Happy Families (4 page)

THE MOTHER
. He knew where Elvira Morales sang, and he could always find her. In the eleven o’clock show at the cabaret Aladdin’s Cave. Would he come back? Or wouldn’t she see him again? Looking at the past calmly, Elvira Morales always calculated that the anonymous spectator who had shared the white lights with her one night would come back to hear her and have the courage to talk to her. She kept the image of a tall, robust man, his incipient baldness compensated for by long sideburns and a well-groomed mustache. Though it was also possible he’d never come back, and it was all a mirage in the great gray desert of the Cuauhtémoc district. The fact is, he did come back, their eyes met as she sang “Two Souls,” and in what was an unusual move for her, she came down from the small stage surrounded by applause and went over to the man waiting for her at table 12A. Pastor Pagán. “Shall we dance?” In her heart of hearts, she had made a bet. This man seems arrogant because he’s shy. Which was why now, thirty-three years later, when Elvira felt that a second desert was growing, the desert of married life, she continued the song knowing that Pastor, when he heard her, would ask her to dance that same night. There were no working-class cabarets like the ones they used to have. The life of the city had broken through the old borders. Nobody dared to go into dangerous neighborhoods. Young people went far away, to the edge of the city. Old people were more secure, frequenting the salsa dance halls in the Roma district, where everything was so dependable you could even go up onstage and show your skill as a dancer. This was where they went, though Elvira and Pastor got up to dance only to the slowest, most melancholy boleros. Listen. I’ll tell you in secret that I really love you. And I follow your steps even if you don’t want me to. Then, in each other’s arms, on the floor, dancing the way they did when they met, she could close her eyes and admit that when she gave up her career and agreed to marry, it was to become indispensable at home. If she didn’t, it wasn’t worth it. To be indispensable, she soon discovered (not now, now she’s dancing cheek-to-cheek with her husband) that once out of her profession, she was free to bring the song lyrics into her private life. She realized, with bitter surprise, that the bolero was the truth. In the cabaret, she had sung what she hadn’t lived: the temptation of evil. Now, in her home, the lyrics returned almost like something imposed, a law. Say it isn’t true, Elvira. Say I didn’t fall in love with you because of a secret despair, that I didn’t transform the ringing of wedding bells into a prelude to an emptiness so profound that only a poor tyranny over the house can fill it. Giving orders. Being obeyed. Never being dominated. Hiding her probable melancholy. Burying her unwanted restlessness. Devising matrimonial strategies so he would never say what she feared most: “We’re not the way we used to be.” He never said it. They went to bars with the illusion that there was never any “used to” but always nothing except “right now.” She always sang, and he knew where to find her. Always. She wouldn’t leave. “You have an exciting voice.” Mustache. Sideburns. Incipient baldness. Attributes of a macho. “Thank you, Señor.” She did have an exciting voice as a singer, that’s true. As a woman and mother, she felt her sentimental voice gradually turning into something else difficult to describe aloud. In her heart, she perhaps could tell herself—dancing very close to her past, present, for always lover, her man, Pastor Pagán—that instead of the woman’s martyrdom typical of the bolero, she now felt tempted to identify with the wife and mother who gives orders, however small they may be. And who is obeyed. This causes melancholy and agitation in Elvira Morales. She cannot understand why she doesn’t accept the simple tranquility of her home or rather, even if she does accept it, why she feels attracted to the misfortune at the heart of the song, though when you sing it, there’s no need to live it, and when you stop singing it, you fall into the trap of giving it life. “I don’t recognize myself,” Elvira whispers in Pastor’s ear when they dance together in the club. She doesn’t go on. She suspects he wouldn’t understand, and neither would anyone else. She would never say: “I regret it. I should have continued with my singing career.” And neither would she say something as melodramatic as: “A mother and wife needs to be worshiped.” She would never say a thing like that. She preferred, now and then, to declare her love. To her husband, her children, Alma and Abel. Her children didn’t return the favor. In the shrug of their shoulders, in their cold eyes, she recognized that all of a mother’s sentimental baggage seemed despicable to her children. For them, the bolero was ridiculous. But for Pastor, the music was just what it should be. The key to happiness. The prologue to the feeling, if not the feeling itself. Something overly sweet. Strange but overly sweet. Dancing in the half-light of romantic dance halls (there were still a few left), Elvira realized that what her children rejected in her was exactly what she rejected in her husband. The dreadful mawkishness of a world that decks itself out in colored spheres, as brittle and hollow as the balls on a Christmas tree. Was it necessary to elevate like a profane Eucharist one’s cheap and overly sentimental innermost feelings in order to disguise the lack of emotion in daily life, the absence of seriousness in the eternal disorder that affirms us in the face of the void, that distances us from everyone—from other people and from ourselves? Elvira Morales dances with her arms around her husband, and Pastor Pagán says into her ear, “How long are we going to pretend we’re still young? How long are we going to admit that our children threaten us? That they annihilate us little by little.” When she married, she thought: I can turn him down. But only now. Later, I won’t have that freedom. And before returning to the everyday schedule, the customary obligations, the degrees of indifference, the thermometer of real or imaginary debts, he would say into her ear as they danced to boleros, holding each other very tight: “Once, there was magic here.”

