Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [127]
His shaved, bluish skull, firm jawline, the spiderweb surrounding eyes by turn icy and smiling (mocking?), the impertinence of arched eyebrows, the sensuality of lips that were mocking (smiling?), everything gave this man whatever age he wanted to be, now with Lavinia, now with Cordelia.
The remarkable thing was that with both present, he did not stop being the man he was with each separately. They knew it. He knew it. Leo moved his pawns on a board that he controlled but one on which the pieces moved with an economy of chance very similar—he reflected—to the most dangerous kind of independence. At that moment he knew it was time for him to act, boldly, even impetuously, by surprise but with no vulgarity.
That is, for the moment when they had a drink together, Leo deferred his personal movements.
The two women left at the same time, not coming to any agreement except the decorous necessity of not remaining alone with Leo.
Before they leave (they have already picked up their handbags, and one has smoothed her skirt, the other her trousers, both of them their hair), Leo asks them:
“What do you think of Hokusai’s painting? What does it say to you?”
Lavinia and Cordelia look at each other, disconcerted.
8. He wanted to execute everything to perfection. The distribution of spaces allowed all kinds of combinations. Taking the large bedroom as the center of the game, one entered it through a hall door or through two bathrooms at either side of the master bedroom (nuptial chamber?), both supplied with everything necessary: closet, hangers, shoe racks, changes of clothing, caftans. The usual. The doors of the bathrooms opened to the left and the right of the bedroom. The bedroom itself was an upholstered, carpeted cave perfumed by the Persian aroma of tapestries more than by any artificial flowering, giving freedom to bodies to perspire, to smell, if necessary, to stink in order not to lose the animality of the relationship, not to sanitize it until it was extinguished in a mere required function of mental substitutions because of a lack of physical incentives.
Leo Casares put on a blue-and-white-striped robe and amused himself thinking about how the two women would come out of each bathroom into the bedroom, each with an appointment, the other not knowing, the twin bathrooms separated by a single bed. He had exercised all afternoon at the gym without taking a shower afterward. He wanted to proclaim in an olfactory way his animal masculinity. He refused to displace probable offenses with splashes of lavender. He wanted to enjoy and be enjoyed within the Augustinian precept, so inculcated in Catholic school, of sex as the act of beasts. He felt the need to verify, with two women at the same time, that animal nature could coexist with the human, if Cordelia would finally accept anal intercourse or if Lavinia would be satisfied with frontal. Anal like animals. Frontal like heroes. But pleasure among the three of them, like gods.
He guessed correctly. At ten sharp, as he had asked each one, Cordelia opened the door on the left, Lavinia the door on the right.
Lavinia, as was her custom, appeared naked. Cordelia, as was hers, came in enveloped in a white caftan. In the center of the bedroom, Leo waited for them in a robe. He looked at one, then the other. He looked at the far wall of the bedroom. Hanging there was the Japanese painting of sea and sky, wave and cliff. He did not look at the women. He looked at the painting. Let them act. Let them understand that this was the next step in the relationship. That Leo wasn’t asking them to love another man, different from him and also from their husbands, Álvaro and Cristóbal. That this was no longer enough to excite him. That the new rule was this: you and I, the three of us together, two women and a man.
This was what we needed. This was the necessary step toward the unknown, toward what comes next. The meeting of land and sea and sky. Would Lavinia