Happy Families (19 page)

Chorus of a Son of the Sea

the tip of the peninsula opens like the biggest fan in the world

the freezing distant pacific ocean crashes into the hot storms of sinaloa

displaying two hundred degrees of surf

Nicanor Tepa stands on the board waiting for the monster wave nine feet high

he takes it with audacity elegance reticence simplicity strength

always from the left

you never take a huge wave from the right

from the right the wave falls on the surfer crushes him drowns him

from the left Nicanor Tepa conquers the wave turns into wave

a vast white veil holds up Nicanor’s body

the white foam crowns his dark head

the tension of his muscles isn’t felt it is resolved with jubilation in his triumph over the

wave of blue crystal

it is august the great month for headlands in baja

in september Nicanor Tepa will travel to san onofre beach in california and its

forty kilometers of waves inviting him to tame them as if the sea were an

immense whale and the wave only the spout of the monster spewing sea spray

twenty-four meters into the air

in october Nicanor is in the burial ground of the freezing sea of Ireland in the bay of

Donegal and its waves of turbid green broken and enlarged by the barrier

reefs

and in december he’ll arrive in Hawaii to win the Triple Crown championship exposed

to the incessant hammering of the bay of Waimea and its waves thirty-six meters

high

Nicanor begins the new year on the peninsula of Guanacaste in Costa Rica and

in february goes down to Australia to the longest sandbar in the world where three gigantic

waves gather and explode and allow him to glide like a gull over

the heights of the sea

that hurls him at the end of the monsoon in Tahiti with its electrical storms

flashing into the sea where Nicanor conquers the most fearsome of all waves

the Teahupú

and now the wave shatters against the head of Nicanor who made a mistake taking it from

the right

and he comes to under a high-tension spiderweb in a hovel in the Capulín

district

and he tries to grasp the volcanic rock so he won’t drown in the marsh

and he wakes in his one-room windowless shack

and he’ll go out right away to see if he can catch what’s fallen from the trucks going to the

market

and he forms his pyramid of peanuts on the highway that goes to the airport

and looks without interest at the venders of gum plastic toys lottery tickets

hairpins

and tells himself in silence that if he were bolder he would clean windshields and even eat

fire at the crossroads

you have to eat fire to revive the six little brothers dead before their first

birthday typhus polio rabies

you have to bring in an ocean wave to demolish the district without potable water to carry to the

sea the mountains of garbage

but Nicanor Tepa trusts in luck

he resumes looking at the surfers’ calendar now they should go to Jeffreys Bay in South

Africa

Nicanor lifts one after another the pages of his calendar of waves

july in Fiji august back to the headlands immediately again san onofre and then

ireland until the new year in costa rica but in december the year ends

and Nicanor Tepa has no calendar for next year he found this one in a

trash can at a hotel in the airport

that he flies out of to Indonesia Tahiti Australia Hawaii

and Nicanor falls asleep exhausted dreaming that he’ll change what he can and bow his

head before what he can’t change and have the wisdom to

know the difference

he is surrounded by dry bitter broken earth

Nicanor grasps the volcanic rock

Nicanor sinks into the huisache swamp

then the gigantic wave of sleep falls on his head

The Official Family

1. President Justo Mayorga was awakened by the abrupt, huge, unlocatable noise. He opened his eyes with more suspicion than surprise. His first impulse always was never to give in to alarm and look for a redeemable error or a condemnable act. The procession of functionaries who had been fired, punished, ignored because they had
erred
still passed through his drowsy mind. Other people’s mistakes guided, even in dreams, his presidential decisions and—he yawned without wanting to—opened lists where disloyalty was only one chapter, the lowest and most insidious, of the catalog of faults the president always had close at hand. There never was a shortage of Judases.

He looked with early-morning distance at his strong hand, broad but with long, slender fingers. He knew how to use it effectively in his speeches. Only one hand, the right, is required: clenched in a fist—strength; open—generosity; palm down—calm, calm; palm up—warning? request? with the fingers slightly bent toward his own person—come, approach, I love you, don’t be afraid of me. Justo Mayorga had given up using both hands in his speeches. On the largest screens and in the smallest squares, the use of both hands at the same time seemed not only hackneyed but counterproductive. It indicated that the orator was
orating,
and when he orated, he deceived, making promises he knew he would never be able to keep. He asked for faith from the incredulous and doubt from believers.

