Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [129]
Knowing what he already knows?
Forgetting everything?
What was the next step?
Everything configured an imperfect duel. Leo refused to look at them. He prayed that this scene would not make them tired of him, of themselves, of the irretrievable earlier situation. All of this flashed through his head; accepting habit was the greatest defeat, unacceptable to him. True, in the end, it was all an imperfect duel between desire and its consummation: repeatable or unrepeatable. Leo, with almost Edenic innocence (that’s right, with fragile compassion for himself, he thought), wanted only today’s satisfaction to leave us unsatisfied so we could desire and achieve the next day’s satisfaction.
Would the women understand it this way? Why didn’t they say anything? Why didn’t they move? Would one of them—Cordelia or Lavinia—dare to destroy the proposed trio, tacitly believing that in this way they would return to the earlier couple? Or had he, Leo, destroyed forever all possible relations with them? Did they (Lavinia, Cordelia) realize that Leo had done them the favor of showing each one that her life was false, that the artifice offered by Leo was the truth, in spite of the artifice, just as in the Japanese painting?
“Everything I’ve done is for the sake of happy families.”
How was he going to say this if he himself was incapable of believing it? Of believing anything? Even that these women might be happier with their husbands than with him?
This idea provoked irrepressible laughter in him. He decided to face them, laughing, gauging them, the two women. He, triumphant. This would be the propitious moment to bring the situation to a head. A laugh to absolve them and absolve himself, dispelling everything as a huge joke, an exquisite corpse of Leo’s surrealist spirit. Or perhaps dazzling, almost diabolical laughter, defying the women’s imagination, a fatal invitation to a shared copulation that would renew and even exceed relations among the three. The great pact, euphoric, gallant, transgressive, of Leo, Lavinia, and Cordelia.
He let them look at the Japanese painting. He turned on his heel to face the two women he had just imagined behind him, immobile, each one coming out of a bathroom, walking toward the bed they would share. Or moving away from the bed, returning to the bathrooms, disappearing . . .
“You need to have a great lack of imagination to break off an amorous relationship,” Leo said to himself in a very low voice.
9. Sitting on the sofa in front of the picture of the turbulent sea and the immobile cliff, Leo smoked a light-tobacco cigarette, breaking his New Year’s resolution: to give up all secondary vices. He allowed the spirals to add a transparent, fleeting coat to the painting. Why was the sea turbulent if the cliff did not move? Why was the physical world so capricious? In Leo’s desire, on that night everything had to be transformed, crossed, multiplied. The sea would become calm. The coast would rise up murmuring, trembling, to culminate in a vast barren plain populated with unknown bodies that would advance naked but wrapped in transparent black veils, like the figures of Manuel Rodríguez Lozano in the main room of the apartment on Calle de Schiller.
He did not identify those two bodies. They were not familiar. He noticed that he did not recognize the colors offered him by the world of the painting. They were too new, perhaps happy, in any case, frighteningly pure. The colors were pure and bold. The figures, on the other hand, seemed impure and uncertain.
Leo shook his head. He looked directly at the painting. It was pure glass. It was transparent. It was the perfect work of art. Each person put in it what he or she wanted to see. Nothing