Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [45]
Did he understand me? I couldn’t tell him that you freed the executioner. Not with your sex. Only with your gaze. But I wanted to free the executioner, do you understand, my darling? Better yet, do you approve? Alessandra, my dear daughter, perhaps I said to that man,
Make a kingdom of your prison. Don’t move again. Don’t ever move again. Don’t touch anything.
Do you remember, Alessandra? You had so much confidence in me, the confidence you always denied your father, that you reserved only for me, which is the reason I had to communicate with your killer, so he would understand whom he murdered. You remember: You were reading Pascal and quoted it to me. All the evils in the world come from our inability to remain still, seated in our chair.
Now I’ve written to a man locked in a cell in California about a woman walled up in a church in Coyoacán. We all come from somewhere else. We all leave Pascal’s chair and allow ourselves to be carried along by the great magnetism of the world. I imagine that man whom I’ll never see in person, and I see a dark pilgrim whose ancestors reached the land where the gods have their mountains, he migrated to Oaxaca and ended up in California.
The nation is called the U.S.A. What is the name of the Mexican locked in that prison? Can I comfort him from my own wandering, my dear, can I speak of my Spanish father killed by the Falange, can I speak of my mother fleeing the Italian Fascists? Can I speak in the name of my own orphanhood, sent as a girl to Veracruz in a ship loaded with orphans? Can I speak in the name of all this endless moving around of a humanity erring and errant, fleeing and fleet, incapable of remaining still because it believes that immobility is the opposite of freedom?
We are free because we move. We leave a wound called solitude and travel to another wound called death. There is a crossroads between the point of departure and the port of arrival. On that carrefour, my adored child, we always meet the other, the one who is not like us, and we find ourselves obliged to understand that if we move and meet one another, we ought to love one another on account of the contrast. Did you feel that contrast with your killer? Did he feel it with you, my love? Or do we perhaps go out into the world to fatally choose evil?
Fatally, because at the crossroads, we meet the other person and act on that person, giving free rein to our freedom, which is always the freedom to affect the lives of others. Perhaps José Nicasio, when he saw you that afternoon in Monte Albán, had a secret fear of not being free with you, betraying his freedom if he let you pass. He had to act before you, with you, but he didn’t know how. You gave him the opportunity. You were afraid of him.
You decided for him, my adored child. He wanted to choose another person as a sign of his freedom. Except on that afternoon there was no one else but you. If José Nicasio hadn’t approached you, he would have betrayed himself. He lived for that moment, do you understand? Imagine him alone before an alien, forbidden person, daring to look at her in search of a smile. Instead, he saw only the fear in your eyes. He saw the evil, Alessandra. Your fear of him was evil for him. He lived his life to win respect. Above all, the respect of not being seen as a man who was frightening, evil, hidden, ugly, Indian.
If he hadn’t killed you, José Nicasio would have betrayed himself. He had to kill you to know that he existed. That he culminated his life saying,
“Don’t be afraid of me. Please. Don’t give me fear. Give me love.”
And you gave him fear.
He killed you out of fear of himself, of his effort to come out of obscurity. You betrayed him with your rejection, my dear.
Now, kneeling before the urn that holds your remains, I tell you that perhaps you didn’t know how to remove the fear from your consciousness. Your intelligence, so brilliant, had that enormous flaw. You were afraid. It’s my fault. You gave me so much. If I can write these lines, it is because by