There was only one hiatus: when you were fifteen and I was only twelve and you were embarrassed to be seen with me. I didn’t understand, because you looked the same as always to me: slim, strong, tanned, your curly chestnut hair reddened by the sun. But we were friends again the next year, going everywhere together, no longer picking up shells or inventing adventures, but seeking now to prolong a day that began to seem too short and a night forbidden to us, a night that became our temptation, symbol of the new possibilities in a recently discovered, recently begun life. We walked along the rocky Farallón after dinner, holding hands in silence, not looking at the groups playing guitar around a bonfire or at the couples kissing among the rocks. We didn’t need to say how painful it was to be around anyone else. As we didn’t need to say that the best thing in the world was to walk together in the evening, holding hands, without a word, in silent communion with our secret, that mystery that between us never gave rise to a joke or a snide remark. We were serious but never solemn, remember? And maybe we were good for each other without knowing it, in a way I’ve never been able to explain exactly, but that had to do with the warm sand beneath our bare feet, with the silence of the sea at night, with the brushing of our thighs as we walked together, you in your new long, tailored white pants, I in my new full red skirt. We had changed our way of dressing, and no longer took part in the jokes, the embarrassment, the violence of our friends. You know, Juan Luis, that most of them still act as if they were fourteen — the kind of fourteen-year-olds we never were. Machismo is being fourteen all one’s life; it is cruel fear. You know, because you weren’t able to avoid it. As we left our childhood behind and you tried out all the experiences common to your age, you began to avoid me. (I would look out at you from my window, I watched you go out in a convertible full of friends and come back late, feeling sick.) And so I understood when, after years of scarcely speaking to me, when I enrolled in Arts and Science and you in Business, you sought me, not at home, which would have been the natural thing, but at school, and you asked me to have a cup of coffee one afternoon in the Mascarones cellar café, hot and packed with students.
You caressed my hand and said: “Forgive me, Claudia.”
I smiled and thought that all our childhood was suddenly returning, not to be prolonged, but rather to be brought to an end, to a kind of recognition that would at the same time dissipate those years forever.
“For what?” I replied. “I’m happy we can talk again. That’s all I want. We see each other every day, but each time it was as if the other weren’t there. Now I’m happy we can be friends again, like before.”
“We’re more than friends, Claudia. We’re brother and sister.”
“Yes, but that’s an accident. Because we are brother and sister we loved each other very much when we were children; but we’ve hardly spoken to each other since.”
“I’m going away, Claudia. I’ve already told my father. He doesn’t agree. He thinks I ought to get my degree. But I have to go away.”
“Where?”
“I’ve got a job with the United Nations in Geneva. I can continue my studies there.”
“You’re doing the right thing, Juan Luis.”
You told me what I already knew. You told me you were sick of whorehouses, of learning everything by rote, of the obligation to be macho, of patriotism, lip-service religion, the lack of good films, the lack of real women, girls your own age you could live with … It was quite a speech, spoken quietly across that table in the Mascarones café.
“It’s not possible to live here. I mean it. I don’t want to serve either God or the devil; I want to burn the candle at both ends. And you can’t do it here, Claudia. Just wanting to live makes you a potential traitor; here you’re obliged to serve, to take a position; it’s a country that won’t let you be yourself. I don’t want to be ‘decent.’ I don’t want to be courteous, a liar, muy macho, an ass-kisser, refined and clever. There’s no country like Mexico … thank God! I don’t want to go from brothel to brothel. When you do that, then all your life you are forced to treat women with a kind of brutal, domineering sentimentality because you never learned to really understand them. I don’t want that.”
“And what does Mother say?”
“She’ll cry. It doesn’t matter. She cries about everything, what else would you expect?”
“And what about me, Juan Luis?”
He smiled childishly. “You’ll come to visit me, Claudia. Swear you’ll come see me!”
I not only came to see you; I came to look for you, to take you back to Mexico. And four years ago, when we said goodbye, the only thing I said was: “Think about me. Find a way to be with me always.”
Yes, you wrote me begging me to visit you; I have your letters. You found a room with bath and kitchen in the most beautiful spot in Geneva, the Place du Bourg-de-Four. You wrote that it was on the fifth floor, right in the middle of the old city. From there you could see steep roofs, church towers, small windows and narrow skylights, and in the distance the lake fading from sight toward Vevey and Montreux and Chillon. Your letters were filled with the joy of independence. You had to make your bed and clean and get your own breakfast and go down to the dairy next door for milk. And you had your drinks in the café on the plaza. You talked so much about that café. It is called La Clémence and it has an awning with green and white stripes and anyone who is anyone in Geneva goes there. It’s tiny, six tables facing a bar; waitresses in black serve cassis and say “M’sieudame” to everyone. I sat there yesterday to have a cup of coffee and looked at all those students in their long mufflers and university caps, at Hindu girls with saris askew under winter coats, at diplomats with rosettes in their lapels, at actors who are trying to avoid paying taxes, who take refuge in chalets on the lake shore, at the young Germans, Chileans, Belgians, and Tunisians who work at the ILO. You wrote that there were two Genevas. The ordered conventional city that Stendhal described as a flower without perfume; that’s the one where the Swiss live, the backdrop for the other, the city of transients and exiles, a foreign city of chance encounters, of glances and sudden conversations, without the standards the Swiss have imposed upon themselves that then free their guests. You were twenty-three when you arrived here, and I can imagine your enthusiasm.
“But enough of that [you wrote]. I must tell you that I am taking a course in French literature and that there I met … Claudia, I can’t explain what I feel and I won’t even try, because you have always understood me without needing words. Her name is Irene and you can’t imagine how beautiful and clever, how nice she is. She’s studying literature here, and she is French; strange that she is studying the same things you are. Maybe that’s why I liked her immediately. Ha ha.” I think it lasted a month. I don’t remember. It was four years ago. “Marie-José talks too much, but she amuses me. We spent the weekend at Davos and she made me look ridiculous because she is a formidable skier and I’m not worth a damn. They say you have to learn as a child. I confess I got a little uptight and the two of us returned to Geneva Monday as we had left Friday, except that I had a sprained ankle. Isn’t that a laugh?” Then spring came. “Doris is English and she paints. I think she has real talent. We took advantage of the Easter holidays to go to Wengen. She says she makes love to stimulate her subconscious, and she leaps out of bed to paint her gouaches with the white peaks of the Jungfrau before her. She opens the windows and takes deep breaths and paints in the nude while I tremble with cold. She laughs a lot and says that I am a tropical creature with arrested development, and serves me kirsch to warm me up.” I laughed at Doris the whole year they were seeing each other. “I miss her gaiety, but she decided that one year in Switzerland was enough and she left with her paint boxes and her easels to live on Mykonos. So much the better. She amused me, but the kind of woman who interests me is not a woman like Doris.” One went to Greece and another came from Greece. “Sophia is the most beautiful woman I have ever known, I swear it. I know it’s a cliche, but she looks like one of the Caryatids. Although not in the common sense. She is a statue because she can be observed from all angles; I have her turn around, nude, in the center of the room. But the important thing is the air that surrounds her, the space around the statue, do you understand? The space she occupies that permits her to be beautiful. She is dark, she has very thick eyebrows, and tomorrow, Claudia, she is leaving with some rich guy for the Côte d’Azur. Desolate, but satisfied, your brother who loves you, Juan Luis.”