Authors: Carlos Fuentes
You’re the object of love who ought to be unaware of it.
Do you know something? I’m tired of the comedy of pain, devotion, and fidelity. Passion exhausts me. The problem with my husband is that things weren’t as satisfactory as I hoped or as indifferent as he expected.
What did you want, Cordelia? Being a couple is an illness. It’s a sickness. It isn’t true that the couple is the perfect egotism between two people. The couple is shared hell.
You and I?
The exception that proves the rule.
Aren’t there three of us, if we include Álvaro?
Tell me something, Cordelia: At some point in your marriage, did you ever have the feeling that you and your husband were a single person?
Yes. How horrible. As soon as I felt that, I began to step back.
Was I the way to distance yourself from the similarity to your husband?
In part. Not completely. Not always. It doesn’t matter. The more you resemble yourself, the less you resemble your spouse. That’s what I thought then. With you, there are no physical antipathies. Very strange. With you, there are no doubts about the amorous relationship.
Inevitable doubts?
Maybe.
Are you sure? You didn’t break with Álvaro. Not completely, I mean.
I love each one in his own way. You and he.
Would you take the next step?
It depends. I don’t know. What are you talking about?
About egotism disguised as generosity. I’m talking about giving. About giving oneself. About giving oneself completely. About going beyond the couple . . .
5. Leo could concentrate on the painting by Hokusai. On the other hand, it was difficult for him to concentrate on the two women, Lavinia and Cordelia. In the painting, he could see what he wanted to. It was a transparent painting, pure glass open to the whim of one’s eyes and the strength of one’s imagination. For example: In the picture, it is raining on the landscape. To Leo’s eyes, the rain is smoke. In the painting, the world floats past. To Leo’s eyes, the world tends to be fixed, immobile, in the most immediate reality. Leo’s daily reality? Or the reality of the imaginary painting? Aren’t they, both of them—everyday reality, the virtual reality of art—permanent flux, everything flows? Leo understands it this way even though he doesn’t feel it. Leo is the victim of a parceling of hours into immobile minutes that, no matter how they follow in succession, are identical among themselves or, at least, to themselves. But Hokusai’s sea, though immobile in the painting (or within the painting), is like the gigantic spirit of the world. That surf along the Japanese coast, enclosed within the four sides of the painting, over-flows them, the sea ascends to the sky, invades the beaches, sinks to the bottom of itself, devours itself in each singular, repeated wave.
The sea, like the figures in Piero della Francesca, looks
elsewhere, ailleurs, làbas.
Leo knows there are no geographical
làbas
to flee to, as Gauguin and Stevenson did. Gauguin’s grandchildren receive the Paris papers by plane every day. Stevenson’s grandchildren watch a serialized
Treasure Island
on television. The
làbas,
the
other place,
the great undiscovered country, exists only in each person’s soul, but there are beings with no soul, that is, with no imagination. And even those who have more than enough, which is what Leo thinks about himself, who use it up rapidly, soon become sated with their own fantasy and then feel the need to go
beyond,
farther than where they have already gone.
An enormous lassitude invades the entire being of Leo Casares when he thinks this, and then he returns to his bedroom and continues to look at the painting. The world is floating by. Grab it!
6. First he spoke with each woman and later with both of them together in the penthouse on Calle de Schiller. He had spoken to each about the other without revealing the nature of their relationships to him. They were friends, barely acquaintances. To each—it was the most difficult point—he explained the particular beauty of the other. He admired each for her beauty—one so different from the other—and when he told this to the other, he did not add what the one listening—Lavinia, Cordelia—wanted to know, each more beautiful than the other. And since they could not say that about themselves, they waited for him to say: “She is very beautiful, but you’re more beautiful.” Or “not as beautiful as you.” Or at least “there’s no comparison to you.” He kept this back. At the most, he told each one: “A woman is interesting not because she’s beautiful but because she’s
another
beauty.”
