Page 17 of Happy Families

It really wasn’t necessary to reaffirm a love given as spontaneously as the flow of a fountain, though with constant references to everything in the life of the world that pleased them and identified them. Their intimacy was the thing that was sacred, untouchable, the impalpable diamond that, handled too much, could change into coal. In the secret chamber of their intimacy, Guy and José Luis established a relationship as close to itself as water is to its continent. “Death Without End,” the great poem by José Gorostiza, was one of the couple’s vital bibles. Form was content and content form with no more motive than the patterns of delight in touch begun that increasingly distant afternoon in the movies. The joy of mutual contemplation. The knowledge of the respect owed to each one and to the couple.

  As for the world . . . they weren’t naive. They knew they were in society, and society tests us, it demands periodic examinations, especially of homosexual lovers who dare to be happy. José Luis and Guy prepared good-naturedly to endure the world’s tests, aware that they wanted to have contact with the group but avoid (as if it were mange) promiscuity.

  “You’re not a flirt,” José Luis said to Guy. “You just display yourself. You like to show yourself off. You’re right. You’re handsome, and you ought to let yourself be admired. I’m happy you’re like this. I’m happy people admire you.”

  “Don’t fool yourself,” Guy responded. “People need to know me to love me. If a person doesn’t know me, he probably won’t like me.”

  They laughed at these topics and admitted:

  “There can always be somebody who seduces us.”

  Until now, no one had come between them. The serious, amiable behavior of the boys, their stability as a couple, made them likable. They dressed well, they spoke well, they were doing well in their respective careers. They saved criticism of other people for private moments. They weren’t gossipmongers.

  “Did you see the faces Villarino was making? He was putting moves on you.”

  “You like people to admire me, didn’t you say that?”

  “Show yourself off now that you’re young. Take a good look at Villarino so you never become a flirt when you’re old. How awful!”

  “No. How ridiculous!”

  Both had been educated in English schools, but they never referred to what is called “the English vice.” They did accept, however, a rule of conduct learned by means of educational blows with a cane to the gluteals:

  Never complain. Never explain.

  Ni quejarse ni explicarse. The demands of love imposed themselves naturally, without any need for complaints or explanations, in the very act of love. Demands before love tended to kill pleasure, withdrawing its implicit satisfactions, losing them in the harsh antagonist of love, which was logic, though this only reinforced the professional competence of the two men.

  And so there was a very attractive equilibrium in their lives, measured out between their work and their private life. Which doesn’t mean that my friends Guy and José Luis didn’t have a social life in the very lively Mexico City of the forties and fifties to the mid-sixties. They participated in various groups founded to the almost biological rhythm of the decades and their newsworthy duration, their inevitable decline, the attachments to and detachments from social groups and, in particular, the solid middle class to which they both belonged. They were present at the end of the fiesta dominated by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, two large multicolored piñatas that skillfully avoided the sticks of governments, political parties, or social classes. Artists ate apart. They owed nothing to anyone except art. Frida and Diego swung picturesquely at an unreachable height to which you had access only if your name was Trotsky, Breton, or Rockefeller, or if you were a modest cantina owner, the projectionist at the movies, or the indispensable hospital nurse. In the forties, José Luis and Guy were present only at the end of that boisterous party, the tail of the comet that pulled along in its generous wake the lights of artistic creativity, sexual confusion, and political arbitrariness.

  Then they moved among the romantic violins of Reyes Albarrán’s Rendez Vous and the Jockey Club, which became the most discreetly gay and refined place to meet on Sunday thanks to the management of Jaime Saldívar, a man endowed with inseparable amiability and elegance, capable of making himself followed, like the pied piper of Hamelin, by newly minted princes and the patriarchs of ancient line-ages. Although the mix of European epavés from World War II and the stars of a Hollywood undecided between Roosevelt’s New Deal and McCarthy’s witch hunt met at the Ciro’s of the dwarf A. C. Blumenthal, a partner of the gangster Bugsy Siegel, and in what remained of the intimate wartime cabarets: Casanova, Minuit, Sans Souci . . .

