ERNESTO AND GIULIA’S TWIN GIRLS were born on a splendid morning in June of 2005.
I got to the hospital at the moment that Ernesto had just welcomed his two daughters and was sitting with two rosy packages in his arms, crying. I started crying too, happy tears because these infants represented a definitive end to his being a widower and the beginning of a new stage in his life. Now he was a father. When Willie saw them, he said that one looked like Mussolini and the other like Frida Kahlo, but a couple of weeks later, their features took shape and we could see that they were a pair of beautiful little girls: Cristina, blond and happy, like her mother; Elisa, dark and intense, like her father. They are so different in looks and personality that they could have been adopted: one in Kansas and the other in Tenerife. Giulia gave herself completely to her daughters, to the degree that for more than a year she hasn’t talked about anything else. She managed to get them on a schedule of sleeping and eating at the same time; that gave her a few minutes of freedom between naps that she uses to restore order from chaos. She’s bringing them up with Latin music, the Spanish language, and with no fear of germs or accidents. Pacifiers go from the floor into the mouth and no one makes a fuss, and later, before they learned to walk, the twins discovered how to go up and down tiled stairs with the sharp edges of the steps scraping their bellies. Cristina is a little weasel who can’t stop moving for a minute; she approaches the abyss of balconies with suicidal indifference. Elisa, on the other hand, sinks into somber thoughts that tend to bring on attacks of inconsolable tears. I don’t know how, but Giulia finds the energy to dress them like dolls, in embroidered booties and sailor hats.
The previous year, precisely on December 6, the anniversary of your death, Ernesto was accepted at the university to study for his master’s degree at night; at the same time he was hired to teach mathematics in the best public school in the county, fifteen minutes from his house. He had been without a job for a few months, and had gone around with a dark cloud over his head, meditating on his future. Giulia, always sparkly and optimistic, was the only one in the family who never doubted that her husband would find his way, though the rest of the family was getting a little nervous. Tío Ramón reminded me in a letter that men suffer a crisis of identity somewhere around the age of forty; it’s part of the process of maturing. It had happened to him in 1945 when he fell in love with my mother in Peru, over sixty years ago. At that time he’d gone to a hotel in the mountains, locked himself in the silence of a room for days, and when he came out he was a different person. He had shaken off his Catholic religion, his family, and the woman who was then his wife. There he had grown up, been educated, had matured, and had realized that until that moment he had lived confined in the straitjacket of social conventions. When he tore that off, he lost all fear of the future. It was he who coined the phrase he taught me in my early adolescence, and that I have never forgotten: Everyone else is more afraid than you are. I repeat those words when I have to face some frightening situation, from an auditorium filled with people to loneliness. I have no doubt that Tío Ramón determined his fate in that drastic way because I have seen his decisiveness on other occasions. Like the time he caught my brother Pancho smoking—he was only about ten. Tío Ramón crushed out his own cigarette butt before us and announced, “This is the last cigarette of my life, and if I catch any of you smoking before you’re adults you will have to deal with me.” He never smoked again. Fortunately Ernesto overcame his forty-year crisis, and when his daughters were born he was ready to welcome them, already settled in his position as a high school math teacher and studying to be a college professor.
ALFREDO LÓPEZ LAGARTO-EMPLUMADO appeared on the Spanish TV channel, handsomer than ever, dressed in black with an Indian band around his forehead and several silver and turquoise necklaces around his neck. Tabra called me at ten o’clock at night to tell me to turn on the television and watch, and I had to admit that the man was very attractive, and that if I hadn’t known him so well, his image on the screen would undoubtedly have impressed me. He was speaking English—with subtitles—with the calm of an academic and the moral conviction of an apostle, explaining the justice of why he had been drawn to the mission of recovering Moctezuma’s crown, a symbol of the dignity and tradition of the Aztec people that had been appropriated by European imperialism. After so many years of not being heard, at last his message had reached the ears of the Aztecs and their hearts had ignited like gunpowder. The president of Mexico had sent a commission of jurists to Vienna to negotiate with the congress of that country for the return of the historic trophy. Lagarto ended by calling on Mexican immigrants in the United States to join in the struggle with their brothers and enlist the aid of the North American government to put pressure on the Austrians. I congratulated Tabra for her friend’s leap to fame, but she answered with a deep sigh. If Lagarto had been elusive before, now it would be impossible to hunt him down. “Maybe he will follow me to Costa Rica after he gets the crown back,” she suggested, but without conviction. “Well, that’s if I ever save enough money to move there.” Be careful what you ask for, I thought, heaven might grant it, but I didn’t say it to her. For a long time, Tabra had been buying gold coins that she hid in nooks and crannies, creating the danger of having them stolen.