Burnt Water (7 page)

On the way back to the house in Pedregal with my drunk and humiliated grandfather, I remembered the construction of the university, how they polished the volcanic rock, Pedregal put on spectacles of green glass, a cement toga, painted its lips with acrylic, encrusted its cheeks with mosaic, conquered the blackness of the land with an even blacker shadow of smoke. The silence was broken. On the far side of the vast parking lot at the university they parceled out the Pedregal Gardens. They established a style that would unify the buildings and landscape of the new residential site. High walls, white, indigo blue, vermilion, and yellow. The vivid colors of the Mexican fiesta, Grandfather, combined with the Spanish tradition of the fortress, are you listening? They sowed the rock with dramatic plants, stark, with no adornment but a few aggressive flowers. Door locked tight like chastity belts, Grandfather, and flowers open like wounded genitals, like the cunt of the whore Judith that you couldn't fuck and I could, and what for, Grandfather?

We were approaching Pedregal Gardens, the mansions that must all have been the same behind their walls, Japan with a touch of Bauhaus, modern, one-floor, low roofs, wide picture windows, swimming pools, rock gardens. Do you remember, Grandfather? The perimeter of the development was encircled by walls, and access was limited to a certain number of orange wrought-iron gates tended by guards. What a pitiful attempt at urban chastity in a capital like ours, wake up, Grandfather, look at it by night, Mexico City, voluntarily a cancerous city, hungry for uncontrolled expansion, a hodgepodge of styles, a city that confuses democracy with possessions, and egalitarianism with vulgarity, look at it now, Grandfather, how we saw it that night we spent with the mariachis and the whores, look at it now that you're dead and I'm over thirty, bound by its broad belts of poverty, legions of unemployed, immigrants from the countryside, and millions of babies conceived, Grandfather, between a howl and a sigh: our city, Grandfather, it won't long tolerate oases of exclusiveness. Keeping Pedregal Gardens in good condition was like fixing your fingernails while your body rots of gangrene. The gates collapsed, the guards disappeared, the caprice of construction broke forever the quarantine of our elegant leprosarium, and my grandfather's face was as gray as the concrete walls of the ring road. He'd fallen asleep, and when we reached the house I had to lift him out of the car like a child. How light he was, emaciated, just skin and bones, and what a strange grimace of forgetfulness on a face laden with memories. I carried him to his bed. My father was waiting for me at the door.

He signaled me to follow him through the marble halls to the library. He opened the cabinet filled with crystal ware and mirrors and bottles. He offered me a cognac and I shook my head no. I prayed he wouldn't ask me where we'd gone, what we'd done, because I would have had to give him an answer he wouldn't understand, and that, as I've already said, hurt me more than it did him. I rejected the cognac as I would have rejected his questions. It was the night of my liberation and I wasn't going to lose it by acknowledging that my father had the right to interrogate me. I had my silver platter, hadn't I, why try once more to find out, for myself alone, what love was, what it was to be courageous, to be free.

“What is it you hold against me, Plutarco?”

“That you left me out of everything, even pain.”

I felt sorry for my father as I said it. He stood there for a moment, then walked to the picture window overlooking an interior patio, glass-enclosed, a marble fountain in the center. He drew back the curtains with a melodramatic gesture at the very moment Nicomedes turned on the fountain; it was as if they'd rehearsed it. I felt sorry for him; these were gestures he'd learned at the movies. Every move he made he'd learned at the movies. Everything he did was learned, and pompous. I compared his actions to the spontaneous hell my grandfather knew how to raise. My father for years had been hobnobbing with gringo millionaires and marquises with invented titles. His own certificate of nobility was his appearance in the society pages, his English mustache carefully brushed upward, graying hair, discreet gray suit, a showy handkerchief sprouting from his breast pocket like the dry plants from the Pedregal. Like many vulgar rich Mexicans of his generation, he modeled himself on the Duke of Windsor, a large knot in the necktie, but they never found their Mrs. Simpsons. Pitiful creatures: hobnobbing with some vulgar Texan who'd come to buy a hotel in Acapulco, or a Spanish sardine seller who'd bought his aristocracy from Franco, people like that. He was a very busy man.

