Burnt Water

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.

“Victor, Nibelung, for the first time I realize that you men are right in being misogynists and that we are born for you to detest. I’m not going to pretend any longer. I’ve discovered that misogyny is the condition of love. I know now that I’m mistaken, but the longer I express certain needs, the more you are going to hate me and try to satisfy me. Victor, Nibelung, you must buy me an old-fashioned sailor suit like Jeanne Moreau’s.”

I told her that she seemed perfect to me as long as she continued to expect everything of me. Elena stroked my hand and smiled.

“I know you don’t feel completely free, darling, but have faith. After you have given me everything I ask of you, you yourself will beg that another man share our lives. You yourself will ask to be Jules. You yourself will ask that Jim live with us and bear the load. Didn’t the Little Blond Jesus say it? Let us love one another … Why not?”

I thought that Elena might be right as far as the future was concerned; I knew that with her, after four years of marriage, all the moral rules learned from childhood tended simply to fade away. That’s what I have always loved about her: her naturalness. She never rejects one rule to replace it with another, but only to open a kind of door, like those in children’s stories where every illustrated page announces a garden, a cave, an ocean one reaches through the secret opening on the previous page.

“I don’t want to have children for six years,” she said one night, resting against my legs in the big dark room of our house while we listened to Cannonball Adderley records, that same house in Coyoacán that we’ve decorated with colonial woodcarvings of polychrome saints and virgins and hypnotic-eyed colonial masks: “You never go to Mass and nobody says a word. I’m not going either, they can say whatever they please.” And in the attic that serves us as a bedroom, bathed on clear mornings in the light from the distant volcanoes: “I’m going to have coffee with Alejandro today. He’s a great artist and he would feel inhibited if you were there, and I need him to explain a few things to me alone.” And as she follows me across the boards connecting the unlaid floors in the houses I’m building in Desierto de los Leones: “I’m going to be gone for ten days, taking a train around the country.” And as we have a hurried cup of coffee one midafternoon in the Tirol, fluttering her fingers in greeting to some friends passing by on Hamburgo: “Thanks for taking me to the brothel, Nibelung. It seemed straight out of the time of Toulouse-Lautrec, as innocent as a Maupassant story. And you know? Now I’ve found out that that’s not where sin and depravation are, but elsewhere.” And after a private showing of Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel: “Victor, morality is everything that gives life, and immorality everything that refutes it, isn’t that right?”

And now she repeated, nibbling a sandwich: “Aren’t I right? If a ménage à trois gives us life and happiness and makes for better personal relations among the three of us than the relationship between the two of us, then isn’t that moral?”

I nodded as I ate, listening to the sputtering of the meat cooking on the raised grill. Several friends were watching that their cuts were done just the way they like them, and then came to sit with us, and Elena began to laugh again and be her usual self. Unfortunately, I was inspired to scan the faces of our friends in turn, imagining each of them installed in my house, giving Elena the portion of affection, stimulus, passion, or intelligence that I, exhausted beyond my limits, was incapable of granting her. As I observed the nearest face, avidly disposed to listen to her (and at times I grow weary of hearing her), another amiably offering to fill in the lacunae in her reasoning (I prefer that her conversation not be logical or consistent), yet another, more inclined to formulate precise and, according to him, revealing questions (and I never use words — rather, gestures or telepathy to set Elena in motion), I took some consolation from telling myself that, after all was said and done, what little they could give her would be given beyond a certain boundary of my life with her, like dessert or a cordial, an appendage. That one, the one who combed his hair like Ringo Starr, asked her precisely and revealingly why she continued to be faithful to me, and Elena replied that today infidelity is mandatory, just as Communion every Friday used to be, and turned away from him. The nearer one, the one in a turtleneck shirt, interpreted Elena’s reply, adding that, doubtlessly, my wife meant that fidelity was becoming the attitude of the rebel. And the one here by me, the one in the perfect Edwardian frock coat, merely invited Elena with an intensely oblique glance to continue speaking: he would be the perfect audience. Elena raised her arms and asked the waiter for an espresso.

