Happy Families

  THE DAUGHTER. From the moment she decided to seclude herself on the third floor of her father’s house, Alma Pagán had also decided on her new—and permanent—lifestyle. She felt revulsion when she remembered being as cold as a statue at conferences and charity benefits, or when she remembered being pawed, pinched, insulted on the Mexico City–Mexicali or Mexico City–Mérida flights. She didn’t blame anyone but herself. Her body was the offender. Good-looking, desirable, corruptible. She alone was responsible for inciting macho lust. She punished herself. She abandoned her flight uniform and adopted the style appropriate to internal exile. Keds, jeans, flip-flops, and sometimes sweatshirts from Indiana University Kokomo. A perpetual baseball cap from the ancient Jaibos of Tampico. Appearance wasn’t the important thing, though it was enough just to see her not to desire her. The important thing was that by isolating herself from a hostile, unpleasant world, Alma could enter completely into a world of action and excitement, of vicarious emotion, of endless accident, and all of it without physical consequences for her. The world of the reality show. She bought a subscription to receive periodically the best programs about these real-life situations in which young, vigorous men and women participate in daring adventures, constant competitions, select prizes. . . . Right now, in the middle of the story, Alma follows with almost strabismic attention the beginning of the adventure of a group of four couples who must compete for the first three places in a journey filled with obstacles. The odyssey begins in Ciudad Juárez and ends in Tapachula. That is to say, it starts at the border with the U.S.A. and ends at the border with Guatemala. The contestants have to compete, overcoming deterrents to reach the objective in first, second, or third place. The couple who comes in last is eliminated. The winning couple receives a week on the luxury cruise ship Sirens of the Sea. Those in second and third place receive thanks and a DVD on mountain climbing. Now Alma observes the departure of the four couples on the international bridge between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. It turns out that four of the contestants are gringos and the other four are Mexican. The first gringo couple consists of two young men, Jake and Mike, slim and handsome, as if born for reality stardom. The second is two women, one black (Sophonisbe) and the other white (Sally). On the other hand, the Mexican couples consist of a man and a woman, as if avoiding suspicions of homosexuality. There are two short, skinny young people, Juan and Soledad, and two thin, weather-beaten old people, Jehová and Pepita. The North Americans wear T-shirts and shorts. The young Mexicans are attired like Tarahumara Indians from Chihuahua, that is, with bare legs, embroidered shirts, and red bandanas tied around their heads. The old people are dressed just like Alma Pagán. It shocks her that the most decrepit have appropriated the dress of the youngest. Is there no longer a difference in ages? Perhaps not. But the most interesting thing is that the race from frontier to frontier begins on the one between Mexico and the United States, that is, the contestants run from the border that millions of Mexicans would like to cross to find work in the prosperous north. And they end up on the border between Mexico and Guatemala, that is, the dividing line between two miseries that poor Central Americans sneak across to get to the United States. This paradox is not lost on Alma. It is part of her education. She begins to feel that the reality show is the university she never attended. Vicarious reality. Emotion without a value-added tax. Movement without danger. Alma finds her reality. She no longer has a reason to put herself at risk and go out into the hostile, degrading world. Thanks to the Net, the world was within reach; she felt that now she was becoming part of an instant tribe, connected by virtual Nets, stimulated by the audiovisual universe, and overstimulated by the temptation to make contact with other seafarers like herself. But she still didn’t have the courage to chat.

