Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

“Why, Father?”

“So you won’t sin.”

“Why would I sin?”

“Because you’ve become a woman. Let’s go.”

They left the sacristy of Acatzingo with its beautiful Franciscan convent and came to live here, where you look at snow and breathe in ash. It was the isolated spot closest to Puebla, and since no one wanted to come where one was, they gladly sent him.

“Are you taking your niece, Father?

“Did you think I’d abandon her? She depends on me. Without me, she’d be a poor orphan. She owes everything to me.”

“Ah!”

“Though let me clarify, Bishop. She isn’t my niece. Don’t burden me with that old story.”

“Ah! Your daughter?” the bishop asked with raised eyebrows.

The priest turned and left the bishopric.

“That man is turning into a recluse,” remarked the prelate. “He doesn’t know how to get on with people. He’s better off going to the mountains.”

It wasn’t that Father Benito Mazón had sought out a parish in the foothills of a volcano to isolate himself from people. The fact is people withdrew from him, and this suited him perfectly. In the end, he came out ahead. No matter how disagreeable Don Benito was, God was not only agreeable but indispensable. Only Father Mazón, with his eyes of an uneasy wolf, iguana’s profile, and paper-thin habit, had the ability to administer the sacraments, baptize, sing a requiem, and certify a death. People in the village depended on him in order to live with a clear conscience. And he depended less on one. Even if nobody attended the miserable little adobe church on the edge of the volcano, Benito would receive his stipend, and of course, the same village that distrusted him for being disagreeable would not let him die of hunger. One.

Well, the fact is that we parishioners — one — feel animosity toward Father Benito Mazón. He seems to live indifferent to one. One reproaches his hypocrisy in introducing the girl Mayalde, who is sixteen years old, as his goddaughter. One knows that goddaughters tend to be priests’ daughters. Should he be given credit for the charity he has shown in putting a roof over the girl’s head? Or must one display indignation at the hypocrisy?

One does not have easy answers. In the end, habits follow their own course, with or without complete explanations. One suspects. One intuits. One fears. In the end, one shrugs one’s shoulders. One.

“It’s worse to have bad habits than to have no habits at all,” Father Mazón whispered in outrage to our most devout woman, Doña Altagracia Gracida, during the act of confession.

“And where does the girl sleep, Father?”

“Be careful, woman.”

The parish in the mountains was barely a house, made of adobe bricks, with a wood-burning stove, a small living/dining room, a bedroom, and an outdoor bathroom. The church was just as modest. But the adjoining chapel was a small, richly decorated Baroque delight, almost as splendid (almost) as the lamented Acatzingo. This was how it should be. Father Benito worships God because he believes that God is horrified by the world.

Mayalde’s beauty created a small storm of indecision in the village. She was a fresh, lovely girl, comparable in her look of purity to the snow that crowns the mountain before it is obliterated in ash. A lightskinned brunette with very large black eyes, as if she wanted to see beyond the frame of her oval face and then immediately, as if conscious of the vanity signified in using beauty to gain happiness, she lowers them to attend to her tasks in the humble house that scrapes the sky. She is used to it. She doesn’t expect anything else from life. One might think that the priest always treated her badly in order to treat her well. That is what he always told her:

“If Our Lord Jesus Christ suffered, why shouldn’t you?”

Then he sat her on his knees. “Do you think I don’t suffer, Mayalde, seeing you suffer?”

All manual tasks were her responsibility. When Father Mazón walked by and saw her washing clothes, making the bed, or dusting polychromes in the church, he would say things like:

“You’d like to be a lady, wouldn’t you?”

“I spoiled you too much when you were little. Now I’m going to get rid of all that spoiling.”

“Clean the church. It’ll do you more good. I’m going to check each holy vessel as if you were drinking my milky cum from it.”

Then he sat her again on his knees. She feared these moments of affection because Father Benito agonized so much to be good and then treated her badly to compensate for the failing of tenderness.

“You’re a mule. A sterile freak. But you work very hard and endure the cold of the mountains.”

She didn’t smile openly for fear of offending him. But the damn priest made her laugh inside, and she mocked him as she tended to the birds in their cold cages, gathered scarce mountain flowers and put them in water, went to the market and came back, humming, with baskets full of vegetables, pigs’ feet, warm tortillas, and serrano chiles.

“The girl is simpleminded,” we would say in the village.

She knew that this way, by being so obliging, she provoked Father Benito. She wasn’t a good-for-nothing. And she wasn’t a beast of burden. When she went down to the market, one admired her cadenced walk, the lightness of her flowered dress, the guessed-at feminine forms, firm and rounded. Mayalde was, for one, the elusive magic of the village. She smiled at everybody.

“She’s simpleminded.”

One thought, however, that her coquettishness was fidelity to Father Benito Mazón. That was what one told oneself.

One day Father Benito broke the flowerpots and freed the canaries. She remained very still, staring at the priest and imagining that she, if she decided to, could change into a flower or fly like a bird.

Father Benito did not want to admit that nothing defeated Mayalde. He felt like telling her, “Go on, my girl. Go back to your mother. Tell her to treat you well and that I remember her. You know I’m no good at being your father. We’ll see if she even bothers to see you. Though I doubt it. You should have seen how glad she was to get rid of you.”

For her part she thought, I make him angry because I love things, I love the flowers, the birds, the markets, and he doesn’t. I serve him, but he doesn’t enjoy it. He’s a sour old man with vinegar in his blood.

It was clear to Mayalde that Father Benito wanted to enjoy things. She bathed outside under an improvised shower in a small courtyard, and she knew the priest spied on her. It amused her to play with the schedule. Sometimes she bathed at dawn; other times she bathed at night. The priest always spied on her, and she soaped her sex and her breasts before pretending alarm at being caught, covering herself quickly with her hands and laughing without stopping as she imagined the confusion of the priest with the narrow eyes of an uneasy wolf and the iguana’s profile.

“Put aside evil thoughts,” the priest would tell her when she confessed. And he would add with growing exaltation: “Repeat after me, child. I am a sack of foul-smelling filth. My sins are an abomination. I am pernicious, scandalous, incorrigible. I deserve to be locked away in a cell on bread and water until I die.” And rolling up his eyes to heaven: “My fault, my fault, my most grievous fault.”

Mayalde observed him with a smile, convinced he had lost his mind. The girl shrugged in amazement and kept her own counsel.

Father Mazón would sing these damn hallelujahs that have been repeated in Mexican churches for the past five hundred years and eventually move away from Mayalde, the object of his recriminations, and conclude by praising himself, remembering what they had told him at home when he disclosed his ecclesiastical vocation: