Leonardo turned the key in the ignition, started the car, and headed back to Campazas.
Grandmother Doña Zarina agreed with her granddaughter. Michelina would be dressed for her marriage in the old-fashioned way, in authentic clothes the old lady had naturally been collecting for generations. The girl could choose.
A crinoline, said the young woman, I’ve always dreamed of wearing a crinoline so everyone could wonder about me, could imagine me, and not know clearly what the bride was like. In that case, the grandmother said cheerfully, you’ll need a veil.
One night, she tried on her wedding outfit, the crinoline and the veil, and went to bed to sleep alone for the last time. She dreamed she was in a convent, strolling through patios and arcades, chapels and corridors, while the other nuns, locked in, peered out like animals through the bars on their cells, shouted obscenities at her because she was getting married, because she preferred the love of a man to wedding Christ. They insulted her for violating her vows, for leaving her religious order, her social class.
Michelina tried to escape from her dream, whose space was identical to that of the convent, but all the nuns, crowded in front of the altar, blocked her way. The black maids tore the habits off the sisters, stripping them naked to the waist, and then the nuns screamed imploringly for the whip to suppress the devil in the flesh and to give an example for Sister Michelina. Others immodestly menstruated on the tiled floor, then licked their own blood and marked crosses on the icy stone. Others lay next to the prostrate, bleeding, wounded, thorn-pierced Christs, and here Michelina’s dream in Mexico City fused with Mariano’s in the lightless bedroom in Campazas. The boy, too, dreamed of one of those dolorous Christs in Mexican churches, more dolorous than their Virgin Mothers, the Son laid out in a crystal coffin surrounded by dusty flowers, He Himself turning to dust, disappearing on His homeward journey to the spirit, leaving only the evidence of a few nails, a lance, a crown of thorns, a rag dipped in vinegar … how he longed to leave behind the miseries of this ephemeral body!
That was only for Christ, and how Mariano envied Him! If the suffering, mocked, wounded Christ had been left in holy peace, why not him? All he wanted was to live on his parents’ ranch, reading all day with no other company than the Indians, who were natural and indifferent to the perversions of nature, Indians some called Pacuaches and others “erased Indians.” Like him: invisible Indians, beings who copied that great canvas of imitations and metamorphoses, the desert. Was he more confined, more isolated out there on the desert ranch than his family was in Disneyland, out of touch as they were with Campazas, with the nation, ignoring everything that occurred outside their high walls, consuming only imported things, watching only cable television? Why was he denied his solitude, his isolation, when he was indifferent to theirs? He who read so much, things that were so beautiful, worlds as perfect as his imagination could desire, infinitely new pasts, futures foretold and already, already enjoyed.
He dreamed of a hare.
A hare is a wild quadruped with long ears and a short tail.
Its fur is reddish, and its offspring are born hairy.
Its feet are longer than those of the rabbit. It runs very quickly because it is very timid.
It does not dig, as other members of the species do. It makes nests, seeking out a stable, warm, respected space where it will be left in peace.
It’s a mammal. It’s born from milk, desires it again, wants to suckle in darkness, to be sucked, in a nest with no surprises and no one to watch it enjoy itself.
There wasn’t a woman in the world who could tolerate his desire. Mariano only wanted, finally, to live physically where he’d always wanted to live by will and where he’d always lived in spirit. On a ranch. With little money, many books, and a few “erased Indians” as silent as he. Alone, because where in the world was there a woman who could eclipse all space but the bedroom, where space and presence coincided. Was Michelina such a woman? Would she respect his solitude? Would she liberate him forever from ambition, inheritance, social obligations, the need to make public appearances?
It wasn’t his fault that inside his mouth there lived a blind, hairy, swift, and voracious hare, nesting permanently on his tongue.
On her wedding day, Michelina entered the living room of the Tudor-Norman mansion wearing her beautiful old dress, her crinoline, flat-heeled white velvet slippers, and a heavy white veil that completely hid her features. And above the veil, a crown of orange blossoms. She was on the arm of her father, the retired ambassador Don Herminio Laborde. Michelina’s mother was unwilling to make the trip north (gossip had it that she disapproved of the marriage but lacked the means to stop it). The grandmother, old as she was, would have made the trip with pleasure.
“I’ve seen every type of crossbreeding imaginable, and one more, even if it’s between a tigress and a gorilla, much less between a dove and a rabbit, isn’t going to shock me.”
Her ailments kept her from traveling; somehow, though, she was present in the crinoline, in the veil… Dona Lucila spent a whole month in Houston outfitting herself as if she were the bride, and today she looked like something from a pastry shop. She embodied the wedding cake itself: triangular like a cream pyramid, she was crowned with a cherry hat, her hair a caramel delight, her face a huge, smiling meringue, her breasts a wave of crème Chantilly. And then the dress: draped over her like a burial shroud, it had all the tones of blackberry jam spread over marzipan.
But she did not offer her arm to her son, Mariano. No, it was Leonardo Barroso himself who wrapped Mariano’s shoulders in a big embrace. The young man was simply dressed: a beige suit, a blue shirt, and a string tie. Doña Lucila did not lean on her son until the party, the gathering of a multitude of friends, acquaintances, curiosity seekers, all there to attend the wedding of the son of one of the most powerful men, et cetera. Properties, customs offices, real estate deals, wealth and power provided by control over an illusory, crystal border, a porous frontier through which each year pass millions of people, ideas, products — in short, everything (sotto voce: contraband, drugs, counterfeit money, et cetera).
Was there anyone who didn’t have something to do with or didn’t depend on or hope to serve Don Leonardo Barroso, tsar of the northern frontier? What a shame about his son. There has to be a balance in this life. The son humanizes the father. But the young lady from the capital sold herself, don’t tell me otherwise. Human beings are bought, Don Enrique. Put it this way: the buying and selling are humanized, Don Raúl.
Although in those years every possible concession had been made to the Catholic Church, Don Leonardo Barroso maintained his liberal Jacobinism, the old tradition of nineteenth-century Mexican reform and revolution: “I’m a liberal, but I respect religion.”
In their bedroom (to the horror of Doña Lucila), he had a reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica instead of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. “What ugly scrawls! A child could draw better than that.” Luckily, by then they were sleeping in separate bedrooms, so they each had their own icons over the bed: Pope Paul VI and Jesus, united in their vision of sacrifice, death, and redemption. Don Leonardo never entered a church and held the civil part of the nuptial ceremony in his own house — of course, where else? Even so, the bride’s outfit infused the act with a mysterious severity, sacred rather than ecclesiastical.
“Think she’s a witch?”
“No, man, just one of those snooty bitches from the capital who come up here to make us look like hicks.”