THE DAUGHTER
. The four couples, fatigued, are approaching the final goal. The border with Guatemala. The Mexicans, Jehová and Pepita, have taken the train that goes to the Suchiate River, and the two North American boys, Jake and Mike, have opted for motorcycles. The Chihuahans, Juan and Soledad, prefer to run with a marathon highland rhythm. Only the Mexicans from Ciudad Juárez, the last-minute contestants, have lost their way in Oaxaca, where they finally were found in an inn sick with indigestion from a black
mole.
Half an hour from the goal, in the Chiapas forest, the train is halted by trees blocking the track, and out of the forest come ten, twelve young devils. Heads shaved, naked from the waist up, tears tattooed on their chests. The announcer on the reality show does not omit these details. He thinks it’s one more obstacle anticipated for the race. Part of the show. It’s not. Five or six boys get into the train with machine guns and begin to shoot the passengers. Jehová and Pepita die instantly. The gringos, Jake and Mike, arrive like the cavalry in a cowboy movie, realize what is happening, get off their motorcycles, attack the devils of the murdering gang with their fists. They can’t subdue them. Four boys with shaved heads shoot the young North Americans. They fall down dead. The forest is inundated with blood. The Chihuahans smell the blood from a distance. They have an ear for violence. They have suffered it for centuries at the hands of whites and mestizos. It is their inheritance to be suspicious. They don’t approach the train. They take another road to the border. They win the competition. In Indian dress, they are right in style to take a Caribbean cruise. “We’ve never been to the ocean,” they declare when they are awarded the prize. Alma Pagán turns off the television. She doesn’t know when she’ll turn it on again. In any case, she feels better informed than her parents. They are very ignorant. And without information, what authority can they have over her and her brother, Abel? She thought this and didn’t understand why she felt more vulnerable than ever.

THE SON
. Abel Pagán walks along the avenue, its walls heavily painted with graffiti. On wall after wall, the Mara Salvatrucha gang announces that it will bring the war to the city. They are young Central Americans displaced by the wars in El Salvador and Honduras. Abel feels sad looking at this graphic violence that makes the city so ugly. Though making Mexico City ugly is a tautology. And graffiti are universal. Abel saw and felt the immense desolation of the broad gray street. There was nothing to be done. He reached the metro station. He decided to jump the gate and board the train without paying for a ticket. Nobody saw him. He felt free. The train, filled with people, pulled out.

THE BOSS
. Leonardo Barroso shows no emotion at all when he reads these lines. Or rather, his lack of emotion is the most eloquent statement of his disdain. “Look, Abel. There are no indispensable employees here. Wise up, boy. With modern technology, production increases, and the worker goes down. If I ever offer you something, consider yourself privileged. Here you have a secure, steady job. What I don’t tolerate are stupid whims. Personal rebellions in exchange for the privilege of working with me. With Leonardo Barroso. Understand? It’s up to you. You’re either in or you’re out. I don’t need you. The business will grow with or without you. If you want the truth, it’ll do better without you. You should always feel that a job is a privilege, because you, Abel, are turning out to be superfluous.”

THE FATHER AND MOTHER
. I don’t describe Elvira because in my eyes she’s always the same girl I met one day singing the bolero “Two Souls.”

Chorus of the Street Gossips

Exita gave birth in the street

Half the girls on the street are pregnant

They’re between twelve and fifteen years old

Their babies are newborns up to six years old

A lot of them are lucky and miscarry because they’re given a beating

And the fetus comes out screeching with fear

Is it better to be inside or outside?

