Happy Families Book

3.5*

The title is, of course, ironic. Carlos Fuentes' short stories are usually reunited under the hat of a theme in volumes (or at least the ones that I have read so far). While the Crystal Frontier has stories that talk with grace about things that both unite and separate the US and Mexico ideologically, gastronomically, behaviorally, historically and so on, the short stories from this volume have as premise Tolstoy's idea from Anna Karenina that "happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Quite brilliant premise I would say and the way Fuentes illustrates this idea in vignettes presenting different families is also brilliant. I could not connect to all the stories, but some of them really touched me.

A farmer obliges his sons to become priests, but they end up doing the opposite through a silent rebellion; the members of a family experience loneliness in very different ways; a woman puts up with the sadism of her husband only because she remembers the wonderful beginnings of their love; a mother in pain explains the life and personality of her daughter to the man who has murdered her in cold blood; a military commander has to choose whom of his two sons keeps living and who dies; the husband of a very beautiful woman for whom he feels no love falls in love with her very ugly cousin; two old people meet in their old age and talk about their brief relationship from their youth. These are just some of the stories chosen by Fuentes to prove his point. There are some others.

The ones that I liked most were: A Cousin Without Charm, Conjugal Ties (1) and Sweethearts, but I choose to talk about the last.

Sweethearts

Two old people meet by mistake on a ship (or is it a yacht?) and they recognize each other: they had been sweethearts for a month or so in their youth. Their love story had been intense, the most intense thing they've got. Or this is how they both remember it. But, as we know, we shape our memories according to our desires and perception of events which is always subjective and constantly changing. So, we keep constructing and reconstructing them. He is a bachelor now and a loner and she is married, has kids and grand-sons/grand-daughters. They indulge in reminiscence together, they reveal hidden reasons behind their breakup, they remember and relive moments they had spent together. He had never married and she had been trapped in a marriage of convenience.
"But the past is a mist that moves invisibly over our heads without our realizing it. Until the day it rains." While at the beginning they delve into the nostalgia of their lost love, they realize that it all might have been a mirage just because it didn't get ripe. We are all in love with the concepts of "what if?" and "it might have been", but if sometimes they come true, we might end up realizing that all that charm that we imagine when we strongly desire something we cannot get is only determined by a human ability (or shall I say inability?) to make things we cannot get so desirable, so special and unique! We can lie to ourselves so damn well without even knowing it. "Is the wait for love to come more tortured than sadness for love that was lost? If it's any confort to you, let me say that it's nice to love someone we couldn't have only because with that person we were a promise and will keep being one forever." and "We didn't really know each other. It's all fiction. We decided to create a nostalgic past for ourselves. Nothing but lies. Attribute it to chance. Don't worry. There was no past. There's only the present and its moments." And Fuentes chooses to end this story in a very metaphorical way. I thought the comparison was brilliant (the way he presents what it was and what we actually see or choose/want to see), but I guess you will have to read this genuinely brilliant story to get the whole context and see what I am talking about: "He looked at the Dalmatian Coast. They were approaching the port of Spalato, in reality a huge palace transformed into a city. Emperor Diocletian lived here in courtyards that today are restaurants, chambers that today are apartments, galleries that today are streets, baths that today are sewage pipes…From the deck of the ship Manuel did not see these details. He saw the mirage of the ancient imperial city, the fiction of its lost grandeur restored only by the imagination, by the hunger to know what once was better than what is and what could have been more than anything else."