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.