why did we run away?

because they abused us they whipped us they threatened to cut us because they threw us out of the house papa and mama, abusive father, single mother, father and mother divorced, addict fathers, drunken fathers, unemployed fathers because papa and mama have no other mirror than us their lost youth because papa and mama resent their lives and they ruin ours so we won't dare to be better because we don't have grandparents and our grandparents have no grandmother because my husband wanted a male heir and he made me get an abortion when the doctor told him that my baby was a girl like me ultrasound ultrasound there are no fetal secrets anymore mountains of fetuses more fetuses than garbage a little girl is undesirable she'll wind up going off with her husband she'll lose the father's name educating a girl is throwing water into the sea the husband will have the benefit of the education we gave her with so much sacrifice ungrateful the two of them (the s.e.x of a fetus is no longer a secret) (the garbageman baptizes the s.e.x) save yourself from happy families look at your parents: only violence settles things look at your parents: don't respect women look at your parents: your father killed you because he wanted to kill your mother and you were near at hand and now where?

escape your dumba.s.s family the school that makes you stupid the suffocating office the loneliness of the streets kid, become a cycleboy! they give you a motorcycle you laugh at the traffic lights the curses the police the endless delays zigzag cycleboy kill pedestrians freefreefree fastfastfast adrenaline express bulletcycle cycleboy urban cowboy though you're the one who regularly dies every day the only one among a thousand cycleboys who are saved one day to die smashed up one by one in the following days and now where?

join the flashmobs the lightningrace find out where's the hookup today escape: arrive and join in leave no more than two minutes at a time this is the fiesta of pa.s.sing friendship of impossible communication of instantaneous flight suck up the c.o.ke and run there's no way out run before they play taps for you they throw you in jail they apply the fugitive law to you quick quick the kiss the greeting the pa.s.s and now where?

d.a.m.n motherf.u.c.ker wandering around don't you have a home? I don't have a home because n.o.body's looking for me and n.o.body's looking for me because I don't have a home how many are there? how many flies are there in an outhouse with open windows?

why don't you go back?

because I'm not a d.a.m.n kid anymore I'm a man like my father why don't you go back? Because I'm getting mixed up help me

The Gay Divorcee

Guy Furlong and Jose Luis Palma met in the old Balmori movie house on Avenida alvaro Obregon, a sumptuous art deco palace with the best sound equipment of the day and a seductive gleam of l.u.s.trous bronzes, mirrors, and marbles. They happened to sit next to each other. The first brush of knees was avoided with nervous urgency. That of elbows, forgiven. That of hands, spontaneous, when they clasped during the laughter demanded by the screen, awkward only for a moment-the instant just before the meeting of their eyes that, with its intensity, eclipsed the erotic ballet of Fred and Ginger on the screen.

The Gay Divorcee was the t.i.tle of the film with the Rogers-Astaire team. Then came was the t.i.tle of the film with the Rogers-Astaire team. Then came The Gay Desperado, The Gay Desperado, with an Italian singer disguised as a Mexican with an Italian singer disguised as a Mexican charro, charro, and later, and later, Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, the autobiography of a Broadway actress. Except back then the word "gay" meant only "happy, carefree, lighthearted," while contemptuous, insulting terms were reserved for h.o.m.os.e.xuals. Queer. Pansy. f.a.ggot. A whole gamut of them. Forty-one, because of an old club of bourgeois transvest.i.tes with that number of members. the autobiography of a Broadway actress. Except back then the word "gay" meant only "happy, carefree, lighthearted," while contemptuous, insulting terms were reserved for h.o.m.os.e.xuals. Queer. Pansy. f.a.ggot. A whole gamut of them. Forty-one, because of an old club of bourgeois transvest.i.tes with that number of members. Adelitas, Adelitas, for being "popular with the troops," considering the relative ease of hiring indifferent soldiers for last-minute performances. for being "popular with the troops," considering the relative ease of hiring indifferent soldiers for last-minute performances. Jotos Jotos in Mejico with the "j" of Garcia Lorca and with the murdered poet in Mejico with the "j" of Garcia Lorca and with the murdered poet pajaros pajaros in Havana, in Havana, apios apios in Seville, in Seville, floras floras in Alicante, and in Alicante, and adelaidas adelaidas in Portugal. in Portugal.

