Guy shrugged. "Frankly, it's all the same to me if we see him or not."

"Ah," exclaimed Jose Luis, accustomed to less ambiguous or contradictory answers from his companion. "Then you think it's a matter of one of those surmountable surmountable incidents." incidents."

It wasn't a question. It was a statement.

The conversation was following brand-new paths. Generally, Guy and Jose Luis were in agreement because they knew they were united against a world that would have liked to be hostile if they themselves did not make it habitable. The couple's agreement in the face of society translated into an affirmation of the couple in their intimacy. One thing, as they knew very well, defended and empowered the other.

Now something was happening that obliged Guy to say sarcastically, "Do you know what they call us in secret?"

"No," Jose Luis said with a smile.

"Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the twins Alice meets who say the same thing at the same time."

"But they never make stupid remarks." Jose Luis escalated the dialogue.

"Don't torture me." Guy smiled again.

Then they went to sleep without speaking or even touching each other. The next morning, while they were shaving side by side in the art nouveau bathroom, Guy broke the ice.

"If you prefer, we won't see him anymore."

"Who?" Jose Luis said from behind the lather.

"Please, Jose Luis."

"I couldn't care less."

"That's not true."

"I give you my word. In any case, I'm not going to let that flan with legs ruin our life. We don't owe him anything."

"Nothing," Guy said without conviction. "Nothing at all."

Curly did not fail to appear that same morning with a bouquet of roses and a handwritten note: "My dear friends. Why are you indifferent to me? Like the Brazilians, I watch over your absences. With love, C.V."

They decided to invite him to dinner the next day. Good manners demanded it. Not appearing to be offended demanded it even more. And denying power to Curly demanded it most of all.

As required, they wore tuxedos.

"Out of nostalgia," said Guy.

"Out of habit," added Jose Luis.

"Out of laziness," laughed Curly, dressed in red velvet with a ruffled shirt. "Do you two know? I know you know that boy turned me down, and I've come to ask you not to tell anyone about it."

Guy said nothing. Jose Luis became indignant at so vulgar a provocation. He dropped his silverware with a clatter.

"I expected better taste or at least better irony from you," he said to Curly.

"I'm in no mood for irony tonight," Curly said with a sigh. "I'm suffering from lovesickness."

The chubby man turned toward Guy.

"But you know about that, don't you, darling?"

Jose Luis couldn't believe it. Guy blushed. Jose Luis weighed in to the defense.

"We know only what it's important for us to know. You're putting in the banderillas and we won't tolerate it."

"No?" The young man smiled. "Well, look, Jose Luis, you can stick me with banderillas, lances, and swords, and I won't be irritated. Talk it over with your little friend and see if he tolerates it from you."

"I don't understand. What are you talking about?" Jose Luis asked Curly, though he was looking at Guy.

"For G.o.d's sake," Guy replied. "Don't make a tempest in a teapot."

Curly laughed out loud.

"I don't believe it! Please stop presenting me with such glorious opportunities. Gang up on me, I beg you. Defend yourselves against your little spy Curly Villarino, the busybody who knows everything and divulges everything. Isn't that right? Oh, discretion isn't my forte!"

Suddenly, he changed his tone.

"What do you want me to tell you. That only novelty excites me? That I'm desperate because the night before last I didn't seduce the busboy? That I don't need witnesses to my amatory failures? That I've come on my knees to beg you to remain silent? That I'll find the way to f.u.c.k you over if you betray me to other people?"

Then Jose Luis told me that "other people" was too vast to refer to a circle growing smaller and smaller. The fact is that on the day Curly came for dinner, he initiated a lament to my friends. Both of them, united in their old custom of remaining on the margins of other people's pa.s.sions, of being a discreet couple, one that was solitary if necessary but never condemned to partic.i.p.ate in what would be called a radio soap opera yesterday, a TV soap opera today, and a melodrama always. And melodrama, as you know, is comedy without humor.

"That I've always been an outsider?" Curly continued. "Always marginalized? That I'll leave the closet and no one will follow me?" Suddenly, he snapped his fingers, imitating the click of castanets. "Or be the life of the party?" He laughed artlessly. "And sometimes the death of the party."

He put on a funereal air and stood up. "I know. You want me to leave. You don't want me to foul your sweet little love nest. Fine, my dear f.a.gs. I won't beg. You think you've conquered me. Fine. We'll see." He made a ridiculous pirouette, sometimes lifting off the ground despite his large bodily ma.s.s, revealed in that act as a balloon filled only with self-satisfaction. "Fine. I'll go. But my box of surprises isn't empty yet. Wait a little. A bee stings harder the longer he retains the venom."