We walked beneath the ash trees through the cobbled streets of Coyoacán, holding hands, experiencing the contrast of the day’s heat still clinging to our clothing and the moist coolness of the night that, following the afternoon shower, brought a glow to our eyes and color to our cheeks. Silently, our heads bowed, holding hands, we like to walk through the ancient streets that have been since the beginning a point of encounter, a common meeting ground of our inclination to assimilate what is around us. I think we have never spoken of this, Elena and I. Nor do we need to. What I do know is that it pleases us to collect old things, as if we were rescuing them from painful oblivion, or as if by touching them we gave them new life, or as if in seeking the right place, light, and ambience in our home we were in reality defending ourselves against a similar future oblivion. We still have the lion’s-maw handle we found in a hacienda in Los Altos that we caress every time we open the door to our home, knowing that every caress consumes it; illuminated by a yellow light in the garden, we have the stone cross representing the four converging rivers of hearts torn out, perhaps, by the same hands that later worked the stone; and we have the black horses from some long-ago dismantled carrousel, like figureheads from the prows of brigantines that would lie forever on the ocean floor unless their wooden skeletons came to rest on some distant shore of solemn cockatoos and dying turtles.

While I look for some Cannonball records, Elena takes off her sweater and lights the fire. I serve two glasses of absinthe and lie down on the rug to wait for her. She lies with her head cradled on my legs, smoking, while we both listen to the slow sax of Brother Lateef, whom we met in the Gold Bug in New York, looking like a Congolese witch doctor dressed by Disraeli, his eyes sleepy and swollen like two African boas, a segregated-Svengali beard, his purplish lips joined to the saxophone that silences the black so that he may speak with an eloquence foreign to his surely hoarse everyday stammer: the slow notes are a kind of mournful affirmation that will never say all they want to say, since from beginning to end they are only a seeking, an approximation, muted by a strange shyness; they give joy and direction to the contact of our bodies, which begins to follow the feeling of Lateef’s instrument; pure announcement, pure prelude, limited entirely to the pleasures of foreplay, which, because of the sax, become the act itself.

* * *

“What American Negroes are doing is turning the tables on the whites,” Elena says as we take our appointed places at her parents’ enormous Chippendale dining table. “The love, the music, the vitality of the Negroes is forcing the whites to justify themselves. See how the whites are now physically persecuting the blacks, because they have finally realized that, psychologically, the blacks are persecuting them.”

“Well, I’m just thankful that there’re no Negroes here,” says Elena’s father, helping himself to the potato-leek soup offered him in a steaming porcelain tureen by the Indian servant who during the daytime waters the gardens at the big Lomas house.

“But what does that have to do with it, Papa? That’s like saying the Eskimos are thankful for not being Mexicans. Everyone is what he is, and that’s that. What’s interesting is watching what happens when we come across somebody who makes us doubt ourselves. Somebody, nonetheless, whom we know we need. Somebody we need because they reject us.”

“Come along now, eat. These conversations get more idiotic every Sunday. The only thing I know is that you didn’t marry a Negro, did you? Higinio, bring the enchiladas.”

Don José observes Elena, his wife, and me with an air of triumph. Doña Elena, in an effort to revive the languishing conversation, relates all the past week’s activities. I look around at the brocaded rosewood furniture, the Chinese vases, the billowy curtains and vicuna rugs in the rectilinear house through whose towering windows one sees the eucalyptus trees shivering in the barranca. Don José smiles as Higinio serves the enchiladas topped with rich cream, and his little green eyes fill with an almost patriotic satisfaction, the same satisfaction I have seen when the President waves the flag on the fifteenth of September. But not the same that makes them tender when he sits down in front of his private jukebox to smoke a cigar and listen to boleros — they are much more moist then. My eyes stop at the sight of Doña Elena’s pale hand playing with the soft center of her roll as she wearily enumerates all the cares that have kept her busy since we last saw each other. I listen abstractedly to that cascade of comings and goings, canasta games, visits to the poor children’s ward, novenas, charity balls, searches for new curtains, quarrels with the servants, long telephone conversations with her friends, the expected visits to priests, babies, dressmakers, doctors, watch repairmen, pastry cooks, cabinetmakers, and engravers. I am hypnotized by the long, pale, caressing fingers rolling the soft bread into little balls.

