Happy Families (16 page)

If this double play passed through the minds of Miles and the soldiers, all of them concealed it without difficulty. The general commanded, the troops obeyed. The general was carrying out to the letter his duty to explore the sierra. And the troops were doing theirs, covering every inch of the steep, solitary, overgrown terrain. Who could accuse them of shirking their duty?

Roberto Miles. He could. The general’s younger son, Roberto Miles, dressed in a guayabera and holding an insolent, phallic cigar between his teeth. Roberto Miles sitting at a table on the hotel terrace with a sweet roll and a small espresso growing cold as he waited for his father to appear and not show—because it wasn’t his nature—any surprise at all.

Marcelino sat down calmly next to Roberto, ordered another coffee, and asked him nothing. They didn’t even look at each other. The father’s severity was a mute reproach. What was his son doing here? How did he dare interrupt a professional campaign with his presence, not merely useless but inopportune as well? His presence was impertinent, disrespectful. Didn’t he know his father was pursuing his older brother through the sierra?

“Don’t look for him anymore in the sierra, Father,” Roberto said as he sipped the coffee with voluntary slowness. “You’re not going to find him there.”

The general turned to look coldly at his son. He asked nothing. He wasn’t going to compromise—or frustrate, he admitted to himself—his intimate project of
not finding
the rebel, of deceiving headquarters without incurring any blame at all.

Let Roberto talk. The general would not say anything. A profound intuition ordered this conduct. Not to look. Not to speak.

When he looked at himself in the mirror the next morning, the general thought his slender little mustache, as thin as a pencil line, was ridiculous, and with a couple of strokes of the Gillette, he shaved it off, seeing himself suddenly free of the past, of habits, of useless presumptions. He looked like a defeated commander. His undershirt was loose, and his trousers hung on him unwillingly.

He reacted. He tightened his belt, rinsed his sweaty armpits, and put on his tunic buttoned with conflictive anger and disinclination.

Andrés Miles was now in prison. He smiled at his father when they arrested him in the house of his sweetheart, Esperanza Abarca.

“There’s no better disguise than invisibility,” the older son said with a smile when he was detained. “I mean, you have to know how to look at the obvious.”

He placed a small Dominican banana in his mouth and surrendered without resistance. He had only to see the equally sad faces of his father and the troops to realize that what they did, they did against their wills. It was almost as if the father as well as the soldiers had lost in one stroke the reason for this campaign aimed at what had happened now—the capture of the rebel leader, Andrés Miles—and reached an unwanted conclusion that brought all of them face-to-face with a fatal decision. Eliminating the rebel.

“Just don’t apply the fugitive law to me,” Andrés said with a smile when they tied his hands.

“Son . . .” the father dared to murmur.

“General, sir,” his son answered with steel in his voice.

And so Marcelino Miles spent the whole night debating with himself. Should he try his son according to the summary procedure dictated by the military code? How comfortable it was for the political authorities to shoot the rebel and leave no trace . . . make him disappear, provoke a passing protest, and assure the eventual triumph of forgetting. How complicated to bring the rebel before judges who would determine the proper punishment for insurgency and uprising. How destructive to paternal morale to attend the son’s trial and oblige himself to present the infamous evidence: His brother had betrayed him. Wouldn’t it be better for Roberto to stay out of the case, for the father to assume complete responsibility?

“I captured him in the sierra. My men will testify to that. Mission accomplished. Let justice be done.”

He remembered Roberto’s face when he betrayed his brother.

“It’s as clear as two and two make four.” Roberto dared to be ironic. “Don’t tell me, Father, that it never occurred to you the rebel might be hiding like a coward behind the skirts of his old lady here in Chilpancingo?” He laughed. “And you lost in the sierra, just think . . .”

“Why, Roberto?”

The ironic mask shattered. “Did you calculate, Father, the cost of having a brother who appears day after day in the papers as an insurgent fugitive? Have you thought of the very serious damage all of this does to my business? Do you believe that people, people, General, sir, the government, businessmen, gringo partners, all of them, do you believe they’ll have confidence in me with a guerrilla brother? For God’s sake, Papa, think about me, I’m twenty-eight years old, things haven’t gone well for me in business, give me a chance, plea—”

“Capturing him was only a question of time. You had no patience with me,” Marcelino Miles said, making a great effort to be conciliatory.

“Naaaaa,” his younger son mocked him openly. “Nonsense! You were acting like a fool, to put it kindly, you—”

The general stood, hit his son Roberto in the face with his whip, and headed for the prison.

