Carlos Fuentes: Happy Families

Don Pedro was fifty-two years old

His compadre Don Félix fifty-four

The baptismal font joined them

Pedro was godfather to Félix’s son

Félix was godfather to Pedro’s daughter

They got together on Sundays for a family barbecue

They were both supporters of the PRI they felt nostalgic for the PRI because with the PRI there was order progress security for people like

Don Pedro and Don Félix

Not now without the PRI

They became annoyed with each other only once

In the line to vote for the PRI

“I got up first”

“You’re wrong I was here before anybody”

“What difference does it make Félix if in the end we’re both voting for the PRI”

“Are you sure Pedro? Suppose I change my vote?”

“But the vote is secret”

“Then don’t get in front of me Félix I got here first get in line compadre asshole”

And the second time was on the highway to Cuernavaca

They were going to celebrate the fifteenth birthday of the daughter of their boss

The undersecretary

But on the curves Félix passed Pedro and Pedro got mad and decided to speed past Félix

And the races began

We’ll see who’s more of a fucker

Félix or Pedro

Who’s more macho

The cars ran side by side

Pedro gives Félix the finger

Félix comes back at Pedro with five insulting blasts on the horn

Shave and a haircut, dum-dum

Pedro pulls his car alongside Félix’s

Félix accelerates

Pedro spits on the steering wheel

Félix feels his macho hormone-amen rising up

Pedro reflects hormones are idiots

The dog lifts his leg and urinates

The dog behind him tries to urinate more than the first one

In the sacred space where men piss

Félix jumps the median

Pedro goes over the cliff

The dogs urinate

They’re served with parsley at the undersecretary’s barbecue.

1. We didn’t talk about “That Woman” in this house. Even her name was forgotten. She was simply “That Woman.” Some crossed themselves when she was mentioned; some sneered; some took offense. It was very difficult to convince the matriarch, Doña Piedad Quiroz de Sorolla, that “That Woman” was no longer here, and Doña Piedita could get out of bed and move around the desolate house in El Desierto de los Leones with no danger of running into the wicked “That Woman.”

“There’s no reason anymore to fulfill your vow, Doña Piedita. You can get up and walk. You can even change your dress.”

Because the “vow” that Widow de Sorolla had imposed on herself consisted of two decisions. First, to take to her bed, and second, to take to her bed dressed without getting up or changing her “clothes” until “That Woman” had left.

The truth is that life was better before, or at least bearable. The big old house in El Desierto, submerged in mourning since the death of the patriarch, Don Fermín Sorolla, revived when the daughter of the family, Ana Fernanda Sorolla, contracted matrimony with a young accountant, Jesús Aníbal de Lillo. The wedding caused a great stir, and everyone remarked on what a good-looking couple they were: Ana Fernanda — tall, very white-skinned, with luxuriant black hair and a suggestive mixture of willfulness and affection in her eyes, lips always partially open to show off her teeth, her Indian cheekbones, high and hard under skin that was so Spanish, and her walk, also intriguing, tip-toeing and stepping hard at the same time — all of which seemed to support as well as complement the serious, dry personality of the bridegroom, as if the severe manner and amiable but distant smile of CPA Jesús Aníbal de Lillo served to toughen the barely “virile” physical beauty of a twenty-seven-year-old man who had kept the look of a beardless adolescent: impeccable skin and pale cheeks on which the long blond mustache could not erase the impression that Jesús Aníbal was a young Asturian Apollo with curly blond hair and a bearing not at all athletic, almost consumed in his refined, patrician physical essence, of ordinary height and only apparent fragility, for in the nakedness of their bedroom — Ana Fernanda discovered it that very night — the young certified public accountant possessed extreme virile potency, proclaiming in words, over and over again, his sexual satisfaction when he fell back naked beside a modest Ana Fernanda rapidly covered by the sheet while her husband declaimed with actions his instantaneous, incessantly renewed sexual hunger.

Ever since he met Ana Fernanda at the celebrated Christmas party of the poet Carlos Pellicer, Jesús Aníbal had felt attracted to her and stifled the ugly thought that the girl was rich, the daughter of a newly rich millionaire who was protected by powerful politicians, recipient of a thousand contracts, and married to a Quiroz of provincial lineage who had been impoverished by the same thing that had enriched her husband: the political changes that invariably translated into favor or disfavor in Mexico. But this time Jesús Aníbal was the pauper allied by marriage to a wealthy family. Wealthy but severely eccentric.

After the wedding, Jesús Aníbal de Lillo would have preferred to leave the ancestral home of the Sorollas in the solitary and perpetually démodé Desierto de los Leones in the far southwest of Mexico City: a steep forest of twisting paths, fragrant pines, and views of Mount Ajusco that startled the spirit with an intrusion so close, gigantic, and uninhabited in plain sight of twenty million residents. He would have preferred to join the modern, secure, and comfortable advance of the city, the urban development in Santa Fe and its tall condominiums on the road to Toluca, with all the amenities nearby: movies, stores, restaurants.

This was impeded by Ana Fernanda’s will. The house in El Desierto de los Leones was where the Sorollas had always lived, her father had died here, her mother would not move from a house identical to her life: old, long, and empty. And Jesús Aníbal shouldn’t even think, not even think, said the young bride, covering his mouth with a perfumed hand viscous and sticky with masculine love, about moving from here, but above all, he absolutely should not think about the death of Doña Piedad since Ana Fernanda would exclude her husband from the nuptial bedroom because that would certainly kill the matriarch, and she, Ana Fernanda, would not allow herself to be touched again by the young bridegroom if he insisted on moving from El Desierto to Santa Fe.

CPA De Lillo, however, not only was very much in love with Ana Fernanda Sorolla but also respected her for that charming mixture of inexperience and will that kept Jesús Aníbal in a state of delectable expectation. What would his wife ask of him this time?

Nothing. This is what the first five years of marriage brought. Nothing. The habit that becomes nothing. From the happy contrasts of their wedding night, the couple was moving to the never-spoken conviction that to love each other, there was no need to talk about love.

“Don’t be so insistent.”

That was the extent of Ana Fernanda’s rejection, when she was fearful of physical contact with Jesús Aníbal after the birth of their daughter, Luisa Fernanda, and the mother had to spend three weeks in bed, grow maddeningly fat, suffer even more to recover her vaunted slenderness, and refuse to have another child, but was obliged by her religious conscience to forbid her husband to use condoms and limit their sexual contact to her safe days according to the rhythm method.