Read Online Happy Families by Carlos Fuentes - Free Book Online Page A

not separate it from physical pleasure. Impossible dreams: that Ana Fernanda would agree to leave the decrepit, uncomfortable, gloomy old house in El Desierto. Forbidden dream: that the acerbic, closed Doña Piedita would pass from this life to a better one.
    Ana Fernanda was not entirely unaware of Jesús Aníbal’s unspoken aspirations. As the years went by, the house in El Desierto was growing not only older but more unrepairable, a leak here announced a damp wall there, a creaking floor in one place foretold a collapsed roof in another, and the old woman kept a fierce hold on life, though Jesús Aníbal began to think that once his mother-in-law was dead, his wife would inherit her manias, and just as the memory of the deceased patriarch, Don Fermín, kept them tied to El Desierto, Doña Piedita would pass on to a better life but not Ana Fernanda and Jesús Aníbal: The big family house tied them to the past and to the future.
    Jesús Aníbal would come home from work and enter the desolation of an enormous living room, empty except for a piano that no one played and a good number of chairs placed along the walls. No pictures were hung, and the glass doors opened on a damp, untamable courtyard that seemed to grow according to its own desires and in opposition to all the efforts of the gardener.
    Then the husband thought of something that would banish solitude and authorize repairs.
    “To what end?” his old mother-in-law said with a sigh. “Houses should be like people, they grow old and die . . . This is an old, lived-in house. Let people see that.”
    “Ana Fernanda, don’t we have friends, the people who came to the wedding, relatives? Wouldn’t you like to invite them here once in a while?”
    “Ay, Jesús Aníbal, you know that taking care of Mama uses up not only my time but my desire for parties.”
    “The people who came to the wedding. They seemed nice. Friends.”
    “They weren’t friends. They were
acquaintances.
”
    “Relatives?”
    Ana Fernanda seemed surprised that her husband, for once, had an acceptable idea. Of course they had kin, but they were very scattered. Puebla and Veracruz, Sonora and Sinaloa, Monterrey and Guadalajara, every family who came to the capital came from somewhere else but put down roots in the city, the systoles and diastoles of the internal migration in the nation determined by wars, revolutions armed, agrarian, and industrial, the long nomadic border in the north, the muddy, wild border to the south, the poles of development, ambition, and resignation, love and hate, unkept promises and persistent vices, yearnings for security and challenges to insecurity.
    This was how, Jesús Aníbal thought on his daily
viacrucis
along the Periférico Highway, the country had been made, and inviting distant family members was upright, it was entertaining, it was instructive, since all of them had gone through experiences that satisfied the lively curiosity of the young, unsatisfied husband who was eager as well to dilute to the maximum his own Basque inheritance and not think again about
gachupín
or
indiano,
the words for Spaniard in America. Take a bath in Mexicanism.
    He had the reception rooms repaired, and the relatives began to arrive, with the cooperative enthusiasm of Ana Fernanda, who hadn’t thought of a pretext, as she said, to “show off a little bit,” fix up the house, and, in passing, free herself from the enslaving excuse of her mother.
    And so the old Jaliscan uncle was constructing a family tree before the last Quiroz, that is to say, himself, disappeared. And the young nephew from Monterrey had created a center for technological development in the north. And the enterprising niece who was an executive in Sonora had joined a conglomerate of businesses in California. And Aunt Chonita from Puebla had arthritis, and it was hard for her to go every afternoon to say the rosary in the beautiful Soledad Church with its no less beautiful tiled dome, as she had been in the