Читать книгу The Revolutionaries Try Again - Mauro Javier Cardenas - Страница 13

IV / ANTONIO EDITS HIS BABY CHRIST MEMOIR

For first, there is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense, education, and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves.

— DAVID HUME, AN ENQUIRY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING, SECTION X

After a twenty one year absence my father returned to the church. The pious boy I was back then had convinced him to attend Christmas Mass, and, according to my grandmother, his return that night led to the baby christ’s tears. Most in my family readily adopted my grandmother’s version, as I was to do in the years that followed, sharing it with my American acquaintances as another example of the quaint superstitions of my Third World country, which would often prompt in them comparisons to eyewitness news reports of Virgin Mary sightings on trunks of trees or mortadella sandwiches. Of course I suspected my grandmother’s version was far too simple, and yet nothing ever compelled me to elaborate on it by implicating others or by including events that began long before that night or that decade.

—

Everyone was implicated, Antonio writes along the margins of his baby christ memoir, meaning everyone he’d once known in Guayaquil (Cristian Cordero’s grandfather, Espinel’s father, Julio Esteros’s mother, his own father) plus everyone else in the world (and here Antonio wishes he wasn’t inside a plane so he could search online for an essay by Leszek Kołakowski, a philosopher Antonio had been drawn to because he was from Poland like John Paul II, the first pope to visit Ecuador — we can never forget the existence of evil and the misery of the human condition, Kołakowski wrote —), and so to write about implicating others before that Christmas night and that decade seems redundant to him since it was implied everyone was implicated, although he could argue against himself and state that most of us need reminders that we’re implicated with the existence of evil and the misery of the human condition, okay, so let’s say that you encounter these reminders in the leisurely world of memoir or fiction: wouldn’t you ignore them, Antonio, or at most be smote by yet another round of deep urges to change Ecuador that might impede your reasoning and compel you to board a plane back to Guayaquil without much of a plan or money?

—

Before my father agreed to attend Christmas Mass we were at my grandmother’s house. My father had announced I was old enough to sit with the adults, and since my grandmother’s dining table could seat only eight, and since neither my aunts nor my grandfather wanted to sour our Christmas by starting another pyrrhic battle, ten of us struggled to pass the potatoes and slice the pig without elbowing each other. And we did so in silence. My father was in an awful mood, and we knew that whoever spoke during dinner risked being savaged by his sarcasm.

—

But perhaps he has been equating Leszek Kołakowski with Father Villalba, Antonio thinks, perhaps he has been drawn to certain novelists and philosophers not because they’re from Poland like John Paul II but because their work reminds him of Father Villalba’s sermons, even though he doesn’t remember Father Villalba’s sermons anymore (once Antonio searched online for texts by Clodovis Boff and unbeknownst to him he later ascribed them to Father Villalba — never purchase a painting of your favorite landscape because that painting will come to replace your favorite landscape, one of W. G. Sebald’s narrators says, but what choice did Antonio have if his favorite landscapes have, for the most part, vanished? — bless me Father, Clodovis Boff recounts, Father we are dying —), or perhaps he hasn’t been drawn to certain novelists and philosophers because of Father Villalba but because he likes to believe intricate association mechanisms subtend his mind like in the novels of W. G. Sebald, drawn to Father Villalba like Jacques Austerlitz is drawn to fortresses that contain the seeds of their own destruction, for instance, and whether on that Christmas night at his grandmother’s house they stuffed themselves with potatoes and pig he doesn’t remember anymore either, so he should just delete the porcine and potato details or acknowledge he doesn’t remember them anymore.

—

My father had assumed that his appointment in the administration of León Martín Cordero had entitled him to arrogance, and perhaps because of his airs of infallibility we did not consider something could be troubling him.

—

He had also assumed that his father’s appointment in the administration of León Martín Cordero had entitled him to arrogance at San Javier, Antonio thinks, but who could blame such a skinny teenager with acne on his face for assuming airs of infallibility for just a tiny bit? (And here Antonio recalls some notes he’d written about Your Face Tomorrow by Javier Marías — one never experiences genuine self disgust, Javier Marías wrote, and it’s that inability that makes us capable of doing almost anything — or, in Antonio’s case, of doing almost nothing — I’m on a plane on my way back, isn’t that enough? — no.)

