“I beg you. For me. Please.”
Rossetti yielded with a disdainful shrug of his shoulders. “This is the last time you will set foot in my house, Maldonado.”
“I’m aware of that. It’s fine with me. Sorry.”
The servant returned Bernstein’s glasses to him, and with them, the professor’s lost face. Bernstein patted Felix’s shoulder paternally. From the professor’s fat finger, the water-clear stone in his ring sparked pinpoints of light.
“Our host is very Italian, even though four generations of his family have lived in Mexico. The Italians understand nothing of the old or the new, only the eternal. They find the accidents of history inconsequential, even laughable. Rossetti doesn’t understand that we Jews are parricides, while all Mexicans are filicides. In Christ we tried to kill the Father, terrified that we might find the Messiah incarnate in a usurper. This makes sense, especially if you consider that each time a Redeemer appears, our destruction hangs in the balance. On the other hand, Mexicans wish only to kill their sons. What tortures you is the idea of offspring. Any form of continuation serves as proof of your degeneration and bastardy. No, Mauricio doesn’t know these things. There are many things Mauricio doesn’t know. My image is too paternal for you to want to kill me, isn’t that right, Sara?”
“You are my lover,” Sara spoke in a sterile tone. “What do you want me to say?”
Bernstein looked straight at Felix, neither smiling nor in triumph.
“You would never kill your father, Felix, that’s what our poor little Mauricio cannot understand. You would kill only your sons. Am I wrong?”
A devastated Felix glanced toward Sara, but then, to avoid her eyes, studied the painting by Ricardo Martínez over the fireplace. Massive forms, Indians squatting in the middle of a cold and windswept plain with swirling mists nibbling at the outline of human contours.
Finally he spoke. “Then I deserve to get what everyone else is getting.”
“Poor Felix,” said Sara. “You were never vulgar as a young man.”
Bernstein interrupted his protective patting and, still smiling, pressed his face dangerously close to Sara’s.
“I warned you not to come,” said the fat man with the ring as watery as his eyes.
“Poor Felix,” Sara repeated, and touched the hand of the man who loved her. “Now you know that I am like all your women. Poor Felix.”
“That’s a laugh.” Abruptly, Felix burst out laughing. He laughed till he was doubled over, and finally had to support himself by grasping the edge of the mantelpiece decorated with reproductions of tiny sixth-century Jaina figurines. “What a joke! Mary turns out to be the only woman I haven’t laid a hand on in at least ten years. A lifetime, right? Mary, Miss Mary Hotpants, will have to be my ideal woman from now on. I give you my word never to go to bed with Mary.”
“He’s crazy.” Sara’s composure had vanished. “Bernstein, do something. Remind this imbecile that he never touched me, and he never shall. He’s going to go around telling everyone that Mary’s the only woman he hasn’t had in the last ten years.”
“I just spent five minutes mentally fornicating with you,” Felix told Sara. “Why, Sara? And why Bernstein, of all people?”
“May I tell him, Bernstein?” Sara glanced toward the professor to ask his permission. The professor nodded, but the exchange infuriated Felix, and once again he was on the point of yanking off his former professor’s eyeglasses.
“Don’t treat me as if I were a fool,” Felix said to the two. He would have to get used to them as a couple. How disgusting. How ridiculous. To think that he’d tried to demean his poor Ruth, so loyal, so noble …
“Like the newspapers…” the professor tried to interject.
“Oh, sure,” Felix cut him off. “We’ve been going to political breakfasts for ten years, Professor. Before that, you were my instructor in the history of economic theories at the university. Sure I know.”
“The truth isn’t found in the texts of Charles Gide and Charles Rist,” Bernstein joked weakly.
“I like to tie up loose ends. I know you’ve served the cause of those who track down war criminals. I know that. Men who flush the Nazis from their burrows in Paraguay and then place them in glass cages for judgment. And Sara went to live in Israel twelve years ago. You go to Israel twice a year. Right? It fits together perfectly. Where’s the mystery?”
“The word ‘mystery,’ my dear Felix, has many synonyms,” Bernstein replied with perfect equanimity.
A long, long moment of silence passed. Felix took note of Sara’s grimace and Bernstein’s silent plea: let’s drop it here, let Maldonado believe this, let him believe whatever he wants, what importance does Felix Maldonado have, anyway? Sara tugged at Bernstein’s sleeve, but the professor removed her hand affectionately. Angelica Rossetti decided to speed things along, and invited the guests to come in to dinner. She glared with undisguised displeasure at Felix, as she would at a cockroach unworthy of eating the cannelloni set out on the buffet table.
“Won’t you come in, Sara?”
Bernstein escorted the mistress of the house into the colonial dining room, and Sara Klein, arms crossed, leaned against the mantelpiece. Maldonado realized it was the first time since he’d entered the room that she’d changed position. An oppressive dankness rose from the living-room floor in spite of the fire. Homage to the cold stone floor, the proximity of the garden attempting to penetrate the house through the French doors, the mud after the rain, the waterlogged desert plants, a monstrous dampness.
Sara Klein stroked the hand of her old friend, and Felix felt warmth and life returning to him. He dared not look at her, but he knew once again that he truly loved her, and would always love her, whether she was near or far, pure or sullied. Now he understood. As long as he had known her, he had falsified his feeling about Sara Klein. The truth lay in admitting that he loved her, and that he didn’t care who possessed her. It was no longer Felix or no one.
Sara saw what was passing through his eyes. “Felix, do you remember the time we celebrated your twentieth birthday together?”
Felix nodded. Sara stroked his cheeks and cradled in her hands Felix’s curl-ringed, dark-skinned, slim, virile, moustached, Moorish face.
Sara had said that all celebrations are sad. She remembered very few that had really been celebrations, and many that could not be held because the dates were there but the people were not any longer.
“You were sad on that birthday. We went dancing. It was fourteen years after the war. You set yourself the task of teaching me everything I’d missed. Films and books. Songs and styles. Dances and automobiles. I’d missed all that as a child in Germany. Then the orchestra began to play Kurt Weill, the theme song from the Dreigroschenoper. Louis Armstrong had made it popular again, you remember? And something very strange happened. The twenty years of your life, my childhood in Germany, that song united us magically, as nothing had before.”
“‘Mack the Knife,’ I remember.”
“You were telling me about a song in vogue in 1956, and I remembered that it was one my parents used to hum. They had a version recorded by Lotte Lenya before the war, before the persecution. A poor, scratched record. Everything joined together to make your melancholy authentic. We were infected by sadness that night. You told me something, do you remember?”
“How could I forget, Sara? That one’s death begins with his twentieth birthday.”