Burnt Water (20 page)

In the midst of so much ugliness it was only natural that he maintain his little oasis of beauty, his personal Eden which nobody envied him anyway. Voluntarily, consciously, he had remained on the edge of the mainstream. He'd watched the caravans of fashion pass him by. He preserved a few fashions, it was true. But what he chose and he preserved. When something went out of style he continued to wear it, he cultivated it and saved it from the vagaries of taste. So his style was never out of style, his suits, his hats and canes and Chinese dressing gowns, the elegant ankle-high boots for his tiny Oriental feet, the suave kid gloves for his tiny Mandarin hands.

He had been this way for years, since the forties, all the time he was waiting for his mother to die and leave him her fortune, and now, in turn, he would die, at peace, in any way he wished, alone in his house, freed finally from the burden of his mother, so extravagant and at the same time so stingy, so vain, so painted, powdered, and bewigged till her dying day. The attendants at the funeral parlor had outdone themselves. Feeling an obligation to bestow in death a more colorful and lavish appearance than life, they presented Federico Silva, with great pride, with a raving caricature, an enameled mummy. The moment he saw her he'd ordered the casket sealed.

Family and friends had gathered during the days of the wake for Doña Felícitas Fernández de Silva, and her burial. Discreet, distinguished people everyone else referred to as aristocrats, as if, Federico Silva mused, an aristocracy were possible in a colony settled by fugitives, petty clerks, millers, and swineherds.

“Let us content ourselves,” he used to tell his old friend María de los Angeles Negrete, “with being what we are, an upper middle class that in spite of the whirlwinds of history has managed through time to preserve its very comfortable personal income.”

The oldest name in this assemblage had acquired its fortune in the seventeenth century, the most recent before 1910. An unwritten law excluded from the group the nouveaux riches of the Revolution, but admitted those damaged by the civil strife who'd then used the Revolution to recover their standing. But the customary, the honorable, thing was to have been rich during the colonial period, through the empire and the republican dictatorships. The ancestral home of the Marqués de Casa Cobos dated from the times of the Viceroy O'Donojú, and his grandmother had been a lady-in-waiting to the Empress Carlota; Perico Arauz's ancestors had been ministers to Santa Anna and Porfirio Díaz; and Federico, on the Fernández side, was descended from an aide-de-camp to Maximilian, and through the Silvas from a magistrate to Lerdo de Tejeda. Proof of breeding, proof of class maintained in spite of the political upheavals of a country known for its surprises, somnolent one day, in tumult the next.

Every Saturday Federico joined his friends to play Mah-Jongg, and the Marqués always told him, “Don't worry, Federico. No matter how it shocks us, we must admit that the Revolution tamed Mexico forever.”

He hadn't seen the resentful eyes, the caged tigers lurking in the nervous bodies of the youths sitting watching the smog drift by.

II

The day he buried his mother he really began to remember. Moreover, he realized that it was because of her disappearance that detailed memories were returning which had been buried beneath Doña Felícitas's formidable weight. That was when he remembered that once mornings could be perceived at midnight, and that he'd gone out on his balcony to breathe them, to collect the anticipated gift of the day.

But that was only one memory among many, the one most closely resembling a revived instinct. The fact is, he told himself, that the memory of old people is stimulated by the deaths of other old people. So he found that he was waiting for the death of some uncle or aunt or friend to be announced, secure in the knowledge that new memories would attend the rendezvous. In the same way, some day, they would remember him.

How would he be remembered? Meticulously grooming himself every morning before the mirror, he knew that he had changed very little over the last twenty years. Like Orientals, who, once they begin to age, never change until the day they die. But also because all that time he'd kept the same style of dress. No denying it, in hot weather he was the only person he knew who still wore a boater like the one made famous by Maurice Chevalier. With delight, savoring the syllables, he enunciated several foreign names for that hat:
straw hat, canotier, paglietta.
And in winter, a black homburg with the obligatory silk ribbon imposed by Anthony Eden, the most elegant man of his epoch.

