Happy Families (23 page)

We descended one day, she and I, from the slopes of the volcano to the great city that awaited us without rumors, curses, suspicions. But recollections, yes.

She could not forget, and she infected my memory.

When I married her after the priest died, I decided to take her far away from the little village in the mountains. I stopped talking behind the mask of the one who kept me far from the desire to make her mine. I became an “I” determined to show her that the uses of life are not sins you have to run away from by taking refuge in the mountains, that the false saint takes pleasure in humiliating himself only to inflict his arrogance on us, that humility sometimes hides great pride, and that faith, hope, and charity are not things of the next world. They should be realities in this world of ours.

I told her that Félix Camberos fought for these things.

I don’t really know if the beautiful Mayalde resigned herself to abandoning the adjoining graves of Father Benito and the student Félix. There was a sense of transitory guilt in her glance that I attempted to placate with my love.

In the end, all that remained were these words of my wife, spoken years later:

“All of that happened in the ill-fated year of 1968.”

Chorus of Rancorous Families

and not only El Mozote

on May 22 1979 we protested on the steps of the cathedral and the army came and fired and three hundred of us died

blood pouring down the steps like water in a red waterfall

on January 22 1980 cotton workers

electricians office clerks teachers

machine-gunned cut off between two avenues

He

in the Sampul River trapped in the water fleeing

on one side Salvadoran soldiers firing at us

on the other side Honduran troops blocking our way

the Salvas grab children toss them into the air and cut off their heads with machetes

they call it operation cleanup

the next day the Sampul River can’t be seen

it is covered by a mass of turkey buzzards devouring the corpses

better dead than alive fool

we saw it in the villages

they talk about it in the shacks

go on look go see your father’s

two bodies

half a body on one corner

the other half on another corner

come see fool your mother’s head

stuck on a fence

look at the sky fool

look at the dragonfly jet fighters 37

they bring you little presents

they bring you six thousand pounds of incendiary bombs and explosives

they bring you white phosphorus rockets

they shoot at you with 60mm machine guns

they’re the spotter planes

they see people

they’re the huey helicopters

when they don’t see people they fire at livestock

huey oxen

it’s better to run away

whole families on the roads

it’s better to have a fiery sky fall on you

it’s better to die in despair on the road in the daytime

than to fall into their hands

they tortured my father with a plastic bag filled

with flour on his head

talk

they mutilated my father cutting off his testicles

they hung weights on my father’s balls until they maimed him

forever

but we’re still there in our miserable villages

the women wash boil grind

we kids are couriers

we carry the news

they killed Gerinaldo

Jazmín won’t return to the village

we kids played ambush

Rutilio and Camilo and Selvín

then we grew up however we could

we formed gangs of rancorous orphans:

there is rancor

and nobody hides it

there are the fourteen families’ mansions in San Benito beach

houses cocktails at the country club Hollywood musicals

at the Vi movie theater

there are the mobs of one-eyed lottery-ticket sellers bootblacks

shooshine the lucky little number the blind man

on the streets

and the fourteen only read condensed novels from reader’s digest

and the fourteen listen to music by mantovani even when they take a shit

and they are protected by soldiers nothing but dark-skinned little farts with no

forehead no chin with boots that hurt and belts

that pinch

who follow the orders of strutting whites

who don’t dirty their hands

and the gang was formed there

children and grandchildren of guerrillas of soldiers of widows

of other courier children

the ones who got together night after night to wait for news

about the disappeared

then tell us

who cares about my death?

what’s more fucked up?

being dead?

or being poor?

