Happy Families (3 page)

THE MOTHER
. Elvira Morales decided not to lose her joy. She proposed a daily celebration of their meeting, thirty-three years ago, in Aladdin’s Cave. She was singing. He knew where to find her. She wouldn’t go away. And he came back. They married and were happy. Elvira wanted to sum up her existence in this sentence: Let arguments always remain embryonic, their differences hidden, and all the rest resolved romantically by dancing together again at the cabaret whenever there were clouds on the horizon. The cabaret had been the cradle of their love, and in it Elvira felt that the juices of their love were renewed. Pastor Pagán once again became the lover of her dreams. The incarnation of a bolero with no tears or complaints, though certainly filled with sighs, Elvira stopped being a martyr to her husband’s destiny. When she felt trapped, she would return to the bolero, and then her marriage reeled. The entire sense of her life consisted in leaving song lyrics behind, nullifying them with a reality in which her portion of happiness was larger than her share of misfortunes, and therefore, when something clouded the happy marriage that was Elvira’s sacrament, the altar of her spirit, she would invite her husband to dance, to return to the cabaret, to what were now called “caves,” and dance, holding each other very tight, very close, feeling how the sap of illusion began to flow again. When he was younger, Abel would laugh at these nostalgic excursions. “And in its caves let the earth tremble,” he would say in a parody of his favorite author, Gonzalo Celorio. But in the end the children were grateful for these ceremonies of renewed fidelity because they brought peace into the home and gave some lee-way to questions about the children’s position in the world: at home or not at home. Elvira realized that more and more children were remaining at home beyond the age of thirty or returned home at the age of Christ, like her son, Abel, or were prepared to grow old at home, like Alma, locked away in her garret. All of this only reinforced Elvira Morales’s conviction: If the children were tightrope walkers in the circus of life, their parents would be the safety net that broke the fall and kept them from crashing to their deaths. Was this the real reason for Elvira’s behavior, why she forgave mistakes, why she fed the sacred flame of love with her husband, why she forgot everything dangerous or disagreeable, why she kept secrets so well? Because life isn’t a bolero? Because life ought to be a sentimental ballad that soothes, a secret idyll, a pot of flowers that wither if we don’t water them? That was why she and her husband would go together to the old bars and dance in cabarets. To remember what isn’t forgotten by endlessly identifying happiness. Elvira’s aged mother died while her daughter was singing boleros in Aladdin’s Cave, on the night she identified Pastor Pagán without knowing that her ailing mama had passed. That’s how destiny deals the cards. And destiny is reversible, like a coat that keeps out the cold on one side and protects against the rain on the other. That was why Elvira Morales never said, “But that was then.” That was why she always said, “Now. Right now. Right this very minute.”

THE DAUGHTER
. The two American women (Sophonisbe and Sally) didn’t get past Ciudad Juárez. On the first day of the race, they disappeared and then were found dead in a ditch near the Rio Grande. Two residents of El Paso, Texas, had to be called very quickly to satisfy the rules of the competition. No gringo couple had the courage to cross the river. The organizers resigned themselves to recruiting a couple of Mexicans prepared to do anything in order to win a trip to the Caribbean. In their eyes, the palm trees drunk on the sun were already before them, behind them the deserts of huisache cactus and rattlesnakes. The aridity of northern Mexico was part of the test for winning. The competitors in the reality show were receiving written instructions in manila envelopes. Now stop to pick prickly pears or pack serapes. You’re free. Choose. What’s faster? It doesn’t matter. Now they have to cross the desert riding unruly burros. Now they have to take a train up to Zacatecas, and the ones who miss it will have to wait for the next one and fall behind. They have to make up for lost time—how? Getting on a rattletrap bus that drives along a mountain road. The gringos shout with glee on every deadly curve. The Mexicans maintain a stoic silence. They lose it when they have to let themselves be pulled by a team of oxen through a muddy swamp. They survive. The desire to win moves them. Each couple is pursued by the one behind. Each is treading on the tail of the one in front and prefiguring the panting of the one that follows. They have to go into a bull-ring with a red handkerchief (courtesy of the house) and fight a bull calf disoriented because it ate cornflakes for breakfast. Once again, the two gringos are jubilant as they fight, giving Apache war whoops. The Mexican women abstain. The men—old Jehová, skinny Juan—make passes more worthy than the frightened, confused calf. Now they’re traveling through the middle of the country. There are posters, there are colors, there are instructions. Stop here. Sleep wherever you please. Outdoors. On a bench. However you can. The next day everyone has to shovel up the manure on a local cattle farm. They complain, it smells bad. Pepita falls down. She eats shit. A gringo falls down. He eats shit. He declares that this is very sexy. The women caress their breasts as if to confirm that they’re still intact. They all get into a bus heading for Oaxaca. Another bus appears, going in the opposite direction. Will they all die? Alma Pagán turns off the television set. She doesn’t want to know what happens. She doesn’t want the violence to interrupt, perhaps forever, not her second but her authentic life, the existence that offers her, free of charge, with no danger to her person, the reality show. She turns on the set in order to enter into the danger on the street. Though seeing it clearly, the small screen saves her from danger by giving it to her right here, where it doesn’t touch her, in her house. She feels alive, stimulated. She no longer knows she is vulnerable. In her way, she has entered paradise.