  THE SON. Leonardo Barroso was a powerful man because he did not ignore details. His eagle eye swooped down from trading stocks on the Hong Kong exchange to the life story of his humblest employee. Abel Pagán was situated midway between a billion-dollar investment and a porter’s salary. Barroso had paid attention to him ever since the young man asked for a job and stupidly announced that he had come to degrade his father. Abel was intentionally sent to walk department-store floors. Just to soften him up and show him who was in charge of the company. Who was “top man.” Which was why the call to come to the office of the boss, Don Leonardo, and then the peremptory offer, were so surprising. The son would do what his father had done for twenty-five years. Receive checks from the accounting office, take checks to the bank. Ask no questions. It was a position of trust. Don Leonardo winked: Abel ought to learn to wink. Wink at the bank manager. Wink at the teller. Wink at the driver. Wink at everybody. “They’ll all understand, because that’s what your father did. You just say: ‘My name’s Pagán, and Don Leonardo sent me.’ They’ll all understand. But don’t forget to wink. It’s the sign of assent. If they don’t return the wink, you’d better be suspicious and leave.” Abel was torn between satisfaction and doubt. Barroso trusted him. But he was manipulating him, too. More than anything else, he was placing Abel in a sequence of unknown actions in which the son’s work was the continuation of the father’s. Blindly, the young man decided to try his luck. After all, he had moved up from the counter to management in the wink of an eye. The boss trusted him. They gave him a raise. He rented a very small apartment over a bridal shop on Insurgentes. In no time he was living beyond his salary, given the demands of his status. Broads began to pursue him, and he couldn’t receive them in an apartment damaged by earthquakes. He moved to the Hotel Génova in the Rosa district, and his screwing was regular but lacked the pleasure of conquest. Tasty. Girls offered themselves to him insinuatingly (suspicion) and fucked as if obeying orders. Whose? Abel began to be even more suspicious. Expenses increased. So did his work. And, in the end, his frustrations. Abel lived like an automaton. The table was set for him. He didn’t have to make any effort. The measure of his ambition was constantly frustrated by the abundance of his success. They called him Don Abel at the hotel. A table was permanently reserved for him at the Bellinghausen restaurant. They gave him a clothing account at Armani. They presented him with a red BMW, “Don Leonardo’s orders.” The broads, every single one of them, pretended to have torrential orgasms. In the bathroom, he was supplied with cologne, soap, toothpaste, and shampoo without having to ask. They even put pink condoms with little painted elephants on them in his bureau. Faithful to his origins and temperament, Abel felt that he had higher aspirations—call them independence, personal expression, free will, who knows—and that his position at Barroso Brothers didn’t completely satisfy them. He also realized that his work was illusory. Without the nod from Barroso, his world would collapse. He owed everything to the boss, nothing to his own efforts. Abel Pagán wasn’t a fool. Understanding embittered him. He began to feel an urgent need to prove himself. Not to depend on Barroso. Not to be anybody’s servant. Did anyone think that he, the young man, didn’t know more than the adults (Barrosos or parents)? Did anyone think he couldn’t fill his own position, an independent position in the marketplace? He looked at everything around him—hotel suite, plenty of women, expensive restaurants, luxury cars, Armani clothes—and told himself that he, without anybody’s help, deserved all this and had the brains and the guts and the balls to get it on his own. He began to long for a freedom that his job denied him. What did he have that would allow him to enter the job market with autonomy? He counted up his marbles. Very few and pretty faded. All of them said: “Property of L. Barroso.” He wanted desperately to assert himself. He let his hair grow and tied it back in a ponytail. He couldn’t go any further. He wanted to live a different reality, not his parents’. And he didn’t want the reality of his contemporaries, either. It made him sick to his stomach when someone in the office said to him, “You’ve arrived, Abel,” and the more vulgar ones, “Broads, bread, the boss’s protection, you fucking have it made, what else could you want, do you want anything else?” Yes, he wanted something else. Then everything began
to change. Little by little. That’s how it was. Abel had a secure job in an insecure world. He was smart and realized that the company was growing and diversifying production while work was being reduced. The fact was, you could produce more and work less, Abel told himself. He thought about all this and felt protected, privileged. And still he wanted more. Then everything began to change. They canceled his credit card. The little sluts didn’t visit him anymore. The office didn’t pass him checks anymore. There were no winks anymore. They put him in a dark tiny office without light or air, almost a prophecy of prison. Finally, they fired him. Disconcerted, not to mention stunned, overnight Abel Pagán found himself out on the street. Wasn’t this what he had wanted? To be independent, first of his family, then of his boss? Sure, it was just that he wanted to do it on his own terms, not anybody else’s. Barroso had given him a destiny and now was snatching it away from him. Abel imagined the boss licking his lips with pleasure. Barroso had humiliated the father; now it was time to humiliate the son. Abel felt like the sacrificial lamb, ready to have his throat cut. Abel asked himself what Barroso was up to. Testing the father’s fidelity by testing the son’s honesty? Abel looked at his hands, dirtied by more checks than the legs in a colony of spiders. “It’s not fair,” he murmured. He felt adrift, vulnerable, without direction. He felt dispensable and humiliated. He felt that his efforts had not been compensated. Didn’t he deserve, on the merits, a better job because he had more education? Why were things just the opposite? Something was wrong, very wrong. Now what was he going to do? Where would he begin again? What had he done wrong? He screwed up his courage and asked for an appointment with Don Leonardo Barroso. He was turned down. But the boss’s secretary handed him an envelope. Inside was a check for five thousand pesos and a phrase in Latin: Delicta maiorum immeritus lues. A professor at the university was kind enough to translate it for him. “Even though you are not responsible, you must expiate the sins of your father.”

