Burnt Water by Carlos Fuentes Page B

difficult thing was getting used to the document officials who didn’t know your work habits. Finally, that you had had the luck to work with a “compatible” official, and in the next letter: her name is Claire. And three months before, you had sent me the postcard from Montreux. Claire, Claire, Claire.
    I answered: “Mon ami Pierrot.” So you weren’t going to be honest with me any more. How long has it been Claire? I wanted to know everything, I demanded to know everything. Juan Luis, hadn’t we been best friends before we were brother and sister? You didn’t write for two months. Then came an envelope with a snapshot inside. The two of you with the tall jet of a fountain behind you, and the lake in summertime; you and she leaning against the railing. Your arm around her waist. She, so cute, her arm resting on a flower-filled stone urn. But it wasn’t a good snapshot. It was difficult to decide about Claire’s face. Slim and smiling, yes, a kind of Marina Vlady, slimmer but with the same smooth long blond hair. Low heels. A sleeveless sweater. Cut low.
    You admitted it without explaining anything. First the letters relating facts. She lived in a pension on the rue Emile Jung. Her father was an engineer, a widower, and he worked in Neuchâtel. You and Claire were going swimming together at the beach. You had tea at La Clémence. You saw old French films in a theater on the rue Mollard. Saturdays you had dinner at the Plat d’Argent and each of you paid his own check. During the week, you ate in the cafeteria of the Palace of Nations. Sometimes you took the tram and went to France. Facts and names, names, names, like a guidebook: Quai des Berges, Gran’ Rue, Cave à Bob, Gare de Cornavin, Auberge de la Mère Royaume, Champelle, Boulevard des Bastions.
    Later conversations. Claire’s preference for certain films, certain books, concerts, and more names, that river of nouns in your letters ( Drôle de Drame and Les Enfants du Paradis, Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Radiguet, Schumann and Brahms), and then Claire says, Claire thinks, Claire feels. Carné’s characters live their freedom as if it were a shameful conspiracy. Fitzgerald invented the modes, the gestures, and the disillusion that continue to nourish us. The German Requiem celebrates all profane deaths. Yes, I replied. Orozco has died, and there is an enormous retrospective in the Bellas Artes. And so on, round and round, all of it written out, as I had asked you.
    â€œEvery time I listen to you, I say to myself that it’s as if we realized that we need to consecrate everything that up till now has been condemned, Juan Luis; to turn things inside out. Who mutilated us, my love? There’s so little time to recover everything that has been stolen from us. No, I’m not suggesting anything, you know. Let’s not make plans. I believe as Radiguet does that the unconscious maneuvers of a pure soul are even more singular than all the possible combinations of vice.”
    What could I answer? Nothing new here, Juan Luis. Papa and Mama are very sad that you won’t be here with us for their silver wedding anniversary. Papa has been promoted to vice president of the insurance company and he says that’s his best anniversary present. Mama, poor thing, invents some new illness every day. The first television station is broadcasting. I’m studying for finals for my junior year. I dream a little about everything that’s happening to you; I pretend to myself I get it out of books. Yesterday I was telling Federico everything you’re doing and seeing and reading and hearing, and we think perhaps if we pass our exams we could come visit you. Aren’t you planning to come back someday? You could during your next vacation, couldn’t you?
    You wrote that fall was different now you were with Claire. On Sundays you often went for walks, holding hands, in silence; the scent of decaying