On the long journey from local Culiacán delegate to national office at Los Pinos—twenty long years—he had learned a form of vigorous but serene speech-making using only his right hand as rhetorical art and keeping the left in his jacket pocket, on his silver belt buckle, and on only one celebrated occasion, on national television, grasping his testicles to skewer his opponent in an election debate:

“I have more than enough of what you’re missing.”

Now, when he was awake, he felt his balls bristling at the infernal noise that had come—he looked quickly at the clock, recovering his keen faculties—to wake him at three in the morning. Earlier presidents of Mexico might think of things like armed attack, military uprising, popular demonstration. Justo Mayorga was not paranoid. The noise was infernal, but not even the devil could get into Los Pinos, that’s what the well-guarded barred windows and well-trained military staff were for.

And yet . . . no doubt about it. The din that woke him came from his own space, the presidential residence Los Pinos, and not from the interior of the house but—President Mayorga opened the windows to the balcony—from outside, from the avenue through the garden watched over by icy, immobile statues (because some are warm and dynamic) of his predecessors at the head of the state.

He soon had the evidence. He went out to the balcony. Two cars were racing at top speed along the alameda of Los Pinos. An unchecked suicidal speed competing with life more than with the courage of the two untamed drivers who, to a lethal degree, accelerated the low-slung cars, one black, the other red, both capable of revivifying all the statues in the garden, from tiny Madero to gigantic Fox.

A very Mexican idiom—Mayorga thought of it—said, to indicate native stoicism and impassive strength, that something or someone “bothered me the way the wind bothered Juárez.”

The president of the republic did not lose his serenity and did not explicitly invoke the Hero of the Americas. He pressed the proper buttons, put on his robe, and calmly waited for his military aides to give him an explanation. One of them smiled stupidly. The other did not.

“It’s your son, Mr. President,” said the serious one.

“Enriquito,” the idiot said with a smile.

“He’s racing with a friend.”

“Richi, you know? Richi Riva.”

“We thought you had authorized it.”

“ ‘Don’t worry. My father knows.’ That’s what he said. Quique and Richi.” The aide-de-camp with a limited future in the presidential residence gave a stupid smile.

2. Enrique Mayorga felt offended, uncomfortable, flat-out annoyed that his father, the president, had made a date with him for breakfast at nine in the morning without taking into account the scant hours of filial sleep, not to mention his hangover, his eyes like a bedbug’s, his tongue like a rag.

To make matters worse, President Mayorga had seated Quique’s mama at the table, the first lady, Doña Luz Pardo de Mayorga, Lucecita. Father and mother sat at the two ends of the table. Enrique sat in the middle, like the accused between two fires, naked under the Calvin Klein robe with the yellow and green stripes. Barefoot. The only things missing, the boy thought, were the hooded executioner and the guillotine.

He scratched at the bristles emerging on his neck and thought with pride that his Adam’s apple was not trembling. “What the hell is it now?”

The president got to his feet and gave his son a resounding slap in the face. Enrique swallowed hard and waited.

“Do you know who you are, you moron?” said Justo Mayorga, still standing, looking down at his diminished offspring.

“Sure. Enrique Mayorga, your son.”

“That’s what you know, you idiot? Only that?”

“The son of the president,” Quique managed to say in quotation marks.

“And do you know who I am?”

“Don Corleone.” The boy laughed before he was slapped a second time.

“I’m a man of the people.” With a powerful hand, the president lifted his son’s chin, and the boy could feel the controlled trembling of his father’s long, sensual fingers. “I come from the bottom. It cost your mother and me a lot to reach the top. When I was a boy in Sinaloa, I lived in a hut with a roof so low you had to go in on your knees. Yes, Señor, when I was a boy, I slept with the straw roof up my nose.”

“And now, Papa, you want me to live like you did?”

The third slap of breakfast.

“No, Señor. I want you to be responsible about my position, not make me look ridiculous, not give my enemies ammunition, not let people think I’m a weak or frivolous man who spoils his son, a rich kid who doesn’t work or do anyone any good.”

