Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

“Resentment,” Augusta continued. “The worst sin. Suffering because of other people’s happiness. Envying other people’s luck. Looking out for other people’s faults while you hide your own.”

She stopped because once again her thoughts were faster than her words and her doubt that she’d be understood even greater. The fact is that Augusta wanted to take on, as much as possible, the faults of their father. Promising happiness in the future, never today. Defer. Defer. Defer everything. Replace necessity with hope and hope with ceremony. Talk about what we don’t know and neither does he. Make us feel ignorant. Foment mistaken ideas about and within each of his daughters. Concede things too early or too late. Nothing at the opportune moment, Papa, do you realize that? Nothing at the right time, everything deferred until tomorrow, or console yourselves because you already have it and don’t know it. Always leaving us in uncertainty. Do we threaten him or does he threaten us? Can we make him disappear in a cloud of smoke? Or can he make us disappear? Does he accept each plea as the homage he deserves, the gift that is requested of him, or the illusion that is fulfilled when we ask him for it? When we dare to doubt his wisdom, he escapes from us, transforming his ignorance into shrewdness.

Did her sisters realize the number of things they didn’t do because they feared Papa? Did they realize that with this story about the day of the anniversary, they continued to defer their lives like old cars in a parking lot without a meter?

“Just count the demands he made on us from the time we were little girls. Didn’t it give us a mischievous joy to do the opposite of what he asked? Isn’t that what he expected of us, the pleasure of disobedience followed by redemptive penance? He condemned us. We condemned him. He treated us like simple things in his greenhouse, like little seeds subject to the temperature of his glance, the ice of his disapproval. He kept us in a larval state.”

“He has us,” Genara interrupted. “I mean in a larval state.”

Augusta stopped speaking. She withdrew into herself again. She did not know if her silence was hers alone or had joined the clamor of everything not said by the sisters who had gathered tonight, for the last time, in the garage in the sunken park where Papa had been born.

6. Augusta looked with judicious cruelty at Julia. She thought the innocence of the youngest sister was — or could become — only the mask of a profound malice. She had her doubts. Did Julia get what she wanted? Had she used the restrictions of the inheritance to do the only thing she was interested in doing: playing the violin? Augusta did not want to believe in Julia’s virginal appearance. She was always surrounded by men, in every orchestra. Perhaps she did not give the men her name. Perhaps she did not give her real name: Julia. Perhaps she went to bed with the clarinetist, let herself be fingered by the cellist, strummed with the guitarist, pulled out the stops with the man who played saxophone, blew with the piccolo player, all in a vast, harmonic, anonymous concupiscence. Julia had arranged things so her true life would be impenetrable.

Genara, on the other hand, was transparent. If she were to insinuate love affairs — something she had never done — her lies would have more weight than any truth. Possibly she had temptations. What she did not have were opportunities. All day at the wheel, with muddied hands and a stained brown apron. A woman with her sleeves rolled up and her hair pulled back. A strand falling over her forehead. Her legs spread as if she were giving birth to clay.

She once said about their father: “He watched over us as if we were his dolls.” This passivity of a toy was the nature, not second but first and who knows if original, of the sister who was a potter. Waiting for the anniversary was by now part of her customary life. What would she do without this expectation? Genara was not a woman capable of living without the routine of her calendar. In her heart, she wanted this situation to go on until the end of time. Not doing anything but ceramics. Being the potter to a vast world of clay by rescuing the clay and giving it the shape of human work. Was each worker a rival of God?

Genara would never accept this reasoning. She did not want to do anything that might contradict Papa’s wishes, though the contradiction in those wishes was that whatever she did, she would be both good and evil. Good if she obeyed instead of rebelling but evil because she disobeyed Papa. Genara wondered if this was the father’s policy — leave his daughters in permanent suspense, condemn them if they acted and also if they did not act? Genara felt very sad about having this conflict. Julia at least deceived others. Genara deceived herself. She continued to be a doll sitting on their father’s quilted bed, surrounded by flickering candles beneath a crucifix without nails where the figure of Our Lord seemed to be flying toward heaven.

Then their father came out of the bathroom, freshly shaved, smelling of Yardley lavender, of Barry’s Tricopherous, of Mum deodorant, with his colorless eyes and his hair of a yearning albino, to say: “I’m going to show you something you’ve never seen before.”

He always says it and disappears into the remains of the steam in the sauna.

None of them dares enter the sauna. Not even their father’s bathroom.

All the cosmetics and lavenders cannot lubricate the dry skin of the father who disappears walking backward, at a turtle’s pace, into the mists of his daily grooming routine.

A ceremonious man.

A rigid man.

The regularity of our lives.

A man who simultaneously represents the fantasy and the business of the world. Etcetera.

“Give us peace,” Genara says in a frightened voice.

“That depends on us, not on him,” interjects Augusta. “We shouldn’t give him a minute’s peace. We have to criticize him, question him, unmask him, pull the rabbits out of the hat, take the deck of cards out of his hands. Look, our father is a carnival magician, a theatrical wizard, a sorcerer at a fair. He is an illusion. A phantom. A sheet blown by the wind.”

Julia again collapsed into tears, her arms around the coffin. Like a Pietà among sisters, the group composed itself when Genara and Augusta embraced Julia, dissolved when they separated, somewhat confused about their own attitudes, and embraced again as if a decisive warning — night falling, a period of time about to conclude, the end of the plot — obliged them to defend themselves, united, against their father’s terrorist wishes, whatever they might be.

Augusta looked at them with a measure of scorn. The ten years would be over tonight. They had obeyed Papa’s posthumous decision. And then what? Would they never meet again? Would they consider the test decade concluded, the time in which each one had done as she wished knowing that this was what their father wanted, for them to do what he didn’t want them to do only in order to blame them and in this way oblige them to continue, as they had for the past ten years, this ceremony determined by him, almost as an act of contrition?

Is this what their father wanted? To have daughters who were free but poor (Genara), free but modest (Julia), prosperous but in the end obedient (Augusta)? And what were the three sisters looking for? To prove to their father that they could live without the inheritance even though they lived waiting for the inheritance? Because otherwise, why would they come to the annual appointment in the sunken park? Had none of them thought about rebelling against the command of their damn paterfamilias? Excluding herself from the ceremony? Telling him to go to hell?

“Did you ever think about disobeying Papa? Did one of you ever say to yourself: ‘Enough, I’ve had it up to here. That’s it. We don’t know if this is a game or a punishment? In any case, it’s tyranny.’ Did you ever think that?” Augusta spoke in a moderate way. She looked at her sisters without emotion. “Let’s see who is capable, right now, of leaving here,” she continued.