Carlos Fuentes: Happy Families

THE FATHER. Pastor Pagán was a good man, and he welcomed the prodigal son with dignity. He was moved by Abel’s wounded vanity, and to avoid any hint of anger, he turned a blind but tearless eye when opening his arms to Abel. It was better to proceed as if nothing had happened. Look ahead. Never behind. He realized that the son, like the father, did not have many resources for confronting anything. Abel’s return made them equal. The thought worried the father a good deal. Should he ask Abel directly: What’s going on? Did not saying anything imply that he could imagine what had happened? Did saying something open the door to a confession in which the past would infect the present forever? Abel gave him the key. A month after his return home, after thirty days of pretending that nothing out of the ordinary had happened because the ordinary was fatal, Abel thought that if he was going to live with his parents and sister forever, the best thing was to say, “The truth is, I wasn’t ready for that position.” Which was his father’s old position. These words of his son’s confused the father and hurt him deeply. Pastor Pagán didn’t say anything. He took refuge in the ruins of his pride only to confirm that Abel’s return meant that neither father nor son controlled his own life. Pastor lacked energy. Abel had no will, either. When the father realized this, he began to bring up topics indirectly to see if he could finally tell his son the truth. One night they got drunk in a cantina out toward La Piedad, and in the heat of the drinks, Pastor thought the ice was breaking — the iceberg that the years had built between father and son — and he dared to sigh: “The goddess success is a whore.” To which Abel, for the first time in a long time, responded, “Sure.” “To be successful, you need losers. If not, how do you know you did well?” “Sure, for each success you have, it has to go badly for somebody else. It’s the way the game is played.” “And what happens when first things go badly and you move up and then things go badly and you fall?” “You become a philosopher, my boy.” “Or you sing songs in cantinas, Pop.” Which, being pretty tight, they proceeded to do. “The one who left.” Not a woman. Luck is the one who left. Fortune is the one who got away. They embraced, though they were thinking different thoughts. The father was afraid Abel would sink into rancor and not know how to get out. The son put together alcoholic lists of the mistakes he had made and was still making. “How many mistakes did I make today?” he asked Pastor with a thick tongue. “Whew, don’t count mistakes, son, because that’s a count that never ends.” “What do you regret, Pop?” Pastor answered, laughing: “Not having bought a painting by Frida Kahlo for two thousand pesos when I was young. And you?” “Getting things that I flat out didn’t deserve.” “Go on, don’t get depressed on me. You had everything given to you.” “That’s the bad thing.” “You didn’t have to save as a young man just to lose it all with inflation and currency devaluations.” “Is that why you sold yourself to Barroso, Pop?” “Don’t fuck with me, son, show some respect, I worked a quarter of a century to put a roof over my children’s heads and educate them. Don’t try to find out how I did it. More respect. More gratitude.” “But the only thing I want to know is if he treated you as badly as he did me.” “Worse, son, worse.” “Tell me about it.” “Look, Abel, don’t look back, let’s look ahead.” “The problem is, I’m seeing double.” “What?” “I’m seeing you double, as if you were two people.” “You’re tight.” “Who knows. Suddenly, I’m as sober as I ever was.” “Go on, finish up your tequila and let’s go home. Our girls are waiting for us. They must be worried.”

