The Revolutionaries Try Again

by Mauro Javier Cardenas

  —

  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 inconseque
ntial 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.

  Nothing unusual happened during Mass. As always, we drove to the Iglesia Redonda, the round church with four entrances distributed equidistantly around its circular perimeter, and in between these entrances, rows and rows of arched benches facing the elevated altar on the temple’s epicenter. Following tradition, my grandmother placed our family’s baby christ on the altar’s steps, next to the other family effigies, but not without spending some time hogging the best spot and patrolling it until everyone sat down. Because we did not arrive early enough we seated ourselves as best we could. Parallel to the front of the altar, by the confession booth, far from the rest of the family, my father and I sat together. I must have felt triumphant. Or perhaps humble and grateful to the Virgin Mary for answering my prayers. Surely I felt compelled to concentrate on the Christmas sermon, ignoring the subdued elegance of the faithful and the perfumed smells of Ecuadorian women intent on becoming European damsels. The priest delivered his last blessings. The crowd that minutes before had been silent became festive, friends and families searching for each other in circles and laughing heartily upon finding one another. My father remained in his seat. I did not stand up either. By the front row, near my father and me, men in distinguished suits were walking up to my Uncle Fernando. They were grinning stupidly and shaking his hand with the same vigor they were using to chat him up, probably sending their best regards to the minister and joking that they had some deals they would like to discuss further. My father tried to avoid them. He stood up, covering his face by pretending he was wiping sweat off his forehead, but as he walked away someone next to my Uncle Fernando shouted out his name. My father stopped, hesitated, but then he turned and saluted the man by cracking a joke across the aisle. My father was a joker. Outside our family, everyone seemed to relish seeing him on the street or at restaurants. He would put people at ease simply by changing their name from Roberto to Roberticux or from Ernesto to Ernestinsky. I had seen him do this many times before, especially when I visited him. At first I would take the bus up the cordillera to Quito, but from the second summer on my father bought me a plane ticket as well as imported clothes and the expensive sneakers I had wanted to show off at school. One early Sunday evening, during my last summer there, my father said he wanted to show me where my Uncle Fernando worked. He said this with obvious pride, so instead of reminding him that Sunday nights were our chess nights, I went along with him. A huge slab of cement, darkened by mold on most of its windows’ edges, a sight that I was to see again many years later in the soviet buildings of Warsaw: this was the ministry of finance. My father and I entered the minister’s office without knocking. I had never seen so much lacquered wood or as many fur rugs inside an office. My father locked the door behind us. As we glided by, emboldened by my father’s knowledge that we were special guests, I could see our reflection on the thick edges of the bookcases lined with edicts and regulations. On the far end of the room, by the windows overseeing our capital, the minister, my Uncle Fernando, and a few others were already gathered by an oval table. The minister greeted my father with one jolly clap, then stood up and delivered a mock address: We are gathered here today. The minister placed a black leather briefcase on the table. He squinted and concentrated on aligning the briefcase’s three tiered code as if trying to open a safe, and after the gold fastenings popped and the minister rearranged the knot of his silver necktie, he began to serve us wads of cash as if giving away free money for a game of dice. Some of the men accompanied their cheer
s by playing with the rubber bands gripping their cash. I can still remember the sound of scrunched rubber against paper. We should all thank our chief of office supplies here, the minister said, although of course he should thank us. Someone poured champagne as if it were meant to be spilled, and later that night, at La Cueva, a traditional Spanish restaurant dug under a new downtown skyscraper, everyone swigged champagne and wine and whiskey. During dinner my father stood on his chair. Up there, his head almost touching the low brick ceiling, he removed his gray suit jacket with the minute violet stripes, placed it over his shoulders like a cape, and as he slurred his toast his tie dangled like a reptile and his splotched white dress shirt consumed the liquor overflowing from his glass. He flashed his wads of cash and said tonight, gentlemen, the women are on me. Everyone else at our table puffed their cigars. Clapped. The service had no choice but to celebrate us. My father patted me on the back, and since I did not readily smile he increased the force of his greeting. After downing half a glass of Chivas he thrust it toward me. This, it occurred to me as I sniffed his drink, is the kind of life my father leads. But I did not question my father about what type of deal he was celebrating. I knew that the answer would be unpleasant. I also knew that any questions might alter my father’s mood and ruin my chances of getting more expensive sneakers out of him. And so I ate and laughed and drank his stiff drinks and by night’s end I, too, must have been drunk.

  At the Iglesia Redonda, as my father walked across the aisle to join the others, I recognized the man who had yelled my father’s name: he had been at the minister’s office, too. He was the father of Maraco Espinel, one of my classmates at San Javier.

  I did not wait for my father to call out my name across the aisle and introduce me to his friends. I walked the other way and searched for the rest of my family. Eventually we all found each other. As we gathered to leave, my grandmother realized that my father and my Uncle Fernando were missing. Despite my protests, my grandmother sent me to look for them. She was still visibly excited about my father attending Mass, clutching the baby christ’s basket with one hand and fanning herself with the other, and I could tell that she’d cried and that she would continue to cry whenever she remembered this Christmas. When my grandmother found out my father was serious about becoming a Jesuit priest, many years before I was born, she grounded him. When he wouldn’t budge, defying her by praying loudly in his room, she took him on a trip to Paris, Milan, and other European cities where she showered him with the traditions of luxury. At the lobby of the Hotel Saint Jacques he met a girl from Norway. My grandmother suggested he should travel with her for an extra month or two. He accepted my grandmother’s money and did. He must have been seventeen years old.