Page 22 of Happy Families


  “Father, don’t say falsehoods. It’s a sin.”

  “Ah,” Mazón said in surprise. “Are you rebelling, little girl? Don’t you want to go to a convent to get away from me?”

  She didn’t say anything, but Father Mazón was already on the track that one knows.

  “Well, I swear to you, your rebellion won’t last very long. And do you know why? Because you’re submissive. Submissive in your soul. Submissive to men. Because submission is stronger in you than rebellion.”

  Felix intervened. “But affection is stronger than submission or rebellion, don’t you agree?”

  “Of course, young man. Here you can prove it. In this house there is only love . . .” The priest paused and toyed with the blue and white Talavera cup he always had with him, supposedly to keep from forgetting his humble origins, before he raised his wolfish eyes. “Haven’t you proved that yet, boy?”

  “I think I have.” Félix decided on irony to counteract the priest’s snares.

  “Wasn’t it enough for you?”

  “Affection is a good thing,” said Félix. “But you need knowledge, too.”

  The priest smiled sourly. “You’re a student, aren’t you?”

  “A student and a mountaineer, as I told you.”

  “Do you think you know a great deal?”

  “I try to learn. I know that I know very little.”

  “I know God.”

  Abruptly, the priest rose to his feet. “I am on intimate terms with God.”

  “And what does God tell you, Father?” Félix continued in an agreeable tone.

  “That the devil comes into houses by the back door.”

  “You invited me in through the front door,” Félix responded with exacting harshness.

  “Because I did not know you were going to steal the host from my temple.”

  “Father.” Félix also stood, though he had no answer that wasn’t a lie. “You have to control yourself if you want to be respected.”

  “I don’t control myself or respect myself—”

  “Father.” Mayalde approached him. “It’s time you went to bed. You’re tired.”

  “You put me to bed, girl. Undress me and sing me to sleep. Prove that you love me.”

  He said it as if he wanted to transform his wolf’s eyes into the eyes of a lamb. Félix circled the dining room chair as if that piece of furniture gave him balance or checked, like a barrier, his desire to break the chair over the priest’s head.

  “Father, restrain yourself, please.”

  “Restrain myself?” Father Mazón replied with a nasal growl. “Up here? In this wilderness? Here where nothing grows? You come here to ask me to restrain myself? Has anyone shown restraint with me? Do you understand me? What do you think the knowledge is that you’re so proud of, student?”

  “It’s what you people have denied all your life,” exclaimed Félix.

  “I’m going to explain to you the only thing worth knowing,” the priest replied, letting his arms drop. “I come from a family in which each member hurt the others in one way or another. Then, repentant, each one hurt himself.” He looked at the student with savage intensity. “Each one constructed his own prison. Each one, my father, my mother, especially my sisters, we beat ourselves in our bedrooms until we bled. Then, together again, we sang praises to Mary, the only woman conceived without sin. Do you hear me, Señor Don University Wise Man? I’m talking to you about a mystery. I’m talking to you about faith. I’m telling you that faith is true even if it’s absurd.”

  The priest held his own head as if to stabilize a body that had a tendency to race away. “The Virgin Mary, the only sweet, protective, and pure woman in the corrupt harem of Mother Eve. The only one!”

  Mayalde had withdrawn to a corner like someone protecting herself from a squall that doesn’t end because it is only the prelude to the one that follows.

  Mazón turned to look at her. “Not only a woman, an Indian. A race damaged for centuries. That’s why I keep her as a maid.” He looked with contempt at Félix. “And you, thief of honor, learn this. Life is not a sheepskin jacket.”

  “It’s not a cassock, either.”

  “Do you think I’m castrated?” Benito Mazón murmured, both defiant and sorrowful. “Ask the girl.”

  “Don’t be vulgar. What I think is that there is no physical limit to desire,” said Félix Camberos. “There is only a moral limit.”

  “Ah, you’ve come to give me lessons in morality!” shouted the priest. “And my desires? What about them?”

  “Control yourself, Father.” Félix was about to put his arms around Mazón.

  “Do you think I don’t spend my life struggling against my own wickedness, my sordid vileness?” shouted the priest, beside himself.

  “I don’t accuse you of anything.” Félix stepped back two paces. “Respect yourself.”

  “I am a martyr,” the priest exclaimed, his eyes those of a madman.

  3. That same afternoon, when the two of them were alone, the priest sat a docile and mocking Mayalde on his knees and told her that God curses those who knowingly lead us down the wrong path. He caressed her knees.

  “Think, child. I saved you from temptation and also from ingratitude. Don’t you have anything to say to me?”

  “No, Father. I have nothing to say.”

  “Get rid of the wild ideas that boy put in your head.”

  “They weren’t wild ideas, Father. Félix put something else in me, just so you know.”

  The priest pushed the girl off his lap. He didn’t stand up. “Forget him, girl. He’s gone away. He didn’t love you. He didn’t free you from me.”

  “You’re wrong, Father. I feel free now.”

  “Be quiet.”

  “You’re a very sad man, Father. I’ll bet sadness hounds you even when you’re asleep.”

  “What a chatterbox you’ve turned into. Did the deserter give you lessons?”

  Mayalde was silent. She looked at the priest with hatred and felt herself being pawed at. The priest didn’t have anybody else to humiliate. What was he going to ask of her now? Would he humiliate her more than he did before Félix Camberos’s visit?

  Perhaps there was a certain refinement in Father Benito Mazón’s soul. He didn’t mistreat Mayalde. Just the opposite. One knows he said things about thinking carefully if life with him had favored her or not.

  “Do you want to go down to the village with me? When the sun shines, it makes you feel like leaving this prison. Let yourself be seen, fix yourself up. I’ll dress you.”

  “So I won’t talk, Father?”

  “You’re an absolute idiot.” The priest whistled between his teeth. “You don’t know what’s good for you. I’m a man of God. You’re less than a maid.” He began to hit her, shouting, “Wild ideas, wild ideas!”

  The black cover over his body seemed like a flag of the devil as the priest shouted, “Man of God, man of God!” and Mayalde, on the floor, did not say a word, protected herself from the blows, and knew that in a little while the priest’s rage would begin to give out like air in an old, broken bellows, “Wild ideas, wild ideas, what did that boy put in your head?”

  And in the end, out of breath, his head bowed, he would say to her (one knows it): “You’re an absolute idiot. Nobody wants to see you. Only me. Thank me. Get undressed. Have you called anyone else Daddy?”

  When, barely two years later, Mayalde came down the mountain to tell one that Father Benito had died accidentally when he fell over a cliff, one was not surprised that the features and attitude of the eighteen-year-old girl had changed so much. It is clear to one that the priest kept her prisoner after the incident with the student Félix Camberos. The young woman who now approached looked stronger, robust, proven, capable of anything. Nothing like a prisoner.

  “What happened to the priest?”

  “Nothing. A slip. A misstep.”

  “Where do you want to bury him?”

  “Up there. In the ashes. Next to where Fél
ix Camberos is buried.”

  There the two of them are, side by side, on an abrupt slope of the mountain that looks pushed up toward the sky. From that point you can see all the way to the city that is generally hidden by the volcanic mass. The city is large, but from here you can barely make it out. One can imagine it as a conflagration. Though in the midst of the fire, there is an oasis of peace. The urban struggle concentrates on itself, and one forgets it if one takes refuge in an isolated corner, an island in the multitude.

  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
r />   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.