Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [48]
Doña Medea moves through the market and doesn’t buy anything because she feels everything that comes in through her eyes is hers. That’s why, as far as she’s concerned, there are no objects without a price. Everything that is used contains a lost value that returns in a magical, unexpected way to a shopwindow with dusty wedding dresses, a record of ranchera music, an exvoto giving thanks to the Virgin for having saved us from certain death . . . She is devoted to the Immaculate Conception of Mary, and every day she visits the small church presided over by the Mother of God. You know her, and you know she’s not just any devout old woman. Her devotion has a mission. Why does she enter on her knees? Why does she light candles? Why, in short, does she pray to the Virgin? And why does she read the ex-votos with so much attention, as if she were hoping to find in one of them—only one—the message she is waiting for, the telegram from heaven, the announcement that the Virgin sends to her and no one else?
She stops to read that ex-voto. A certain death. Have you noticed how the undertaker at the funeral parlor on the corner salivates as he watches her walk by? She laughs at this. The undertaker wants to frighten her, Doña Medea explains. He’s measuring her for the coffin. But she still has a good while to go before she lies down in a casket.
“Don’t be such a meddler,” she says to the undertaker.
“And don’t you be so deferential.” And with a smile, “Listen to me. Come and see me. I ought to take your measurements once and for all.”
“Don’t be a fool. Death doesn’t matter. The terrible thing is dying.”
“I’m here waiting for you, Doña Medea. You should take more precautions.”
“Well, just be very patient, because when you come with your little box, I’ll already be resurrected.”
The truth is that Doña Medea doesn’t want to surrender to eternal darkness just like that. The guacamole doesn’t drip out of her taco. She sees other women to compare herself to and guess their destinies. She classifies them accurately. Some seem like beasts of burden. Others are thought of as clever. Doña Medea can smell from a distance the predatory women who conspire all day and the ones who seem so resigned they don’t even complain.
The entire neighborhood is a swarm of ambitions, desires to leave, to get out of the swamp of the city. That’s what you say, Señor.
“A city without hope, destroyed inside and out, but fed by illusions that, with luck, allow the luxury of being more abused than a fatality that gnaws away at everything until it leaves the residents in the neighborhood with no recourse except crime. Violence as the final refuge of hope, no matter how strange this sounds.”
“Suddenly, violence is afraid of Doña Medea. Because she has constructed her entire life as a defense against two things.”
“What are they?”
“One, the throb of violence she feels all around her, which she defeats with her ordinary routine.”
“And the other?”
“Ah, that’s her secret. For now all you need to know is that she sleeps with the Picot Songbook as her pillow. She believes the words come in through the hole that Don Lupino, the druggist, says we have at the base of our skull, and in this way the danger vanishes like the snake rattle in her mouth. What she’s really afraid of, without understanding it completely, is the urban wave that can wipe out everything, licentiate, drag her to a destiny that isn’t hers, implicate her in mistakes she hasn’t made . . .”
Until she ends up in diapers in the hands of the police, a woman who has always gotten along wonderfully with the gendarmes who need, who knows, to know a person like her who can