“Promiscuity is taking pleasure in yourself.”
“Sex doesn’t bring happiness, but it does calm the nerves.”
“Amity is so drunk she’s even drinking from the vases.”
“Nothing’s as exciting as exposing yourself to a man in church.”
“The problem with Rudy is that he’s orthopedic.”
“Gustavito has a bore inside his head.”
These malicious witticisms were received with laughter, Guy’s happier than that of José Luis, who—as he confessed to his lover—was beginning to weary of Curly’s verbal excesses.
“He can be very impertinent. That isn’t our style.”
“Don’t pay attention to him, José Luis. Impertinence only hides his vacuousness. Did you expect profundity from a boy like that?”
“Not profundity. Not impertinence, either.”
“Let it pass. Who would replace this blessed Rigoletto fallen from heaven?”
“Or come up from a sulfurous pit, how can anyone tell . . .”
They felt sorry for him one night when they were having supper together in a restaurant on Calle de Havre, and Curly’s eyes became dangerously distracted. Guy’s back was to the dining room. José Luis, beside Curly, could appreciate the obscure object of desire.
A dark-skinned boy went back and forth with ancestral agility, as if a remote ancestor of his had been responsible for bringing fresh fish from the coast to Emperor Moctezuma in his palace on the plateau.
He was nimble, swift, graceful, without an extra gram on his face or body. Curly looked at him with a desire that was increasingly difficult to hide, to the point where he stopped chatting with his friends and absently committed the unforgivable error of sitting with his mouth open, his gaze lost in the waiter’s movements, something that provoked José Luis to laugh and remark that a “closed mouth catches no boys,” which provoked Curly’s irritation followed by this action that revealed, to whomever wishes to measure it, the nature, naturata and naturante, of the witty fat man.
The fact is that Curly, as the young indigenous waiter walked past, dropped his napkin to the floor and looked at the boy with a mixture of indignation and scorn.
“What are you waiting for?” said Curly.
“Excuse me?” responded the waiter.
“Stupid Indian. Pick up the napkin.”
The waiter bent over and picked up the napkin lightly spotted with lipstick, as Guy and José Luis could observe with smiles, but not the servile object of Curly’s wounded contempt. The servant.
“Learn to serve,” Curly continued. “Learn to differentiate.” And stressing the two words, he concluded: “I am a gentleman.”
He said it with an insufferable arrogance that mortified Guy and José Luis, whose glances, one directed at Curly and the other at the waiter, were both filled with someone else’s excuses and sorrow. The boy bowed gravely to Curly and withdrew to continue his work.
“They’re our only aristocrats,” José Luis commented when the waters had calmed.
“Who?” asked a red-faced Curly.
José Luis did not respond, and in Curly’s eyes, this registered as a serious offense.
“Did you realize?” said José Luis, holding a New Yorker when they were back home. “Since he couldn’t punish you for seeing him turned into an imbecile with his mouth hanging open, he turned on the weak one, the waiter.”
Guy buttoned his pajamas and said nothing.
“He’s a shameful coward” was José Luis’s judgment. “I don’t know if it’s worthwhile to keep cultivating him.”
“Yes,” Guy said with a yawn. “Probably he’s already served his purpose.”
“Which was?” suggested José Luis, setting aside the magazine.
Guy shrugged. “Frankly, it’s all the same to me if we see him or not.”
“Ah,” exclaimed José Luis, accustomed to less ambiguous or contradictory answers from his companion. “Then you think it’s a matter of one of those surmountable incidents.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a statement.
The conversation was following brand-new paths. Generally, Guy and José Luis were in agreement because they knew they were united against a world that would have liked to be hostile if they themselves did not make it habitable. The couple’s agreement in the face of society translated into an affirmation of the couple in their intimacy. One thing, as they knew very well, defended and empowered the other.
Now something was happening that obliged Guy to say sarcastically, “Do you know what they call us in secret?”
“No,” José Luis said with a smile.
“Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the twins Alice meets who say the same thing at the same time.”
“But they never make stupid remarks.” José Luis escalated the dialogue.
“Don’t torture me.” Guy smiled again.
Then they went to sleep without speaking or even touching each other. The next morning, while they were shaving side by side in the art nouveau bathroom, Guy broke the ice.
“If you prefer, we won’t see him anymore.”
“Who?” José Luis said from behind the lather.
“Please, José Luis.”
“I couldn’t care less.”
“That’s not true.”
“I give you my word. In any case, I’m not going to let that flan with legs ruin our life. We don’t owe him anything.”
“Nothing,” Guy said without conviction. “Nothing at all.”
Curly did not fail to appear that same morning with a bouquet of roses and a handwritten note: “My dear friends. Why are you indifferent to me? Like the Brazilians, I watch over your absences. With love, C.V.”
They decided to invite him to dinner the next day. Good manners demanded it. Not appearing to be offended demanded it even more. And denying power to Curly demanded it most of all.
As required, they wore tuxedos.
“Out of nostalgia,” said Guy.
“Out of habit,” added José Luis.
“Out of laziness,” laughed Curly, dressed in red velvet with a ruffled shirt. “Do you two know? I know you know that boy turned me down, and I’ve come to ask you not to tell anyone about it.”
Guy said nothing. José Luis became indignant at so vulgar a provocation. He dropped his silverware with a clatter.
“I expected better taste or at least better irony from you,” he said to Curly.
“I’m in no mood for irony tonight,” Curly said with a sigh. “I’m suffering from lovesickness.”
The chubby man turned toward Guy.
“But you know about that, don’t you, darling?”
José Luis couldn’t believe it. Guy blushed. José Luis weighed in to the defense.
“We know only what it’s important for us to know. You’re putting in the banderillas and we won’t tolerate it.”
“No?” The young man smiled. “Well, look, José Luis, you can stick me with banderillas, lances, and swords, and I won’t be irritated. Talk it over with your little friend and see if he tolerates it from you.”
“I don’t understand. What are you talking about?” José Luis asked Curly, though he was looking at Guy.
“For God’s sake,” Guy replied. “Don’t make a tempest in a teapot.”
Curly laughed out loud.
“I don’t believe it! Please stop presenting me with such glorious opportunities. Gang up on me, I beg you. Defend yourselves against your little spy Curly Villarino, the busybody who knows everything and divulges everything. Isn’t that right? Oh, discretion isn’t my forte!”
Suddenly, he changed his tone.
“What do you want me to tell you. That only novelty excites me? That I’m desperate because the night before last I didn’t seduce the busboy? That I don’t need witnesses to my amatory failures? That I’ve come on my knees to beg you to remain silent? That I’ll find the way to fuck you over if you betray me to other people?”
Then José Luis told me that “other people” was too vast to refer to
a circle growing smaller and smaller. The fact is that on the day Curly came for dinner, he initiated a lament to my friends. Both of them, united in their old custom of remaining on the margins of other people’s passions, of being a discreet couple, one that was solitary if necessary but never condemned to participate in what would be called a radio soap opera yesterday, a TV soap opera today, and a melodrama always. And melodrama, as you know, is comedy without humor.
“That I’ve always been an outsider?” Curly continued. “Always marginalized? That I’ll leave the closet and no one will follow me?” Suddenly, he snapped his fingers, imitating the click of castanets. “Or be the life of the party?” He laughed artlessly. “And sometimes the death of the party.”
He put on a funereal air and stood up. “I know. You want me to leave. You don’t want me to foul your sweet little love nest. Fine, my dear fags. I won’t beg. You think you’ve conquered me. Fine. We’ll see.” He made a ridiculous pirouette, sometimes lifting off the ground despite his large bodily mass, revealed in that act as a balloon filled only with self-satisfaction. “Fine. I’ll go. But my box of surprises isn’t empty yet. Wait a little. A bee stings harder the longer he retains the venom.”
