Carlos Fuentes - Distant Relations

Professions deform one; archaeology is no exception. I spoke more with the stones than with my wife and my sons, Antonio and Victor. I had to travel constantly and our apartment on Río Garona Street became little more than a pied-à-terre for me. I met my wife Lucie in the French Institute of Latin America, that urban oasis on Río Nazas Street where my entire generation went to learn about film, literature, and, above all, about the civilization we thought it our personal responsibility to sustain during the years France was in eclipse. The first thing Lucie pointed out to me was that everything I told her about my ancestors was marked by that strange love for France which supposedly saves us Latin Americans from our ancient subordination to Spain and our more recent subordination to the Anglo-Saxon world. France seems like a safe and longed-for haven. Lucie was from one of the families of Barcelonnette in the Basses-Alpes who traditionally emigrated to Mexico. Her family made a fortune there in department stores, and now, as so often happens, she was atoning for the commercial sins of her ancestors by studying history and literature at the Institute. It was natural for us to meet, to fall in love, to marry.

I owe her a great deal. Unlike me, she found nothing shameful in business enterprises; she had no such pride or pretensions. She complemented my formation, my culture; French reason is a good antidote to Latin American delirium. It is also its incubator, and Lucie delighted in reminding me that my country had fought a revolution for independence because a few men had read Rousseau and Voltaire, an enlightened counterrevolution because a few others had read Comte, and a new intellectual revolution inspired by Bergson. I leave to you your opinion of the success of these ideological transplants. But I confess to you, Branly, that Lucie’s perception, her discipline, her capacity for work, were the goad to one of my own ambitions, my decision to read everything, to know everything, to find the interrelationships of all I had learned, and not to succumb to our century’s gangrenous absurdity, which in the business world, in the very same trade that enriched my wife’s parents — and, because they were grand hidalgos and never learned how to exercise it, impoverished my own — is today translated into mercilessly divorcing the past from the present, with the proposition that the past must always be something dead and we always something new, something different from that much-to-be-scorned past — new, and consequently thirsting for the latest innovation in art, clothing, entertainment, machines. Novelty has become the blazon of our happiness. So we drug ourselves against the realization that our destiny, too, will be death, the moment the future relegates us to the past.

No, I did not often speak with my family; I communicated to them only the lesson of the stones. I may never have known anything but the stones; this is my guilt, but I have purged it. Lucie applauded the “good lesson” of the stones, as she called it: the sense of the past, the obstinate refusal to sacrifice, to exile the past from a present that is incomprehensible except within the context of the past. This aspect of my work delighted her. But not what she came to call the “bad lesson” of the stones: the conviction that we belonged to a superior caste endowed with innate privileges that entitled us to reclaim the authority usurped from us by a world of parvenus.

Lucie was highly intelligent, and she feared my attitude, she said, because on our continent oppression went to even greater lengths than in Europe. The Europeans exploited peoples of distant lands and were able, without undue effort, to forget about them. We had our victims in our own homes, in ever-increasing numbers. They are the only palpable ghosts I know, my wife used to say: we see them begging in the streets, sleeping on garbage heaps, daggers of glass crystallizing in their resentful gaze.

“One day you will feel that guilt, Hugo,” she used to tell me. “That good European conscience has a great deal to do with the remoteness of its victims. The day will come when the presence of the humbled among us will make it impossible to sleep.”

Antonio was close to his mother and listened to her teachings; Victor was my favorite, and he learned mine. Believe me, Branly, when I say that those were the true and spontaneous motives for the fact that more and more often Victor accompanied me on my constant trips to the work sites. In doing so, he learned more about our country than Antonio, and I cannot deny that I did nothing to extinguish the spark of domination and hatred in his eyes when he saw what he had to see: entire villages of drunken men, women, and children: the men drunk because of the fiesta, the women because of pain, the infants because they suckled alcohol with their milk; the devout humiliation of Mexican churches, the incense haze of indistinguishable misery and faith; the pillage, the cruelty against man that is the watchword of the Mexican countryside. He scorned the people; he admired the stones, and in the latter, the “good lesson,” he coincided with his mother and his brother.

One night I surprised my two sons as they were playing a strange game. Remember, they shared the “good lesson” of a finely developed respect for the past, and, in truth there is no past without the sense of play that keeps it fresh. They were wagering on something. I felt a shiver when I understood on what. They were wagering on our deaths theirs, and ours.

“Who do you think will die first?” asked Toño.

“Most likely it will be Father and me,” said Victor. “You should see the little planes we take in the mountains.”

“I promise that Mother and I will cry a lot,” Toño answered.

“Father and me, too,” said Victor.

I spoke with Lucie about their game. We decided, if decided is the word, to vary our responsibilities. We thought it morbid that the boys should identify their own deaths with that of one of their parents. They were right about one thing, however: the two of us should never travel together and thus expose Victor and Antonio to being orphaned. For my part, I would begin taking Antonio with me on some of the trips to explore the villages in the isolated mountains and barrancas of Mexico. I was an only child. My own parents were dead, and Lucie’s parents, in spite of her efforts to maintain contact and visit them regularly, lived in remote French indifference. We told our friends this was a decision we had made when Victor was born. No one was surprised; some praised our foresight. No one remembered, you see, that occasionally three of us had traveled together — Lucie, one of the children, and I — exposing the other child to being the sole survivor of the family. But if we ourselves forget the logical order of our lives, how can we expect others to remember? In fact, Branly, this is the very essence of my profession: to reverse to some degree that amnesia about ourselves, that oblivion to what we were, to what our parents and our grandparents were, the nothingness that evokes the reluctant phantom that appears to tell us: this is what you were, this is what your people were; you have forgotten. The very mission of a ghost is to rectify the forgetfulness of the living, their injustice toward the dead.

Our decision to travel separately is common among families today, and Victor was right; the planes in which anthropologists hop from Palenque to San Cristobal, penetrate the sierras of Guerrero, or skim the ravines of Nayarit and Morelos, are as reliable as mosquitoes in a hurricane. Because in Mexico, Branly, even when nature is at rest, it seems to tremble threateningly. Bottomless chasms, slabs of solid basalt, treacherous peaks, the crosswinds of this delirious orography, the unexpected deserts, the thousands of pyramids disguised as innocuous hills. You are looking at them now where we find ourselves this evening.