Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

This is a thought that, in a very different way, Julia and Genara share. Julia out of simple charity. That everything will conclude and everyone will be at peace. Be able to wear spring flower prints again. A pretty cream-colored dress with an asparagus print. A tailored dress with orchids on the lapel. Leave behind the mourning imposed by their father.

Julia believes more, much more, in the kindnesses of memory that her sisters, for different reasons, reject or malign. Julia selects the best moments from her recollection and puts them together in nosegays of happiness. Games, affections, roses. Her father’s arms lifting her high. Her father’s lap receiving the curled-up little girl. The father’s hands. .

“I was my father’s little bird.” The young woman smiles. “I was always at his side. In silence. I never contradicted him. I never was disrespectful. I never raised my voice to him.”

Julia curbs her recollections as if her sisters can hear what she is thinking. She imagines that each of them at these moments does one of two things: She remembers or eliminates memories. Genara struggles against the memory of their father. She even makes the mistake of humming some tune from her childhood, revealing in this way what she does not wish to show.

Their father would accuse her: “You’re a full-fledged lazy thing.”

No, she wasn’t lazy. She was indolent, which isn’t the same thing. It isn’t that she wouldn’t or couldn’t do things. She believed that in the end everything would work out, more or less, with no need for her to act. Perhaps she was a contented girl who, since she did not know how to lie, thought it better to be quiet. How could she call her father “daddy dear,” like that hypocrite Julia, if she didn’t believe it? No, she wasn’t lazy. She avoided contradicting her father or fulfilling his expectations with regard to the affection he deserved. Perhaps Genara was simply walled inside her own childhood, distrustful of growing up in a world determined by the will of her father. What was wrong with that?

Only Augusta has sealed off her memory, carrying in her head a ridiculous mnemonic: the numbers of her bank accounts. But it is she, unexpectedly, who breaks the round of their silences by placing a hand on the coffin.

“He spent his life putting us to the test. How good that this is over.”

The sisters look at her with disbelief, amazement, and grievance.

“It’s true,” wails Genara. “It’s true. He’s dead.”

“He died,” Julia insists without wanting to. “What a shame.”

“Died, yes,” Augusta concludes. She insists, “Do you remember? Do you remember that list of prohibitions he wrote out by hand and tacked at the entrance to the bathroom?”

“You don’t remember that,” Julia said with easy tolerance.

“I remember, and so do you, Julia,” Augusta continued with the air of a gardener who cuts the overgrown grass and can’t interrupt the work without changing the rhythm or destroying a bed of roses by mistake. “Don’t touch yourself, don’t look at yourself. Avoid mirrors. Get dressed in the dark. Bathe in your shift. Don’t touch yourself. Don’t look at yourself. Don’t look at a man. Don’t let anyone touch you. Don’t go out alone. Sit in the first row at the movies even if it makes you cross-eyed. Don’t let yourself be looked at. Put a fig leaf on the art prints at school. Better yet: Don’t go to school anymore. I’ll be your school. Come, Augusta, sit on my lap so I can teach you. Go on, Genara, let me dress and undress you while you close your eyes and imagine I’m the sweetheart I forbid you to have. Lie down, Julia, I’ll sing you to sleep. You girls don’t have a mother. I’ll be father and mother both, I’ll—”

“I’d say that a father can be a perverse mother.” Augusta twisted her lips.

Julia touched Augusta’s hand. “There were only good intentions.”

“Then why do I remember them as perversions?”

“Because the perverse one is you,” Genara dared to say, and Augusta slapped her, a heavy blow of square, metallic Caesarian rings.

Julia stopped Augusta’s hand and looked incredulously at the signs of authority that adorned her sister’s long, curved fingers.

“What, haven’t you ever worn rings?” the oldest sister said haughtily.

Julia bowed her head artfully. “The one I wanted Papa denied me. He forbade the three of us. But you know that.”

Genara bit a finger and thought of everything she and perhaps Augusta and certainly Julia had not done in their lives out of fear of their father while their father was alive. And now, now that he had been dead for ten years. .

“. . why don’t we have the courage to do everything he prohibited while he was alive?”

“Out of respect,” Julia said sweetly, though with a lost, disoriented look, as if she had been left hanging on the last word said before this one.

“Out of greed,” Augusta stated brusquely. “Because we don’t want to lose the inheritance. Be honest with the devil. Because we’re afraid to disobey him even though he’s dead.”

“Because you’re afraid of him,” Julia said almost inaudibly, “the way you were when he was alive?”

“Papa and his damn time periods. All of you wait. I’m coming. You’ll find out. Have faith, have faith, have faith!”

Augusta’s voice was lost in its own echo. Julia and Genara knew that echo. It was what Augusta emitted in order not to cry or shout. The two sisters approached to embrace her, caressing her head with its short, bristly, masculine hair. Genara, without meaning to, pulled off one of Augusta’s earrings.

“Oh! You’re always so clumsy.”

Julia and Genara withdrew their hands from Augusta’s head as if they had profaned an authority that competed only with that of the father. She was the oldest sister, though her authority always remained beneath that of their father, feeding a sense of inferiority in her that only increased her throbbing pride.

“Don’t deceive yourselves,” Augusta said to her sisters. “Don’t forget his disdainful, pitying, triumphant face. ‘Don’t upset yourself, my girl. Don’t deceive yourself. Don’t lower your eyes when I come in. Without us you aren’t. .’ ”

“What is she saying?” said Julia.

“What are you saying?” asked Genara.

“Nothing.” Augusta blew her nose with the cambric handkerchief she always had tucked in the long sleeve of her dress.

That “nothing” was the most certain reflection of the belief Augusta had been cultivating since their father had disappeared and she suddenly realized that now authority fell to the oldest sister. She felt overwhelmed by the suspicion that the fact of his death made the authority fall to her and was the inheritance that Augusta at one time rejected and longed for in a conflict with no way out that only her sisters, if they understood it, would dare to resolve for her. But Augusta not only did not want to explain to Julia and Genara what she herself could not really understand, she also wanted to admit that she, Augusta, felt uncomfortable with their father’s moral inheritance.

“Do you remember Mama?” Julia interrupted Augusta’s clouded thoughts in a melancholy way.

“Yes and no.”

“What do you mean?”

“That it wasn’t necessary to invent her. She was there. We came out of her and never really stopped living in her belly.”

“How awful. Not even when she died?”

Genara listened with languid patience to this exchange between Augusta and Julia. Rocking back and forth on her heels, she valued being the patient sister, the one who counted up the longest times. She knew her sisters did not recognize that virtue — or any others — in her. They did not offend her, Julia with her goodness, Augusta with her arrogance. They simply ignored her. Julia because she was good, so good she could not admit comparable goodness in another sister. It was enough for Genara to know this to also know that Julia, despite her sweetness, was condemned to the flames of a hell where simulation is not admitted. Julia was good because it suited her, because she wanted to go to heaven, when in reality, good people are the largest population in hell. Being good may deceive God but not the devil.