Guy’s unusual spiritual distance during the days that followed was understood by José Luis as uneasiness rather than irritation due to the scenes provoked by Curly. Still, in his more intelligent moments, José Luis decided to treat what seemed serious as if it were frivolous, what seemed profound as if it were superficial. He didn’t change his behavior, the rhythm of his daily actions, the usual chatter of lives that were too intimate and too old not to understand that the times of the most level normalcy did not exclude but underscored the moments filled with physical love as well as intelligent discourse between two human beings.
José Luis, somewhat pensive, asked silent questions of Guy. What is our relationship made of? Desire and jealousy? Or innocence and disdain? Will you always love me in the natural way you have until now? Or are you going to make me feel that you’re indulging me? Isn’t indulgence the most deceptive form of tolerance?
(“We’ve never tolerated each other, you and I. We wouldn’t have lived together for so long if we only tolerated each other.”)
His glance happened to fall on a photograph taken when they were young. Guy and José Luis side by side, smiling but serious, not embracing, displaying the seriousness of their relationship because it wasn’t demonstrative, it was discreet. It was enough for him to see himself in his twenties, when the relationship was already an irreversible fact, to know that he and Guy always knew how to survive the bad times, and this conviction deflected the irritations found in every shared, intense, prolonged life. They put off explosions of bad temper. They exiled misunderstandings. They banished tedium and indifference. Precisely because all of that was found in the relationship, not because it was missing.
Perhaps the inevitable was treated by the couple not as something not talked about—hypocrisy—but as something just the opposite—imagination. Bad humor saved by an opportune joke. Misunderstandings elevated to the level of vain possibility. Tedium deflected by a reference to the movies, to literature, to art, to everything that, being theirs, should have been everybody’s.
This was the difference. Now it would seem that the roles they had once shared were turning into monologues. José Luis resisted being the actor of jealousy opposite the protagonist of desire in Guy’s distant glance. He was afraid that jealousy would turn into scorn as Guy’s desire disguised itself, ridiculously, as innocence.
The fact is that José Luis, knowing Guy so intimately, could distinguish the temperatures of desire in his lover. What disturbed him was that, after a few days, he could not identify the object of that desire. Because he, José Luis, was not the object or the subject of Guy’s familiar palpitations.
José Luis was in his office at nightfall when Curly phoned to invite him to supper in his penthouse near here, opposite Diana the Huntress. José Luis tried to confirm what the now not very trustworthy Curly had said, but Guy was no longer in the gallery. And he hadn’t returned home. José Luis changed and went to Curly’s supper alone.
“Welcome to the Pink Pantheon,” Curly said with a smile to José Luis. “And remember my slogan: sex copuli, sex dei . . .”
With his forelock tilted like the Tower of Pisa, Curly was wearing his host’s attire. A plush velvet jacket, white ascot, Scottish plaid trousers, and black slippers, one with the image of the sun, the other the moon. He wore no socks.
“Ah,” he said with a sigh. “What can I offer you? You have to drink to put up with me, José Luis. I swear, tonight I feel stranger than a green dog, and I don’t see more in my future than martyrdom with dark glasses.”
“You’re in Technicolor.” José Luis smiled as he took the margarita that Curly served him.
“And in wide screen, love,” said Curly. “Just have a look.” He approached the large picture window in the penthouse and tugged at the cord of the drawn curtains. “There’s no better view of the city,” he remarked as the curtains separated to reveal the terrace and two men embracing, kissing each other, one mature, the other young. Their faces were hidden by the long kiss until light from the living room fell on the lovers’ closed lids, obliged them to open their eyes, turn their heads, and show themselves to Curly and José Luis.
“Courage, José Luis. Don’t worry.” Curly smiled. “Sex is like a hangover: It lasts eight hours.”
If he had seen him in the days that followed, José Luis would have told Guy what he wrote to him in a letter that was never sent.
