Free Burnt Water by Carlos Fuentes Page A

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.
    â€œVictor, 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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œI 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