Happy Families (7 page)

I thought I had been born to bother others and now I am going to think I am loved because I am different

and because you are ugly Valentina and also because you are ugly

don’t you want me to feel beautiful because of you?

no Valentina feel ugly so I can adore you for what nobody else would dare to tell you

I am ugly Jesús

ugly ugly ugly you’re my perversion and my longed-for adventure an unforeseen love first give me a minute Valentina then let me spend the night with you then my whole life

ugly

offer me to your soul Valentina and I will give you mine

whom shall I tell that I love you?

whom, that we love each other?

3. Everyone withdrew after dinner. Only Valentina remained in the living room. Only for her the night had not ended.

Then he comes in.

Everyone has gone. They have all hidden themselves away to gossip.

Except Valentina still waiting for the sight that is the attraction: Jesús Aníbal.

His eyes tell her, “I want to find you alone again.”

Only they look at each other.

The others try to avoid others’ eyes.

She knows how a protective attraction is being transformed into a physical attraction.

She returns to her first moment with Jesús Aníbal.

She ignores everyone else.

She does not listen to the gossip.

The pretty woman desires the ugly woman’s luck.

It seems a travesty.

Only a blind man would marry her.

It happens in the best of families.

And Ana Fernanda to Jesús Aníbal: “You traded me for that scare crow? I don’t have to pretend to despise you. But you are my husband in the eyes of God and man. I will never leave you. I will never give you a divorce. Get used to the idea. Dare to tell me I have done something wrong. Tell me something. Did you choose her because of your immense vanity, so you would know you are better-looking than she is? Because you could not stand being less good-looking than me, your wife? It was an unlucky day that we fixed up the house.”

The relatives left.

Doña Piedita took to her bed, preparing, in her words, to go to “the hacienda in the sky.”

Ana Fernanda did not invite anyone again and dedicated herself to bringing up her daughter, Luisa Fernanda, in accordance with the strictest Catholic morality.

Chorus of the Threatened Daughter

either you pay or we kill you

they say she was a very good student a good daughter she had

a boyfriend and everything they skated together they went on the ferris

wheel the merry-go-round the octopus

the fair smelled of muégano candy and popcorn peanuts cotton candy

sticky sodas

the wheel turned and her boyfriend took advantage of the girl’s fear

to put his arms around her and tell her if you don’t kiss me I’ll throw you

out and to please him she opened his fly and

there were sticky candies there too

who pays for the fair?

don’t they pay you for Sunday?

I don’t have enough

oh well then find another cheaper boyfriend

don’tsqueezeit

mayyourotthere

what would happen to me without the fair on saturdays or without the sodas

the popcorn the tamales

how will you pay for the fair without money

wait for me love I’ll invite you to the fair don’t rush

put a hundred clips of drugs in your knapsack

you’ll sell them when school lets out

we’ll give you a hundred pesos for every hundred clips you sell and you’ll

give us three thousand

she goes out

we can go together to skate here in perisur mall away from the neighborhood

and the dusty streets and the whistle of drug

buyers and thieves when school lets out

some pickpockets stole my knapsack

it had the three thousand pesos I owed you

either you pay or we kill you

she covered everything but her head in blankets

if I don’t pay them they’ll kill me

they hit me all over look at the bruises papamama

they robbed me

they didn’t kill me

I killed myself

because if I didn’t kill myself they said they’d kill you papamama

for the three thousand pesos I owe them

ferris wheel merry-go-round drug dealers cocaine

popcorn marijuana sodas straw hats of glue

terrific

Conjugal Ties (1)

