Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [124]
No. And I’ll tell you why. Forgive me, Cordelia. Yesterday I went to visit your husband.
You saw Álvaro? Why? What happened?
First of all let me clarify: He called me. He reached out to me.
I don’t understand. What did he want?
To require my presence.
Why?
To clarify my relationship with you.
And what did you tell him?
That it is reflection in absence that makes a husband undesirable, not his proximity.
Did he understand you? Because I don’t really understand you.
Let both of you understand me, then. The great romantic rule is that distance stimulates desire. Tristan and Isolde. Abelard and Heloise.
I know. You always refer to those couples.
It’s the great romantic rule. Unacceptable to modern promiscuity. We want immediate satisfaction. And we get it. Except that what is gotten right away is consumed quickly and then thrown in the trash. I don’t know how a society can be called conservative when it doesn’t conserve anything. We are engaged in an imperfect duel with the world.
Don’t leave for the hills of Úbeda.
I mean that if the consumer society is the way it is, Abelard and Heloise are impossible. The rule takes a leap to tell us that absence separates us and makes us undesirable. We want to consume each other. If we can’t, we don’t hate each other, we simply ignore each other. Whoever isn’t immediately available becomes old and decayed forever. Love has an expiration date, too, just like a bottle of milk. Everything conspires to disenchant us.
You forget that one can love somebody without that somebody knowing it.
Ah. That’s the case with your husband.
It may be, if you insist.
Naturally. I insist. Of course I do.
Nothing you’ve told me includes my case.
Tell me.
Being the object of love that is ignorant of the fact.
I don’t follow.
Álvaro doesn’t know that even if I leave him for you, I’ll go on loving him. And even though he hates me because of you, I don’t know if Álvaro will go on loving me.
You know and he doesn’t?
He doesn’t know that I know.
Why?
Because he doesn’t have an imagination for the good. He thinks and feels only in darkness.
Why does he bring me into it, Cordelia?
Because Álvaro doesn’t love or hate. He fears vulnerability. He wants to know he’s protected.
I repeat: Why me? I believe I’m the least qualified to give your husband protection.
You’re thinking sentimentally. Remember who gave him a job at the Department of the Interior.
The secretary.
Who recommended him?
I did, because you asked me to.
Who are you?
Adviser to the secretary.
Who dismissed my husband?
The secretary, because Álvaro was insubordinate.
Did you approve the dismissal?
There was nothing else I could do. It was a bureaucratic decision. Don‘t think it was on account of you. Besides, it isn’t that he was insubordinate. He simply didn’t measure up. I’m sorry.
It doesn’t matter. For my husband, you’re the factotum. You hire. You fire. You seduce the wives of your employees. And just as you seduce them, you can abandon them. And then, Leo, then he would be there, ready to receive me with feigned anger, with disguised tenderness, he, Álvaro Meneses, who is who he is only because of favors received, becomes the giver, do you understand? The Good Samaritan, the sentimental Midas, oh, I don’t know! He receives. He gives to me. That’s his well-being.
You’re the object of love who ought to be unaware of it.
Do you know something? I’m tired of the comedy of pain, devotion, and fidelity. Passion exhausts me. The problem with my husband is that things weren’t as satisfactory as I hoped or as indifferent as he expected.
What did you want, Cordelia? Being a couple is an illness. It’s a sickness. It isn’t true that the couple is the perfect egotism between two people. The couple is shared hell.
You and I?
The exception that proves the rule.
Aren’t there three of us, if we include Álvaro?
Tell me something, Cordelia: At some point in your marriage, did you ever have the feeling that you and your husband were a single person?
Yes. How horrible. As soon as I felt that, I began to