  Then came the adventures of the Basfumista group, fervent, anarchic, invented by the painter Adolfo Best Maugard, a former assistant to Sergei Eisenstein in Mexico and endowed with a vestal in residence, Mercedes Azcárate, and a slim blond philosopher, Ernesto de la Peña, who knew some twenty languages, including that of Christ, and was master within the group of a distracted vocation for alarm in a society still capable of being surprised and forgetting from one day to the next about its own newness. Basfumismo never defined itself beyond the Chaplinesque call for attention before a dehumanized society.

  It was the last clarion call of the 1940s, before the immense city devoured every attempt to come together under the roof of culture and acquire a personality by means of avant-garde circles. On the horizon, the Rosa district was already dawning, a mix of St. Germain des Prés and Greenwich Village around a Café Tyrol presided over every afternoon by a Colombian writer, Gabriel García Márquez, who had lived in Mexico City since 1960, and baptized by the painter José Luis Cuevas, a cat who seduced with scratches.

  But by then Guy Furlong and José Luis Palma were the only Mexicans who still wore tuxedos to eat dinner. They were distinguished by a reluctance to abandon the styles of their youth. Both of them based elegance on style, not fashion. The bad thing was that by the sixties, wearing a dinner jacket at a cocktail party or a vernissage meant running the risk of being confused with the waiters. The old seducer of adolescents, Agustín Villarino, had turned in his documents to eternity sometime earlier. Not, however, without leaving a successor in Mexico City, his nephew Curly Villarino, and here our story actually begins.

  Guy and José Luis did not want to be left behind. The groups and conclaves mentioned here tacitly proclaimed their modernity, their cosmopolitanism, and their youth. Three purposes that condemned them to disappear. The modern is destined to vanish quickly for the sake of its own decaying currency and in favor of the next brand-new novelty that, whether it’s called postmodern or retro and rejects or evokes nostalgia, simply repeats the warning of death to fashion in the Pensieri of Giacomo Leopardi: Madama la Morte, Madama la Morte, don’t ask me who I am: I am fashion, death . . . I am you.

  Then the spree began to fall apart in a charmless slumming in run-down, high-living cabarets in the Guerrero district and in San Juan de Letrán. El Golpe, King Kong, El Burro, Club de los Artistas . . . and if one wanted to dance the mambo on Sunday with one’s servants, the Salón Los Angeles dissolved, with delight in loud revelry and false democracy, the barriers between classes. The cabarets for danzón and dance hostesses died a natural death, the Río Rosa, next to the Bullfight Ring, and the Waikiki, whose only vegetation was the cactus on Paseo de la Reforma. Thanks to its consecration by Aaron Copland, the Salón México survived with its famous sign: DON’T THROW LIT CIGARETTES ON THE FLOOR, THE GIRLS CAN BURN THEIR FEET.

  Cosmopolitanism customarily required a center of worldwide attraction, like Paris in the nineteenth century or New York in the twentieth. The fall of colonial empires after World War II meant the end of one or even two cultural metropolises in favor of a revindication of traditions, each anchored in a calendar distinct from the Western. For a Mexican, in any case, it was easier to refer to the Mayas or the Baroque than to the contributions of Kenya, Indonesia, or Timbuktu, the new capitals of the disguised anthropology of third-world revolu
tion.

  As for youth, it was being transformed into a solitary avenue that José Luis and Guy stopped walking with the impression that they were ghosts. It was difficult for them to abandon the obligation to be the representatives of a youth. What was left was the dejection of losing—abandonment, death, lack of will—the people who, half in self-congratulation, called themselves “our crowd,” “our set.” These compliments were not, however, the requiem for Guy’s and José Luis’s constant certainty: We didn’t let ourselves go with a group of dispensable people, we weren’t interchangeable, we were irreplaceable as a couple.

  In the midst of these changes, both kept the friends who hadn’t succumbed to violence or been liberated into death. A man needs sad friends to whom he can tell what he doesn’t say to his lover. A man needs patient friends who give him the time that a lover denies him. A man needs the friend who talks to him about his lover and evokes a kind of shared warmth that requires the presence of a third person, a special confidant. And above all, a man must respect the relationship with the friend who isn’t his lover and gives the assurance that passion could overwhelm him.

