Happy Families

  “Do you need to believe to live?” said Genara, suddenly enthralled by the primitive beauty, straight blond hair, blue eyes, bows on her head, clean hands, of the youngest sister. How well she trimmed her nails. How well she repeated the catechism. She seemed to be a saint.

  “We can’t be good if we don’t believe,” replied Julia. “Without faith, we’d be cynics.”

  “Faith can become blindness,” Augusta scoffed in all seriousness. “Cynicism is better.”

  “No, no,” Julia pleaded. “It’s better for us to be credulous than cynical.” And resting her hand on Augusta’s shoulder: “Don’t be afraid.”

  Augusta looked at her sister with contempt.

  Genara looked at them with involuntary complicity.

  “Don’t you think that Papa was basically a simple man and that we’re the complicated ones? Because if you think about it, Papa was something as simple as his smell of cologne.”

  “He smelled of incense,” said an insolent Augusta.

  “Tobacco,” Julia said with a smile.

  “Sweat,” Augusta insisted. “He smelled of sour sweat.”

  “He was a courteous, ceremonious man.” Julia blinked.

  “Rigid, pretentious.” Augusta grimaced.

  “Very hardworking?” Julia inquired.

  “He made other people work and took advantage of them,” said a disagreeable Augusta.

  “Just like you.” Genara simulated a joking little smile.

  “Genara, don’t accuse your sister. It isn’t nice,” Julia intervened.

  “Don’t worry.” Genara rested a hand on Julia’s shoulder, like a comrade. Julia moved away from Genara.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t like—”

  “You don’t like what?”

  “Nothing. Forget it. What were you going to say?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “No, tell me, everything matters.”

  “Don’t worry. I accept my limitations. It’s my rule.”

  Augusta remained silent during this exchange. Looking at Julia, she thought that the innocent only complicate life for others. Evil, envy, malice, the great defects, the whole treasury of transgressions, when they appear, have the virtue of uprooting moral hypocrisy, false appearances, deceptive piety. In any event, Augusta was bored by her sisters. She was bored with her sisters. She laughed to herself. What could she do to liven up the vigil? It was not a question of making anyone indignant. And she did not want to give in to the provocation programmed ahead of time by their absent father. How many times had she confirmed that he did not want to talk about his daughters, he wanted his daughters to talk about him. That was why Augusta tended to remain silent while the sisters argued over who would speak first: You tell, no: you first . . . Augusta feared that the secret silence she knew how to maintain would be transformed, through the good works of her clumsy sisters, into a simple exchange of confidences. Didn’t Augusta know, because she was the oldest and the one who first knew the father, that each time she wanted to keep something to herself, her desire was violated by their severe, vengeful, brutal father?

  “What secret are you hiding, Augusta?”

  “Nothing, Papa. You’re imagining things.”

  “Of course I am. I imagine nothing less than the truth. Why do you keep your secrets from me? Are you ashamed? Or do you like to make me angry?”

  “No, Papa. You’re wrong.”

  “One of two things, my girl. You’re acting this way out of the shame pleasure gives you or because of the pleasure shame gives you. There’s not much to think about. You don’t fool me, etcetera.”

  The young Augusta (she was forty-three now) blushed, and Papa looked at her with an air of understanding and forgiveness.

  “The miserable bully.” Augusta struggled to open the coffin. The sisters screamed and stopped her. Augusta only wanted to liven up the vigil. The younger sisters returned to their quibbling.

  “What is it you don’t . . . ?”

  “Nothing. What were you going to—?”

  “It doesn’t mat—”

  “No, tell me.”

  “That his motives were doubtful,” murmured Augusta. “Doubtful, if not disagreeable.”

  She realized that Julia and Genara were paying attention to her. Had that been their father’s triumph: to demand attention when they didn’t give it to him? For a second, the oldest sister saw herself in the dead man’s coffin, shut in, without the sisters coming to save her from silent asphyxiation. And she realized that at this moment, being in a coffin meant occupying their father’s position.