And back in Mexico, joteria joteria to cla.s.sify an entire s.e.xual group. A pipe makes his mouth water. He likes his rice with the stem. He enjoys boiled Coca-Cola. The storm of nominal and adjectival scorn that poured down on Mexican h.o.m.os.e.xuals perhaps only hid, crudely, the very disguised inclinations of the most macho of machos: those who deceived their wives with men and brought venereal disease into their decent homes. Enchiladas with cold cream. Male hookers. to cla.s.sify an entire s.e.xual group. A pipe makes his mouth water. He likes his rice with the stem. He enjoys boiled Coca-Cola. The storm of nominal and adjectival scorn that poured down on Mexican h.o.m.os.e.xuals perhaps only hid, crudely, the very disguised inclinations of the most macho of machos: those who deceived their wives with men and brought venereal disease into their decent homes. Enchiladas with cold cream. Male hookers.

Jose Luis and Guy, from the very beginning, by an agreement unspoken but acted upon, established themselves as a couple removed from both dissimulation and excuses. It was auspicious that the movies brought them together when they were only eighteen years old. They still weren't emanc.i.p.ated, but their early relationship pushed them to find as soon as possible the way to leave their families (indifferent to the situation because the lovers decided it that way) and live together. Guy achieved it first, since his success as an artistic promoter produced good commissions that allowed him to establish an agency called Artvertising, which quickly had a list of distinguished clients. In the meantime, Jose Luis completed his law studies at the age of twenty-three.

It was auspicious that the movies brought them together. In the silver images of the Balmori, they had discovered a capacity for wonder that set fire to their love and kept it alive. They divided their attraction to films among the several unreachable models offered to them by the irreplaceable darkness of the cinematographic cave. They let pa.s.s the pretty ones like Robert Taylor, the rough ones like James Cagney, the extroverts like Cary Grant, the introverts like Gary Cooper, and settled into their admiration, secret in its androgyny, of Greta Garbo, the woman men wanted to be but the woman no man would ever become. Mademoiselle Hamlet, as Gertrude Stein called her (or was it Alice Toklas?). The sphinx. Her face filled with wintry absence projected from the screen like an offering and a challenge. Leave me alone, like bullfighters, but make me yours, like courtesans.

As soon as they moved into a nice apartment with neocla.s.sical architecture in the Roma district, Guy and Jose Luis placed some photos of Garbo in strategic spots, though their princ.i.p.al paintings were given to them by Alfonso Michel and Manuel Rodriguez Lozano. A still life that throbbed with vital breath in the exuberant, disheveled, husky Michel (a midwife to painting) and a funeral procession in blacks, whites, and grays from Rodriguez Lozano (its gravedigger).

Together they found their professions. Guy Furlong opened an art gallery on Calle de Praga to give a s.p.a.ce to painters who used an easel and to prove that murals were not the only art in Mexico. Jose Luis established a law office on Avenida Juarez that soon specialized in discreet divorce negotiations, division of property, awarding of custody, and other troublesome matters in the life of a family that ought to be kept away from public opinion.

"To be who we are, we need money," Jose Luis said judiciously, and of course Guy agreed.

In order not to worry about money, they had to make money. Without ostentation. The important thing was to keep alive desire, the capacity for wonder, to share time, to create a common background of memories and an evanescent oasis of desires. If love was divided among several unreachable models, affection was concentrated on a single intimate model. Themselves.

The two boys established certain rules for their life in common. Guy said it one night: "The first time you made love to me, you accepted me once and for all, without any need to test me or constantly reaffirm the ties that bind us. Between us, there are more than enough complications."

It really wasn't necessary to reaffirm a love given as spontaneously as the flow of a fountain, though with constant references to everything in the life of the world that pleased them and identified them. Their intimacy was the thing that was sacred, untouchable, the impalpable diamond that, handled too much, could change into coal. In the secret chamber of their intimacy, Guy and Jose Luis established a relationship as close to itself as water is to its continent. "Death Without End," the great poem by Jose Gorostiza, was one of the couple's vital bibles. Form was content and content form with no more motive than the patterns of delight in touch begun that increasingly distant afternoon in the movies. The joy of mutual contemplation. The knowledge of the respect owed to each one and to the couple.

