trace of my son, turned to salt and foam, is coming back to us, after circulating incessantly, like a ghost ship, from ocean to ocean. . We try to fix him in our memory as he appears in the photos of his childhood and especially in the final images of his short life. He looked like a younger version of his mother, turned into a little boy. Pale, with large black eyes and thick straight hair that fell naturally over the back of his neck and was beautifully trimmed to dangle over his broad forehead. But it’s hard to find a portrait in which he is smiling. Whenever someone with a camera asked him to smile, he protested, “I refuse to look goofy!” a disconcerting amount of dignity in such a little boy. He took his talent for sports so seriously it might have been life itself. And it was. It was life. His life was gone. Away. From us.
We aren’t particularly religious, Asunción and I. My maternal family of French Huguenots never yielded to Catholicism, but I have caught Asunción, more than once, speaking to a photograph of Didier, or murmuring, alone, words of love and longing for our son. I only do so in silence.
We needed to forget the animosity that brought us to each other’s throats when Didier disappeared. Asunción had wanted to dredge the sea, to explore the whole coastline, to excavate the beach, and to rip open the rocks. She would have drained the ocean until it revealed the boy’s body. I pleaded for serenity and acceptance: “I don’t want to see him again,” I begged, to Asunción’s deep offense, “I want to remember him the way he was. .”
I’ll never forget that awful look she shot at me, its disgust and resentment. We never discussed the matter again.