Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [74]
In short, each group brings with it the question: “What impression are we making?” The Jockey’s aristocrats, L’Aiglon’s gilded youth, the Rosa district’s artists and intellectuals. All of them wanted to make an impression, and in this aspiration lay the defeat or triumph of its members. Both transitory, except that those who failed had to choose between returning to their families or, following André Gide’s proclamation—families, I detest you—give themselves over to a bohemia that was sad, poor, solitary, scruffy, and as dependent on what they could beg as the most “subjugated” son at home. Only a few stayed afloat in the heavy seas of yesterday’s groups, asserting their talent thanks to the hard exigencies of indiscipline, the purges of monogamy (sometimes serial), and carefully measured-out absences from the ravenous homeland. Mexico City threatened to devour alive each one of its inhabitants, whether victim or victimizer.
Instead of a single center—between the Zócalo and Angel—the capital spread in concentric circles increasingly distant from what Guy and José Luis considered the “heart” of the city. The Rosa district would end up prostituted and brothelized, exiling its mobile geography of restaurants, cafés, and boutiques to Avenida Masaryk, from where it would soon move to the center, expelled now by gangs of car thieves, pilferers of watches, entire families of crooks who specialized in breaking into houses, robbing banks, handling burglary tools, murdering for pay, beating with clubs, stabbing, pimping, and prostituting. Old pensioners without a pension, fugitives from justice, con artists . . . What remained of the ancient City of Palaces? A huge supermarket filled with cans of blood and bottles of smoke? Blood and hunger, basic necessities of the city-monster.
“The consumer society,” wrote Georges Bataille in La Part maudite, “was invented by the Aztecs. They consumed hearts.”
Guy and José Luis believed they had saved their hearts from Mexican ritual cannibalism. At the age of fifty-six, they could look with nostalgic apprehension at their youthful meeting in the Balmori movie theater and tell each other, “I think we saved ourselves, we think we haven’t been touched by undesirable emotions, we think that by this time nothing can disturb us . . .” They condemned the city to death.
They did not count on the opposition of Curly Villarino, committed to reviving the days of an aristocratic freedom reserved, at this point in history, only for a handful of multimillionaires and members of European and Arabic royal houses. That is what Curly’s calling card was: a summons to the nostalgia of Guy and José Luis for their youth, a sweet evocation of a lost time that he, Curly Villarino, seemed to or pretended to reincarnate for the exclusive benefit of the two friends.
“All my uncle Agustín’s friends have died. Only you two are left from that time, Guy, José Luis, my dears. You are my seductive perfumes.”
He said it in so childlike and lovable a manner. With his voice and manners, he made you forgive his somewhat outlandish appearance of a fat boy who never finished growing. The baby fat on his cheeks swayed from side to side with the emphatic movement of his pink cherub’s lips, though the fat seraph was contradicted by narrow myopic eyes behind a pair of small eyeglasses in the style of Schubert that, Curly dixit, would eventually replace the oversize aviator’s glasses favored by the deplorable decade of miniskirts, mammoth belts, and bell-bottom trousers.
Curly’s entire spherical existence was crowned by a mass of curls, once blond but now streaked with gray, that resembled the inspired wig of the great Harpo Marx. But if the latter was famously mute, Curly talked incessantly, wittily, and freely. It charmed my friends that when he was introduced, Curly said to them:
“I am not impartial, don’t believe that even for a minute. You two are my classics.