Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [75]
And after a long sigh:
“Sometimes I find them, other times no. We are all like submarines that cut through posh marinas checking on whether the yachts have anchors, how many barnacles are clinging to them, if the ship is old or new. Then—I warn you—I attack. I attack in earnest. With torpedoes. I warn you so that no one can call it a deception. If I suspect a couple isn’t getting along, I am going to try to seduce them . . .”
Guy and José Luis remarked that Curly was an amiable buffoon, reminiscent of the most notable excesses of another time. Nowadays singular personalities were lost in the sulfurous urban magma, groups disintegrated, and the only recourse was to search the haystack for the brilliant needle of the brilliant eccentricity that once was.
“Do you realize that we’re beginning to talk like a couple of doddering old men?” asked Guy.
José Luis didn’t reveal either melancholy or fatalism. “That’s why we like Curly. He’s young, but he’s in sync with us.”
“We didn’t need clowns before,” Guy said with a frown.
“No, but only because everybody was comical except you and me.”
“Do you feel that self-congratulatory about our behavior?”
“ ‘Self-congratulatory’ isn’t the word. Don’t be pedantic. Perhaps serious, serious in the midst of the circus. ‘Serious’ is the word. We never deceive, and we don’t allow ourselves to be deceived. If you take a good look at our life, Guy, you’ll admit that we were observers but never full participants.”
“You mean we never allowed our private relationship to be confused with our social life?”
“Something better. We were witnesses in order to survive.”
“Do you think we’ve survived? As measured by what?”
“As measured by what we proposed being. A faithful couple, Guy. I believe we both know very well that we’ve never failed in our loyalty. Promiscuity was all around us. We never fell into it.”
“Don’t be so sure,” joked Guy. “There’s still time.”
On the verge of turning sixty, Guy and José Luis had solidified their personal relationship as well as their professional lives and their dealings—increasingly rare—with a society in which they no longer recognized themselves. Rises and falls were too abrupt. Famous names turned infamous. Anonymous people achieved their fifteen minutes of Warholian fame before somersaulting and disappearing. The hateful norms of a hypocritical Catholic morality had disappeared only to be replaced by a no less hypocritical cult of immorality: pleasure, money, consumption hailed as a proof of freedom, and sophisticated indifference behind a mask of sincerity even in those who did not practice it but felt compelled to celebrate it. There were no well-rooted islands left. Everything was like a vast, drifting political and social Xochi-milco crossed by boats with names written in flowers that withered from one day to the next. The men in power changed. The vices of power remained.
Curly, then, was an island of cheer as well as nostalgia for a lost world: the world of Guy’s and José Luis’s youth. He brought them the private pleasure of an audacious joke, a caricatured excess, which the expectant nature of the Furlong–Palma couple demanded, almost as if it were an acquired right. Curly was their show.
Of course the plump young man surpassed himself in word and deed. That is, he alone took the place of several generations from their social past. It was part of his charm. It was inevitable. He was, for Guy and José Luis, a reminiscence. Like a minor Oscar Wilde, Curly fired off paradoxes and bons mots left and right.
“Life would be perfect