I fix myself a drink. I see a helplessness in Mariana’s eyes. The curious thing about her expressions is that they have to be deciphered like a code, maybe the marriage code. No one but me could understand them. To the untrained eye, Mariana’s expression could be summed up as one of those looks that tries to say nothing, to conceal what it is trying to express, or to let the other person know that whatever the look might be expressing, however true, has not the least value, and whether or not it is expressed doesn’t even matter. It doesn’t bother Mariana that I drink. She knows it’s a habit, but one that I can control. Time was, when we were young, she would sometimes drink with me. I still ask, but these days she no longer wants to join me.
She looks down at her blouse, at the stains it has accumulated in the kitchen, her very own commendations. Everything, I think, will be fine, it is the most normal thing in the world. The dialectical wheel of existence rises and falls, it is seasonal. The flow of tourists does not constantly arrive at target destinations at the same rate. Since the arrival of tourists is not uniform, but focused on certain months, we say that it is seasonal. High seasons have peaks and low seasons have troughs, but however acute the fortunes or misfortunes, we come through them.
You can’t drink too much, Mariana says. Just a little more, I say. I am sitting on the wicker sofa with my feet up. I open my eyes, sigh, press my lips together, and hesitant to swallow, I move the liquid around my mouth. Mariana runs her fingers through my hair. Her hand does not move smoothly, my hair is thick and her fingers rough. I squeeze her hips and carry on swilling the drink around my mouth. A little rum mixed with spittle escapes and trickles down my chin. The liquid trace collects into a droplet and falls onto my pants. Mariana has told me that María never stole anything and I suspect that this is true because, if she had stolen, how could we forgive her? They’ve been trying to pressure me. I thought that a man was best judged by his position in society, but a man is his family. His wife and children.
I pour myself another drink. There are few chasms as great as that between drinking alone and drinking with someone. When Diego comes home, I’ll put my arm around his shoulder, I’ll hug him and apologize. He’s almost nineteen, and it’s time that we started drinking together. He should be here now, but we heard that a few of the other soldiers fell ill and he offered to stay at the barracks for another three weeks. That’s not nothing. It’s the direct result of the principles we taught him here at home. Make sacrifices, take the first step.
We have a lot of hopes tied up in that boy. We expect him to go a little further than we did. Because that is the way of things. A surname is not borne in vain, it is borne to remind you where you come from, who put you here, or upon what mountain of bones you are standing. My father was an immigrant from Galicia who arrived in the country early in the century. He settled in Occidente, but in the central region, in the lush prairie. He cut mangroves, made charcoal, sowed rice, and managed to buy his little plot of land where he made a living as a horse trader.
The acrid smell that tickled my grandfather’s nostrils still lingers. This is a pueblo fecund with the dry, bittersweet dust of horseshit, and with the sea a few kilometers away, even if we turn our back on it. The last street in the pueblo, the street that leads to the train station, the street where my grandfather settled, where my father started out in life, where later I started out, is broad but deserted, with much light on the asphalt, with light that trickles down the gutters and light in the potholes, as though light were contained in a glass and the glass had tipped over. No one comes here. Beyond this street is the sea, the rugged coastline, the reef. The beach and the hotels have stolen the limelight.
But my father knew these places, and it was from here, thanks to my grandfather, that he set out. He became a primary school teacher and later gave classes in various colleges, and burnished by the luster of experience, when the time came, he taught up in the mountains, before once more coming back to the old wooden house. He never truly moved away, yet all these comings and goings, at a time when I did not yet exist and there was no guarantee that I would ever exist, had already begun to make their mark on me. I was already being defined, molded. Man is born old, with a burden on his shoulders. If a man is not destined to be of this earth, then he never was, but if he is to be, then he exists long before he is born.
This is the stock I come from, and I thought it was enough for me that, in me, the family name had reached its apogee, that I was born in the nick of time. All the historical portents suggested as much. The people were marching toward a bright future, along the perfectly paved road of the future, we had only to keep marching, to move from one point to another. But the family name did not end with me: my daughter and son were born, and they took on the burden that I had carried, what until that time had been mine. Now they probably believe that the family name ends with them, and I won’t be the one to tell them that it doesn’t end with them—I will let them believe, though the truth is that the name does not end with them, no way.
Don’t drink any more, Mariana says. Stop now, Armando, you’ve had enough for today. When you drink alone, alcohol makes you feel like you’ve got company. And when you drink with others, it makes you feel a little alone. Alcohol tells me that the war will not come now, that it will never come, that I am no longer waiting for it. The future came and went, war never came, and no one noticed. But a person can’t be expected to know everything. In any case, Mariana thinks that I know nothing, but I do know a thing or two. Better yet, I choose what I want to know. The officious little men have had their revenge on me, but this is still an isolated incident and there’s nothing to prove otherwise. They want me to take this to another level, but I can’t see beyond what’s happening to me, and that’s that. The officious little men taking their revenge. What is there to be gleaned from a group of individuals in an office firing another individual? The great cathedrals of philosophy and justice remain standing—they are unaffected by what goes on in offices.
Now that I have some free time, I have been thinking about going back to the last street in the pueblo, wandering around what used to be my home. For months I have been shuttling between the hotel and this apartment that I call home because it was allocated to me, just as this television is my television, this telephone is my telephone because they gave it to me, but what was your home is something no one can ever take from you. That’s what my parents told me. This is your home, hijo, you will always have a home here. But I founded a family, and a new family inevitably brings about the destruction of the old. We are a bridge between the people from whom we come and those toward whom we go.
Give me that bottle, Mariana says. Stop sniveling, Armando, stop sniveling. My wife is mad, I’m not sniveling. I am stone-cold sober. She is going to die sooner than I thought. I never expected that. Don’t die, I say. No, Mariana. Even though we will live on in our children. If a man is not to be of this earth, then he never was, but if ever he once was, then he will always be.