Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [59]
“Was it like that, Manolo?”
“I don’t know. The first meeting is always a day without memory.”
“There were many days, a love that seemed very long to me, very long . . .”
“No, remember it as a single day, the day we met.”
Lucila was about to take Manuel’s hand. She stopped herself. She said only: “What long fingers. I think that’s what I remember best. What I liked most about you. Your long fingers.”
She stared at him with a cruel gleam that took him by surprise. “So much asking myself, Whatever happened to him? Is he happy, unlucky, poor, rich?” She smiled. “And I had only one certainty left. Manuel has very slender, very long, very lovable fingers . . . Tell me, were we so inexperienced back then?”
He returned her smile. “You know that in czarist Russia, couples older than fifty needed their children’s permission to marry.”
She bowed her head. “Forty years later and you still reproach me?”
No, Manuel denied it, no.
“You know I died for you?”
“Why didn’t you tell me so then?”
She didn’t respond directly. She fanned herself wearily, not looking at him. “Perfection is what they expected of me.” She let the fan fall on her lap, next to the fashion magazine. “Who’s perfect? Not even those who demand it of you.”
“You hurt me very much, Lucila.”
“Imagine how hard it was for me to tell you, ‘Go, I don’t love you anymore.’ ”
“Is that what your parents asked you to do?”
She was perturbed. “I had to tell you that so you’d go away, so you wouldn’t love me anymore.”
“No, tell me really, did you believe it?”
“What do you think?” She raised her voice without intending to.
“Did they ask you to?”
“Yes, but that wasn’t the reason I turned you down.”
Manuel kept to himself what he knew. Lucila was supposed to marry a rich boy from high society. Manuel was “decent people”—that was what it was called—but with no sizable bank account. That was the real reason, a categorical order, break off with that pauper, this Manuel can’t give you the life you deserve, romantic love ends, you get older, and what you want is security, comfort, a chauffeur, a house in Las Lomas, vacations in Europe, shopping in Houston, Texas.
“Then what was it?”
She sat erect, proud. “ ‘Go. I don’t love you.’ ” She looked straight at him. “I thought I’d keep you that way.”
“I want to understand you . . .” Manuel murmured.
Lucila lowered her eyes. “Besides, that excited me. Letting you go . . .”
“Like a servant.”
“Yes. And getting excited. To see if you rebelled and refused to believe what I said and pushed me against the wall . . .”
“It was your parents’ decision.”
“. . . and carried me off, I don’t know, kidnapped me, would not be defeated . . . It was my decision. It was my hope.”
Waiters served consommé and biscuits. Manuel sat thinking, self-absorbed and struggling against that undesirable thought: seeing in the separation of two young sweethearts only an episode in the autobiography of an egotist. There had to be something more. He sipped the consommé.
“We made a date, remember?” said Manuel.
“And kept postponing it,” said Lucila.
“How could we lose hope?”
“So much wondering: Whatever happened to him? So many selfrecriminations: Why did I let him go? I wasn’t happy with the husband they forced on me. I was happy with you, Manuel.”
They looked at each other. Two old people. Two old people remembering distant times. Did they both think that when all was said and done, none of it had happened? Or that, given the fact of chance, it could have occurred in very different ways? Looking at each other now as they never had when nostalgia was exiled by presence, both of them thought that if none of it had happened yesterday, it was happening now, and only in this way would they be able to remember tomorrow. It would be an unrepeatable moment in their lives. With its actuality, it would supplant all nostalgia for the