Happy Families Part 7

When the port came into view, Manuel discovered the palace and felt a lightning flash of pity for the innocence and illusion that separated those young princes, at once ingenuous and ambitious, from a life of hereditary tranquility in Europe and hurled them into a death of shrapnel and madness in Mexico.

They were, after all, only two unfortunate sweethearts.

"Look at the palace, baby . . . Oh, don't be annoying. You're so clumsy!"

There was a calamitous sound of abandoned chairs followed by a resigned sigh that turned into labored breathing. Manuel came around the corner on the deck and saw the woman attempting to pick up a capsized chair. He hurried to help her. The irritated lady could recline once more on her deck chair.

"Grazie," she said to Manuel.

"You're welcome, Senora," Manuel said, smiling, but she didn't return his amiability; she looked at him with curiosity and turned back to her feigned reading of a fas.h.i.+on magazine.

For an instant, however, their eyes had met with a question that Manuel, returning to his false lookout post at the railing (travelers travel as if the proper operation of the train, the plane, or the s.h.i.+p depends on them), dared to formulate in secret that the lady was Mexican, her verbal localisms betrayed her. Did he know her? Had he seen her before? And she, did she recognize him?

Manuel smiled at Trieste. Too often he had been mistaken, searching in the most hidden little light in aging eyes, in the weariest tone of a voice that had once been fresh, for a friends.h.i.+p from his youth . . .

Sometimes he guessed correctly: Are you Borras Barroso, basket-ball champion at the Frances Morelos Secondary School? And sometimes not: Didn't you sit in the first row in the cla.s.s on civil law at San Ildefonso? With men, it was a simple matter: yes or no. With women, it was more complicated: Don't be fresh, Senor, your tactics are stale, excuse me, you're mistaken and what a shame, I would like to have known you when you were a young man, or frankly, you're an overconfident old man, very well preserved but a little inappropriate.

Sixty-five well-preserved years. Like marmalade . . .

The lady concentrated on her reading. Manuel looked at her out of the corner of his eye. They were probably the same age as well as the same nationality. Perhaps, with luck, at supper they'd be at the same table, there would be an opportunity to approach her naturally, courteously, without ridiculous or dangerous pretexts.

She didn't appear at supper. The steamer was docked in Trieste all night. Perhaps she went down to a restaurant in the port. She. He kept thinking-had he seen her before? Where? When?

Memory ought to have supplementary lenses capable of superimposing, through layer after layer of skin, the faces prior to the present face, until the final face of death was unveiled. By the same token, this process ought to operate in reverse until it also showed the first profile, the one of a longed-for youth, along with the unrenounceable feeling that we once were young and because of that we once were happy, strong, attractive, unique . . .

But the past is a mist that moves invisibly over our heads without our realizing it. Until the day it rains.

Manuel's heart still throbbed with the sensation of youthful fulfillment. He was not alarmed by that. He was astonished. Calendars, mirrors, above all the glances of those who no longer recognized him, could not vanquish the image that Manuel Toledano had of himself. His interior interior sight kept alive an sight kept alive an anterior anterior sight, that of his youth. It was a vision that he judged faithful, summonable, persistent in a thousand and one characteristics of his face remodeled by time. sight, that of his youth. It was a vision that he judged faithful, summonable, persistent in a thousand and one characteristics of his face remodeled by time.

If others did not see the Manuel Toledano that had been, he did. He was the best, most knowledgeable guardian of his own true image: that of his youth.

And she? Was his interior and anterior sight that of a memory that preserved, in faithful archives, the faces of his closest relatives, lost friends, forgotten sweethearts?

And she . . .

The following day, walking on the deck and avoiding the heroic Adriatic sun with a hand placed like a visor over his forehead, Manuel took advantage of the situation to direct surrept.i.tious glances at the lady masked by her fas.h.i.+on magazine and unmasked by an impatient distraction, as if reading were the disguise for something else, a constantly deflected vigilance, a duty both troublesome and imperative . . . The woman turned the pages of the magazine without looking at them. She almost scratched at them as if memory were a sharp nail.

