Happy Families

  3. Tonight the ten years prescribed as a condition of their father’s will are over, and the three daughters prepare for the outcome. They arrived punctually (at nightfall), though Julia came early to light a long candle at each corner of the coffin. They arrive and give one another light, rapid, purely ceremonial kisses on the cheek. Each one knows she doesn’t love the other two. No matter how Julia dissimulates with sweet gestures of affection. Genara disguises displeasure—real—as well as love—nonexistent. Only Augusta appears with a sour face and crosses her arms.

  The sisters don’t speak to one another for a long time. Julia fusses over making certain the candles are lit. That they don’t go out in spite of being very long. Augusta looks at her nails and doesn’t say a word. Genara observes the ceiling of the garage as if it were the starry sky on a cold, clear winter night. Augusta, who knows her very well, murmurs quietly, “Tropics, we’re in the tropics, fool.”

  Augusta doesn’t hide the fact that her sisters bore her. Though her father bored her even more. The severe daughter corrects herself immediately. Saying “bored me” is a cheap way to debase her father. The truth is, he enervated her, made her uncomfortable. It has always been Augusta’s opinion that their father was like flies. He had so many eyes he could see everything and wouldn’t let himself be flattened by a slap. She would like to believe that recollection is all that remains of her father. He took care not to be simply a pious memory. This annual ceremony keeps him alive. Above all because of the unsettling question—more like a threat—that at the end of ten years, something will happen. And it won’t be anything good, about that Augusta feels certain.

  On the other hand, thinks the guileless Genara, after ten years the inheritance will be established. This doesn’t concern her. She knows that the condition, which suspends for only a certain period of time the execution of the will, does not stop the daughters from acquiring a right to the inheritance. She looks at Augusta and understands that the oldest sister can read her thoughts. She considers her naive. To think that today, tonight, their father is going to resolve the enigma of his will is not to know the man.

  Augusta would like to say to her sisters:

  “Papa is deceiving us. He always deceived us. Deceit is his profession. He’s like a smiling cardsharp.” (There’s a reason Genara always crossed herself when she saw her father.) (Genara avoids the piercing eyes of her older sister.) (Genara is superstitious.)

  (Genara believes in the stars, lucky dates, black cats.) Augusta knows this and makes fun of her in secret. Their father also knows the power of superstition. He counts on it to keep the daughters unsettled year after year.

  “Don’t be superstitious,” Augusta suddenly springs on Genara.

  “What? What did you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s too bad,” Julia gently intervenes.

  “What?” Genara repeats.

  “I said that’s too bad. We ought to talk to one another. At least once a year.”

  “Do you know why we don’t talk to one another?” Augusta interrupts inconsiderately.

  Julia shakes her blond head.

  “So Papa won’t catch us.”

  Julia and Genara don’t understand Augusta, and Augusta doesn’t deign to clarify her words. She keeps her reasons to herself. The sisters exhaust her. They believe their father eventually will grow tired, and today, after a decade, he will free them of mourning so he himself can rest in peace.

  This is a thought that, in a very different way, Julia and Genara share. Julia out of simple charity. That everything will conclude and everyone will be at peace. Be able to wear spring flower prints again. A pretty cream-colored dress with an asparagus print. A tailored dress with orchids on the lapel. Leave behind the mourning imposed by their father.

  Julia believes more, much more, in the kindnesses of memory that her sisters, for different reasons, reject or malign. Julia selects the best moments from her recollection and puts them together in nosegays of happiness. Games, affections, roses. Her father’s arms lifting her high. Her father’s lap receiving the curled-up little girl. The father’s hands . . .

  “I was my father’s little bird.” The young woman smiles. “I was always at his side. In silence. I never contradicted him. I never was disrespectful. I never raised my voice to him.”

  Julia curbs her recollections as if her sisters can hear what she is thinking. She imagines that each of them at these moments does one of two things: She remembers or eliminates memories. Genara struggles against the memory of their father. She even makes the mistake of humming some tune from her childhood, revealing in this way what she does not wish to show.

  Their father would accuse her: “You’re a full-fledged lazy thing.”

  No, she wasn’t lazy. She was indolent, which isn’t the same thing. It isn’t that she wouldn’t or couldn’t do things. She believed that in the end everything would work out, more or less, with no need for her to act. Perhaps she was a contented girl who, since she did not know how to lie, thought it better to be quiet. How could she call her father “daddy dear,” like that hypocrite Julia, if she didn’t believe it? No, she wasn’t lazy. She avoided contradicting her father or fulfilling his expectations with regard to the affection he deserved. Perhaps Genara was simply walled inside her own childhood, distrustful of growing up in a world determined by the will of her father. What was wrong with that?

  Only Augusta has sealed off her memory, carrying in her head a ridiculous mnemonic: the numbers of her bank accounts. But it is she, unexpectedly, who breaks the round of their silences by placing a hand on the coffin.

  “He spent his life putting us to the test. How good that this is over.”

  The sisters look at her with disbelief, amazement, and grievance.

  “It’s true,” wails Genara. “It’s true. He’s dead.”