that’s what we want

everybody poor

and that’s why they’re afraid of us now

since we stood up to the death battalions

the huey helicopters

since we were kids we thought think now you’re dead and your

worries are over

maybe only when you’re dead do you see your papa again and your mama

your little brother

so be initiated into the

gang take the vomiting test

you stick your finger in the back of your mouth

touch your uvula

if you don’t puke we jam a snapdragon to the back

of your palate and a corncob up your sweet ass

be initiated

with a savage beating

to see if you can take it

kicks to the balls

they cut off your father’s son of a bitch kicks to the belly

they kicked your pregnant mother bastard fucker until you

came out

kicks to the knees

they cut off your grandfather’s legs to make him talk

kicks to the shins

your grandfather cut off my grandfather’s

now pull down your pants and take a shit in front of everybody

put on a happy face

imagine you’re not shitting you’re killing

get used to the idea bro that killing is the same as the euphoria

of shitting

you’ll be the sergeant you shit

you’ll be the captain you turd

but don’t stop thinking about all of them

the fourteen families

the mob

the killers and torturers in the battalions of death

just like you

the guerrillas who killed in self-defense just like you

the gringos arming giving classes on death weapons of death

now remember a single soldier from the battalion: forget about him

now remember a single guerrilla at the front: forget about him

life begins with you

in the gang

get used to that idea

nobody cares about your death

try to remember a single ácatl

try to remember a single farabundo

forget about them

erase the words patriotism revolution from your head

there was no history

history begins with the salvatrucha gang

your only identity is your tattooed

skin

swastikas totems tears a little death

knives stones rifles pistols daggers

everything’s good

burn the earth

leave nothing standing

we don’t need allies

we need the jungle to hide rest invent

we learn to walk like shadows

each mara gang member is a walking tree

a shadow that moves toward you

toward you carefree asshole

do you think you saved yourself from us?

do you think you saved yourself from us?

just smell the acid of our tattooed skin

just taste the rust of our navels

just put your finger in the mudhole of our assholes

just suck the curdled cum of our pricks

just sink into the red butter of our mouths

just twist around in the black jungle of our armpits

we are the gang

we save salvatruchas everything all of you nice and clean and neat in your sunday best hid shaved cleaned deodorized

and on top of that tattooed skin

and the warnings on our skin

tears and teardrops painted on our

faces by death

while all of you read advertisements in the press on television

peripherals

we announce ourselves with our bitter stinking rancorous tattooed

skin

read the news on our skin

The Secret Marriage

Every time I want to tell you the truth, something interrupts us.

Don’t worry, Lavinia. We’re alone, my love. I’ve given orders not to be interrupted. What do you want to tell me?

I’m very unhappy. No, don’t interrupt me. I want your love, not your sympathy.

You have both. You know that. Tell me.

Can I begin at the beginning?

I’m all yours. So to speak.

Leo, you know about my life, and you know I never lie to you. I want to talk to you about him. As you say in your discussions, I want to recapitulate. I only hope I can be brief. After all, we’ve been together nine years. I want you to be aware of my relationship to Cristóbal. I won’t hide anything from you. You know almost everything, but only in pieces. I want you to put yourself in my place and understand why my relationship with him has lasted so long. You have to imagine what it meant to me at the age of twenty-nine, when you begin to feel the terror of turning thirty, to renew my life thanks to a passion that was fresh, new, and above all, dangerous.

I swear to you, Lavinia—

Don’t interrupt, please. I was at an age, nine years ago, when you still believe you can begin your life over again, throw the old baggage over the side, and remake yourself from head to toe. I confess I already carried that inside me. Restlessness, the little worm, whatever you want to call it. My career had given me successes, compensations. Being a top publicist is something. It’s enough for a lot of women. They marry their careers.

They say a professionally successful woman always has a lover in her bed: her career.

Agreed. A career is very erotic. And yet I was dissatisfied. My career was just my dish of
mole.
But the sauce needed spice. Well, I was fertile ground, as they say . . . The fact is that on the afternoon he came into the office, our eyes met, and we both said in silence what we repeated to each other afterward in a quiet voice, you understand, both of us in half-light. Love at first sight. An infatuation. I’m telling you this with no shame at all. Cristóbal came into the office, and I undressed him with my eyes. I guessed what he looked like naked, and he did the same to me. We found out that night. Do you care if I tell you about it just the way it happened?

No. I like it. If you kept anything secret from me, you’d be an egotist.

You’re a savage. In the bedroom, he took off my panties, picked me up still dressed, with tremendous strength he picked me up and took me with my legs wrapped around his waist . . . I’ve never felt pleasure like that. Except with you.

Thanks.

But not the first time. With you, I had to get used to you. With him, I was afraid so much pleasure right away could only produce a kind of backlash of reduced sensations as time passed and we became accustomed to being together.

The law of diminishing returns.

But no. The truth was that the initial excitement lasted a long time. Danger helps, of course. Trysts, places that are nice but of necessity secret, fear of being discovered.

One’s companion always viewed as a temptation, not as a habit.