Finally-inevitably?-their eyes met, hers blinded by the glare from the sea, his by the shadow of his own hand. Manuel smiled at the lady. "Excuse me. It's just that I heard you yesterday and told myself you're Mexican."

She nodded without saying a word.

He insisted, conscious that he was engaging in a dangerous piece of audacity. "That's not all. I have the impression we've met before."

He laughed at himself, half closing his eyes. Now came the resounding verbal slap, no we've never met, don't be insolent and inappropriate, that ploy is very old.

She looked up. "Yes. I had the same impression."

"I'm Manuel Toledano-"

"Manuel! Manolo!"

He nodded in surprise.

"Manuel, but I'm Lucy, Lucila Casares, don't you remember?"

How could he not remember? Through Manuel's head pa.s.sed images at once sweet and violent, of his early youth, nineteen or twenty years old, ardent nights cooled only by the stars. Beaches. The perfume of young flesh, sweat washed by the sea and restored by kisses. Dancing pressed close, motionless, on the floor of the club La Perla in Acapulco. Illusive perfumes. Dead aromas.

Lucila Casares. He looked at her with infinite tenderness, now without a trace of surprise or wariness. He did not see a woman over sixty, his contemporary. He saw the girl with curly hair of an indefinable color, blond but dark, copper over gold, wheat over barley, small, sensual, conscious of every movement she made, Lucila of the soft arms and golden legs and the face lit forever by the tropics. Manuel felt the foam of melancholy on his lips. "Lucila . . ."

"It's a miracle, Manuel!"

"Chance?"

"Whatever you call it. How wonderful!"

She made a coquettish gesture with her hand, gently patting the reclining chair next to hers and urging Manuel to sit down.

Manuel was afraid of one thing. That information about the present-the current life of a man and a woman in their sixties-would displace the delicious return to his early youth, the young love they both enjoyed so much. He, Manuel. She, Lucila.

"Is it really you, Manolo?"

"Yes, Lucila. Look, touch my hand. Don't you recognize it?"

She denied it, smiling.

"That doesn't change. The palm of the hand," he insisted.

"Ah yes, the lifeline. They say it gets shorter with age."

"No, it gets deeper."

"Manuel, Manuel, what a surprise."

"Like before, like Acapulco in 1949."

She laughed. She brought a finger to her lips and widened her eyes in feigned alarm.

He laughed. "All right, Acapulco always."

He felt he had a right to remember, and he asked her to join him. The Adriatic, a calm, high-colored sea, also offered an unrepeatable sky this morning. "Just think, I heard you before I knew you."

"And when was that?"

"During the holidays in '49. I was in the room next to yours at the Hotel Anahuac. I heard you laugh. Well, what they call 'giggle' in English, that fresh, youthful, ingenuous laugh . . ."

"Deceptive," Lucila said with a smile, raising an eyebrow mischievously.

But the meeting that same night at the c.o.c.ktail party was no deception. He saw her approach, ethereal, radiant, with those tones of gold and copper that illuminated her from head to toe, a pretty girl, he saw her come in and said, "That can only be her, the girl in the next room," and he went up to her and introduced himself.

"Manuel Toledano. Your neighbor, Senorita."

"That's too bad."

He asked why, disconcerted.

"Yes," the girl went on. "Walls separate us."

They didn't separate again during that unforgettable December in the year 1949 that was prolonged, following the festival of San Silvestre, in the January vacation and the tender, astonis.h.i.+ng repet.i.tion of the first meeting, at the c.o.c.ktail party, only you and I talked to each other looked at each other the others at the party didn't exist they were talking nonsense from the first moment only you and I were there Lucila and Manuel Lucy and Manolo.

The days were long. The nights too short.

"We danced on the floor of La Perla, do you remember?"

"Do you remember the music they were playing?"

"I'm taking the tropical way . . ."

"The night restless, unquiet . . ."

"In the breeze that comes from the sea . . ."

"No, you're wrong. First it says 'With its perfume of dampness . . .' "

They both laughed.

"How vulgar," said Lucila.

