Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

Doña Matilde Cousiño, as it turned out, died on Christmas Eve, so for Don Luis, December 24 was a day of mourning, solitude, and remembrance. Between the night of the twenty-fourth and the morning of the twenty-fifth, Señor Albarrán dismissed the servants and remained alone, recalling the details of life with Matilde, perusing the objects and rooms of the house, kneeling at the bed his wife occupied at the end of her life, playing records of old Chilean tunes and Mexican boleros that choked him with romantic and sexual nostalgia, going through photograph albums, and preparing rudimentary meals with odds and ends, gringo cereals and spoonfuls of Coronado jelly. He had a sweet tooth, it was true, he saw nothing wrong in sweetening his bitterness and something sinful in stopping at a mirror hoping to see the face of his lost love, and the sorrow that ensued when he discovered only a closely shaved face, an aquiline nose, eyes with increasingly drooping lids, a broad forehead, and graying hair vigorously brushed straight back.

The doorbell rang at eight on the evening of December 24. Don Luis was surprised. The entire staff had left. The days of asking for lodgings were over, destroyed by the city’s dangers, and still the voice on the other side of the door of corrugated glass and wrought iron sang the Christmas song,

iiiiin the name of heaaaaa-ven

I ask yoooou for loooodging. .

Don Luis, incapable of admitting his incipient deafness, approached the door, trying to make out the silhouette outlined behind the opaque panes. The voice, obviously, was a caricature of childish tones; the height of the silhouette was that of an adult.

“Who is it?”

“Guess, good guesser.”

Dissolute, unruly, strewing the same destructive actions no matter where he was or whom he was with, at home or outside. The news had arrived: He was the same as always. Thirty-four forgotten years returned at one stroke, making Don Luis Albarrán’s extended hand tremble as he wavered between opening the door to his house or saying to the suspect phantom,

“Go away. I never want to see you again. What do you want of me? Get away. Get away.”

2. Reyes Albarrán had been given that name because he was born on January 5, a holiday that, in the Latino world, celebrates the arrival of the Santos Reyes, Melchor, Gaspar, and Baltasar, bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the stable in Bethlehem. Centuries before the appearance of Santa Claus, children in Mexico and Chile, Spain and Argentina, celebrated the Day of the Kings as the holiday with presents and homemade sweets, culminating in the ceremony of the rosca de reyes, the ring-shaped kings’ cake inside which is hidden a little white porcelain figure of Baby Jesus.

Tradition dictates that whoever cuts the piece of cake that hides the baby is bound to give a party on the second day of the following month, February, and every month after that. Few get past the month of March. Nobody can endure an entire year of Christmas parties. The last time he saw his brother, Don Luis received from him a rosca de reyes with twelve little dolls of Baby Jesus, one next to the other. It was a treacherous invitation from Reyes to Luis: “Invite me every month, brother.”

Matilde said it: “On top of everything else, he’s a scrounger. I don’t want to see him again. Not even as a delivery boy.”

When Luis Albarrán, moved by an uncontrollable mixture of blameworthy argumentativeness, buried fraternity, seignorial arrogance, unconscious valor, but especially shameful curiosity, opened the door of his house on that December 24, the first thing he saw was the outstretched hand with the little porcelain doll held between thumb and index finger. Don Luis felt the offense of the contrast between the pulchritude of the doll and the grime of the cracked fingers, the broken nails edged in black, the shredded shirt cuff.

“What do you want, Reyes?” said Luis abruptly. With his brother, courtesy was not merely excessive. It was a dangerous invitation.

“Lodging, brother, hospitality,” a voice as cracked as the fingers replied from the darkness. It was a voice broken by cheap alcohol: A stink of rum lashed the nostrils of Don Luis Albarrán like an ethylic whip.

“It isn’t—” he began to say, but the other man, Reyes Albarrán, had already pushed him away to come into the vestibule. Don Luis stood to one side, almost like a doorman, and rapidly closed the door as if he feared that a tribe of beggars, drunkards, and sots would come in on the heels of his undesirable brother.

He repeated: “What do you want?”

The other man guffawed, and his Potrero rum breath floated toward the living room. “Look at me and you tell me.”

Don Luis stood outside the bathroom listening to his brother singing “Amapola” in a loud off-key voice, splashing with joy and punctuating his song with paleo-patriotic observations: “Only — Veracruz — is — beautiful, howprettyismichoacán, Ay! Chihuahua! What! Apache!” as if the guest wanted to indicate that for the past three and a half decades, he had traveled the entire republic. Only because of a trace of decency, perhaps, he did not sing “Ay Jalisco, don’t brag.”

And if not the entire republic, Reyes had traveled — Don Luis said with alarmed discretion — its lowest, most unfortunate neighborhoods, its black holes, its spider nests, its overgrown fields of bedbugs, lice, and chancres, its maw of ashes, mud, and garbage. It was enough to look at the pile of dirty, frayed clothing riddled with holes, and its grayish tone, with no real color or form: Reyes Albarrán had left all this — the rags of wretchedness — at the bathroom door. With repugnance, the master of the house smelled his acrid armpits, the crust of his asshole, the bitter intimacy of his pubis.

He closed his eyes and tried to imagine the handsome, intelligent boy who, at the age of twenty-four, ruled over the most exclusive bar in Mexico City, the Rendez-Vous, facing the traffic circle of the Angel of Independence, when the capital had two and not twenty million inhabitants, when all the known people really did know one another and would meet at the Rendez-Vous, where, with luck, night after night, you would see one of the many celebrities who, in those days, frequented the exotic Mexican metropolis — John Steinbeck, Paulette Goddard, Aaron Copland, Virginia Hill. The so-called most transparent region, still wearing the halo of the recent glories of European exile and the distant fires of the Mexican Revolution.

Reyes Albarrán not only made cocktails. He was a cocktail. He mixed languages, references, gossip, jokes, he played the piano, he sang Agustín Lara and Cole Porter, combed his hair with pomade, imitated Gardel, introduced surprising mixtures of alcohol with irresistible names — the Manhattan, the sidecar, the Tom Collins — attempted to bring together necessary and dissimilar couples, urged homosexuals and lesbians to show themselves without complexes, impelled boys ruined by the Revolution to fall in love with girls enriched by the same event, deceived the Hungarian princess dispossessed by Communism into marrying the false rogue without a cent posing as a petro-millionaire from Tabasco. Between drinks, he imagined them all, learning on their wedding night that between the two of them — the princess and the rogue — they couldn’t put two eggs in the refrigerator.

“My specialty is launching penury in pursuit of wealth,” he would say, the sophisticated Reyes Albarrán with his elbow on the bar and a gin fizz in his hand.

But the clientele —hélas! — began to understand that the owner of the Rendez-Vous was a mocker, a gossip, a cruel and talkative man, even if he tended bar with burlesque religious solemnity, serving each drink with an “ego baptiso te whiskey sour” and closing the establishment at the hour prescribed by law with a no less mocking “Ite Bacchus est.”