I don’t want to be here mamacita

Toss me in the garbage instead mother

I don’t want to be born and grow dumber each day

With no bath mamacita with no food mother

With no nourishment except alcohol mother marijuana mother

Paint thinner mother glue mother cement mother cocaine mother

Gasoline mother

Your tits overflowing with gasoline mother

I spit flames from the mouth I nursed with mother

A few cents mother

On the crossroads mother

My mouth full of the gasoline I nursed mother

My mouth burning burned

My lips turned to ash at the age of ten

How do you want me to love me mother?

I don’t hate you

I hate me

I’m not worth dog shit mother

I’m only worth what my fists deliver

Fists for fighting fists for stealing fists for stabbing mother

If you’re still alive mother

If you still love me just a little

Order me please to love me just a little

I swear I hate me

I’m less than a dog’s vomit a mule’s shit a hair on your ass an abandoned

Huarache a rotten peach a black banana peel

Less than a drunkard’s belch

Less than a policeman’s fart

Less than a headless chicken

Less than a bum’s old prick

Less than the skinny ass of a Campeche whore

less than a drug dealer’s spittle

less than the shaved ass of a baboon in the zoo

less than less mamacita

don’t let me kill myself all alone

tell me something to make me feel like a real fucker

a real bad motherfucker mother

jes gimme a hand to get out of this mother

damned to this forever mother?

look at my nails black to the quick

look at my eyes glued shut by rheum

look at my lips chapped raw

look at the black slime on my tongue

look at the yellow slime in my ears

look at my green thick navel

mother gemme outta here

what did I do to end up here?

Digging gnawing scratching crying

what did I do to end up here?

xxxxxita

The Disobedient Son

1. Sometimes my father drank and sang Cristero songs.

2. He liked to recall the deeds of his father, our grandfather, in the War of Christ the King, when the Catholics of Jalisco rose up in arms against the “atheistic” laws of the Mexican Revolution. First he would drink and sing. Right after that he would remember and, finally, admonish. “May the sacrifice of your grandfather Abraham Buenaventura not have been in vain.”

Because it seems that Grandfather Abraham was captured by federal troops in 1928 and shot in the Sierra de Arandas, a place, they say, that was fairly desolate and desolating.

“The fact is that it was his time to die. I don’t know how many times he saved himself during the Cristero crusade.”

Our father, Isaac, recounts that at times Grandfather Abraham showed too much compassion and at other times too much cruelty. Though all wars were like that. Many government soldiers fell at the battle of Rincón de Romos. Grandfather Abraham walked among the corpses, pistol in hand, counting them one by one by order of his superior, General Trinidad de Anda.

They were all good and dead. Except for one, lying in the dust, who moved his eyes and pleaded with my grandfather, Have pity on me, I’m a Christian, too. Grandfather Abraham continued on his way but hadn’t taken two steps before the general stopped him cold. “Buenaventura, go back and finish off that soldier.”

“But General, sir—”

“Because if you don’t kill him, I’ll kill you.”

In our family, these stories were told over and over again. It was the way to make them present. Otherwise, they would have been forgotten. My father, Isaac, would not tolerate that. The Buenaventura family, all of it, had to be a living temple to the memory of those who fell in the Crusade of Christ the King. So long ago now because it began in 1925 and ended in 1929. But as current as the news on the radio in this remote ranch in Los Camilos, where there are no newspapers and even the radio played with intermissions of silence, thunder, cackling, and stuttering. The Sunday sermons (and every day’s remembering) supplied the missing information.

The priest’s homily invariably evoked the exploits of Christ the King and lashed out at Masons (where were they?), Communists (what were they?), and all impious people, especially the teachers sent from the capital: the men, sons of Lucifer, the women, socialist harlots.

“As if you needed to know how to read in order to pray,” the good father intoned. “As if you needed to know how to write in order to herd cattle.”

He would make a dramatic pause before exclaiming: “The good Christian needs only a rosary around his neck and a pistol in his hand.”

My father drank and sang. He felt guilty that the war hadn’t touched him. On the other hand, he had times of peace and prosperity here in Los Altos de Jalisco. The war was bloody and cruel. The government emptied the Christian villages and sent the people to concentration camps from which they trooped back in emaciated ranks. They say half of them turned into ghosts. They came back in long starving columns howling like dogs—says my father. The merchants barred their stores with chains. So great was the fury of those who came back that they destroyed the harvests so the shopkeepers would have nothing to sell.