“Let him go,” he told the captain of the guard. “Tell him that this time he should really disappear, because the second time will be the end.”

“But General, sir . . . If headquarters finds out, you’ll—”

Miles interrupted him brutally. “Who’s going to tell what happened?” he asked in a voice as hard as basalt.

“I don’t know . . .” stammered the captain. “The soldiers . . .”

“They’re loyal to me,” the brigadier general answered without any doubts. “None of them wanted to capture my son. You can testify to that.”

“Then, General, sir, your other son.” The captain’s firm tone returned. “The one who turned him in, the one—”

“Do you mean Judas, Captain?”

“Well, I—”

“My son Cain, Captain?”

“It’s your—”

“What do you think of the fugitive law, Captain?”

The captain swallowed hard. “Well, sometimes there’s nothing else—”

“And what do you think is worse, Captain, rebellion or betrayal? I repeat: Which one stains the honor of the military more? A rebel or an informer?”

“The honor of the army?”

“Or of the family, if you prefer.”

“There’s no question, General, sir.” Now Captain Alvarado blinked. “The traitor is despicable, the rebel is respectable.”

Nobody knows who shot Roberto Miles in the back as he was going into the hotel La Gloria in Chilpancingo. He fell dead on the street, surrounded by an equally instantaneous flow of thick blood that ran with sinister brilliance from the snow-white guayabera.

General Marcelino Miles communicated to headquarters that the rebel Andrés Miles had succeeded in escaping military detention.

“I know, Mr. Secretary, that this family drama is very painful. You must understand that it was very difficult for me to capture my own son after six weeks of combing the mountains looking for him. I couldn’t imagine that my other son, Roberto Miles, would put a pistol to the head of the upstanding Captain Alvarado and force him to allow his brother, Andrés, to escape.”

“And who killed Roberto, General?”

“Captain Alvarado himself, Mr. Secretary. A valiant soldier, I assure you. He wasn’t going to allow my son Roberto to stain the honor of an officer.”

“It’s murder.”

“That’s how Captain Alvarado understands it.”

“He thinks so? Or he knows so? He only thinks so?” the secretary of national defense said with controlled passion.

“General, Captain Alvarado has joined the rebels of the Vicente Guerrero Popular Army in the Sierra Madre del Sur.”

“Well, it’s better for him to join the guerrillas than the narcos.”

“That’s true, General. You see that four out of ten leave us to go with the narcos.”

“Well, you know your duty, General Miles. Continue looking for them,” said the secretary with a smile of long irony in which General Marcelino Miles could detect the announcement of a not very desirable future.

Marcelino Miles returns with pleasure to the sierra in Guerrero. He loves the plants and birds of the mountains. Nothing gives him greater pleasure than identifying a tropical almond from a distance, the tall lookout of the forests, catching fire each autumn to strip itself bare and be renewed immediately: flowers that are stars, perfume that summons bumblebees, yellow fleshy fruits. And also, close up, he likes to surprise the black iguana—the garrobo—looking for the burning rock of the mountain. He counts the five petals of the basket tulip; he’s amazed that the flower exists outside a courtyard and has made its way into the dense growth. He looks up and surprises the noisy flight of the white-faced magpie with its black crests, the long throat of the social flycatcher and its spotted crown, the needle beak of the cinnamon-colored hummingbird. The clock-bird marks the hours with its dark beak, conversing with the cuckoo-squirrel with its undulating flight . . . This is the greatest pleasure of Marcelino Miles. Identifying trees. Admiring birds. That is why he loves the mountains in Guerrero. He doesn’t search for Andrés. He has forgotten Roberto. He is in the army because of his passion for nature.

Chorus of the Suffering Children

why did we run away?

because my papa wouldn’t let me be with other children nobody could come to play

with me I couldn’t go anywhere

because my father hit us both my mama and me

because my mother was afraid and so was I

because locked in my room I hear the insults the blows

because I have nightmares

because I don’t sleep

because my father doesn’t respect my mother and if he doesn’t respect her he can’t respect

me

because my papa makes me take a freezing-cold shower so I’ll behave

because my papa makes me watch porn movies with him on TV

because if my papa insults my mama why can’t I?

why did we run away?

