Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [58]
“Manuel Toledano. Your neighbor, Señorita.”
“That’s too bad.”
He asked why, disconcerted.
“Yes,” the girl went on. “Walls separate us.”
They didn’t separate again during that unforgettable December in the year 1949 that was prolonged, following the festival of San Silvestre, in the January vacation and the tender, astonishing repetition of the first meeting, at the cocktail party, only you and I talked to each other looked at each other the others at the party didn’t exist they were talking nonsense from the first moment only you and I were there Lucila and Manuel Lucy and Manolo.
The days were long. The nights too short.
“We danced on the floor of La Perla, do you remember?”
“Do you remember the music they were playing?”
“I’m taking the tropical way . . .”
“The night restless, unquiet . . .”
“In the breeze that comes from the sea . . .”
“No, you’re wrong. First it says ‘With its perfume of dampness . . .’ ”
They both laughed.
“How vulgar,” said Lucila.
A small Acapulco, adolescent like them, half grown, always divided between hills and beach, poor and rich, native and tourist, still possessed, Acapulco, of a clean sea and clear nights, families that loved one another, and first courtships: warm, gentle water at Caleta and Caletilla, wild water at Revolcadero, pounding waves at the Playa de Hornos, silent waves at Puerto Marqués, stone cliffs at La Quebrada, recently opened hotels—Las Américas, Club de Pesca—and very old hotels—La Marina, La Quebrada—but sand castles, all of them.
“Boleros let us dance very close together.”
“I remember.”
“In the breeze that comes from the sea . . .”
“We hear the sound of a song . . .”
A vacation spot both daring and tranquil, wavering between its humble past and probable heavenly future. There already vibrated in the air at the airport another Acapulco of big planes, big millionaires, big celebrities. In 1949, not yet. Though the domestic calm of that time could not hide a social chasm deeper than the ravine of La Quebrada itself.
“I remember,” Manuel said with a smile.
“It’s true,” Lucy said.
The perfume of two bodies in bloom. The smell of the Acapulco sun. Manuel a contagious perspiration. Lucila a sweet perspiration. Both transformed by the brand-new experience of young love . . . A day when Lucy is sometimes with us and sometimes Manolo.
The perfect symmetry of the day and of life during a month’s vacation in Acapulco.
They spoke with preserved emotion, separated from the world by the voyage and joined to the earth by shared memory. Acapulco during the vacation of 1949. Acapulco is the awakening of the new decade of the fifties. A time of peace, illusion, confidence. And the two of them, Lucila and Manuel, embracing at the center of the world. What did they say to each other?
“I don’t remember. Do you?”
“What two puppies say to each other.” Manuel laughed. “What they do . . .”
“You know I was never happier in my life, Manolo.”
“Neither was I.”
“It’s wonderful that in five weeks you can live more than in fifty years . . . Forgive my frankness. Age authorizes what it was once forbidden to say.”
Detailed memories tumbled out, the beaches back then, Caleta during the day, Hornos at dusk, the children playing in the sand, the fathers walking along the sea wearing long trousers and short-sleeved shirts, the mothers in flowered dresses and straw hats, never in bathing suits, the fathers vigilant, watching the adolescents moving away from the beach, swimming to Roqueta Island where paternal glances did not reach where young love could ally itself with the one visible love young love in heat surrender of the soul more than of the body but senseless uncontrollable pounding of the pulse the flesh the look of closed eyes—do you remember Lucy do you remember Manolo?—the touch uncertain more than experienced and sensual exploratory and auroral, Lucy, Manolo, while from Caleta the fathers