  This idea shamed and disturbed Augusta. She reproached herself for the temptation to supplant their father, even in death. She gave herself over to a kind of extremely personal prayer. Authority is authoritarian. Be careful, Augusta, try to give your sisters the grace that Papa denied them, try to make them content with the rhythms of life now that this long period of mourning is coming to an end, make them look outside, make them feel things like the temperature, the seasons, the neglected birds, the barking of dogs, the silence of butterflies, how the grass grows, everything Papa denied us because even a dragonfly could compete for the attention he deserved.

  Augusta realized she wasn’t saying what went through her mind because she was sure that when she tried to speak, she would have no voice. Was that their father’s original theft: to make her mute? Did their father know that Augusta wouldn’t dare ask Julia and Genara what they feared and desired when the time period imposed by him was concluded: Now we’re going to live together at last, come, sisters, the time of wandering the world looking for other pleasures and other companions is over, I’m afraid that after tonight we’ll all go mad, mad in our solitude, tied to calendars of fire, led to the very brink of old age . . . Together. Here in the sunken park. Together and finally free.

  It was enough to listen to them.

  “He never told us ‘Don’t leave, come live with me . . .’ ”

  “We were all grown up, Julia, we had no reason to continue at his side.”

  “Despicable, despicable, that’s what he called us.”

  “Well, now you see, he ground us down, he left us free.”

  “To do what? To die?”

  “No, to go on living.”

  “Despicable.”

  “What freedom? Let me tell you. The freedom to come here every year to obey him as if he were alive.”

  “But if we didn’t—”

  “Say it, Julia, but if we didn’t—”

  “We’d be left without the inheritance.”

  “What an injustice! Isn’t it?”

  “But I thought when he was gone . . .”

  “That we’d do what we wanted?”

  “Why can’t we see him?”

  “He died.”

  “Do you think so? Maybe he just can’t be seen, that’s all.”

  “No. He died. This is just a ceremony. An empty ritual. Wake up. Realize what’s happening.”

  “How hard you can be behind that cherub’s face.”

  Augusta heard them without saying a word. She told herself she accepted fears because by now she was used to them. Now what would she have to accustom herself to when the custom of the annual ceremony around their father’s coffin was ended? What would become of their lives? Would they change? Or was custom now too strong?

  She imagined, with a mixture of revulsion and humor, that the three of them, Genara and Julia and, why not, she herself, Augusta, would continue returning year after year to the garage in the sunken park, celebrating this action that none of the three could classify as commitment, ceremony, duty, habit, caprice, because by dint of repetition, it had become a part of their lives. Would they dare to end the custom? Or would it become the customary obligation in a hollow formula, an empty ritual? How to maintain the sensation of menace in the duty their father had awarded them? Was that feeling his real inheritance: keep me alive, daughters, live on the alert, questioning, dissatisfie
d? Why do you think I’ve imposed these time periods on you? Out of love, my pretty babies, out of love and nothing but! To avoid your falling into the softness of girls with good inheritances pursued by a legion of lecherous upstarts, starving good-for-nothings who don’t love you, cannot adore you as I do.

  4. “Do you remember that we put on shifts and blindfolds when we bathed?”

  “To avoid sin.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Do you realize, Julia, that we ourselves never saw him naked, in the bathroom, shaving?”

  “Didn’t he let us see him?”

  “Or didn’t he let us see ourselves?”

  As the hours passed, Augusta thought their father had told her that he didn’t want his daughters to see him age. That he wanted to be forever young for them. An attractive father, in short.

  “Do you know Papa’s age when he died?” Augusta asked them.

  Genara and Julia looked at each other. “I don’t know . . . seventy, eighty? A hundred?”

  “Do you remember him as an old man?”

  “What?”

  “Yes, old.”

  “No, young, always young. He ate the years.”

  Genara laughed a great deal. “It isn’t the only thing he ate.”

  “We remember him young.”

  “But we never saw him young.”

  “Because we only have photographs of the young Papa.”

  “Isn’t there a single photo of the old Papa?”

  “What’s the difference between what used to be and what was?”

  “The difference between conscience and memory,” Augusta pronounced, and the sisters laughed because they didn’t understand.

