Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

“It doesn’t matter.”

“No, tell me, everything matters.”

“Don’t worry. I accept my limitations. It’s my rule.”

Augusta remained silent during this exchange. Looking at Julia, she thought that the innocent only complicate life for others. Evil, envy, malice, the great defects, the whole treasury of transgressions, when they appear, have the virtue of uprooting moral hypocrisy, false appearances, deceptive piety. In any event, Augusta was bored by her sisters. She was bored with her sisters. She laughed to herself. What could she do to liven up the vigil? It was not a question of making anyone indignant. And she did not want to give in to the provocation programmed ahead of time by their absent father. How many times had she confirmed that he did not want to talk about his daughters, he wanted his daughters to talk about him. That was why Augusta tended to remain silent while the sisters argued over who would speak first: You tell, no: you first. . Augusta feared that the secret silence she knew how to maintain would be transformed, through the good works of her clumsy sisters, into a simple exchange of confidences. Didn’t Augusta know, because she was the oldest and the one who first knew the father, that each time she wanted to keep something to herself, her desire was violated by their severe, vengeful, brutal father?

“What secret are you hiding, Augusta?”

“Nothing, Papa. You’re imagining things.”

“Of course I am. I imagine nothing less than the truth. Why do you keep your secrets from me? Are you ashamed? Or do you like to make me angry?”

“No, Papa. You’re wrong.”

“One of two things, my girl. You’re acting this way out of the shame pleasure gives you or because of the pleasure shame gives you. There’s not much to think about. You don’t fool me, etcetera.”

The young Augusta (she was forty-three now) blushed, and Papa looked at her with an air of understanding and forgiveness.

“The miserable bully.” Augusta struggled to open the coffin. The sisters screamed and stopped her. Augusta only wanted to liven up the vigil. The younger sisters returned to their quibbling.

“What is it you don’t. .?”

“Nothing. What were you going to—?”

“It doesn’t mat—”

“No, tell me.”

“That his motives were doubtful,” murmured Augusta. “Doubtful, if not disagreeable.”

She realized that Julia and Genara were paying attention to her. Had that been their father’s triumph: to demand attention when they didn’t give it to him? For a second, the oldest sister saw herself in the dead man’s coffin, shut in, without the sisters coming to save her from silent asphyxiation. And she realized that at this moment, being in a coffin meant occupying their father’s position.

This idea shamed and disturbed Augusta. She reproached herself for the temptation to supplant their father, even in death. She gave herself over to a kind of extremely personal prayer. Authority is authoritarian. Be careful, Augusta, try to give your sisters the grace that Papa denied them, try to make them content with the rhythms of life now that this long period of mourning is coming to an end, make them look outside, make them feel things like the temperature, the seasons, the neglected birds, the barking of dogs, the silence of butterflies, how the grass grows, everything Papa denied us because even a dragonfly could compete for the attention he deserved.

Augusta realized she wasn’t saying what went through her mind because she was sure that when she tried to speak, she would have no voice. Was that their father’s original theft: to make her mute? Did their father know that Augusta wouldn’t dare ask Julia and Genara what they feared and desired when the time period imposed by him was concluded: Now we’re going to live together at last, come, sisters, the time of wandering the world looking for other pleasures and other companions is over, I’m afraid that after tonight we’ll all go mad, mad in our solitude, tied to calendars of fire, led to the very brink of old age. . Together. Here in the sunken park. Together and finally free.

It was enough to listen to them.

“He never told us ‘Don’t leave, come live with me. .’ ”

“We were all grown up, Julia, we had no reason to continue at his side.”

“Despicable, despicable, that’s what he called us.”

“Well, now you see, he ground us down, he left us free.”

“To do what? To die?”

“No, to go on living.”

“Despicable.”

“What freedom? Let me tell you. The freedom to come here every year to obey him as if he were alive.”

“But if we didn’t—”

“Say it, Julia, but if we didn’t—”

“We’d be left without the inheritance.”

“What an injustice! Isn’t it?”

“But I thought when he was gone. .”

“That we’d do what we wanted?”

“Why can’t we see him?”

“He died.”

“Do you think so? Maybe he just can’t be seen, that’s all.”

“No. He died. This is just a ceremony. An empty ritual. Wake up. Realize what’s happening.”

“How hard you can be behind that cherub’s face.”

Augusta heard them without saying a word. She told herself she accepted fears because by now she was used to them. Now what would she have to accustom herself to when the custom of the annual ceremony around their father’s coffin was ended? What would become of their lives? Would they change? Or was custom now too strong?

She imagined, with a mixture of revulsion and humor, that the three of them, Genara and Julia and, why not, she herself, Augusta, would continue returning year after year to the garage in the sunken park, celebrating this action that none of the three could classify as commitment, ceremony, duty, habit, caprice, because by dint of repetition, it had become a part of their lives. Would they dare to end the custom? Or would it become the customary obligation in a hollow formula, an empty ritual? How to maintain the sensation of menace in the duty their father had awarded them? Was that feeling his real inheritance: keep me alive, daughters, live on the alert, questioning, dissatisfied? Why do you think I’ve imposed these time periods on you? Out of love, my pretty babies, out of love and nothing but! To avoid your falling into the softness of girls with good inheritances pursued by a legion of lecherous upstarts, starving good-for-nothings who don’t love you, cannot adore you as I do.

4. “Do you remember that we put on shifts and blindfolds when we bathed?”

“To avoid sin.”

“That’s what he said.”

“Do you realize, Julia, that we ourselves never saw him naked, in the bathroom, shaving?”

“Didn’t he let us see him?”

“Or didn’t he let us see ourselves?”

As the hours passed, Augusta thought their father had told her that he didn’t want his daughters to see him age. That he wanted to be forever young for them. An attractive father, in short.

“Do you know Papa’s age when he died?” Augusta asked them.

Genara and Julia looked at each other. “I don’t know. . seventy, eighty? A hundred?”

“Do you remember him as an old man?”

“What?”

“Yes, old.”

“No, young, always young. He ate the years.”

Genara laughed a great deal. “It isn’t the only thing he ate.”

“We remember him young.”

“But we never saw him young.”

“Because we only have photographs of the young Papa.”

“Isn’t there a single photo of the old Papa?”

“What’s the difference between what used to be and what was?”

“The difference between conscience and memory,” Augusta pronounced, and the sisters laughed because they didn’t understand.