Happy Families

  “I remember,” Manuel said with a smile.

  “It’s true,” Lucy said.

  The perfume of two bodies in bloom. The smell of the Acapulco sun. Manuel a contagious perspiration. Lucila a sweet perspiration. Both transformed by the brand-new experience of young love . . . A day when Lucy is sometimes with us and sometimes Manolo.

  The perfect symmetry of the day and of life during a month’s vacation in Acapulco.

  They spoke with preserved emotion, separated from the world by the voyage and joined to the earth by shared memory. Acapulco during the vacation of 1949. Acapulco is the awakening of the new decade of the fifties. A time of peace, illusion, confidence. And the two of them, Lucila and Manuel, embracing at the center of the world. What did they say to each other?

  “I don’t remember. Do you?”

  “What two puppies say to each other.” Manuel laughed. “What they do . . .”

  “You know I was never happier in my life, Manolo.”

  “Neither was I.”

  “It’s wonderful that in five weeks you can live more than in fifty years . . . Forgive my frankness. Age authorizes what it was once forbidden to say.”

  Detailed memories tumbled out, the beaches back then, Caleta during the day, Hornos at dusk, the children playing in the sand, the fathers walking along the sea wearing long trousers and short-sleeved shirts, the mothers in flowered dresses and straw hats, never in bathing suits, the fathers vigilant, watching the adolescents moving away from the beach, swimming to Roqueta Island where paternal glances did not reach where young love could ally itself with the one visible love young love in heat surrender of the soul more than of the body but senseless uncontrollable pounding of the pulse the flesh the look of closed eyes—do you remember Lucy do you remember Manolo?—the touch uncertain more than experienced and sensual exploratory and auroral, Lucy, Manolo, while from Caleta the fathers look anxiously toward the island and ask only will they be back in time for lunch? and the mothers will open their parasols even wider and the fathers will wave their panama hats asking them to come back come back it’s time . . .

  “Was it like that, Manolo?”

  “I don’t know. The first meeting is always a day without memory.”

  “There were many days, a love that seemed very long to me, very long . . .”

  “No, remember it as a single day, the day we met.”

  Lucila was about to take Manuel’s hand. She stopped herself. She said only: “What long fingers. I think that’s what I remember best. What I liked most about you. Your long fingers.”

  She stared at him with a cruel gleam that took him by surprise. “So much asking myself, Whatever happened to him? Is he happy, unlucky, poor, rich?” She smiled. “And I had only one certainty left. Manuel has very slender, very long, very lovable fingers . . . Tell me, were we so inexperienced back then?”

  He returned her smile. “You know that in czarist Russia, couples older than fifty needed their children’s permission to marry.”

  She bowed her head. “Forty years later and you still reproach me?”

  No, Manuel denied it, no.

  “You know I died for you?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me so then?”

  She didn’t respond directly. She fanned herself wearily, not looking at him. “Perfection is what they expected of me.” She let the fan fall on her lap, next to the fashion magazine. “Who’s perfect? Not even those who demand it of you.”

  “You hurt me very much, Lucila.”

  “Imagine how hard it was for me to tell you, ‘Go, I don’t love you anymore.’ ”

  “Is that what your parents asked you to do?”

  She was perturbed. “I had to tell you that so you’d go away, so you wouldn’t love me anymore.”

  “No, tell me really, did you believe it?”

  “What do you think?” She raised her voice without intending to.

  “Did they ask you to?”

  “Yes, but that wasn’t the reason I turned you down.”

  Manuel kept to himself what he knew. Lucila was supposed to marry a rich boy from high society. Manuel was “decent people”—that was what it was called—but with no sizable bank account. That was the real reason, a categorical order, break off with that pauper, this Manuel can’t give you the life you deserve, romantic love ends, you get older, and what you want is security, comfort, a chauffeur, a house in Las Lomas, vacations in Europe, shopping in Houston, Texas.

  “Then what was it?”

  She sat erect, proud. “ ‘Go. I don’t love you.’ ” She looked straight at him. “I thought I’d keep you that way.”

  “I want to understand you . . .” Manuel murmured.

  Lucila lowered her eyes. “Besides, that excited me. Letting you go . . .”

  “Like a servant.”

  “Yes. And getting excited. To see if you rebelled and refused to believe what I said and pushed me against the wall . . .”

  “It was your parents’ decision.”

  “. . . and carried me off, I don’t know, kidnapped me, would not be defeated . . . It was my decision. It was my hope.”

  Waiters served consommé and biscuits. Manuel sat thinking, self-absorbed and struggling against that undesirable thought: seeing in the separation of two young sweethearts only an episode in the autobiography of an egotist. There had to be something more. He sipped the consommé.

  “We made a date, remember?” said Manuel.

  “And kept postponing it,” said Lucila.

  “How could we lose hope?”

  “So much wondering: Whatever happened to him? So many selfrecriminations: Why did I let him go? I wasn’t happy with the husband they forced on me. I was happy with you, Manuel.”

