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wasn’t worth it? She had traded the gold of an independent career for the small change of conjugal life. She was a sentimental slave to the bolero and became the martyr of the family. She never had escaped from the bolero. How ridiculous. She had sung in Aladdin’s Cave. Aladdin didn’t have a cave. He had a lamp. The one with the cave was Ali Baba. His folks are so ignorant. What a fucked-up life. A school for the children. A home for the old folks. What a choice! Still, there are times when he is overcome by emotion, especially when his vanity is catered to by the perpetual cooing of his mother as she caresses his forehead and describes him, how handsome my boy is you’re my boy your broad forehead your black curly hair your silky skin the color of dark mamey your profile like the king of clubs, like a Roman emperor, that’s what they say, a nose with no bridge your small but full mouth, that face you make my boy as if defying a world you don’t like, that cock-of-the-walk tension in every last inch of your sweet body, you were that way when you were little, you’re that way now that you’re big, tell me, who admires you more than I do? And his sister gets on his nerves. How easy to lock yourself up with a laptop in a safe imaginary uncontaminated universe with no stardust, no offensive smells. And his father the worst of all, the high priest of deception, a man trapped in lies. And he himself, Abel Pagán, did he still have aspirations? And if he did, would he realize them one day? And where would he “fulfill” himself best? In the shelter of his family, at the age of thirty-two, or unprotected out on the great street, knowing that his vanity, no matter how small, was going to demand more and more effort? With what conviction would he arm himself to leave the no-cost comfort of home and go back out into the world? Was he going to tell himself: Stop brooding, Abel Pagán, the future’s here, it’s called the present? Or better yet, am I going to accept everything we were and improve it every day? How do you reject the past without negating the future? What would be the cost of his two rebellions, the insurrection against his family and the revolt against his office? Would he be capable of denying reality in order to bring it up to his desire? Could he forget completely what it was that opposed the ideal life of Abel Pagán, fortune’s darling? Or should he submit to everything that denied him a happy—that is to say, an autonomous—free life without any obligation to subject himself to the family or the office? He had to choose. Secretly, he wrote desperate phrases in order to obtain some light. We are destroying ourselves to reach the unrealizable. To be a son, it’s not enough to be against your parents. To be free, it’s not enough to be against your boss. I need to change. I can’t separate myself from my life. My family doesn’t care about oblivion. They don’t care that by midcentury no one will remember them. But I do. I do. What am I doing? Who will remember me? How do I make my mark on the wall?

    THE FATHER . It wasn’t that the drinks in the cantina went to his head. It was that for the first time, he felt like a friend to his son. They were buddies. Maybe it was that they hadn’t had the chance to chat before. It was that they might not have the chance to talk frankly again. It was that the time had come to prepare the balance sheet of one’s life, one’s history, the time one had lived. We are children of an ill-starred revolution, Pastor had said to his son, who looked at him with uncertainty and suspicion and a kind of distant forgetfulness close to indifference. What revolution? What was his father talking about? The technological revolution? Pastor continues. He thinks we did a lot of things badly because we lost our illusions. The country slipped from our hands, Abel. And so the ties that bound us together were broken. In the long run, it’s a question of surviving, that’s all.