  For Guy and José Luis, their relationship with friends secretly established an obligation, which was to avoid promiscuity. It was implicit that a friendship, no matter how close, would never cross the frontier of physical love. In their youth and early maturity, Guy and José Luis proposed taking part in everything but in moderation, without vulgarity, without failures in respect. They told each other that a couple needs others but ought to reserve to itself the dialogue between you and me, never surrendering intimacy to the group, to others. And above all, it must respect the relationship with the friend who isn’t a lover and gives the assurance that passion could overwhelm him.

  Both Guy and José Luis, now lagging behind the avant-garde, believed that this friend was Curly Villarino, a bridge between our couple’s sixty years and the thirtysomething of everybody else. Guy and José Luis suffered the feeling of having lost the group, the circle that accompanied them between the ages of twenty and fifty, decimated now by age, death, indolence, the loss of a center, and the move to the outskirts of a Dantesque city: the wild forest.

  In short, each group brings with it the question: “What impression are we making?” The Jockey’s aristocrats, L’Aiglon’s gilded youth, the Rosa district’s artists and intellectuals. All of them wanted to make an impression, and in this aspiration lay the defeat or triumph of its members. Both transitory, except that those who failed had to choose between returning to their families or, following André Gide’s proclamation—families, I detest you—give themselves over to a bohemia that was sad, poor, solitary, scruffy, and as dependent on what they could beg as the most “subjugated” son at home. Only a few stayed afloat in the heavy seas of yesterday’s groups, asserting their talent thanks to the hard exigencies of indiscipline, the purges of monogamy (sometimes serial), and carefully measured-out absences from the ravenous homeland. Mexico City threatened to devour alive each one of its inhabitants, whether victim or victimizer.

  Instead of a single center—between the Zócalo and Angel—the capital spread in concentric circles increasingly distant from what Guy and José Luis considered the “heart” of the city. The Rosa district would end up prostituted and brothelized, exiling its mobile geography of restaurants, cafés, and boutiques to Avenida Masaryk, from where it would soon move to the center, expelled now by gangs of car thieves, pilferers of watches, entire families of crooks who specialized in breaking into houses, robbing banks, handling burglary tools, murdering for pay, beating with clubs, stabbing, pimping, and prostituting. Old pensioners without a pension, fugitives from justice, con artists . . . What remained of the ancient City of Palaces? A huge supermarket filled with cans of blood and bottles of smoke? Blood and hunger, basic necessities of the city-monster.

  “The consumer society,” wrote Georges Bataille in La Part maudite, “was invented by the Aztecs. They consumed hearts.”

  Guy and José Luis believed they had saved their hearts from Mexican ritual cannibalism. At the age of fifty-six, they could look with nostalgic apprehension at their youthful meeting in the Balmori movie theater and tell each other, “I think we saved ourselves, we think we haven’t been touched by undesirable emotions, we think that by this time nothing can disturb us . . .” They condemned the city to death.

  They did not count on the opposition of Curly Villarino, committed to reviving the days of an aristocratic freedom reserved, at this point in history, only for a handful of multimillionaires and members of European and Arabic royal houses. That is what Curly’s calling card was: a summons to the nostalgia of Guy and José Luis for their youth, a sweet evocation of a lost time that he, Curly Villarino, seemed to or pretended to reincarnate for the exclusive benefit of the two friends.

  “All my uncle Agustín’s friends have died. Only you two are left from that time, Guy, José Luis, my dears. You are my seductive perfumes.”

  He said it in so childlike and lovable a manner. With his voice and manners, he made you forgive his somewhat outlandish appearance of a fat boy who never finished growing. The baby fat on his cheeks swayed from side to side with the emphatic movement of his pink cherub’s lips, though the fat seraph was contradicted by narrow myopic eyes behind a pair of small eyeglasses in the style of Schubert that, Curly dixit, would eventually replace the oversize aviator’s glasses favored by the deplorable decade of miniskirts, mammoth belts, and bell-bottom trousers.

