Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [9]
quickly to satisfy the rules of the competition. No gringo couple had the courage to cross the river. The organizers resigned themselves to recruiting a couple of Mexicans prepared to do anything in order to win a trip to the Caribbean. In their eyes, the palm trees drunk on the sun were already before them, behind them the deserts of huisache cactus and rattlesnakes. The aridity of northern Mexico was part of the test for winning. The competitors in the reality show were receiving written instructions in manila envelopes. Now stop to pick prickly pears or pack serapes. You’re free. Choose. What’s faster? It doesn’t matter. Now they have to cross the desert riding unruly burros. Now they have to take a train up to Zacatecas, and the ones who miss it will have to wait for the next one and fall behind. They have to make up for lost time—how? Getting on a rattletrap bus that drives along a mountain road. The gringos shout with glee on every deadly curve. The Mexicans maintain a stoic silence. They lose it when they have to let themselves be pulled by a team of oxen through a muddy swamp. They survive. The desire to win moves them. Each couple is pursued by the one behind. Each is treading on the tail of the one in front and prefiguring the panting of the one that follows. They have to go into a bull-ring with a red handkerchief (courtesy of the house) and fight a bull calf disoriented because it ate cornflakes for breakfast. Once again, the two gringos are jubilant as they fight, giving Apache war whoops. The Mexican women abstain. The men—old Jehová, skinny Juan—make passes more worthy than the frightened, confused calf. Now they’re traveling through the middle of the country. There are posters, there are colors, there are instructions. Stop here. Sleep wherever you please. Outdoors. On a bench. However you can. The next day everyone has to shovel up the manure on a local cattle farm. They complain, it smells bad. Pepita falls down. She eats shit. A gringo falls down. He eats shit. He declares that this is very sexy. The women caress their breasts as if to confirm that they’re still intact. They all get into a bus heading for Oaxaca. Another bus appears, going in the opposite direction. Will they all die? Alma Pagán turns off the television set. She doesn’t want to know what happens. She doesn’t want the violence to interrupt, perhaps forever, not her second but her authentic life, the existence that offers her, free of charge, with no danger to her person, the reality show. She turns on the set in order to enter into the danger on the street. Though seeing it clearly, the small screen saves her from danger by giving it to her right here, where it doesn’t touch her, in her house. She feels alive, stimulated. She no longer knows she is vulnerable. In her way, she has entered paradise.
THE SON. Why did he go back like a miserable pain in the ass, to ask for another job with Barroso? Is this the effect of the moral hangover from the night with his father in the cantina in La Piedad? Did he see his father for the first time? Or did he see himself for the last time? Why did he know more than his parent but not have a secure position in the marketplace? Did mockery defeat him, the irresistible temptation to laugh at his parents? She sang boleros. She thought living contrary to the lyrics was enough to be happy. She hadn’t realized she was living in a false world of illusion. She believed in the lyrics. Why had she stopped singing? Didn’t she realize that the sacrifice wasn’t worth it? She had traded the gold of an independent career for the small change of conjugal life. She was a sentimental slave to the bolero and became the martyr of the family. She never had escaped from the bolero. How ridiculous. She had sung in Aladdin’s Cave. Aladdin didn’t have a cave. He had a lamp. The one with the cave was Ali Baba. His folks are so ignorant. What a fucked-up life. A school for the children. A home for the old folks. What a choice! Still, there are times when he is overcome by emotion, especially when his vanity is catered to by the