“You’re a genius, sir. . ”
“No. My mother was the genius — she was the one who came up with the brilliant idea of giving birth to me!”
“What are we going to do with the executive bonuses this year, sir?”
“Maximize them, Rodríguez. Maximize them with share options and hide the expense so the investors don’t get wind of it. Never record options as expenses. You hold on to your millions.”
“What about the employees?”
“Fuck ’em.”
“I should warn you that Quique, your speechwriter, is getting a little out of line, he’s been going around and saying that he gives you all your ideas, sir.”
“Get rid of that ass-kissing bastard now. Take his things out of the office and put them out on the street.”
“He has been a faithful employee for twelve years. . ”
“There’s always work out there for a good ass-kisser. . ”
“And the investors?”
“They can go to hell.”
“And the prosecutors?”
“Don’t you go worrying about them. Don’t say a word. Nobody’s going to send us to jail. There are too many people out there who depend on us.”
My mother was better. Just like my father, she always wore black.
“I’m in mourning for Mexico. Eternal mourning,” he used to say. And so she imitated him and went even further with that funereal severity by wearing a long black skirt all the time.
Do you think you can picture me as a little girl, sitting at the dinner table between my father and mother, both wearing black from head to toe, eating their meal without exchanging a word?
He stared at her with his wildcat eyes.
She never looked up from her plate.
The servants had learned not to make a noise.
And yet there was more hatred in my mother’s downcast eyes than in my father’s fierce scrutiny.
If there was affection it was there in my father’s yellow eyes as he looked at me — but it was guilty, cagey. Over and over again, I’d hear him rebuking my mother behind closed doors.
“You couldn’t give me an heir. You’re completely useless.”
“You may be everyone’s boss, Barroso Junior, but you can’t give orders to God. It was God’s will that she should be a girl.”
It was as if the Virgin Mary were apologizing to the Holy Spirit for having given birth to a girl.
My father’s resentment, though, ended up working in my favor. He had no male heir. The doctors had advised my mother, Casilda Galván, not to risk a second pregnancy. It made them both bitter. My father decided to educate me as if I were a boy, thinking that one day I would inherit his fortune and run his businesses. That was why I was able to study in Paris, meet you, and fall in love with you, Bernal. I was the rich little Mexican girl who went to study at the University of Paris, all expenses paid, so that I could hang on to all those millions my father would eventually leave me. And you were the government’s young scholarship student, a protégé that Mexico sent to France almost as a compensation for the death of your parents and the injustices you suffered for having the same name as your father.
“Since my name is Bernal Herrera, just like my father, they arrested and tortured me, thinking I was him. Then, finally, the Juárez police chief came in and told them, ‘Don’t be idiots. The father’s dead, and we even buried him.’ ”
There was suffering in your expression, but it was combined with serenity, and I envied that; it was a look inherited from pain and courage and faith. . I don’t know.
You, on the other hand, could see the family bitterness in my eyes, and you reproached me for it.
“Sweetheart, resentment, envy, and self-pity are poison. Turn what you feel into the will to love. Into the freedom to act. Don’t wear yourself out hating your father. Overcome it. Be more than him. Better than him. But be different from him. That’s what will most rankle inside him.” You laughed, my love.
You and I in love, Bernal Herrera. It was love at first sight. A love born in lecture rooms and the books we read, in the cafés on the Boul’Mich, on our walks along the Seine, in the old films on the Rue Champollion, during our hurried meals of croque-monsieur and café au lait, our impassioned readings of the immortal Nouvel Obs and Jean Daniel, our study sessions, our book-hunting expeditions along the Rue Soufflot, our passionate nights in your attic flat on the Rue Saint Jacques, the dawn views of the Panthéon, our protection. It was love at first sight.
“We’re in Paris. Nothing changes here. The city’s always the same. That’s why lovers in Paris will always be lovers!”
Tra-la-la.
There were two reasons why I had to rush back to Mexico.
First, because I found out that my father had cheated my mother out of her money. Once they were married, they combined their assets. My mother had inherited a large beer consortium and it was understood that my parents’ common assets didn’t include my mother’s involvement with the company, only her personal estate.
One fine day, the executive board of the company summoned my mother and informed her that my father had not only driven her personal fortune into the ground through a series of fraudulent financial operations but that he had also forged the signature of Casilda Galván de Barroso, taken control of the company stock, and cheated everyone out of their money.
I returned to Mexico in the middle of this melodrama. I only made it worse. That was when I announced to my father that I was in love with you and that I intended to marry you.
“A Communist! And dirt poor, no less! The son of my archenemies, those trade-union ringleaders in the north! You’ve gone mad!” my father shouted, as he threw his bowl of scalding soup at me, got up from the table, and started hitting me while I cried, “Stop it! Hit me but don’t hit my child!”
Bernal, my love. Melodrama is inevitable in private life. There’s no family without its soap opera. And what is melodrama, but comedy without the humor?
“I don’t want sons-in-law!” my father exploded.
The furies that had always tormented him were unleashed on the accumulated disgrace: the “lost daughter,” the wife who had “ruined him.” Even though he had, in fact, been the one to ruin everything for us with the rage that was too much even for him. It was a storm, a tempest on open ground, the rustling of dry trees and sterile plains and raging skies, Bernal, a raw fury like a resurrection of all the dead seasons of his life — silent springs, long, hot summers, black autumns, discontented winters. Yes, Bernal, my father’s rage was let loose, as if poisoning himself weren’t enough — he had to poison the rest of the world as well.
“My daughter! Some communist’s whore!” he howled like an animal. “My daughter, the lover of a man who harassed the Barroso family and tried to ruin all of us! My grandson, a child with poisoned blood!
“Whore, swine, you belong in a pigsty,” he shouted, and he hit me, tearing the tablecloth off the table, destroying all the glasses and plates, staining the rugs, all of it in front of my mother, motionless, cold, dressed in black, reproaching my father with a deadly look. Then, suddenly she stood up and took a gun from her bag, observing the fleeting shock that crossed his face. At that, my father took out his own gun and they faced each other, like in a Posada etching or a Tarantino film, pointing their guns at each other and me in the middle, battered, terrified, wanting to separate them but defeated by my womb, by the instinct to save my child, our child. .
I moved away from the dark, obscene figures of my parents. I backed out of the dining room. I saw them looking at each other with hatred, dollar bills and bile in their eyes. Standing opposite each other, both armed, pointing their guns, waiting. Who would shoot first? The duel was a long time coming.