Through the years he’d saved the clothes he’d worn as a young man, and when Doña Felícitas died he gathered up her extraordinary wardrobe and arranged it in several closets, one corresponding to the styles that predated the First World War, another for the twenties, and a third for the hodgepodge style she’d dreamed up in the thirties and then affected until her death: colored stockings, silver shoes, boas of shrieking scarlet, long skirts of mauve silk, décolleté blouses, thousands of necklaces, garden-party hats, and pearl chokers.
Every day he walked to the Bellinghausen on Londres Street, where the same corner table had been reserved for him since the era of the hand-tailored suits he wore. There he ate alone, dignified, reserved, nodding to passing acquaintances, picking up the checks of unaccompanied ladies known to him or his mother, none of this backslapping for him, no vulgarity, shouting, What’s new! What-a-sight-for-sore-eyes! or You’ve-made-my-day! He detested familiarity. An almost tangible aura of privacy surrounded his small, dark, scrupulous person. Let no one attempt to penetrate it.
His familiarity was reserved for the contents of his house. Every evening he took delight in looking at, admiring, touching, stroking, sometimes even caressing his possessions, the Tiffany lamps and ashtrays, the Lalique figurines and frames. These things gave him particular satisfaction, but he enjoyed equally a whole room of Art Deco furniture, round mirrors on silvered boudoir tables, tall lamps of tubular aluminum, a bed with a headboard of pale burnished metal, an entirely white bedroom: satin and silk, a white telephone, a polar-bear skin, walls lacquered a pale ivory.
Two events had marked his life as a young man. A trip to Hollywood, when the Mexican consul in Los Angeles had arranged a visit to the set of Dinner at Eight, where he’d been shown Jean Harlow’s white bedroom and even seen the actress from a distance: a platinum dream. And in Eden Roc he’d met Cole Porter, who’d just composed “Just One of Those Things,” and Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, who was writing Tender Is the Night. He’d had his picture taken with Porter that summer on the Riviera, but not with the Fitzgeralds. A photograph with a box camera that didn’t need a flash. And in his room in the Hotel Negresco he’d had an adventure with a naked woman in the darkness. Neither knew who the other was. Suddenly the woman had been illuminated by moonlight as bright as day, as if the moon were the sun, a prurient, blinding spotlight stripped of the fig-leaf effect of the silver screen.
The visit to the Côte d’Azur was a constant topic of nostalgic reminiscences during the Saturday-afternoon reunions. Federico was a skilled Mah-Jongg player, and three of the habitual players, María de los Angeles, Perico, and the Marqués, had been with him that summer. It had all been memorable but that one event, the incident of the blond girl who resembled Jean Harlow. If one of the friends felt that another was about to venture into that forbidden territory, he warned him with a heavily charged look. Then everybody changed the subject, avoided talking about the past, and turned to their usual discussions of family and money.
“The two cannot be separated,” Federico said as they played. “And as I have no immediate family, when I’m gone my money will be dispersed among distant branches of the family. Amusing, isn’t it?”
He apologized for talking about death. But not about money. Each of them had had the good fortune to appropriate a parcel of the wealth of Mexico at an opportune time—mines, forests, land, cattle, farms—and the luck to convert it quickly, before it had passed out of their hands, into the one secure investment: Mexico City real estate.
Half daydreaming, Federico Silva thought about the houses that so punctually produced his rents, the old colonial palaces on Tacuba, Guatemala, and La Moneda Streets. He’d never visited them. He was totally ignorant about the people who lived there. Perhaps one day he would ask one of his rent collectors to tell him who lived in the old palaces. What were the people like? Did they realize they were living in the noblest mansions of Mexico?
He would never invest in a new building like those that had blocked out his sun and made his house list to one side. That much he’d sworn to himself. Smiling, he repeated his oath as they walked to the dining table that Mah-Jongg Saturday in his home. Everyone knew that to be received by Federico Silva was a very special honor. Only he entertained with such detail, the seating plan in a red leather holder, the places set in accord to the strictest protocol—rank, age, former posts—and the card with the name of each guest at its precise place, the menu written out in the host’s own hand, Dondé’s impeccable service at the table.
