Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [70]
they apply the fugitive law to you
quick quick the kiss the greeting the pass
and now where?
damn motherfucker wandering around
don’t you have a home? I don‘t have a home because
nobody’s looking for me and nobody’s looking for me
because I don’t have a home
how many are there? how many flies are there in an outhouse
with open windows?
why don’t you go back?
because I’m not a damn kid anymore I’m a man
like my father
why don’t you go back? Because I’m getting mixed up
help me
The Gay Divorcee
Guy Furlong and José Luis Palma met in the old Balmori movie house on Avenida Álvaro Obregón, a sumptuous art deco palace with the best sound equipment of the day and a seductive gleam of lustrous bronzes, mirrors, and marbles. They happened to sit next to each other. The first brush of knees was avoided with nervous urgency. That of elbows, forgiven. That of hands, spontaneous, when they clasped during the laughter demanded by the screen, awkward only for a moment—the instant just before the meeting of their eyes that, with its intensity, eclipsed the erotic ballet of Fred and Ginger on the screen.
The Gay Divorcee was the title of the film with the Rogers-Astaire team. Then came The Gay Desperado, with an Italian singer disguised as a Mexican charro, and later, Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, the autobiography of a Broadway actress. Except back then the word “gay” meant only “happy, carefree, lighthearted,” while contemptuous, insulting terms were reserved for homosexuals. Queer. Pansy. Faggot. A whole gamut of them. Forty-one, because of an old club of bourgeois transvestites with that number of members. Adelitas, for being “popular with the troops,” considering the relative ease of hiring indifferent soldiers for last-minute performances. Jotos in Méjico with the “j” of García Lorca and with the murdered poet pájaros in Havana, apios in Seville, floras in Alicante, and adelaidas in Portugal.
And back in Mexico, jotería to classify an entire sexual group. A pipe makes his mouth water. He likes his rice with the stem. He enjoys boiled Coca-Cola. The storm of nominal and adjectival scorn that poured down on Mexican homosexuals perhaps only hid, crudely, the very disguised inclinations of the most macho of machos: those who deceived their wives with men and brought venereal disease into their decent homes. Enchiladas with cold cream. Male hookers.
José Luis and Guy, from the very beginning, by an agreement unspoken but acted upon, established themselves as a couple removed from both dissimulation and excuses. It was auspicious that the movies brought them together when they were only eighteen years old. They still weren’t emancipated, but their early relationship pushed them to find as soon as possible the way to leave their families (indifferent to the situation because the lovers decided it that way) and live together. Guy achieved it first, since his success as an artistic promoter produced good commissions that allowed him to establish an agency called Artvertising, which quickly had a list of distinguished clients. In the meantime, José Luis completed his law studies at the age of twenty-three.
It was auspicious that the movies brought them together. In the silver images of the Balmori, they had discovered a capacity for wonder that set fire to their love and kept it alive. They divided their attraction to films among the several unreachable models offered to them by the irreplaceable darkness of the cinematographic cave. They let pass the pretty ones like Robert Taylor, the rough ones like James Cagney, the extroverts like Cary Grant, the introverts like Gary Cooper, and settled into their admiration, secret in its androgyny, of Greta Garbo, the woman men wanted to be but the woman no man would ever become. Mademoiselle Hamlet, as Gertrude Stein called her (or was it Alice Toklas?). The sphinx. Her face filled with wintry absence projected from the screen like an offering and a challenge. Leave me alone, like bullfighters, but make me yours, like courtesans.
As soon as they moved into a nice