THE MOTHER. Elvira Morales decided not to lose her joy. She proposed a daily celebration of their meeting, thirty-three years ago, in Aladdin’s Cave. She was singing. He knew where to find her. She wouldn’t go away. And he came back. They married and were happy. Elvira wanted to sum up her existence in this sentence: Let arguments always remain embryonic, their differences hidden, and all the rest resolved romantically by dancing together again at the cabaret whenever there were clouds on the horizon. The cabaret had been the cradle of their love, and in it Elvira felt that the juices of their love were renewed. Pastor Pagán once again became the lover of her dreams. The incarnation of a bolero with no tears or complaints, though certainly filled with sighs, Elvira stopped being a martyr to her husband’s destiny. When she felt trapped, she would return to the bolero, and then her marriage reeled. The entire sense of her life consisted in leaving song lyrics behind, nullifying them with a reality in which her portion of happiness was larger than her share of misfortunes, and therefore, when something clouded the happy marriage that was Elvira’s sacrament, the altar of her spirit, she would invite her husband to dance, to return to the cabaret, to what were now called “caves,” and dance, holding each other very tight, very close, feeling how the sap of illusion began to flow again. When he was younger, Abel would laugh at these nostalgic excursions. “And in its caves let the earth tremble,” he would say in a parody of his favorite author, Gonzalo Celorio. But in the end the children were grateful for these ceremonies of renewed fidelity because they brought peace into the home and gave some lee-way to questions about the children’s position in the world: at home or not at home. Elvira realized that more and more children were remaining at home beyond the age of thirty or returned home at the age of Christ, like her son, Abel, or were prepared to grow old at home, like Alma, locked away in her garret. All of this only reinforced Elvira Morales’s conviction: If the children were tightrope walkers in the circus of life, their parents would be the safety net that broke the fall and kept them from crashing to their deaths. Was this the real reason for Elvira’s behavior, why she forgave mistakes, why she fed the sacred flame of love with her husband, why she forgot everything dangerous or disagreeable, why she kept secrets so well? Because life isn’t a bolero? Because life ought to be a sentimental ballad that soothes, a secret idyll, a pot of flowers that wither if we don’t water them? That was why she and her husband would go together to the old bars and dance in cabarets. To remember what isn’t forgotten by endlessly identifying happiness. Elvira’s aged mother died while her daughter was singing boleros in Aladdin’s Cave, on the night she identified Pastor Pagán without knowing that her ailing mama had passed. That’s how destiny deals the cards. And destiny is reversible, like a coat that keeps out the cold on one side and protects against the rain on the other. That was why Elvira Morales never said, “But that was then.” That was why she always said, “Now. Right now. Right this very minute.”

THE DAUGHTER. The two American women (Sophonisbe and Sally) didn’t get past Ciudad Juárez. On the first day of the race, they disappeared and then were found dead in a ditch near the Rio Grande. Two residents of El Paso, Texas, had to be called very quickly to satisfy the rules of the competition. No gringo couple had the courage to cross the river. The organizers resigned themselves to recruiting a couple of Mexicans prepared to do anything in order to win a trip to the Caribbean. In their eyes, the palm trees drunk on the sun were already before them, behind them the deserts of huisache cactus and rattlesnakes. The aridity of northern Mexico was part of the test for winning. The competitors in the reality show were receiving written instructions in manila envelopes. Now stop to pick prickly pears or pack serapes. You’re free. Choose. What’s faster? It doesn’t matter. Now they have to cross the desert riding unruly burros. Now they have to take a train up to Zacatecas, and the ones who miss it will have to wait for the next one and fall behind. They have to make up for lost time — how? Getting on a rattletrap bus that drives along a mountain road. The gringos shout with glee on every deadly curve. The Mexicans maintain a stoic silence. They lose it when they have to let themselves be pulled by a team of oxen through a muddy swamp. They survive. The desire to win moves them. Each couple is pursued by the one behind. Each is treading on the tail of the one in front and prefiguring the panting of the one that follows. They have to go into a bull-ring with a red handkerchief (courtesy of the house) and fight a bull calf disoriented because it ate cornflakes for breakfast. Once again, the two gringos are jubilant as they fight, giving Apache war whoops. The Mexican women abstain. The men — old Jehová, skinny Juan — make passes more worthy than the frightened, confused calf. Now they’re traveling through the middle of the country. There are posters, there are colors, there are instructions. Stop here. Sleep wherever you please. Outdoors. On a bench. However you can. The next day everyone has to shovel up the manure on a local cattle farm. They complain, it smells bad. Pepita falls down. She eats shit. A gringo falls down. He eats shit. He declares that this is very sexy. The women caress their breasts as if to confirm that they’re still intact. They all get into a bus heading for Oaxaca. Another bus appears, going in the opposite direction. Will they all die? Alma Pagán turns off the television set. She doesn’t want to know what happens. She doesn’t want the violence to interrupt, perhaps forever, not her second but her authentic life, the existence that offers her, free of charge, with no danger to her person, the reality show. She turns on the set in order to enter into the danger on the street. Though seeing it clearly, the small screen saves her from danger by giving it to her right here, where it doesn’t touch her, in her house. She feels alive, stimulated. She no longer knows she is vulnerable. In her way, she has entered paradise.