As for the world . . . they weren't naive. They knew they were in society, and society tests us, it demands periodic examinations, especially of h.o.m.os.e.xual lovers who dare to be happy. Jose Luis and Guy prepared good-naturedly to endure the world's tests, aware that they wanted to have contact with the group but avoid (as if it were mange) promiscuity.

"You're not a flirt," Jose Luis said to Guy. "You just display yourself. You like to show yourself off. You're right. You're handsome, and you ought to let yourself be admired. I'm happy you're like this. I'm happy people admire you."

"Don't fool yourself," Guy responded. "People need to know me to love me. If a person doesn't know me, he probably won't like me."

They laughed at these topics and admitted: "There can always be somebody who seduces us."

Until now, no one had come between them. The serious, amiable behavior of the boys, their stability as a couple, made them likable. They dressed well, they spoke well, they were doing well in their respective careers. They saved criticism of other people for private moments. They weren't gossipmongers.

"Did you see the faces Villarino was making? He was putting moves on you."

"You like people to admire me, didn't you say that?"

"Show yourself off now that you're young. Take a good look at Villarino so you never become a flirt when you're old. How awful!"

"No. How ridiculous!"

Both had been educated in English schools, but they never referred to what is called "the English vice." They did accept, however, a rule of conduct learned by means of educational blows with a cane to the gluteals: Never complain. Never explain.

Ni queja.r.s.e ni explica.r.s.e. The demands of love imposed themselves naturally, without any need for complaints or explanations, in the very act of love. Demands before love tended to kill pleasure, withdrawing its implicit satisfactions, losing them in the harsh antagonist of love, which was logic, though this only reinforced the professional competence of the two men. The demands of love imposed themselves naturally, without any need for complaints or explanations, in the very act of love. Demands before love tended to kill pleasure, withdrawing its implicit satisfactions, losing them in the harsh antagonist of love, which was logic, though this only reinforced the professional competence of the two men.

And so there was a very attractive equilibrium in their lives, measured out between their work and their private life. Which doesn't mean that my friends Guy and Jose Luis didn't have a social life in the very lively Mexico City of the forties and fifties to the mid-sixties. They partic.i.p.ated in various groups founded to the almost biological rhythm of the decades and their newsworthy duration, their inevitable decline, the attachments to and detachments from social groups and, in particular, the solid middle cla.s.s to which they both belonged. They were present at the end of the fiesta dominated by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, two large multicolored pinatas that skillfully avoided the sticks of governments, political parties, or social cla.s.ses. Artists ate apart. They owed nothing to anyone except art. Frida and Diego swung picturesquely at an unreachable height to which you had access only if your name was Trotsky, Breton, or Rockefeller, or if you were a modest cantina owner, the projectionist at the movies, or the indispensable hospital nurse. In the forties, Jose Luis and Guy were present only at the end of that boisterous party, the tail of the comet that pulled along in its generous wake the lights of artistic creativity, s.e.xual confusion, and political arbitrariness.

Then they moved among the romantic violins of Reyes Albarran's Rendez Vous and the Jockey Club, which became the most discreetly gay and refined place to meet on Sunday thanks to the management of Jaime Saldivar, a man endowed with inseparable amiability and elegance, capable of making himself followed, like the pied piper of Hamelin, by newly minted princes and the patriarchs of ancient line-ages. Although the mix of European epaves epaves from World War II and the stars of a Hollywood undecided between Roosevelt's New Deal and McCarthy's witch hunt met at the Ciro's of the dwarf A. C. Blumenthal, a partner of the gangster Bugsy Siegel, and in what remained of the intimate wartime cabarets: Casanova, Minuit, Sans Souci . . . from World War II and the stars of a Hollywood undecided between Roosevelt's New Deal and McCarthy's witch hunt met at the Ciro's of the dwarf A. C. Blumenthal, a partner of the gangster Bugsy Siegel, and in what remained of the intimate wartime cabarets: Casanova, Minuit, Sans Souci . . .

