Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [31]
I think you owe that to me.
What?
Understanding at least a corner of the world.
I don’t want anyone to think you’re married to me out of loyalty and habit. I want to know and I want you to know that you’re here against your will. That you can’t escape this house. Dammit, not even this bedroom. Prisoner.
Then why did you tell Leo on the phone that I’m here because I want to be?
How do you dare to call that bum here?
Well, Álvaro, life follows its course. I mean, beyond these four walls.
Look at them carefully. What they’re like.
Yellow. A dirty, stained yellow. Full of white shadows where photographs used to be.
You’d call them lies. Photos of your childhood, your first communion, our engagement, fucking rowing on Chapultepec, fucking holding Madero’s hand, fucking honeymoon in Nautla, fucking skiing on Tequesquitengo Lake . . .
A flooded valley, Álvaro. You can see a sunken church at the bottom of the lake. You ski past, and your feet brush against the dome.
Tequesquitengo.
The cross, the cross.
The cross where Our Lord Jesus Christ died, of course.
Yes, the instrument of execution. The cross or the electric chair or the gibbet or the wall. Ways to dispatch us to the next world without a God who comes down to save us. The cross. I laugh at the cross and at fiction. The cross is fiction. We might as well worship an electric chair. We might as well place a gibbet on the altar. We might as well carry a guillotine in a procession. We might as well distribute wafers with cyanide during Mass. Ite vita est.
CORDELIA THINKS and sometimes says (above all to Leo, less to Álvaro) that at first along with resignation there was affection, even a little respect, but as the arguments increased, she felt the temptation to hatred. She didn’t want to embitter her life. She felt acidity rising from the pit of her stomach and became irritated with herself. Affection, respect, resignation were better for the spirit. But Leo you understand that a woman can feel herself at the crossroads (Álvaro makes puns about the cross the fiction) because she didn’t obtain the total love that only came (well) for a time. Now the blood flows in my veins like cold water and I ask myself, I ask my husband, why don’t you leave if you hate me so much? why don’t you go and live alone?
DO YOU KNOW what irritates me most about you?
Tell me, Álvaro.
Your well-bred voice. Your voice that’s so well bred. And do you know what I can’t stand about you? Intimacy. Intimacy with you annoys me. Long story short.
The truth is, Leo, what attracted me was his appearance. Not him. Then I found out what he really was like. Too late, my friend. Then his appearance changed.
Why does he hold on to you?
Because only my eyes remember the way he was when he was young.
Don’t sacrifice yourself anymore, Cordelia.
Do you see me as sacrificed? Don’t think that. Do you see resignation in my eyes? You don’t, do you? I’m calm. Do you know why?
No. Tell me.
I believe—that is, I imagine—that he knows more about what will come than about what’s already happened.
Are you sure? He or you?
Both of us. I’m still with him because there’s nobody left but me who remembers his youth and his promise. Only I have his eyes of yesterday in my eyes of today.
I NEED TO SLEEP with the window open. Close it. I need fresh air. It smells like a circus in here. I’ll get pneumonia. Close it. Look at what a disaster the bathroom is. Why don’t you keep your makeup someplace else? Why don’t you clean the sink after you shave look at the dirty soap look at your hairs look at my brush full of your bleached hairs hang the towel up to dry spread it out don’t leave it like that just thrown down put a mat beside the bathtub don’t get the floor all wet yesterday I slipped and almost broke my neck why do you use so much toilet paper? don’t you prefer to wipe your silky, high-handed ass with Kleenex? don’t use my razors anymore to shave under your arms you leave them full of hair but I only use the one you’ve already