A small Acapulco, adolescent like them, half grown, always divided between hills and beach, poor and rich, native and tourist, still possessed, Acapulco, of a clean sea and clear nights, families that loved one another, and first courts.h.i.+ps: warm, gentle water at Caleta and Caletilla, wild water at Revolcadero, pounding waves at the Playa de Hornos, silent waves at Puerto Marques, stone cliffs at La Quebrada, recently opened hotels-Las Americas, Club de Pesca-and very old hotels-La Marina, La Quebrada-but sand castles, all of them.

"Boleros let us dance very close together."

"I remember."

"In the breeze that comes from the sea . . ."

"We hear the sound of a song . . ."

A vacation spot both daring and tranquil, wavering between its humble past and probable heavenly future. There already vibrated in the air at the airport another Acapulco of big planes, big millionaires, big celebrities. In 1949, not yet. Though the domestic calm of that time could not hide a social chasm deeper than the ravine of La Quebrada itself.

"I remember," Manuel said with a smile.

"It's true," Lucy said.

The perfume of two bodies in bloom. The smell of the Acapulco sun. Manuel a contagious perspiration. Lucila a sweet perspiration. Both transformed by the brand-new experience of young love . . . A day when Lucy is sometimes with us and sometimes Manolo.

The perfect symmetry of the day and of life during a month's vacation in Acapulco.

They spoke with preserved emotion, separated from the world by the voyage and joined to the earth by shared memory. Acapulco during the vacation of 1949. Acapulco is the awakening of the new decade of the fifties. A time of peace, illusion, confidence. And the two of them, Lucila and Manuel, embracing at the center of the world. What did they say to each other?

"I don't remember. Do you?"

"What two puppies say to each other." Manuel laughed. "What they do . . ."

"You know I was never happier in my life, Manolo."

"Neither was I."

"It's wonderful that in five weeks you can live more than in fifty years . . . Forgive my frankness. Age authorizes what it was once forbidden to say."

Detailed memories tumbled out, the beaches back then, Caleta during the day, Hornos at dusk, the children playing in the sand, the fathers walking along the sea wearing long trousers and short-sleeved s.h.i.+rts, the mothers in flowered dresses and straw hats, never in bathing suits, the fathers vigilant, watching the adolescents moving away from the beach, swimming to Roqueta Island where paternal glances did not reach where young love could ally itself with the one visible love young love in heat surrender of the soul more than of the body but senseless uncontrollable pounding of the pulse the flesh the look of closed eyes-do you remember Lucy do you remember Manolo?-the touch uncertain more than experienced and sensual exploratory and auroral, Lucy, Manolo, while from Caleta the fathers look anxiously toward the island and ask only will they be back in time for lunch? and the mothers will open their parasols even wider and the fathers will wave their panama hats asking them to come back come back it's time . . .

"Was it like that, Manolo?"

"I don't know. The first meeting is always a day without memory."

"There were many days, a love that seemed very long to me, very long . . ."

"No, remember it as a single day, the day we met."

Lucila was about to take Manuel's hand. She stopped herself. She said only: "What long fingers. I think that's what I remember best. What I liked most about you. Your long fingers."

She stared at him with a cruel gleam that took him by surprise. "So much asking myself, Whatever happened to him? Is he happy, unlucky, poor, rich?" She smiled. "And I had only one certainty left. Manuel has very slender, very long, very lovable fingers . . . Tell me, were we so inexperienced back then?"

He returned her smile. "You know that in czarist Russia, couples older than fifty needed their children's permission to marry."

She bowed her head. "Forty years later and you still reproach me?"

No, Manuel denied it, no.

"You know I died for you?"

"Why didn't you tell me so then?"

She didn't respond directly. She fanned herself wearily, not looking at him. "Perfection is what they expected of me." She let the fan fall on her lap, next to the fas.h.i.+on magazine. "Who's perfect? Not even those who demand it of you."

"You hurt me very much, Lucila."

"Imagine how hard it was for me to tell you, 'Go, I don't love you anymore.' "

"Is that what your parents asked you to do?"

She was perturbed. "I had to tell you that so you'd go away, so you wouldn't love me anymore."

"No, tell me really, did you believe it?"

"What do you think?" She raised her voice without intending to.

"Did they ask you to?"