Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [98]
It’s the good thing about being the mistress and not the wife.
Why?
The wife makes the bed after love. The mistress has a maid who makes it for her.
Don’t kid around, Leo. I’m talking to you seriously.
Like a piece of furniture, you were saying . . .
Waiting for the man to sit on you, eat on you, urinate on you without even looking at you. Cristóbal made me feel unique. Queen of a kingdom with only two subjects, he and I, both subject to the desires—all the desires—of the other, which, because it was what the other wanted, belonged to both and to each, to me, to him . . .
Fornication is a universal and inalienable right.
At first he filled me with enthusiasm. He made me ecstatic. He told me things like “You have a fragile beauty and an intense sadness.” How could I not love him? It’s an ornate sentence, vulgar perhaps, but you’re not told that every day, Leo, you’re told what time we’ll see each other, I’ll be back at seven, order me some tacos, where did you leave the keys, you’re not told that your beauty is fragile and your sadness profound, no, not that . . . Nobody but a passionate man tells you he doesn’t know if you’re beautiful because you’re proud or proud because you’re beautiful, things like that. I would watch him combing his hair and get terribly excited. He combed his hair with his fingernails, you know? I spied on him when he tidied up in front of the mirror alone pushing his hair back alone before returning alone to the bedroom alone with the strength of an animal and with my own secret animality maintaining the very human love of the looks I gave him without his knowing I was looking at him. We made love, and he called me whore bitch in heat shameless tight cunt with a clit as cute as a golf course he told me all that with no shame and finally:
“If you deceive me, I want you to be faithful to me. If you’re faithful to me, I want you to deceive me.”
In everything, almost, you’re very frank. And you have a good memory.
What? Do you think something like this can be forgotten?
Not everyone knows how to mix memory and desire. When the second ends, the first goes away.
Leo, the most attractive vanity can become repellent. Habitual surprise can stop surprising one day. No, he’s always given me the best. The best hotels, the best restaurants, the most beautiful trips, everything first class, always. I have nothing to complain about. But do you know something, Leo? Even the unexpected became routine. I can’t reproach him for his desire to pay attention to me, to always take me to the most elegant places. The moment came when I wanted everything except the exceptional. Because I began to anticipate the extraordinary, you know? Then the ordinary threatened to come back. With indomitable strength, the strength of the exceptional. Normalcy began to appear in every first-class section of Air France, every suite at every Ritz, every table at El Bodegón, truffles began to make me itch, pheasants left me cross-eyed, lobsters grabbed at my hands to pull me back to the ocean floor . . . Love can suffocate us, Leo. It’s like eating candy all the time. You have to give tedium its due. You have to be grateful for the boring moments in a relationship. You have to . . . You have to stop anticipating the extraordinary. You have to learn to foresee the foreseeable.
It’s the best thing about love.
You said it! What happens is that nobody foresees the moment when you no longer want to be as happy as you were and you desire a little of that unhappiness called ordinary life. Well, what you give me, Leo.
X kills Y and Z kills X.
You pay attention to me—
I’m referring to proofs.
You never talk about yourself. You listen to me.
I pay attention only to you, Lavinia.
Aren’t you ever offended?
You and I never had to pretend. Not before, not now.
I admit there are confidences I don’t like to hear.
I’m just the opposite, Lavinia, I love hearing yours. Please go on.
Do you know what I began to detest in him?
No.
His laugh. The way he laughed. At first I thought it was part of his charm. You’re pretty solemn,