Then came the adventures of the Basfumista group, fervent, anarchic, invented by the painter Adolfo Best Maugard, a former a.s.sistant to Sergei Eisenstein in Mexico and endowed with a vestal in residence, Mercedes Azcarate, and a slim blond philosopher, Ernesto de la Pena, who knew some twenty languages, including that of Christ, and was master within the group of a distracted vocation for alarm in a society still capable of being surprised and forgetting from one day to the next about its own newness. Basfumismo never defined itself beyond the Chaplinesque call for attention before a dehumanized society.

It was the last clarion call of the 1940s, before the immense city devoured every attempt to come together under the roof of culture and acquire a personality by means of avant-garde circles. On the horizon, the Rosa district was already dawning, a mix of St. Germain des Pres and Greenwich Village around a Cafe Tyrol presided over every afternoon by a Colombian writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who had lived in Mexico City since 1960, and baptized by the painter Jose Luis Cuevas, a cat who seduced with scratches.

But by then Guy Furlong and Jose Luis Palma were the only Mexicans who still wore tuxedos to eat dinner. They were distinguished by a reluctance to abandon the styles of their youth. Both of them based elegance on style, not fashion. The bad thing was that by the sixties, wearing a dinner jacket at a c.o.c.ktail party or a vernissage meant running the risk of being confused with the waiters. The old seducer of adolescents, Agustin Villarino, had turned in his doc.u.ments to eternity sometime earlier. Not, however, without leaving a successor in Mexico City, his nephew Curly Villarino, and here our story actually begins.

Guy and Jose Luis did not want to be left behind. The groups and conclaves mentioned here tacitly proclaimed their modernity, their cosmopolitanism, and their youth. Three purposes that condemned them to disappear. The modern is destined to vanish quickly for the sake of its own decaying currency and in favor of the next brand-new novelty that, whether it's called postmodern or retro and rejects or evokes nostalgia, simply repeats the warning of death to fashion in the Pensieri Pensieri of Giacomo Leopardi: Madama la Morte, Madama la Morte, don't ask me who I am: I am fashion, death . . . I am you. of Giacomo Leopardi: Madama la Morte, Madama la Morte, don't ask me who I am: I am fashion, death . . . I am you.

Then the spree began to fall apart in a charmless slumming in run-down, high-living cabarets in the Guerrero district and in San Juan de Letran. El Golpe, King Kong, El Burro, Club de los Artistas . . . and if one wanted to dance the mambo on Sunday with one's servants, the Salon Los Angeles dissolved, with delight in loud revelry and false democracy, the barriers between cla.s.ses. The cabarets for danzon and dance hostesses died a natural death, the Rio Rosa, next to the Bullfight Ring, and the Waikiki, whose only vegetation was the cactus on Paseo de la Reforma. Thanks to its consecration by Aaron Copland, the Salon Mexico survived with its famous sign: DON'T THROW LIT CIGARETTES ON THE FLOOR, THE GIRLS CAN BURN THEIR FEET DON'T THROW LIT CIGARETTES ON THE FLOOR, THE GIRLS CAN BURN THEIR FEET.

Cosmopolitanism customarily required a center of worldwide attraction, like Paris in the nineteenth century or New York in the twentieth. The fall of colonial empires after World War II meant the end of one or even two cultural metropolises in favor of a revindication of traditions, each anch.o.r.ed in a calendar distinct from the Western. For a Mexican, in any case, it was easier to refer to the Mayas or the Baroque than to the contributions of Kenya, Indonesia, or Timbuktu, the new capitals of the disguised anthropology of third-world revolution.

As for youth, it was being transformed into a solitary avenue that Jose Luis and Guy stopped walking with the impression that they were ghosts. It was difficult for them to abandon the obligation to be the representatives of a a youth. What was left was the dejection of losing-abandonment, death, lack of will-the people who, half in self-congratulation, called themselves "our crowd," "our set." These compliments were not, however, the requiem for Guy's and Jose Luis's constant certainty: We didn't let ourselves go with a group of dispensable people, we weren't interchangeable, we were youth. What was left was the dejection of losing-abandonment, death, lack of will-the people who, half in self-congratulation, called themselves "our crowd," "our set." These compliments were not, however, the requiem for Guy's and Jose Luis's constant certainty: We didn't let ourselves go with a group of dispensable people, we weren't interchangeable, we were irreplaceable irreplaceable as a couple. as a couple.

