Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [15]
Less than a headless chicken
Less than a bum’s old prick
Less than the skinny ass of a Campeche whore
less than a drug dealer’s spittle
less than the shaved ass of a baboon in the zoo
less than less mamacita
don’t let me kill myself all alone
tell me something to make me feel like a real fucker
a real bad motherfucker mother
jes gimme a hand to get out of this mother
damned to this forever mother?
look at my nails black to the quick
look at my eyes glued shut by rheum
look at my lips chapped raw
look at the black slime on my tongue
look at the yellow slime in my ears
look at my green thick navel
mother gemme outta here
what did I do to end up here?
Digging gnawing scratching crying
what did I do to end up here?
xxxxxita
The Disobedient Son
1. Sometimes my father drank and sang Cristero songs.
2. He liked to recall the deeds of his father, our grandfather, in the War of Christ the King, when the Catholics of Jalisco rose up in arms against the “atheistic” laws of the Mexican Revolution. First he would drink and sing. Right after that he would remember and, finally, admonish. “May the sacrifice of your grandfather Abraham Buenaventura not have been in vain.”
Because it seems that Grandfather Abraham was captured by federal troops in 1928 and shot in the Sierra de Arandas, a place, they say, that was fairly desolate and desolating.
“The fact is that it was his time to die. I don’t know how many times he saved himself during the Cristero crusade.”
Our father, Isaac, recounts that at times Grandfather Abraham showed too much compassion and at other times too much cruelty. Though all wars were like that. Many government soldiers fell at the battle of Rincón de Romos. Grandfather Abraham walked among the corpses, pistol in hand, counting them one by one by order of his superior, General Trinidad de Anda.
They were all good and dead. Except for one, lying in the dust, who moved his eyes and pleaded with my grandfather, Have pity on me, I’m a Christian, too. Grandfather Abraham continued on his way but hadn’t taken two steps before the general stopped him cold. “Buenaventura, go back and finish off that soldier.”
“But General, sir—”
“Because if you don’t kill him, I’ll kill you.”
In our family, these stories were told over and over again. It was the way to make them present. Otherwise, they would have been forgotten. My father, Isaac, would not tolerate that. The Buenaventura family, all of it, had to be a living temple to the memory of those who fell in the Crusade of Christ the King. So long ago now because it began in 1925 and ended in 1929. But as current as the news on the radio in this remote ranch in Los Camilos, where there are no newspapers and even the radio played with intermissions of silence, thunder, cackling, and stuttering. The Sunday sermons (and every day’s remembering) supplied the missing information.
The priest’s homily invariably evoked the exploits of Christ the King and lashed out at Masons (where were they?), Communists (what were they?), and all impious people, especially the teachers sent from the capital: the men, sons of Lucifer, the women, socialist harlots.
“As if you needed to know how to read in order to pray,” the good father intoned. “As if you needed to know how to write in order to herd cattle.”
He would make a dramatic pause before exclaiming: “The good Christian needs only a rosary around his neck and a pistol in his hand.”
My father drank and sang. He felt guilty that the war hadn’t touched him. On the other hand, he had times of peace and prosperity here in Los Altos de Jalisco. The war was bloody and cruel. The government emptied the Christian villages and sent the people to concentration camps from which they trooped back in emaciated ranks. They say half of them turned into ghosts. They came back in long starving columns howling like dogs—says my father. The merchants barred their stores with chains. So great was the fury of those who came back that they destroyed the harvests so the shopkeepers would have nothing to sell.
“And they mutilated