Happy Families by Carlos Fuentes Page B

dances with someone else but looks at me. I’m the only one not wearing tails. I came unexpectedly. I’m dressed as a peasant. I can’t stop looking at her. I get her to look at me. Now we don’t stop looking at each other. Her eyes enslave mine. My eyes magnetize hers. We don’t know if we’re living for an instant or imagining an entire life. When she dances, she’s so graceful, so fresh, so beautiful that measures of time disappear. She is now. She is always. She turns my internal clocks upside down. She concentrates all the time I’ve lived or can live. She makes me feel I don’t need to go anywhere because now I’m here. She is my years, my months, my hours, in a minute. She is my place, all the spaces I’ve traveled through or can travel through. I am no longer divided. I am entire in myself and with her. I don’t need to have her in my arms. The young Cordelia dances with others but looks at me. When I came in, I was an indeterminate man. From now on, she determines me. I understand this in a flash and already begin to hate her. With what right is this woman I don’t even know going to determine me? I argue with myself, struggle against my doubts, I know I desire her, know my desire could be satisfied but still remain desire. I am like an island adrift that would like to unite with a continent. My insular desire can leave me there, surrounded by oceans. It can also unite me with the land I look at from my island and I see beaches strewn with black pearls and impenetrable forests and mountains broken into the steps of terraces and ravines that plunge into the deepest bowels of the earth. All of this I will have to conquer, the country called Cordelia, and once I conquer it, will I stop desiring it? No, I tell myself from the isolated island, from the shore of the dance that she dominates as if the floor were the entire universe, no, I’ll obtain what I desire and will immediately want to dominate what I have desired because there is no gratuitous desire, there is no desire that does not desire to possess and dominate what is desired, make it mine, with no opening whatsoever for any possession that isn’t mine. I desire Cordelia in order to have her first and dominate her immediately because otherwise how do I satisfy my desire? how, if I already possess her, am I going to stop desiring because I already possess? She is my wife. Don’t they call a wife a “ball and chain,” the handcuffs that bind the hands of the fugitive who attempted to steal the object of desire . . . ? The music stops. The lights dim. The orchestra withdraws to the sound of chairs carelessly overturned, feet accelerated by haste, abandoned music stands. The beaux are leaving downhearted, their black lines whipped by the approaching storm sending albino messages to the open-air ballroom. Only she remains in a circle of light that belongs only to her, to Cordelia Ortiz, my future wife, my beautiful prisoner, so no one will take her from me, she is my dream made reality . . .

    WHY DO YOU PERSIST? Leo asks Cordelia and Cordelia responds: Because it is his way of showing me he lives only for me. He doesn’t love himself. He becomes furious with me. Look, I tried to love him, to save him from everything unpleasant . . . I loved him once.
    He hasn’t reciprocated.
    That isn’t the point. The important thing is when I realized that Álvaro could love only me, I decided to put it to the test. To the point where I believed I was mad by my own will. The important thing is that by torturing me, he lives only for me. That’s what counts, Leo. Would you do as much for me?

    LEO DIDN’T SAY A WORD . Leo and Cordelia live together and don’t need to state that they love each other.
    You know my desire is that you don’t ever see him again.
    I know, and that’s why I’m explaining my reasons for going back. Once a month. It’s not too much.
    I won’t say anything, love. You know your game. But to see you come back each month in that