“And they mutilated the animals,” Isaac said, lowering his voice behind his wet, scaly mustache.

He sat at the head of the refectory with five keys—very large ones—in his hand and his chair set on the metal plate that leads to the mysterious basement where no one else but he can go because it has five padlocks and he is master of the keys.

He looks at us, his four sons, Lucas, Juan, Mateo, and me, Marcos, so named, my father said, to move from the Old to the New Testament once and for all. Otherwise, he advised our mother, Angelines, he would have had to call us Esaú, Jacobo, and right there the problems began, since Jacobo had thirteen sons and my father only four. His decision to change Testaments saved me and my three brothers from being named Isacar, Zebelún, or Zilpa.

Long live the New Testament, I said to myself and wondered from the time I was a boy why there was no Third Testament. What happens next, what’s the Present-day Testament?

After the war, the agrarian laws of the Revolution were gradually set aside or punched as full of holes as a colander. There were no more haciendas. Now they were called ranchos. And all you had to do was put together small properties with names of various owners to have, at the very least, a mini-estate. And sometimes recreate a real old-fashioned land holding.

My father was in an intermediate position with his property, Los Camilos, thanks to the benevolence of successive municipal presidents, governors, and dignitaries of the official party, the PRI, the great political umbrella for all ideological postures, from ultraconservative Catholics to simulated Marxists. The latter were radishes—red on the outside, white on the inside. The former, from holy cross-bearing families, had an obscene popular appeal.

Perhaps, for my father, the legacy of the bloody religious war was the obligation to restore the lands of Los Altos and wipe out all vestiges of faces and walls equally marred by disease and machine guns.

And that was what he did. The honor fell to my father of recovering his wealth without renouncing his faith. From the time we were children, he would take his four sons to visit the lands of the Los Camilos ranch, named in honor of the congregation founded in Rome in 1586 to care for the dying. “Because this land was dying, and only with reborn faith was the land reborn.”

Herds of cattle. Extensive cornfields. Land without tenant farmers, all of it belonging to Isaac Buenaventura and his four sons. From the Sierra del Laurel to the border with Aguascalientes, there was no ranch more productive, better run, and with more certain boundaries than this property of Los Camilos, land that only the sons of Isaac and the grandsons of Abraham would share one day.

My father had us—Juan, Lucas, Mateo, and Marcos—learn about every corner of Los Camilos, the herders and the cornfields, how to tend to the mares about to give birth and how to count acres, but finding out as well that here the hail was severe, and there were snakes and huisache cactus, and the great organs of nopal were like the sentinels of our land.

For this was our land, and its miracle, to my young eyes, was that nothing had killed it, neither war nor peace, since both can suffocate life that isn’t the extreme of violence or of tranquility but the object of constant attention, a state of alert to avoid falling into destruction or abstinence. It was enough to see and love this land to re-create in the soul a vigorous equilibrium typical of complete men, conscious of possible mistakes and reluctant to accept premature glory. Nature in Los Altos de Jalisco is frugal, parsimonious, sober, like the appearance and speech of the inhabitants.

And still there was a latent power in the herds and cornfields, in the clouds of slow urgency, in the wind trapped in the caves that didn’t allow me to live absently, without ambition and even without rebelliousness. When the mountain approaches and the wheat rises, the brambles retract and the beeches grow until they reach their dense green coronation, a man is transformed along with nature and the senses are nourished by the smells and tastes of the countryside, smoke and tar and stables and sometimes the flashing passage of half-seen butterflies, more fragile than a rainbow, that blinded me with their rapid flight, as if saying, Follow us, Marcos, come with us, let yourself go . . .

But my father was anchored to this land and even more so to his place at the head of the refectory, sitting there with the keys to the basement in his hand and looking at us with severity when he said that if our Cristero grandfather died for religion, it was up to his son and grandsons to pay homage to Abraham’s sacrifice by dedicating ourselves to God.

“That is why I have determined that each one of you, when you turn eighteen, will go to Guadalajara to begin your studies at the Seminario del Eterno Enfermo in order to enter the priesthood and dedicate your lives to the service of Our Lord.”

His patriarchal glance cut off any response, protest, or personal opinion.

