Free Burnt Water by Carlos Fuentes Page B

a word. I’m not going either, they can say whatever they please.” And in the attic that serves us as a bedroom, bathed on clear mornings in the light from the distant volcanoes: “I’m going to have coffee with Alejandro today. He’s a great artist and he would feel inhibited if you were there, and I need him to explain a few things to me alone.” And as she follows me across the boards connecting the unlaid floors in the houses I’m building in Desierto de los Leones: “I’m going to be gone for ten days, taking a train around the country.” And as we have a hurried cup of coffee one midafternoon in the Tirol, fluttering her fingers in greeting to some friends passing by on Hamburgo: “Thanks for taking me to the brothel, Nibelung. It seemed straight out of the time of Toulouse-Lautrec, as innocent as a Maupassant story. And you know? Now I’ve found out that that’s not where sin and depravation are, but elsewhere.” And after a private showing of Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel: “Victor, morality is everything that gives life, and immorality everything that refutes it, isn’t that right?”
    And now she repeated, nibbling a sandwich: “Aren’t I right? If a ménage à trois gives us life and happiness and makes for better personal relations among the three of us than the relationship between the two of us, then isn’t that moral?”
    I nodded as I ate, listening to the sputtering of the meat cooking on the raised grill. Several friends were watching that their cuts were done just the way they like them, and then came to sit with us, and Elena began to laugh again and be her usual self. Unfortunately, I was inspired to scan the faces of our friends in turn, imagining each of them installed in my house, giving Elena the portion of affection, stimulus, passion, or intelligence that I, exhausted beyond my limits, was incapable of granting her. As I observed the nearest face, avidly disposed to listen to her (and at times I grow weary of hearing her), another amiably offering to fill in the lacunae in her reasoning (I prefer that her conversation not be logical or consistent), yet another, more inclined to formulate precise and, according to him, revealing questions (and I never use words—rather, gestures or telepathy to set Elena in motion), I took some consolation from telling myself that, after all was said and done, what little they could give her would be given beyond a certain boundary of my life with her, like dessert or a cordial, an appendage. That one, the one who combed his hair like Ringo Starr, asked her precisely and revealingly why she continued to be faithful to me, and Elena replied that today infidelity is mandatory, just as Communion every Friday used to be, and turned away from him. The nearer one, the one in a turtleneck shirt, interpreted Elena’s reply, adding that, doubtlessly, my wife meant that fidelity was becoming the attitude of the rebel. And the one here by me, the one in the perfect Edwardian frock coat, merely invited Elena with an intensely oblique glance to continue speaking: he would be the perfect audience. Elena raised her arms and asked the waiter for an espresso.
    We walked beneath the ash trees through the cobbled streets of Coyoacán, holding hands, experiencing the contrast of the day’s heat still clinging to our clothing and the moist coolness of the night that, following the afternoon shower, brought a glow to our eyes and color to our cheeks. Silently, our heads bowed, holding hands, we like to walk through the ancient streets that have been since the beginning a point of encounter, a common meeting ground of our inclination to assimilate what is around us. I think we have never spoken of this, Elena and I. Nor do we need to. What I do know is that it pleases us to collect old things, as if we were rescuing them from painful oblivion, or as if by touching them we gave