  “He died,” Julia insists without wanting to. “What a shame.”

  “Died, yes,” Augusta concludes. She insists, “Do you remember? Do you remember that list of prohibitions he wrote out by hand and tacked at the entrance to the bathroom?”

  “You don’t remember that,” Julia said with easy tolerance.

  “I remember, and so do you, Julia,” Augusta continued with the air of a gardener who cuts the overgrown grass and can’t interrupt the work without changing the rhythm or destroying a bed of roses by mistake. “Don’t touch yourself, don’t look at yourself. Avoid mirrors. Get dressed in the dark. Bathe in your shift. Don’t touch yourself. Don’t look at yourself. Don’t look at a man. Don’t let anyone touch you. Don’t go out alone. Sit in the first row at the movies even if it makes you cross-eyed. Don’t let yourself be looked at. Put a fig leaf on the art prints at school. Better yet: Don’t go to school anymore. I’ll be your school. Come, Augusta, sit on my lap so I can teach you. Go on, Genara, let me dress and undress you while you close your eyes and imagine I’m the sweetheart I forbid you to have. Lie down, Julia, I’ll sing you to sleep. You girls don’t have a mother. I’ll be father and mother both, I’ll—”

  “I’d say that a father can be a perverse mother.” Augusta twisted her lips.

  Julia touched Augusta’s hand. “There were only good intentions.”

  “Then why do I remember them as perversions?”

  “Because the perverse one is you,” Genara dared to say, and Augusta slapped her, a heavy blow of square, metallic Caesarian rings.

  Julia stopped Augusta’s hand and looked incredulously at the signs of authority that adorned her sister’s long, curved fingers.

  “What, haven’t you ever worn rings?” the oldest sister said haughtily.

  Julia bowed her head artfully. “The one I wanted Papa denied me. He forbade the three of us. But you know that.”

  Genara bit a finger and thought of everything she and perhaps Augusta and certainly Julia had not done in their lives out of fear of their father while their father was alive. And now, now that he had been dead for ten years . . .

 
“. . . why don’t we have the courage to do everything he prohibited while he was alive?”

  “Out of respect,” Julia said sweetly, though with a lost, disoriented look, as if she had been left hanging on the last word said before this one.

  “Out of greed,” Augusta stated brusquely. “Because we don’t want to lose the inheritance. Be honest with the devil. Because we’re afraid to disobey him even though he’s dead.”

  “Because you’re afraid of him,” Julia said almost inaudibly, “the way you were when he was alive?”

  “Papa and his damn time periods. All of you wait. I’m coming. You’ll find out. Have faith, have faith, have faith!”

  Augusta’s voice was lost in its own echo. Julia and Genara knew that echo. It was what Augusta emitted in order not to cry or shout. The two sisters approached to embrace her, caressing her head with its short, bristly, masculine hair. Genara, without meaning to, pulled off one of Augusta’s earrings.

  “Oh! You’re always so clumsy.”

  Julia and Genara withdrew their hands from Augusta’s head as if they had profaned an authority that competed only with that of the father. She was the oldest sister, though her authority always remained beneath that of their father, feeding a sense of inferiority in her that only increased her throbbing pride.

  “Don’t deceive yourselves,” Augusta said to her sisters. “Don’t forget his disdainful, pitying, triumphant face. ‘Don’t upset yourself, my girl. Don’t deceive yourself. Don’t lower your eyes when I come in. Without us you aren’t . . .’ ”

  “What is she saying?” said Julia.

  “What are you saying?” asked Genara.

  “Nothing.” Augusta blew her nose with the cambric handkerchief she always had tucked in the long sleeve of her dress.

  That “nothing” was the most certain reflection of the belief Augusta had been cultivating since their father had disappeared and she suddenly realized that now authority fell to the oldest sister. She felt overwhelmed by the suspicion that the fact of his death made the authority fall to her and was the inheritance that Augusta at one time rejected and longed for in a conflict with no way out that only her sisters, if they understood it, would dare to resolve for her. But Augusta not only did not want to explain to Julia and Genara what she herself could not really understand, she also wanted to admit that she, Augusta, felt uncomfortable with their father’s moral inheritance.

  “Do you remember Mama?” Julia interrupted Augusta’s clouded thoughts in a melancholy way.

  “Yes and no.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That it wasn’t necessary to invent her. She was there. We came out of her and never really stopped living in her belly.”

  “How awful. Not even when she died?”

  Genara listened with languid patience to this exchange between Augusta and Julia. Rocking back and forth on her heels, she valued being the patient sister, the one who counted up the longest times. She knew her sisters did not recognize that virtue—or any others—in her. They did not offend her, Julia with her goodness, Augusta with her arrogance. They simply ignored her. Julia because she was good, so good she could not admit comparable goodness in another sister. It was enough for Genara to know this to also know that Julia, despite her sweetness, was condemned to the flames of a hell where simulation is not admitted. Julia was good because it suited her, because she wanted to go to heaven, when in reality, good people are the largest population in hell. Being good may deceive God but not the devil.

