Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [18]
“Listen, Marcos, before you become a priest, break the cherries of a couple of girls.”
My father gave me a snakeskin belt lined with silver pesos and newly coined morelianos. “So you don’t ask me for more. Manage it carefully. There’s no need to write to me. Don’t think about me. Think about God and your dead mother.”
And so I left behind my home village with a sound of barren rock and abandoned tools (which pursued me).
3. When I came back for a visit three years later to celebrate my twenty-first birthday at home, my father, filled with pride, ordered the church bells rung and boasted that now it was Juan’s turn to go to the seminary, too, because he was almost eighteen, and then Lucas, seventeen, would follow in his footsteps and little—or not so little anymore—Mateo, who was fifteen.
I arrived dressed in black—suit, tie, shoes—and a white shirt but without a high collar, in order not to attract too much attention.
With a certain pleasure I recognized the herds and the cornfields, the roads and tools of my childhood, and prepared to hear again the exploits of the Cristero War during supper with my three brothers, my father presiding as always with the key in his hand and the patriarchal chair set over the metal door and the forbidden basement.
“Well, well,” my father murmured. “Look, boys, at how they’ve sent your brother back to us so correct. You can really see his correctness, don’t you think?” He laughed out loud. “As they used to say in my day, politicians and lawyers are bigassed creatures. You can really see”—he gave me an apocalyptic look—“that Marcos has grown wings and that the discipline of seclusion and frugal meals has made his spirit thin and enlarged his soul.”
I imagined that my father would take these virtues for granted, without too much inquiry and almost as the work of the Holy Spirit.
“Well, Christian, what do you have to tell me?” my father, Isaac Buenaventura, said familiarly.
“Nothing,” I replied very seriously. “I study a great deal and never go out.”
“Learn something, boys,” he said to my brothers. “And get ready, it’s Juan’s turn now to go to Guadalajara to become a priest, and then you, Lucas, and you, Mateo, will follow.”
I dared to interrupt the old man, more wrinkled than a glove. “Tell me, Father, when the four of us are priests and you find yourself at the side of God, who will take care of the ranch?”
It was clear he wasn’t expecting this clairvoyant question. It was evident he was perturbed: He squeezed the keys to the basement more furiously than ever and, something unheard of in him, stammered and didn’t know what to say. It took him some time to find the words.
“What God gives us, God takes away. Think of your sainted mother.”
“Which means?” I insisted.
“That the lands will be for Holy Mother Church.”
“Why?” I asked with absolute relevance, I think.
“That’s what I promised my sainted wife. ‘Don’t worry. The lands will belong to the Church. Die in peace, Angelines.’ ”
“And what about us?” I asked, this time with audacity.
Now the old man didn’t hide his anger. “There are provisions in the will. Do you think I’m going to leave all of you out on the street?” He choked. “Insolent,” he concluded and, for the first time, stood and left the dining room.
Then Lucas stirred the fire in the living room, and the four of us sat down, certain the old man was already in his room.
“Do you really want to be a priest, Juan?” I asked the brother who was next to me in age and destiny.
Juan said no.
“What, then?”
“I want to be an agronomist. That way I’ll manage the ranch and make it prosper.”
“I think it’s dumb to go into the Church,” said Lucas. “It’s like going back to the rule of—what do you call it—”
“Mortmain,” I said mildly. “And you, Mateo?”
The impetuous fifteen-year-old didn’t restrain himself. “I want to get married. No priest, no nothing. I’d rather be an idiot in an asylum than a priest. I like skirts, not cassocks. I’m a man now. But damn it, if I tell Papa, he’ll tan my hide.”
I looked at the three of them slowly.
Juan with