  They looked at each other. Two old people. Two old people remembering distant times. Did they both think that when all was said and done, none of it had happened? Or that, given the fact of chance, it could have occurred in very different ways? Looking at each other now as they never had when nostalgia was exiled by presence, both of them thought that if none of it had happened yesterday, it was happening now, and only in this way would they be able to remember tomorrow. It would be an unrepeatable moment in their lives. With its actuality, it would supplant all nostalgia for the past. Perhaps all yearning for the future.

  “The sweet sorrow of separation. Who said that?” he murmured.

  “The sorrow, the sorrow of losing you,” she said very quietly. “And the obligation to hide my feelings . . . Do you know I was dying for you?”

  “But why didn’t you tell me so back then?”

  Lucila abruptly changed the subject. No, her marriage hadn’t been happy. Though she was, because she had three children. All girls. She smiled. And he? No, he was a die-hard bachelor.

  “It’s never too late,” Lucila said with a smile.

  He returned the smile. “At the age of sixty, it’s better to marry for the fourth time, not the first.”

  She was about to laugh. She restrained herself. There was a superficial but respectable sadness in his words. A sentimentality necessary to both their current lives. Still, Lucila noticed a certain coldness in him as soon as they moved from the evocation of their youth to the destiny of their maturity.

  “How was it for you, Lucila?”

  “I lived surrounded by people whose company was preferable to their intelligence.”

  “Dispassionate people.”

  “Yes, decent people. Sometimes I’m grateful not to be young anymore.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t have to seduce anymore. And you?”

  “Just the opposite. Being an old man means being obliged to seduce.”

  “What’s an old bachelor looking for?” Lucila took up the subject again in a playful voice.

  “A quiet place to work.”

  “Did you find it?”

  “I don’t know. I think so. I have no family obligations. I can travel.”

  He decided not to say where. He was
afraid of compromising this miraculous encounter. Opening the door once more to postponed assignations, as if they were twenty years old again and about to break off their relationship because of external pressures. The imposition of wills that did not understand the love of two young people without the experience to live their lives.

  Who understood? Those ignorant of the miracle of lovers who weren’t strangers when they met. Guessed at. Perhaps desired with no name or profile yet. For them, the first time was already the next occasion.

  “I imagine you don’t live in Mexico City.”

  “No. I go back to Mexico City every once in a while.”

  “Why?”

  “Before, because of a nostalgia for tranquility. Unhurried schedules. Even slower meals. Everything was so human then. Now I go back because I fear death.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. I don’t want to die without seeing Mexico City one last time.”

  “But these days the city is very unsafe. It’s hostile.”

  He smiled. “Not for a romantic, damaged man like—” He stopped and abruptly changed the subject and his tone. “Let me tell you that I foresaw your love. I had always carried it inside me.” He stopped and looked into her eyes. “How could I renounce what already existed before I even saw you? Admitting it could endure only when I lost you?” He stopped on the brink of what he despised most. Self-pity. Perhaps she would think what he wasn’t saying. Damaged by love for the wrong woman and not able to avoid . . .

  “Loving her . . .”

  “What?”

  “Look at the sea.” He pointed. “Don’t you see some nuns swimming fully dressed?”

  Finally, she laughed. “You always amused me, Manuel.”

  “I lost the compass. Without you, I had to reorient my entire life.”

  “Don’t say that. Don’t even think it.”

  “No. And you?”

  “I live in New York. Mexico City is too unsafe. They kidnapped the husband of one of my daughters. They killed him. We paid the ransom. Even so, they killed him. My other two daughters are still in the capital because their husbands work there, with bulletproof windows in their cars and armies of bodyguards. I need them. Especially my grandchildren. I visit them. They visit me.” She laughed softly. “Oh, Manuel.”

  She sobbed. He embraced her. Between sobs, she said, “I’ve spent years looking sideways at what was approaching and not daring to look at it straight on, not daring to look at what was approaching, now I think it was always you, like a phantom of my youth, why does everything we shouldn’t do exclude exceptions while what we like to do is always exceptional?”

  “Not me,” he replied with a kind of growing certainty. “I go on hoping. I go on hearing that noise at my back. I’m not sure about anything. Even before I guessed at you in the next room in Acapulco, I had always carried the anticipated delight of you deep inside me. The only thing needed to dislodge the phantom was you.”

  He embraced her tightly. He placed his lips on her temple. “How do you want me to renounce something that has always existed? By admitting it could endure only after you left me?”

  He released her, and for a moment both sat looking at the sea, she thinking that there is nothing more melancholy than disillusioned youthful passion, he thinking that when we sacrifice immediate emotion, we gain the serenity of being remote, both of them wondering, without daring to say so, if they had lived nothing but an adolescent fantasy or an act indispensable for growth.

  “How good that we met,” Lucila insisted at last with a sincerity she didn’t want. “Each of us could have died without seeing the other again, do you realize that? You know”—her voice modulated—“sometimes I’ve thought with joy and sorrow, both things, about everything we could have done together, you know, read, talk, think . . . Go to the movies together, to a restaurant . . .”

  “I don’t,” Manuel replied. “You know we saved ourselves from habit and indifference.”

