Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [67]
If this double play passed through the minds of Miles and the soldiers, all of them concealed it without difficulty. The general commanded, the troops obeyed. The general was carrying out to the letter his duty to explore the sierra. And the troops were doing theirs, covering every inch of the steep, solitary, overgrown terrain. Who could accuse them of shirking their duty?
Roberto Miles. He could. The general’s younger son, Roberto Miles, dressed in a guayabera and holding an insolent, phallic cigar between his teeth. Roberto Miles sitting at a table on the hotel terrace with a sweet roll and a small espresso growing cold as he waited for his father to appear and not show—because it wasn’t his nature—any surprise at all.
Marcelino sat down calmly next to Roberto, ordered another coffee, and asked him nothing. They didn’t even look at each other. The father’s severity was a mute reproach. What was his son doing here? How did he dare interrupt a professional campaign with his presence, not merely useless but inopportune as well? His presence was impertinent, disrespectful. Didn’t he know his father was pursuing his older brother through the sierra?
“Don’t look for him anymore in the sierra, Father,” Roberto said as he sipped the coffee with voluntary slowness. “You’re not going to find him there.”
The general turned to look coldly at his son. He asked nothing. He wasn’t going to compromise—or frustrate, he admitted to himself—his intimate project of not finding the rebel, of deceiving headquarters without incurring any blame at all.
Let Roberto talk. The general would not say anything. A profound intuition ordered this conduct. Not to look. Not to speak.
When he looked at himself in the mirror the next morning, the general thought his slender little mustache, as thin as a pencil line, was ridiculous, and with a couple of strokes of the Gillette, he shaved it off, seeing himself suddenly free of the past, of habits, of useless presumptions. He looked like a defeated commander. His undershirt was loose, and his trousers hung on him unwillingly.
He reacted. He tightened his belt, rinsed his sweaty armpits, and put on his tunic buttoned with conflictive anger and disinclination.
Andrés Miles was now in prison. He smiled at his father when they arrested him in the house of his sweetheart, Esperanza Abarca.
“There’s no better disguise than invisibility,” the older son said with a smile when he was detained. “I mean, you have to know how to look at the obvious.”
He placed a small Dominican banana in his mouth and surrendered without resistance. He had only to see the equally sad faces of his father and the troops to realize that what they did, they did against their wills. It was almost as if the father as well as the soldiers had lost in one stroke the reason for this campaign aimed at what had happened now—the capture of the rebel leader, Andrés Miles—and reached an unwanted conclusion that brought all of them face-to-face with a fatal decision. Eliminating the rebel.
“Just don’t apply the fugitive law to me,” Andrés said with a smile when they tied his hands.
“Son . . .” the father dared to murmur.
“General, sir,” his son answered with steel in his voice.
And so Marcelino Miles spent the whole night debating with himself. Should he try his son according to the summary procedure dictated by the military code? How comfortable it was for the political authorities to shoot the rebel and leave no trace . . . make him disappear, provoke a passing protest, and assure the eventual triumph of forgetting. How complicated to bring the rebel before judges who would determine the proper punishment for insurgency and uprising. How destructive to paternal morale to attend the son’s trial and oblige himself to present the infamous evidence: His brother had betrayed him. Wouldn’t it be better for Roberto to stay out of the case, for the father to assume complete responsibility?
“I captured