—

My grandmother, restless amid our silence, seemed to be counting rice grains with her fork, though most likely she was deliberating whether to talk. She loved a seated audience, and Christmas was the time of the year when everyone was more receptive to her stories. She must have reminded herself that she was, after all, the most inured to my father’s jabs because she began recounting for us the storied origins of her dining table. The story was not a new one (none of them were) yet we were relieved someone other than us was talking. After her father sold a small fraction of his plantations, she said, he had decided on a whim to throw out all their furniture and start anew, contracting for the job all the carpenters available in Portoviejo at the time. For a week, on their cobblestone patio, the sound of hammers and hacksaws merged with the sound of poor families carrying off the old furniture her father was giving away. The dining table my grandmother had inherited from those days had knotted flowers carved on its thick width, which matched the dense Guayacan patterns of the four adjacent cabinets, immense cabinets stuffed with more plates and teacups and sugar bowls than anyone could ever use in a lifetime, all of them burnished at least monthly, most of them handpainted with landscapes no one wanted to see.

—

Before Antonio’s grandmother squandered what remained of her father’s plantations in Portoviejo, Antonio would stay with her during the summer, and what he remembers of those summers in Portoviejo are the black bats that would appear outside the immense windows in his bedroom like apparitions from Monstruo Cinema, the weekly horror TV hour he wasn’t allowed to watch, the black bats that he knows he hasn’t invented in retrospect because he’d asked the laborers in his grandmother’s plantation and they had confirmed that yes, niño Antonio, vampires love bananas, and clouds of them do swarm us at night, and although the black bats had terrified him they hadn’t traumatized him irreversibly, or at least his nightmares about the black bats by those immense windows did vanish eventually, and what Antonio also remembers of those summers in Portoviejo is the chained monkey at an outdoor grill by the side of the highway, Antonio hurling rocks at the squalid monkey chained to what looked like a giant nail sledgehammered into the mud, the monkey charging toward him and choking himself before he could reach him until the one afternoon the monkey managed to grab his hair and wouldn’t let go, someone help that little boy, for god’s sake, the monkey thrashing Antonio by his hair and Antonio thinking then or later that he got what he deserved, the monkey not letting go of Antonio’s hair even after a pair of brooms descended on him, the monkey probably thinking we’re both going down, carajo, you and me to the grave.

—

My father did not interrupt my grandmother’s story. He remained silent, concentrating on the uneven horizon inside his wineglass. I could not tell if he had been staring at it for long, or if it was just a passing gesture of wine connoisseurship because I was too distracted by my upcoming speech. After participating in my father’s reckless lifestyle the summer before, I had decided it was my duty to convince him to attend Christmas Mass with us, and for this delicate task I had prepared a speech. I had spent quite some time contemplating not the exact words to deliver but my father’s reaction to them, envisioning a sudden conversion like Saul on his way to Damascus, god’s light passing through me so as to inspirit my every word. In a mixture of rosary prayers and feverish writing, I’d finished my speech the night before. Perhaps a resolute argument, perhaps a series of unconnected allusions to the theological texts I was studying in school, either way, I’d accumulated at least seven or eight pages wrinkled by my scribbling and crossing and waiting for the light to shine. I would address my father after dinner.

My Aunt Carmen, the only one in my father’s family with enough good looks to marry a bold, young politician, brought up the headline news. The mayor of our city, or perhaps some other elected official that I can no longer recall, had defrauded the municipality and fled.

Just another crook, my father muttered, aware that my grandmother had urged everyone to vote for that crook during election time. We waited for my father to riff on his remark. He didn’t. This did not imply his mood was improving. Under the table I could see his hands stroking his gray suit pants, as if reassuring them of their own fine tailoring and fabric, which he had once explained to me by pointing at the minute violet stripes that had been woven into them.

—

His father never explained those minute violet stripes to him, Antonio thinks, crossing out the passage about the minute violet stripes, but his father did drag him along to splurge on Italian business suits at the most expensive boutiques in Quito, no, not drag him along, Antonio loved sauntering into those expensive boutiques where the voluptuous saleswomen would dote on both father and son, his father flirting with them and the saleswomen saying your son’s so handsome, Don Antonio, he’s going to stir the cauldron as much as you, a prediction that didn’t come true while he lived in Guayaquil — hide your Smurfs, here comes that ugly Gargamel — but that came true once he arrived in San Francisco — good one, Menudo Boy — and although Antonio likes to believe he has inherited nothing from his corrupt father, he knows he has inherited his father’s penchant for expensive clothes because he splurged even when he couldn’t afford them (and likely will continue to splurge because the realization that a behavior is inherited isn’t strong enough to counter the inherited behavior — you could simply stop buying expensive clothes, Drool — easier to continue to splurge and blame it on my corrupt father? —), and of course to his American acquaintances his penchant for expensive clothes was a source of amusing anecdotes, courtesy of Antonio from faraway Ecuador, but to him his penchant for expensive clothes dispirited him because if he hadn’t splurged he could’ve quit his database job and returned to Ecuador sooner, although he would have never returned to Ecuador without owning a sizable amount of expensive clothes — you’re fated either way, Gargamel — fine, let’s not delete the minute violet stripes since my father did purchase a gray suit with those minute violet stripes, Antonio writes along the margins of his baby christ memoir, and I did notice the minute violet stripes without my father pointing them out to me (though possibly the saleswomen had been the ones who had explained the minute violet stripes to them?).

