Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [61]
He embraced her tightly. He placed his lips on her temple. “How do you want me to renounce something that has always existed? By admitting it could endure only after you left me?”
He released her, and for a moment both sat looking at the sea, she thinking that there is nothing more melancholy than disillusioned youthful passion, he thinking that when we sacrifice immediate emotion, we gain the serenity of being remote, both of them wondering, without daring to say so, if they had lived nothing but an adolescent fantasy or an act indispensable for growth.
“How good that we met,” Lucila insisted at last with a sincerity she didn’t want. “Each of us could have died without seeing the other again, do you realize that? You know”—her voice modulated—“sometimes I’ve thought with joy and sorrow, both things, about everything we could have done together, you know, read, talk, think . . . Go to the movies together, to a restaurant . . .”
“I don’t,” Manuel replied. “You know we saved ourselves from habit and indifference.”
He said it in a way he didn’t want to say it. Cutting, disagreeable, hiding the reasons she didn’t know about and that he would never say to the girl from 1949 but with violent shame he said to the woman of today, it wasn’t only your decision, Lucila, not only your parents were opposed to me, my mother was, too, my mother would stand behind me in the mirror while I was shaving, take me by the shoulders, embrace me with a butterfly’s touch that I felt like the mortal grip of an octopus and say you look so much like me my baby look at yourself in the mirror that girl doesn’t deserve you her people aren’t right for you they’ll humiliate you leave her now I don’t want you to suffer the way I’ve suffered since your father left and died dear boy think it over carefully, will you?
“Why did we separate, Manuel?”
“Because you demanded total surrender from me.”
“I did?” She smiled the smile of a woman accustomed to complying.
“Forget my friends. Forget my work. Forget my mother. Enter your exclusive and excluding world.”
Lucila reacted with a strange desire not to disappoint Manuel. “And you didn’t know how. Or couldn’t, is that right?”
“All of us, every one of us, wanted to do other things and were lost, Lucy. Let’s be happy with what we managed to accomplish. Families oblige us to recognize our differences. You left a rich poor man for a poor rich one.” He stopped for a second to turn and look straight at her. “Is the wait for love to come more tortured than sadness for love that was lost? If it’s any comfort to you, let me say that it’s nice to love someone we couldn’t have only because with that person we were a promise and will keep being one forever . . .”
“You didn’t tell me.” Lucila spoke with a touch of contempt. “What do you do?”
He shrugged.
“Final words,” Lucila concluded.
“Yes.” Manuel took his leave, bowed courteously, and walked away on the deck, murmuring to himself, “We became parasites of ourselves,” uncertain about this meeting, disturbed by doubt.
Lucila smiled to herself. How many things had been said, how many, so many more, had not been said. How was I going to tell this man, You know, I live hoping that someone will tell me the day’s events, you know, those little things that fill our hours, so I can say the really important thing to myself?
“You know? You’re going to die. This is your last vacation. Milk it for all it’s worth. You’re going to die. Invent a life.”
She was grateful for what had happened. The memory of adolescence and young love completely filled the void of separation and frustrated affection. It wasn’t bearable to die without knowing. About death but also about love. Communicate it to anyone, to the first person who passed with the veil of ignorance covering his face and the gloves of the past disguising