In the midst of these changes, both kept the friends who hadn't succ.u.mbed to violence or been liberated into death. A man needs sad friends to whom he can tell what he doesn't say to his lover. A man needs patient friends who give him the time that a lover denies him. A man needs the friend who talks to him about his lover and evokes a kind of shared warmth that requires the presence of a third person, a special confidant. And above all, a man must respect the relationship with the friend who isn't his lover and gives the a.s.surance that pa.s.sion could overwhelm him.

For Guy and Jose Luis, their relationship with friends secretly established an obligation, which was to avoid promiscuity. It was implicit that a friendship, no matter how close, would never cross the frontier of physical love. In their youth and early maturity, Guy and Jose Luis proposed taking part in everything but in moderation, without vulgarity, without failures in respect. They told each other that a couple needs others but ought to reserve to itself the dialogue between you and me, never surrendering intimacy to the group, to others. And above all, it must respect the relationship with the friend who isn't a lover and gives the a.s.surance that pa.s.sion could overwhelm him.

Both Guy and Jose Luis, now lagging behind the avant-garde, believed that this friend was Curly Villarino, a bridge between our couple's sixty years and the thirtysomething of everybody else. Guy and Jose Luis suffered the feeling of having lost the group, the circle that accompanied them between the ages of twenty and fifty, decimated now by age, death, indolence, the loss of a center, and the move to the outskirts of a Dantesque city: the wild forest.

In short, each group brings with it the question: "What impression are we making?" The Jockey's aristocrats, L'Aiglon's gilded youth, the Rosa district's artists and intellectuals. All of them wanted to make an impression, and in this aspiration lay the defeat or triumph of its members. Both transitory, except that those who failed had to choose between returning to their families or, following Andre Gide's proclamation-families, I detest you-give themselves over to a bohemia that was sad, poor, solitary, scruffy, and as dependent on what they could beg as the most "subjugated" son at home. Only a few stayed afloat in the heavy seas of yesterday's groups, a.s.serting their talent thanks to the hard exigencies of indiscipline, the purges of monogamy (sometimes serial), and carefully measured-out absences from the ravenous homeland. Mexico City threatened to devour alive each one of its inhabitants, whether victim or victimizer.

Instead of a single center-between the Zocalo and Angel-the capital spread in concentric circles increasingly distant from what Guy and Jose Luis considered the "heart" of the city. The Rosa district would end up prost.i.tuted and brothelized, exiling its mobile geography of restaurants, cafes, and boutiques to Avenida Masaryk, from where it would soon move to the center, expelled now by gangs of car thieves, pilferers of watches, entire families of crooks who specialized in breaking into houses, robbing banks, handling burglary tools, murdering for pay, beating with clubs, stabbing, pimping, and prost.i.tuting. Old pensioners without a pension, fugitives from justice, con artists . . . What remained of the ancient City of Palaces? A huge supermarket filled with cans of blood and bottles of smoke? Blood and hunger, basic necessities of the city-monster.

"The consumer society," wrote Georges Bataille in La Part maudite, La Part maudite, "was invented by the Aztecs. They consumed hearts." "was invented by the Aztecs. They consumed hearts."

Guy and Jose Luis believed they had saved their hearts from Mexican ritual cannibalism. At the age of fifty-six, they could look with nostalgic apprehension at their youthful meeting in the Balmori movie theater and tell each other, "I think we saved ourselves, we think we haven't been touched by undesirable emotions, we think that by this time nothing can disturb us . . ." They condemned the city to death.

They did not count on the opposition of Curly Villarino, committed to reviving the days of an aristocratic freedom reserved, at this point in history, only for a handful of multimillionaires and members of European and Arabic royal houses. That is what Curly's calling card was: a summons to the nostalgia of Guy and Jose Luis for their youth, a sweet evocation of a lost time that he, Curly Villarino, seemed to or pretended to reincarnate for the exclusive benefit of the two friends.

"All my uncle Agustin's friends have died. Only you two are left from that time, Guy, Jose Luis, my dears. You are my seductive perfumes."

