Happy Families
He avoided looking at them. That was what Hokusai’s painting was there for. To fix Leo’s attention on a work of art untouchable by sex, barely caressable by fingers, though destructible by hands. To distance Leo, at that moment, from an unhealthy curiosity to see the two women, observe their attitudes, guess at their intentions, judge Lavinia’s young body in contrast to Cordelia’s mature one, see how the two women saw each other or know if they even looked at each other, if they avoided looking at each other, if they had eyes only for their austere, distant, perhaps incomprehensible, perhaps seductive or seducible lord and master and voluntary slave Leo Casares.
Would the two women read Leo’s thoughts? Would they realize that this mise-en-scène eliminated jealousy, extinguished envy, exiled banal prejudices? Who would dare, here and now, in the bedroom elevated to a personal sanctuary for Leo, who would dare offend the other two? Whoever gives offense, loses. And if one leaves, the couple remains. And if yesterday’s couple doesn’t remain, a new couple will be found tomorrow. A new game, always beginning, culminating now or never.
“It’s a win-win situation,” Leo murmured, summarizing what he knew they also knew, because after all, in fragments, here and there, over time, each couple (Leo-Lavinia, Leo-Cordelia) had said it or intuited it or thought it. Except that even in the most perfect geometry of joy deferred or premeditated cruelty, the demon of pleasure puts in an appearance, and Leo was doing battle with him now in order to stare at the painting and avoid looking at or being looked at by them.
“Of course beauty exists,” he said in a very quiet voice. “But only for a moment.”
The imperfect actuality of the beautiful had to be sacrificed. He thought about it. Did they know? Leo felt on the verge of an almost supernatural happiness and of too physical a misfortune. He felt doubts. The women revealed nothing. It had been easy to concentrate on each one separately. Would it be difficult to pay attention to both at the same time? In what order would the pleasures of each occur, the inevitable couple, the potential trio? Was the orgasm the little death or a transitory suicide? At that moment suicide and death attempted to personalize themselves in the feverish yet lucid mind of Leo. What did he want? To be rid of the husbands, Cristóbal and Álvaro? Or of the wives, Lavinia and Cordelia? Leo had prepared this scene in order to take the next step, to put to the test not the conjugal fidelity he knew had been overcome but the intensity of emotions, which he imagined had been postponed. He did not have to look at Lavinia (naked?) or Cordelia (caftan?) to know that the situation did not eliminate the villain of the piece, the green monster of jealousy. He did not need to see them to know this because he felt it in his own heart.
This was what alarmed him. That he imagined the step following the ménage à trois. It was the step toward reconstituting the couples. Not the return to conjugal ties. Not even the permanence of the trio but an alliance of the two women against him, against Leo, the two of them alone against the solitary man who proposed tonight to make love to both women only to reach the culminating point and abort the ecstasy, interrupt the pleasure in order to exasperate both and oblige them to desire once more, again, and again, and again . . .
He did not want to look at them just then. He would have liked to tell them that blind distance maintains the mystery, that he wanted them both far from him in order to continue to read them. He realized he had already said that. That instead of advancing in his purpose, he was moving backward, like a crab. That his imagination obliged him to go forward in order to overthrow any habit past, present, or future, to move toward perhaps unreachable possibilities without understanding that his desire for them could be a desire to begin all over again in order to love better.
Knowing what he already knows?
Forgetting everything?
What was the next step?
Everything configured an imperfect duel. Leo refused to look at them. He prayed that this scene would not make them tired of him, of themselves, of the irretrievable earlier situation. All of this flashed through his head; accepting habit was the greatest defeat, unacceptable to him. True, in the end, it was all an imperfect duel between desire and its consummation: repeatable or unrepeatable. Leo, with almost Edenic innocence (that’s right, with fragile compassion for himself, he thought), wanted only today’s satisfaction to leave us unsatisfied so we could desire and achieve the next day’s satisfaction.
Would the women understand it this way? Why didn’t they say anything? Why didn’t they move? Would one of them—Cordelia or Lavinia—dare to destroy the proposed trio, tacitly believing that in this way they would return to the earlier couple? Or had he, Leo, destroyed forever all possible relations with them? Did they (Lavinia, Cordelia) realize that Leo had done them the favor of showing each one that her life was false, that the artifice offered by Leo was the truth, in spite of the artifice, just as in the Japanese painting?
“Everything I’ve done is for the sake of happy families.”
How was he going to say this if he himself was incapable of believing it? Of believing anything? Even that these women might be happier with their husbands than with him?
This idea provoked irrepressible laughter in him. He decided to face them, laughing, gauging them, the two women. He, triumphant. This would be the propitious moment to bring the situation to a head. A laugh to absolve them and absolve himself, dispelling everything as a huge joke, an exquisite corpse of Leo’s surrealist spirit. Or perhaps dazzling, almost diabolical laughter, defying the women’s imagination, a fatal invitation to a shared copulation that would renew and even exceed relations among the three. The great pact, euphoric, gallant, transgressive, of Leo, Lavinia, and Cordelia.