—

Heartened by what she mistook as my father’s unusual restraint, my grandmother loosed tale after tale about our great ancestry, ranches and islands and heroes of the Independencia, eventually landing on her favorite story: about how the baby christ materialized into our family. In a dream, she said, a voice had guided her grandmother. Buried on the far side of her father’s plantation, the voice had said, by the tallest oak tree with the knifed bark, she was to find resounding evidence of god’s existence. Her grandmother awoke, soaked in sweat despite the force of her ceiling fan. She was not the gullible type, no sir, my grandmother said, but when god calls, our lineage answers. Her grandmother sprang out of bed, and with her mosquito net still entangled around her knees she ran across her father’s field, one of the largest ones in Manabí, and despite the bats and the Pacific coast wind, she fell on her knees and with her hands she pierced the earth until she found him: our baby christ. He was intact, lying in a wicker basket like the one Moses must have been in when the Egyptian princess found him. He was wrapped in a purple and gold shawl, his wide clay eyes contemplating the heavens.

—

No tallest oak tree with the knifed bark, Antonio writes along the margins of his baby christ memoir, no mosquito nets, no bats (or rather, yes, bats but not in his grandmother’s baby christ story), no Pacific coast wind, no force of the ceiling fan (his old bedroom in Guayaquil did have a poorly installed ceiling fan that spun like a moribund turbine above his bed): the dream guiding her grandmother to the baby christ, on the other hand, had been recounted enough times by his grandmother for him to still remember that the function of the dream had been to guide his grandmother’s grandmother to where the baby christ was buried, and yes, he understood the narrative purpose of telling details, and he also understood the need to add concrete details for the sake of verisimilitude, but there has to be another way to revisit his past without him pretending he remembers the whole of it.

—

I had heard my grandmother tell the baby christ story many times before. Sometimes her grandmother pierced the earth with a shovel, sometimes she rushed out at noon, either way, I wasn’t judging her inconsistencies this time because I knew she was feeling slighted by the rest of us. After Christmas Mass, as long as I could remember, we had always driven back to her house for our gift exchange. This year we were driving back to my Uncle Fernando and my Aunt Carmen’s newly built home instead. Along with my Aunt Carmen, I had openly rooted for this change of location, so out of guilt and solidarity I listened to my grandmother’s story attentively, as if riveted by the alternatives (the lord not choosing us, the baby christ not being there).

—

No riveting alternatives could’ve existed for me because we believed we’d been fated as a family to receive the baby christ, Antonio thinks, and although he likes to believe he no longer believes he’s fated, chances are he will forever be tied to semblances of those childhood beliefs, which shouldn’t matter that much to him except how can he get anything done if he’s always waiting to receive fateful instructions on what to do with his life, how can he make himself less vulnerable to interpreting so much of his life as fateful signs just as he’d done when Leopoldo called him and said come back, Drool, because even though he’s returning to Ecuador as requested, if they accomplish nothing and he flees back to San Francisco and then ten or fifteen years from now Leopoldo were to call him again, Antonio’s likely to still be vulnerable to interpreting Leopoldo’s call as a fateful sign — this time the time really is right, Drool — but what are the alternatives: Do atheists rationally scrutinize every potential turning point in their lives? Do agnostics run logistic models to predict whether a phone call or an email or an article in the newspaper could become pivotal to their lives? How can he be expected to scrutinize what might constitute a symbol or a sign after seeing the sun move in Cajas? After seeing his family’s baby christ cry?

—

As if searching for a better position from which to pounce, my father straightened himself on his chair. Perhaps tired of imitating himself, he dropped and dangled his forearms from his armrests. He nevertheless said to my grandmother too bad that voice didn’t advise you and your father on how to keep all that land. This was true. They had squandered it all. Half of my grandmother’s house was now for rent. The other half was crammed with handcrafted armoires.

