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THE FIRST STORY TOLD BY M
Two boys, classmates, decide one afternoon to play a trick on their parents: upon leaving school each would take the road to the other’s house, go in, and greet everyone as though it were their own. They finalized the details as they left the building and, anticipating the illusion they had dreamt up, both laughed happily as they traded names: Sergio called Miguel Sergio, Miguel called Sergio Miguel. Until they arrived, neither wanted to give up their role; the routine of the journey home, coupled with the novelty of the route and particularly the new identity, intensified both impressions and thoughts. It was a kind of emotional tourism; similar to, though the opposite of, the way children imagine their own death and actually feel afflicted. They got their first surprise when the mothers welcomed them naturally, as though they really were their sons and had been at school since the morning. The second setback was encountering the same attitude in the fathers when they got home from work later on. In the meantime, everything seemed at once strange and familiar because, even though they had been over i
Later that night, in the solitude of the other’s room, each grew more uneasy with every passing hour; they felt the unchecked growth of something that, despite their having initiated it, was strange to them. They could make no sense of it. Just a few hours earlier they had still been themselves, but now a simple, i
Meanwhile, the thought of punishment or lessons did not even occur to their parents, who were even more lost within their naivety than their sons: they simply did not notice the change. The anguish of that first night, born of the certainty that only terror can produce, brought Miguel and Sergio close to the truth, though it also made them retreat from it in favor of a more comfortable — albeit false — theory: that of punishment. And so, as tends to be the case, the more exhilarating the start — that unfortunate act of trading names — the closer they would get to the truth, from which they would in turn distance themselves the further they got from that inaugural rite. Meanwhile, the following night would be torturous for both of them. They missed their parents. They wanted to sit on the floor of their houses and never get up again, to breathe in the natural scent of home. Di
The next day, in school, each saw his own desperation reflected in the face of the other. They thought they were dreaming, but their reciprocal experiences confirmed the simple, very real nature of what was happening. During recess they went over a number of strategies; by the time they said their goodbyes in the street, they had already decided to do something drastic in the hope of bringing things back to normal: they were going to admit to the prank. If the adults wanted their humiliation, they would have it. That afternoon they could hardly sit still. They had decided to broach the topic that night, so that was what they did. Decisive moments tended to come at night, during di
From that time on, whenever the families would visit one another, Miguel and Sergio would feel joined again in brotherhood, although every time it was their despair that brought them together. They saw themselves as victims of a cruel conspiracy that, if not the product of nature, was all the more cruel for being their parents’ idea. It goes without saying that the moment arrived when their names seemed unreal to them, both the previous (Miguel and Sergio) and current ones (Sergio and Miguel). When they heard them, they saw only an equivocal extension of the other and not of themselves. But the problem was also that the extension was evident; the evidence was right there in the names. At the same time, the friendship between their parents revealed its own ambiguities: for example, Miguel and Sergio were able to see, one night when the two families got together, how the ex-father of the first — making an elaborate effort to conceal the gesture, which only highlighted the transgression — grabbed the waist of the boy’s current mother as he asked her to let him pass, despite the fact that he had the whole width of the house at his disposal. After a few bottles of wine the conversation turned to the mysteries of romantic affinities and how, when they fizzle out, they tend to redirect themselves toward a person of the same social circle as a means of staying faithful, if only to some basic and primordial sense of community without which we all would feel lost, orphaned in the void. They were, evidently, talking about themselves and their own crossed desires, which had been aroused by the alcohol: as though they belonged to a shared but unknown past, they longed for a galaxy in which those affinities could be realized. It was then that the four, without the prompting of anything concrete, looked over at their children, who were watching them in silence. In this way, Miguel and Sergio sensed, without fully comprehending, that they were the manifestations of their parents’ desire. Not so much as people, bodies — that seemed obvious — but as subjects whose identity constituted a relative and unverifiable gift, conferred or withdrawn according to circumstance or the emotional state of the adults. The friendship that once could have joined them had been eclipsed by domestic ambiguity; at the same time, this confusion would seem redundant to anyone who understood that it was simply a friendship.