“You and Rocío seem well.”
I never spoke about my relationships with my parents.
“Sure. We’re doing fine.”
There was something else he wanted to ask me, I could tell, but he didn’t. He narrowed his eyes, thinking, and then something changed in his face—a slackness emerged, the edges of his mouth dropped. He’d given up.
“I always hated this house,” my old man said after a few minutes. “I can’t imagine that anyone would want it. We should bulldoze the thing and be done with it.”
It was all the same to me, and I told him so. We could set it on fire, or shatter every last brick with a sledgehammer. I had no attachments to this place, to this town. My father did, but he preferred not to think about them. It was a place to visit with a heavy heart, when an old relative died. Or with your family on holiday, if such a luxury could be afforded. Francisco, it occurred to me, might feel the same way toward the city where we’d been raised.
“I’ve let you down,” my old man said. His voice was timid, hushed, as if he hadn’t wanted me to hear.
“Don’t say that.”
“We should have pushed you harder, sent you away sooner. Now…” He didn’t finish, but I understood that now, in his estimation, was far too late.
“It’s fine.”
“I know it is. Everyone’s fine. I’m fine, you’re fine, your mother’s fine too. Even Francisco is fine, or so the rumor goes, God bless the U.S.A. Everything is fine. Just ask the mummies sitting on the benches out there. They spend every evening telling the same five stories again and again, but if you ask them, they’ll respond with a single voice that everything is just fine. What do we have to complain about?”
“I’m not complaining,” I said.
“I know you aren’t. That’s precisely what concerns me.”
I slumped, feeling deflated. “I’ll leave when the visa comes. I can’t leave before that. I can’t do anything before that.”
My father winced. “But it isn’t entirely accurate to say you can’t do anything, is it?”
“I suppose not.”
“Consider this: what if it doesn’t come? Or what if it comes at an inconvenient time. Let’s say you’re in love with Rocío—”
“Let’s suppose.”
“And she doesn’t want to leave. So then you stay. What will you do then?”
He was really asking: What are you doing right now?
When I didn’t say anything, he pressed further, his voice rising in pitch. “Tell me, son. Are you sure you even want that visa? Are you absolutely certain? Do you know yet what you’re going to do with your life?”
We were determined not to shout at each other. Eventually, he went to bed, and I left the house for a walk along the town’s desolate streets, where there was not a car to be seen, nor a person. You could hear the occasional truck roaring by in the distance, but fewer at this hour, like a sporadic wind. It looked like an abandoned stage set, and I wondered: who’s absolutely certain about anything? I found a pay phone not far from the plaza and called Rocío. I wanted her to make me laugh, and I sighed with relief when she answered on the first ring, as if she’d been waiting for my call. Maybe she had. I told her about the drive, about the fight we witnessed, about my great-uncle’s dank and oppressive house, filled with pictures of racehorses and marching bands and the various women who’d borne his children and had their hopes and their hearts shattered. I didn’t tell her about the conversation with my father.
“I’ve taken a lover,” Rocío said, interrupting.
It was a game we played; I tried to muster the energy to play along. I didn’t want to disappoint her. “And what’s he like?”
“Handsome, in an ugly sort of way. Crooked nose, giant cock. More than adequate.”
“I’m dying of jealousy,” I said. “Literally dying. The life seeps from my tired body.”
“Did you know that by law, if a man finds his wife sleeping with another man on their marriage bed, he’s allowed to murder them both?”
“I hadn’t heard that. But what if he finds them on the couch?”
“Then he can’t kill them. Legally speaking.”
“So did you sleep with him on our bed?”
“Yes,” Rocío answered. “Many, many times.”
“And was his name Joselito?”
There was quiet. “Yes. That was his name.”
“I’ve already had him killed.”
“But I just saw him this morning.”
“He’s gone, baby. Say goodbye.”
“Goodbye,” she whispered.
I was satisfied with myself. She asked me about the town, and I told her that everyone confused me with my brother. So many years separated my family from this place that they’d simply lost track of me. There was room in their heads for only one son; was it any surprise they chose Francisco?
“Oh, that’s so sad!” Rocío said. She was mocking me.
“I’m not telling you so you’ll feel sorry for me.”
“Of course not.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know,” she said, drawing out the syllable in a way she probably thought was cute, but which just annoyed me.
“I’m hanging up now.” The phone card was running out anyway.
“Goodnight, Joselito,” Rocío said, and blew a kiss into the receiver.
We spent a few hours the next morning in my great-uncle’s house, sifting through the clutter, in case there was anything we might want to take back with us. There wasn’t. My father set some items aside for the soldiers, should it come to that; nothing very expensive, but things he thought might look expensive if you were a bored young man with a rifle who’d missed all the action by a few years, and were serving your time standing by the side of a highway, collecting tributes: a silver picture frame; an antique camera in pristine condition; an old but very ornate trophy, which would surely come back to life with a little polish. It didn’t make much sense, of course; these young men wanted one of two things, I told my father: cash or electronics. Sex, perhaps, but probably not with us. Anything else was meaningless. My father agreed.
Our unfinished conversation was not mentioned.
After lunch, we headed into town. There was some paperwork to be filed in order to transfer Raúl’s property over to a distant cousin of ours, an unmarried woman of fifty who still lived nearby and might have some use for the house. Raúl’s children wanted nothing, refused, on principle, to be involved. My father was dreading this transfer, of course, not because he was reluctant to give up the property, but because he was afraid of how many hours this relatively simple bureaucratic chore might require. But he hadn’t taken his local celebrity into account, and of course we were received at city records with the same bright and enthusiastic palaver with which we’d been welcomed in the plaza the night before. We were taken around to greet each of the dozen municipal employees, friendly men and women of my father’s generation and older who welcomed the interruption because they quite clearly had nothing to do. It was just like evenings in the plaza, I thought, only behind desks and under fluorescent lights. Many of them claimed some vague familial connection to me, especially the older ones, and so I began calling them all uncle and auntie just to be safe. Again and again I was mistaken for Francisco—When did you get back? Where are you living now?—and I began to respond with increasingly imprecise answers, so that finally, when we’d made it inside the last office, the registrar of properties, I simply gave in to this assumption, and said, when asked: “I live in California.”