Guy's unusual spiritual distance during the days that followed was understood by Jose Luis as uneasiness rather than irritation due to the scenes provoked by Curly. Still, in his more intelligent moments, Jose Luis decided to treat what seemed serious as if it were frivolous, what seemed profound as if it were superficial. He didn't change his behavior, the rhythm of his daily actions, the usual chatter of lives that were too intimate and too old not to understand that the times of the most level normalcy did not exclude but underscored the moments filled with physical love as well as intelligent discourse between two human beings.

Jose Luis, somewhat pensive, asked silent questions of Guy. What is our relationship made of? Desire and jealousy? Or innocence and disdain? Will you always love me in the natural way you have until now? Or are you going to make me feel that you're indulging me? Isn't indulgence the most deceptive form of tolerance?

("We've never tolerated each other, you and I. We wouldn't have lived together for so long if we only tolerated each other.") His glance happened to fall on a photograph taken when they were young. Guy and Jose Luis side by side, smiling but serious, not embracing, displaying the seriousness of their relationship because it wasn't demonstrative, it was discreet. It was enough for him to see himself in his twenties, when the relationship was already an irreversible fact, to know that he and Guy always knew how to survive the bad times, and this conviction deflected the irritations found in every shared, intense, prolonged life. They put off explosions of bad temper. They exiled misunderstandings. They banished tedium and indifference. Precisely because all of that was found in the relationship, not because it was missing.

Perhaps the inevitable was treated by the couple not as something not talked about-hypocrisy-but as something just the opposite-imagination. Bad humor saved by an opportune joke. Misunderstandings elevated to the level of vain possibility. Tedium deflected by a reference to the movies, to literature, to art, to everything that, being theirs, should have been everybody's.

This was the difference. Now it would seem that the roles they had once shared were turning into monologues. Jose Luis resisted being the actor of jealousy opposite the protagonist of desire in Guy's distant glance. He was afraid that jealousy would turn into scorn as Guy's desire disguised itself, ridiculously, as innocence.

The fact is that Jose Luis, knowing Guy so intimately, could distinguish the temperatures of desire in his lover. What disturbed him was that, after a few days, he could not identify the object of that desire. Because he, Jose Luis, was not the object or the subject of Guy's familiar palpitations.

Jose Luis was in his office at nightfall when Curly phoned to invite him to supper in his penthouse near here, opposite Diana the Huntress. Jose Luis tried to confirm what the now not very trustworthy Curly had said, but Guy was no longer in the gallery. And he hadn't returned home. Jose Luis changed and went to Curly's supper alone.

"Welcome to the Pink Pantheon," Curly said with a smile to Jose Luis. "And remember my slogan: s.e.x copuli, s.e.x dei . . . s.e.x copuli, s.e.x dei . . ."

With his forelock tilted like the Tower of Pisa, Curly was wearing his host's attire. A plush velvet jacket, white ascot, Scottish plaid trousers, and black slippers, one with the image of the sun, the other the moon. He wore no socks.

"Ah," he said with a sigh. "What can I offer you? You have to drink to put up with me, Jose Luis. I swear, tonight I feel stranger than a green dog, and I don't see more in my future than martyrdom with dark gla.s.ses."

"You're in Technicolor." Jose Luis smiled as he took the margarita that Curly served him.

"And in wide screen, love," said Curly. "Just have a look." He approached the large picture window in the penthouse and tugged at the cord of the drawn curtains. "There's no better view of the city," he remarked as the curtains separated to reveal the terrace and two men embracing, kissing each other, one mature, the other young. Their faces were hidden by the long kiss until light from the living room fell on the lovers' closed lids, obliged them to open their eyes, turn their heads, and show themselves to Curly and Jose Luis.

"Courage, Jose Luis. Don't worry." Curly smiled. "s.e.x is like a hangover: It lasts eight hours."

If he had seen him in the days that followed, Jose Luis would have told Guy what he wrote to him in a letter that was never sent.

"Believe me, I understand you. You've never lost the need to attract. As I once told you, you're not a flirt, you simply need to display yourself. Since I understand that, it doesn't bother me too much that you've taken the next step at least once. We always avoided it. We never excluded it. In the end, did we deceive ourselves? Did we let ourselves be poisoned by what we had always evaded-jealousy, disillusionment, accusation? I see our picture taken when we were thirty, and I put myself in the adverse situation. Do you remember Agustin Villarino? He had lost his youth and sought out young men who would return it to him. He infuriated us. We laughed at him. Not death in Venice, you said then, but death in Xochimilco. You'll say these are cruel words. It isn't my intention to hurt you. I only want you to understand that I understand you. We managed to grow old together. My request is very simple. Don't ruin everything. everything."

