Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [113]
iiiiin the name of heaaaaa-ven
I ask yoooou for loooodging . . .
Don Luis, incapable of admitting his incipient deafness, approached the door, trying to make out the silhouette outlined behind the opaque panes. The voice, obviously, was a caricature of childish tones; the height of the silhouette was that of an adult.
“Who is it?”
“Guess, good guesser.”
Dissolute, unruly, strewing the same destructive actions no matter where he was or whom he was with, at home or outside. The news had arrived: He was the same as always. Thirty-four forgotten years returned at one stroke, making Don Luis Albarrán’s extended hand tremble as he wavered between opening the door to his house or saying to the suspect phantom,
“Go away. I never want to see you again. What do you want of me? Get away. Get away.”
2. Reyes Albarrán had been given that name because he was born on January 5, a holiday that, in the Latino world, celebrates the arrival of the Santos Reyes, Melchor, Gaspar, and Baltasar, bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the stable in Bethlehem. Centuries before the appearance of Santa Claus, children in Mexico and Chile, Spain and Argentina, celebrated the Day of the Kings as the holiday with presents and homemade sweets, culminating in the ceremony of the rosca de reyes, the ring-shaped kings’ cake inside which is hidden a little white porcelain figure of Baby Jesus.
Tradition dictates that whoever cuts the piece of cake that hides the baby is bound to give a party on the second day of the following month, February, and every month after that. Few get past the month of March. Nobody can endure an entire year of Christmas parties. The last time he saw his brother, Don Luis received from him a rosca de reyes with twelve little dolls of Baby Jesus, one next to the other. It was a treacherous invitation from Reyes to Luis: “Invite me every month, brother.”
Matilde said it: “On top of everything else, he’s a scrounger. I don’t want to see him again. Not even as a delivery boy.”
When Luis Albarrán, moved by an uncontrollable mixture of blameworthy argumentativeness, buried fraternity, seignorial arrogance, unconscious valor, but especially shameful curiosity, opened the door of his house on that December 24, the first thing he saw was the outstretched hand with the little porcelain doll held between thumb and index finger. Don Luis felt the offense of the contrast between the pulchritude of the doll and the grime of the cracked fingers, the broken nails edged in black, the shredded shirt cuff.
“What do you want, Reyes?” said Luis abruptly. With his brother, courtesy was not merely excessive. It was a dangerous invitation.
“Lodging, brother, hospitality,” a voice as cracked as the fingers replied from the darkness. It was a voice broken by cheap alcohol: A stink of rum lashed the nostrils of Don Luis Albarrán like an ethylic whip.
“It isn’t—” he began to say, but the other man, Reyes Albarrán, had already pushed him away to come into the vestibule. Don Luis stood to one side, almost like a doorman, and rapidly closed the door as if he feared that a tribe of beggars, drunkards, and sots would come in on the heels of his undesirable brother.
He repeated: “What do you want?”
The other man guffawed, and his Potrero rum breath floated toward the living room. “Look at me and you tell me.”
Don Luis stood outside the bathroom listening to his brother singing “Amapola” in a loud off-key voice, splashing with joy and punctuating his song with paleo-patriotic observations: “Only—Veracruz—is—beautiful, howprettyismichoacán, Ay! Chihuahua! What! Apache!” as if the guest wanted to indicate that for the past three and a half decades, he had traveled the entire republic. Only because of a trace of decency, perhaps, he did not sing “Ay Jalisco, don’t brag.”
And if not the entire republic, Reyes had traveled—Don Luis said with alarmed discretion—its lowest, most unfortunate neighborhoods, its black