—
He had also assumed that his father’s appointment in the administration of León Martín Cordero had entitled him to arrogance at San Javier, Antonio thinks, but who could blame such a skinny teenager with acne on his face for assuming airs of infallibility for just a tiny bit? (And here Antonio recalls some notes he’d written about Your Face Tomorrow by Javier Marías — one never experiences genuine self disgust, Javier Marías wrote, and it’s that inability that makes us capable of doing almost anything — or, in Antonio’s case, of doing almost nothing — I’m on a plane on my way back, isn’t that enough? — no.)
—
My grandmother, restless amid our silence, seemed to be counting rice grains with her fork, though most likely she was deliberating whether to talk. She loved a seated audience, and Christmas was the time of the year when everyone was more receptive to her stories. She must have reminded herself that she was, after all, the most inured to my father’s jabs because she began recounting for us the storied origins of her dining table. The story was not a new one (none of them were) yet we were relieved someone other than us was talking. After her father sold a small fraction of his plantations, she said, he had decided on a whim to throw out all their furniture and start anew, contracting for the job all the carpenters available in Portoviejo at the time. For a week, on their cobblestone patio, the sound of hammers and hacksaws merged with the sound of poor families carrying off the old furniture her father was giving away. The dining table my grandmother had inherited from those days had knotted flowers carved on its thick width, which matched the dense Guayacan patterns of the four adjacent cabinets, immense cabinets stuffed with more plates and teacups and sugar bowls than anyone could ever use in a lifetime, all of them burnished at least monthly, most of them handpainted with landscapes no one wanted to see.
—
Before Antonio’s grandmother squandered what remained of her father’s plantations in Portoviejo, Antonio would stay with her during the summer, and what he remembers of those summers in Portoviejo are the black bats that would appear outside the immense windows in his bedroom like apparitions from Monstruo Cinema, the weekly horror TV hour he wasn’t allowed to watch, the black bats that he knows he hasn’t invented in retrospect because he’d asked the laborers in his grandmother’s plantation and they had confirmed that yes, niño Antonio, vampires love bananas, and clouds of them do swarm us at night, and although the black bats had terrified him they hadn’t traumatized him irreversibly, or at least his nightmares about the black bats by those immense windows did vanish eventually, and what Antonio also remembers of those summers in Portoviejo is the chained monkey at an outdoor grill by the side of the highway, Antonio hurling rocks at the squalid monkey chained to what looked like a giant nail sledgehammered into the mud, the monkey charging toward him and choking himself before he could reach him until the one afternoon the monkey managed to grab his hair and wouldn’t let go, someone help that little boy, for god’s sake, the monkey thrashing Antonio by his hair and Antonio thinking then or later that he got what he deserved, the monkey not letting go of Antonio’s hair even after a pair of brooms descended on him, the monkey probably thinking we’re both going down, carajo, you and me to the grave.
—
My father did not interrupt my grandmother’s story. He remained silent, concentrating on the uneven horizon inside his wineglass. I could not tell if he had been staring at it for long, or if it was just a passing gesture of wine connoisseurship because I was too distracted by my upcoming speech. After participating in my father’s reckless lifestyle the summer before, I had decided it was my duty to convince him to attend Christmas Mass with us, and for this delicate task I had prepared a speech. I had spent quite some time contemplating not the exact words to deliver but my father’s reaction to them, envisioning a sudden conversion like Saul on his way to Damascus, god’s light passing through me so as to inspirit my every word. In a mixture of rosary prayers and feverish writing, I’d finished my speech the night before. Perhaps a resolute argument, perhaps a series of unconnected allusions to the theological texts I was studying in school, either way, I’d accumulated at least seven or eight pages wrinkled by my scribbling and crossing and waiting for the light to shine. I would address my father after dinner.
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