My father downed his glass of Concha y Toro, my grandmother’s favorite wine. He knew what he had just done. He always knew. And yet his facial expression (his brown contentious eyes at odds with his downcast glances, although it’s possible that over time I have layered these features on a face I can no longer remember) informed us that for him this knowing was punishment enough.

Uncle Fernando, who despite being young and short always looked at ease next to our dignitaries, said what are you, the Grinch? Lighten up, Antonio. You’re scaring the children. My Uncle Fernando was the only one in our family who could reproach my father. Three or four years earlier, after a series of my father’s business ventures floundered, my uncle had secured my father a post as head of a minor government agency in charge of shipping office supplies to government bureaus across Ecuador, and so of course my father could not yell or swear back at him like he did with the rest of us. I liked Uncle Fernando. He sent my mother good presents even after she divorced my father, sported slim Italian suits, raced European sports cars despite the ban on imports. He also worked as a personal advisor to the minister of finance, whom he had known since his days at San Javier High School.

—

So many hours of his summers with his father in Quito were spent under long, empty office desks inside that minor government agency, Antonio thinks, playing with a calculator that must have had games on it because he probably spent all eight office hours a day under those long, empty desks along empty hallways instead of wandering the city on his own, instead of writing love letters to the neighbor from Sweden at his father’s apartment building whom his father was to introduce him to and whom he was to date the summer after, when he was already too tall to bury himself under those long, empty office desks (and what he remembers most about that neighbor from Sweden is how proud he’d been of declining to sleep with her because he was fifteen and intercourse before marriage was a mortal sin — anyone want to guess what the Drool was doing with the pigeon from Sweden? — I didn’t have the heart to inflict that kind of pain to our Madre Dolorosa — with the same hand you masturbate you stab a dagger into our Madre Dolorosa’s heart —), and sometimes the secretaries who were probably his father’s lovers would stop by his lair under those long, empty desks and ask him if he wanted or needed anything, hoping to ingratiate themselves with Antonio as if he had any sway at the minor government office his father managed, bah, on the contrary: if he could go back in time he would have denounced them — or you would try to sleep with them? — probably.

—

My father’s smile tried to mask any signs of strain. He echoed my uncle’s jovial tone and said isn’t it Mass time already? You Cristianitos are going to be late.

My father lit a cigar, and my grandmother, with synchronic urgency, as if cued by his silver lighter’s snap, tolled her tiny porcelain bell, which to me sounded like a poodle’s. In restaurants she would deploy her bell if she did not receive immediate service. At home it was part of her daily meals. Maria, caramba, pay attention, she said. An ashtray for Don Antonio.

Since my grandmother sat at the head of the table with her back to the kitchen, she could not see Maria, her most recent maid, trying to suppress her scowl. In a country where more than 60 percent of the population lives in poverty, any family with a decent income can afford a live in maid. And my grandmother went through them as if they were a disposable breed of humans. At first they came the safe way, recommended by her fellow obstetricians, but after the recommendations ran out, my grandmother had to hang a Maid Wanted sign outside her gate, which of course lured strangers, who eventually absconded with her silverware. My three aunts liked Maria, though, and as she approached us, my aunts’ glances pleaded with her: patience with the old woman, please, patience. I had never seen my aunts’ pleads before.

—

So what that I hadn’t seen my aunts’ pleads before, Antonio writes along the margins of his baby christ memoir, crossing out the sentence about not seeing his aunts’ pleads before, he doesn’t remember that seeing his aunts’ pleads for the first time carried any significance for him, so perhaps he’s mindlessly following the narrative convention of these coming of age stories in which the first time the boy sees something out of the ordinary he undergoes a transmogrifying shock or revelation, the word transmogrifying, incidentally, which rhymes too much with the word ogro, should only be unfurled to mock transformative feelings, the word unfurl, Antonio writes, likewise.

—

Without raising her gaze Maria placed the ashtray by my father, whose eyes became fixed on the curvy silhouette beneath her white uniform. Her one piece uniform was several sizes too small (we could see her brown shoulders and thighs, although we were not staring), not out of coquetry but because it was the same uniform the other maids had had to wear and hand wash every other day. Maria hurried back to the kitchen, leaving behind her scent of talc and sweat. We did not know it at the time, but that night was to be Maria’s last.