He let them look at the Japanese painting. He turned on his heel to face the two women he had just imagined behind him, immobile, each one coming out of a bathroom, walking toward the bed they would share. Or moving away from the bed, returning to the bathrooms, disappearing . . .
“You need to have a great lack of imagination to break off an amorous relationship,” Leo said to himself in a very low voice.
9. Sitting on the sofa in front of the picture of the turbulent sea and the immobile cliff, Leo smoked a light-tobacco cigarette, breaking his New Year’s resolution: to give up all secondary vices. He allowed the spirals to add a transparent, fleeting coat to the painting. Why was the sea turbulent if the cliff did not move? Why was the physical world so capricious? In Leo’s desire, on that night everything had to be transformed, crossed, multiplied. The sea would become calm. The coast would rise up murmuring, trembling, to culminate in a vast barren plain populated with unknown bodies that would advance naked but wrapped in transparent black veils, like the figures of Manuel Rodríguez Lozano in the main room of the apartment on Calle de Schiller.
He did not identify those two bodies. They were not familiar. He noticed that he did not recognize the colors offered him by the world of the painting. They were too new, perhaps happy, in any case, frighteningly pure. The colors were pure and bold. The figures, on the other hand, seemed impure and uncertain.
Leo shook his head. He looked directly at the painting. It was pure glass. It was transparent. It was the perfect work of art. Each person put in it what he or she wanted to see. Nothing more. And nothing less. That was the miracle of the Japanese painting. It was a virtual work. It was pure emptiness as liquid as the air, as aerial as the ocean. It was an invisible mirror. It was an eternally renewed story . . .
10. When he went into the bathroom, he found the mirror smeared with toothpaste and the tube, used up, tossed carelessly into the wastebasket.
Leo shrugged. He did not want to calculate which of the two had used this bathroom.
Chorus of the Savage Families
they come from the north
they occupy the city of nuestra señora de la porciúncula de
los ángeles on the border with mexico
they come from the south
they occupy the city of tapatatapachula south of chiapas on t
he border
with guatemala
they divide up the city of los ángeles
the mexican mafia are the southsiders
the salvadoran mara sansalvatrucha are in control from thirteenth street
to central venice
the mestizos from venice thirteen to south central
the mexican wetbacks wherever night finds them
they invade the city of tapachula
they cross the coatán river
they vandalize silversmiths goldsmiths as they please
they steal orange saddles still redolent of
sacrificed cattle
they take off their pants to feel the down on the saddle
mix with the hair of their sex
the clicas confront the gangas of los ángeles
the salvadoran marassansalvatruchas against the
mexican mafia
the confrontation
each crew sends its big guys in front
its giant headbreaking fighters
the clash takes place at the devil’s corner calle
666 and eighteen
the raza endures
the maras break your head stomp on you fuck you up
but the mexican babes reward you with kisses after the brawl
the maras announce their attacks in tapachula
they close the schools
but nobody can run away
the maras come down whistling from the volcanoes
they walk like spiders with spiders
they pull out sawed-off shotguns and daggers that they saw off
they control the train run from chiapas to tabasco
they tie their victims to the train track
the train cuts off their legs
the gang members disappear in the forest
they reappear in los ángeles
they specialize in drive-by shootings
firing at random from their cars
at their mexican rivals
they pretend to be mexicans their accent gives them away
captain bobby of the LAPD the los ángeles police
force is capturing them one by one
they come from the wars of ronaldanger ronaldranger
ronaldanger in central america
sons of
grandsons of
exiles who identify themselves with a tattoo on the arm and they
give themselves away with a false mexican accent
they hate mexico
the captain smiles he knows
send them back to salvador captain bobby?
no way
fly them back home?
no way
they say they are mexicans? send them back through mexico
let mexico deal with them
from the south
from soconusco
from the north
from california
they advance toward the center mexicocity greattenochtitlán
baptismal water of the nahuas from sacramento to nicaragua
an interminable pilgrimage
from south to north from north to south
the mara salvatrucha gang and the mara dieciocho gang
rivals united by death
a hundred thousand members on the two borders
a hundred thousand gangs in mexico city
between pensil norte and los indios verdes
they announce themselves with graffiti in all the urban centers
black spray paint stylized letters
they dress like hoods heads shaved and tattooed
they have their hole in lost cities
lairs in iztapalapa
refuges in gustavo madero
they attack kill extort rape murder
leave mutilated bodies in the streets
their leaders are called commanders of the clica
their head is called “the sinister one”
they wait for christmas for their great slaughter
twenty-eight people murdered on the D.F. subway
twenty-one wounded
six children
they want the land burned from border to border
“let them be afraid of us”
they murder to frighten
they free to tell about it
they have dry skin and foaming mouths
they are the army of silence
they never speak
they communicate by signs
CALLE 8
CALLE 18
FLY AWAY,
BIRDS
Eternal Father
1. Each anniversary the father made an appointment with them in this old place next to the sunken park. The sunken park was not its official name, but Parque Luis G. Urbina, in honor of a poet of the last century. The popular name has survived the fame of the poet, and everybody gives as a direction “Take me to the sunken park,” which is a cool, shaded urban depression in the midst of countless avenues and mute skyscrapers. Not a fierce oasis but a shadowy refuge. A green roof for lovers greener still. Even when you climb up from the park, you have the feeling that you’re climbing down. The park is sinking, and the city is sinking along with it.
