Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

Mayalde had withdrawn to a corner like someone protecting herself from a squall that doesn’t end because it is only the prelude to the one that follows.

Mazón turned to look at her. “Not only a woman, an Indian. A race damaged for centuries. That’s why I keep her as a maid.” He looked with contempt at Félix. “And you, thief of honor, learn this. Life is not a sheepskin jacket.”

“It’s not a cassock, either.”

“Do you think I’m castrated?” Benito Mazón murmured, both defiant and sorrowful. “Ask the girl.”

“Don’t be vulgar. What I think is that there is no physical limit to desire,” said Félix Camberos. “There is only a moral limit.”

“Ah, you’ve come to give me lessons in morality!” shouted the priest. “And my desires? What about them?”

“Control yourself, Father.” Félix was about to put his arms around Mazón.

“Do you think I don’t spend my life struggling against my own wickedness, my sordid vileness?” shouted the priest, beside himself.

“I don’t accuse you of anything.” Félix stepped back two paces. “Respect yourself.”

“I am a martyr,” the priest exclaimed, his eyes those of a madman.

3. That same afternoon, when the two of them were alone, the priest sat a docile and mocking Mayalde on his knees and told her that God curses those who knowingly lead us down the wrong path. He caressed her knees.

“Think, child. I saved you from temptation and also from ingratitude. Don’t you have anything to say to me?”

“No, Father. I have nothing to say.”

“Get rid of the wild ideas that boy put in your head.”

“They weren’t wild ideas, Father. Félix put something else in me, just so you know.”

The priest pushed the girl off his lap. He didn’t stand up. “Forget him, girl. He’s gone away. He didn’t love you. He didn’t free you from me.”

“You’re wrong, Father. I feel free now.”

“Be quiet.”

“You’re a very sad man, Father. I’ll bet sadness hounds you even when you’re asleep.”

“What a chatterbox you’ve turned into. Did the deserter give you lessons?”

Mayalde was silent. She looked at the priest with hatred and felt herself being pawed at. The priest didn’t have anybody else to humiliate. What was he going to ask of her now? Would he humiliate her more than he did before Félix Camberos’s visit?

Perhaps there was a certain refinement in Father Benito Mazón’s soul. He didn’t mistreat Mayalde. Just the opposite. One knows he said things about thinking carefully if life with him had favored her or not.

“Do you want to go down to the village with me? When the sun shines, it makes you feel like leaving this prison. Let yourself be seen, fix yourself up. I’ll dress you.”

“So I won’t talk, Father?”

“You’re an absolute idiot.” The priest whistled between his teeth. “You don’t know what’s good for you. I’m a man of God. You’re less than a maid.” He began to hit her, shouting, “Wild ideas, wild ideas!”

The black cover over his body seemed like a flag of the devil as the priest shouted, “Man of God, man of God!” and Mayalde, on the floor, did not say a word, protected herself from the blows, and knew that in a little while the priest’s rage would begin to give out like air in an old, broken bellows, “Wild ideas, wild ideas, what did that boy put in your head?”

And in the end, out of breath, his head bowed, he would say to her (one knows it): “You’re an absolute idiot. Nobody wants to see you. Only me. Thank me. Get undressed. Have you called anyone else Daddy?”

When, barely two years later, Mayalde came down the mountain to tell one that Father Benito had died accidentally when he fell over a cliff, one was not surprised that the features and attitude of the eighteen-year-old girl had changed so much. It is clear to one that the priest kept her prisoner after the incident with the student Félix Camberos. The young woman who now approached looked stronger, robust, proven, capable of anything. Nothing like a prisoner.

“What happened to the priest?”

“Nothing. A slip. A misstep.”

“Where do you want to bury him?”

“Up there. In the ashes. Next to where Félix Camberos is buried.”

There the two of them are, side by side, on an abrupt slope of the mountain that looks pushed up toward the sky. From that point you can see all the way to the city that is generally hidden by the volcanic mass. The city is large, but from here you can barely make it out. One can imagine it as a conflagration. Though in the midst of the fire, there is an oasis of peace. The urban struggle concentrates on itself, and one forgets it if one takes refuge in an isolated corner, an island in the multitude.

We descended one day, she and I, from the slopes of the volcano to the great city that awaited us without rumors, curses, suspicions. But recollections, yes.

She could not forget, and she infected my memory.

When I married her after the priest died, I decided to take her far away from the little village in the mountains. I stopped talking behind the mask of the one who kept me far from the desire to make her mine. I became an “I” determined to show her that the uses of life are not sins you have to run away from by taking refuge in the mountains, that the false saint takes pleasure in humiliating himself only to inflict his arrogance on us, that humility sometimes hides great pride, and that faith, hope, and charity are not things of the next world. They should be realities in this world of ours.

I told her that Félix Camberos fought for these things.

I don’t really know if the beautiful Mayalde resigned herself to abandoning the adjoining graves of Father Benito and the student Félix. There was a sense of transitory guilt in her glance that I attempted to placate with my love.

In the end, all that remained were these words of my wife, spoken years later:

“All of that happened in the ill-fated year of 1968.”

and not only El Mozote

on May 22 1979 we protested on the steps of the cathedral and the army came and fired and three hundred of us died

blood pouring down the steps like water in a red waterfall

on January 22 1980 cotton workers

electricians office clerks teachers

machine-gunned cut off between two avenues

He

in the Sampul River trapped in the water fleeing

on one side Salvadoran soldiers firing at us

on the other side Honduran troops blocking our way

the Salvas grab children toss them into the air and cut off their heads with machetes

they call it operation cleanup

the next day the Sampul River can’t be seen

it is covered by a mass of turkey buzzards devouring the corpses

better dead than alive fool

we saw it in the villages

they talk about it in the shacks

go on look go see your father’s

two bodies

half a body on one corner

the other half on another corner

come see fool your mother’s head

stuck on a fence

look at the sky fool

look at the dragonfly jet fighters 37

they bring you little presents

they bring you six thousand pounds of incendiary bombs and explosives

they bring you white phosphorus rockets

they shoot at you with 60mm machine guns

they’re the spotter planes

they see people

they’re the huey helicopters

when they don’t see people they fire at livestock

huey oxen

it’s better to run away