Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [141]
“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 apron. 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 passivity 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