THE SON
. Why did he go back like a miserable pain in the ass, to ask for another job with Barroso? Is this the effect of the moral hangover from the night with his father in the cantina in La Piedad? Did he see his father for the first time? Or did he see himself for the last time? Why did he know more than his parent but not have a secure position in the marketplace? Did mockery defeat him, the irresistible temptation to laugh at his parents? She sang boleros. She thought living contrary to the lyrics was enough to be happy. She hadn’t realized she was living in a false world of illusion. She believed in the lyrics. Why had she stopped singing? Didn’t she realize that the sacrifice wasn’t worth it? She had traded the gold of an independent career for the small change of conjugal life. She was a sentimental slave to the bolero and became the martyr of the family. She never had escaped from the bolero. How ridiculous. She had sung in Aladdin’s Cave. Aladdin didn’t have a cave. He had a lamp. The one with the cave was Ali Baba. His folks are so ignorant. What a fucked-up life. A school for the children. A home for the old folks. What a choice! Still, there are times when he is overcome by emotion, especially when his vanity is catered to by the perpetual cooing of his mother as she caresses his forehead and describes him, how handsome my boy is you’re my boy your broad forehead your black curly hair your silky skin the color of dark mamey your profile like the king of clubs, like a Roman emperor, that’s what they say, a nose with no bridge your small but full mouth, that face you make my boy as if defying a world you don’t like, that cock-of-the-walk tension in every last inch of your sweet body, you were that way when you were little, you’re that way now that you’re big, tell me, who admires you more than I do? And his sister gets on his nerves. How easy to lock yourself up with a laptop in a safe imaginary uncontaminated universe with no stardust, no offensive smells. And his father the worst of all, the high priest of deception, a man trapped in lies. And he himself, Abel Pagán, did he still have aspirations? And if he did, would he realize them one day? And where would he “fulfill” himself best? In the shelter of his family, at the age of thirty-two, or unprotected out on the great street, knowing that his vanity, no matter how small, was going to demand more and more effort? With what conviction would he arm himself to leave the no-cost comfort of home and go back out into the world? Was he going to tell himself: Stop brooding, Abel Pagán, the future’s here, it’s called the present? Or better yet, am I going to accept everything we were and improve it every day? How do you reject the past without negating the future? What would be the cost of his two rebellions, the insurrection against his family and the revolt against his office? Would he be capable of denying reality in order to bring it up to his desire? Could he forget completely what it was that opposed the ideal life of Abel Pagán, fortune’s darling? Or should he submit to everything that denied him a happy—that is to say, an autonomous—free life without any obligation to subject himself to the family or the office? He had to choose. Secretly, he wrote desperate phrases in order to obtain some light. We are destroying ourselves to reach the unrealizable. To be a son, it’s not enough to be against your parents. To be free, it’s not enough to be against your boss. I need to change. I can’t separate myself from my life. My family doesn’t care about oblivion. They don’t care that by midcentury no one will remember them. But I do. I do. What am I doing? Who will remember me? How do I make my mark on the wall?