That night as he glanced around the table, counting the absent, the friends who had preceded him in death, there was scarcely a flicker of expression on Federico Silva’s Oriental mask. He rubbed his tiny porcelain Mandarin hands together: ah, there was no protocol as implacable as death, no priority more strict than that of the tomb. High overhead, the Lalique chandelier shed a vertical beam, perversely illuminating the Goyaesque faces of his table companions, the flesh of curdled custard, the deep fissures at the corners of the mouths, the hollow eyes of his friends.
Whatever became of the nude blond girl of that night in my room in the Hotel Negresco?
A Mayan profile thrust between Federico Silva and the lady seated at his right, his friend María de los Angeles Negrete, as Dondé began to serve the soup. The bridge of Dondé’s nose began in the middle of his forehead and his tiny eyes were crossed.
“Isn’t it extraordinary,” Federico Silva commented in French. “Do you realize that this type of profile and crossed eyes was a mark of physical beauty among the Mayas? To achieve it they bound the infants’ heads when they were born and forced them to follow the pendulum motion of a marble suspended on a thread. How is it possible that centuries later those artificially imposed characteristics continue to be transmitted?”
“It’s like inheriting a wig and false teeth.” María de los Angeles whinnied like a mare.
Dondé’s profile between the host and his guest, his arm holding the soup tureen, the brimming soup ladle, the unexpected offense of Dondé’s sweat, he’d warned him for the last time, bathe after you finish in the kitchen and before you begin to serve, sometimes it isn’t possible, señor, there isn’t enough time, señor.
“Yours, or my mother’s, María de los Angeles?”
“What, Federico?”
“The wig. The teeth.”
Someone jarred the ladle, Federico Silva, Dondé, or María de los Angeles, who knows, but steaming chickpea soup disappeared into the woman’s bodice, screams, how could that have happened, Dondé, I’m sorry, señor. I swear, I didn’t do it, ay! the curds-and-whey breasts of María de los Angeles, ay! the scalded tits, go take a bath, Dondé, you offend me, Dondé, my mother’s wig and false teeth, the naked blonde, Nice …
He awakened with a fearful start, the anguish of a desperate effort to remember what he’d just dreamed, the certainty he would never recapture it, another dream lost forever. Drunk with sadness, he put on his Chinese dressing gown and walked out on the balcony.
He breathed deeply. He sniffed in vain for odors of the morning to come. The mud of the Aztec lake, the foam of the Indian night. Impossible. Like his dreams, the lost perfumes refused to return.
“Is anything the matter, señor?”
“No, Dondé.”
“I heard the señor call out.”
“It was nothing. Go back to sleep, Dondé.”
“Whatever you say, señor.”
“Good night, Dondé.”
“Good night, señor.”
III
“As long as I’ve known you, you’ve been a real stickler about what you wear, Federico.”
He’d never forgiven his old friend María de los Angeles, who had once made fun of him by addressing him as Monsieur Verdoux. Maybe there was something Chaplinesque in antiquated elegance, but only when it disguised a diminishing fortune. And Federico Silva, as everyone knew, was not down on his luck. It was just that, like every person of true taste, he had the good sense to choose things tha
t lasted. A pair of shoes, or a house.
“Save electricity. Go to bed early.”
He would never, for example, wear spats and carry a cane at the same time. In his daily stroll down Córdoba Street to the Bellinghausen restaurant, he was careful to offset the showy effect of a brick-colored jacket with a Buster Brown belt he’d had made in 1933 by draping a nondescript raincoat over his arm with studied insouciance. And only on the infrequent days when it was really cold did he wear the derby, the black overcoat and white muffler. He was well aware that behind his back his friends whispered that the way he hung on to his clothes was really the most humiliating proof of dependence. With what Doña Felícitas had put him through, he had to make things last twenty or thirty years.
“Save electricity. Go to bed early.”