The three sisters—Julia, Genara, and Augusta—respond to their father’s call on the day of the anniversary. For the rest of the year, they don’t see or speak to one another. Genara makes pottery. Julia plays the violin. Augusta manages a bank, but she compensates for this lack of modesty with social work in working-class neighborhoods. Even though they don’t search one another out, they are joined by the fact that they are daughters of the same father, and they do what they do in order to show their father that they don’t need the inheritance. They refuse to receive a fatal inheritance because of the fact that they are their father’s daughters. The three work as if they are not going to receive anything. Or perhaps as if they deserve to inherit only if they demonstrate from now on that with or without an inheritance, they can earn a living. Besides—except for Augusta—they do it with a humility calculated to offend or at least disconcert their father. Except for Augusta.
Is an inheritance won or lost? Augusta smiles at the thought. Do the sisters know which their father prefers? To offer the inheritance, although the three of them are perfect idlers? Or to save it until he finds out that the three of them are not waiting for the comfort of a promised bequest but are earning their livings without worrying about their father’s desire? Or would their father be irritated if the sisters, instead of waiting idly for the testamentary period to be over, find occupations?
Their father is very severe. He would tell his daughters that the richer the family, the more ungrateful the descendants.
“You don’t know how to value things. You didn’t work your way up, like me. You feel like destiny’s pampered darlings. Bah! Keep guessing whether you’ll inherit or will be disinherited. And if you inherit, try to imagine how much I’ll leave you.”
He said that when children know how much they’re going to inherit, they become ungrateful and stop calling.
“But you can revoke the inheritance at any moment, Papa.”
Their father’s gestures were somewhat truculent. “Who says I didn’t do that already? You just keep sucking up to me if you don’t want to starve.”
“Let them wait,” the father murmured before he went into the bathroom each morning. “What do you think? You should never hand over your money before you die. Have faith! Have hope! Be patient. Wait until I die.”
He would say this and cackle before going in for his daily sauna. Augusta imagined him dissolving in sour vapors until he was changed into pure spirit.
“He was the regularity in our lives,” Augusta said to Julia and Genara.
Julia had always thought her vocation was music. With or without the approval of her father, God willing, she would devote her life to playing the violin, indifferent to the famous inheritance. Genara says she prefers making pottery to the inheritance. A sum of money or owning real estate can’t compare t
o the joy of creating a useful and beautiful object from essential clay: earth. And Augusta, the most disobedient, does not want to concede the game to humility or pride. She presides over a successful banking enterprise but pays her tribute to what she considers the ambiguous paternal inheritance with the rebellion of doing social work in proletarian districts.
Each sister knows what the other two have done. Only on the night of the anniversary, however, do the three see one another’s faces, calculate how much they have aged, imagine what has happened to them during the past year, predict what the new one will bring: change, permanence, going backward, moving forward, kilos, wrinkles, hair color, contact lenses, fleeting styles . . .
On the anniversary, the three show up dressed in black. The three meet, at the new year, around a coffin.
2. The house in the sunken park scarcely deserves the name “house.” It is an old bare garage with a sliding metal door and an improvised toilet on one side. The kitchen is part of the garage. An electric stove and a disconnected refrigerator. The adobe walls show weariness and a wounded color. The door clangs and sounds like prison bars. The sisters, familiar with the ritual, have each brought a seat. Julia a revolving piano stool. Genara a complicated beach chair with faded cloth strips. Augusta an easily transported folding chair.
They know they are going to spend many hours here without moving.
This was the testamentary decision of their father. For the ten years following my death, you will hold a wake for me on each anniversary of my birth in the same humble place where I was born: an old garage next to the sunken park.
This is my last will and testament. I want you to remember where the fortune comes from that you will inherit. From down below. Thanks to my effort. In virtue of—if you’ll permit the irony—the vices you attribute to me. At the end of the decade, each one will receive her corresponding portion. I have no other condition but this one: to hold a respectful wake for me on each day of my birth. I don’t care what you do for the rest of the year. Earn your living, not to oppose me but for your own good. I tell you this: There is no greater satisfaction than earning your bread by the etcetera. I could have left you the estate when I died. I would have condemned you to the idleness that is mother of all the etceteras. Now you are going to feel that inheriting is something more than a privilege. It is a reward. Not alms. In short, do what you want. Don’t please me by doing what I would have wanted or not wanted you to do. In short, you know my condition: Do what you want, but don’t get married. I don’t want some loafer in trousers to enjoy my money and enslave you in the hope of filling his pockets. And don’t have children. I’m a frustrated mathematician, and my calculations concern only three people. You, Augusta, Julia, and Genara. I don’t need barnacles on my ship. I want to reach the final port unencumbered: I and my three adored daughters, sole possessors of all my affection, the love I give them, the love they give me, incomparable, incompatible.