Exactly. Heaven on earth, isn’t it? Everything’s so unpredictable, so risky, so destructive to everyone if you’re discovered, that . . . Well, I admit it all feeds the vanity of a woman who feels herself needed, admired, without the humiliating sensation of just being there like a piece of furniture.

It’s the good thing about being the mistress and not the wife.

Why?

The wife makes the bed after love. The mistress has a maid who makes it for her.

Don’t kid around, Leo. I’m talking to you seriously.

Like a piece of furniture, you were saying . . .

Waiting for the man to sit on you, eat on you, urinate on you without even looking at you. Cristóbal made me feel unique. Queen of a kingdom with only two subjects, he and I, both subject to the desires—all the desires—of the other, which, because it was what the other wanted, belonged to both and to each, to me, to him . . .

Fornication is a universal and inalienable right.

At first he filled me with enthusiasm. He made me ecstatic. He told me things like “You have a fragile beauty and an intense sadness.” How could I not love him? It’s an ornate sentence, vulgar perhaps, but you’re not told that every day, Leo, you’re told what time we’ll see each other, I’ll be back at seven, order me some tacos, where did you leave the keys, you’re not told that your beauty is fragile and your sadness profound, no, not that . . . Nobody but a passionate man tells you he doesn’t know if you’re beautiful because you’re proud or proud because you’re beautiful, things like that. I would watch him combing his hair and get terribly excited. He combed his hair with his fingernails, you know? I spied on him when he tidied up in front of the mirror alone pushing his hair back alone before returning alone to the bedroom alone with the strength of an animal and with my own secret animality maintaining the very human love of the looks I gave him without his knowing I was looking at him. We made love, and he called me whore bitch in heat shameless tight cunt with a clit as cute as a golf course he told me all that with no shame and finally:

“If you deceive me, I want you to be faithful to me. If you’re faithful to me, I want you to deceive me.”

In everything, almost, you’re very frank. And you have a good memory.

What? Do you think something like this can be forgotten?

Not everyone knows how to mix memory and desire. When the second ends, the first goes away.

Leo, the most attractive vanity can become repellent. Habitual surprise can stop surprising one day. No, he’s always given me the best. The best hotels, the best restaurants, the most beautiful trips, everything first class, always. I have nothing to complain about. But do you know something, Leo? Even the unexpected became routine. I can’t reproach him for his desire to pay attention to me, to always take me to the most elegant places. The moment came when I wanted everything except the exceptional. Because I began to anticipate the extraordinary, you know? Then the ordinary threatened to come back. With indomitable strength, the strength of the exceptional. Normalcy began to appear in every first-class section of Air France, every suite at every Ritz, every table at El Bodegón, truffles began to make me itch, pheasants left me cross-eyed, lobsters grabbed at my hands to pull me back to the ocean floor . . . Love can suffocate us, Leo. It’s like eating candy all the time. You have to give tedium its due. You have to be grateful for the boring moments in a relationship. You have to . . . You have to stop anticipating the extraordinary. You have to learn to foresee the foreseeable.

It’s the best thing about love.

You said it! What happens is that nobody foresees the moment when you no longer want to be as happy as you were and you desire a little of that unhappiness called ordinary life. Well, what you give me, Leo.

X kills Y and Z kills X.

You pay attention to me—

I’m referring to proofs.

You never talk about yourself. You listen to me.

I pay attention only to you, Lavinia.

Aren’t you ever offended?

You and I never had to pretend. Not before, not now.

I admit there are confidences I don’t like to hear.

I’m just the opposite, Lavinia, I love hearing yours. Please go on.

Do you know what I began to detest in him?

No.

His laugh. The way he laughed. At first I thought it was part of his charm. You’re pretty solemn, if truth be told.

Just serious. A little serious.

He had an elegant laugh. Spontaneous. Joyful. Everything well rehearsed.

Have you ever heard sad laughs?

Something worse. There are laughs with significance.

I don’t understand.

Of course you do, you know. Those people who never laugh at somebody else’s jokes and die laughing at their own, though nobody else finds them funny. I mean, Cristóbal began to laugh to redeem his defects. I realized he wasn’t only laughing at a joke or to lighten a tiresome situation. Not to liven up the conversation and even life itself. He laughed to excuse himself. When he did something wrong. When he said something inopportune. When he forgot an anniversary. When he was late for an appointment. When he fired a servant without consulting me first. When he didn’t like my makeup, my dress, the book or magazine I was reading, he laughed. He laughed at me. He excused himself for throwing out my lipstick or giving half my wardrobe to the Red Cross or grabbing away the book by Dan Brown or my copy of
Hola!,
laughing as he said bad taste, trash, I have to educate you.

