Read Online Happy Families by Carlos Fuentes - Free Book Online

startled the spirit with an intrusion so close, gigantic, and uninhabited in plain sight of twenty million residents. He would have preferred to join the modern, secure, and comfortable advance of the city, the urban development in Santa Fe and its tall condominiums on the road to Toluca, with all the amenities nearby: movies, stores, restaurants.
    This was impeded by Ana Fernanda’s will. The house in El Desierto de los Leones was where the Sorollas had always lived, her father had died here, her mother would not move from a house identical to her life: old, long, and empty. And Jesús Aníbal shouldn’t even think,
not even think,
said the young bride, covering his mouth with a perfumed hand viscous and sticky with masculine love, about moving from here, but above all, he absolutely should not think about the death of Doña Piedad since Ana Fernanda would exclude her husband from the nuptial bedroom because that would certainly kill the matriarch, and she, Ana Fernanda, would not allow herself to be touched again by the young bridegroom if he insisted on moving from El Desierto to Santa Fe.
    CPA De Lillo, however, not only was very much in love with Ana Fernanda Sorolla but also respected her for that charming mixture of inexperience and will that kept Jesús Aníbal in a state of delectable expectation. What would his wife ask of him this time?
    Nothing. This is what the first five years of marriage brought. Nothing. The habit that becomes nothing. From the happy contrasts of their wedding night, the couple was moving to the never-spoken conviction that to love each other, there was no need to talk about love.
    “Don’t be so insistent.”
    That was the extent of Ana Fernanda’s rejection, when she was fearful of physical contact with Jesús Aníbal after the birth of their daughter, Luisa Fernanda, and the mother had to spend three weeks in bed, grow maddeningly fat, suffer even more to recover her vaunted slenderness, and refuse to have another child, but was obliged by her religious conscience to forbid her husband to use condoms and limit their sexual contact to her safe days according to the rhythm method.
    Jesús Aníbal didn’t know whether to laugh or be angry when he found Ana Fernanda lying on the bed, scissors in hand, cutting off the tips of the collection of condoms that the misguided young husband had brought to the house in order to combine safety and pleasure.
    “The Church forbids these nasty things.”
    The husband loved his wife. He did not want to find defects in her. He had no reason to be surprised. He had always known that Ana Fernanda was a devout Catholic. He had accepted this, and if he thought he could “cut it away” one day, it did not take him long to realize that in his wife’s spirit, her love of God had precedence over her love of Jesús, no matter how ironic or crude that might sound, to the point where, on fixed days, when she accepted his favors, Ana Fernanda stopped exclaiming “Jesús Jesús” and began to say “Aníbal Aníbal” or simply “my love.”
    “At least call me Chucho,” the genial husband said with a smile one night.
    “You’re blasphemous. That’s a dog’s name,” Ana Fernanda said before turning her back to say the rosary, then facing Jesús Aníbal again only to conclude with precision: “Don’t be stupid. Loving means not talking about love.”
    Jesús Aníbal didn’t mind the daily trek from El Desierto to his office at Insurgentes and Medellín. There was no distance in Mexico City that did not require at least an hour of patience. If anything tested national stoicism, it was urban traffic. He listened to music. He bought cassettes of poetry in Spanish and felt the birth in his spirit of something that was his own but latent. He thought. Sometimes, thanks to Garcilaso or Cernuda, he even dreamed possible dreams: that Ana Fernanda would finally give in before the evidence of her husband’s affection and accept the normality of matrimony but