Nobody wanted to listen, 2

‘Normal people’

Not all my close friends are as primitive as a pastry chef who, like a balm, tries to spread whipped cream to his existential pain. In my adolescence there was a time when Hector Covarrubias and my father commented on the wonders of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the house in Palenque. As I said in the narrative section, the film culminates with the return to Earth of a man turned into an overman to eradicate Neanderthalism. Arthur Clarke himself suggests this at the end of the novel, which Hector had read. Of my relatives, Hector was considered the most intelligent in the family and as a teenager I visited him, being impressed by his clear and transparent rationalism. The lectures on physics he gave me individually in 1977 had moments as lucid as I would later hear on Carl Sagan’s shows. But Hector was blinded about the conflict with my parents. He didn’t see the dysfunction in our family even when, because of the seventh circle of hell at home, he saw me completely broken. His house was an Enlightenment room as long as we touched on the topics of science, rationalism, and the criticism of magical thinking. The problems of the soul were forbidden. Instead of seeing my family problem, he repressed the whole thing and looked me down. He disowned the nephew who most admired him…

Hector was already a married man with daughters when I stopped visiting him in the early 1980s. But I have also been offended by relatives younger than myself. When my first cousin Octavio read my Epistle to the mother in 1990 he commented to me: ‘My view of your parents is changing!’ I remember those words very well while, sitting and reading it absorbed, he had the manuscript on the desk. However, some months later he spread the gossip with my father that I could publish it. Octavio had been the closest of my intelligent cousins, but like years later with Pablo, I felt very hurt by his behaviour and I distanced myself permanently from him. Something not so grotesque happened with my cousin Carmina when I visited her at her house, next to Hector, our uncle. When I made a sheepishly critical comment on parental abuse, my cousin jumped, ‘You think your parents are demons’. I don’t know why she reacted like this. I suppose that from other relatives she was familiar with my ideas. It was the last time I visited her. Hector, Octavio and Carmina are sophisticated people. But their reactions were typical cases of extreme dissociation before the most elemental psychological reality.

Gerardo Tort filmed De la Calle, a film about homeless children in Mexico City. He is one of the two cousins Korina referred to in her letter of advice and scolding. Surely my cousin Gerardo could hear me, I thought. I had read an approximation of the script for his film before the script reached its final elaboration, and I gave him my opinion. What would be my surprise when Gerardo didn’t comment on a draft of my first two books, nor would he do so in subsequent years. And he didn’t tell me anything even though, on one occasion when I ran into him on the street, I brought up the subject of the manuscript I had given him. Not even a filmmaker my age, with whom I had talked about so many things against the established order in the past, could hear my story. Gerardo can bring his guts to the camera into the sewers where street children live. But he doesn’t have them to listen to his cousin about what happened in one of the Tort families. My sister would say that those who act like this ‘are normal people who run away from problems; they are not interested and cannot do anything about it’. I’d say they are Neanderthals—exterminable Neanderthals indeed, as I will argue elsewhere.