Inez: A Novel by Carlos Fuentes

We never learn. Sex teaches us everything. It’s our fault that we never learn, and again and again fall into the same delicious trap.
    Maybe he could compare Inez’s body to opera itself. Making visible what the absence of the body——body we remember and body we desire—gives us visibly.
    He felt tempted to cover Inez’s exposed sex with the sheet that had been thrown aside, catching light like that from an Ingres or Vermeer open window. He stopped, because tomorrow at rehearsal the music would act as veil for the woman’s nakedness, the music would fulfill its eternal mission of hiding certain objects from view in order to deliver them to the imagination.
    Would music steal words as well, not merely vision?
    Was music the great mask of paradise, the true fig leaf of our shames, the final sublimation—beyond death—of our mortal visibility: body, words, literature, painting? Was only music
abstract, free of visible ties, the purification and illusions of our mortal bodily misery?
    He was watching Inez sleep after the lovemaking he had coveted ever since she had sunk into oblivion and hibernated for nine years in his subconscious. Love as passionate as unpredictable. Gabriel didn’t want to cover her, because he understood that in this instance modesty would be a betrayal. One day very soon, next week, Marguerite would be the victim of the passion of her body, seduced by Faust through the cunning of the great procurer, Mephistopheles, and when she was snatched from hell by the choir of angels that would carry her to heaven, Atlan-Ferrara, given his wish, would opt for daring in his production of Berlioz, he would have the heroine ascend to heaven naked, purified by her nakedness, defiant in her beauty. I sinned, I pleasured, I suffered, I was forgiven, but I will not renounce the glory of my pleasure, the integrity of my freedom as a woman to enjoy sex, I have not sinned, you angels know it, you may be carrying me to paradise grudgingly but you have no choice but to accept the sexual joy I found in the arms of my lover; my body and my pleasure have triumphed over the diabolical pacts of Mephisto and the vulgar carnal appetite of Faust; my woman’s orgasm has defeated two men, my sexual satisfaction has made two men expendable.
    God knows it. The angels know it, and that is why the opera ends with Marguerite’s ascension during the invocation to Mary, whose face I, Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara, would cover with the veil of Veronica … or maybe the hood of the Magdalene.
    An organ-grinder began to play not far from the window where Gabriel was gazing into the Mexican night. Following the sudden rain, the streets gleamed like patent leather, and the perfumes of the cloudburst were disappearing before the onslaught
of sputtering grease, the pungent scent of griddle-warmed tortillas, and the rebirth of the maize of the gods of this land.
    How different these aromas, sounds, hours, and labors from London’s—clouds racing the pale sun, the nearby sea scenting the core of the urban soul, and the cautious but determined step of islanders threatened and protected by their insularity, the blinding green of their parks, the waste of a disdainful river that turns its back to the city … and despite everything, the acrid odor of English melancholy, disguised as cold and indifferent courtesy.
    As if every city in the world made different pacts with day and night, so that nature, briefly but for as long as necessary, might respect the arbitrary collective ruins we call “city,” “the accidental tribe,” as Dostoyevsky described another capital, the yellow doors, lights, walls, faces, bridges, and rivers of Petersburg.
    Inez interrupted Gabriel’s musings, picking up the organ-grinder’s song from where she lay in bed: “You, only you, are the cause for all my tears, for my disillusion and despair …”
     
     
    He addressed the chorus with the energizing certainty that at forty-two he was among the conductors most in