because they abused us they whipped us they threatened to cut us

because they threw us out of the house

papa and mama, abusive father, single mother, father and mother divorced, addict fathers, drunken fathers, unemployed fathers because papa and mama have no other mirror than

us their lost youth

                                    because papa and mama resent their lives and

they ruin ours so we won’t dare

to be better
because we don’t have grandparents and our grandparents have no

grandmother
because my husband wanted a male heir and

he made me get an abortion when the doctor told him
that my baby was a girl like me
ultrasound ultrasound there are no fetal secrets anymore
mountains of fetuses
more fetuses than garbage
a little girl is undesirable she’ll wind up going off with her

husband she’ll lose the father’s name
educating a girl is throwing water into the sea the husband

will have the benefit of the education we gave her with so much

sacrifice
ungrateful the two of them
(the sex of a fetus is no longer a secret)
(the garbageman baptizes the sex)
save yourself from happy families
look at your parents: only violence settles things
look at your parents: don’t respect women
look at your parents: your father killed you because he
                           wanted to kill your mother and you were near at hand
                                    and now where?
escape your dumbass family the school that makes you stupid

the suffocating office the loneliness of
the streets
kid, become a cycleboy! they give you a motorcycle you
laugh

at the traffic lights the curses
the police the endless delays
zigzag cycleboy kill pedestrians freefreefree

fastfastfast
adrenaline express
bulletcycle cycleboy urban cowboy
though you’re the one who regularly dies every day

the only one among a thousand cycleboys who are
saved one day to die smashed up one by one

in the following days
and now where?
join the flashmobs the lightningrace find out

where’s the hookup today
escape: arrive and join in leave no more than two

minutes at a time this is the fiesta of
passing friendship of impossible communication

of instantaneous flight
suck up the coke and run
there’s no way out
run before they play taps for you

they throw you in jail
they apply the fugitive law to you
quick quick the kiss the greeting the pass
and now where?
damn motherfucker wandering around
don’t you have a home? I don‘t have a home because
                                    nobody’s looking for me and nobody’s looking for me
                                    because I don’t have a home
how many are there? how many flies are there in an outhouse

with open windows?
why don’t you go back?
because I’m not a damn kid anymore I’m a man

like my father
why don’t you go back? Because I’m getting mixed up

help me

The Gay Divorcee

Guy Furlong and José Luis Palma met in the old Balmori movie house on Avenida Álvaro Obregón, a sumptuous art deco palace with the best sound equipment of the day and a seductive gleam of lustrous bronzes, mirrors, and marbles. They happened to sit next to each other. The first brush of knees was avoided with nervous urgency. That of elbows, forgiven. That of hands, spontaneous, when they clasped during the laughter demanded by the screen, awkward only for a moment—the instant just before the meeting of their eyes that, with its intensity, eclipsed the erotic ballet of Fred and Ginger on the screen.

The Gay Divorcee
was the title of the film with the Rogers-Astaire team. Then came
The Gay Desperado,
with an Italian singer disguised as a Mexican
charro,
and later,
Our Hearts Were Young and Gay,
the autobiography of a Broadway actress. Except back then the word “gay” meant only “happy, carefree, lighthearted,” while contemptuous, insulting terms were reserved for homosexuals. Queer. Pansy. Faggot. A whole gamut of them. Forty-one, because of an old club of bourgeois transvestites with that number of members.
Adelitas,
for being “popular with the troops,” considering the relative ease of hiring indifferent soldiers for last-minute performances.
Jotos
in Méjico with the “j” of García Lorca and with the murdered poet
pájaros
in Havana,
apios
in Seville,
floras
in Alicante, and
adelaidas
in Portugal.

And back in Mexico,
jotería
to classify an entire sexual group. A pipe makes his mouth water. He likes his rice with the stem. He enjoys boiled Coca-Cola. The storm of nominal and adjectival scorn that poured down on Mexican homosexuals perhaps only hid, crudely, the very disguised inclinations of the most macho of machos: those who deceived their wives with men and brought venereal disease into their decent homes. Enchiladas with cold cream. Male hookers.

José Luis and Guy, from the very beginning, by an agreement unspoken but acted upon, established themselves as a couple removed from both dissimulation and excuses. It was auspicious that the movies brought them together when they were only eighteen years old. They still weren’t emancipated, but their early relationship pushed them to find as soon as possible the way to leave their families (indifferent to the situation because the lovers decided it that way) and live together. Guy achieved it first, since his success as an artistic promoter produced good commissions that allowed him to establish an agency called Artvertising, which quickly had a list of distinguished clients. In the meantime, José Luis completed his law studies at the age of twenty-three.