He said it in so childlike and lovable a manner. With his voice and manners, he made you forgive his somewhat outlandish appearance of a fat boy who never finished growing. The baby fat on his cheeks swayed from side to side with the emphatic movement of his pink cherub's lips, though the fat seraph was contradicted by narrow myopic eyes behind a pair of small eyegla.s.ses in the style of Schubert that, Curly dixit, dixit, would eventually replace the oversize aviator's gla.s.ses favored by the deplorable decade of miniskirts, mammoth belts, and bell-bottom trousers. would eventually replace the oversize aviator's gla.s.ses favored by the deplorable decade of miniskirts, mammoth belts, and bell-bottom trousers.

Curly's entire spherical existence was crowned by a ma.s.s of curls, once blond but now streaked with gray, that resembled the inspired wig of the great Harpo Marx. But if the latter was famously mute, Curly talked incessantly, wittily, and freely. It charmed my friends that when he was introduced, Curly said to them: "I am not impartial, don't believe that even for a minute. You two are my cla.s.sics. And I need a 'cla.s.sic' in order to live and die. I think you" (he looked at them innocently) "are the culmination of the race. You are from mon genre, mon genre, if such a thing can be repeated. No, seriously. Everything would be perfect if we were immortal. Since we aren't, let us at least be unending. I mean, let us ask: Why do they tolerate us h.o.m.os? Answer: in order not to discriminate against us. If we accept this truth, let us admit its consequences. I devote myself only to looking for opportunities that 'normality' would deny me." if such a thing can be repeated. No, seriously. Everything would be perfect if we were immortal. Since we aren't, let us at least be unending. I mean, let us ask: Why do they tolerate us h.o.m.os? Answer: in order not to discriminate against us. If we accept this truth, let us admit its consequences. I devote myself only to looking for opportunities that 'normality' would deny me."

And after a long sigh: "Sometimes I find them, other times no. We are all like submarines that cut through posh marinas checking on whether the yachts have anchors, how many barnacles are clinging to them, if the ship is old or new. Then-I warn you-I attack. I attack in earnest. With torpedoes. I warn you so that no one can call it a deception. If I suspect a couple isn't getting along, I am going to try to seduce them . . ." I attack in earnest. With torpedoes. I warn you so that no one can call it a deception. If I suspect a couple isn't getting along, I am going to try to seduce them . . ."

Guy and Jose Luis remarked that Curly was an amiable buffoon, reminiscent of the most notable excesses of another time. Nowadays singular personalities were lost in the sulfurous urban magma, groups disintegrated, and the only recourse was to search the haystack for the brilliant needle of the brilliant eccentricity that once was.

"Do you realize that we're beginning to talk like a couple of doddering old men?" asked Guy.

Jose Luis didn't reveal either melancholy or fatalism. "That's why we like Curly. He's young, but he's in sync with us."

"We didn't need clowns before," Guy said with a frown.

"No, but only because everybody was comical except you and me."

"Do you feel that self-congratulatory about our behavior?"

" 'Self-congratulatory' isn't the word. Don't be pedantic. Perhaps serious, serious in the midst of the circus. 'Serious' is the word. We never deceive, and we don't allow ourselves to be deceived. If you take a good look at our life, Guy, you'll admit that we were observers but never full partic.i.p.ants."

"You mean we never allowed our private relationship to be confused with our social life?"

"Something better. We were witnesses in order to survive."

"Do you think we've survived? As measured by what?"

"As measured by what we proposed being. A faithful couple, Guy. I believe we both know very well that we've never failed in our loyalty. Promiscuity was all around us. We never fell into it."

"Don't be so sure," joked Guy. "There's still time."

On the verge of turning sixty, Guy and Jose Luis had solidified their personal relationship as well as their professional lives and their dealings-increasingly rare-with a society in which they no longer recognized themselves. Rises and falls were too abrupt. Famous names turned infamous. Anonymous people achieved their fifteen minutes of Warholian fame before somersaulting and disappearing. The hateful norms of a hypocritical Catholic morality had disappeared only to be replaced by a no less hypocritical cult of immorality: pleasure, money, consumption hailed as a proof of freedom, and sophisticated indifference behind a mask of sincerity even in those who did not practice it but felt compelled to celebrate it. There were no well-rooted islands left. Everything was like a vast, drifting political and social Xochi-milco crossed by boats with names written in flowers that withered from one day to the next. The men in power changed. The vices of power remained.

