Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [125]
Was I the way to distance yourself from the similarity to your husband?
In part. Not completely. Not always. It doesn’t matter. The more you resemble yourself, the less you resemble your spouse. That’s what I thought then. With you, there are no physical antipathies. Very strange. With you, there are no doubts about the amorous relationship.
Inevitable doubts?
Maybe.
Are you sure? You didn’t break with Álvaro. Not completely, I mean.
I love each one in his own way. You and he.
Would you take the next step?
It depends. I don’t know. What are you talking about?
About egotism disguised as generosity. I’m talking about giving. About giving oneself. About giving oneself completely. About going beyond the couple . . .
5. Leo could concentrate on the painting by Hokusai. On the other hand, it was difficult for him to concentrate on the two women, Lavinia and Cordelia. In the painting, he could see what he wanted to. It was a transparent painting, pure glass open to the whim of one’s eyes and the strength of one’s imagination. For example: In the picture, it is raining on the landscape. To Leo’s eyes, the rain is smoke. In the painting, the world floats past. To Leo’s eyes, the world tends to be fixed, immobile, in the most immediate reality. Leo’s daily reality? Or the reality of the imaginary painting? Aren’t they, both of them—everyday reality, the virtual reality of art—permanent flux, everything flows? Leo understands it this way even though he doesn’t feel it. Leo is the victim of a parceling of hours into immobile minutes that, no matter how they follow in succession, are identical among themselves or, at least, to themselves. But Hokusai’s sea, though immobile in the painting (or within the painting), is like the gigantic spirit of the world. That surf along the Japanese coast, enclosed within the four sides of the painting, over-flows them, the sea ascends to the sky, invades the beaches, sinks to the bottom of itself, devours itself in each singular, repeated wave.
The sea, like the figures in Piero della Francesca, looks elsewhere, ailleurs, làbas. Leo knows there are no geographical làbas to flee to, as Gauguin and Stevenson did. Gauguin’s grandchildren receive the Paris papers by plane every day. Stevenson’s grandchildren watch a serialized Treasure Island on television. The làbas, the other place, the great undiscovered country, exists only in each person’s soul, but there are beings with no soul, that is, with no imagination. And even those who have more than enough, which is what Leo thinks about himself, who use it up rapidly, soon become sated with their own fantasy and then feel the need to go beyond, farther than where they have already gone.
An enormous lassitude invades the entire being of Leo Casares when he thinks this, and then he returns to his bedroom and continues to look at the painting. The world is floating by. Grab it!
6. First he spoke with each woman and later with both of them together in the penthouse on Calle de Schiller. He had spoken to each about the other without revealing the nature of their relationships to him. They were friends, barely acquaintances. To each—it was the most difficult point—he explained the particular beauty of the other. He admired each for her beauty—one so different from the other—and when he told this to the other, he did not add what the one listening—Lavinia, Cordelia—wanted to know, each more beautiful than the other. And since they could not say that about themselves, they waited for him to say: “She is very beautiful, but you’re more beautiful.” Or “not as beautiful as you.” Or at least “there’s no comparison to you.” He kept this back. At the most, he told each one: “A woman is interesting not because she’s beautiful but because she’s another beauty.”
He knew, looking at each one in turn, that he was looking for a woman who would have a little of Lavinia and a little of Cordelia. Since that woman did not exist, Leo preferred having both. The problem that was becoming acute, distressing, exciting, and filled with expectation was knowing