THE FATHER
. It wasn’t that the drinks in the cantina went to his head. It was that for the first time, he felt like a friend to his son. They were buddies. Maybe it was that they hadn’t had the chance to chat before. It was that they might not have the chance to talk frankly again. It was that the time had come to prepare the balance sheet of one’s life, one’s history, the time one had lived. We are children of an ill-starred revolution, Pastor had said to his son, who looked at him with uncertainty and suspicion and a kind of distant forgetfulness close to indifference. What revolution? What was his father talking about? The technological revolution? Pastor continues. He thinks we did a lot of things badly because we lost our illusions. The country slipped from our hands, Abel. And so the ties that bound us together were broken. In the long run, it’s a question of surviving, that’s all. When you have ideals, you don’t care if you survive or not. You take the risk. Now there are no more connections. They were broken by forgetting, corruption, deceit, winking. The wink instead of thought, instead of the word, the damn dirty wink, Abel, the sign of complicity for everybody and between everybody and for everything. Look at me and contemplate the sadness of a survivor. I worked very hard to feel like a moral man. Even realizing that in Mexico the only morality is making a fortune without working. Not me, son. I swear, for my whole life, I did nothing but take care of the work they gave me. Cutting through red tape. Negotiating licenses. Lowering fees. Going back and forth with checks, funds, bank deposits. What did I expect in return? A little respect, Abel. Not condescension. Not the wink of a crook. I showed I was a decent man. Courteous to my superiors. Not obsequious. How could I not notice that the thieves, the asskissers, the grabby ones moved up very quickly, and I didn’t? I seemed fated to always do the same thing until I retired. It cost me twenty-five years of honesty to reach an instant of lying. Because a five-thousand-dollar concession on a contract isn’t a crime, son. It’s a weakness. Or charity. In other words, what they call an existential stupidity. Then Barroso found out I had my price, too. I noticed the cynical, knowing gleam in his eyes. I was just like all the rest. I had just taken a little longer to fall. I was no longer his honest, trustworthy employee. I could be bribed. I was like everybody else. What to do with a brand-new thief, hey? In that exchange of glances, I knew that my destiny and my boss’s were joined only to put an official seal on a pact of complicity in which he gave the orders and I kept quiet. He didn’t have to say, “You disappointed me, Pagán.” He knows how to speak with a movement of his eyelids. That’s all that moves. Not his eyebrows or his mouth or his hands. He moves his eyelids and condemns you to complicity. I didn’t have to do anything to feel that my poor triumph—five thousand dollars in charity—was my great failure, son. A mess of pottage, that’s what it was. At that moment I felt obliged to really want what I once said I despised. I was disgusted with myself. I tell you that openly. I also knew I had to hide what had happened. That made me even more ashamed. And I knew that sooner or later I’d pay for my weakness in the face of power. “Don’t worry, Pagán,” Barroso said in a voice that was metallic and syrupy at the same time. “To be good, it has to be convenient.” That wasn’t true. I could confront life only because I didn’t tolerate cheating. I didn’t resign myself to being guilty. That was my mistake. If I wasn’t innocent, I’d at least be as perverse as they were. A game of cat and mouse. Except that the cat was a tiger and the mouse a meek little lamb. I didn’t have to threaten anybody. I didn’t have to say a word. I had to put up with the consequences of actions that I thought were honorable, but they weren’t. I didn’t understand the value of a wink. I didn’t understand the cost of a bribe. But as soon as he realized I was vulnerable, Barroso decided to destroy me so my weakness wouldn’t become a danger for him. Each of us—Barroso and I—thought his own thoughts. I understood what was happening to me. Barroso always knew, and that’s why he outstripped me. “Look, Pagán. There’s a crime called fraudulent management. It consists of carrying out operations prejudicial to the owner’s wealth for the benefit of oneself or other parties. It consists of making a profit as a direct consequence of issuing documents made out to an individual, on demand or to the bearer, against an assumed person. For example, selling the same thing to two different people. Altering accounts or contractual terms. Declaring nonexistent expenses.” He sat looking at me, I’m telling you, like a tiger you suddenly run into in the jungle, a wild animal hidden until that moment, though predictable. You knew it was there, that it always was there, but you thought it wouldn’t attack you, that it would look at you in that sweet and at the same time threatening way typical of felines, thought it would disappear again into the underbrush. Not this time. “In other words,” the boss continued, “you’re guilty of fraud against this company for your own benefit.” I could stammer that it wasn’t true, that I had only followed instructions. That there could be no doubt about my good faith. Barroso shook his head in compassion. “Pagán, my friend. Accept the offer I’m making you for your sake and for mine. Your secret is safe with me. I’m not going to investigate where you got the five thousand dollars in your bank account.” “But Señor, you gave them to me.” “Prove it, Pagán. Where’s the receipt?” He paused and added: “I’m going to give you a pension. A pension for life. You’re fifty-two years old. Prepared to live quietly, with a secure envelope each month. A receipt isn’t necessary. A contract isn’t necessary, what an idea. Ten thousand pesos adjusted to inflation. Accept and the matter dies here.” He made a melodramatic pause, very typical of him. “Refuse and what dies is you.” He smiled and held out his hand. “What do you prefer? To be free and happy or in prison for twenty years? Because you should know that your crime carries a sentence of five to ten years in jail. Ten more on top of that will be because of me and the influence I have.” He smiled, and his smile disappeared instantly. Look at my hand, son. That’s what we’ve lived on since then. With the necessary adjustments for inflation.