Curly, then, was an island of cheer as well as nostalgia for a lost world: the world of Guy's and Jose Luis's youth. He brought them the private pleasure of an audacious joke, a caricatured excess, which the expectant expectant nature of the FurlongPalma couple demanded, almost as if it were an acquired right. Curly was their show. nature of the FurlongPalma couple demanded, almost as if it were an acquired right. Curly was their show.

Of course the plump young man surpa.s.sed himself in word and deed. That is, he alone took the place of several generations from their social past. It was part of his charm. It was inevitable. He was, for Guy and Jose Luis, a reminiscence. Like a minor Oscar Wilde, Curly fired off paradoxes and bons mots left and right.

"Life would be perfect if I were immortal."

"Promiscuity is taking pleasure in yourself."

"s.e.x doesn't bring happiness, but it does calm the nerves."

"Amity is so drunk she's even drinking from the vases."

"Nothing's as exciting as exposing yourself to a man in church."

"The problem with Rudy is that he's orthopedic."

"Gustavito has a bore inside his head."

These malicious witticisms were received with laughter, Guy's happier than that of Jose Luis, who-as he confessed to his lover-was beginning to weary of Curly's verbal excesses.

"He can be very impertinent. That isn't our style."

"Don't pay attention to him, Jose Luis. Impertinence only hides his vacuousness. Did you expect profundity from a boy like that?"

"Not profundity. Not impertinence, either."

"Let it pa.s.s. Who would replace this blessed Rigoletto fallen from heaven?"

"Or come up from a sulfurous pit, how can anyone tell . . ."

They felt sorry for him one night when they were having supper together in a restaurant on Calle de Havre, and Curly's eyes became dangerously distracted. Guy's back was to the dining room. Jose Luis, beside Curly, could appreciate the obscure object of desire.

A dark-skinned boy went back and forth with ancestral agility, as if a remote ancestor of his had been responsible for bringing fresh fish from the coast to Emperor Moctezuma in his palace on the plateau.

He was nimble, swift, graceful, without an extra gram on his face or body. Curly looked at him with a desire that was increasingly difficult to hide, to the point where he stopped chatting with his friends and absently committed the unforgivable error of sitting with his mouth open, his gaze lost in the waiter's movements, something that provoked Jose Luis to laugh and remark that a "closed mouth catches no boys," which provoked Curly's irritation followed by this action that revealed, to whomever wishes to measure it, the nature, naturata naturata and and naturante, naturante, of the witty fat man. of the witty fat man.

The fact is that Curly, as the young indigenous waiter walked past, dropped his napkin to the floor and looked at the boy with a mixture of indignation and scorn.

"What are you waiting for?" said Curly.

"Excuse me?" responded the waiter.

"Stupid Indian. Pick up the napkin."

The waiter bent over and picked up the napkin lightly spotted with lipstick, as Guy and Jose Luis could observe with smiles, but not the servile object of Curly's wounded contempt. The servant.

"Learn to serve," Curly continued. "Learn to differentiate." And stressing the two words, he concluded: "I am a gentleman. a gentleman."

He said it with an insufferable arrogance that mortified Guy and Jose Luis, whose glances, one directed at Curly and the other at the waiter, were both filled with someone else's excuses and sorrow. The boy bowed gravely to Curly and withdrew to continue his work.

"They're our only aristocrats," Jose Luis commented when the waters had calmed.

"Who?" asked a red-faced Curly.

Jose Luis did not respond, and in Curly's eyes, this registered as a serious offense.

"Did you realize?" said Jose Luis, holding a New Yorker New Yorker when they were back home. "Since he couldn't punish you for seeing him turned into an imbecile with his mouth hanging open, he turned on the weak one, the waiter." when they were back home. "Since he couldn't punish you for seeing him turned into an imbecile with his mouth hanging open, he turned on the weak one, the waiter."

Guy b.u.t.toned his pajamas and said nothing.

"He's a shameful coward" was Jose Luis's judgment. "I don't know if it's worthwhile to keep cultivating him."

"Yes," Guy said with a yawn. "Probably he's already served his purpose."

"Which was?" suggested Jose Luis, setting aside the magazine.