Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

How could Roberto Miles not oppose his brother, Andrés? The general had brought up his sons in modest comfort. They never lacked for anything. They didn’t have an abundance of anything, either. The general wanted to prove that at least in the army, the national pastime of corruption had no place. He was a Spartan from the south of Mexico, where the difficulties of life and the immensity of nature are the salvation or perdition of human beings. The person who maintains a minimum of values that the forest, the mountains, the tropics cannot subdue, is saved.

Marcelino Miles was one of those men. But from the moment his superiors transferred him from Chilpancingo to Mexico City, his sons’ tendencies were revealed outside the rules (his pact with nature) the father had imposed.

The forest and the mountain were the ironic allies of Division Commander Miles. He fulfilled his duty by climbing the sierra with the help of machetes. He fled his obligation by thinking that guerrillas never engage in formal combat. They attack the army in its barracks or ambush it in the wild. Then they vanish like hallucinations, clouded mirrors in the terrifying, impenetrable magic of the forest.

They attacked and disappeared. It wasn’t possible to foresee the attack. The lessons of the past had been learned. Today Zapata wouldn’t fall into the government’s trap, believing in good faith that the enemy had come over to his side and would meet with him in Chinameca to seal the double betrayal. The feigned betrayal by the government army of its leader, Carranza. A clear prediction of the certain betrayal of each Zapata.

Betrayal was the name of the final battle.

Now there was a deficit of ingenuousness, just as yesterday there had been an excess of trust. Marcelino Miles thought this bitterly, because if he, Marcelino Miles, offered amnesty to his son Andrés in exchange for his surrender, the son would see a trick in the father’s generosity. The son would not trust the father. The son knew the father was obliged to capture and shoot him.

Two calculations presented themselves to General Marcelino Miles’s mind as he led his troops through the mountains. One, that the populations of the mountains and the plain offered their loyalty to the insurgents. Not because they had identified with the cause. They didn’t support them out of necessity or conviction. They were loyal to them because the guerrillas were their brothers, their husbands, their fathers, their friends. They were themselves in other activities as normal as sowing and harvesting, cooking and dancing, selling and buying: bullets, adobe bricks, corn, roof tiles, huapango dances, guitars, jugs, more bullets. . It was the familial link that strengthened the guerrillas, sheltered them, hid them, fed them.

The general’s other calculation, on this night of droning macaques and clouds so low they seemed about to sing, covering the column and driving it mad as if the real siren song came from the air itself and not from the distant, atavistic sea, was that sooner or later, the countryside would grow weary of the war and abandon the rebels. He prayed that moment would come soon: He wouldn’t have to capture and try his own son.

He was fooling himself, he thought immediately. Even if the villages abandoned him, Andrés Miles wasn’t one of those who surrendered easily. He was one of those who went on fighting, even if only six guerrillas were left, or two, or only one: himself. Andrés Miles with his tanned face and melancholy eyes, his shock of hair prematurely grayed at the age of thirty, his slim, nervous, impatient, crouched body, always ready to leap like a mountain animal. Obviously, he didn’t belong to the pavements, he wasn’t a creature of the sidewalk. The wild called to him, nostalgic for him. Since his childhood in Guerrero, he would occasionally get lost when he climbed the mountain and not be heard from for an entire day. Then he would come back home but never admit he had been lost. An admirably stubborn pride had distinguished him from the time he was very little.

Was his brother better? Roberto was clever, Andrés intelligent. Roberto calculating, Andrés spontaneous. Roberto the actor in a smiling deception, Andrés the protagonist in a drama of sincerity. Both victims, the father suspected with sorrow. As an adolescent, Andrés had committed to the leftist struggle. He didn’t marry. Politics, he said, was his legitimate wife. His lover was his adolescent sweetheart in Chilpancingo. At times he visited her. Other times she came to the capital. Andrés lived in the house of his father, the general, but he didn’t bring the girl home. Not because of bourgeois convention but because he wanted her all to himself and didn’t care to have anyone judge her, not even himself.

On the other hand, Roberto, at the age of twenty-eight, had been married and divorced twice. He changed wives according to his own idea of social prestige. He began in a high-technology company, decided to start his own electromagnetic equipment business, but his ambition was to be a software magnate. Things were not going too well for him now, which was why he returned, a divorced man, to his father’s house, following the “Italian” law — today universal — of living at home for as long as possible and in this way saving on rent, food, and domestic help. He always had women, since he was good-looking—“cute,” his father said to himself — but he didn’t bring them home or mention them.

One woman united father and sons, the mother, Peregrina Valdés, dead of colic before the boys reached adolescence.

“Take care of them for me, Marcelino. I know your discipline, but also give them the love you gave to me.”

Roberto was very different from his brother. Lighter-skinned, with a green-eyed gaze walled in by suspicion. He shaved twice a day as if to file down all the rough spots on a face that demanded trust without ever receiving it completely.

The warm memories of his family did not prevent the general from acknowledging the discouragement of his troops. Every day, inch by inch, they explored the Guerrero Mountains. The general was methodical. Nobody could accuse of him of negligence in his mission, which was to seek out the rebels in every corner of the sierra. Miles knew his effort was useless. First, because the rebel band was small and the mountains immense. The revolutionaries knew it and hid easily, constantly changing their position. They were the needles in a gigantic haystack. The general explored the sierra from the air and could not make out a single road, much less a village. In the vast extension of the mountains, not even a solitary wisp of smoke betrayed life. The dense growth admitted no space other than its own compact green nature.

And second, because the troops under his command knew that he knew. Each day they resumed the trek, aware they would never find the enemy. No one dared to say aloud what he was thinking: that this useless campaign of General Miles saved them from confronting the rebels. Until now they had fired only at rabbits and turkey buzzards. The first were fast and offered an exciting game of marksmanship. The second devoured the dead rabbits, stealing them from the soldiers.

The pact of deception between the commander and the troops allowed Marcelino Miles to enjoy the gratitude of his men and avoid recriminations from headquarters. Let them ask any soldier if the general had or had not carried out the order to search for the rebels in the sierra. Let them just ask. The commander’s well-being was also that of the troops.

They had spent six weeks on this ghostly campaign when something happened that the general hadn’t expected and the troops never would have imagined.

Quartered in Chilpancingo after three weeks of exploring the wild, Marcelino Miles and his soldiers had an air of duty fulfilled that authorized a couple of peaceful days for them. Though the general understood that the troops knew as well as he did that the guerrillas were not in the mountains, the physical effort of climbing and exploring redeemed them from all blame: What if now, right now, the rebels slipped up to the top and now, right now, the general and his people captured them there?