Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [38]
“God has given us everything because we’re very poor,” my father would say.
Go to the market, Señora Vanina, and try to hear Castilian in that murmur of Indian voices, which are high but sweet. They are bird voices, Señora, Zapoteca voices filled with tlanes and tepecs. We speak Castilian only to offer goods to the customers who visit us, dear customer, two pesos a dozen, this cheese shreds all by itself it’s so delicious . . . Señora, you say we all come from somewhere else, and that’s true. When I was a little boy, I began to play with colors and papers from the amate tree and then to paint on white amate wood and invent little pictures, then bigger ones, until my honored father said take them to the market, José Nicasio, and I did and began to sell my little paintings. Until the distinguished professor from the city of Oaxaca saw what I was doing and said this boy has talent and took me to live in the city (with the permission of my honored father) and there I grew up learning to read and write and paint with so much joy, Señora, as if I myself had been amate paper or an adobe wall that gradually is covered with lime and maguey sap until the wall of earth is transformed into something as soft and smooth as a woman’s back . . . It wasn’t easy, Señora, don’t think that. Something in me was always pulling back to the village, the way they say a nanny goat pulls back to the mountains. My new happiness wasn’t enough to make me forget my old happiness as a boy with no literature, no Castilian, barefoot with no clothes except drill trousers and a threadbare white shirt and mud-caked huaraches. And another white shirt stiff with starch and carefully pressed black trousers and shoes once a week so I could go to Mass like a respectable person . . . Now, in the city, I was a respectable person, I was being educated, I read, I went to school, I knew people who had come from Mexico City and friends who would visit the distinguished professor’s studio. But I swear to you that an enormous piece of my soul was still tied to the life I left behind, the village, the market, the noise of donkeys and pigs and turkeys, the straw sleeping mats, cooking in the fireplace, poor stews, rich aromas . . . Except when I returned to the village on Sundays and feast days, it was like offending those who stayed behind, throwing it in their faces that I could leave and they couldn’t. I swear it isn’t just a silly suspicion. One day I went back out of sheer feeling, Señora, what you people call “nostalgia,” and at first nobody recognized me, but when word got around,
“It’s José Nicasio, he’s come back,”
some looked at me with so much rancor, others with greed, most of them with distance, Señora, that I decided never to go back to the place I came from. But can we cut ourselves off forever from our roots? Isn’t there something left that hurts us, the way they say an amputated arm continues to hurt . . . ? I couldn’t return to my village. I could only return to the ruins of my village and from there calmly observe a world that was mine but no longer acknowledged me. The world before the world.
José Nicasio: Thank you for your letter. Thank you for having taken the time to answer me. What am I