Carlos Fuentes: Happy Families

THE MOTHER. He knew where Elvira Morales sang, and he could always find her. In the eleven o’clock show at the cabaret Aladdin’s Cave. Would he come back? Or wouldn’t she see him again? Looking at the past calmly, Elvira Morales always calculated that the anonymous spectator who had shared the white lights with her one night would come back to hear her and have the courage to talk to her. She kept the image of a tall, robust man, his incipient baldness compensated for by long sideburns and a well-groomed mustache. Though it was also possible he’d never come back, and it was all a mirage in the great gray desert of the Cuauhtémoc district. The fact is, he did come back, their eyes met as she sang “Two Souls,” and in what was an unusual move for her, she came down from the small stage surrounded by applause and went over to the man waiting for her at table 12A. Pastor Pagán. “Shall we dance?” In her heart of hearts, she had made a bet. This man seems arrogant because he’s shy. Which was why now, thirty-three years later, when Elvira felt that a second desert was growing, the desert of married life, she continued the song knowing that Pastor, when he heard her, would ask her to dance that same night. There were no working-class cabarets like the ones they used to have. The life of the city had broken through the old borders. Nobody dared to go into dangerous neighborhoods. Young people went far away, to the edge of the city. Old people were more secure, frequenting the salsa dance halls in the Roma district, where everything was so dependable you could even go up onstage and show your skill as a dancer. This was where they went, though Elvira and Pastor got up to dance only to the slowest, most melancholy boleros. Listen. I’ll tell you in secret that I really love you. And I follow your steps even if you don’t want me to. Then, in each other’s arms, on the floor, dancing the way they did when they met, she could close her eyes and admit that when she gave up her career and agreed to marry, it was to become indispensable at home. If she didn’t, it wasn’t worth it. To be indispensable, she soon discovered (not now, now she’s dancing cheek-to-cheek with her husband) that once out of her profession, she was free to bring the song lyrics into her private life. She realized, with bitter surprise, that the bolero was the truth. In the cabaret, she had sung what she hadn’t lived: the temptation of evil. Now, in her home, the lyrics returned almost like something imposed, a law. Say it isn’t true, Elvira. Say I didn’t fall in love with you because of a secret despair, that I didn’t transform the ringing of wedding bells into a prelude to an emptiness so profound that only a poor tyranny over the house can fill it. Giving orders. Being obeyed. Never being dominated. Hiding her probable melancholy. Burying her unwanted restlessness. Devising matrimonial strategies so he would never say what she feared most: “We’re not the way we used to be.” He never said it. They went to bars with the illusion that there was never any “used to” but always nothing except “right now.” She always sang, and he knew where to find her. Always. She wouldn’t leave. “You have an exciting voice.” Mustache. Sideburns. Incipient baldness. Attributes of a macho. “Thank you, Señor.” She did have an exciting voice as a singer, that’s true. As a woman and mother, she felt her sentimental voice gradually turning into something else difficult to describe aloud. In her heart, she perhaps could tell herself — dancing very close to her past, present, for always lover, her man, Pastor Pagán — that instead of the woman’s martyrdom typical of the bolero, she now felt tempted to identify with the wife and mother who gives orders, however small they may be. And who is obeyed. This causes melancholy and agitation in Elvira Morales. She cannot understand why she doesn’t accept the simple tranquility of her home or rather, even if she does accept it, why she feels attracted to the misfortune at the heart of the song, though when you sing it, there’s no need to live it, and when you stop singing it, you fall into the trap of giving it life. “I don’t recognize myself,” Elvira whispers in Pastor’s ear when they dance together in the club. She doesn’t go on. She suspects he wouldn’t understand, and neither would anyone else. She would never say: “I regret it. I should have continued with my singing career.” And neither would she say something as melodramatic as: “A mother and wife needs to be worshiped.” She would never say a thing like that. She preferred, now and then, to declare her love. To her husband, her children, Alma and Abel. Her children didn’t return the favor. In the shrug of their shoulders, in their cold eyes, she recognized that all of a mother’s sentimental baggage seemed despicable to her children. For them, the bolero was ridiculous. But for Pastor, the music was just what it should be. The key to happiness. The prologue to the feeling, if not the feeling itself. Something overly sweet. Strange but overly sweet. Dancing in the half-light of romantic dance halls (there were still a few left), Elvira realized that what her children rejected in her was exactly what she rejected in her husband. The dreadful mawkishness of a world that decks itself out in colored spheres, as brittle and hollow as the balls on a Christmas tree. Was it necessary to elevate like a profane Eucharist one’s cheap and overly sentimental innermost feelings in order to disguise the lack of emotion in daily life, the absence of seriousness in the eternal disorder that affirms us in the face of the void, that distances us from everyone — from other people and from ourselves? Elvira Morales dances with her arms around her husband, and Pastor Pagán says into her ear, “How long are we going to pretend we’re still young? How long are we going to admit that our children threaten us? That they annihilate us little by little.” When she married, she thought: I can turn him down. But only now. Later, I won’t have that freedom. And before returning to the everyday schedule, the customary obligations, the degrees of indifference, the thermometer of real or imaginary debts, he would say into her ear as they danced to boleros, holding each other very tight: “Once, there was magic here.”

THE DAUGHTER. The four couples, fatigued, are approaching the final goal. The border with Guatemala. The Mexicans, Jehová and Pepita, have taken the train that goes to the Suchiate River, and the two North American boys, Jake and Mike, have opted for motorcycles. The Chihuahans, Juan and Soledad, prefer to run with a marathon highland rhythm. Only the Mexicans from Ciudad Juárez, the last-minute contestants, have lost their way in Oaxaca, where they finally were found in an inn sick with indigestion from a black mole. Half an hour from the goal, in the Chiapas forest, the train is halted by trees blocking the track, and out of the forest come ten, twelve young devils. Heads shaved, naked from the waist up, tears tattooed on their chests. The announcer on the reality show does not omit these details. He thinks it’s one more obstacle anticipated for the race. Part of the show. It’s not. Five or six boys get into the train with machine guns and begin to shoot the passengers. Jehová and Pepita die instantly. The gringos, Jake and Mike, arrive like the cavalry in a cowboy movie, realize what is happening, get off their motorcycles, attack the devils of the murdering gang with their fists. They can’t subdue them. Four boys with shaved heads shoot the young North Americans. They fall down dead. The forest is inundated with blood. The Chihuahans smell the blood from a distance. They have an ear for violence. They have suffered it for centuries at the hands of whites and mestizos. It is their inheritance to be suspicious. They don’t approach the train. They take another road to the border. They win the competition. In Indian dress, they are right in style to take a Caribbean cruise. “We’ve never been to the ocean,” they declare when they are awarded the prize. Alma Pagán turns off the television. She doesn’t know when she’ll turn it on again. In any case, she feels better informed than her parents. They are very ignorant. And without information, what authority can they have over her and her brother, Abel? She thought this and didn’t understand why she felt more vulnerable than ever.