Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [40]
I defended my daughter’s solitude. Her self-sufficiency. And above all, her promise. I told my husband, “If Alessandra does what you want and marries and has children, she’ll be a superior mother and spouse, not an ordinary, run-of-the-mill housewife.” At times my husband found consolation. The moment would come when Alejandra—“Sandy”—would settle down and lead a “normal life.” But for me, her normality was to be how she was, a voracious reader, endlessly eager to know, as if her grandfather, my father, had survived the war and Franco’s tyranny and continued, as a ghost, in the existence of his granddaughter—disciplined, focused, but ignorant of the world.
Innocent. Innocent but promising.
That was my daughter, José Nicasio. A promise inside a translucent sphere where the corrupt air of the human city could not penetrate. A promise, José Nicasio. Repeat that to yourself in your solitude. Repeat it night and day. I want these words to forever occupy the center of your life. You have to know who my daughter was. And please don’t protect yourself, as my husband does, behind the lie of Alessandra’s supposed human coldness. Ah yes, they say, she was a promising girl but barely human. She lacked warmth. She lacked emotion.
People who think that infuriate me, beginning with my husband, I’ll tell you that with all honesty. It means not understanding that the “familiar address” Alessandra used with genius—or brilliance, I don’t know—was an intense, erotic form of desire. My daughter loved, Señor. Not what everyone vulgarly attributes to that verb, physical attraction, not even the tenderness and warmth shared with other human beings. Alessandra loved Nietzsche or the Brontës because she felt them alone, alone in the graves of their books and their thoughts. Alessandra approached the geniuses of the past to give them life with her attention, which was the form her affection took: paying attention.
She didn’t want to take anything from anyone. She wanted to give to the neediest. The dead? Yes, perhaps. It’s true, “The dead are so alone.” But she sought out the company of the less frequented dead. The immortals. That’s what she told me. She wanted to look after, offer her hand to so many human beings, the artists and thinkers who are the subject of studies, biographies, yes, and lectures, but not of a love equivalent to what we give to a close, living being. Offer her hand to the immortals. That was my daughter’s vocation. Perhaps that was why she was there, that afternoon, in Monte Albán.
José Nicasio: Don’t condemn me without hearing me. I talked a great deal with my daughter. I warned her that love can isolate us from everything around us. But in its absence, we can be filled with the fear that something comparable exists. I believe my daughter wanted to love the incomparable and that all respect for the comparable filled her with disquiet. Is what I say true? Can you, if not judge, at least comprehend the words of a grieving mother? To think is to desire, I would tell my husband. He didn’t understand me. Did you think about my daughter? Did you desire her, José Nicasio?
Señora Vanina: You’ve never seen me. You don’t know me physically. I have no reason to hide what I am or where I come from. I’m ugly, Señora. I’m an ugly Oaxacan Indian. I’m short but muscular. I have a short neck, pushed down into my shoulders. This only makes the strength of my torso more prominent. If you could see how powerfully my heart beats. At times I believe that the front of my shirt betrays me. Right there, if you place your hand on my chest, right there you can feel the power of my heartbeats, Señora. I have an impatient heart, Señora. I moved up, I left my village and my people behind, and this makes me feel guilty, to tell you the truth. Unhappy. I have to constantly compare what could have been—what I left behind—and what I am. That’s why I feel guilty. Shouldn’t I have continued down there, in the village, in the Tlacolula market? Did I have the right to be more than all those people