were nonexistent, leading us to one of two conclusions: Either Don Nazario was out-and-out wrong, or he was treating us in a manner that would not offend but did save him from the possible mistake of owing us something and having forgotten it.
In any event, the confusion passed as rapidly as the speed with which Senor Esparza, radiating cordiality, pushed us forward and repeated the ceremony of the joyous, grateful embrace with the guests behind us, freeing us from the welcome of his wife, Dona Estrellita, who was there, no doubt about that, we saw her, we greeted her, though at the same time she was absent, hidden by the powerful presence of her husband as well as by a desire for invisibility that duplicated, in a certain sense, the desire to disappear altogether.
Was the attire of the mistress of the house the result of her own taste or an imposition by her husband? If the second, we were approaching uxoricide. The lady seemed dressed, if not to go to heaven or hell, then to inhabit a gray limbo, as gray as her mouse-colored tailored suit, her eternal cotton stockings replaced by old-style nylons, her low-heeled shoes by ones of patent leather with ankle straps. Her discomfort at standing on line and receiving in public was so evident that it immediately classified her husband as a sadist who, when he saw her from time to time, would say with a ferocious look, utterly foreign to his affability as host:
“Laugh, you idiot! Don’t make me look bad!”
Patently clear because Senora Estrella gave forced smiles and looked for approval in the eyes of a husband who did not need to look at her: He dominated her, we realized, through pure anticipatory habit. Dona Estrellita knew that if she didn’t do one thing or another, she would have to pay dearly when the guests had left.
I confess that my understandable fascination with the couple separated me from the rest of the crowd, which was dissolving behind a veil of noises, inaudible conversations, the clink of glasses, and the passing of canapes offered by a short, dark-skinned waiter costumed in a striped shirtfront. I could not help admiring the discipline of Errol’s mother in playing the part of the present absent woman. In her fixed, dead eyes there appeared from time to time a lightning flash that commanded her:
“Obey.”
I don’t believe it was difficult for her to do so. She knew she was easy to ignore, and I suppose that from the time she was young her comments, timid in and of themselves, were extinguished to the beat of her husband’s brutal orders, shut up, don’t play the fool, you’re always out of place. Why worry about it?
“Leave the zoo, guys. Let’s go to the den,” said Errol. “My refuge.”
The “den” was the disordered room we had already seen. Errol took off his jacket and invited us to do the same.
“After what you’ve seen, do you feel capable of betting everything on art and philosophy?”
I think we laughed. Errol didn’t give us the chance to respond. Sprawled on the most comfortable armchair in his shirtsleeves, legs spread, he freed himself of tasseled loafers and seized a guitar as if it were the willing waist of an obedient woman.
“You’d be better off getting into politics. Let’s hope you can find a path between what you want to be and what society permits you.”
I was going to answer. Errol did not allow himself to be interrupted.
“Or are you suddenly going to wager on destiny?”
He held up a hand to silence us.
“Just imagine, I’ve already bet on a destiny.”
He observed us; we were polite and interested.
He told us, without our asking, that even though we didn’t believe him, once-a long time ago-Nazario and Estrellita might have loved each other. At what moment did they stop? What would you call the night he no longer desired her, or didn’t see her as young anymore, and she knew he was watching her grow old? In the beginning everything was very different, Errol elaborated, because my mother Estrella was a convent girl and my father wanted a wife without blemish-that’s what it’s called-because in his life he had known only sluts, and whores know how to deceive. With Estrella there was no doubt. She traveled from the convent to the bed of her lord and master, who used her up in one night, demonstrating to her that he didn’t care a fig about convents-that was his outmoded expression-and it would be better if his wife, being chaste, behaved like a whore to please a macho like Nazario Esparza.
Her family handed over Estrellita, received a check and some properties, and never concerned themselves about her again. Who were they? Who knows. They charged a good price to give her, chaste and pure, to a voracious, ambitious husband. The passion ended, though sometimes he looked at her with an intense absence. It wasn’t enough to avoid the repetition of the same battle every night, when Estrella still retained a shred of courage and dignity that served only to infuriate Nazario. The same battle every night until they found the reason for the next dispute, which was to postpone the obligation of sex that she needed not only as something new but because of the chaste obligation of the matrimonial sacrament and that he, perhaps, wanted to put off because of a strange feeling that in this way he was honoring the virginity of his wife, though it was clear to him that Estrella had come to the marriage bed intact and if she was impure, he had been the reason. None of this endured or had too much importance. He was plunging into a gross vulgarity, which Jerico and I had observed that night and Errol now expanded on for us.
“I loved her ten thousand enchiladas ago” was the husband’s response.
She took refuge in the renunciation of sex in the name of religion and set up a pious little shrine in the matrimonial bedroom that Nazario wasted no time in getting rid of with a swipe of his hand, leaving Estrellita resigned to finally seeing herself one night as her husband saw her. She no longer looked young to herself and was certain she looked like an old woman to him.
“Ten thousand enchiladas ago, while she prayed on her knees: ‘Neither for vice nor fornication. It is to make a child in Thy holy service.’ ”
She replaced the saints with pictures of Errol Flynn, whose erotic proclivities were unknown to both Estrellita and Nazario.
“Do you know what?” Errol continued. “I bet I can have a destiny that lets me overthrow my father. Do you like that word? Don’t we hear it every day in history class? Tom took up arms and overthrew Dick hoping that Harry would overthrow somebody else and so forth and so on. Is that history, dudes? A series of overthrows? Maybe so.”
He seemed to take a breath and say: “Maybe so. Maybe not…”
Without letting go of the guitar, he raised his glass: “I bet I can have a destiny that overthrows my father’s. Overthrowing a destiny, as if it were a throne. Maybe so! Suddenly! Or maybe not…”
He stretched out his arm and played the guitar, beginning to sing, very appropriately, the ballad of the disobedient son:
“Out of the way, father, I’m wilder than a big cat, don’t make me fire a bullet that’ll go straight through your heart…”
Voices rose, angry and gruff, in the hall between the Versailles salon and the refuge where we were sitting.
“Are you crazy? Give me that camera.”
“Nazario, I only wanted-”
“It doesn’t matter what you wanted, you’ve made me look ridiculous taking pictures of my guests! That’s all I needed!”
“
“It’s also your nothing, you old idiot.”
“You’re to blame. I don’t like receiving. I don’t like standing on that line. You do it just to-”
“If you did it well, you wouldn’t humiliate me. You’re the one who makes me look ridiculous. Taking pictures of my guests!”
“What does-?”
“You can blackmail somebody with a photograph. Don’t you realize?”
“But they all appear on the society pages.”
“Yes, you moron, but not in my house, not associated with
“I don’t understand…”
“Well, you should, you fool!”
Errol stood up and hurried to the hallway. He put himself between Nazario and Estrella.
