Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [42]
The newly arrived Mexicans gave me ugly looks. I wasn’t going to turn them in. Don’t think I was going to displace them. I was out of place everywhere, in my Indian village, in the capital of Oaxaca, in San Diego, California. I’ve known nothing but discrimination, Señora, even when I’m accepted, I’m good only for soothing a bad conscience.
Look how far we’ve come, José Nicasio. Once we put signs outside restaurants NO DOGS OR MEXICANS ALLOWED. Once we called them greasers, greasy, filthy, untouchable.
And now you can’t live without our work, I told them, and everybody took it badly, the gringos, the wetbacks, even myself.
Why do you shoot off your mouth, José Nicasio.
Learn to calm down.
Life has treated you well.
But the grimace was still there, Señora, as if nothing had happened.
José Nicasio: You’re mistaken if you believe my daughter, Alessandra, discriminated against you. She was incapable of anything so vile. I’m not saying that Sandra was a Sister of Charity. She didn’t display condescension. That kind of thing horrified her. She simply treated inferiors with respect and dignity. I mean, people different from her. She was conscious of the hypocrisies of our society and rejected them. How many times did I ask her to make friends with this girl, approach that woman, and she’d say, No, Mama, you haven’t seen that the girl has already learned the art of dissembling, you haven’t seen that the woman is a master of deceit.
How do you know, Alessandra? They’re not bad people. I know them.
No, it’s not that they’re bad. It’s that they’re obliged to pretend they’re good. They’ve been brought up to deceive and be cunning, to protect themselves from our society. I don’t want to be like that. I prefer the company of the spirits . . .
Please, accept other people’s limitations. Sooner or later, you’ll have to be just a little familiar with society.
Never.
A mother is speaking to you, José Nicasio. I am speaking to you freely and with the futile hope that you yourself feel free. What I’m saying to you about Alessandra, I’m saying so you’ll know who my daughter was. At the same time, I keep asking myself: Who was Alessandra? I thought I knew her character. That is what I’m describing to you. But I also knew that each character has its own exception. Is this what happened to you? That nightfall in Monte Albán, did you see the exception in my daughter? Did you discover the fault, the crack in a personality so carefully constructed?
Her father, my husband, a practical man, would become desperate.
“Tell me, Vanina, doesn’t our daughter have a single defect?”
I would tell him no, Sandra was perfect, because I never was going to allow her own father to dissect her like an insect. For me, Alessandra was sacred. But I am not, and behind my husband’s back, I had to look for the chinks of imperfection in my daughter.
Love.
Did Alessandra really love? Did her love for dead artists and thinkers hide a profound contempt for ordinary people? Forgive me, José Nicasio, was my daughter a social snob, a typical bas bleu? I implore you to forgive my frankness. My husband and I love each other. My husband is an excellent lover. He knows how to give me pleasure. Forgive me. I mean that Alessandra wasn’t born of the routine obligations of marriage. No, my husband knew how to excite me, transport me, raise me to the pleasure enjoyed by a woman who knows herself not only desired, but physically ecstatic. Alessandra was born of pleasure. But she doesn’t seem ever to have touched the pleasure I’m describing to you while she was alive.
I was afraid, observing my daughter’s lack of sexual interest, that her coldness led back to me, to her mother, to that sadness that is the price of love not shared