THERE WERE MISUNDERSTANDINGS
. I made a date with you for twelve o’clock. What? You said two. No, twelve. Write down your dates. Dates? How many do you have in a day? With whom? With how many people? Why do you provoke my jealousy with equivocal answers? You always knew I was jealous. You even liked it. I like to feel jealous. That’s what you told me. And why didn’t you ever make me feel jealous with another woman? What? You were always faithful? Or didn’t you have the imagination? I was busy with my career. I never had time for chasing after women. I was absorbed in my work. You know that. I wanted to get ahead. For you. For me. For our marriage. For the two of us. I had ambitions. My greatest ambition was to be director general. You held me back. What did I do? Nothing. That was the problem. No, tell me, really, what did I do? Your behavior. Your wanton behavior. But if I’m tied to you, do you think I have time to deceive you? Ah, then, if you had the time . . . But you watch me like a jailer. That’s what brought you down. Hovering over me the whole day. First those phone calls from the office. Then you’d show up unannounced. Then the absurdity of opening closet doors, looking under the bed, saying aha! in front of an open window. Finally, you wouldn’t leave the house. You watched over me day and night. And instead of calming down, you grew more and more jealous. Of what? Of whom? And you don’t remember that jealousy inflamed my desire, the more I had you, the more I laid siege to you, like an enemy city, I laid siege to you with my tenderness and my eyes and my skin until you surrendered and then felt disgust for me and disgust for yourself for having done everything you shouldn’t have what was forbidden what was dirty what degrades us to ourselves but not you, you took it for granted, it was natural, you had no idea of sin, my disgust wasn’t yours, you felt something like ecstasy, whore, you displayed it to me, you didn’t share my anguish, you laughed at me, where did you get all that business about “existential anguish,” Álvaro, what did you think, that I was a book or a student thirsty for knowledge? why didn’t you accept all sexual experiences, the most daring, the most calculated, but especially the most spontaneous, the ones that came to us out of the night, the postponed dawn, the unexpected afternoon? why did you interrupt my orgasm to tell me to look at the horrifying sight of two roosters slashing each other to death in a pit? where did you get the idea that a cockfight would excite me more than your sex? why give me explanations? cockfights always excited me, I had my first erection watching a fighting cock slash another fighting cock in an imaginary pit, no, it was in San Marcos, at the fair, but I wasn’t there, the pit was the sand of my imagination, Cordelia, the battle took place in my head and you were incapable of penetrating it that’s why I said to myself as long as she doesn’t penetrate my imagination, I won’t penetrate her body again, that’s the simple truth, enough explanations, let’s not give any cause for gossip, fire the maids, don’t invite anyone to the house, I don’t want busybodies in my life, I want the freedom to imagine the worst and make you pay for your sins, they’re imaginary Álvaro, nothing of what you imagine has happened but it can happen, you can’t deny that Cordelia.

MY GREATEST AMBITION
was to be director general. Your behavior held me back. Can’t you repent, can’t you do that for me?

HE TAKES PLEASURE IN
muzzling me and asking: What are you thinking about?

I WANT TO CONQUER
your superiority of a well-brought-up girl, from a good family, discreet. And unbearable because of it.

HE EVOKES
Cordelia’s young perfumed hair. Now he pulls off her wig and guffaws. He chokes her with both hands and asks her to sing “Amapola.”

BEG, BEG.

Why are you doing this to me?

I want you to pay for the simple fact of being an old woman and having lost your looks.

Have you no mercy?

Isn’t cruelty better than compassion?

I’m tired, Álvaro, you exhaust me.

How could you marry me, a man without humor, ugly, vulgar, ignorant?

I don’t know, Álvaro.

I know, my sassy little princess. You think that with you, princess, I’ll overcome my own inferiority complex.

I’ll think about it.

Whaaat . . . ?

HE CHAINS HER
to the foot of the bed and observes her for hours waiting for her to say something or ask for water or to be hungry and she only looks at him with a kind of passive resistance that makes him suspect that her gamble is to endure the unbearable for years in order to dominate the tyrant in the end, wear him down until she conquers him. Like that troublemaker Mahatma Gandhi.

DO YOU KNOW, CORDELIA
? There’s no difference between the morgue and bed. Lie down like a corpse! And now fornicate.

HE LEAVES HER
tied to the bed until he sees her surrounded by excretions and he closes his eyes to smell in all their purity her internal wastes, what she carries inside, not erotic delight, not sublime love, but all this that he looks at now and smells . . .

I’M COUNTING
on blind obedience aging and hardening a woman, that’s what I’m counting on . . .

HE THREATENS
to pull out one of her nails with pliers. Once he dares to do it. A single nail. The one on the little finger of her left hand. Her wedding band shines even more brightly on the adjacent ring finger stained with blood. That seems beautiful to him. Let the little finger bleed and the ring finger look good. Aren’t they husband and wife? He wouldn’t do this to a prostitute. He wouldn’t give her that much importance. Does he exult, thinking that with all these actions he is exalting the conjugal relationship to the maximum?

Do you realize I’m doing all this only to prove one thing to you?

What thing?

That I live only for you.

And the world?

What world?

Don’t you realize that the world is much larger than this bedroom?

I don’t want to know that.

You can’t save yourself from the world, Álvaro. Don’t you realize that?

You’re the one who doesn’t understand that you protect me from the immensity of the world and reduce it down to this corner.

I think you owe that to me.

What?

Understanding at least a corner of the world.

I don’t want anyone to think you’re married to me out of loyalty and habit. I want to know and I want you to know that you’re here against your will. That you can’t escape this house. Dammit, not even this bedroom. Prisoner.

Then why did you tell Leo on the phone that I’m here because I want to be?

How do you dare to call that bum here?

Well, Álvaro, life follows its course. I mean, beyond these four walls.