But why after Doña Felícitas’s death did he continue to wear the same old outfits? That was something they’d never asked him, now that he’d inherited the fortune. You could say that Doña Felícitas had deformed him, and he had turned necessity into a virtue. No, that wasn’t it. His mother only pretended to be stingy. It all began with that sacred sentence—save electricity, go to bed early—said as if it were a sarcastic joke one night when she wanted to conceal her real intent, to save face, to pretend she didn’t know her son was grown up, that he went out at night without asking her permission, that he dared leave her by herself.
“If I support you, the least I can expect is that you won’t leave me here all alone, Feddie. I could die at any moment, Feddie. I know Dondé’s here, but I am not thrilled at the idea of dying in the arms of a servant. Very well, Feddie. I suppose it must be, as you say, a very, very important engagement to cause you to abandon your own mother. Abandon, yes, that’s the word. I pray to God you make up for the hurt you’ve caused me, Feddie. You know how. You promised me this year you’d follow Father Tellez’s spiritual exercises. Please do that little favor for me, Feddie. I’m going to hang up now. I’m feeling very tired.”
She replaced the white receiver. Sitting in the bed with the burnished metal headboard, surrounded with white cushions, covered with white furs, a great ancient doll, a milk-white Punchinella, lavishing powder on a floury face in which her blazing eyes, orange mouth, and red cheeks were obscene scars, flourishing with panache the white puff, enveloping herself in a choking, perfumed cloud of rice powder and aromatic talcum, her bare skull protected by a white silk cap. At night the wig of tight, shiny black curls reposed on a cotton-stuffed head on the silver boudoir table, like the wigs of ancient queens.
Sometimes Federico Silva liked to interject a touch of the fantastic into the Saturday conversations. Nothing more satisfying than an appreciative audience, and inevitably it was easy to frighten María de los Angeles. Federico Silva found this flattering. María de los Angeles was older than he, and he’d been in love with her as a boy; he’d wept when the precious little sixteen-year-old had chosen to go to the Country Club ball with older boys, not with him, the devoted little friend, the humble admirer of her blond perfection, her rose-colored skin, the filmy tulle and silken ribbons that veiled and encircled her desirable flesh. Oh, beautiful María de los Angeles. Now she looked like Goya’s Queen María Luisa. He realized that in frightening her Federico Silva was still paying homage, just as he had at fifteen. But was the only possible homage gooseflesh?
“Supposedly, the guillotine was invented to spare the victim pain, you see. But the result was precisely the opposite. The speed of the execution actually prolongs the victim’s agony. Neither the head nor the body has time to adjust. They feel they are still joined together, and the awareness that they are not takes several seconds to be comprehended. For the victim those seconds are centuries.”
Did she understand? this long-toothed woman with the horse laugh and curds-and-whey breasts; the cruel overhead light from the Lalique chandelier could favor only a Marlene Dietrich, exaggerated shadows, funereal hollows, hallucinatory mystery. Beheaded by light.
“Without a head the body continues to move, the nervous system continues to function, the arms jerk and the hands implore. And the severed head, stimulated by a rush of blood to the brain, experiences extreme lucidity. The bulging eyes stare at the executioner. The accelerated tongue curses, remembers, denies. And the teeth clamp ferociously on the basket. Every basket at the foot of a guillotine looks as if it had been gnawed by an army of rats.”
María de los Angeles exhaled a swooning sigh; the Marqués de Casa Cobos felt her pulse, Perico Arauz offered her a handkerchief dampened in cologne water. At two in the morning, after everyone had left, Federico Silva walked out onto his bedroom balcony wondering whose would be the next corpse, whose the next death, that would allow him to reclaim a bit more of his memories. One could also be a landlord of memory, but the only way to collect that rent was through another’s death. What memories would his own death unleash? Who would remember him? He closed the French windows of his balcony and lay down on the white bed that had been his mother’s. He tried to go to sleep by counting the people who would remember him. They might be the “best” people, but they were very few.
After the death of Doña Felícitas, Federico Silva began to worry about his own death. He instructed Dondé: “When you discover my body, before you notify anybody, put this record on the record player.”
