The Revolutionaries Try Again. Mauro Javier Cardenas

me la tomé / ya se la tomó / ahora le toca al vecino, which translates to drink another cup of wine, and, when you are done, it is your neighbor’s turn. By song’s end my grandmother would turn to my grandfather and call him mi perrito, my little doggy, and my grandfather would reciprocate by barking or asking her to dance. Much later, after the cocktails and the dance, they would lie on the sofa like exhausted lovers, my grandmother bunched against my grandfather, who would have fallen asleep without fanfare sometime earlier. My grandfather was the only one in the family who prayed to the baby christ regularly. He had built a wooden altar for this purpose, and since he had placed it by the entrance to their bedroom, we always had to be careful not to swing their door open, lest we bump the door against his worn kneeler and disrupt the order inside his altar. Every space on his altar was crowded with rosaries, scapulars, fringed crosses, miniature images of saints too fragile to be taken out of their plastic sleeves, so many of them that sometimes we wondered if my grandfather bought a new one every week, and whether he did so in honor of the baby christ or to keep himself company in those long hours of fasting and prayer. Most of the time we didn’t have to worry about bumping the door against my grandfather because, when he was by his altar, my grandmother would always tiptoe out of their bedroom, and like a guard who thinks her task is as important as that of whom she guards, she would admonish us and ask us to keep quiet. Silence. Grandpa Antonio is praying.

      My father did not touch his coconut flan. After Maria cleared the pig’s skeleton, he was still chewing on its hard skin, gnawing at it with such force that I could see his grimacing teeth like a dog’s.

      With rushed signs of the cross we stood up and readied ourselves to leave. My father, sprawled on the sofa closest to the exit, examined us with feigned amusement, as if preparing to taunt us out of my grandmother’s house.

      We had to start heading to Christmas Mass, and I, without much time left, had to start convincing my father to come with us. This was my only chance till next Christmas. For his government post my father had moved to Quito, and although I visited him during the summer, his lifestyle in the capital did not allow for much church talk. I know I wouldn’t have ventured my speech in front of my family (my grandmother would have asked me not to pester my father), and I know they wouldn’t have let me stay behind. In that brief space between the house and the garage, I must have told them I had forgotten my rosary or my bible. My grandmother must have given me her house keys because my father did not open the door. He had moved to the sofa farthest away from the door. He had crossed his legs like a professor about to lecture himself, but he had sunk the rest of his body inside the sofa. He was holding up his cigar backwards, with the burning end facing him, and he was staring at it as if inspecting a live snake or an alarm clock that should’ve gone off.

      He noticed me and said qué, flaco, you’re not going to Mass?

      He asked this without ridicule or annoyance. He asked this with sincere concern. I was sixteen at the time and steeped in love with our Madre Dolorosa. That year I had successfully avoided any impure thoughts that could have marred my love for Mary. I do not know why this was so. At San Javier, I used to advertise the daily rosary service my friend Leopoldo and I had founded and our classmates would ridicule us because they thought we were just brownnosers. But my father did not make fun of me. I do not know how he found out about my religious fervor (I didn’t tell anyone about my rosary prayers or my volunteer service because I was following the precept of not letting one hand know what the other hand was doing), but around me he tried to keep his disdain for religion to himself. I am not sure if I knew it then, or later, or if I had guessed it all along with that intuition that binds a son to the defeated aspirations of his father, but in his last year at San Javier my father had decided to give everything up and become a Jesuit priest.

      I delivered my father no inspired speech. I stuttered and asked him to please come with us. Without grumbling an okay or an all right my father stood up. He nodded absently, walking toward me and then beside me like a surrendered fugitive. On the front seat of her car my grandmother, who was carrying the baby christ on her lap, silenced the Christmas carols with a careful turn of the stereo’s dial and contained her tears as if afraid the merest peep would change my father’s mind.