Carlos Fuentes: Happy Families

THE SON. Abel Pagán did not finish his studies in economics at the Autonomous University of Mexico because he thought he was smarter than his instructors. The boy’s agile, curious mind searched for and found the obscure fact that would leave his professors astounded. He spoke with self-assurance of the “harmonies” of Bastiat and the GDP in the Republic of Congo, but if they asked him to locate that country on the map or to make the leap from the forgotten Bastiat to the very well-remembered Adam Smith, Abel was lost. He had learned the superfluous at the expense of the necessary. This made him feel at once superior to his professors and misunderstood by them. He left school and returned home, but his father told him he could stay only if he found work, this house wasn’t for slackers, and he, Pastor Pagán, hadn’t been lucky enough to go to college. Abel responded that it was true, one bum was enough. His father slapped him, his mother cried, and Abel sailed away on the ship of his dignity. He went out to find a job. He longed for freedom. He wanted to return home in triumph. The prodigal son. He confused freedom with revenge. He applied to the firm where his father worked. The office of Leonardo Barroso. Abel told himself he would show that he, the son, could handle the position that had destroyed his father. “Do I care about Barrosos? Little authoritarian bosses? Tin-hat desk dictators? Let them act tough with me!” He didn’t have to wink. They received him with smiles, which he returned. He didn’t realize that fangs lie halfway between smiles and grimaces. Big fangs. They took him on without further negotiations. Not even how easy it was perked up his antennae. They needled him, as if they were afraid that Abel was spying for his father, which meant he had to prove he was his father’s enemy, and this led him to rail against Pastor Pagán, his weakness and his laziness, his lack of gratitude toward the Barrosos, who had given him work for over twenty years. The son’s attitude seemed to please the company. The fact is they gave him a job as assistant floorwalker in one of the firm’s stores, where his occupation consisted of walking among possible buyers and impossible sellers, watching them all to make sure that one didn’t steal the merchandise and the other didn’t take little breaks. Abel was the elegant civilian gendarme of the store. He became bored. He began to long for his university days, the protection of the family, their savings destined for his education. He felt uncomfortable, unappreciated. His own filial insolence, his own love of easy living, his ingratitude, appeared to him like habitual, ungraspable ghosts. He felt that the carpets in the store were clearly wearing out under his useless walking back and forth. He made friends. The best salespeople received commissions and appeared in the weekly celebratory bulletin. Abel Pagán never appeared in the bulletin. His bad reputation spread. “Be more accommodating with people, Abel.” “I can’t help it, Señor. I’ve always been rude to stupid people.” “Listen, Abel, you saw that Pepe was in the bulletin this week.” “How little intelligence you need to succeed.” “Why don’t you try to get into the bulletin?” “Because I don’t care.” “Don’t be so difficult, kid.” “I’m not difficult. I’m just taking on the disgust all of you ought to feel, a bunch of brownnosers.” “Why don’t you accept things the way they are and try to improve them every day, Abel?” “Because everything is the way it is, and it’s not my style.” “I wish I understood you, pal.” Life was turning into a very long walk between the shoe department and the shirt department. Then the unforeseeable happened.

THE FATHER. Looking back at the past, Pastor Pagán asked himself, Why wasn’t I dishonest when I had the chance? Weren’t they all thieves? Except me? Why did I have to speak to Señor Barroso himself and tell him that everybody had gotten rich but me, Señor? Why did I settle for the pittance — a check for five thousand dollars — that they gave me as a consolation prize? Why, from that time on, did they stop winking at me? What crime did I commit by talking to the big fish, to the boss? He soon found out. When he presented himself as the only honest employee, he implied that the others were not. For Barroso, this meant he was belittling his fellow workers. A real lack of solidarity. And without internal solidarity, the company didn’t work. When he set himself up as the one employee above suspicion, Pastor aroused Barroso’s perverse intelligence. As far as the boss was concerned, they were all corruptible. This was the central premise at all levels in Mexico, from the government to the company and from the grocery store to the communal pasture. How could Pastor Pagán presume to be the exception? Barroso the boss must have laughed to himself. Pastor did not commit the crime of asking for a taste, he committed the crime of calling himself honest. He did not understand that it wasn’t enough for a powerful man like Leonardo Barroso to give an improper commission to a minor employee. Pastor offered up his naked breast so his boss would try to really corrupt him. Now, forced into retirement with a pension for life, Pastor had time to reflect on the motives that drive each person to destroy others. Sometimes it’s necessity, when the enemy is dangerous. Sometimes vanity, when he is stronger than you. Sometimes the simple indifference with which you squash a fly. But on occasion it’s also to eliminate the threat of the weak man when the weak man knows a secret that the powerful one wants to keep hidden. Pastor Pagán lived in retirement, shuffling the possibilities of his destiny, which, after all, had already been fulfilled. The truth was they exchanged the whip for the cudgel. When he asked his employer to let him be another militant in the gigantic army of corruption, he committed the crime of accusing others while excusing himself. From that moment on, he was in the hands of the boss, which is to say, power. After that, Pastor would lack moral authority. He would be just another crook. The rule, not the exception he had been before. What would he have gained by not asking his employer for anything? Would he be freer, more respected, still employed? The bitterest day of Pastor Pagán’s life was the one on which he realized that whatever he did, and without even knowing it, he was now part of the web of bribery in the small country of his own job. For years he had served corruption, carrying checks back and forth, accepting false accounts, winking, being winked at, morally captured at that photographic moment when a single eye closes in complicity and the other stays open in shame. But he had remained pure until now. He looked at himself in the mirror, searching for a halo, and all he found was a circle of thinning hair. He proposed a martyr’s reflection, and the response was gray skin, a face with defeated cheeks, evasive eyes, and nervous eyebrows. He straightened his torso, and his chest caved in.

THE MOTHER. The bolero proposes lovers to us. Some are fatal. They live waiting for their luck to change or for death to come like a blessing. Others are nostalgic: We will live like the wandering bird, longing for love. There are those who are devotion’s beggars: The woman he loved took everything and left him alone. There are boleros bursting with passion: They want to drink the honey in the woman’s mouth and, in passing, be enthralled by her skin. There are dominating boleros that impose the heat of their passion. Elvira Morales sang all these feelings but kept them in her bosom, which was why she communicated them with so much power. She avoided looking at the people who, night after night, listened to her sing in Aladdin’s Cave. She made one fortunate exception. Something magical, mysterious, must have guided her eyes as she sang “Two Souls” and stopped them at the man who looked back at her with eyes different from all the others. Accustomed to denying the correspondence between the words of the boleros and the presence of the men who listened to her, she felt this time that the song and the person magically coincided. “Two souls that God had joined in the world, two souls that loved, that’s what you and I were.” A tender man: That’s what the eyes of the spectator said as he was isolated in the nocturnal darkness of the cabaret by a spot just like the light that emphasized Elvira Morales’s moon face and bare round shoulders, and paused at the low neckline of the red sequined dress, leaving everything else in the penumbra of mystery. Why were just two faces illuminated that night, Elvira’s and the unknown man’s? Who but God, or an archangel on a divine mission, was operating the spotlights that night? The fact is that Elvira, for the first time since she left home and began to sing, felt that a man deserved her voice, understood her lyrics, incarnated her music. This lasted only an instant. When the song was over and the lights went on, Elvira Morales looked in vain for the man she had glimpsed as she sang. Could it have been an illusion, a strange projection of the bolero into reality? No. The place was there, but the seat was empty, and when the table was occupied by a couple who had just come in, she knew that the man who had captured her attention had been there before, and even if he had left, she would still be there, and he would know where to find her. If he really wanted to see her again.