Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [138]
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, dissatisfied? 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