“I told them never to come to ask me for money again, because I don’t make the decisions about anything. That I would gladly send them to your father’s office and his secretary would take care of it…”

… the languid movements of the slim wrist and the bracelet with the gold and copper medallions of the Christ of the Cubilete, the Holy Year in Rome, and President Kennedy’s visit, that clink against each other as Doña Elena plays with the bread …

“… enough that one gives them moral support, don’t you agree? I looked for you Thursday to come to the new film at the Diana with us. I even sent the chauffeur on ahead to stand in line, you know what the lines are like on opening day…”

… the plump arm, the translucent skin, the veins like a second skeleton, of glass, outlined beneath the smooth whiteness.

“… I invited your cousin Sandrita and went by to pick her up in the car, but we started playing with the new baby and lost track of time. He’s simply precious. She’s very hurt that you haven’t even called to congratulate her. It wouldn’t be any effort to call, Elenita…”

… the black neckline open on high breasts constrained like some kind of new animal captured on a new continent …

“… after all, we’re family. You can’t deny your blood. She wanted you and Victor to come to the christening. It’s next Saturday. I helped her pick out the little ashtrays they’re going to give as a remembrance to the guests. Well, as you see, the time got away from us while we chatted, and the tickets went to waste.”

I looked up. Doña Elena was looking at me. She lowered her eyelids and announced that coffee would be served in the living room. Don José excused himself and went to the library, where his electric jukebox plays his favorite records if a slug is put in the slot. We sat down to have our coffee and in the distance the jukebox snorted and began to play “Nosotros” while Doña Elena turned on the television but, placing a finger to her lips, indicated that there would be no sound. We watched the mute images before us: a giveaway program in which a solemn master of ceremonies guided the five contestants — two nervously grinning young girls with beehive hairdos, a very proper housewife, and two dark, mature, melancholy men — toward the check hidden in the crowded studio replete with vases of flowers, fake books, and music boxes.

Elena, sitting next to me in the shadows of this marble-floored, plastic-lilied living room, smiled. I don’t know where she got my nickname or what it has to do with me, but she began playing word games with it as she stroked my hand: “Nibelung. No Belong. Noble Hung. Nip Along.”

The gray, striped, undulating figures searched for the treasure before our gaze and Elena, curling up, dropped her shoes on the carpet and yawned, while Doña Elena, taking advantage of the darkness, looked at me with those wide, wide, dark-circled, questioning black eyes. She crossed her legs, arranging her skirt over her knees. From the library came snatches of the bolero: “Nosotros, que tanto nos quisimos”—We loved each other so — and what was perhaps a grunt or two of digestive stupor from Don José. Doña Elena turned from me to fix her great black eyes on the quavering eucalyptus trees beyond the picture window.

I followed the direction of her glance. Elena yawned and purred, leaning against my knees. I caressed her neck. Behind us, the barranca that crosses Lomas de Chapultepec like a savage wound seemed to glow with hidden light, secretly accentuated by the movement of the night that bent the backs of the trees and loosened their long, pale hair.

“Do you remember Veracruz?” the mother asked the daughter, smiling. But Doña Elena was looking at me. Elena agreed with a murmur, half asleep against my legs, and I answered: “Yes. We’ve been there many times together.”

“Do you like it?” Doña Elena extended her hand and then let it fall in her lap.

“A lot,” I said. “They say it’s the last Mediterranean city. I like the food. I like the people. I like sitting for hours on end under the open arches, eating rolls and drinking coffee.”

“That’s where I’m from,” she said. For the first time I noticed her dimples.

“Yes. I know.”

“But I’ve lost the accent.” She laughed, showing her gums. “I was married when I was twenty-two. After you live in Mexico City awhile, you lose the Veracruz accent. And when you met me, well, I was older.”

“Everyone says you and Elena look like sisters.”

Her lips were thin but aggressive. “No. I was just remembering the stormy nights on the Gulf. How the sun doesn’t want to give up, you know, and gets all mixed up with the storm and everything is bathed in a very pale, very greenish light, and you’re suffocating there behind the shutters, waiting for the rain to end. Rain doesn’t cool things off in the tropics. It simply makes it hotter. I don’t know why the servants had to close the shutters every time a storm was coming. It would have been so beautiful to let it come with the windows open wide.”

I lighted a cigarette. “Yes, the rain brings out some very heady odors. The earth releases its perfumes of tobacco and coffee and ripe fruit…”

“The bedrooms, too.” Doña Elena closed her eyes.

