Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

Jesús Aníbal didn’t know whether to laugh or be angry when he found Ana Fernanda lying on the bed, scissors in hand, cutting off the tips of the collection of condoms that the misguided young husband had brought to the house in order to combine safety and pleasure.

“The Church forbids these nasty things.”

The husband loved his wife. He did not want to find defects in her. He had no reason to be surprised. He had always known that Ana Fernanda was a devout Catholic. He had accepted this, and if he thought he could “cut it away” one day, it did not take him long to realize that in his wife’s spirit, her love of God had precedence over her love of Jesús, no matter how ironic or crude that might sound, to the point where, on fixed days, when she accepted his favors, Ana Fernanda stopped exclaiming “Jesús Jesús” and began to say “Aníbal Aníbal” or simply “my love.”

“At least call me Chucho,” the genial husband said with a smile one night.

“You’re blasphemous. That’s a dog’s name,” Ana Fernanda said before turning her back to say the rosary, then facing Jesús Aníbal again only to conclude with precision: “Don’t be stupid. Loving means not talking about love.”

Jesús Aníbal didn’t mind the daily trek from El Desierto to his office at Insurgentes and Medellín. There was no distance in Mexico City that did not require at least an hour of patience. If anything tested national stoicism, it was urban traffic. He listened to music. He bought cassettes of poetry in Spanish and felt the birth in his spirit of something that was his own but latent. He thought. Sometimes, thanks to Garcilaso or Cernuda, he even dreamed possible dreams: that Ana Fernanda would finally give in before the evidence of her husband’s affection and accept the normality of matrimony but not separate it from physical pleasure. Impossible dreams: that Ana Fernanda would agree to leave the decrepit, uncomfortable, gloomy old house in El Desierto. Forbidden dream: that the acerbic, closed Doña Piedita would pass from this life to a better one.

Ana Fernanda was not entirely unaware of Jesús Aníbal’s unspoken aspirations. As the years went by, the house in El Desierto was growing not only older but more unrepairable, a leak here announced a damp wall there, a creaking floor in one place foretold a collapsed roof in another, and the old woman kept a fierce hold on life, though Jesús Aníbal began to think that once his mother-in-law was dead, his wife would inherit her manias, and just as the memory of the deceased patriarch, Don Fermín, kept them tied to El Desierto, Doña Piedita would pass on to a better life but not Ana Fernanda and Jesús Aníbal: The big family house tied them to the past and to the future.

Jesús Aníbal would come home from work and enter the desolation of an enormous living room, empty except for a piano that no one played and a good number of chairs placed along the walls. No pictures were hung, and the glass doors opened on a damp, untamable courtyard that seemed to grow according to its own desires and in opposition to all the efforts of the gardener.

Then the husband thought of something that would banish solitude and authorize repairs.

“To what end?” his old mother-in-law said with a sigh. “Houses should be like people, they grow old and die. . This is an old, lived-in house. Let people see that.”

“Ana Fernanda, don’t we have friends, the people who came to the wedding, relatives? Wouldn’t you like to invite them here once in a while?”

“Ay, Jesús Aníbal, you know that taking care of Mama uses up not only my time but my desire for parties.”

“The people who came to the wedding. They seemed nice. Friends.”

“They weren’t friends. They were acquaintances. ”

“Relatives?”

Ana Fernanda seemed surprised that her husband, for once, had an acceptable idea. Of course they had kin, but they were very scattered. Puebla and Veracruz, Sonora and Sinaloa, Monterrey and Guadalajara, every family who came to the capital came from somewhere else but put down roots in the city, the systoles and diastoles of the internal migration in the nation determined by wars, revolutions armed, agrarian, and industrial, the long nomadic border in the north, the muddy, wild border to the south, the poles of development, ambition, and resignation, love and hate, unkept promises and persistent vices, yearnings for security and challenges to insecurity.

This was how, Jesús Aníbal thought on his daily viacrucis along the Periférico Highway, the country had been made, and inviting distant family members was upright, it was entertaining, it was instructive, since all of them had gone through experiences that satisfied the lively curiosity of the young, unsatisfied husband who was eager as well to dilute to the maximum his own Basque inheritance and not think again about gachupín or indiano, the words for Spaniard in America. Take a bath in Mexicanism.

He had the reception rooms repaired, and the relatives began to arrive, with the cooperative enthusiasm of Ana Fernanda, who hadn’t thought of a pretext, as she said, to “show off a little bit,” fix up the house, and, in passing, free herself from the enslaving excuse of her mother.

And so the old Jaliscan uncle was constructing a family tree before the last Quiroz, that is to say, himself, disappeared. And the young nephew from Monterrey had created a center for technological development in the north. And the enterprising niece who was an executive in Sonora had joined a conglomerate of businesses in California. And Aunt Chonita from Puebla had arthritis, and it was hard for her to go every afternoon to say the rosary in the beautiful Soledad Church with its no less beautiful tiled dome, as she had been in the habit of doing for the past forty years. And her sister, Purificación, had died of indigestion from an orgy of marzipan, ham, candied sweet potatoes, and other delicacies of Pueblan pastry-making — and who told her to do that? — after a ten-day ecclesiastical fast in honor of the Holy Infant of Atocha. And (distant) Cousin Elzevir was on the run from Matamoros because of who knew what trouble with skirts or drugs or contraband, who can tell with somebody as disreputable as him. And the Sorolla twins from Sinaloa were looking for a singer to form a trio in Mazatlán. And Cousin Valentina Sorolla came from Morelia Michoacán to visit them, which was very unusual since she was known to be a reclusive spinster who did not even go to Mass though she did go to the bank punctually for the monthly allowance left to her by her miserly father, Don Amílcar.

“I’ll bet she prays to Saint Anthony to get married. She must be over forty by now,” said the Sonoran niece.

“Cousin Valentina was supposed to become a nun, but she didn’t have the vocation,” remarked the cousin from Monterrey.

Jesús Aníbal thought he had found in this lengthy parade of scattered clans the way to enliven the spirit of the big old house in El Desierto, learning in passing the peculiarities of related families and creating a pedigree for himself that saved him from an incestuous relationship between the Asturians and his beloved Basque country.

And so they call Aunt Teófila from Guadalajara 09 because she complains all day on the telephone. And the Quiroz family from Veracruz spends the entire day listening to boleros on a jukebox, all of them together as if they were at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, imagine. And Aunt Gudula from San Luis Potosí swears her house is a bijou, she’s so vulgar. And Uncle Parménides from Mérida is such a kid that at night he runs past barracks so the soldiers will shout “Halt! Halt!” at him.

These anecdotes were accompanied by a chorus of laughter from the family visitors on duty.