He parted the curtains and said he knew his arguments wouldn't sway me, that my mother had not taken proper care of me, she'd been dazzled by the social scene, it was the time when the European emigres were arriving, King Carol and Madame Lupescu with valets and Pekingese, and for the first time Mexico City felt itself to be an exciting cosmopolitan capital, not a petty town of Indians and military coups. It was inevitable that it would impress Evangelina, a beautiful girl from the provinces who'd had a gold tooth when he first met her, one of those girls from the coast of Sinaloa who become women while still very young, tall and fair, with eyes like silk, and long black hair, whose bodies hold both night and day, Plutarco, night and day glowing in the same body, all the promises, all of them, Plutarco.

He'd gone to the carnival in Mazatlán with some friends, young lawyers like himself, and Evangelina was the Queen. She was paraded along the seawall called Olas Altas in an open car adorned with gladiolas, everyone was courting her, the orchestras were playing “Little sweetheart mine, pure as a newborn child,” she'd preferred him, she'd chosen him, chosen happiness with him, life with him, he hadn't forced her, he hadn't offered any more than the others, the way the General had with your grandmother Clotilde, who had no recourse but to accept the protection of a powerful and courageous man. Not Evangelina. Evangelina had kissed him for the first time one night on the beach, and said, I like
you,
you're the tenderest, you have handsome hands. And I
was
the most tender, I was, Plutarco, that's the truth, I wanted to love. The sea was as young as she, they'd been born together that very minute, Evangelina your mother and the sea, owing nothing to anyone, no obligations, unlike your grandmother Clotilde. I didn't have to force her, I didn't have to teach her to love me, as your grandfather had to teach his Clotilde.

In his heart the General knew that, and his veneration for my mother Clotilde pained him, Plutarco, he was like the old saying, he never lost, but if he lost, he took it with him, my mother was part of his war booty, no matter how hard he tried to hide it, she hadn't loved him, she had had to learn to love him, but Evangelina chose me, I wanted to love, your grandfather wants people to love him, and that's why he determined that Evangelina should stop loving me, the reverse of what happened to him, do you understand? all day long he compared her to his sainted Clotilde, everything was my dear dead Clotilde wouldn't have done it that way, when my Clotilde was alive—my Clotilde, may she rest in peace—she knew how to run a household, she was modest, she never raised her voice to me, my Clotilde was so well-mannered, she'd never had her picture taken showing her legs, and the same, even more, when you were born, Plutarco, take my Clotilde, now there was a real Mexican mother, there was a woman who knew how to care for a baby.

“Why don't you nurse Plutarco? Are you afraid it'll ruin those beautiful boobs? Well, what do you want them for? To show the men? Carnival's over, miss, it's time to be a decent mother.”

If my father succeeded in making me hate the memory of my mother Clotilde, imagine how it exasperated Evangelina, it's no wonder your mother felt isolated, and then driven out of the house, going to the dentist, looking for parties to go to, looking for another man, my Evangelina was so simple, leave your father, Agustín, let's go live by ourselves, let's love each other the way we did at first, and the General, don't let that woman get on your back, you let her get her own way just once and she'll dominate you forever, but in his heart he was hoping she would stop loving me so I would have to force her to love me, the way it had been with him, so I wouldn't have any advantage he hadn't had. So no one would have the freedom he'd missed. If he'd had to work hard for everything, then we'd have to, too—first me and then you, that's how he sees things, his own way, he gave us everything on a silver platter as he always says, and there wasn't going to be another Revolution where a man could win at a stroke both love and valor, not any more, now we have to prove ourselves in other ways, why should he pay for everything and us for nothing? he's our eternal dictator, don't you see? see if we dare show we don't need him, that we can live without his memories, his heritage, his tyranny of sentiment. He wants people to love him, General Vicente Vergara is our father, by God, and we're obliged to love him and emulate him, to see if we can do what he did, now that it's more difficult.