Enrique was attached to the idea that the words and slaps weren’t going to upset him. But now he kept silent.

“From the bottom, kid. Through diligence, dedication, studies, night classes, humble jobs but a great ambition: to move up, to serve my country—”

“Without friends?” Quique interrupted. “Alone, all by yourself?”

“With your mother,” the president said in a firm voice.

“Your slave,” Quique said and smiled, but Doña Luz nodded and signaled her husband with her finger.

“My companion. Loyal and discreet. Attentive to my needs and not putting obstacles in my way.”

“Justo . . .” murmured Doña Luz with an unknown intention.

“I can’t have friends,” Justo Mayorga said savagely. “And neither can you.”

“Without friends,” his son repeated, sitting up straight in his chair. “The Loner of Los Pinos, that’s what they call you. Listen, don’t you like anybody? Why don’t you have friends?”

Justo Mayorga returned to his seat. “A president of Mexico has no friends.”

Doña Luz shook her head, imploring or understanding. Her tastes were always ambiguous.

“I achieved everything because I had no friends.” He paused and played with the crumbs from his roll. “I had accomplices.”

“Justo . . .” Doña Luz stood and walked to her husband.

“A president of Mexico can govern only if he has no friends. He can’t owe anything to anybody.” He looked at his son with cold severity. “And nobody’s going to tell me I can’t govern the country if I can’t govern my own son.”

He stood. “I don’t want to see your pals around here again.”

3. Don’t be discouraged, Richi Riva said to Enrique Mayorga, hugging him to the rhythm of the yacht anchored in Acapulco Bay, it’s all right, we won’t run races at Los Pinos anymore, but as long as your papa doesn’t send you away with the bodyguards, we can keep having a great time, look, here we are, the two of us alone on my yacht, and as the saying goes, gloomy night falls and you and I have our lives in front of us, don’t let yourself get trapped by the old geezers, play it smart, look at Acapulco in the distance, how fantastic, how those lights shine and each one is like an invitation to let yourself go, Quique, give in to your emotions, that’s something nobody can take away from us, that’s what makes all the papas green with envy, because they don’t know how to have fun anymore, but you and I, Quique baby, look at Acapulco waiting for us, imagine the wild night that’s waiting for us, we can go wherever we feel like, you have the protection of the federal army, Quique my friend, who else in this country can say “The army is my babysitter”? we’re untouchable, bro, don’t let yourself be trapped, everything’s under control as long as you’re with Richi Riva, your best bud, we’ll go to whatever disco you want, your goons will open the way for us, we’re the greatest and we have everything under control, pick the babe you like best, send the lieutenant to bring her to the table, what else is power for, you jerk? look at the supply right here in the disco, what do you prefer, society girls, good-looking broads, top models, or plain European whores? ah what the hell, go on, order those bleached blondes to stop in front of us on the floor and moon us, to pull down their panties and show us their buns, go on Quique baby, don’t be shy come onto the dance floor with me, let’s give in to our emotions, the gringa doesn’t want to come over to our table? tell the lieutenant to threaten her with the uzi, fuck, don’t let yourself be trapped by power, use it Quique my friend, let the eagle lift you up and the serpent get you excited, don’t let yourself be trapped, don’t be afraid, I ordered the soldiers to occupy the roof of this dive and if you get tired of the hood we’ll just move on to a cooler one, let’s see, Lieutenant, bring us that broad and if she refuses threaten her with the uzi and if there’s a boyfriend (the broad’s, not yours, Lieutenant, it’s no innuendo) take him away by force and if he gives you any trouble shoot him on the beach ah fuck don’t wake the wildcat I have inside, Quique my friend, because you should know I want to move at full speed with the whole world, I want to be nice and have everybody love me, and the only thing I want is to get along with the galaxies, I swear, I love to have good relations with bad friends, it’s my specialty, fuck, don’t beat yourself up so much Quique my friend, make a stand, you’re the son of the prez, you can do whatever the fuck you want, just surround yourself with soldiers, that’s what the national army’s for, so you and I can have a hell of a time in a cool world, now let’s go, this hole stinks, Mancuernas is expecting us, you know, the one with the retro haircut? the one who pets me and caresses my cheek and tells me Richi you have a sweet and dangerous face, but your eyes are glass . . .

