IN FEBRUARY, 2004, the mayor of San Francisco had committed the unpardonable political sin of trying to legalize the union of homosexuals; that galvanized the Christian right to defend “family values.” Preventing gay marriage became the rallying cry of the Republicans during Bush’s reelection campaign that same year. It’s astounding how that issue weighed more heavily in the voting booth than the war in Iraq. The country wasn’t mature enough for an initiative like the mayor’s. He had issued it on a weekend, when the courts were closed, so no judge was able to block the order. The minute the news was announced, hundreds of couples lined up at the city hall, an unending queue in the rain. During the next hours, messages of congratulations poured in and bouquets of flowers carpeted the street. The first couple to be married was two women of eighty-some years, white-haired feminists who had lived together for more than fifty years, and the second was two men, each of whom was carrying a baby in a sling on his chest: adopted twins. The people in that long line wanted a normal life, to raise children, buy a house, inherit from a mate, and be together at the hour of death. No family values there, obviously. Celia and Sally were not part of that throng; they thought that the mayor’s initiative would quickly be declared illegal, which is in fact what happened.
By then it had been a long time since Celia’s brother had left the scene. The strategy of marrying Sally to obtain a U.S. visa had not been effected and he had instead decided to return to Venezuela, where finally he married a pretty young girl, bossy and entertaining, had an enchanting little boy, and found the destiny that had eluded him in the United States. That had allowed Sally and Celia to be legally joined in a “domestic partnership.” I imagine that it would have been a little complicated to explain to the clerks if Sally had “married” two people with the same surname but different sexes. As for the children, who had seen the wedding photo of her and their uncle, not much explanation was required; they understood from the beginning that Sally was only doing him a favor. I think that nothing regarding the family shocks my grandchildren now.
Celia and Sally have become so stable and bourgeois that it’s difficult to recognize them as the daring young women who years before defied society to love each other. They like to go to restaurants, or lie in bed watching their favorite television programs, or organize parties in their tiny home, where they somehow manage to greet a hundred people with food, music, and dancing. One of them is a night owl and the other goes to bed at eight, so their schedules don’t coincide.
“We have to make a date to meet at noon, agendas in hand, or we’d live like friends rather than lovers. Finding moments for intimacy when you have three kids and so much work is a real challenge,” Celia confessed, laughing.
“That’s more information than I need, Celia.”
They remodeled their house, converting the garage into a TV room and a room for Alejandro, who’s at an age when he wants privacy. They have a dog named Poncho, black, easy-going, huge, like the Barrabás of my first novel, who sleeps on the children’s beds by turns, one night with each one. His arrival terrified the two spitfire cats, which fled across the rooftops and were never seen again. When my grandchildren spend the week in their father’s house, an unhappy Poncho throws himself at the foot of the stairs, with soulful eyes awaiting the following Monday.
Celia discovered the passion of her life: mountain biking. Although she’s over forty, she wins prizes in endurance races competing with twenty-year-olds, and she started a small side business leading biking tours: Mountain Biking Marin. Fanatics come from remote places to follow her up rugged trails to the heights.
It’s my opinion that these are two happy women. They work for a living but don’t kill themselves just to make money, and they agree that their priority is the children, at least until they’re grown and independent. I remember the days when Celia used to run, hide, and throw up because she was trapped in a life that wasn’t right for her. They had the good luck to be living in California, at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In a different place and a different time they would have been condemned by implacable prejudices. Here their being gay does not pose a problem even at the girls’ Catholic school; that’s not what defines them. Most of their friends are couples, with children, ordinary, everyday families. Sally unhesitatingly took on the role of housewife, while Celia tends to behave like a caricature of a Latin American husband.
“How do you put up with her, Sally?” I asked once, when I saw her cooking and helping Nicole with her arithmetic lesson while Celia, in her scandalous pants and crazy helmet, went pedaling around mountain trails with tourists.
“Because we have such a good time together,” she replied, stirring the pot.
In this adventure of forming a couple, chance plays a large role, but so does intent. Often during an interview someone will ask me “the secret” of Willie’s and my notable relationship. I don’t know what to answer because I don’t know the formula, if indeed there is one, but I always remember something I learned from a composer and his wife who visited us. They were in their sixties but they looked young, strong, and filled with enthusiasm. This musician explained that they had married—or, more accurately, renewed their commitment—seven times during their long life together. They had met when they were university students, fallen in love at first sight, and had been together for more than four decades. They had passed through various stages, and in each one they had changed and been near the point of separating but had opted to review their relationship. Following each crisis, they had decided to stay married a little longer, for they discovered that they still loved each other even though they were not the same persons they’d been before. “In all, we have gone through seven marriages and no doubt there are more to come. It isn’t the same thing to be a couple when you are raising children, with no money and no time, as when you are in your mature years, established in your profession, and expecting your first grandchild,” he said. He told us, as an example, that in the 1970s, at the height of the hippie madness, they had lived in a commune with twenty idle young people; he was the only one who was working; the others spent the day in a cloud of marijuana smoke, playing the guitar, and reciting in Sanskrit. One day he grew tired of supporting them and kicked them out of the house. That had been a crucial moment when he, with his wife, had had to revise the rules of the game. Then came the materialistic stage of the 1980s, which nearly destroyed their love because they were both running after success. On that occasion, too, they had opted to make basic adjustments and start over again. And so it went, again and again. It seems to me that theirs is a formula that’s right on the mark, and one Willie and I have had to put into practice more than once.