Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [95]
And in the end, out of breath, his head bowed, he would say to her (one knows it): “You’re an absolute idiot. Nobody wants to see you. Only me. Thank me. Get undressed. Have you called anyone else Daddy?”
When, barely two years later, Mayalde came down the mountain to tell one that Father Benito had died accidentally when he fell over a cliff, one was not surprised that the features and attitude of the eighteen-year-old girl had changed so much. It is clear to one that the priest kept her prisoner after the incident with the student Félix Camberos. The young woman who now approached looked stronger, robust, proven, capable of anything. Nothing like a prisoner.
“What happened to the priest?”
“Nothing. A slip. A misstep.”
“Where do you want to bury him?”
“Up there. In the ashes. Next to where Félix Camberos is buried.”
There the two of them are, side by side, on an abrupt slope of the mountain that looks pushed up toward the sky. From that point you can see all the way to the city that is generally hidden by the volcanic mass. The city is large, but from here you can barely make it out. One can imagine it as a conflagration. Though in the midst of the fire, there is an oasis of peace. The urban struggle concentrates on itself, and one forgets it if one takes refuge in an isolated corner, an island in the multitude.
We descended one day, she and I, from the slopes of the volcano to the great city that awaited us without rumors, curses, suspicions. But recollections, yes.
She could not forget, and she infected my memory.
When I married her after the priest died, I decided to take her far away from the little village in the mountains. I stopped talking behind the mask of the one who kept me far from the desire to make her mine. I became an “I” determined to show her that the uses of life are not sins you have to run away from by taking refuge in the mountains, that the false saint takes pleasure in humiliating himself only to inflict his arrogance on us, that humility sometimes hides great pride, and that faith, hope, and charity are not things of the next world. They should be realities in this world of ours.
I told her that Félix Camberos fought for these things.
I don’t really know if the beautiful Mayalde resigned herself to abandoning the adjoining graves of Father Benito and the student Félix. There was a sense of transitory guilt in her glance that I attempted to placate with my love.
In the end, all that remained were these words of my wife, spoken years later:
“All of that happened in the ill-fated year of 1968.”
Chorus of Rancorous Families
and not only El Mozote
on May 22 1979 we protested on the steps of the cathedral and the army came and fired and three hundred of us died
blood pouring down the steps like water in a red waterfall
on January 22 1980 cotton workers
electricians office clerks teachers
machine-gunned cut off between two avenues
He
in the Sampul River trapped in the water fleeing
on one side Salvadoran soldiers firing at us
on the other side Honduran troops blocking our way
the Salvas grab children toss them into the air and cut off their heads with machetes
they call it operation cleanup
the next day the Sampul River can’t be seen
it is covered by a mass of turkey buzzards devouring the corpses
better dead than alive fool
we saw it in the villages
they talk about it in the shacks
go on look go see your father’s
two bodies
half a body on one corner
the other half on another corner
come see fool your mother’s head
stuck on a fence
look at the sky fool
look at the dragonfly jet fighters 37
they bring you little presents
they bring you six thousand pounds of incendiary bombs and explosives
they bring you white phosphorus rockets
they shoot at you with 60mm machine guns