Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [81]
july in Fiji august back to the headlands immediately again san onofre and then
ireland until the new year in costa rica but in december the year ends
and Nicanor Tepa has no calendar for next year he found this one in a
trash can at a hotel in the airport
that he flies out of to Indonesia Tahiti Australia Hawaii
and Nicanor falls asleep exhausted dreaming that he’ll change what he can and bow his
head before what he can’t change and have the wisdom to
know the difference
he is surrounded by dry bitter broken earth
Nicanor grasps the volcanic rock
Nicanor sinks into the huisache swamp
then the gigantic wave of sleep falls on his head
The Official Family
1. President Justo Mayorga was awakened by the abrupt, huge, unlocatable noise. He opened his eyes with more suspicion than surprise. His first impulse always was never to give in to alarm and look for a redeemable error or a condemnable act. The procession of functionaries who had been fired, punished, ignored because they had erred still passed through his drowsy mind. Other people’s mistakes guided, even in dreams, his presidential decisions and—he yawned without wanting to—opened lists where disloyalty was only one chapter, the lowest and most insidious, of the catalog of faults the president always had close at hand. There never was a shortage of Judases.
He looked with early-morning distance at his strong hand, broad but with long, slender fingers. He knew how to use it effectively in his speeches. Only one hand, the right, is required: clenched in a fist—strength; open—generosity; palm down—calm, calm; palm up—warning? request? with the fingers slightly bent toward his own person—come, approach, I love you, don’t be afraid of me. Justo Mayorga had given up using both hands in his speeches. On the largest screens and in the smallest squares, the use of both hands at the same time seemed not only hackneyed but counterproductive. It indicated that the orator was orating, and when he orated, he deceived, making promises he knew he would never be able to keep. He asked for faith from the incredulous and doubt from believers.
On the long journey from local Culiacán delegate to national office at Los Pinos—twenty long years—he had learned a form of vigorous but serene speech-making using only his right hand as rhetorical art and keeping the left in his jacket pocket, on his silver belt buckle, and on only one celebrated occasion, on national television, grasping his testicles to skewer his opponent in an election debate:
“I have more than enough of what you’re missing.”
Now, when he was awake, he felt his balls bristling at the infernal noise that had come—he looked quickly at the clock, recovering his keen faculties—to wake him at three in the morning. Earlier presidents of Mexico might think of things like armed attack, military uprising, popular demonstration. Justo Mayorga was not paranoid. The noise was infernal, but not even the devil could get into Los Pinos, that’s what the well-guarded barred windows and well-trained military staff were for.
And yet . . . no doubt about it. The din that woke him came from his own space, the presidential residence Los Pinos, and not from the interior of the house but—President Mayorga opened the windows to the balcony—from outside, from the avenue through the garden watched over by icy, immobile statues (because some are warm and dynamic) of his predecessors at the head of the state.
He soon had the evidence. He went out to the balcony. Two cars were racing at top speed along the alameda of Los Pinos. An unchecked suicidal speed competing with life more than with the courage of the two untamed drivers who, to a lethal degree, accelerated the low-slung cars, one black, the other red, both capable of revivifying all the statues in the garden, from tiny Madero to gigantic Fox.
A very Mexican idiom—Mayorga thought of it—said, to indicate native stoicism and impassive strength, that something or someone “bothered me the way the wind bothered Juárez.”
The president