It was auspicious that the movies brought them together. In the silver images of the Balmori, they had discovered a capacity for wonder that set fire to their love and kept it alive. They divided their attraction to films among the several unreachable models offered to them by the irreplaceable darkness of the cinematographic cave. They let pass the pretty ones like Robert Taylor, the rough ones like James Cagney, the extroverts like Cary Grant, the introverts like Gary Cooper, and settled into their admiration, secret in its androgyny, of Greta Garbo, the woman men wanted to be but the woman no man would ever become. Mademoiselle Hamlet, as Gertrude Stein called her (or was it Alice Toklas?). The sphinx. Her face filled with wintry absence projected from the screen like an offering and a challenge. Leave me alone, like bullfighters, but make me yours, like courtesans.

As soon as they moved into a nice apartment with neoclassical architecture in the Roma district, Guy and José Luis placed some photos of Garbo in strategic spots, though their principal paintings were given to them by Alfonso Michel and Manuel Rodríguez Lozano. A still life that throbbed with vital breath in the exuberant, disheveled, husky Michel (a midwife to painting) and a funeral procession in blacks, whites, and grays from Rodríguez Lozano (its gravedigger).

Together they found their professions. Guy Furlong opened an art gallery on Calle de Praga to give a space to painters who used an easel and to prove that murals were not the only art in Mexico. José Luis established a law office on Avenida Juárez that soon specialized in discreet divorce negotiations, division of property, awarding of custody, and other troublesome matters in the life of a family that ought to be kept away from public opinion.

“To be who we are, we need money,” José Luis said judiciously, and of course Guy agreed.

In order not to worry about money, they had to make money. Without ostentation. The important thing was to keep alive desire, the capacity for wonder, to share time, to create a common background of memories and an evanescent oasis of desires. If love was divided among several unreachable models, affection was concentrated on a single intimate model. Themselves.

The two boys established certain rules for their life in common. Guy said it one night:

“The first time you made love to me, you accepted me once and for all, without any need to test me or constantly reaffirm the ties that bind us. Between us, there are more than enough complications.”

It really wasn’t necessary to reaffirm a love given as spontaneously as the flow of a fountain, though with constant references to everything in the life of the world that pleased them and identified them. Their intimacy was the thing that was sacred, untouchable, the impalpable diamond that, handled too much, could change into coal. In the secret chamber of their intimacy, Guy and José Luis established a relationship as close to itself as water is to its continent. “Death Without End,” the great poem by José Gorostiza, was one of the couple’s vital bibles. Form was content and content form with no more motive than the patterns of delight in touch begun that increasingly distant afternoon in the movies. The joy of mutual contemplation. The knowledge of the respect owed to each one and to the couple.

As for the world . . . they weren’t naive. They knew they were in society, and society tests us, it demands periodic examinations, especially of homosexual lovers who dare to be happy. José Luis and Guy prepared good-naturedly to endure the world’s tests, aware that they wanted to have contact with the group but avoid (as if it were mange) promiscuity.

“You’re not a flirt,” José Luis said to Guy. “You just display yourself. You like to show yourself off. You’re right. You’re handsome, and you ought to let yourself be admired. I’m happy you’re like this. I’m happy people admire you.”

“Don’t fool yourself,” Guy responded. “People need to know me to love me. If a person doesn’t know me, he probably won’t like me.”

They laughed at these topics and admitted:

“There can always be somebody who seduces us.”

Until now, no one had come between them. The serious, amiable behavior of the boys, their stability as a couple, made them likable. They dressed well, they spoke well, they were doing well in their respective careers. They saved criticism of other people for private moments. They weren’t gossipmongers.

“Did you see the faces Villarino was making? He was putting moves on you.”

“You like people to admire me, didn’t you say that?”

“Show yourself off now that you’re young. Take a good look at Villarino so you never become a flirt when you’re old. How awful!”

“No. How ridiculous!”

Both had been educated in English schools, but they never referred to what is called “the English vice.” They did accept, however, a rule of conduct learned by means of educational blows with a cane to the gluteals:

Never complain. Never explain.

Ni quejarse ni explicarse.
The demands of love imposed themselves naturally, without any need for complaints or explanations, in the very act of love. Demands before love tended to kill pleasure, withdrawing its implicit satisfactions, losing them in the harsh antagonist of love, which was logic, though this only reinforced the professional competence of the two men.

