Happy Families (10 page)

José Nicasio: Don’t condemn me without hearing me. I talked a great deal with my daughter. I warned her that love can isolate us from everything around us. But in its absence, we can be filled with the fear that something comparable exists. I believe my daughter wanted to love the incomparable and that all respect for the comparable filled her with disquiet. Is what I say true? Can you, if not judge, at least comprehend the words of a grieving mother? To think is to desire, I would tell my husband. He didn’t understand me. Did you think about my daughter? Did you desire her, José Nicasio?

Señora Vanina: You’ve never seen me. You don’t know me physically. I have no reason to hide what I am or where I come from. I’m ugly, Señora. I’m an ugly Oaxacan Indian. I’m short but muscular. I have a short neck, pushed down into my shoulders. This only makes the strength of my torso more prominent. If you could see how powerfully my heart beats. At times I believe that the front of my shirt betrays me. Right there, if you place your hand on my chest, right there you can feel the power of my heartbeats, Señora. I have an impatient heart, Señora. I moved up, I left my village and my people behind, and this makes me feel guilty, to tell you the truth. Unhappy. I have to constantly compare what could have been—what I left behind—and what I am. That’s why I feel guilty. Shouldn’t I have continued down there, in the village, in the Tlacolula market? Did I have the right to be more than all those people who saw me born, grow, play, work? In my heart this question always beats, Señora Vanina, an unsettling question that rises up to my neck where very thick veins throb to keep up my defiant head, I admit it, Señora, I have the face of an ugly Indian, flat nose, narrow forehead, and on my mouth an indecipherable sneer that I can’t change no matter what I do. I look in the mirror and say to myself, José Nicasio, take off that sneer, smile, try to be nice. My face must have come to me from very far away. My mask, naturally, Señora. Let us understand each other. We are born with the face that time gave us. Hard time, almost always. Time to suffer. Time to endure. What face do you want us to put on . . . ?

You can see, my Indian nature comes out no matter how I try to hide it. It just comes out, like a wildcat crouching in my belly. I tell you that I see myself in the mirror and say, Change your expression, José Nicasio, put a nice friendly smile on your mouth, don’t twist it like that, nobody’s threatening you. And I try to do that, Señora, but it doesn’t work, my head filled with colors and my chest filled with trembling tells me so. Don’t look so fierce, José Nicasio, don’t show so openly that you’re taking revenge, not for your humble origin but for your present-day success, do you understand? Stop telling people excuse me for having moved up, I’m an Indian who carries on his back centuries of humiliation, an ordinary dark-skinned man, an indigenous Zapoteca who’s not allowed to be on the sidewalk, they whip us down into the dust in the street . . .

Let me laugh, Señora. I go to the museums of Mexico and walk through the rooms of indigenous cultures—Mayas, Olmecas, Aztecas—filled with admiration for the art of my forebears. Well, that’s where they want to keep us, Señora, hidden away in the museums. Like bronze statues on the avenues. What happens if King Cuauhtémoc climbs down from his pedestal on the Paseo de la Reforma and walks among the people? They burn his feet again . . .

Let me laugh, Señora. As soon as we’re out on the street, we’re filthy Indians again, submissive Indians, redskins. They seize our ancestral lands, force us into the wild and hunger, sell us rifles and aguardiente so we’ll fight among ourselves. They invent a right to our women. They attribute every crime to us. They discover that their white women desire us in secret, and they come after us opening our backs so that dark blood spills even blacker blood. They shout Indian! at us or they shout redskin! when they come after us. Didn’t you know, isn’t Your Grace aware of all this? Your Grace. We’re not “reasonable people.” We’re not “decent people.” You kill us as soon as we turn our backs on you. The fugitive law is applied to us. Does Your Grace, a reasonable person, know what it means to be a stupid Indian, without reason, a stupid animal scorned in this country? A tongue-tied, splay-footed Indian.

And do you know what it means to escape the world of our fathers? First to Oaxaca because of my meritorious amate paintings. Then, thanks to the gringos who admire my work, to a school of Mexican handicrafts in San Diego, California, right on the border between Mexico and the United States. Far from my family’s village in the privilege of Oaxaca, in the house of the distinguished professor who treated me like half a son, a proof of his generosity with the less fortunate. I heard him say so,

“I’m not racially prejudiced. Look at José Nicasio. I treat him like a son.”

And now, far from my village, wandering the border. The wetbacks in California are dry when they arrive because there’s no river between San Diego and Tijuana. There are barbed-wire fences. There’s the migra. There are tunnels full of rats. There are garbage trucks where you can hide to cross over. There are vans abandoned in the desert, locked with padlocks and full of suffocated workers who paid a hundred or two hundred dollars to cross the border like animals. There’s injustice, Señora. Something you can’t save yourself from, even if you migrate to California . . .

But I already was “on the other side.” In every sense, Señora. I was respected by the gringos because I had talent and knew how to work. They even invited me to their parties to show how democratic they were. I was what they call their “token Mexican,” their nice demonstration Mexican, and they say a button’s enough for a demonstration. I was the Mexican button.

The newly arrived Mexicans gave me ugly looks. I wasn’t going to turn them in. Don’t think I was going to displace them. I was out of place everywhere, in my Indian village, in the capital of Oaxaca, in San Diego, California. I’ve known nothing but discrimination, Señora, even when I’m accepted, I’m good only for soothing a bad conscience.

Look how far we’ve come, José Nicasio. Once we put signs outside restaurants
NO DOGS OR MEXICANS ALLOWED
. Once we called them
greasers,
greasy, filthy, untouchable.

And now you can’t live without our work, I told them, and everybody took it badly, the gringos, the wetbacks, even myself.

Why do you shoot off your mouth, José Nicasio.

Learn to calm down.

Life has treated you well.

But the grimace was still there, Señora, as if nothing had happened.

José Nicasio: You’re mistaken if you believe my daughter, Alessandra, discriminated against you. She was incapable of anything so vile. I’m not saying that Sandra was a Sister of Charity. She didn’t display condescension. That kind of thing horrified her. She simply treated inferiors with respect and dignity. I mean, people different from her. She was conscious of the hypocrisies of our society and rejected them. How many times did I ask her to make friends with this girl, approach that woman, and she’d say, No, Mama, you haven’t seen that the girl has already learned the art of dissembling, you haven’t seen that the woman is a master of deceit.

How do you know, Alessandra? They’re not bad people. I know them.

No, it’s not that they’re bad. It’s that they’re obliged to pretend they’re good. They’ve been brought up to deceive and be cunning, to protect themselves from our society. I don’t want to be like that. I prefer the company of the spirits . . .

Please, accept other people’s limitations. Sooner or later, you’ll have to be just a little familiar with society.

Never.

A mother is speaking to you, José Nicasio. I am speaking to you freely and with the futile hope that you yourself feel free. What I’m saying to you about Alessandra, I’m saying so you’ll know who my daughter was. At the same time, I keep asking myself: Who was Alessandra? I thought I knew her character. That is what I’m describing to you. But I also knew that each character has its own exception. Is this what happened to you? That nightfall in Monte Albán, did you see the exception in my daughter? Did you discover the fault, the crack in a personality so carefully constructed?

Her father, my husband, a practical man, would become desperate.

“Tell me, Vanina, doesn’t our daughter have a single defect?”

I would tell him no, Sandra was perfect, because I never was going to allow her own father to dissect her like an insect. For me, Alessandra was sacred. But I am not, and behind my husband’s back, I had to look for the chinks of imperfection in my daughter.

Love.

Did Alessandra really love? Did her love for dead artists and thinkers hide a profound contempt for ordinary people? Forgive me, José Nicasio, was my daughter a social snob, a typical
bas bleu
? I implore you to forgive my frankness. My husband and I love each other. My husband is an excellent lover. He knows how to give me pleasure. Forgive me. I mean that Alessandra wasn’t born of the routine obligations of marriage. No, my husband knew how to excite me, transport me, raise me to the pleasure enjoyed by a woman who knows herself not only desired, but physically
ecstatic.
Alessandra was born of pleasure. But she doesn’t seem ever to have touched the pleasure I’m describing to you while she was alive.

I was afraid, observing my daughter’s lack of sexual interest, that her coldness led back to me, to her mother, to that sadness that is the price of love not shared with those you love. Sandra had to know she was beautiful. At least I knew it. When she was already a woman, she would ask me to dry her after her bath. Running the towel along her wet body, I would tell myself how beautiful, how desirable my daughter is, does she know it, or is she still the little girl I would dry with the most delicate love during her childhood?

You know, José Nicasio, there is no human body that isn’t visible and concealed at the same time. What is revealed in our bodies is as important as what is hidden. With my daughter, I had the secret feeling that the visible and the invisible were the same thing. She concealed nothing of her body because its mystery was only in her mind. That was for me, for the world, the invisible part of Alejandra. That was how she offered herself to me, her mother. I had to ask myself, how did she offer herself to a man? What will happen on the day Alessandra opens her visible body to a man who desires her only for her body and only later for her soul? Because in Alessandra, just as she was, there was no dissatisfaction.

Tell me, José Nicasio, do you believe you woke my daughter’s latent bodily dissatisfaction? You, who describe yourself as an ugly man, forgive me for repeating it to you, almost a monkey, a dressed macaque, a simian with a narrow forehead and short neck and long arms? Forgive me. Forgive me. I want to see you the way my daughter saw you that afternoon. You, you couldn’t wake the desire in my daughter. You, you, though you’ll never admit it, desired my daughter that afternoon. You made her feel that a man’s sex was threatening her. You wanted to be loved by a woman who did not desire you. Looked at by a woman who did not direct a glance at you. Greeted by . . .

You sexually assaulted Sandra. You took advantage of the solitude of twilight at Monte Albán to unleash your bestial instincts on my helpless daughter. Tell me it happened that way, José Nicasio. I need to know the truth. I’ve been sincere with you. I’ve written to you in prison so you’ll know who my daughter was. You have to know whom you killed that afternoon in Monte Albán.

Answer me.

Tell me you understand.

I’m familiar with your situation. You became a U.S. citizen in San Diego. It was a necessary step, I imagine, to overcome discrimination, no matter how slightly. Now your ambition has worked against you. If you were a Mexican, they would have sentenced you to life, and in the end, influence would have set you free. Not in California. You’ll be tried as a citizen of the United States. You’ll be sentenced to death.

Tell me the truth before you die. Why did you kill my daughter?

Señora Vanina: Believe me, I am deeply grateful for your letters. Word of honor, I respect your courage and spirit enormously. I know what lies ahead. You don’t need to remind me. I swear I want to tell you the truth. We were alone that afternoon, your daughter and I, watching the twilight in Monte Albán. It was clear that was the reason we stayed there when all the visitors had gone. To admire the sunset sitting on the steps of the Zapoteca temple.

What does a gaze mean, Señora? Is a gaze directed at the mountain the same as a gaze directed at a person? Do you look at a twilight and a woman the same way? I didn’t want to look at your daughter, Señora, but I did want to look at her looking just as I was and know I shared with her the emotion of natural beauty. Perhaps I should have controlled myself. Perhaps I should have repeated the lesson of my entire life and continued to be the crouching man. The Indian who does not have permission to raise his eyes from the ground.

I rebelled, Señora. I wanted to look at your daughter. I looked at her. Not like a crouching man but like a haughty one. The arrogant one? The one made equal? Or the one redeemed? Judge however you like. The artist. The one who sees.