Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [131]
Eternal Father
1. Each anniversary the father made an appointment with them in this old place next to the sunken park. The sunken park was not its official name, but Parque Luis G. Urbina, in honor of a poet of the last century. The popular name has survived the fame of the poet, and everybody gives as a direction “Take me to the sunken park,” which is a cool, shaded urban depression in the midst of countless avenues and mute skyscrapers. Not a fierce oasis but a shadowy refuge. A green roof for lovers greener still. Even when you climb up from the park, you have the feeling that you’re climbing down. The park is sinking, and the city is sinking along with it.
The three sisters—Julia, Genara, and Augusta—respond to their father’s call on the day of the anniversary. For the rest of the year, they don’t see or speak to one another. Genara makes pottery. Julia plays the violin. Augusta manages a bank, but she compensates for this lack of modesty with social work in working-class neighborhoods. Even though they don’t search one another out, they are joined by the fact that they are daughters of the same father, and they do what they do in order to show their father that they don’t need the inheritance. They refuse to receive a fatal inheritance because of the fact that they are their father’s daughters. The three work as if they are not going to receive anything. Or perhaps as if they deserve to inherit only if they demonstrate from now on that with or without an inheritance, they can earn a living. Besides—except for Augusta—they do it with a humility calculated to offend or at least disconcert their father. Except for Augusta.
Is an inheritance won or lost? Augusta smiles at the thought. Do the sisters know which their father prefers? To offer the inheritance, although the three of them are perfect idlers? Or to save it until he finds out that the three of them are not waiting for the comfort of a promised bequest but are earning their livings without worrying about their father’s desire? Or would their father be irritated if the sisters, instead of waiting idly for the testamentary period to be over, find occupations?
Their father is very severe. He would tell his daughters that the richer the family, the more ungrateful the descendants.
“You don’t know how to value things. You didn’t work your way up, like me. You feel like destiny’s pampered darlings. Bah! Keep guessing whether you’ll inherit or will be disinherited. And if you inherit, try to imagine how much I’ll leave you.”
He said that when children know how much they’re going to inherit, they become ungrateful and stop calling.
“But you can revoke the inheritance at any moment, Papa.”
Their father’s gestures were somewhat truculent. “Who says I didn’t do that already? You just keep sucking up to me if you don’t want to starve.”
“Let them wait,” the father murmured before he went into the bathroom each morning. “What do you think? You should never hand over your money before you die. Have faith! Have hope! Be patient. Wait until I die.”
He would say this and cackle before going in for his daily sauna. Augusta imagined him dissolving in sour vapors until he was changed into pure spirit.
“He was the regularity in our lives,” Augusta said to Julia and Genara.
Julia had always thought her vocation was music. With or without the approval of her father, God willing, she would devote her life to playing the violin, indifferent to the famous inheritance. Genara says she prefers making pottery to the inheritance. A sum of money or owning real estate can’t compare to the joy of creating a useful and beautiful object from essential clay: earth. And Augusta, the most disobedient, does not want to concede the game to humility or pride. She presides over a successful banking enterprise but pays her tribute to what she considers the ambiguous paternal inheritance with the rebellion of doing social work in proletarian districts.
Each sister knows what the other two have done. Only on the night of the anniversary, however, do the three see one another’s faces, calculate