Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

“I don’t,” Manuel replied. “You know we saved ourselves from habit and indifference.”

He said it in a way he didn’t want to say it. Cutting, disagreeable, hiding the reasons she didn’t know about and that he would never say to the girl from 1949 but with violent shame he said to the woman of today, it wasn’t only your decision, Lucila, not only your parents were opposed to me, my mother was, too, my mother would stand behind me in the mirror while I was shaving, take me by the shoulders, embrace me with a butterfly’s touch that I felt like the mortal grip of an octopus and say you look so much like me my baby look at yourself in the mirror that girl doesn’t deserve you her people aren’t right for you they’ll humiliate you leave her now I don’t want you to suffer the way I’ve suffered since your father left and died dear boy think it over carefully, will you?

“Why did we separate, Manuel?”

“Because you demanded total surrender from me.”

“I did?” She smiled the smile of a woman accustomed to complying.

“Forget my friends. Forget my work. Forget my mother. Enter your exclusive and excluding world.”

Lucila reacted with a strange desire not to disappoint Manuel. “And you didn’t know how. Or couldn’t, is that right?”

“All of us, every one of us, wanted to do other things and were lost, Lucy. Let’s be happy with what we managed to accomplish. Families oblige us to recognize our differences. You left a rich poor man for a poor rich one.” He stopped for a second to turn and look straight at her. “Is the wait for love to come more tortured than sadness for love that was lost? If it’s any comfort to you, let me say that it’s nice to love someone we couldn’t have only because with that person we were a promise and will keep being one forever. .”

“You didn’t tell me.” Lucila spoke with a touch of contempt. “What do you do?”

He shrugged.

“Final words,” Lucila concluded.

“Yes.” Manuel took his leave, bowed courteously, and walked away on the deck, murmuring to himself, “We became parasites of ourselves,” uncertain about this meeting, disturbed by doubt.

Lucila smiled to herself. How many things had been said, how many, so many more, had not been said. How was I going to tell this man, You know, I live hoping that someone will tell me the day’s events, you know, those little things that fill our hours, so I can say the really important thing to myself?

“You know? You’re going to die. This is your last vacation. Milk it for all it’s worth. You’re going to die. Invent a life.”

She was grateful for what had happened. The memory of adolescence and young love completely filled the void of separation and frustrated affection. It wasn’t bearable to die without knowing. About death but also about love. Communicate it to anyone, to the first person who passed with the veil of ignorance covering his face and the gloves of the past disguising his hands. . Tell these things to the first person who came along, an acquaintance or a stranger. And if it was a stranger, tell it with the astute complicity of the solitary traveler longing, like her, to share the memory of what never was.

On the other hand, walking toward the prow of the ship, Manuel Toledano thought that the more untouchable a memory, the more complete it turned out to be.

He hurried his pace to return to Lucila. He stopped when he saw her in the distance, accompanied by an adolescent girl. He turned so he could approach without being seen from a passage that led to the deck.

“Who were you talking to, Granny?”

“Nobody, Mercedes.”

“I saw you. I didn’t want to interrupt.”

“I’m telling you, it was nothing. Just glances. Think, honey, how often we exchange glances with someone and then go our separate ways.”

“And nothing happened?” Mercedes said mischievously.

“No. Nothing happened.”

“Then what did you talk about?”

“What a nosy kid!” Lucila exclaimed. “About places that no longer exist.”

“Like what?”

“Acapulco. Foolish things.”

“And what happened?”

“Nothing, I said. Learn to give emotions to places. Even if they’re nothing but lies.” The grandmother caressed the girl’s cheek. “And now go on, Meche. Let’s find your naughty little sister. It’s time for lunch. Go on.”

Manuel listened to them until the girl helped her grandmother up and both of them walked away. Perhaps he’d meet them again during the trip. Perhaps he’d have the courage to confront Lucila and say:

“We didn’t really know each other. It’s all fiction. We decided to create a nostalgic past for ourselves. Nothing but lies. Attribute it to chance. Don’t worry. There was no past. There’s only the present and its moments.”

He looked at the Dalmatian Coast. They were approaching the port of Spalato, in reality a huge palace transformed into a city. Emperor Diocletian lived here in courtyards that today are squares, walls that today are restaurants, chambers that today are apartments, galleries that today are streets, baths that today are sewage pipes.

From the deck of the ship, Manuel did not see these details. He saw the mirage of the ancient imperial city, the fiction of its lost grandeur restored only by the imagination, by the hunger to know what once was better than what is and what could have been more than anything else.

From mirage to mirage, from Venice to Spalato, the world of memories was turning into the world of desires, and between the two beat a heart divided by love that was put to the test between past and present.

Then the Adriatic wind blew, the damp, warm sirocco carrying the threat of rain and fog. Dry in its North African origins, the sea impregnates it with smoke and water.

Not yet. The wind was gentle, and the Dalmatian city sparkled like one more illusion of the god Apollo.

Manuel only murmured:

“I still think about you.”

My father and my mother

died in the massacre of El Mozote

on December 11 1981

since the army of the dictatorship couldn’t conquer the guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí Front

they decided to kill the innocents to frighten the population

they sent word they would invade us but wouldn’t kill

those who stayed in their houses

only those wandering around the streets and outskirts

those they would kill like rabbits

then the Atlácatl Battalion financed and trained by the USA

made a surprise attack and slaughtered all the inhabitants of El Mozote

men women children

on the tenth of December the soldiers of the battalion

entered

El Mozote

dragged everybody from their houses

gathered them in the main square

ordered them to lie down on their stomachs

kicked people

accusing them of being guerrillas

demanding that they tell where they hid the weapons

but there was only seed plow nail hammer tile

after an hour they ordered them to go back to their houses and not

show even their noses

we crowded into the houses we were hungry

all we heard were the men from the battalion in the streets laughing drinking

celebrating their victory

then at dawn

on the eleventh of December

they dragged us from the houses

gathered us together on the level ground in front of the Church of the Three Kings

kept us standing there for hours and hours

then they put the men and boys in the church