What did you say?

Hey, don’t play Pygmalion with me. That popped out. It was our first disagreement. After that, he enjoyed criticizing me with an eyedropper, always smiling.

Did you say anything to him?

I’m untorturable. That’s what I told him. It was a mistake. He began to annoy me more and more. I didn’t let him. Your successes bore me, I told him. Don’t tell me about them anymore. Stop presenting yourself to me as a man who makes important decisions every half hour. Your decisions bore me. Every night you come into my bedroom shouting “Land ho!” You had a good time colonizing me, Cristobalito. Don’t you ever put off a decision? Don’t you ever reflect, don’t you ever take your time? And not only that, Leo. Slowly I began to realize that behind the boasting about successes, Cristóbal wanted to impress me with a very powerful love, bigger than any affection for me. Love of manipulation. Loyalty to lies. That’s what was behind his boasting.

How did you find out?

It was incredible, Leo. Priscila Barradas, my best friend, you know, the fat woman, made a date with me at the bar in the lobby of the Camino Real. We were drinking margaritas and gossiping very happily when suddenly, fat Pris very calmly stood up and walked out to the lobby. Cristóbal came into the hotel, and she stopped him, holding his arm, whispered something into his ear with her nasty bean breath, and he looked toward the bar nervously, not meeting my eyes—not like the first time, you see?—and hurried away. Shameless Priscila went after him, leaving me flat, sitting in front of a margarita getting warmer and warmer. Oh yes, and leaving me to push up daisies, the old bitch.

Next time order cognac.

That night I reproached Cristóbal for his infidelity. He laughed at me. My conclusions were false, he said. Priscila was the wife of our friend José Miguel Barradas. She simply came over to give him a message from José Miguel. And why didn’t the vulgar cow come back to say goodbye to me? Cristóbal laughed, as usual. To provoke you, he said, to make you jealous. Yes, I said, you have to have friends who are very married who don’t want to trade their husband for yours. This amused Cristóbal very much. He made passionate love to me again, and again he disarmed me.

And your friend Priscila? Surely you saw each other again.

She’s a fat, cynical pig. When I mentioned it to her at a cocktail party, she said, “I think being the only woman who can love your husband is a supreme act of egotism.”

What did you say?

One husband’s as good as another, as far as you’re concerned. Be happy with what you already have, fatso.

And then?

We pulled each other’s hair. It happens in the best circles.

And Cristóbal?

I’m telling you, he made passionate love to me and disarmed me. I’m a poor dumb cow.

As the song says, the one you like so much, “Let’s fall in love, why shouldn’t we fall in love?”

It was at first sight, Leo. Do you have to wait for second sight to take the first step?

“Let our hearts discover—”

Little by little. Condemned to discover the truth a little at a time. What we should have known from the beginning, before we set sail. At least find out if there are lifeboats. Is love fated to be the
Titanic
of one’s life?

Did you see the movie? The only surprise is that the ship sinks. I mean, if you had known then what you know now, would you have given up on love?

Forget it. Okay, novelty is not only exciting, it also blinds. Hah, as if I didn’t know, a publicity executive.

“We were not made for each other.” A variation on the lyric. Cristóbal was exceptional. He’s become familiar.

I tell you, his successes bore me. I’d like to see what face he’ll put on if he fails. Of course, he’ll never admit defeat. Other people fail. He never does. Oh well. I observe him and tell myself I prefer doing something and making a mistake than not doing anything and having passive successes, like an oyster on the ocean floor until it’s pulled up for someone to eat. Perhaps this is what happened to him, and naturally, he would never admit it. He counted on me, on my complicity or passivity or erotic need, who knows. The fact is he acts, knowing he can count on me. Imagine the shame of it. He talks and lets me know I’m the force that sustains him.

Mother Earth, let’s say.

A damn domestic Coatlicué, the mama goddess with her skirt of snakes waiting for the macho Mexican adventurer. Bah, this whole game of statues wears me out, Leo, we’re always turning into stone idols, household idols, with no adventure, no illusion, not even danger, not even . . . I don’t know. I feel imprisoned by the mistaken loyalty of continuing a failed relationship. I’m bored with this.