4. Señora Luz—Lucecita—let them arrange her hair carefully but she avoided looking at herself in the mirror because I don’t want to know the face I have after three years in Los Pinos and I’m just waiting for the moment I go back with Justo to a life that’s more peaceful for me, for him, for our son, I came with Justo from Sinaloa to Los Pinos, I’ve been a loyal companion, I’ve never asked anything for myself, I’ve only worked to clear the way for Justo so he doesn’t stumble on my account, I’ve never shown any personal ambition, I’ve only worked for my husband’s success, tried never to overshadow him, never to say anything that would hurt him, nothing that creates storms of publicity or causes any gossip, I’m not complaining about anything, life has been good to me, I could have been a little provincial woman for the rest of my life, I never had any ambition except to support my husband and understand his passion to serve Mexico, and he’s so all alone, as he never tires of telling me, alone and with no true friends, only accomplices, as he says, the president doesn’t have friends, the president doesn’t love anybody but he uses them all but what about my son? don’t I have the right, after so much sacrifice, to love my own son, to indulge him a little, to protect him from his father’s severity? doesn’t my son deserve, precisely because he likes the wild life so much, a little of the tenderness his father and his friends and his women don’t give him? I want to be a reserve of tenderness for my son, they’ve assigned me the works of charity appropriate for an honorable first lady who knows her place, but I need to give charity to my husband so he at least learns to love at home and to my son so he doesn’t get trapped in the dead end of being angry with his parents, why do I protect my son, I ask myself when I’m alone, does he even deserve my protection? maybe I do it for egotistical reasons, I don’t open my eyes to avoid my current face in the mirror while they style my hair because that way I can be another woman, I save myself from the politics that make us dirty and the power that steals our souls and I protect the most authentic thing I have left today and that’s my memory of youth, my nostalgia for the provinces, for beauty, for youth, the coast of Sinaloa, the evocative names of Navolato and La Noria, El Dorado and El Quelite, Mocorito and the Mesa de San Miguel, late afternoons on the Sea of Cortés the five rivers that flow to the sea, the valleys of sugar and rice, the music of La Tambora in the little square of Santiago Ixcuintla, everything I knew as a girl and never forget because without childhood there’s no nostalgia, without youth there are no memories, and my love for the man who tore me away from tranquility and carried me in his strong arms up the mountain, whispering to me, Justo Mayorga whispering to me, Luz Pardo, his sweetheart from Mazatlán, be happy my love, hope for everything and don’t understand anything and I’m not complaining because I lived the warmth of life with him, hoping for everything though I didn’t understand anything but always telling myself, Luz, you have the right to happiness whatever happens try to be happy today don’t let power make you think that everything beautiful and interesting in life, everything nice in life, is in the past, don’t lose your private self Lucecita because if you let it escape it will never come back no matter how much power you have, don’t give in to that secret desire of yours, the desire to be absent, don’t become completely invisible, make people think you share your husband’s dream of giving hope again to Mexico after all the calamities that have happened to us, return their faith to Mexicans, I want to help the president my husband in that though I know very well the two of us he and I are only actors in a farce, he smiling and optimistic though reality denies it, I smiling and discreet so the people forget about so much failure and hold on to the dream that Mexico can be happy, that’s what we’re working for, that’s why we smile at the cameras, to make people believe the ongoing lie, the dream renewed every six years and now we did it this time everything will turn out fine, oh I’m complaining, yes, how quickly everything passes and what else can I hold on to except love of my husband performing the eternal comedy of the happy orderly stable country and my poor son not understanding anything, trying to break the order established by his father, not realizing that this lasts only six years and wanting him not to know that if he doesn’t make the most of things now he’ll go back afterward to that small ranch which means being a nobody after being everything on a big ranch, I have to maintain those two illusions of my husband’s power and my son’s pleasure and I don’t know how to tell them by indulging and supporting them that neither one will last, that power and pleasure are mere sighs and I was really happy only when I was hoping for everything and didn’t understand anything, when everything was warm like a beach at home and I didn’t know yet the cold truth that happiness doesn’t come back no matter how much power you have . . .