He knew, looking at each one in turn, that he was looking for a woman who would have a little of Lavinia and a little of Cordelia. Since that woman did not exist, Leo preferred having both. The problem that was becoming acute, distressing, exciting, and filled with expectation was knowing how to bring them together, put them face-to-face, and observe what would happen when the two women who were his lovers met without knowing that each was a sexual partner of Leo’s. Would they intuit it? Say it? When two are one, each experiences what Mallarmé calls “the evil of being two.” What does the poet mean? That the amorous couple would like to be a perfect, indissoluble unity, and when they achieve it, they experience evil, the absolute evil of knowing yourself a lover and knowing, fatally, that you are separated from what you desire most in spite of having it?
Leo debates this question with himself, the lover of two women who do not know each other and whom he now invites to have a drink at the same time—seven in the evening—in the apartment that each one—Cordelia, Lavinia—knows and considers hers because each one has moved from the living room to the bedroom and from the bedroom to the bathroom and each one has used the same soap, the same shower, the same towel, the same bidet, and sometimes the same toothbrush (Cordelia never forgets to bring hers, Lavinia does: “What would my husband, Cristóbal, think if he found a toothbrush in my Louis Vuitton bag?”).
Until now Leo has kept them apart thanks to a fortunate though hazardous act of juggling. Two balls in the air. One ball in each hand. Leo becomes irritated. In his life as a great dilettante, a great
enthusiast,
each step ahead has been transformed over time into a step backward if the next step forward is not taken in time. It is what he is experiencing now. Lassitude. Abulia. Lack of surprise. Wonder exhausted. The sea dries up. There is only a cliff that sinks to the bottom of a great cemetery of sand. A ravine whose crown is the great bare desert. The sea basin has to be filled again. Where is the surf, where are the sweet laments of the sea, where is the new, unheard-of, voracious foam that his existence demands in order to move forward? In order not to commit suicide in the name of unknown novelty?
Leo replaces on the mantelpiece the photograph hidden during Cordelia’s and Lavinia’s visits. It was the portrait of a man in his forties, handsome, with a thin face, his chin resting on two hands with long, very slim fingers. The dedication read: “To my adored son Leo, your father, Manuel.”
7. Leo told them the good thing about absence when a couple falls in love but lives apart is that it keeps desire alive.
Lavinia did not agree. She said that absence does not stimulate desire, it kills it. And she added picturesquely: “If you’re smart, don’t stay apart.”
Cordelia intervened with the opinion that absence is like the sweet but unbearable reserve of the next encounter.
“I’ve wanted to be at a distance without desiring,” Leo claimed, leaving unstated the conclusion that neither woman would or could reach.
“I’d rather say stupid things than feel sorrow,” Lavinia said in an eccentric way.
“Do you mean that’s why you say them?” Leo said with a nasty smile.
“I don’t dare oppose older people like the two of you,” Lavinia said, returning his smile.
Leo guffawed in irritation. “I like women who, in spite of being women, are different.”
Cordelia shrugged and made a disapproving face. Did Leo think that being a woman was a uniform? Weren’t men, in any case, more similar to one another than any two women? Lavinia laughed. “We wear feathers like savages, we raise and lower our skirts following the dictates of fashion, whatever that means, we don’t become bald, we don’t have to shave (our faces), and our underwear isn’t predictable, we’re divine!”
Leo and Lavinia wanted to break the ice emanating from Cordelia’s labored breathing. Suddenly, this simple conversation (this complicated presence of the three of them in the home of a shared lover) had placed Cordelia at an age disadvantage, something she was not accustomed to accepting, especially because it was the repeated insult her husband, Álvaro, threw up to her.
It was obvious that Álvaro’s wife was twice the age of Cristóbal’s. Except with Leo, Cordelia had never felt the contrast that the youthful presence of Lavinia imposed on her now. The two women were aware of the difference. They also confirmed that age did not matter to Leo.
His shaved, bluish skull, firm jawline, the spiderweb surrounding eyes by turn icy and smiling (mocking?), the impertinence of arched eyebrows, the sensuality of lips that were mocking (smiling?), everything gave this man whatever age he wanted to be, now with Lavinia, now with Cordelia.
The remarkable thing was that with both present, he did not stop being the man he was with each separately. They knew it. He knew it. Leo moved his pawns on a board that he controlled but one on which the pieces moved with an economy of chance very similar—he reflected—to the most dangerous kind of independence. At that moment he knew it was time for him to act, boldly, even impetuously, by surprise but with no vulgarity.
