Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

If this double play passed through the minds of Miles and the soldiers, all of them concealed it without difficulty. The general commanded, the troops obeyed. The general was carrying out to the letter his duty to explore the sierra. And the troops were doing theirs, covering every inch of the steep, solitary, overgrown terrain. Who could accuse them of shirking their duty?

Roberto Miles. He could. The general’s younger son, Roberto Miles, dressed in a guayabera and holding an insolent, phallic cigar between his teeth. Roberto Miles sitting at a table on the hotel terrace with a sweet roll and a small espresso growing cold as he waited for his father to appear and not show — because it wasn’t his nature — any surprise at all.

Marcelino sat down calmly next to Roberto, ordered another coffee, and asked him nothing. They didn’t even look at each other. The father’s severity was a mute reproach. What was his son doing here? How did he dare interrupt a professional campaign with his presence, not merely useless but inopportune as well? His presence was impertinent, disrespectful. Didn’t he know his father was pursuing his older brother through the sierra?

“Don’t look for him anymore in the sierra, Father,” Roberto said as he sipped the coffee with voluntary slowness. “You’re not going to find him there.”

The general turned to look coldly at his son. He asked nothing. He wasn’t going to compromise — or frustrate, he admitted to himself — his intimate project of not finding the rebel, of deceiving headquarters without incurring any blame at all.

Let Roberto talk. The general would not say anything. A profound intuition ordered this conduct. Not to look. Not to speak.

When he looked at himself in the mirror the next morning, the general thought his slender little mustache, as thin as a pencil line, was ridiculous, and with a couple of strokes of the Gillette, he shaved it off, seeing himself suddenly free of the past, of habits, of useless presumptions. He looked like a defeated commander. His undershirt was loose, and his trousers hung on him unwillingly.

He reacted. He tightened his belt, rinsed his sweaty armpits, and put on his tunic buttoned with conflictive anger and disinclination.

Andrés Miles was now in prison. He smiled at his father when they arrested him in the house of his sweetheart, Esperanza Abarca.

“There’s no better disguise than invisibility,” the older son said with a smile when he was detained. “I mean, you have to know how to look at the obvious.”

He placed a small Dominican banana in his mouth and surrendered without resistance. He had only to see the equally sad faces of his father and the troops to realize that what they did, they did against their wills. It was almost as if the father as well as the soldiers had lost in one stroke the reason for this campaign aimed at what had happened now — the capture of the rebel leader, Andrés Miles — and reached an unwanted conclusion that brought all of them face-to-face with a fatal decision. Eliminating the rebel.

“Just don’t apply the fugitive law to me,” Andrés said with a smile when they tied his hands.

“Son. .” the father dared to murmur.

“General, sir,” his son answered with steel in his voice.

And so Marcelino Miles spent the whole night debating with himself. Should he try his son according to the summary procedure dictated by the military code? How comfortable it was for the political authorities to shoot the rebel and leave no trace. . make him disappear, provoke a passing protest, and assure the eventual triumph of forgetting. How complicated to bring the rebel before judges who would determine the proper punishment for insurgency and uprising. How destructive to paternal morale to attend the son’s trial and oblige himself to present the infamous evidence: His brother had betrayed him. Wouldn’t it be better for Roberto to stay out of the case, for the father to assume complete responsibility?

“I captured him in the sierra. My men will testify to that. Mission accomplished. Let justice be done.”

He remembered Roberto’s face when he betrayed his brother.

“It’s as clear as two and two make four.” Roberto dared to be ironic. “Don’t tell me, Father, that it never occurred to you the rebel might be hiding like a coward behind the skirts of his old lady here in Chilpancingo?” He laughed. “And you lost in the sierra, just think. .”

“Why, Roberto?”

The ironic mask shattered. “Did you calculate, Father, the cost of having a brother who appears day after day in the papers as an insurgent fugitive? Have you thought of the very serious damage all of this does to my business? Do you believe that people, people, General, sir, the government, businessmen, gringo partners, all of them, do you believe they’ll have confidence in me with a guerrilla brother? For God’s sake, Papa, think about me, I’m twenty-eight years old, things haven’t gone well for me in business, give me a chance, plea—”

“Capturing him was only a question of time. You had no patience with me,” Marcelino Miles said, making a great effort to be conciliatory.

“Naaaaa,” his younger son mocked him openly. “Nonsense! You were acting like a fool, to put it kindly, you—”

The general stood, hit his son Roberto in the face with his whip, and headed for the prison.

“Let him go,” he told the captain of the guard. “Tell him that this time he should really disappear, because the second time will be the end.”

“But General, sir. . If headquarters finds out, you’ll—”

Miles interrupted him brutally. “Who’s going to tell what happened?” he asked in a voice as hard as basalt.

“I don’t know. .” stammered the captain. “The soldiers. .”

“They’re loyal to me,” the brigadier general answered without any doubts. “None of them wanted to capture my son. You can testify to that.”

“Then, General, sir, your other son.” The captain’s firm tone returned. “The one who turned him in, the one—”

“Do you mean Judas, Captain?”

“Well, I—”

“My son Cain, Captain?”

“It’s your—”

“What do you think of the fugitive law, Captain?”

The captain swallowed hard. “Well, sometimes there’s nothing else—”

“And what do you think is worse, Captain, rebellion or betrayal? I repeat: Which one stains the honor of the military more? A rebel or an informer?”

“The honor of the army?”

“Or of the family, if you prefer.”

“There’s no question, General, sir.” Now Captain Alvarado blinked. “The traitor is despicable, the rebel is respectable.”

Nobody knows who shot Roberto Miles in the back as he was going into the hotel La Gloria in Chilpancingo. He fell dead on the street, surrounded by an equally instantaneous flow of thick blood that ran with sinister brilliance from the snow-white guayabera.

General Marcelino Miles communicated to headquarters that the rebel Andrés Miles had succeeded in escaping military detention.

“I know, Mr. Secretary, that this family drama is very painful. You must understand that it was very difficult for me to capture my own son after six weeks of combing the mountains looking for him. I couldn’t imagine that my other son, Roberto Miles, would put a pistol to the head of the upstanding Captain Alvarado and force him to allow his brother, Andrés, to escape.”

“And who killed Roberto, General?”

“Captain Alvarado himself, Mr. Secretary. A valiant soldier, I assure you. He wasn’t going to allow my son Roberto to stain the honor of an officer.”

“It’s murder.”

“That’s how Captain Alvarado understands it.”

“He thinks so? Or he knows so? He only thinks so?” the secretary of national defense said with controlled passion.