My grandmother laughed and clapped at something my grandfather had said. I grew thankful at the possibility of merriment, hoping that it might calm my father before it was time for my speech. I cannot tell you what suddenly lifted my grandmother’s mood. Her moods swung as widely as my father’s, and so it could have been nothing at all, or the tiny sound of her porcelain bell, or the way her Christmas lights reflected on our faces so as to make us look happier, or my grandfather holding her hand, or too much Concha y Toro.

There are family members whose roles in one’s memories, through no fault of their own, become so inconsequential that eventually one is free to remember them in whichever way one chooses. This is how I choose to remember my grandmother: dancing a cumbia on her seat during our family dinners, raising her wineglass and singing tómese una copa / una copa de vino / ya me la tomé / ya se la tomó / ahora le toca al vecino, which translates to drink another cup of wine, and, when you are done, it is your neighbor’s turn. By song’s end my grandmother would turn to my grandfather and call him mi perrito, my little doggy, and my grandfather would reciprocate by barking or asking her to dance. Much later, after the cocktails and the dance, they would lie on the sofa like exhausted lovers, my grandmother bunched against my grandfather, who would have fallen asleep without fanfare sometime earlier. My grandfather was the only one in the family who prayed to the baby christ regularly. He had built a wooden altar for this purpose, and since he had placed it by the entrance to their bedroom, we always had to be careful not to swing their door open, lest we bump the door against his worn kneeler and disrupt the order inside his altar. Every space on his altar was crowded with rosaries, scapulars, fringed crosses, miniature images of saints too fragile to be taken out of their plastic sleeves, so many of them that sometimes we wondered if my grandfather bought a new one every week, and whether he did so in honor of the baby christ or to keep himself company in those long hours of fasting and prayer. Most of the time we didn’t have to worry about bumping the door against my grandfather because, when he was by his altar, my grandmother would always tiptoe out of their bedroom, and like a guard who thinks her task is as important as that of whom she guards, she would admonish us and ask us to keep quiet. Silence. Grandpa Antonio is praying.

My father did not touch his coconut flan. After Maria cleared the pig’s skeleton, he was still chewing on its hard skin, gnawing at it with such force that I could see his grimacing teeth like a dog’s.

With rushed signs of the cross we stood up and readied ourselves to leave. My father, sprawled on the sofa closest to the exit, examined us with feigned amusement, as if preparing to taunt us out of my grandmother’s house.

We had to start heading to Christmas Mass, and I, without much time left, had to start convincing my father to come with us. This was my only chance till next Christmas. For his government post my father had moved to Quito, and although I visited him during the summer, his lifestyle in the capital did not allow for much church talk. I know I wouldn’t have ventured my speech in front of my family (my grandmother would have asked me not to pester my father), and I know they wouldn’t have let me stay behind. In that brief space between the house and the garage, I must have told them I had forgotten my rosary or my bible. My grandmother must have given me her house keys because my father did not open the door. He had moved to the sofa farthest away from the door. He had crossed his legs like a professor about to lecture himself, but he had sunk the rest of his body inside the sofa. He was holding up his cigar backwards, with the burning end facing him, and he was staring at it as if inspecting a live snake or an alarm clock that should’ve gone off.

He noticed me and said qué, flaco, you’re not going to Mass?

He asked this without ridicule or annoyance. He asked this with sincere concern. I was sixteen at the time and steeped in love with our Madre Dolorosa. That year I had successfully avoided any impure thoughts that could have marred my love for Mary. I do not know why this was so. At San Javier, I used to advertise the daily rosary service my friend Leopoldo and I had founded and our classmates would ridicule us because they thought we were just brownnosers. But my father did not make fun of me. I do not know how he found out about my religious fervor (I didn’t tell anyone about my rosary prayers or my volunteer service because I was following the precept of not letting one hand know what the other hand was doing), but around me he tried to keep his disdain for religion to himself. I am not sure if I knew it then, or later, or if I had guessed it all along with that intuition that binds a son to the defeated aspirations of his father, but in his last year at San Javier my father had decided to give everything up and become a Jesuit priest.

I delivered my father no inspired speech. I stuttered and asked him to please come with us. Without grumbling an okay or an all right my father stood up. He nodded absently, walking toward me and then beside me like a surrendered fugitive. On the front seat of her car my grandmother, who was carrying the baby christ on her lap, silenced the Christmas carols with a careful turn of the stereo’s dial and contained her tears as if afraid the merest peep would change my father’s mind.