  Did Genara engage in this mental construct in order to acquit Augusta of an unhappy fate? She glanced at the oldest sister, and behind the hard facade, she guessed at a weakness disguised by the abrupt way Augusta had of distancing herself from emotion. Which was why it surprised and moved Genara when her sister emitted the echo of a sob. What do we expect of the unexpected? Are these actions sincere or calculated? Genara reflected: Augusta didn’t allow herself to be carried away because of emotion or love for their father but because of absence of faith. Have faith, have faith. It was the chorus of a single voice. If Julia’s modesty was pure hypocrisy, then Augusta’s bitter will was a weak comedy put on to defy the father and, paradoxically, refuse to assume the authority that was hers as firstborn. An excuse. An evasion. Telling the father that at least one of his daughters was rebellious, obstinate, and wicked. As if the father didn’t know how to see through filial farces and humiliate Augusta with the punishment of pity.

  That is why Genara is languid and patient. That is why she persists in dressing in an old-fashioned way, with her hair rolled high like a dark tower and makeup typical of Joan Crawford in the 1940s. Mouth very wide and very red. Eyes very open. Brows somewhat skeptical. And an expression very etcetera, as their father would say. She would say “imposed,” because it was true. Genara felt like a caricature of another time and knew it was because her fiction had become her reality. Joan Crawford in the 1940s. Mildred Pierce. Despite the modesty of its owner, her black silk one-piece dress turned out to be provocative, striking. Genara wanted to provoke only sorrow and consolation.

  It’s true: In the annual reunions, there was a latent desire for consolation. Let the three, so different among themselves, remember that in the end, they were sisters. Perhaps they were brought together, with dissimilar masks, by the unconfessed pride of being daughters of a man so original and so involved in their origins, their powerful and eternal father. They were proud. The proof was in their reluctance to offer consolation to one another. That was why Genara was patient. In the depths of her soul, she believed that at some point mercy would flower, the three would embrace—as in that fleeting instant when Augusta, so unlike herself, made an echo of her sorrow.

  “Save us from all responsibility,” murmured Genara.

  “What did you say?” Augusta was tense.

  “Nothing, sister. It just occurred to me that since he isn’t with us, in reality we can do whatever we want.”

  “You know very well why we can’t do what we want.”

  “Why?”

  “You know very well. It’s in the will. It’s our duty.”

  “It’s greed.”

  “Or risk.” Julia intervened for the first time. “Do you realize our lives would be at risk if we disobey? I mean, we don’t know the cost of disobedience—”

  “That doesn’t matter anymore,” Genara interrupted. “We’ve done our duty for nine years.”

  “That’s why it would be foolish to avoid it now without knowing what would have happened if—”

  Augusta interrupted in a tone comparable to Julia’s: “Don’t be stupid. We’ve done what we had to do. Let’s not speculate on what would have happened if we had disobeyed Papa.”

  “We still can disobey him,” Genara said slyly.

  “Be quiet,” Augusta continued. “It no longer makes sense, since we did obey him. We’ve come to the point he asked us to reach.”

  “And if we disobey him?” Genara insisted with childish perversity. “Just once?”

  Julia did not hide her horror. She did not have to say anything to indicate the fear caused in her by the idea of having done their duty for nine years of obedience only to stop at the finish line, violate the promise, and be left forever without knowing the truth. She would have liked to scratch Genara, knock down her soaring hairdo of a film noir diva. Since that didn’t correspond to her personality—a personality constructed so meticulously—Julia cried instead, her head leaning against the coffin. Mercy was safer than the passivity of the modest Genara or the authoritarian hardness of the proud Augusta, both pale imitations of their father. Perhaps similar to what their mother was in life. She didn’t know. She hadn’t known Mama.

  Still, when she thought this, Julia felt she was better than her sisters. Superior to them. And along with pride, there beat in Julia a kind of loss or personal mourning for having been condemned, when Papa died, to always wear mourning, unnecessary for those people—members of the orchestra, the conductor, the stagehan
ds—who did not know who the violinist‘s father was and what obligations he had imposed on her. Julia had auditioned for the orchestra under a false name. Only she knew the rule imposed by Papa, which was why she could have worn her youthful clothes, the springtime prints, the low necklines, the daring two-piece bathing suits when she was invited to Agua Azul to swim.

  And she didn’t. Why? Did she want to create mystery? Her colleagues in the orchestra did not dare to ask “Why do you always wear black?” and since black eventually became fashionable for women during those nine years and stopped being only a sign of mourning, no one said anything, and Julia let it be known that for her, even morning rehearsals were gala occasions. But she soon realized that her orchestra colleagues knew nothing about the existence of Julia’s papa, that she could be named Julia without attracting anyone’s attention.

  Julia smiled sweetly at her sisters. “I’ve never doubted. Have you?”

  Genara and Augusta observed her with indifference. Julia did not back down.

  “Do you know something? I have faith. I’m not referring to the circumstances that bring us together today. Do you know what faith is? It’s believing without condition, independent of circumstances. Faith is understanding that facts don’t change the world. Faith moves everything. Faith is true even if it’s absurd.”