Federico Silva always rose late. He had no reason to pretend that he was anything other than a wealthy rent collector. His friends' sons had fallen prey to a misplaced social consciousness, which meant they must be seen up and in some restaurant by eight o'clock in the morning, eating hotcakes and discussing politics. Happily, Federico Silva had no children to be embarrassed by being wealthy, or to shame him for lying in bed till noon, waiting for his valet and cook, Dondé, to bring him his breakfast so he could drink his coffee and read the newspapers with tranquillity, shave and dress with calm.

Through the years he'd saved the clothes he'd worn as a young man, and when Doña Felícitas died he gathered up her extraordinary wardrobe and arranged it in several closets, one corresponding to the styles that predated the First World War, another for the twenties, and a third for the hodgepodge style she'd dreamed up in the thirties and then affected until her death: colored stockings, silver shoes, boas of shrieking scarlet, long skirts of mauve silk, décolleté blouses, thousands of necklaces, garden-party hats, and pearl chokers.

Every day he walked to the Bellinghausen on Londres Street, where the same corner table had been reserved for him since the era of the hand-tailored suits he wore. There he ate alone, dignified, reserved, nodding to passing acquaintances, picking up the checks of unaccompanied ladies known to him or his mother, none of this backslapping for him, no vulgarity, shouting, What's new! What-a-sight-for-sore-eyes! or You've-made-my-day! He detested familiarity. An almost tangible aura of privacy surrounded his small, dark, scrupulous person. Let no one attempt to penetrate it.

His familiarity was reserved for the contents of his house. Every evening he took delight in looking at, admiring, touching, stroking, sometimes even caressing his possessions, the Tiffany lamps and ashtrays, the Lalique figurines and frames. These things gave him particular satisfaction, but he enjoyed equally a whole room of Art Deco furniture, round mirrors on silvered boudoir tables, tall lamps of tubular aluminum, a bed with a headboard of pale burnished metal, an entirely white bedroom: satin and silk, a white telephone, a polar-bear skin, walls lacquered a pale ivory.

Two events had marked his life as a young man. A trip to Hollywood, when the Mexican consul in Los Angeles had arranged a visit to the set of
Dinner at Eight,
where he'd been shown Jean Harlow's white bedroom and even seen the actress from a distance: a platinum dream. And in Eden Roc he'd met Cole Porter, who'd just composed “Just One of Those Things,” and Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, who was writing
Tender Is the Night.
He'd had his picture taken with Porter that summer on the Riviera, but not with the Fitzgeralds. A photograph with a box camera that didn't need a flash. And in his room in the Hotel Negresco he'd had an adventure with a naked woman in the darkness. Neither knew who the other was. Suddenly the woman had been illuminated by moonlight as bright as day, as if the moon were the sun, a prurient, blinding spotlight stripped of the fig-leaf effect of the silver screen.

The visit to the Côte d'Azur was a constant topic of nostalgic reminiscences during the Saturday-afternoon reunions. Federico was a skilled Mah-Jongg player, and three of the habitual players, María de los Angeles, Perico, and the Marqués, had been with him that summer. It had all been memorable but that one event, the incident of the blond girl who resembled Jean Harlow. If one of the friends felt that another was about to venture into that forbidden territory, he warned him with a heavily charged look. Then everybody changed the subject, avoided talking about the past, and turned to their usual discussions of family and money.

“The two cannot be separated,” Federico said as they played. “And as I have no immediate family, when I'm gone my money will be dispersed among distant branches of the family. Amusing, isn't it?”

He apologized for talking about death. But not about money. Each of them had had the good fortune to appropriate a parcel of the wealth of Mexico at an opportune time—mines, forests, land, cattle, farms—and the luck to convert it quickly, before it had passed out of their hands, into the one secure investment: Mexico City real estate.

Half daydreaming, Federico Silva thought about the houses that so punctually produced his rents, the old colonial palaces on Tacuba, Guatemala, and La Moneda Streets. He'd never visited them. He was totally ignorant about the people who lived there. Perhaps one day he would ask one of his rent collectors to tell him who lived in the old palaces. What were the people like? Did they realize they were living in the noblest mansions of Mexico?

