Happy Families Part 24

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 compa.s.sion? 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 n.o.ble, 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 punis.h.i.+ng. 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.

Did her sisters realize the number of things they didn't do because they feared Papa? Did they realize that with this story about the day of the anniversary, they continued to defer their lives like old cars in a parking lot without a meter?

"Just count the demands he made on us from the time we were little girls. Didn't it give us a mischievous joy to do the opposite of what he asked? Isn't that what he expected of us, the pleasure of disobedience followed by redemptive penance? He condemned us. We condemned him. He treated us like simple things in his greenhouse, like little seeds subject to the temperature of his glance, the ice of his disapproval. He kept us in a larval state."

"He has us," Genara interrupted. "I mean in a larval state."

Augusta stopped speaking. She withdrew into herself again. She did not know if her silence was hers alone or had joined the clamor of everything not said by the sisters who had gathered tonight, for the last time, in the garage in the sunken park where Papa had been born.

6. Augusta looked with judicious cruelty at Julia. She thought the innocence of the youngest sister was-or could become-only the mask of a profound malice. She had her doubts. Did Julia get what she wanted? Had she used the restrictions of the inheritance to do the only thing she was interested in doing: playing the violin? Augusta did not want to believe in Julia's virginal appearance. She was always surrounded by men, in every orchestra. Perhaps she did not give the men her name. Perhaps she did not give her real name: Julia. Perhaps she went to bed with the clarinetist, let herself be fingered by the cellist, strummed with the guitarist, pulled out the stops with the man who played saxophone, blew with the piccolo player, all in a vast, harmonic, anonymous concupiscence. Julia had arranged things so her true life would be impenetrable.

Genara, on the other hand, was transparent. If she were to insinuate love affairs-something she had never done-her lies would have more weight than any truth. Possibly she had temptations. What she did not have were opportunities. All day at the wheel, with muddied hands and a stained brown ap.r.o.n. A woman with her sleeves rolled up and her hair pulled back. A strand falling over her forehead. Her legs spread as if she were giving birth to clay.

She once said about their father: "He watched over us as if we were his dolls." This pa.s.sivity of a toy was the nature, not second but first and who knows if original, of the sister who was a potter. Waiting for the anniversary was by now part of her customary life. What would she do without this expectation? Genara was not a woman capable of living without the routine of her calendar. In her heart, she wanted this situation to go on until the end of time. Not doing anything but ceramics. Being the potter to a vast world of clay by rescuing the clay and giving it the shape of human work. Was each worker a rival of G.o.d?

Genara would never accept this reasoning. She did not want to do anything that might contradict Papa's wishes, though the contradiction in those wishes was that whatever she did, she would be both good and evil. Good if she obeyed instead of rebelling but evil because she disobeyed Papa. Genara wondered if this was the father's policy-leave his daughters in permanent suspense, condemn them if they acted and also if they did not act? Genara felt very sad about having this conflict. Julia at least deceived others. Genara deceived herself. She continued to be a doll sitting on their father's quilted bed, surrounded by flickering candles beneath a crucifix without nails where the figure of Our Lord seemed to be flying toward heaven.

Then their father came out of the bathroom, freshly shaved, smelling of Yardley lavender, of Barry's Tricopherous, of Mum deodorant, with his colorless eyes and his hair of a yearning albino, to say: "I'm going to show you something you've never seen before."

He always says it and disappears into the remains of the steam in the sauna.

None of them dares enter the sauna. Not even their father's bathroom.

All the cosmetics and lavenders cannot lubricate the dry skin of the father who disappears walking backward, at a turtle's pace, into the mists of his daily grooming routine.

A ceremonious man.

A rigid man.

The regularity of our lives.

A man who simultaneously represents the fantasy and the business of the world. Etcetera.

"Give us peace," Genara says in a frightened voice.

"That depends on us, not on him," interjects Augusta. "We shouldn't give him a minute's peace. We have to criticize him, question him, unmask him, pull the rabbits out of the hat, take the deck of cards out of his hands. Look, our father is a carnival magician, a theatrical wizard, a sorcerer at a fair. He is an illusion. A phantom. A sheet blown by the wind."

Julia again collapsed into tears, her arms around the coffin. Like a Pieta Pieta among sisters, the group composed itself when Genara and Augusta embraced Julia, dissolved when they separated, somewhat confused about their own att.i.tudes, and embraced again as if a decisive warning-night falling, a period of time about to conclude, the end of the plot-obliged them to defend themselves, united, against their father's terrorist wishes, whatever they might be. among sisters, the group composed itself when Genara and Augusta embraced Julia, dissolved when they separated, somewhat confused about their own att.i.tudes, and embraced again as if a decisive warning-night falling, a period of time about to conclude, the end of the plot-obliged them to defend themselves, united, against their father's terrorist wishes, whatever they might be.

Augusta looked at them with a measure of scorn. The ten years would be over tonight. They had obeyed Papa's posthumous decision. And then what? Would they never meet again? Would they consider the test decade concluded, the time in which each one had done as she wished knowing that this was what their father wanted, for them to do what he didn't want them to do only in order to blame them and in this way oblige them to continue, as they had for the past ten years, this ceremony determined by him, almost as an act of contrition?

Is this what their father wanted? To have daughters who were free but poor (Genara), free but modest (Julia), prosperous but in the end obedient (Augusta)? And what were the three sisters looking for? To prove to their father that they could live without the inheritance even though they lived waiting for the inheritance? Because otherwise, why would they come to the annual appointment in the sunken park? Had none of them thought about rebelling against the command of their d.a.m.n paterfamilias? Excluding herself from the ceremony? Telling him to go to h.e.l.l?

