Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [126]
Leo debates this question with himself, the lover of two women who do not know each other and whom he now invites to have a drink at the same time—seven in the evening—in the apartment that each one—Cordelia, Lavinia—knows and considers hers because each one has moved from the living room to the bedroom and from the bedroom to the bathroom and each one has used the same soap, the same shower, the same towel, the same bidet, and sometimes the same toothbrush (Cordelia never forgets to bring hers, Lavinia does: “What would my husband, Cristóbal, think if he found a toothbrush in my Louis Vuitton bag?”).
Until now Leo has kept them apart thanks to a fortunate though hazardous act of juggling. Two balls in the air. One ball in each hand. Leo becomes irritated. In his life as a great dilettante, a great enthusiast, each step ahead has been transformed over time into a step backward if the next step forward is not taken in time. It is what he is experiencing now. Lassitude. Abulia. Lack of surprise. Wonder exhausted. The sea dries up. There is only a cliff that sinks to the bottom of a great cemetery of sand. A ravine whose crown is the great bare desert. The sea basin has to be filled again. Where is the surf, where are the sweet laments of the sea, where is the new, unheard-of, voracious foam that his existence demands in order to move forward? In order not to commit suicide in the name of unknown novelty?
Leo replaces on the mantelpiece the photograph hidden during Cordelia’s and Lavinia’s visits. It was the portrait of a man in his forties, handsome, with a thin face, his chin resting on two hands with long, very slim fingers. The dedication read: “To my adored son Leo, your father, Manuel.”
7. Leo told them the good thing about absence when a couple falls in love but lives apart is that it keeps desire alive.
Lavinia did not agree. She said that absence does not stimulate desire, it kills it. And she added picturesquely: “If you’re smart, don’t stay apart.”
Cordelia intervened with the opinion that absence is like the sweet but unbearable reserve of the next encounter.
“I’ve wanted to be at a distance without desiring,” Leo claimed, leaving unstated the conclusion that neither woman would or could reach.
“I’d rather say stupid things than feel sorrow,” Lavinia said in an eccentric way.
“Do you mean that’s why you say them?” Leo said with a nasty smile.
“I don’t dare oppose older people like the two of you,” Lavinia said, returning his smile.
Leo guffawed in irritation. “I like women who, in spite of being women, are different.”
Cordelia shrugged and made a disapproving face. Did Leo think that being a woman was a uniform? Weren’t men, in any case, more similar to one another than any two women? Lavinia laughed. “We wear feathers like savages, we raise and lower our skirts following the dictates of fashion, whatever that means, we don’t become bald, we don’t have to shave (our faces), and our underwear isn’t predictable, we’re divine!”
Leo and Lavinia wanted to break the ice emanating from Cordelia’s labored breathing. Suddenly, this simple conversation (this complicated presence of the three of them in the home of a shared lover) had placed Cordelia at an age disadvantage, something she was not accustomed to accepting, especially because it was the repeated insult her husband, Álvaro, threw up to her.
It was obvious that Álvaro’s wife was twice the age of Cristóbal’s. Except with Leo, Cordelia had never felt the contrast that the youthful presence