  Curly’s entire spherical existence was crowned by a mass of curls, once blond but now streaked with gray, that resembled the inspired wig of the great Harpo Marx. But if the latter was famously mute, Curly talked incessantly, wittily, and freely. It charmed my friends that when he was introduced, Curly said to them:

  “I am not impartial, don’t believe that even for a minute. You two are my classics. And I need a ‘classic’ in order to live and die. I think you” (he looked at them innocently) “are the culmination of the race. You are from mon genre, if such a thing can be repeated. No, seriously. Everything would be perfect if we were immortal. Since we aren’t, let us at least be unending. I mean, let us ask: Why do they tolerate us homos? Answer: in order not to discriminate against us. If we accept this truth, let us admit its consequences. I devote myself only to looking for opportunities that ‘normality’ would deny me.”

  And after a long sigh:

  “Sometimes I find them, other times no. We are all like submarines that cut through posh marinas checking on whether the yachts have anchors, how many barnacles are clinging to them, if the ship is old or new. Then—I warn you—I attack. I attack in earnest. With torpedoes. I warn you so that no one can call it a deception. If I suspect a couple isn’t getting along, I am going to try to seduce them . . .”

  Guy and José Luis remarked that Curly was an amiable buffoon, reminiscent of the most notable excesses of another time. Nowadays singular personalities were lost in the sulfurous urban magma, groups disintegrated, and the only recourse was to search the haystack for the brilliant needle of the brilliant eccentricity that once was.

  “Do you realize that we’re beginning to talk like a couple of doddering old men?” asked Guy.

  José Luis didn’t reveal either melancholy or fatalism. “That’s why we like Curly. He’s young, but he’s in sync with us.”

  “We didn’t need clowns before,” Guy said with a frown.

  “No, but only because everybody was comical except you and me.”

  “Do you feel that self-congratulatory about our behavior?”

  “ ‘Self-congratulatory’ isn’t the word. Don’t be pedantic. Perhaps serious, serious in the midst of the circus. ‘Serious’ is the word. We never deceive, and we don’t allow ourselves to be deceived. If you take a good look at our life, Guy, you’ll admit that we were observers but never full participants.”

  “You mean we never allowed our private relationship to be confused with our social life?”

  “So
mething better. We were witnesses in order to survive.”

  “Do you think we’ve survived? As measured by what?”

  “As measured by what we proposed being. A faithful couple, Guy. I believe we both know very well that we’ve never failed in our loyalty. Promiscuity was all around us. We never fell into it.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” joked Guy. “There’s still time.”

  On the verge of turning sixty, Guy and José Luis had solidified their personal relationship as well as their professional lives and their dealings—increasingly rare—with a society in which they no longer recognized themselves. Rises and falls were too abrupt. Famous names turned infamous. Anonymous people achieved their fifteen minutes of Warholian fame before somersaulting and disappearing. The hateful norms of a hypocritical Catholic morality had disappeared only to be replaced by a no less hypocritical cult of immorality: pleasure, money, consumption hailed as a proof of freedom, and sophisticated indifference behind a mask of sincerity even in those who did not practice it but felt compelled to celebrate it. There were no well-rooted islands left. Everything was like a vast, drifting political and social Xochi-milco crossed by boats with names written in flowers that withered from one day to the next. The men in power changed. The vices of power remained.

  Curly, then, was an island of cheer as well as nostalgia for a lost world: the world of Guy’s and José Luis’s youth. He brought them the private pleasure of an audacious joke, a caricatured excess, which the expectant nature of the Furlong–Palma couple demanded, almost as if it were an acquired right. Curly was their show.

  Of course the plump young man surpassed himself in word and deed. That is, he alone took the place of several generations from their social past. It was part of his charm. It was inevitable. He was, for Guy and José Luis, a reminiscence. Like a minor Oscar Wilde, Curly fired off paradoxes and bons mots left and right.

  “Life would be perfect if I were immortal.”