Happy Families
THE SON. Abel Pagán walks along the avenue, its walls heavily painted with graffiti. On wall after wall, the Mara Salvatrucha gang announces that it will bring the war to the city. They are young Central Americans displaced by the wars in El Salvador and Honduras. Abel feels sad looking at this graphic violence that makes the city so ugly. Though making Mexico City ugly is a tautology. And graffiti are universal. Abel saw and felt the immense desolation of the broad gray street. There was nothing to be done. He reached the metro station. He decided to jump the gate and board the train without paying for a ticket. Nobody saw him. He felt free. The train, filled with people, pulled out.
THE BOSS. Leonardo Barroso shows no emotion at all when he reads these lines. Or rather, his lack of emotion is the most eloquent statement of his disdain. “Look, Abel. There are no indispensable employees here. Wise up, boy. With modern technology, production increases, and the worker goes down. If I ever offer you something, consider yourself privileged. Here you have a secure, steady job. What I don’t tolerate are stupid whims. Personal rebellions in exchange for the privilege of working with me. With Leonardo Barroso. Understand? It’s up to you. You’re either in or you’re out. I don’t need you. The business will grow with or without you. If you want the truth, it’ll do better without you. You should always feel that a job is a privilege, because you, Abel, are turning out to be superfluous.”
THE FATHER AND MOTHER. I don’t describe Elvira because in my eyes she’s always the same girl I met one day singing the bolero “Two Souls.”
Chorus of the Street Gossips
Exita gave birth in the street
Half the girls on the street are pregnant
They’re between twelve and fifteen years old
Their babies are newborns up to six years old
A lot of them are lucky and miscarry because they’re given a beating
And the fetus comes out screeching with fear
Is it better to be inside or outside?
I don’t want to be here mamacita
Toss me in the garbage instead mother
I don’t want to be born and grow dumber each day
With no bath mamacita with no food mother
With no nourishment except alcohol mother marijuana mother
Paint thinner mother glue mother cement mother cocaine mother
Gasoline mother
Your tits overflowing with gasoline mother
I spit flames from the mouth I nursed with mother
A few cents mother
On the crossroads mother
My mouth full of the gasoline I nursed mother
My mouth burning burned
My lips turned to ash at the age of ten
How do you want me to love me mother?
I don’t hate you
I hate me
I’m not worth dog shit mother
I’m only worth what my fists deliver
Fists for fighting fists for stealing fists for stabbing mother
If you’re still alive mother
If you still love me just a little
Order me please to love me just a little
I swear I hate me
I’m less than a dog’s vomit a mule’s shit a hair on your ass an abandoned
Huarache a rotten peach a black banana peel
Less than a drunkard’s belch
Less than a policeman’s fart
Less than a headless chicken
Less than a bum’s old prick
Less than the skinny ass of a Campeche whore
less than a drug dealer’s spittle
less than the shaved ass of a baboon in the zoo
less than less mamacita
don’t let me kill myself all alone
tell me something to make me feel like a real fucker
a real bad motherfucker mother
jes gimme a hand to get out of this mother
damned to this forever mother?
look at my nails black to the quick
look at my eyes glued shut by rheum
look at my lips chapped raw
look at the black slime on my tongue
look at the yellow slime in my ears
look at my green thick navel
mother gemme outta here
what did I do to end up here?
Digging gnawing scratching crying
what did I do to end up here?
xxxxxita
The Disobedient Son
1. Sometimes my father drank and sang Cristero songs.
2. He liked to recall the deeds of his father, our grandfather, in the War of Christ the King, when the Catholics of Jalisco rose up in arms against the “atheistic” laws of the Mexican Revolution. First he would drink and sing. Right after that he would remember and, finally, admonish. “May the sacrifice of your grandfather Abraham Buenaventura not have been in vain.”
Because it seems that Grandfather Abraham was captured by federal troops in 1928 and shot in the Sierra de Arandas, a place, they say, that was fairly desolate and desolating.
“The fact is that it was his time to die. I don’t know how many times he saved himself during the Cristero crusade.”
Our father, Isaac, recounts that at times Grandfather Abraham showed too much compassion and at other times too much cruelty. Though all wars were like that. Many government soldiers fell at the battle of Rincón de Romos. Grandfather Abraham walked among the corpses, pistol in hand, counting them one by one by order of his superior, General Trinidad de Anda.
They were all good and dead. Except for one, lying in the dust, who moved his eyes and pleaded with my grandfather, Have pity on me, I’m a Christian, too. Grandfather Abraham continued on his way but hadn’t taken two steps before the general stopped him cold. “Buenaventura, go back and finish off that soldier.”
“But General, sir—”
“Because if you don’t kill him, I’ll kill you.”
