Burnt Water by Carlos Fuentes Page 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.
    â€œBut 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.”
    And Christine, Consuelo, Sonali, Marie-France, Ingrid … The references were ever more brief, ever more disinterested. You became preoccupied with your work and with talking a lot about your friends there, about their national idiosyncrasies, their dealings with you, with meetings and salaries and trips and even retirement benefits. You didn’t want to tell me that that place, like all places, in the end creates its own quiet conventions and that you were falling into the pattern of an international official. Until a postcard arrived with a view of Montreux and your cramped writing telling about a meal in a fabulous restaurant, and lamenting my absence, signed with two signatures, your scrawl, and an illegible—but carefully copied below—Claire.
    Oh yes. You were gauging this one carefully. You didn’t present her like the others. First it was a new job you were going to be recommended for. Then that it was involved with the next meeting of the council. Then, after that, how you enjoyed working with your new friends but that you missed the old ones. Then, that the most