“Yes, señor.”
“Look at it carefully. No mistakes, I’m putting it right on top.”
“Don’t worry, señor.”
“And open this book on the table beside my bed.”
“As you wish, señor.”
He wanted to be found to the strains of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, with Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood open beside him. This was the least elaborate of his fantasies about his death. He decided to write four letters. In one he would describe himself as a suicide; in another, as a man condemned to death; in the third, as incurably ill; and in the fourth, as a victim of a human or natural disaster. This was the letter that presented the greatest difficulties. How could he synchronize the necessary three factors: his death, mailing the letter, and the disaster, an earthquake in Sicily, a hurricane in Key West, a volcanic eruption in Martinique, an air crash in…? He could send the other three letters to people in places scattered around the world asking them please to mail the letters written and signed by him and addressed to his friends as soon as they learned of his death: the suicide letter to María de los Angeles, the condemned-man letter to Perico Arauz, and the incurable-illness missive to the Marqués de Casa Cobos. Confusion. Uncertainty. Eternal doubt. The man about whose body we’ve gathered, the man we are burying, was he actually our friend Federico Silva?
Nevertheless, the predictable confusion and uncertainty of his friends were as nothing compared to his own. As he reread the three letters, Federico realized that he knew whom to send them to, but no one who would do him the favor of mailing them. He had never again traveled abroad following that trip to the Côte d’Azur. Cole Porter had died smiling, the Fitzgeralds and Jean Harlow, weeping. To whom would he send the letters? In his mind’s eye he saw his bathing-suited young friends, Perico, the Marqués, and María de los Angeles, in Eden Roc forty years ago. Where was the girl now who looked like Jean Harlow? She was his only secret ally. In death she could atone for the pain and humiliation she had caused him in life.
“And who the hell are you?”
“I myself don’t know as I look at you.”
“Sorry! I’m in the wrong room.”
“No. Don’t go. I don’t know who you are.”
“Let me go. Let me go or I’ll scream.”
“Please…”
“Let me go. Not even if you were the last man on earth. Filthy Chink!”
The last man. Carefully, he folded the letters before replacing them in their envelopes. A heavy hand fell on his fragile shoulder: a clatter of bracelets and chains, metal striking against metal.
“What’s in the envelopes, old man? Your dough?”
??
?Is it him?”
“Sure it’s him. He goes by the snack bar every day.”
“I didn’t recognize him in his darling Fu Manchu bathrobe.”
“You’d know him with his cane.”
“Or the cute little bibs over his shoes. Shit!”
“Hey, old man, don’t get nervous. These are my buddies, the Barber, and Pocahontas. They call me Artist, at your service. We won’t hurt you, I promise.”
“What do you people want?”
“Only a lot of stuff you don’t need.”
“How did you get in here?”
“Ask the little fruit when he wakes up.”
“What ‘little fruit’?”
“The one who runs your errands.”
“We put him out for a while. Like a light.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you. I don’t keep any money in the house.”
“I told you, we didn’t come for your fucking money. Screw the money, old man.”
“Come on, Artist. You’re wasting time. Let’s get going.”
“Right on!”
“Barber, you entertain the walking dead here while Poca and I start collecting stuff.”
“My party, Artie.”
“Are the others downstairs?”
“The others? How many are there of you?”
“Christ, don’t make me laugh, you old shit. Hey, he says how many are there? Christ!”
“Cuddle up to him, Pocahontas, and see how he likes that beautiful puss of yours. Give him a big smile, now; wiggle that cute little nose. That’s the way, baby. Now tell him how many, what the fuck.”
“Haven’t you ever noticed us when you walk by the snack bar, old man?”
“No. Never. I don’t lower myself to…”
“That’s just it, baby. You should pay more attention to us. We pay attention to you. We’ve been paying attention to you for months. Right, Barber?”
“You said it. Day after fun-filled day. But let me tell you, Pocahontas, if I was you I’d feel pretty bad that the old shit didn’t pick up on me, all decked out like that, all that pretty skin showing. Tongolele, you are with it!”