“Believe me, I understand you. You’ve never lost the need to attract. As I once told you, you’re not a flirt, you simply need to display yourself. Since I understand that, it doesn’t bother me too much that you’ve taken the next step at least once. We always avoided it. We never excluded it. In the end, did we deceive ourselves? Did we let ourselves be poisoned by what we had always evaded—jealousy, disillusionment, accusation? I see our picture taken when we were thirty, and I put myself in the adverse situation. Do you remember Agustín Villarino? He had lost his youth and sought out young men who would return it to him. He infuriated us. We laughed at him. Not death in Venice, you said then, but death in Xochimilco. You’ll say these are cruel words. It isn’t my intention to hurt you. I only want you to understand that I understand you. We managed to grow old together. My request is very simple. Don’t ruin everything.”
He found out that Curly had taken Guy and the boy to a rented house in Acapulco. José Luis expected a letter. What he received was a phone call.
“Excuse me. I had to. I thought you’d indulge me.”
“I was going to write.”
“I didn’t receive anything.”
“Isn’t my intention enough?”
“I don’t know if you realized it.”
“Realized what?”
“Saffron is just like you.”
“With that name? Don’t make me laugh.”
“Well, it’s the name Curly gave him.”
“Then he can’t be just like me.”
“He’s like you at the age of twenty, José Luis.”
“Please, leave the past in peace.”
“I wasn’t prepared for this.”
“Neither was I.”
“Did we deceive ourselves?”
“Who knows. It’s always too late to know when we move from one phase to the next in our lives. When we realize it, the first act is over, and the play is about to end.”
“I’ll tell you something else, it might be a comfort to you. This boy is unreachable.”
“Excuse me while I laugh. You reached him. Or he reached you.”
“Understand me, José Luis . . . I called you humbly . . . I need . . .”
“You’ve turned into an imbecile. Or a baby.”
“It depends on your preference. We have to endure the bad times.”
“Don’t tell me you’re coming back to me. How? Tender
ly, longingly, regretfully?”
“We’re an old couple, José Luis. We’ll overcome the crisis. Didn’t you tell me once that I’m handsome, that I like to display myself, that you enjoy my being like that?”
And after a silence: “Don’t hate me, José Luis.”
“I don’t hate anybody.”
He hung up the phone because he was about to add (he tells me): “I don’t hate anybody. I love you.” And he didn’t want to say those words. Guy’s resonated in his head: “He’s just like you when you were young.”
At nightfall, José Luis went out for a walk. A desire both determining and difficult led him to Avenida Álvaro Obregón and the place where the luxurious movie house Balmori had once been located.
Now it was an empty lot where metal ruins stood. Twilight birds flew over the site as if looking for a nest in memories of yesterday. Greta Garbo. That unrepeatable smell of celluloid, sticky muégano candy, melting chocolates, programs made of pink-colored paper, sounds like a bird’s wings. That first touch of hands watching Fred and Ginger dance against a background of snow falling in Manhattan. Greta, Ginger, Fred. As he looked at the ruined theater, José Luis felt that the models we admire and pursue come out of ourselves. They are not imposed on us. We invent them, and they magically, gracefully appear on a white screen. Except they are our own shadows transformed into light. They are our most satisfactory portrait. They remain young even in death.
“I wander the streets like a ghost. I’ve left my image in a ruined movie house. Come and acknowledge it if you dare. I’ve lost everything but the memory of you. I no longer have a body. What I have is the desire to see you again, to talk to you again.”
Guy: A straight, slightly prognathous profile. Wavy hair, without the thin spots of age. Eyes that show interest in everything they see. He is sure he touched the sky one day.
José Luis: Round face. Pronounced baldness. Very large eyes, pools of a sharp, quiet intelligence. The despair of schemers. He never feels the need to challenge his companion. His rule is to avoid promiscuity. He would like to be located at the heart of a constellation.
Chorus of a Son of the Sea