Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

“God has given us everything because we’re very poor,” my father would say.

Go to the market, Señora Vanina, and try to hear Castilian in that murmur of Indian voices, which are high but sweet. They are bird voices, Señora, Zapoteca voices filled with tlanes and tepecs. We speak Castilian only to offer goods to the customers who visit us, dear customer, two pesos a dozen, this cheese shreds all by itself it’s so delicious. . Señora, you say we all come from somewhere else, and that’s true. When I was a little boy, I began to play with colors and papers from the amate tree and then to paint on white amate wood and invent little pictures, then bigger ones, until my honored father said take them to the market, José Nicasio, and I did and began to sell my little paintings. Until the distinguished professor from the city of Oaxaca saw what I was doing and said this boy has talent and took me to live in the city (with the permission of my honored father) and there I grew up learning to read and write and paint with so much joy, Señora, as if I myself had been amate paper or an adobe wall that gradually is covered with lime and maguey sap until the wall of earth is transformed into something as soft and smooth as a woman’s back. . It wasn’t easy, Señora, don’t think that. Something in me was always pulling back to the village, the way they say a nanny goat pulls back to the mountains. My new happiness wasn’t enough to make me forget my old happiness as a boy with no literature, no Castilian, barefoot with no clothes except drill trousers and a threadbare white shirt and mud-caked huaraches. And another white shirt stiff with starch and carefully pressed black trousers and shoes once a week so I could go to Mass like a respectable person. . Now, in the city, I was a respectable person, I was being educated, I read, I went to school, I knew people who had come from Mexico City and friends who would visit the distinguished professor’s studio. But I swear to you that an enormous piece of my soul was still tied to the life I left behind, the village, the market, the noise of donkeys and pigs and turkeys, the straw sleeping mats, cooking in the fireplace, poor stews, rich aromas. . Except when I returned to the village on Sundays and feast days, it was like offending those who stayed behind, throwing it in their faces that I could leave and they couldn’t. I swear it isn’t just a silly suspicion. One day I went back out of sheer feeling, Señora, what you people call “nostalgia,” and at first nobody recognized me, but when word got around,

“It’s José Nicasio, he’s come back,”

some looked at me with so much rancor, others with greed, most of them with distance, Señora, that I decided never to go back to the place I came from. But can we cut ourselves off forever from our roots? Isn’t there something left that hurts us, the way they say an amputated arm continues to hurt. .? I couldn’t return to my village. I could only return to the ruins of my village and from there calmly observe a world that was mine but no longer acknowledged me. The world before the world.

José Nicasio: Thank you for your letter. Thank you for having taken the time to answer me. What am I saying, when I received your message, I thought that man has all the time in the world. Will he learn to be patient? I asked myself from the beginning. Will he be able to hear me? Will he have a residue of tenderness, a thread of intelligence, to understand why I am writing to him? I believe so. I read your letter, José Nicasio, and believe I understand that you do. I also believe you are a rascal, furbo, as we say in Italy, sharp, as you say here in Mexico. You trumped me. You told me where you came from, the mix of luck and effort that got you out of your village and took you to the city and to success. José Nicasio: How unsatisfied you leave me. I understand you less than ever. I agonize trying to comprehend your behavior. I hope you’re not offended if I tell you that as far as I’m concerned, your letter was never received. What interests me is your knowing who my daughter, Alessandra, was. I confess with some guilt that I had little patience where you were concerned. But I realize that if I write so you’ll know who my daughter was, I’ll have to put up with your telling me who you are. . I told you we all come from somewhere else. You from an indigenous community in Oaxaca. My family, from the European exile that followed the Civil War in Spain. My father was a Republican. He didn’t have time to escape. He ended up in prison and was shot by the fascists. My northern Italian mother, from Turin, could not leave her husband’s grave behind without even knowing where they had thrown his body.

“All of Spain is a graveyard,” she said and disappeared into the lands of Castile. I never heard from her again. A Mexican diplomat put me in a group of orphaned children, and we set sail for Veracruz. I reached the age of twelve, and a family of Spanish merchants adopted me. I married their son, who by now was completely Mexican. Diego Ferrer. A businessman. Alessandra was born of that union. You saw her. Her long honey-colored hair. Her Italian profile, with its long, slender nose, her eyes of Lombard mist, her waist that can be encircled by the fingers of two hands. . She was distinctive. It was as if the ancestors, the dead of the house in Italy, were resurrected in her. . Physically, she resembled my mother. But her spirit was her grandfather’s. My husband watched her with astonishment as she grew. José Nicasio, Alessandra was a woman of extraordinary intelligence. She made such rapid progress in her studies that she surpassed the top student. Her calling was philosophy, literature, art, the universe of culture. Her father, my husband, looked at her with suspicion, with disbelief. Alessandra didn’t marry. Or rather, she was married to the world of esthetic forms. Like you? Yes, but just imagine how different. She was born into a comfortable family. Do you believe that coming like you from a very low point brings greater merit to the effort to ascend? You’re wrong. When you’re born at a high point, the temptation to let yourself drift, se laisser aller, is very strong. Fighting comfort is more difficult than struggling against poverty. You had to achieve what you didn’t have. She had to move away from what she already had. . Her father, my husband, was apprehensive. He wanted a “normal” daughter who would go out dancing and meet boys of her own class, marry, give him grandchildren. He didn’t have the courage to tell her this. My daughter’s gaze was so strong it forbade familiarity, at home and away from home. Her eyes said to all of us,

“Don’t come close. I love you very much, but I’m fine alone. Accept me as I am.”

Diego, my husband, was not resigned. To “normalize” her, he called her Sandy, imagine, as if my daughter worked at McDonald’s. Sandy! She was baptized Alejandra, but to emphasize her difference and irritate my husband, I always called her Alessandra.

It’s true. Alessandra didn’t participate, she didn’t make friends, she lived enclosed in a balloon of culture. She used familiar address with the thinkers and artists of the past. It made me laugh to hear her speak not only of Michelangelo and Raphael but of Marcel or Virginia as if they were her intimate friends.

I defended my daughter’s solitude. Her self-sufficiency. And above all, her promise. I told my husband, “If Alessandra does what you want and marries and has children, she’ll be a superior mother and spouse, not an ordinary, run-of-the-mill housewife.” At times my husband found consolation. The moment would come when Alejandra—“Sandy”—would settle down and lead a “normal life.” But for me, her normality was to be how she was, a voracious reader, endlessly eager to know, as if her grandfather, my father, had survived the war and Franco’s tyranny and continued, as a ghost, in the existence of his granddaughter — disciplined, focused, but ignorant of the world.