  Instead, they asked themselves: Why wasn’t an obituary published in the papers? Wasn’t that your obligation, Augusta? No, you said you’d do it, Genara. Don’t look at me, said Julia.

  5. Later, Augusta wondered if there was a difference between conscience and memory. She thought there was. Memory happens today. We remember today. Conscience is always repentance buried in the past. We prefer to forget.

  She didn’t say this because then she feels guilty for saying what she shouldn’t only because her words dictate themselves and demand to be spoken even though Augusta does not know how to and cannot measure the reach of speaking. At times she felt that someone was speaking through her, someone who did understand the difference between conscience and memory, not her, the simple vehicle of a mysterious voice that demanded to be heard.

  Whose voice was it?

  Was it she herself at another stage of her life, a past or future time when Augusta could understand why her recollections of the past all occurred today but her conscious present always happened in another time, never in the present?

  “His demands were excessive,” murmured Genara. “He made the three of us face all the temptations and asked us to beg him for the power to resist them.”

  “Speak clearly,” said Julia. “Who was going to resist the temptation, he or us?”

  “Who knows? He was very capricious.” Genara shook her head.

  “He was a tyrant,” Julia said abruptly, and Genara looked at her in astonishment, Augusta with anticipatory resignation.

  Julia had been the pampered little girl and then the defender of their father’s image. This abrupt change was inexplicable unless, Augusta thought, Julia is trying to tell us that her devotion to Papa wasn’t foolishness but an act of conscious will that still led to faith. Augusta took advantage of the moment.

  “Did you ever see Papa naked?”

  Julia became embarrassed. Then she assented. “And you?” she said to Augusta.

  “I don’t know if I saw him.” The older sister smiled maliciously. “I have the impression that I smelled him. He smelled of dirt, of crusted shit, of sweaty armpits, of crotch, of—”

  “That’s not true.” Julia covered her sister’s mouth with her hand. “His body smelled of Yardley cologne, his hair of Barry’s Tricopherous—”

  “He smelled of urine,” Augusta said with a smile, pleased by Julia’s reaction, her instantaneous fall into the cult to their father, her weakness. “He was a disgusting, miserly, tyrannical old man.”

  “Generous, sweet, loving.” Julia sobbed with a fictitious air of repentance.

  “A miser,” Augusta continued with repressed ferocity. “He was buried with his gold. He forbade us the comfort that was our right. He was like a wicked king. He would have liked to be buried with his servants and his cattle. And look how he achieved it. He saw our faces. He buried the three of us in his pyramid, like vile concubines. You’re right, Julia, he was a tyrant.”

  “A good tyrant, a humane tyrant.” Julia lowered her eyes.

  “An authoritarian father,” added Genara. “Isn’t that what we wanted? A strong man who would tell us ‘Do this, don’t do that . . .’ Without him, we would have been lost in the world.”

  “And he knew it.” Augusta’s response was biting. “That’s why he abused his authority. What did he imagine? That if we were independent, we would steal his power? Why didn’t he understand that our being free would make him stronger?” She looked at Julia scornfully. “He knew that you, Julia, had a vocation for slavery.”

  “And you didn’t?” Julia moaned. “You did, too. That’s why you’re here, that’s why the three of us are still here . . . because we’re slaves.”

  “Don’t be dense. You still haven’t learned that being a tyrant is a courtesy that frees us from freedom.”

  Augusta kept the next thought to herself: Being a tyrant is also being a pedant. And a teacher: A pedant is before anything else the one who educates little boys. And girls. A pedagogue.

  This was a pedantic pedagogical prelude to what obsessed Augusta. The fear that they had been the ones who created the tyrant, though he hadn’t wanted it. He’d simply walked by naked. They were the ones who had dressed him. Because they themselves needed power but were afraid of exercising it. They preferred to give it to a poor passerby who was dumbfounded when the crown and ermine cape fell on him. They breathed a sigh of relief. They were rid of the burden.

