Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [73]
Guy and José Luis did not want to be left behind. The groups and conclaves mentioned here tacitly proclaimed their modernity, their cosmopolitanism, and their youth. Three purposes that condemned them to disappear. The modern is destined to vanish quickly for the sake of its own decaying currency and in favor of the next brand-new novelty that, whether it’s called postmodern or retro and rejects or evokes nostalgia, simply repeats the warning of death to fashion in the Pensieri of Giacomo Leopardi: Madama la Morte, Madama la Morte, don’t ask me who I am: I am fashion, death . . . I am you.
Then the spree began to fall apart in a charmless slumming in run-down, high-living cabarets in the Guerrero district and in San Juan de Letrán. El Golpe, King Kong, El Burro, Club de los Artistas . . . and if one wanted to dance the mambo on Sunday with one’s servants, the Salón Los Angeles dissolved, with delight in loud revelry and false democracy, the barriers between classes. The cabarets for danzón and dance hostesses died a natural death, the Río Rosa, next to the Bullfight Ring, and the Waikiki, whose only vegetation was the cactus on Paseo de la Reforma. Thanks to its consecration by Aaron Copland, the Salón México survived with its famous sign: DON’T THROW LIT CIGARETTES ON THE FLOOR, THE GIRLS CAN BURN THEIR FEET.
Cosmopolitanism customarily required a center of worldwide attraction, like Paris in the nineteenth century or New York in the twentieth. The fall of colonial empires after World War II meant the end of one or even two cultural metropolises in favor of a revindication of traditions, each anchored in a calendar distinct from the Western. For a Mexican, in any case, it was easier to refer to the Mayas or the Baroque than to the contributions of Kenya, Indonesia, or Timbuktu, the new capitals of the disguised anthropology of third-world revolution.
As for youth, it was being transformed into a solitary avenue that José Luis and Guy stopped walking with the impression that they were ghosts. It was difficult for them to abandon the obligation to be the representatives of a youth. What was left was the dejection of losing—abandonment, death, lack of will—the people who, half in self-congratulation, called themselves “our crowd,” “our set.” These compliments were not, however, the requiem for Guy’s and José Luis’s constant certainty: We didn’t let ourselves go with a group of dispensable people, we weren’t interchangeable, we were irreplaceable as a couple.
In the midst of these changes, both kept the friends who hadn’t succumbed to violence or been liberated into death. A man needs sad friends to whom he can tell what he doesn’t say to his lover. A man needs patient friends who give him the time that a lover denies him. A man needs the friend who talks to him about his lover and evokes a kind of shared warmth that requires the presence of a third person, a special confidant. And above all, a man must respect the relationship with the friend who isn’t his lover and gives the assurance that passion could overwhelm him.
For Guy and José Luis, their relationship with friends secretly established an obligation, which was to avoid promiscuity. It was implicit that a friendship, no matter how close, would never cross the frontier of physical love. In their youth and early maturity, Guy and José Luis proposed taking part in everything but in moderation, without vulgarity, without failures in respect. They told each other that a couple needs others but ought to reserve to itself the dialogue between you and me, never surrendering intimacy to the group, to others. And above all, it must respect the relationship with the friend who isn’t a lover and gives the assurance that passion could overwhelm him.
Both Guy and José Luis, now lagging behind the avant-garde, believed that this friend was Curly Villarino, a bridge between our couple’s sixty years and the thirtysomething of everybody else. Guy and José Luis suffered the feeling of having lost the group, the circle that accompanied