“What?”

“There weren’t any closets in those days.” Her fingers touched the slight wrinkles around her eyes. “There was a wardrobe in every room, and the servants used to place laurel and oregano leaves in among the clothing. Besides, there were some places the sun never reached, that never dried out. It smelled … moldy … how shall I say it, musty…”

“Yes, I imagine so. I’ve never lived in the tropics. Do you miss it?”

And now she rubbed her wrists, one against the other, exhibiting the protruding veins of her hands. “Sometimes. It’s hard to remember. Can you imagine, though I got married when I was eighteen, everyone considered me an old maid already.”

“And that strange light from the barranca reminded you of all those things?”

The woman rose. “Yes. They’re the spotlights Jośe ordered installed last week. They look pretty, don’t you think?”

“I think Elena has gone to sleep.”

I tickled Elena’s nose; she awakened and we returned to Coyoacán in the MG.

“I’m really sorry about those dreadful Sundays,” Elena said as I was leaving for work the following morning. “But what can we do? We have to maintain some link to the family and bourgeois life, even if only for the sake of contrast.”

* * *

“What are you going to do today?” I asked as I rolled up my blueprints and picked up my portfolio.

Elena bit into a fig, crossed her arms, and stuck out her tongue at a cross-eyed Christ we found once in Guanajuato. “I’m going to paint all morning. Then I’m going to Alejandro’s for lunch so I can show him my latest things. At his studio. Yes, it’s finished now. Right over in Olivar de los Padres. In the afternoon I’ll go to my French class. Perhaps I’ll have some coffee and then I’ll wait for you at the film club. They’re showing that classic film of Western mythology: High Noon. I made a date to meet those young blacks tomorrow. They’re Black Muslims and I’m mad to know what they really think. Do you realize that the only thing we know about them is what the newspapers say. Have you ever spoken to a North American Negro, Nibelung? Then tomorrow afternoon you mustn’t think of bothering me. I’m going to shut myself up and read Nerval from cover to cover. Don’t think for a minute that Juan’s going to make a fool of me again with all that jazz about the ‘soleil noir de la mélancolie,’ calling himself a widower, talking about how disconsolate he is … like Nerval. I’ve caught on to him and tomorrow night I’m going to screw him … thinks he knows literature! Oh yes, he’s giving a masquerade party. We all have to go dressed as Mexican murals. Oh well, let’s get all that damned folklore over with, once and for all. Buy me some lilies, Victor, Nibelung-of-my-heart, and, if you wish, dress as the cruel conquistador Alvarado who branded Indian maidens with burning irons before possessing them—Oh, Sade, where is thy whip? Oh yes, and Wednesday Miles Davis is playing at the Bellas Artes. He’s a little passé, but at any rate, he excites me — it’s a hormonorama. Get the tickets. Ciao, love.”

She kissed my neck, and because of the rolls of blueprints in my hands I couldn’t embrace her, but I drove away with the smell of figs on my neck and the image of Elena, in my shirt, unbuttoned but tied at the level of her belly button, tight torero stretch pants, barefoot, preparing to…? was it to read a poem or paint a picture? It occurred to me that we would have to go on a trip together soon. That brought us closer than anything. I reached the Periférico. I don’t know why, but instead of crossing the Altavista overpass toward Desierto de los Leones, I entered the ring road and then accelerated. Yes, I do that sometimes. I want to be alone, and race and laugh when someone roars by, giving me the old “Up yours, buddy!” And too, perhaps I wanted to keep for a half hour Elena’s image as she said goodbye, her naturalness, her golden skin, her green eyes, her endless projects, and to think how happy I am to be with her, how no one could be happier by the side of such a lively, modern woman, one who … who … who complements me so well.

I passed a glass factory, a baroque church, a roller coaster, a grove of cypresses. Where have I heard that damn word? Complement. I circle the Petróleos fountain and start up the Paseo de la Reforma. All the cars are moving toward the center of the city reverberating there in the distance beyond an impalpable and suffocating veil. I drive to Lomas de Chapultepec, where at this hour only the servants and wives are home, where husbands have gone to work and children to school, where surely my other Elena, my complement, must await me in her warm bed; Elena of the distrustful, shadowy black eyes, and skin as white and ripe and cushiony and perfumed as clothing in a tropical chest.