And so there was a very attractive equilibrium in their lives, measured out between their work and their private life. Which doesn’t mean that my friends Guy and José Luis didn’t have a social life in the very lively Mexico City of the forties and fifties to the mid-sixties. They participated in various groups founded to the almost biological rhythm of the decades and their newsworthy duration, their inevitable decline, the attachments to and detachments from social groups and, in particular, the solid middle class to which they both belonged. They were present at the end of the fiesta dominated by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, two large multicolored piñatas that skillfully avoided the sticks of governments, political parties, or social classes. Artists ate apart. They owed nothing to anyone except art. Frida and Diego swung picturesquely at an unreachable height to which you had access only if your name was Trotsky, Breton, or Rockefeller, or if you were a modest cantina owner, the projectionist at the movies, or the indispensable hospital nurse. In the forties, José Luis and Guy were present only at the end of that boisterous party, the tail of the comet that pulled along in its generous wake the lights of artistic creativity, sexual confusion, and political arbitrariness.

Then they moved among the romantic violins of Reyes Albarrán’s Rendez Vous and the Jockey Club, which became the most discreetly gay and refined place to meet on Sunday thanks to the management of Jaime Saldívar, a man endowed with inseparable amiability and elegance, capable of making himself followed, like the pied piper of Hamelin, by newly minted princes and the patriarchs of ancient line-ages. Although the mix of European
epavés
from World War II and the stars of a Hollywood undecided between Roosevelt’s New Deal and McCarthy’s witch hunt met at the Ciro’s of the dwarf A. C. Blumenthal, a partner of the gangster Bugsy Siegel, and in what remained of the intimate wartime cabarets: Casanova, Minuit, Sans Souci . . .

Then came the adventures of the Basfumista group, fervent, anarchic, invented by the painter Adolfo Best Maugard, a former assistant to Sergei Eisenstein in Mexico and endowed with a vestal in residence, Mercedes Azcárate, and a slim blond philosopher, Ernesto de la Peña, who knew some twenty languages, including that of Christ, and was master within the group of a distracted vocation for alarm in a society still capable of being surprised and forgetting from one day to the next about its own newness. Basfumismo never defined itself beyond the Chaplinesque call for attention before a dehumanized society.

It was the last clarion call of the 1940s, before the immense city devoured every attempt to come together under the roof of culture and acquire a personality by means of avant-garde circles. On the horizon, the Rosa district was already dawning, a mix of St. Germain des Prés and Greenwich Village around a Café Tyrol presided over every afternoon by a Colombian writer, Gabriel García Márquez, who had lived in Mexico City since 1960, and baptized by the painter José Luis Cuevas, a cat who seduced with scratches.

But by then Guy Furlong and José Luis Palma were the only Mexicans who still wore tuxedos to eat dinner. They were distinguished by a reluctance to abandon the styles of their youth. Both of them based elegance on style, not fashion. The bad thing was that by the sixties, wearing a dinner jacket at a cocktail party or a vernissage meant running the risk of being confused with the waiters. The old seducer of adolescents, Agustín Villarino, had turned in his documents to eternity sometime earlier. Not, however, without leaving a successor in Mexico City, his nephew Curly Villarino, and here our story actually begins.

Guy and José Luis did not want to be left behind. The groups and conclaves mentioned here tacitly proclaimed their modernity, their cosmopolitanism, and their youth. Three purposes that condemned them to disappear. The modern is destined to vanish quickly for the sake of its own decaying currency and in favor of the next brand-new novelty that, whether it’s called postmodern or retro and rejects or evokes nostalgia, simply repeats the warning of death to fashion in the
Pensieri
of Giacomo Leopardi: Madama la Morte, Madama la Morte, don’t ask me who I am: I am fashion, death . . . I am you.

Then the spree began to fall apart in a charmless slumming in run-down, high-living cabarets in the Guerrero district and in San Juan de Letrán. El Golpe, King Kong, El Burro, Club de los Artistas . . . and if one wanted to dance the mambo on Sunday with one’s servants, the Salón Los Angeles dissolved, with delight in loud revelry and false democracy, the barriers between classes. The cabarets for danzón and dance hostesses died a natural death, the Río Rosa, next to the Bullfight Ring, and the Waikiki, whose only vegetation was the cactus on Paseo de la Reforma. Thanks to its consecration by Aaron Copland, the Salón México survived with its famous sign:
DON’T THROW LIT CIGARETTES ON THE FLOOR, THE GIRLS CAN BURN THEIR FEET
.

Cosmopolitanism customarily required a center of worldwide attraction, like Paris in the nineteenth century or New York in the twentieth. The fall of colonial empires after World War II meant the end of one or even two cultural metropolises in favor of a revindication of traditions, each anchored in a calendar distinct from the Western. For a Mexican, in any case, it was easier to refer to the Mayas or the Baroque than to the contributions of Kenya, Indonesia, or Timbuktu, the new capitals of the disguised anthropology of third-world revolution.