Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [72]
Ni quejarse ni explicarse. The demands of love imposed themselves naturally, without any need for complaints or explanations, in the very act of love. Demands before love tended to kill pleasure, withdrawing its implicit satisfactions, losing them in the harsh antagonist of love, which was logic, though this only reinforced the professional competence of the two men.
And so there was a very attractive equilibrium in their lives, measured out between their work and their private life. Which doesn’t mean that my friends Guy and José Luis didn’t have a social life in the very lively Mexico City of the forties and fifties to the mid-sixties. They participated in various groups founded to the almost biological rhythm of the decades and their newsworthy duration, their inevitable decline, the attachments to and detachments from social groups and, in particular, the solid middle class to which they both belonged. They were present at the end of the fiesta dominated by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, two large multicolored piñatas that skillfully avoided the sticks of governments, political parties, or social classes. Artists ate apart. They owed nothing to anyone except art. Frida and Diego swung picturesquely at an unreachable height to which you had access only if your name was Trotsky, Breton, or Rockefeller, or if you were a modest cantina owner, the projectionist at the movies, or the indispensable hospital nurse. In the forties, José Luis and Guy were present only at the end of that boisterous party, the tail of the comet that pulled along in its generous wake the lights of artistic creativity, sexual confusion, and political arbitrariness.
Then they moved among the romantic violins of Reyes Albarrán’s Rendez Vous and the Jockey Club, which became the most discreetly gay and refined place to meet on Sunday thanks to the management of Jaime Saldívar, a man endowed with inseparable amiability and elegance, capable of making himself followed, like the pied piper of Hamelin, by newly minted princes and the patriarchs of ancient line-ages. Although the mix of European epavés from World War II and the stars of a Hollywood undecided between Roosevelt’s New Deal and McCarthy’s witch hunt met at the Ciro’s of the dwarf A. C. Blumenthal, a partner of the gangster Bugsy Siegel, and in what remained of the intimate wartime cabarets: Casanova, Minuit, Sans Souci . . .
Then came the adventures of the Basfumista group, fervent, anarchic, invented by the painter Adolfo Best Maugard, a former assistant to Sergei Eisenstein in Mexico and endowed with a vestal in residence, Mercedes Azcárate, and a slim blond philosopher, Ernesto de la Peña, who knew some twenty languages, including that of Christ, and was master within the group of a distracted vocation for alarm in a society still capable of being surprised and forgetting from one day to the next about its own newness. Basfumismo never defined itself beyond the Chaplinesque call for attention before a dehumanized society.
It was the last clarion call of the 1940s, before the immense city devoured every attempt to come together under the roof of culture and acquire a personality by means of avant-garde circles. On the horizon, the Rosa district was already dawning, a mix of St. Germain des Prés and Greenwich Village around a Café Tyrol presided over every afternoon by a Colombian writer, Gabriel García Márquez, who had lived in Mexico City since 1960, and baptized by the painter José Luis Cuevas, a cat who seduced with scratches.
But by then Guy Furlong and José Luis Palma were the only Mexicans who still wore tuxedos to eat dinner. They were distinguished by a reluctance to abandon the styles of their youth. Both of them based elegance on style, not fashion. The bad thing was that by the sixties, wearing a dinner jacket at a cocktail party or a vernissage meant running the risk of being confused with the waiters. The old seducer of adolescents, Agustín Villarino, had turned in his documents to eternity sometime earlier. Not, however, without leaving a successor in Mexico City, his nephew