Happy Families

  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 feli
nes, 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.

  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, Ja
ke 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.