My Aunt Carmen, the only one in my father’s family with enough good looks to marry a bold, young politician, brought up the headline news. The mayor of our city, or perhaps some other elected official that I can no longer recall, had defrauded the municipality and fled.
Just another crook, my father muttered, aware that my grandmother had urged everyone to vote for that crook during election time. We waited for my father to riff on his remark. He didn’t. This did not imply his mood was improving. Under the table I could see his hands stroking his gray suit pants, as if reassuring them of their own fine tailoring and fabric, which he had once explained to me by pointing at the minute violet stripes that had been woven into them.
—
His father never explained those minute violet stripes to him, Antonio thinks, crossing out the passage about the minute violet stripes, but his father did drag him along to splurge on Italian business suits at the most expensive boutiques in Quito, no, not drag him along, Antonio loved sauntering into those expensive boutiques where the voluptuous saleswomen would dote on both father and son, his father flirting with them and the saleswomen saying your son’s so handsome, Don Antonio, he’s going to stir the cauldron as much as you, a prediction that didn’t come true while he lived in Guayaquil — hide your Smurfs, here comes that ugly Gargamel — but that came true once he arrived in San Francisco — good one, Menudo Boy — and although Antonio likes to believe he has inherited nothing from his corrupt father, he knows he has inherited his father’s penchant for expensive clothes because he splurged even when he couldn’t afford them (and likely will continue to splurge because the realization that a behavior is inherited isn’t strong enough to counter the inherited behavior — you could simply stop buying expensive clothes, Drool — easier to continue to splurge and blame it on my corrupt father? — ), and of course to his American acquaintances his penchant for expensive clothes was a source of amusing anecdotes, courtesy of Antonio from faraway Ecuador, but to him his penchant for expensive clothes dispirited him because if he hadn’t splurged he could’ve quit his database job and returned to Ecuador sooner, although he would have never returned to Ecuador without owning a sizable amount of expensive clothes — you’re fated either way, Gargamel — fine, let’s not delete the minute violet stripes since my father did purchase a gray suit with those minute violet stripes, Antonio writes along the margins of his baby christ memoir, and I did notice the minute violet stripes without my father pointing them out to me (though possibly the saleswomen had been the ones who had explained the minute violet stripes to them?).
—
Heartened by what she mistook as my father’s unusual restraint, my grandmother loosed tale after tale about our great ancestry, ranches and islands and heroes of the Independencia, eventually landing on her favorite story: about how the baby christ materialized into our family. In a dream, she said, a voice had guided her grandmother. Buried on the far side of her father’s plantation, the voice had said, by the tallest oak tree with the knifed bark, she was to find resounding evidence of god’s existence. Her grandmother awoke, soaked in sweat despite the force of her ceiling fan. She was not the gullible type, no sir, my grandmother said, but when god calls, our lineage answers. Her grandmother sprang out of bed, and with her mosquito net still entangled around her knees she ran across her father’s field, one of the largest ones in Manabí, and despite the bats and the Pacific coast wind, she fell on her knees and with her hands she pierced the earth until she found him: our baby christ. He was intact, lying in a wicker basket like the one Moses must have been in when the Egyptian princess found him. He was wrapped in a purple and gold shawl, his wide clay eyes contemplating the heavens.
—
No tallest oak tree with the knifed bark, Antonio writes along the margins of his baby christ memoir, no mosquito nets, no bats (or rather, yes, bats but not in his grandmother’s baby christ story), no Pacific coast wind, no force of the ceiling fan (his old bedroom in Guayaquil did have a poorly installed ceiling fan that spun like a moribund turbine above his bed): the dream guiding her grandmother to the baby christ, on the other hand, had been recounted enough times by his grandmother for him to still remember that the function of the dream had been to guide his grandmother’s grandmother to where the baby christ was buried, and yes, he understood the narrative purpose of telling details, and he also understood the need to add concrete details for the sake of verisimilitude, but there has to be another way to revisit his past without him pretending he remembers the whole of it.
—
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.