In our family, these stories were told over and over again. It was the way to make them present. Otherwise, they would have been forgotten. My father, Isaac, would not tolerate that. The Buenaventura family, all of it, had to be a living temple to the memory of those who fell in the Crusade of Christ the King. So long ago now because it began in 1925 and ended in 1929. But as current as the news on the radio in this remote ranch in Los Camilos, where there are no newspapers and even the radio played with intermissions of silence, thunder, cackling, and stuttering. The Sunday sermons (and every day’s remembering) supplied the missing information.
The priest’s homily invariably evoked the exploits of Christ the King and lashed out at Masons (where were they?), Communists (what were they?), and all impious people, especially the teachers sent from the capital: the men, sons of Lucifer, the women, socialist harlots.
“As if you needed to know how to read in order to pray,” the good father intoned. “As if you needed to know how to write in order to herd cattle.”
He would make a dramatic pause before exclaiming: “The good Christian needs only a rosary around his neck and a pistol in his hand.”
My father drank and sang. He felt guilty that the war hadn’t touched him. On the other hand, he had times of peace and prosperity here in Los Altos de Jalisco. The war was bloody and cruel. The government emptied the Christian villages and sent the people to concentration camps from which they trooped back in emaciated ranks. They say half of them turned into ghosts. They came back in long starving columns howling like dogs—says my father. The merchants barred their stores with chains. So great was the fury of those who came back that they destroyed the harvests so the shopkeepers would have nothing to sell.
“And they mutilated the animals,” Isaac said, lowering his voice behind his wet, scaly mustache.
He sat at the head of the refectory with five keys—very large ones—in his hand and his chair set on the metal plate that leads to the mysterious basement where no one else but he can go because it has five padlocks and he is master of the keys.
&n
bsp; He looks at us, his four sons, Lucas, Juan, Mateo, and me, Marcos, so named, my father said, to move from the Old to the New Testament once and for all. Otherwise, he advised our mother, Angelines, he would have had to call us Esaú, Jacobo, and right there the problems began, since Jacobo had thirteen sons and my father only four. His decision to change Testaments saved me and my three brothers from being named Isacar, Zebelún, or Zilpa.
Long live the New Testament, I said to myself and wondered from the time I was a boy why there was no Third Testament. What happens next, what’s the Present-day Testament?
After the war, the agrarian laws of the Revolution were gradually set aside or punched as full of holes as a colander. There were no more haciendas. Now they were called ranchos. And all you had to do was put together small properties with names of various owners to have, at the very least, a mini-estate. And sometimes recreate a real old-fashioned land holding.
My father was in an intermediate position with his property, Los Camilos, thanks to the benevolence of successive municipal presidents, governors, and dignitaries of the official party, the PRI, the great political umbrella for all ideological postures, from ultraconservative Catholics to simulated Marxists. The latter were radishes—red on the outside, white on the inside. The former, from holy cross-bearing families, had an obscene popular appeal.
Perhaps, for my father, the legacy of the bloody religious war was the obligation to restore the lands of Los Altos and wipe out all vestiges of faces and walls equally marred by disease and machine guns.
And that was what he did. The honor fell to my father of recovering his wealth without renouncing his faith. From the time we were children, he would take his four sons to visit the lands of the Los Camilos ranch, named in honor of the congregation founded in Rome in 1586 to care for the dying. “Because this land was dying, and only with reborn faith was the land reborn.”
Herds of cattle. Extensive cornfields. Land without tenant farmers, all of it belonging to Isaac Buenaventura and his four sons. From the Sierra del Laurel to the border with Aguascalientes, there was no ranch more productive, better run, and with more certain boundaries than this property of Los Camilos, land that only the sons of Isaac and the grandsons of Abraham would share one day.
My father had us—Juan, Lucas, Mateo, and Marcos—learn about every corner of Los Camilos, the herders and the cornfields, how to tend to the mares about to give birth and how to count acres, but finding out as well that here the hail was severe, and there were snakes and huisache cactus, and the great organs of nopal were like the sentinels of our land.
For this was our land, and its miracle, to my young eyes, was that nothing had killed it, neither war nor peace, since both can suffocate life that isn’t the extreme of violence or of tranquility but the object of constant attention, a state of alert to avoid falling into destruction or abstinence. It was enough to see and love this land to re-create in the soul a vigorous equilibrium typical of complete men, conscious of possible mistakes and reluctant to accept premature glory. Nature in Los Altos de Jalisco is frugal, parsimonious, sober, like the appearance and speech of the inhabitants.
And still there was a latent power in the herds and cornfields, in the clouds of slow urgency, in the wind trapped in the caves that didn’t allow me to live absently, without ambition and even without rebelliousness. When the mountain approaches and the wheat rises, the brambles retract and the beeches grow until they reach their dense green coronation, a man is transformed along with nature and the senses are nourished by the smells and tastes of the countryside, smoke and tar and stables and sometimes the flashing passage of half-seen butterflies, more fragile than a rainbow, that blinded me with their rapid flight, as if saying, Follow us, Marcos, come with us, let yourself go . . .