“The first to go will be you, Marcos, because you’re the oldest. I’ve noticed you have a vocation because you fast so often.”

I didn’t disillusion him. If I fasted, it was not because I had a priest’s vocation but because I was fat and wanted to diet to attract the girls in the settlement. But I didn’t say anything. I bowed my head in acceptance and allowed my father to continue his heroic evocations.

“Grandfather Abraham’s final wish was that they not give him anything to drink for an entire day before they shot him and allow him to piss before he stood against the wall.”

He looked at us with a singular, terrible meaning. “You, Marcos, and then Juan and Mateo and Lucas, are going to the seminary the same way, without pissing your pants.”

He made a Jupiter-like pause. “Grandfather Abraham died for religion. You must pay tribute to his sacrifice by dedicating yourselves to God.”

If one of the four of us was tempted to yawn at the table upon hearing the same old song for the thousandth time, our astute father immediately brought into play the memory of our sainted mother, Doña Angelines, who died giving birth to Mateo and on whom, to assure her going to heaven, our father—he recounts it brutally—painted a cross on her breast with blood from the birth.

“Remember it, boys. Remember it, Mateo, when it’s your turn to go to the seminary. You were born under the sign of the bloody cross, and only your dedication to the Lord Our God and His Holy Apostolic Roman Catholic Church will save you from the sin of having caused the death of the one who gave you life.”

I dared to look at my little brother, barely twelve years old and terrified, mortified, disoriented by my father’s words. I listened with my head held high. I looked at Mateo, lifting it even higher, encouraging him in silence, Mateo, don’t bow your head, up, Mateo, up.

Right after that my father skewered us: “If all of you don’t become priests, the ghost of Grandfather Abraham will haunt you.”

That was why at night, all of us lying in the same large bedroom in accordance with another of my father’s maxims (“This way you’ll keep an eye on one another”), we spoke of our fear that the ghost of our grandfather, Abraham Buenaventura, would appear to us if we disobeyed our father, Isaac. We were frightened by the movement of the trees, the creaking of the grate, and the terror that into our room would come the Cristero parade of starving children clutching at their mothers’ skirts, the marred faces of the soldiers, the corpses wrapped in sleeping mats, the dogs barking at the moon.

To say goodbye to me, my father ordered a funeral Mass, since it wasn’t a matter of wishing me luck but of reminding me of our dead mother and in this way burdening me with the responsibility to honor her memory with my future priesthood. The Fiftieth Psalm was recited, intercession for the departed soul was prayed for, the mother of the forsaken was invoked, and then there was a huge ranch fiesta where everybody raised their lemonades and I was sent off with a variety of popular exclamations.

“Don’t bump into any tarts, Marcos.”

“Don’t let your asshole pucker up in the city.”

“Listen, Marcos, before you become a priest, break the cherries of a couple of girls.”

My father gave me a snakeskin belt lined with silver pesos and newly coined morelianos. “So you don’t ask me for more. Manage it carefully. There’s no need to write to me. Don’t think about me. Think about God and your dead mother.”

And so I left behind my home village with a sound of barren rock and abandoned tools (which pursued me).

3. When I came back for a visit three years later to celebrate my twenty-first birthday at home, my father, filled with pride, ordered the church bells rung and boasted that now it was Juan’s turn to go to the seminary, too, because he was almost eighteen, and then Lucas, seventeen, would follow in his footsteps and little—or not so little anymore—Mateo, who was fifteen.

I arrived dressed in black—suit, tie, shoes—and a white shirt but without a high collar, in order not to attract too much attention.

With a certain pleasure I recognized the herds and the cornfields, the roads and tools of my childhood, and prepared to hear again the exploits of the Cristero War during supper with my three brothers, my father presiding as always with the key in his hand and the patriarchal chair set over the metal door and the forbidden basement.

“Well, well,” my father murmured. “Look, boys, at how they’ve sent your brother back to us so correct. You can really see his correctness, don’t you think?” He laughed out loud. “As they used to say in my day, politicians and lawyers are bigassed creatures. You can really see”—he gave me an apocalyptic look—“that Marcos has grown wings and that the discipline of seclusion and frugal meals has made his spirit thin and enlarged his soul.”

I imagined that my father would take these virtues for granted, without too much inquiry and almost as the work of the Holy Spirit.

“Well, Christian, what do you have to tell me?” my father, Isaac Buenaventura, said familiarly.