  Power is cowardice, it is our cowardice, Augusta wanted to say aloud and did not dare because she was assailed by the conviction that her sisters would not understand her words. And did not deserve them. Power is cowardice because we do not dare to be powerful. Power is the hot potato we have to pass to a poor, defenseless, naked, mediocre, unimaginative, spiritually disconsolate individual, a stupid creature whom we anoint with the crown and cover with the ermine that we ourselves do not have the courage to wear. The emperor is the distorted reflection of our impotence. The trouble is that once we hand him the scepter, the chosen one believes himself to be truly powerful. He does not know his strength is borrowed. He assumes it without responsibility because we are the responsible ones. We can no longer replace the chief. Only by killing him. Hanging him by the feet in a public square. Cornering him like a rat in a gloomy courtyard. Condemning him to oblivion in the most forsaken part of a prison filled with chronic ailments and deprived of words.

  Then a great laugh sounds in Augusta’s hollow skull. You’re wrong, you innocent. I’ll end my days on the Riviera. I’ll occupy an entire floor of a New York hotel. I’ll sail around the Caribbean on my yacht. A Roman legion of tough guys will protect me. I won’t need more than twenty dollars in my pocket. My credit will be unlimited. Just like my laugh. Etcetera.

  It made no sense to explain this to her sisters. Why disillusion them? Why deprive them of the illusion of an autonomous, powerful father capable of performing miracles, above all, the miracle of loving his daughters with infinite tenderness and compassion? Why drive them away from their annual visit around the paternal coffin? Why, as a matter of fact, bring them happiness?

  Augusta shrugged discreetly. Let us continue to believe that when we gave all our power to our father, we would be exempt not only from responsibility. We would be exempt from blame.

  How to explain this
to her sisters when Genara was saying foolishness?

  “I asked him to say I was all white inside. And he saw me black.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “His eyes said it all. ‘You have a black soul, Genara. Try to redeem yourself. Confess your sins.’ ”

  “Which ones?” an irritated Augusta intervened.

  “His,” Genara continued. “When I knelt to make my confession, what came out of my mouth was an inventory of Papa’s sins, old conservative, aristocratic, tiresome, you’re not a decadent noble, as you imagine, you’re shameless and arrogant, you’re the worst kind of tyrant, you’re the plebeian climber who doesn’t know how to enjoy the goods of the world because he reverts to his low origins and isn’t accustomed to controlling from above. He staggers. He stumbles. And he reacts by punishing. He abuses his impunity. Doesn’t recognize his errors. Punishes others because he can’t punish himself.”

  Genara dissolved into something resembling a gentle spring rain, though her weeping was acute, repeating “Errors, errors,” until she had stripped the word of meaning.

  “Which errors, Genara?” Julia looked at her sister, but it was Augusta who spoke, fearing too lifeless a response from Genara, the potter unaccustomed to giving free rein to her feelings beyond a certain limit, as if the world were a large clay vase that could become misshapen with one turn too many of the wheel. The truth is, she felt challenged, displaced by the unexpected vigor of Genara’s words.

  “Resentment,” Augusta continued. “The worst sin. Suffering because of other people’s happiness. Envying other people’s luck. Looking out for other people’s faults while you hide your own.”

  She stopped because once again her thoughts were faster than her words and her doubt that she’d be understood even greater. The fact is that Augusta wanted to take on, as much as possible, the faults of their father. Promising happiness in the future, never today. Defer. Defer. Defer everything. Replace necessity with hope and hope with ceremony. Talk about what we don’t know and neither does he. Make us feel ignorant. Foment mistaken ideas about and within each of his daughters. Concede things too early or too late. Nothing at the opportune moment, Papa, do you realize that? Nothing at the right time, everything deferred until tomorrow, or console yourselves because you already have it and don’t know it. Always leaving us in uncertainty. Do we threaten him or does he threaten us? Can we make him disappear in a cloud of smoke? Or can he make us disappear? Does he accept each plea as the homage he deserves, the gift that is requested of him, or the illusion that is fulfilled when we ask him for it? When we dare to doubt his wisdom, he escapes from us, transforming his ignorance into shrewdness.