He would never invest in a new building like those that had blocked out his sun and made his house list to one side. That much he'd sworn to himself. Smiling, he repeated his oath as they walked to the dining table that Mah-Jongg Saturday in his home. Everyone knew that to be received by Federico Silva was a very special honor. Only he entertained with such detail, the seating plan in a red leather holder, the places set in accord to the strictest protocol—rank, age, former posts—and the card with the name of each guest at its precise place, the menu written out in the host's own hand, Dondé's impeccable service at the table.

That night as he glanced around the table, counting the absent, the friends who had preceded him in death, there was scarcely a flicker of expression on Federico Silva's Oriental mask. He rubbed his tiny porcelain Mandarin hands together: ah, there was no protocol as implacable as death, no priority more strict than that of the tomb. High overhead, the Lalique chandelier shed a vertical beam, perversely illuminating the Goyaesque faces of his table companions, the flesh of curdled custard, the deep fissures at the corners of the mouths, the hollow eyes of his friends.

Whatever became of the nude blond girl of that night in my room in the Hotel Negresco?

A Mayan profile thrust between Federico Silva and the lady seated at his right, his friend María de los Angeles Negrete, as Dondé began to serve the soup. The bridge of Dondé's nose began in the middle of his forehead and his tiny eyes were crossed.

“Isn't it extraordinary,” Federico Silva commented in French. “Do you realize that this type of profile and crossed eyes was a mark of physical beauty among the Mayas? To achieve it they bound the infants' heads when they were born and forced them to follow the pendulum motion of a marble suspended on a thread. How is it possible that centuries later those artificially imposed characteristics continue to be transmitted?”

“It's like inheriting a wig and false teeth.” María de los Angeles whinnied like a mare.

Dondé's profile between the host and his guest, his arm holding the soup tureen, the brimming soup ladle, the unexpected offense of Dondé's sweat, he'd warned him for the last time, bathe after you finish in the kitchen and before you begin to serve, sometimes it isn't possible, señor, there isn't enough time, señor.

“Yours, or my mother's, María de los Angeles?”

“What, Federico?”

“The wig. The teeth.”

Someone jarred the ladle, Federico Silva, Dondé, or María de los Angeles, who knows, but steaming chickpea soup disappeared into the woman's bodice, screams, how could that have happened, Dondé, I'm sorry, señor. I swear, I didn't do it, ay! the curds-and-whey breasts of María de los Angeles, ay! the scalded tits, go take a bath, Dondé, you offend me, Dondé, my mother's wig and false teeth, the naked blonde, Nice …

He awakened with a fearful start, the anguish of a desperate effort to remember what he'd just dreamed, the certainty he would never recapture it, another dream lost forever. Drunk with sadness, he put on his Chinese dressing gown and walked out on the balcony.

He breathed deeply. He sniffed in vain for odors of the morning to come. The mud of the Aztec lake, the foam of the Indian night. Impossible. Like his dreams, the lost perfumes refused to return.

“Is anything the matter, señor?”

“No, Dondé.”

“I heard the señor call out.”

“It was nothing. Go back to sleep, Dondé.”

“Whatever you say, señor.”

“Good night, Dondé.”

“Good night, señor.”

III

“As long as I've known you, you've been a real stickler about what you wear, Federico.”

He'd never forgiven his old friend María de los Angeles, who had once made fun of him by addressing him as Monsieur Verdoux. Maybe there
was
something Chaplinesque in antiquated elegance, but only when it disguised a diminishing fortune. And Federico Silva, as everyone knew, was not down on his luck. It was just that, like every person of true taste, he had the good sense to choose things that lasted. A pair of shoes, or a house.

“Save electricity. Go to bed early.”

He would never, for example, wear spats and carry a cane at the same time. In his daily stroll down Córdoba Street to the Bellinghausen restaurant, he was careful to offset the showy effect of a brick-colored jacket with a Buster Brown belt he'd had made in 1933 by draping a nondescript raincoat over his arm with studied insouciance. And only on the infrequent days when it was really cold did he wear the derby, the black overcoat and white muffler. He was well aware that behind his back his friends whispered that the way he hung on to his clothes was really the most humiliating proof of dependence. With what Doña Felícitas had put him through, he had to make things last twenty or thirty years.