Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

Innocent. Innocent but promising.

That was my daughter, José Nicasio. A promise inside a translucent sphere where the corrupt air of the human city could not penetrate. A promise, José Nicasio. Repeat that to yourself in your solitude. Repeat it night and day. I want these words to forever occupy the center of your life. You have to know who my daughter was. And please don’t protect yourself, as my husband does, behind the lie of Alessandra’s supposed human coldness. Ah yes, they say, she was a promising girl but barely human. She lacked warmth. She lacked emotion.

People who think that infuriate me, beginning with my husband, I’ll tell you that with all honesty. It means not understanding that the “familiar address” Alessandra used with genius — or brilliance, I don’t know — was an intense, erotic form of desire. My daughter loved, Señor. Not what everyone vulgarly attributes to that verb, physical attraction, not even the tenderness and warmth shared with other human beings. Alessandra loved Nietzsche or the Brontës because she felt them alone, alone in the graves of their books and their thoughts. Alessandra approached the geniuses of the past to give them life with her attention, which was the form her affection took: paying attention.

She didn’t want to take anything from anyone. She wanted to give to the neediest. The dead? Yes, perhaps. It’s true, “The dead are so alone.” But she sought out the company of the less frequented dead. The immortals. That’s what she told me. She wanted to look after, offer her hand to so many human beings, the artists and thinkers who are the subject of studies, biographies, yes, and lectures, but not of a love equivalent to what we give to a close, living being. Offer her hand to the immortals. That was my daughter’s vocation. Perhaps that was why she was there, that afternoon, in Monte Albán.

José Nicasio: Don’t condemn me without hearing me. I talked a great deal with my daughter. I warned her that love can isolate us from everything around us. But in its absence, we can be filled with the fear that something comparable exists. I believe my daughter wanted to love the incomparable and that all respect for the comparable filled her with disquiet. Is what I say true? Can you, if not judge, at least comprehend the words of a grieving mother? To think is to desire, I would tell my husband. He didn’t understand me. Did you think about my daughter? Did you desire her, José Nicasio?

Señora Vanina: You’ve never seen me. You don’t know me physically. I have no reason to hide what I am or where I come from. I’m ugly, Señora. I’m an ugly Oaxacan Indian. I’m short but muscular. I have a short neck, pushed down into my shoulders. This only makes the strength of my torso more prominent. If you could see how powerfully my heart beats. At times I believe that the front of my shirt betrays me. Right there, if you place your hand on my chest, right there you can feel the power of my heartbeats, Señora. I have an impatient heart, Señora. I moved up, I left my village and my people behind, and this makes me feel guilty, to tell you the truth. Unhappy. I have to constantly compare what could have been — what I left behind — and what I am. That’s why I feel guilty. Shouldn’t I have continued down there, in the village, in the Tlacolula market? Did I have the right to be more than all those people who saw me born, grow, play, work? In my heart this question always beats, Señora Vanina, an unsettling question that rises up to my neck where very thick veins throb to keep up my defiant head, I admit it, Señora, I have the face of an ugly Indian, flat nose, narrow forehead, and on my mouth an indecipherable sneer that I can’t change no matter what I do. I look in the mirror and say to myself, José Nicasio, take off that sneer, smile, try to be nice. My face must have come to me from very far away. My mask, naturally, Señora. Let us understand each other. We are born with the face that time gave us. Hard time, almost always. Time to suffer. Time to endure. What face do you want us to put on. .?

You can see, my Indian nature comes out no matter how I try to hide it. It just comes out, like a wildcat crouching in my belly. I tell you that I see myself in the mirror and say, Change your expression, José Nicasio, put a nice friendly smile on your mouth, don’t twist it like that, nobody’s threatening you. And I try to do that, Señora, but it doesn’t work, my head filled with colors and my chest filled with trembling tells me so. Don’t look so fierce, José Nicasio, don’t show so openly that you’re taking revenge, not for your humble origin but for your present-day success, do you understand? Stop telling people excuse me for having moved up, I’m an Indian who carries on his back centuries of humiliation, an ordinary dark-skinned man, an indigenous Zapoteca who’s not allowed to be on the sidewalk, they whip us down into the dust in the street. .

Let me laugh, Señora. I go to the museums of Mexico and walk through the rooms of indigenous cultures — Mayas, Olmecas, Aztecas — filled with admiration for the art of my forebears. Well, that’s where they want to keep us, Señora, hidden away in the museums. Like bronze statues on the avenues. What happens if King Cuauhtémoc climbs down from his pedestal on the Paseo de la Reforma and walks among the people? They burn his feet again. .

Let me laugh, Señora. As soon as we’re out on the street, we’re filthy Indians again, submissive Indians, redskins. They seize our ancestral lands, force us into the wild and hunger, sell us rifles and aguardiente so we’ll fight among ourselves. They invent a right to our women. They attribute every crime to us. They discover that their white women desire us in secret, and they come after us opening our backs so that dark blood spills even blacker blood. They shout Indian! at us or they shout redskin! when they come after us. Didn’t you know, isn’t Your Grace aware of all this? Your Grace. We’re not “reasonable people.” We’re not “decent people.” You kill us as soon as we turn our backs on you. The fugitive law is applied to us. Does Your Grace, a reasonable person, know what it means to be a stupid Indian, without reason, a stupid animal scorned in this country? A tongue-tied, splay-footed Indian.

And do you know what it means to escape the world of our fathers? First to Oaxaca because of my meritorious amate paintings. Then, thanks to the gringos who admire my work, to a school of Mexican handicrafts in San Diego, California, right on the border between Mexico and the United States. Far from my family’s village in the privilege of Oaxaca, in the house of the distinguished professor who treated me like half a son, a proof of his generosity with the less fortunate. I heard him say so,

“I’m not racially prejudiced. Look at José Nicasio. I treat him like a son.”

And now, far from my village, wandering the border. The wetbacks in California are dry when they arrive because there’s no river between San Diego and Tijuana. There are barbed-wire fences. There’s the migra. There are tunnels full of rats. There are garbage trucks where you can hide to cross over. There are vans abandoned in the desert, locked with padlocks and full of suffocated workers who paid a hundred or two hundred dollars to cross the border like animals. There’s injustice, Señora. Something you can’t save yourself from, even if you migrate to California. .

But I already was “on the other side.” In every sense, Señora. I was respected by the gringos because I had talent and knew how to work. They even invited me to their parties to show how democratic they were. I was what they call their “token Mexican,” their nice demonstration Mexican, and they say a button’s enough for a demonstration. I was the Mexican button.