Look at them carefully. What they’re like.

Yellow. A dirty, stained yellow. Full of white shadows where photographs used to be.

You’d call them lies. Photos of your childhood, your first communion, our engagement, fucking rowing on Chapultepec, fucking holding Madero’s hand, fucking honeymoon in Nautla, fucking skiing on Tequesquitengo Lake . . .

A flooded valley, Álvaro. You can see a sunken church at the bottom of the lake. You ski past, and your feet brush against the dome.

Tequesquitengo.

The cross, the cross.

The cross where Our Lord Jesus Christ died, of course.

Yes, the instrument of execution. The cross or the electric chair or the gibbet or the wall. Ways to dispatch us to the next world without a God who comes down to save us. The cross. I laugh at the cross and at fiction. The cross is fiction. We might as well worship an electric chair. We might as well place a gibbet on the altar. We might as well carry a guillotine in a procession. We might as well distribute wafers with cyanide during Mass.
Ite vita est.

CORDELIA THINKS
and sometimes says (above all to Leo, less to Álvaro) that at first along with resignation there was affection, even a little respect, but as the arguments increased, she felt the temptation to hatred. She didn’t want to embitter her life. She felt acidity rising from the pit of her stomach and became irritated with herself. Affection, respect, resignation were better for the spirit. But Leo you understand that a woman can feel herself at the crossroads (Álvaro makes puns about the cross the fiction) because she didn’t obtain the total love that only came (well) for a time. Now the blood flows in my veins like cold water and I ask myself, I ask my husband, why don’t you leave if you hate me so much? why don’t you go and live alone?

DO YOU KNOW
what irritates me most about you?

Tell me, Álvaro.

Your well-bred voice. Your voice that’s so well bred. And do you know what I can’t stand about you? Intimacy. Intimacy with you annoys me. Long story short.

The truth is, Leo, what attracted me was his appearance. Not him. Then I found out what he really was like. Too late, my friend. Then his appearance changed.

Why does he hold on to you?

Because only my eyes remember the way he was when he was young.

Don’t sacrifice yourself anymore, Cordelia.

Do you see me as sacrificed? Don’t think that. Do you see resignation in my eyes? You don’t, do you? I’m calm. Do you know why?

No. Tell me.

I believe—that is, I imagine—that he knows more about what will come than about what’s already happened.

Are you sure? He or you?

Both of us. I’m still with him because there’s nobody left but me who remembers his youth and his promise. Only I have his eyes of yesterday in my eyes of today.

I NEED TO SLEEP
with the window open. Close it. I need fresh air. It smells like a circus in here. I’ll get pneumonia. Close it. Look at what a disaster the bathroom is. Why don’t you keep your makeup someplace else? Why don’t you clean the sink after you shave look at the dirty soap look at your hairs look at my brush full of your bleached hairs hang the towel up to dry spread it out don’t leave it like that just thrown down put a mat beside the bathtub don’t get the floor all wet yesterday I slipped and almost broke my neck why do you use so much toilet paper? don’t you prefer to wipe your silky, high-handed ass with Kleenex? don’t use my razors anymore to shave under your arms you leave them full of hair but I only use the one you’ve already thrown away why don’t you remove the hair permanently and stop bothering me why did you rearrange my shirts? to make your life easier blue ones here white ones there short-sleeve shirts on one side sport shirts in the back because you wear them less often ah! do you want me to classify your panties your bras your panty hose because you can arrange my closet but I can’t arrange yours right? why? because that’s private Álvaro and I have nothing private, Cordelia? it’s different it’s different.

WE’RE NOT THE SAME
you’re right I have everything hanging on the outside you keep everything in those aromatic crannies, you’re full of folds and more folds Cordelia and you know you smell like a fish market that’s what you smell like a rotten red snapper that’s how I feel when I make love to you that I’m fucking a dead fish left on the beach for a week a man shows himself he shows everything a woman hides everything she arranges everything in little quilted boxes but a woman disarranges your soul roll up your socks slowly bottom to top don’t yank them don’t put your shoes on before your trousers be careful not to stain your tie at the cleaners they ruin ties ties have their virginity too why were you messing with my tube of toothpaste? because it’s very ugly to squeeze it from the top ah yes well I’m going to squeeze the tube from the top just to fuck up your little esthetic manias and give me the remote it’s not mine I want to watch the news with Adriana Pérez Cañedo well Chespirito is on at the same time and I’d rather see Chilindrina where did you leave the
Reforma
? I threw it out why? I already read it and what about me? don’t I have the right to read it, Álvaro? you don’t understand anything, Cordelia, women are bovine creatures they graze and have calves and give milk, that’s all and they don’t know what’s going on in the world and don’t care . . .