Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

José Luis: Round face. Pronounced baldness. Very large eyes, pools of a sharp, quiet intelligence. The despair of schemers. He never feels the need to challenge his companion. His rule is to avoid promiscuity. He would like to be located at the heart of a constellation.

the tip of the peninsula opens like the biggest fan in the world

the freezing distant pacific ocean crashes into the hot storms of sinaloa

displaying two hundred degrees of surf

Nicanor Tepa stands on the board waiting for the monster wave nine feet high

he takes it with audacity elegance reticence simplicity strength

always from the left

you never take a huge wave from the right

from the right the wave falls on the surfer crushes him drowns him

from the left Nicanor Tepa conquers the wave turns into wave

a vast white veil holds up Nicanor’s body

the white foam crowns his dark head

the tension of his muscles isn’t felt it is resolved with jubilation in his triumph over the

wave of blue crystal

it is august the great month for headlands in baja

in september Nicanor Tepa will travel to san onofre beach in california and its

forty kilometers of waves inviting him to tame them as if the sea were an

immense whale and the wave only the spout of the monster spewing sea spray

twenty-four meters into the air

in october Nicanor is in the burial ground of the freezing sea of Ireland in the bay of

Donegal and its waves of turbid green broken and enlarged by the barrier

reefs

and in december he’ll arrive in Hawaii to win the Triple Crown championship exposed

to the incessant hammering of the bay of Waimea and its waves thirty-six meters

high

Nicanor begins the new year on the peninsula of Guanacaste in Costa Rica and

in february goes down to Australia to the longest sandbar in the world where three gigantic

waves gather and explode and allow him to glide like a gull over

the heights of the sea

that hurls him at the end of the monsoon in Tahiti with its electrical storms

flashing into the sea where Nicanor conquers the most fearsome of all waves

the Teahupú

and now the wave shatters against the head of Nicanor who made a mistake taking it from

the right

and he comes to under a high-tension spiderweb in a hovel in the Capulín

district

and he tries to grasp the volcanic rock so he won’t drown in the marsh

and he wakes in his one-room windowless shack

and he’ll go out right away to see if he can catch what’s fallen from the trucks going to the

market

and he forms his pyramid of peanuts on the highway that goes to the airport

and looks without interest at the venders of gum plastic toys lottery tickets

hairpins

and tells himself in silence that if he were bolder he would clean windshields and even eat

fire at the crossroads

you have to eat fire to revive the six little brothers dead before their first

birthday typhus polio rabies

you have to bring in an ocean wave to demolish the district without potable water to carry to the

sea the mountains of garbage

but Nicanor Tepa trusts in luck

he resumes looking at the surfers’ calendar now they should go to Jeffreys Bay in South

Africa

Nicanor lifts one after another the pages of his calendar of waves

july in Fiji august back to the headlands immediately again san onofre and then

ireland until the new year in costa rica but in december the year ends

and Nicanor Tepa has no calendar for next year he found this one in a

trash can at a hotel in the airport

that he flies out of to Indonesia Tahiti Australia Hawaii

and Nicanor falls asleep exhausted dreaming that he’ll change what he can and bow his

head before what he can’t change and have the wisdom to

know the difference

he is surrounded by dry bitter broken earth

Nicanor grasps the volcanic rock

Nicanor sinks into the huisache swamp

then the gigantic wave of sleep falls on his head

1. President Justo Mayorga was awakened by the abrupt, huge, unlocatable noise. He opened his eyes with more suspicion than surprise. His first impulse always was never to give in to alarm and look for a redeemable error or a condemnable act. The procession of functionaries who had been fired, punished, ignored because they had erred still passed through his drowsy mind. Other people’s mistakes guided, even in dreams, his presidential decisions and — he yawned without wanting to — opened lists where disloyalty was only one chapter, the lowest and most insidious, of the catalog of faults the president always had close at hand. There never was a shortage of Judases.

He looked with early-morning distance at his strong hand, broad but with long, slender fingers. He knew how to use it effectively in his speeches. Only one hand, the right, is required: clenched in a fist — strength; open — generosity; palm down — calm, calm; palm up — warning? request? with the fingers slightly bent toward his own person — come, approach, I love you, don’t be afraid of me. Justo Mayorga had given up using both hands in his speeches. On the largest screens and in the smallest squares, the use of both hands at the same time seemed not only hackneyed but counterproductive. It indicated that the orator was orating, and when he orated, he deceived, making promises he knew he would never be able to keep. He asked for faith from the incredulous and doubt from believers.

On the long journey from local Culiacán delegate to national office at Los Pinos — twenty long years — he had learned a form of vigorous but serene speech-making using only his right hand as rhetorical art and keeping the left in his jacket pocket, on his silver belt buckle, and on only one celebrated occasion, on national television, grasping his testicles to skewer his opponent in an election debate:

“I have more than enough of what you’re missing.”

Now, when he was awake, he felt his balls bristling at the infernal noise that had come — he looked quickly at the clock, recovering his keen faculties — to wake him at three in the morning. Earlier presidents of Mexico might think of things like armed attack, military uprising, popular demonstration. Justo Mayorga was not paranoid. The noise was infernal, but not even the devil could get into Los Pinos, that’s what the well-guarded barred windows and well-trained military staff were for.

And yet. . no doubt about it. The din that woke him came from his own space, the presidential residence Los Pinos, and not from the interior of the house but — President Mayorga opened the windows to the balcony — from outside, from the avenue through the garden watched over by icy, immobile statues (because some are warm and dynamic) of his predecessors at the head of the state.

He soon had the evidence. He went out to the balcony. Two cars were racing at top speed along the alameda of Los Pinos. An unchecked suicidal speed competing with life more than with the courage of the two untamed drivers who, to a lethal degree, accelerated the low-slung cars, one black, the other red, both capable of revivifying all the statues in the garden, from tiny Madero to gigantic Fox.

A very Mexican idiom — Mayorga thought of it — said, to indicate native stoicism and impassive strength, that something or someone “bothered me the way the wind bothered Juárez.”