Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [104]
Besides, Cielo would be out of action for five months. Eliminated from the cast and offering you a magnificent excuse to take up again the conquests your celebrated union with Cielo implicitly denied to you. You’d be careful to keep your adventures discreet. You’d threaten talkative starlets with a sudden end to their careers.
“You know, gorgeous, my word will always be worth more than yours. Sex and silence or sex and being fired. It’s up to you, babe . . .”
It wasn’t that Cielo de la Mora would have been upset to learn about another of Alejandro Sevilla’s infidelities. After all, they weren’t married. And in the end, who else had decided to have the baby? Who else had stopped using birth control? Who else had taken the sedative for her nerves?
“I really was very nervous, even though I didn’t show it.”
Which was why, when the baby was born, the mother blamed only herself. She tried to assimilate her horror by watching Roman Polanski’s film Rosemary’s Baby over and over again and trying to imitate Mia Farrow’s maternal feelings. Each gesture of maternal love, however, repelled Cielo de la Mora in the deepest part of her being, obliged her to falsify her desire for serene distance before the world, to openly choose the mother’s love expected of her or the sexual repugnance that had returned to the place of conception. To love or hate. Cielo felt cornered, obliged to make drastic resolutions, abandoning her preferred role as serene (and even submissive) observer of the world.
“Forgive me, Alejandro. Don’t touch me.”
“Control yourself, Señora. That little problem won’t be repeated.”
“Don’t touch me, I’m telling you.”
“Let’s give time a little time.”
The national film industry brought her to you. The national film industry separated her from you. Once she had recuperated from the birth, though not from her melancholy, you included Cielo in the cast of your first contemporary movie. You gave in to the pleas of the producer, the public wants to see you dressed in ordinary clothes, by now they think that even at home you walk around like a musketeer, don’t fuck around, Alejandro, you owe it to your public . . .
One scene in the movie took place in an opera house. Cielo de la Mora was sitting in a box. You looked at her with your binoculars, and she looked away. She was wearing a very low-cut strapless lamé gown. When the performance was over, you approached her on the street. You were wearing a heavy overcoat in addition to the indispensable gray felt hat. But she appeared without a coat, with her bare shoulders and Olympic diver’s neckline. The director hit the ceiling and shouted. Where was the mink, the fur coat the actress was supposed to be wearing?
“It’s very hot,” Cielo said.
“It doesn’t matter. The script says, ‘She comes out carefully buttoned up against the cold north wind on a wintry night.’ ”
“It’s ridiculous. It’s hot. Only in Nicaragua do women wear fox to the opera in spite of the heat.”
“Darling,” you intervened, carefully buttoned up, “it’s precisely to give the impression that Mexico isn’t a tropical country, a banana republic, but that it’s cold here, like in Europe.”
She laughed at you, turned, and got into a taxi while you murmured: “It’s to show that we’re civilized—”
“It’s to hide what we really are,” she said from the taxi.
3. In her goodbye letter, Cielo de la Mora said things like these. She had fallen in love with a photograph. “Even before I met you, even before I had seen you on the screen. An actor has to be admired from a distance. The truth is, fame muddies ordinary affection. At least let’s save the child from our quarrels. From hostility. From humiliations.”
You remembered other things you had forgotten.
“Whenever I want to tell you something that matters to me, Alejandro, you say you’re in a hurry, you leave, you don’t listen to me.”
And now she was writing to say she was leaving you for good.
“How can I explain my desire to get away, to stop being the woman I was with you, to begin a new life?”