  THE FATHER. Pastor Pagán was a good man, and he welcomed the prodigal son with dignity. He was moved by Abel’s wounded vanity, and to avoid any hint of anger, he turned a blind but tearless eye when opening his arms to Abel. It was better to proceed as if nothing had happened. Look ahead. Never behind. He realized that the son, like the father, did not have many resources for confronting anything. Abel’s return made them equal. The thought worried the father a good deal. Should he ask Abel directly: What’s going on? Did not saying anything imply that he could imagine what had happened? Did saying something open the door to a confession in which the past would infect the present forever? Abel gave him the key. A month after his return home, after thirty days of pretending that nothing out of the ordinary had happened because the ordinary was fatal, Abel thought that if he was going to live with his parents and sister forever, the best thing was to say, “The truth is, I wasn’t ready for that position.” Which was his father’s old position. These words of his son’s confused the father and hurt him deeply. Pastor Pagán didn’t say anything. He took refuge in the ruins of his pride only to confirm that Abel’s return meant that neither father nor son controlled his own life. Pastor lacked energy. Abel had no will, either. When the father realized this, he began to bring up topics indirectly to see if he could finally tell his son the truth. One night they got drunk in a cantina out toward La Piedad, and in the heat of the drinks, Pastor thought the ice was breaking—the iceberg that the years had built between father and son—and he dared to sigh: “The goddess success is a whore.” To which Abel, for the first time in a long time, responded, “Sure.” “To be successful, you need losers. If not, how do you know you did well?” “Sure, for each success you have, it has to go badly for somebody else. It’s the way the game is played.” “And what happens when first things go badly and you move up and then things go badly and you fall?” “You become a philosopher, my boy.” “Or you sing songs in cantinas, Pop.” Which, being pretty tight, they proceeded to do. “The one who left.” Not a woman. Luck is the one who left. Fortune is the one who got away. They embraced, though they were thinking different thoughts. The father was afraid Abel would sink into rancor and not know how to get out. The son put together alcoholic lists of the mistakes he had made and was still making. “How many mistakes did I make today?” he asked Pastor with a thick tongue. “Whew, don’t count mistakes, son, because that’s a count that never ends.” “What do you regret, Pop?” Pastor answered, laughing: “Not having bought a painting by Frida Kahlo for two thousand pesos when I was young. And you?” “Getting things that I flat out didn’t deserve.” “Go on, don’t get depressed on me. You had everything given to you.” “That’s the bad thing.” “You didn’t have to save as a young man just to lose it all with inflation and currency devaluations.” “Is that why you sold yourself to Barroso, Pop?” “Don’t fuck with me, son, show some respect, I worked a quarter of a century to put a roof over my children’s heads and educate them. Don’t try to find out how I did it. More respect. More gratitude.” “But the only thing I want to know is if he treated you as badly as he did me.” “Worse, son, worse.” “Tell me about it.” “Look, Abel, don’t look back, let’s look ahead.” “The problem is, I’m seeing double.” “What?” “I’m seeing you double, as if you were two people.” “You’re tight.” “Who knows. Suddenly, I’m as sober as I ever was.” “Go on, finish up your tequila and let’s go home. Our girls are waiting for us. They must be worried.”

  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 bo
leros 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.