Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [3]
THE FATHER. Looking back at the past, Pastor Pagán asked himself, Why wasn’t I dishonest when I had the chance? Weren’t they all thieves? Except me? Why did I have to speak to Señor Barroso himself and tell him that everybody had gotten rich but me, Señor? Why did I settle for the pittance—a check for five thousand dollars—that they gave me as a consolation prize? Why, from that time on, did they stop winking at me? What crime did I commit by talking to the big fish, to the boss? He soon found out. When he presented himself as the only honest employee, he implied that the others were not. For Barroso, this meant he was belittling his fellow workers. A real lack of solidarity. And without internal solidarity, the company didn’t work. When he set himself up as the one employee above suspicion, Pastor aroused Barroso’s perverse intelligence. As far as the boss was concerned, they were all corruptible. This was the central premise at all levels in Mexico, from the government to the company and from the grocery store to the communal pasture. How could Pastor Pagán presume to be the exception? Barroso the boss must have laughed to himself. Pastor did not commit the crime of asking for a taste, he committed the crime of calling himself honest. He did not understand that it wasn’t enough for a powerful man like Leonardo Barroso to give an improper commission to a minor employee. Pastor offered up his naked breast so his boss would try to really corrupt him. Now, forced into retirement with a pension for life, Pastor had time to reflect on the motives that drive each person to destroy others. Sometimes it’s necessity, when the enemy is dangerous. Sometimes vanity, when he is stronger than you. Sometimes the simple indifference with which you squash a fly. But on occasion it’s also to eliminate the threat of the weak man when the weak man knows a secret that the powerful one wants to keep hidden. Pastor Pagán lived in retirement, shuffling the possibilities of his destiny, which, after all, had already been fulfilled. The truth was they exchanged the whip for the cudgel. When he asked his employer to let him be another militant in the gigantic army of corruption, he committed the crime of accusing others while excusing himself. From that moment on, he was in the hands of the boss, which is to say, power. After that, Pastor would lack moral authority. He would be just another crook. The rule, not the exception he had been before. What would he have gained by not asking his employer for anything? Would he be freer, more respected, still employed? The bitterest day of Pastor Pagán’s life was the one on which he realized that whatever he did, and without even knowing it, he was now part of the web of bribery in the small country of his own job. For years he had served corruption, carrying checks back and forth, accepting false accounts, winking, being winked at, morally captured at that photographic moment when a single eye closes in complicity and the other stays open in shame. But he had remained pure until now. He looked at himself in the mirror, searching for a halo, and all he found was a circle of thinning hair. He proposed a martyr’s reflection, and the response was gray skin, a face with defeated cheeks, evasive eyes, and nervous eyebrows. He straightened his torso, and his chest caved in.
THE MOTHER. The bolero proposes lovers to us. Some are fatal. They live waiting for their luck to change or for death to come like a blessing. Others are nostalgic: We will live like the wandering bird,