Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [114]
He closed his eyes and tried to imagine the handsome, intelligent boy who, at the age of twenty-four, ruled over the most exclusive bar in Mexico City, the Rendez-Vous, facing the traffic circle of the Angel of Independence, when the capital had two and not twenty million inhabitants, when all the known people really did know one another and would meet at the Rendez-Vous, where, with luck, night after night, you would see one of the many celebrities who, in those days, frequented the exotic Mexican metropolis—John Steinbeck, Paulette Goddard, Aaron Copland, Virginia Hill. The so-called most transparent region, still wearing the halo of the recent glories of European exile and the distant fires of the Mexican Revolution.
Reyes Albarrán not only made cocktails. He was a cocktail. He mixed languages, references, gossip, jokes, he played the piano, he sang Agustín Lara and Cole Porter, combed his hair with pomade, imitated Gardel, introduced surprising mixtures of alcohol with irresistible names—the Manhattan, the sidecar, the Tom Collins—attempted to bring together necessary and dissimilar couples, urged homosexuals and lesbians to show themselves without complexes, impelled boys ruined by the Revolution to fall in love with girls enriched by the same event, deceived the Hungarian princess dispossessed by Communism into marrying the false rogue without a cent posing as a petro-millionaire from Tabasco. Between drinks, he imagined them all, learning on their wedding night that between the two of them—the princess and the rogue—they couldn’t put two eggs in the refrigerator.
“My specialty is launching penury in pursuit of wealth,” he would say, the sophisticated Reyes Albarrán with his elbow on the bar and a gin fizz in his hand.
But the clientele—hélas!—began to understand that the owner of the Rendez-Vous was a mocker, a gossip, a cruel and talkative man, even if he tended bar with burlesque religious solemnity, serving each drink with an “ego baptiso te whiskey sour” and closing the establishment at the hour prescribed by law with a no less mocking “Ite Bacchus est.”
He loved, in other words, to humiliate his clients while pretending to protect them. But since the clients eventually saw the light, rancor and suspicion accumulated around Reyes Albarrán. He knew too many secrets, he laughed at his own mother, he could put an end to many reputations by means of gossip columns and whispered slander. They began to abandon him.
And the city was growing, the fashionable places changed like serpents shedding skin, social barriers fell, exclusive groups became reclusive or inclusive, the names of the old families no longer meant anything, those of the new families changed with each presidential term before they retired to enjoy their six-year fortunes, engagements to be married were determined by distances, the new Outer Ring dictated debuts, dates, angers, punctual loves, lost friendships . . . Luxury and the places that were frequented moved from the Juárez district to the Zona Rosa to Avenida Masaryk, right here in the Polanco district where the shipwrecked survivor of the postwar period, the pomaded and seductive Reyes Albarrán, had been tossed up one Christmas Eve to knock on the door of his solid old brother, the punctual and industrious Don Luis Albarrán, a recent widower, undoubtedly in need of the fraternal company of the equally needy bartender who had ended as a drunkard, forgetting the golden rule: To be a good saloon keeper, you also have to be a good abstainer.
A drunkard, a pianist in an elegant boîte who ended up pounding the keys in the brothels of the Narvarte district