But my father was anchored to this land and even more so to his place at the head of the refectory, sitting there with the keys to the basement in his hand and looking at us with severity when he said that if our Cristero grandfather died for religion, it was up to his son and grandsons to pay homage to Abraham’s sacrifice by dedicating ourselves to God.
“That is why I have determined that each one of you, when you turn eighteen, will go to Guadalajara to begin your studies at the Seminario del Eterno Enfermo in order to enter the priesthood and dedicate your lives to the service of Our Lord.”
His patriarchal glance cut off any response, protest, or personal opinion.
“The first to go will be you, Marcos, because you’re the oldest. I’ve noticed you have a vocation because you fast so often.”
I didn’t disillusion him. If I fasted, it was not because I had a priest’s vocation but because I was fat and wanted to diet to attract the girls in the settlement. But I didn’t say anything. I bowed my head in acceptance and allowed my father to continue his heroic evocations.
“Grandfather Abraham’s final wish was that they not give him anything to drink for an entire day before they shot him and allow him to piss before he stood against the wall.”
He looked at us with a singular, terrible meaning. “You, Marcos, and then Juan and Mateo and Lucas, are going to the seminary the same way, without pissing your pants.”
He made a Jupiter-like pause. “Grandfather Abraham died for religion. You must pay tribute to his sacrifice by dedicating yourselves to God.”
If one of the four of us was tempted to yawn at the table upon hearing the same old song for the thousandth time, our astute father immediately brought into play the memory of our sainted mother, Doña Angelines, who died giving birth to Mateo and on whom, to assure her going to heaven, our father—he recounts it brutally—painted a cross on her breast with blood from the birth.
“Remember it, boys. Remember it, Mateo, when it’s your turn to go to the seminary. You were born under the sign of the bloody cross, and only your dedication to the Lord Our God and His Holy Apostolic Roman Catholic Church will save you from the sin of having caused the death of the one who gave you life.”
I dared to look at my little brother, barely twelve years old and terrified, mortified, disoriented by my father’s words. I listened with my head held high. I looked at Mateo, lifting it even higher, encouraging him in silence, Mateo, don’t bow your head, up, Mateo, up.
Right after that my father skewered us: “If all of you don’t become priests, the ghost of Grandfather Abraham will haunt you.”
That was why at night, all of us lying in the same large bedroom in accordance with another of my father’s maxims (“This way you’ll keep an eye on one another”), we spoke of our fear that the ghost of our grandfather, Abraham Buenaventura, would appear to us if we disobeyed our father, Isaac. We were frightened by the movement of the trees, the creaking of the grate, and the terror that into our room would come the Cristero parade of starving children clutching at their mothers’ skirts, the marred faces of the soldiers, the corpses wrapped in sleeping mats, the dogs barking at the moon.
To say goodbye to me, my father ordered a funeral Mass, since it wasn’t a matter of wishing me luck but of reminding me of our dead mother and in this way burdening me with the responsibility to honor her memory with my future priesthood. The Fiftieth Psalm was recited, intercession for the departed soul was prayed for, the mother of the forsaken was invoked, and then there was a huge ranch fiesta where everybody raised their lemonades and I was sent off with a variety of popular exclamations.
“Don’t bump into any tarts, Marcos.”
“Don’t let your asshole pucker up in the city.”
“Listen, Marcos, before you become a priest, break the cherries of a couple of girls.”
My father gave me a snakeskin belt lined with silver pesos and newly coined morelianos. “So you don’t ask me for more. Manage it carefully. There’s no need to write to me. Don’t think about me. Think about God and your dead mother.”
And so I left behind my home village with a sound of barren rock and abandoned tools (which pursued me).
3. When I came back for a v
isit three years later to celebrate my twenty-first birthday at home, my father, filled with pride, ordered the church bells rung and boasted that now it was Juan’s turn to go to the seminary, too, because he was almost eighteen, and then Lucas, seventeen, would follow in his footsteps and little—or not so little anymore—Mateo, who was fifteen.
I arrived dressed in black—suit, tie, shoes—and a white shirt but without a high collar, in order not to attract too much attention.
With a certain pleasure I recognized the herds and the cornfields, the roads and tools of my childhood, and prepared to hear again the exploits of the Cristero War during supper with my three brothers, my father presiding as always with the key in his hand and the patriarchal chair set over the metal door and the forbidden basement.
“Well, well,” my father murmured. “Look, boys, at how they’ve sent your brother back to us so correct. You can really see his correctness, don’t you think?” He laughed out loud. “As they used to say in my day, politicians and lawyers are bigassed creatures. You can really see”—he gave me an apocalyptic look—“that Marcos has grown wings and that the discipline of seclusion and frugal meals has made his spirit thin and enlarged his soul.”
I imagined that my father would take these virtues for granted, without too much inquiry and almost as the work of the Holy Spirit.