"Did you ever think about disobeying Papa? Did one of you ever say to yourself: 'Enough, I've had it up to here. That's it. We don't know if this is a game or a punishment? In any case, it's tyranny.' Did you ever think that?" Augusta spoke in a moderate way. She looked at her sisters without emotion. "Let's see who is capable, right now, of leaving here," she continued.

"And be left not knowing the secret?" Julia said again.

"Never finding out how it all ended?" Genara supported her again. "n.o.body leaves a movie without finding out how it all turned out. We can't even stand for somebody to tell us about it later."

"No matter the consequences?" Julia asked with the timidity of a novice.

Augusta did not reply. It was better, she thought, to leave the answer in the air. Or in the heart of each sister. She made a calculation. Genara could go. Julia and Augusta would remain. Julia and Genara could go. Augusta would remain alone.

The mere idea broke her impa.s.sivity. She felt real terror. Terror of absence. Knowing herself absent. Alone. Absent: stripped of inspiration or speculation. Incapable of even commemorating her own death.

How was she going to flee their father? Didn't she know that ten years after his death, as soon as the secret of the inheritance was revealed, their father would impose a new time period? And what new surprise was waiting for them when they completed this one, and the next, and the next? Didn't he once say before he went in for his daily sauna, "If I begin something, I don't stop"?

The twelve strokes of midnight sounded in San Jose Insurgentes.

7. Six in the morning had sounded. Genara stretched. She had fallen asleep against her will. The beach chair was comfortable.

Poor Julia, sitting all night on a piano stool. She wasn't there. Genara looked for her. Julia was putting on makeup, looking at herself in a pocket mirror. Pink powder. Purple lipstick. Eyeliner. Mascara. All arranged on top of the coffin.

Julia fluffed out her hair. She adjusted her bra. "Well, the next appointment is with the notary. We'll see one another then. This business of a conditional will is so annoying! Well, we've fulfilled the condition. Now we'll execute the will. Though we never lost our rights . . . did we?"

"Unless we're disinherited," Augusta said from the shadows in the garage.

"What are you talking about!" Julia laughed. "It's obvious you two didn't know Papa. He's a saint."

Julia pushed the clanking metal door. Light from the sunken park came in. Birds were chirping. Julia went out. A Mustang convertible was parked in front of the garage. A boy in a short-sleeved s.h.i.+rt with the collar open whistled at Julia and opened the door for her. He didn't have the courtesy to get out of the car. This didn't seem to bother Julia. She got in, sat down beside the handsome young man, and gave him a peck on the cheek.

Julia looked young and agile, as if she had shed a gigantic bearskin.

She did not look back. The car took off. She had forgotten the revolving stool.

Genara smoothed her skirt and arranged her blouse. She looked at Augusta, wanting to ask her questions. She felt a hunger to understand. Julia would not explain anything to her. Julia's world was resolved, free of problems. She was sure about inheriting. She had left.

Would Augusta explain things to her?

Genara took her handbag, a Gucci copy, and went toward the metal door. She insisted on looking at Augusta. The oldest sister did not return her look. Disorientation was etched on Genara's features. She knew she could not expect anything of Augusta. She armed herself with patience. She was prepared to continue living her life decorously. In solitude. In front of the wheel. And then in front of the television set. With a cold supper on a tray.

"The three of us will see one another with the notary, won't we?"

She put a foot outside the garage.

The foot stopped in midair.

8. Augusta did not see the actions of her sisters. Let them leave. Let them feel free. Let them run from their father. As if they could get away from him. As if the executors weren't loyal to their father. What an idea.

Augusta will remain beside the father's coffin. She will fulfill the funeral ritual until she herself occupies the father's coffin.

She is the heir.

Choruscodaconrad

the violence, the violence ABOUT THE AUTHOR.CARLOS F FUENTES, Mexico's leading novelist, was born in Panama City in 1928 and educated in Mexico, the United States, Geneva, and various cities in South America. He has been his country's amba.s.sador to France and is the author of more than ten novels, including The Eagle's Throne, The Death of Artemio Cruz, Terra Nostra, The Old Gringo, The Years with Laura Diaz, Diana: The G.o.ddess Who Hunts Alone, The Eagle's Throne, The Death of Artemio Cruz, Terra Nostra, The Old Gringo, The Years with Laura Diaz, Diana: The G.o.ddess Who Hunts Alone, and and Inez. Inez. His nonfiction includes His nonfiction includes The Crystal Frontier The Crystal Frontier and and This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life. This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life. He has received many awards for his accomplishments, among them the Mexican National Award for Literature in 1984, the Cervantes Prize in 1987, and the Legion d'Honneur in 1992. He has received many awards for his accomplishments, among them the Mexican National Award for Literature in 1984, the Cervantes Prize in 1987, and the Legion d'Honneur in 1992.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR.

EDITH G GROSSMAN, the winner of a number of translating awards, most notably the 2006 PEN Ralph Manheim Medal, is the distinguished translator of works by major Spanishlanguage authors, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Mayra Montero, and alvaro Mutis, as well as Carlos Fuentes. Her translation of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote Don Quixote was published to great acclaim in 2003. was published to great acclaim in 2003.

Also by Carlos Fuentes

Aura

The Buried Mirror

Burnt Water

The Campaign

A Change of Skin

Christopher Unborn

Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

The Crystal Frontier

The Death of Artemio Cruz

Diana: The G.o.ddess Who Hunts Alone

Distant Relations

The Eagle's Throne

The Good Conscience

The Hydra Head

Inez

Myself with Others