That is, for the moment when they had a drink together, Leo deferred his personal movements.
The two women left at the same time, not coming to any agreement except the decorous necessity of not remaining alone with Leo.
Before they leave (they have already picked up their handbags, and one has smoothed her skirt, the other her trousers, both of them their hair), Leo asks them:
“What do you think of Hokusai’s painting? What does it say to you?”
Lavinia and Cordelia look at each other, disconcerted.
8. He wanted to execute everything to perfection. The distribution of spaces allowed all kinds of combinations. Taking the large bedroom as the center of the game, one entered it through a hall door or through two bathrooms at either side of the master bedroom (nuptial chamber?), both supplied with everything necessary: closet, hangers, shoe racks, changes of clothing, caftans. The usual. The doors of the bathrooms opened to the left and the right of the bedroom. The bedroom itself was an upholstered, carpeted cave perfumed by the Persian aroma of tapestries more than by any artificial flowering, giving freedom to bodies to perspire, to smell, if necessary, to stink in order not to lose the animality of the relationship, not to sanitize it until it was extinguished in a mere required function of mental substitutions because of a lack of physical incentives.
Leo Casares put on a blue-and-white-striped robe and amused himself thinking about how the two women would come out of each bathroom into the bedroom, each with an appointment, the other not knowing, the twin bathrooms separated by a single bed. He had exercised all afternoon at the gym without taking a shower afterward. He wanted to proclaim in an olfactory way his animal masculinity. He refused to displace probable offenses with splashes of lavender. He wanted to enjoy and be enjoyed within the Augustinian precept, so inculcated in Catholic school, of sex as the act of beasts. He felt the need to verify, with two women at the same time, that animal nature could coexist with the human, if Cordelia would finally accept anal intercourse or if Lavinia would be satisfied with frontal. Anal like animals. Frontal like heroes. But pleasure among the three of them, like gods.
He guessed correctly. At ten sharp, as he had asked each one, Cordelia opened the door on the left, Lavinia the door on the right.
Lavinia, as was her custom, appeared naked. Cordelia, as was hers, came in enveloped in a white caftan. In the center of the bedroom, Leo waited for them in a robe. He looked at one, then the other. He looked at the far wall of the bedroom. Hanging there was the Japanese painting of sea and sky, wave and cliff. He did not look at the women. He looked at the painting. Let them act. Let them understand that this was the next step in the relationship. That Leo wasn’t asking them to love another man, different from him and also from their husbands, Álvaro and Cristóbal. That this was no longer enough to excite him. That the new rule was this: you and I, the three of us together, two women and a man.
This was what we needed. This was the necessary step toward the unknown, toward what comes next. The meeting of land and sea and sky. Would Lavinia and Cordelia understand that from this moment on, both were hostages to the man’s desire? Would they dare to consummate that desire, or would they frustrate it and consequently break everything, erase the image of the painting, return to a situation not only earlier than the couples Leo-Lavinia, Leo-Cordelia, but also solely conjugal, Lavinia-Cristóbal, Cordelia-Álvaro, since he, Leo, would disappear forever from the lives of both women if they did not advance toward him now?
He avoided looking at them. That was what Hokusai’s painting was there for. To fix Leo’s attention on a work of art untouchable by sex, barely caressable by fingers, though destructible by hands. To distance Leo, at that moment, from an unhealthy curiosity to see the two women, observe their attitudes, guess at their intentions, judge Lavinia’s young body in contrast to Cordelia’s mature one, see how the two women saw each other or know if they even looked at each other, if they avoided looking at each other, if they had eyes only for their austere, distant, perhaps incomprehensible, perhaps seductive or seducible lord and master and voluntary slave Leo Casares.
Would the two women read Leo’s thoughts? Would they realize that this mise-en-scène eliminated jealousy, extinguished envy, exiled banal prejudices? Who would dare, here and now, in the bedroom elevated to a personal sanctuary for Leo, who would dare offend the other two? Whoever gives offense, loses. And if one leaves, the couple remains. And if yesterday’s couple doesn’t remain, a new couple will be found tomorrow. A new game, always beginning, culminating now or never.