  He said it in a way he didn’t want to say it. Cutting, disagreeable, hiding the reasons she didn’t know about and that he would never say to the girl from 1949 but with violent shame he said to the woman of today, it wasn’t only your decision, Lucila, not only your parents were opposed to me, my mother was, too, my mother would stand behind me in the mirror while I was shaving, take me by the shoulders, embrace me with a butterfly’s touch that I felt like the mortal grip of an octopus and say you look so much like me my baby look at yourself in the mirror that girl doesn’t deserve you her people aren’t right for you they’ll humiliate you leave her now I don’t want you to suffer the way I’ve suffered since your father left and died dear boy think it over carefully, will you?

  “Why did we separate, Manuel?”

  “Because you demanded total surrender from me.”

  “I did?” She smiled the smile of a woman accustomed to complying.

  “Forget my friends. Forget my work. Forget my mother. Enter your exclusive and excluding world.”

  Lucila reacted with a strange desire not to disappoint Manuel. “And you didn’t know how. Or couldn’t, is that right?”

  “All of us, every one of us, wanted to do other things and were lost, Lucy. Let’s be happy with what we managed to accomplish. Families oblige us to recognize our differences. You left a rich poor man for a poor rich one.” He stopped for a second to turn and look straight at her. “Is the wait for love to come more tortured than sadness for love that was lost? If it’s any comfort to you, let me say that it’s nice to love someone we couldn’t have only because with that person we were a promise and will keep being one forever . . .”

  “You didn’t tell me.” Lucila spoke with a touch of contempt. “What do you do?”

  He shrugged.

  “Final words,” Lucila concluded.

  “Yes.” Manuel took his leave, bowed courteously, and walked away on the deck, murmuring to himself, “We became parasites of ourselves,” uncertain about this meeting, disturbed by doubt.

  Lucila smiled to herself. How many things had been said, how many, so many more, had not been said. How was I going to tell this man, You know, I live hoping that someone will tell me the day’s events, you know, those little things that fill our hours, so I can say the really important thing to myself?

  “You know? You’re going to die. This is your last vacation. Milk it for all it’s worth. You’re going to die. Invent a life.”

  She was grateful for what had happened. The memory of adolescence and young love completely filled the void of separation and frustrated affection. It wasn’t bearable to die without knowing. About death but also about love. Communicate it to anyone, to the first person who passed with the veil of ignorance covering his face and the gloves of the past disguising his hands . . . Tell these things to the first person who came along, an acquaintance or a stranger. And if it was a stranger, tell it with the astute complicity of the solitary traveler longing, like her, to share the memory of what never was.

  On the other hand, walking toward the prow of the ship, Manuel Toledano thought that the more untouchable a memory, the more complete it turned out to be.

  He hurried his pace to return to Lucila. He stopped when he saw her in the distance, accompanied by an adolescent girl. He turned so he could approach without being seen from a passage that led to the deck.

  “Who were you talking to, Granny?”

  “Nobody, Mercedes.”

  “I saw you. I didn’t want to interrupt.”

  “I’m telling you, it was nothing. Just glances. Think, honey, how often we exchange glances with someone and then go our separate ways.”

  “And nothing happened?” Mercedes said mischievously.

  “No. Nothing happened.”

  “Then what did you talk about?”

  “What a nosy kid!” Lucila exclaimed. “About places that no longer exist.”

  “Like what?”

  “Acapulco. Foolish things.”

  “And what happened?”

  “N
othing, I said. Learn to give emotions to places. Even if they’re nothing but lies.” The grandmother caressed the girl’s cheek. “And now go on, Meche. Let’s find your naughty little sister. It’s time for lunch. Go on.”

  Manuel listened to them until the girl helped her grandmother up and both of them walked away. Perhaps he’d meet them again during the trip. Perhaps he’d have the courage to confront Lucila and say:

  “We didn’t really know each other. It’s all fiction. We decided to create a nostalgic past for ourselves. Nothing but lies. Attribute it to chance. Don’t worry. There was no past. There’s only the present and its moments.”

  He looked at the Dalmatian Coast. They were approaching the port of Spalato, in reality a huge palace transformed into a city. Emperor Diocletian lived here in courtyards that today are squares, walls that today are restaurants, chambers that today are apartments, galleries that today are streets, baths that today are sewage pipes.

  From the deck of the ship, Manuel did not see these details. He saw the mirage of the ancient imperial city, the fiction of its lost grandeur restored only by the imagination, by the hunger to know what once was better than what is and what could have been more than anything else.

  From mirage to mirage, from Venice to Spalato, the world of memories was turning into the world of desires, and between the two beat a heart divided by love that was put to the test between past and present.

  Then the Adriatic wind blew, the damp, warm sirocco carrying the threat of rain and fog. Dry in its North African origins, the sea impregnates it with smoke and water.

  Not yet. The wind was gentle, and the Dalmatian city sparkled like one more illusion of the god Apollo.

  Manuel only murmured:

  “I still think about you.”

  Chorus of the Murdered Family

  My father and my mother

  died in the massacre of El Mozote

  on December 11 1981

  since the army of the dictatorship couldn’t conquer the guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí Front

  they decided to kill the innocents to frighten the population