“Don’t be dense. You still haven’t learned that being a tyrant is a courtesy that frees us from freedom.”
Augusta kept the next thought to herself: Being a tyrant is also being a pedant. And a teacher: A pedant is before anything else the one who educates little boys. And girls. A pedagogue.
This was a pedantic pedagogical prelude to what obsessed Augusta. The fear that they had been the ones who created the tyrant, though he hadn’t wanted it. He’d simply walked by naked. They were the ones who had dressed him. Because they themselves needed power but were afraid of exercising it. They preferred to give it to a poor passerby who was dumbfounded when the crown and ermine cape fell on him. They breathed a sigh of relief. They were rid of the burden.
Power is cowardice, it is our cowardice, Augusta wanted to say aloud and did not dare because she was assailed by the conviction that her sisters would not understand her words. And did not deserve them. Power is cowardice because we do not dare to be powerful. Power is the hot potato we have to pass to a poor, defenseless, naked, mediocre, unimaginative, spiritually disconsolate individual, a stupid creature whom we anoint with the crown and cover with the ermine that we ourselves do not have the courage to wear. The emperor is the distorted reflection of our impotence. The trouble is that once we hand him the scepter, the chosen one believes himself to be truly powerful. He does not know his strength is borrowed. He assumes it without responsibility because we are the responsible ones. We can no longer replace the chief. Only by killing him. Hanging him by the feet in a public square. Cornering him like a rat in a gloomy courtyard. Condemning him to oblivion in the most forsaken part of a prison filled with chronic ailments and deprived of words.
Then a great laugh sounds in Augusta’s hollow skull. You’re wrong, you innocent. I’ll end my days on the Riviera. I’ll occupy an entire floor of a New York hotel. I’ll sail around the Caribbean on my yacht. A Roman legion of tough guys will protect me. I won’t need more than twenty dollars in my pocket. My credit will be unlimited. Just like my laugh. Etcetera.
It made no sense to explain this to her sisters. Why disillusion them? Why deprive them of the illusion of an autonomous, powerful father capable of performing miracles, above all, the miracle of loving his daughters with infinite tenderness and compassion? Why drive them away from their annual visit around the paternal coffin? Why, as a matter of fact, bring them happiness?
Augusta shrugged discreetly. Let us continue to believe that when we gave all our power to our father, we would be exempt not only from responsibility. We would be exempt from blame.
How to explain this to her sisters when Genara was saying foolishness?
“I asked him to say I was all white inside. And he saw me black.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“His eyes said it all. ‘You have a black soul, Genara. Try to redeem yourself. Confess your sins.’ ”
“Which ones?” an irritated Augusta intervened.
“His,” Genara continued. “When I knelt to make my confession, what came out of my mouth was an inventory of Papa’s sins, old conservative, aristocratic, tiresome, you’re not a decadent noble, as you imagine, you’re shameless and arrogant, you’re the worst kind of tyrant, you’re the plebeian climber who doesn’t know how to enjoy the goods of the world because he reverts to his low origins and isn’t accustomed to controlling from above. He staggers. He stumbles. And he reacts by punishing. He abuses his impunity. Doesn’t recognize his errors. Punishes others because he can’t punish himself.”
Genara dissolved into something resembling a gentle spring rain, though her weeping was acute, repeating “Errors, errors,” until she had stripped the word of meaning.
“Which errors, Genara?” Julia looked at her sister, but it was Augusta who spoke, fearing too lifeless a response from Genara, the potter unaccustomed to giving free rein to her feelings beyond a certain limit, as if the world were a large clay vase that could become misshapen with one turn too many of the wheel. The truth is, she felt challenged, displaced by the unexpected vigor of Genara’s words.
“Resentment,” Augusta continued. “The worst sin. Suffering because of other people’s happiness. Envying other people’s luck. Looking out for other people’s faults while you hide your own.”
She stopped because once again her thoughts were faster than her words and her doubt that she’d be understood even greater. The fact is that Augusta wanted to take on, as much as possible, the faults of their father. Promising happiness in the future, never today. Defer. Defer. Defer everything. Replace necessity with hope and hope with ceremony. Talk about what we don’t know and neither does he. Make us feel ignorant. Foment mistaken ideas about and within each of his daughters. Concede things too early or too late. Nothing at the opportune moment, Papa, do you realize that? Nothing at the right time, everything deferred until tomorrow, or console yourselves because you already have it and don’t know it. Always leaving us in uncertainty. Do we threaten him or does he threaten us? Can we make him disappear in a cloud of smoke? Or can he make us disappear? Does he accept each plea as the homage he deserves, the gift that is requested of him, or the illusion that is fulfilled when we ask him for it? When we dare to doubt his wisdom, he escapes from us, transforming his ignorance into shrewdness.
Did her sisters realize the number of things they didn’t do because they feared Papa? Did they realize that with this story about the day of the anniversary, they continued to defer their lives like old cars in a parking lot without a meter?
“Just count the demands he made on us from the time we were little girls. Didn’t it give us a mischievous joy to do the opposite of what he asked? Isn’t that what he expected of us, the pleasure of disobedience followed by redemptive penance? He condemned us. We condemned him. He treated us like simple things in his greenhouse, like little seeds subject to the temperature of his glance, the ice of his disapproval. He kept us in a larval state.”
“He has us,” Genara interrupted. “I mean in a larval state.”
Augusta stopped speaking. She withdrew into herself again. She did not know if her silence was hers alone or had joined the clamor of everything not said by the sisters who had gathered tonight, for the last time, in the garage in the sunken park where Papa had been born.
6. Augusta looked with judicious cruelty at Julia. She thought the innocence of the youngest sister was — or could become — only the mask of a profound malice. She had her doubts. Did Julia get what she wanted? Had she used the restrictions of the inheritance to do the only thing she was interested in doing: playing the violin? Augusta did not want to believe in Julia’s virginal appearance. She was always surrounded by men, in every orchestra. Perhaps she did not give the men her name. Perhaps she did not give her real name: Julia. Perhaps she went to bed with the clarinetist, let herself be fingered by the cellist, strummed with the guitarist, pulled out the stops with the man who played saxophone, blew with the piccolo player, all in a vast, harmonic, anonymous concupiscence. Julia had arranged things so her true life would be impenetrable.
Genara, on the other hand, was transparent. If she were to insinuate love affairs — something she had never done — her lies would have more weight than any truth. Possibly she had temptations. What she did not have were opportunities. All day at the wheel, with muddied hands and a stained brown apron. A woman with her sleeves rolled up and her hair pulled back. A strand falling over her forehead. Her legs spread as if she were giving birth to clay.
She once said about their father: “He watched over us as if we were his dolls.” This passivity of a toy was the nature, not second but first and who knows if original, of the sister who was a potter. Waiting for the anniversary was by now part of her customary life. What would she do without this expectation? Genara was not a woman capable of living without the routine of her calendar. In her heart, she wanted this situation to go on until the end of time. Not doing anything but ceramics. Being the potter to a vast world of clay by rescuing the clay and giving it the shape of human work. Was each worker a rival of God?