He found out that Curly had taken Guy and the boy to a rented house in Acapulco. Jose Luis expected a letter. What he received was a phone call.

"Excuse me. I had to. I thought you'd indulge me."

"I was going to write."

"I didn't receive anything."

"Isn't my intention enough?"

"I don't know if you realized it."

"Realized what?"

"Saffron is just like you."

"With that name? Don't make me laugh."

"Well, it's the name Curly gave him."

"Then he can't be just like me."

"He's like you at the age of twenty, Jose Luis."

"Please, leave the past in peace."

"I wasn't prepared for this."

"Neither was I."

"Did we deceive ourselves?"

"Who knows. It's always too late to know when we move from one phase to the next in our lives. When we realize it, the first act is over, and the play is about to end."

"I'll tell you something else, it might be a comfort to you. This boy is unreachable."

"Excuse me while I laugh. You reached him. Or he reached you."

"Understand me, Jose Luis . . . I called you humbly . . . I need . . ."

"You've turned into an imbecile. Or a baby."

"It depends on your preference. We have to endure the bad times."

"Don't tell me you're coming back to me. How? Tenderly, longingly, regretfully?"

"We're an old couple, Jose Luis. We'll overcome the crisis. Didn't you tell me once that I'm handsome, that I like to display myself, that you enjoy my being like that?"

And after a silence: "Don't hate me, Jose Luis."

"I don't hate anybody."

He hung up the phone because he was about to add (he tells me): "I don't hate anybody. I love you." And he didn't want to say those words. Guy's resonated in his head: "He's just like you when you were young."

At nightfall, Jose Luis went out for a walk. A desire both determining and difficult led him to Avenida alvaro Obregon and the place where the luxurious movie house Balmori had once been located.

Now it was an empty lot where metal ruins stood. Twilight birds flew over the site as if looking for a nest in memories of yesterday. Greta Garbo. That unrepeatable smell of celluloid, sticky muegano candy, melting chocolates, programs made of pink-colored paper, sounds like a bird's wings. That first touch of hands watching Fred and Ginger dance against a background of snow falling in Manhattan. Greta, Ginger, Fred. As he looked at the ruined theater, Jose Luis felt that the models we admire and pursue come out of ourselves. They are not imposed on us. We invent them, and they magically, gracefully appear on a white screen. Except they are our own shadows transformed into light. They are our most satisfactory portrait. They remain young even in death.

"I wander the streets like a ghost. I've left my image in a ruined movie house. Come and acknowledge it if you dare. I've lost everything but the memory of you. I no longer have a body. What I have is the desire to see you again, to talk to you again."

Guy: A straight, slightly prognathous profile. Wavy hair, without the thin spots of age. Eyes that show interest in everything they see. He is sure he touched the sky one day. A straight, slightly prognathous profile. Wavy hair, without the thin spots of age. Eyes that show interest in everything they see. He is sure he touched the sky one day.

Jose Luis: Round face. p.r.o.nounced baldness. Very large eyes, pools of a sharp, quiet intelligence. The despair of schemers. He never feels the need to challenge his companion. His rule is to avoid promiscuity. He would like to be located at the heart of a constellation. Round face. p.r.o.nounced baldness. Very large eyes, pools of a sharp, quiet intelligence. The despair of schemers. He never feels the need to challenge his companion. His rule is to avoid promiscuity. He would like to be located at the heart of a constellation.