You and I, Plutarco, what battles are we going to win? what women are we going to tame? what soldiers are we going to castrate? you tell me. That's your grandfather's terrible challenge, realize that quickly or you'll find yourself broken the way he broke me, he laughs and says, let's see whether you can do what I did, now that it can't be done any longer, let's see whether you can find a way to inherit something more difficult than my money.

“Violence with impunity.”

Evangelina was so innocent, so without defenses, that's what galled me more than anything, that I couldn't blame her, but I couldn't forgive her either. Now that's something your grandfather never lived through. Only with such a feeling could I triumph over him forever, inside myself, though he supported me and went on mocking me. I'd done something more than he'd done, or something different. I still don't know which. Your mother didn't know either. She must have felt guilty of everything, except the one thing I blamed her for.

“Her irritating innocence.”

My father had been drinking all night. Even more than Grandfather and me. He walked to the hi-fi and turned it on. Avelina Landín was singing something about silver threads among the gold. My father dropped into a chair, like Fernando Soler in the old Mexican film
Soulless Woman.
I no longer cared whether this, too, was something he'd learned.

“The medical report said your mother had died by choking on a piece of meat. As simple as that. Those things are easily arranged. Your grandfather and I tied a beautiful scarf around her neck for the funeral.”

He gulped down the rest of his cognac, put the glass on a shelf, and stood for a long while staring at the palms of his hands, as Avelina sang about the silvery moon reflected on a lake of blue.

Of course, the business matters were resolved. My father's friends in Los Angeles covered the hundred-million-peso debt so the fields in Sinaloa would remain untouched. Grandfather took to his bed for a month after the binge we'd had together, but he was back in good form for the tenth of May, Mother's Day, when the three of us men who lived in the huge house in Pedregal went together, as we did every year, to the French Cemetery to leave flowers in the crypt where my grandmother Clotilde and my mother Evangelina are buried.

The marble crypt is like our mansion in miniature. They are both sleeping here, said the General in a broken voice, head bowed, sobbing, his face hidden in a handkerchief. I stand between my father and my grandfather, clasping their hands. My grandfather's hand is cold, sweatless, like a lizard's skin. My father's hand blazes like fire. My grandfather sobbed again, and uncovered his face. If I'd looked at him closely, I'm sure I would have asked myself for whom he wept so bitterly, and for whom he wept more, his wife or his daughter-in-law. But at that moment I was simply trying to guess what my future would be. We'd gone to the cemetery without mariachis this time. I would have liked a little music.

The Two Elenas

“I don't know where Elena gets those ideas. That's not the way she was brought up. Nor you either, Victor. The truth is that marriage has changed her. Yes, there's no doubt. I thought she was going to give my husband a heart attack. Those ideas are completely indefensible, and especially at the dinner table. My daughter knows very well that her father needs to eat in peace. If not, his blood pressure goes up immediately. That's what the doctor has told us. And, after all, this doctor knows what he's talking about. He doesn't charge two hundred pesos a visit for nothing. I beg you to talk with Elena. She pays no attention to me. Tell her we'll put up with everything. That it doesn't matter to us that she neglects her home to learn French. That it doesn't matter that she goes to those weird films in dens filled with bushy-haired freaks. And that we don't mind those clownish red stockings. But when she tells her father at dinnertime that by living with two men a woman can better complement herself … Victor, for your own sake, you ought to get ideas like that out of your wife's head.”

When she'd
seen Jules and Jim
at a film club, Elena had gotten the devilish idea that she should carry the battle to the Sunday dinners with her parents—the only obligatory gathering of the family. When we came out of the theater we took the MG and went to get something to eat at the Coyote Flaco in Coyoacán. Elena looked, as always, very beautiful in her black sweater and leather skirt and the stockings her mother didn't like. She was wearing, in addition, a gold chain with a carved jadeite pendant that, according to an anthropological friend, describes the Mixtec prince Uno Muerte. Elena, who is always so happy and carefree, looked intense that night: the color had risen to her cheeks and she barely spoke to the friends who ordinarily get together in that rather elite restaurant. I asked her what she wanted to eat and she didn't answer: instead, she took my closed hand in hers and stared at me intently. I ordered two garlic steak sandwiches as Elena shook out her pale pinkish hair and rubbed her neck.