Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [65]
How could Roberto Miles not oppose his brother, Andrés? The general had brought up his sons in modest comfort. They never lacked for anything. They didn’t have an abundance of anything, either. The general wanted to prove that at least in the army, the national pastime of corruption had no place. He was a Spartan from the south of Mexico, where the difficulties of life and the immensity of nature are the salvation or perdition of human beings. The person who maintains a minimum of values that the forest, the mountains, the tropics cannot subdue, is saved.
Marcelino Miles was one of those men. But from the moment his superiors transferred him from Chilpancingo to Mexico City, his sons’ tendencies were revealed outside the rules (his pact with nature) the father had imposed.
The forest and the mountain were the ironic allies of Division Commander Miles. He fulfilled his duty by climbing the sierra with the help of machetes. He fled his obligation by thinking that guerrillas never engage in formal combat. They attack the army in its barracks or ambush it in the wild. Then they vanish like hallucinations, clouded mirrors in the terrifying, impenetrable magic of the forest.
They attacked and disappeared. It wasn’t possible to foresee the attack. The lessons of the past had been learned. Today Zapata wouldn’t fall into the government’s trap, believing in good faith that the enemy had come over to his side and would meet with him in Chinameca to seal the double betrayal. The feigned betrayal by the government army of its leader, Carranza. A clear prediction of the certain betrayal of each Zapata.
Betrayal was the name of the final battle.
Now there was a deficit of ingenuousness, just as yesterday there had been an excess of trust. Marcelino Miles thought this bitterly, because if he, Marcelino Miles, offered amnesty to his son Andrés in exchange for his surrender, the son would see a trick in the father’s generosity. The son would not trust the father. The son knew the father was obliged to capture and shoot him.
Two calculations presented themselves to General Marcelino Miles’s mind as he led his troops through the mountains. One, that the populations of the mountains and the plain offered their loyalty to the insurgents. Not because they had identified with the cause. They didn’t support them out of necessity or conviction. They were loyal to them because the guerrillas were their brothers, their husbands, their fathers, their friends. They were themselves in other activities as normal as sowing and harvesting, cooking and dancing, selling and buying: bullets, adobe bricks, corn, roof tiles, huapango dances, guitars, jugs, more bullets . . . It was the familial link that strengthened the guerrillas, sheltered them, hid them, fed them.
The general’s other calculation, on this night of droning macaques and clouds so low they seemed about to sing, covering the column and driving it mad as if the real siren song came from the air itself and not from the distant, atavistic sea, was that sooner or later, the countryside would grow weary of the war and abandon the rebels. He prayed that moment would come soon: He wouldn’t have to capture and try his own son.
He was fooling himself, he thought immediately. Even if the villages abandoned him, Andrés Miles wasn’t one of those who surrendered easily. He was one of those who went on fighting, even if only six guerrillas were left, or two, or only one: himself. Andrés Miles with his tanned face and melancholy eyes, his shock of hair prematurely grayed at the age of thirty, his slim, nervous, impatient, crouched body, always ready to leap like a mountain animal. Obviously, he didn’t belong to the pavements, he wasn’t a creature of the sidewalk. The wild called to him, nostalgic for him. Since his childhood in Guerrero, he would occasionally get lost when he climbed the mountain and not be heard from for an entire day. Then he would come back home but never admit he had been lost.