Chorus of a Son of the Sea

the tip of the peninsula opens like the biggest fan in the world the freezing distant pacific ocean crashes into the hot storms of sinaloa displaying two hundred degrees of surf Nicanor Tepa stands on the board waiting for the monster wave nine feet high he takes it with audacity elegance reticence simplicity strength always from the left you never take a huge wave from the right from the right the wave falls on the surfer crushes him drowns him from the left Nicanor Tepa conquers the wave turns into wave a vast white veil holds up Nicanor's body the white foam crowns his dark head the tension of his muscles isn't felt it is resolved with jubilation in his triumph over the wave of blue crystal it is august the great month for headlands in baja in september Nicanor Tepa will travel to san onofre beach in california and its forty kilometers of waves inviting him to tame them as if the sea were an immense whale and the wave only the spout of the monster spewing sea spray twenty-four meters into the air in october Nicanor is in the burial ground of the freezing sea of Ireland in the bay of Donegal and its waves of turbid green broken and enlarged by the barrier reefs and in december he'll arrive in Hawaii to win the Triple Crown championship exposed to the incessant hammering of the bay of Waimea and its waves thirty-six meters high Nicanor begins the new year on the peninsula of Guanacaste in Costa Rica and in february goes down to Australia to the longest sandbar in the world where three gigantic waves gather and explode and allow him to glide like a gull over the heights of the sea that hurls him at the end of the monsoon in Tahiti with its electrical storms flashing into the sea where Nicanor conquers the most fearsome of all waves the Teahupu and now the wave shatters against the head of Nicanor who made a mistake taking it from the right and he comes to under a high-tension spiderweb in a hovel in the Capulin district and he tries to grasp the volcanic rock so he won't drown in the marsh and he wakes in his one-room windowless shack and he'll go out right away to see if he can catch what's fallen from the trucks going to the market and he forms his pyramid of peanuts on the highway that goes to the airport and looks without interest at the venders of gum plastic toys lottery tickets hairpins and tells himself in silence that if he were bolder he would clean windshields and even eat fire at the crossroads you have to eat fire to revive the six little brothers dead before their first birthday typhus polio rabies you have to bring in an ocean wave to demolish the district without potable water to carry to the sea the mountains of garbage but Nicanor Tepa trusts in luck he resumes looking at the surfers' calendar now they should go to Jeffreys Bay in South Africa Nicanor lifts one after another the pages of his calendar of waves july in Fiji august back to the headlands immediately again san onofre and then ireland until the new year in costa rica but in december the year ends and Nicanor Tepa has no calendar for next year he found this one in a trash can at a hotel in the airport that he flies out of to Indonesia Tahiti Australia Hawaii and Nicanor falls asleep exhausted dreaming that he'll change what he can and bow his head before what he can't change and have the wisdom to know the difference he is surrounded by dry bitter broken earth Nicanor grasps the volcanic rock Nicanor sinks into the huisache swamp then the gigantic wave of sleep falls on his head

The Official Family

1. President Justo Mayorga was awakened by the abrupt, huge, unlocatable noise. He opened his eyes with more suspicion than surprise. His first impulse always was never to give in to alarm and look for a redeemable error or a condemnable act. The procession of functionaries who had been fired, punished, ignored because they had erred erred still pa.s.sed through his drowsy mind. Other people's mistakes guided, even in dreams, his presidential decisions and-he yawned without wanting to-opened lists where disloyalty was only one chapter, the lowest and most insidious, of the catalog of faults the president always had close at hand. There never was a shortage of Judases. still pa.s.sed through his drowsy mind. Other people's mistakes guided, even in dreams, his presidential decisions and-he yawned without wanting to-opened lists where disloyalty was only one chapter, the lowest and most insidious, of the catalog of faults the president always had close at hand. There never was a shortage of Judases.

He looked with early-morning distance at his strong hand, broad but with long, slender fingers. He knew how to use it effectively in his speeches. Only one hand, the right, is required: clenched in a fist-strength; open-generosity; palm down-calm, calm; palm up-warning? request? with the fingers slightly bent toward his own person-come, approach, I love you, don't be afraid of me. Justo Mayorga had given up using both hands in his speeches. On the largest screens and in the smallest squares, the use of both hands at the same time seemed not only hackneyed but counterproductive. It indicated that the orator was orating, orating, and when he orated, he deceived, making promises he knew he would never be able to keep. He asked for faith from the incredulous and doubt from believers. and when he orated, he deceived, making promises he knew he would never be able to keep. He asked for faith from the incredulous and doubt from believers.

On the long journey from local Culiacan delegate to national office at Los Pinos-twenty long years-he had learned a form of vigorous but serene speech-making using only his right hand as rhetorical art and keeping the left in his jacket pocket, on his silver belt buckle, and on only one celebrated occasion, on national television, grasping his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es to skewer his opponent in an election debate: "I have more than enough of what you're missing."

Now, when he was awake, he felt his b.a.l.l.s bristling at the infernal noise that had come-he looked quickly at the clock, recovering his keen faculties-to wake him at three in the morning. Earlier presidents of Mexico might think of things like armed attack, military uprising, popular demonstration. Justo Mayorga was not paranoid. The noise was infernal, but not even the devil could get into Los Pinos, that's what the well-guarded barred windows and well-trained military staff were for.