Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

That’s why nobody knows the father of Doña Mede’s only son. The mariachi.

2. Do you know why Doña Medea Batalla finds herself in the police station, dressed only in a diaper? Because, you’ll say, that’s just what she needed. Just that? It isn’t that her life was so full of affliction. Doña Medea, except for her amorous adventures in the pulque taverns, was always a tidy woman. Her day usually begins with a visit to the markets. She spends the entire morning looking without buying, choosing without paying, sensing that the noisy peace of the old city market-places compensates her for life, or at least calms her curiosity about living. She walks up to the stalls, and modern toys, the Barbie dolls, the Dragon Balls, the SpongeBobs, make her laugh. She recalls with affection the dolls in the old days. The bullfighter puppets in their pink stockings, the Mamerto cowboys with their big mustaches and huge hats, the fat Torcuata ladies in their wide skirts and rolled-up braids.

She asks them to play vinyl records of the old boleros and rancheras. And against all her feelings to the contrary, she wants to get angry, she wants to cry, she finally gives in, the mariachi music traps her, silences her, makes her cry, and enrages her, too.

To calm down, she goes up to a food stand, and as she eats, she airs recollections that are very much appreciated by the restaurant owners who offer her food free of charge while Doña Medea talks about the past. It’s as if a great river of memories flows without ever stopping, because in the faces of the new cooks and servers, Doña Medea sees her own youth and senses the same feelings of love, sadness, hope, rancor, and tradition that are recounted in song lyrics. Moles, pozoles, enchiladas. Feeling nourishes, food is felt. That happens, as you know very well. Good Lord!

Doña Medea moves through the market and doesn’t buy anything because she feels everything that comes in through her eyes is hers. That’s why, as far as she’s concerned, there are no objects without a price. Everything that is used contains a lost value that returns in a magical, unexpected way to a shopwindow with dusty wedding dresses, a record of ranchera music, an exvoto giving thanks to the Virgin for having saved us from certain death. . She is devoted to the Immaculate Conception of Mary, and every day she visits the small church presided over by the Mother of God. You know her, and you know she’s not just any devout old woman. Her devotion has a mission. Why does she enter on her knees? Why does she light candles? Why, in short, does she pray to the Virgin? And why does she read the ex-votos with so much attention, as if she were hoping to find in one of them — only one — the message she is waiting for, the telegram from heaven, the announcement that the Virgin sends to her and no one else?

She stops to read that ex-voto. A certain death. Have you noticed how the undertaker at the funeral parlor on the corner salivates as he watches her walk by? She laughs at this. The undertaker wants to frighten her, Doña Medea explains. He’s measuring her for the coffin. But she still has a good while to go before she lies down in a casket.

“Don’t be such a meddler,” she says to the undertaker.

“And don’t you be so deferential.” And with a smile, “Listen to me. Come and see me. I ought to take your measurements once and for all.”

“Don’t be a fool. Death doesn’t matter. The terrible thing is dying.”

“I’m here waiting for you, Doña Medea. You should take more precautions.”

“Well, just be very patient, because when you come with your little box, I’ll already be resurrected.”

The truth is that Doña Medea doesn’t want to surrender to eternal darkness just like that. The guacamole doesn’t drip out of her taco. She sees other women to compare herself to and guess their destinies. She classifies them accurately. Some seem like beasts of burden. Others are thought of as clever. Doña Medea can smell from a distance the predatory women who conspire all day and the ones who seem so resigned they don’t even complain.

The entire neighborhood is a swarm of ambitions, desires to leave, to get out of the swamp of the city. That’s what you say, Señor.

“A city without hope, destroyed inside and out, but fed by illusions that, with luck, allow the luxury of being more abused than a fatality that gnaws away at everything until it leaves the residents in the neighborhood with no recourse except crime. Violence as the final refuge of hope, no matter how strange this sounds.”

“Suddenly, violence is afraid of Doña Medea. Because she has constructed her entire life as a defense against two things.”

“What are they?”

“One, the throb of violence she feels all around her, which she defeats with her ordinary routine.”

“And the other?”

“Ah, that’s her secret. For now all you need to know is that she sleeps with the Picot Songbook as her pillow. She believes the words come in through the hole that Don Lupino, the druggist, says we have at the base of our skull, and in this way the danger vanishes like the snake rattle in her mouth. What she’s really afraid of, without understanding it completely, is the urban wave that can wipe out everything, licentiate, drag her to a destiny that isn’t hers, implicate her in mistakes she hasn’t made. .”

Until she ends up in diapers in the hands of the police, a woman who has always gotten along wonderfully with the gendarmes who need, who knows, to know a person like her who can give them back their confidence in life. Oh!

She says all this to herself, and you recriminate her, and rightly so.

Violence appeared some time ago in Doña Medea’s house. Sorrow treacherously knocked on her door. With warbling knuckles and a goldfinch’s voice. Pure farce. She already carries violence inside herself, with no need for everything that has happened.

Violence at home.

And violence on the street.

Sorrow everywhere.

3. That’s why the old woman moves around the markets and the food stands, that’s why she chats with marketwomen and policemen. That’s why she listens to the music of Agustín Lara and José Alfredo Jiménez. In order to believe that life in the neighborhood has a solution. That it’s the same today as it was yesterday. And if it isn’t, then to exorcize the threat she feels on her skin and in her bones, everything that exists here and that she doesn’t want to admit, as if a good yellow mole would be enough to establish joy and serenity in life. As if, by naming them, the murmuring of a bolero could chase away all the evils of existence. .

Well, it turns out that Doña Medea Batalla is a woman with antennae, and she knows very well that not only unpleasant but downright wicked things are going on. Behind the spotless facade she has erected, there is a good deal of filth and suffering and crime and resentment. She knows that if some have gotten away from here, others have remained, making a virtue of necessity, whether it’s the crook who finds a way to get a rake-off from misfortune or the scoundrel on the bottom who decides to be smarter than the scoundrels on top.

“Will you do a job for me?”

“A rival in love?”

“No, an enemy in business.”

“Tell your son to take the tied-up dog for a walk.”

“That’s the signal?”

“Walk the mascots.”

“Fear doesn’t ride a donkey.”

“Zero tolerance?”

“What do you mean? Zero remorse.”

“What did you say? I can’t hear you.”

“Clear up your voice with some mallow tea.”

“Ah, now I understand you.”

“Really?”

“One hundred percent.”

“Just don’t torture yourself.”

“Sure. Progress is slow.”