Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [57]
If others did not see the Manuel Toledano that had been, he did. He was the best, most knowledgeable guardian of his own true image: that of his youth.
And she? Was his interior and anterior sight that of a memory that preserved, in faithful archives, the faces of his closest relatives, lost friends, forgotten sweethearts?
And she . . .
The following day, walking on the deck and avoiding the heroic Adriatic sun with a hand placed like a visor over his forehead, Manuel took advantage of the situation to direct surreptitious glances at the lady masked by her fashion magazine and unmasked by an impatient distraction, as if reading were the disguise for something else, a constantly deflected vigilance, a duty both troublesome and imperative . . . The woman turned the pages of the magazine without looking at them. She almost scratched at them as if memory were a sharp nail.
Finally—inevitably?—their eyes met, hers blinded by the glare from the sea, his by the shadow of his own hand. Manuel smiled at the lady. “Excuse me. It’s just that I heard you yesterday and told myself you’re Mexican.”
She nodded without saying a word.
He insisted, conscious that he was engaging in a dangerous piece of audacity. “That’s not all. I have the impression we’ve met before.”
He laughed at himself, half closing his eyes. Now came the resounding verbal slap, no we’ve never met, don’t be insolent and inappropriate, that ploy is very old.
She looked up. “Yes. I had the same impression.”
“I’m Manuel Toledano—”
“Manuel! Manolo!”
He nodded in surprise.
“Manuel, but I’m Lucy, Lucila Casares, don’t you remember?”
How could he not remember? Through Manuel’s head passed images at once sweet and violent, of his early youth, nineteen or twenty years old, ardent nights cooled only by the stars. Beaches. The perfume of young flesh, sweat washed by the sea and restored by kisses. Dancing pressed close, motionless, on the floor of the club La Perla in Acapulco. Illusive perfumes. Dead aromas.
Lucila Casares. He looked at her with infinite tenderness, now without a trace of surprise or wariness. He did not see a woman over sixty, his contemporary. He saw the girl with curly hair of an indefinable color, blond but dark, copper over gold, wheat over barley, small, sensual, conscious of every movement she made, Lucila of the soft arms and golden legs and the face lit forever by the tropics. Manuel felt the foam of melancholy on his lips. “Lucila . . .”
“It’s a miracle, Manuel!”
“Chance?”
“Whatever you call it. How wonderful!”
She made a coquettish gesture with her hand, gently patting the reclining chair next to hers and urging Manuel to sit down.
Manuel was afraid of one thing. That information about the present—the current life of a man and a woman in their sixties—would displace the delicious return to his early youth, the young love they both enjoyed so much. He, Manuel. She, Lucila.
“Is it really you, Manolo?”
“Yes, Lucila. Look, touch my hand. Don’t you recognize it?”
She denied it, smiling.
“That doesn’t change. The palm of the hand,” he insisted.
“Ah yes, the lifeline. They say it gets shorter with age.”
“No, it gets deeper.”
“Manuel, Manuel, what a surprise.”
“Like before, like Acapulco in 1949.”
She laughed. She brought a finger to her lips and widened her eyes in feigned alarm.
He laughed. “All right, Acapulco always.”
He felt he had a right to remember, and he asked her to join him. The Adriatic, a calm, high-colored sea, also offered an unrepeatable sky this morning. “Just think, I heard you before I knew you.”
“And when was that?”
“During the holidays in ’49. I was in the room next to yours at the Hotel Anáhuac. I heard you laugh. Well, what they call ‘giggle’ in English, that fresh, youthful, ingenuous laugh . . .”
“Deceptive,” Lucila said with a smile, raising an eyebrow mischievously.
But the meeting that same night at the cocktail party was no deception. He saw her approach, ethereal, radiant, with those tones of gold and