Instant Fellini

Tessa Hadley

• BuyHappy Families by Carlos Fuentes, translated by Edith Grossman
  Bloomsbury, 332 pp, £17.99, October 2008, ISBN 978 0 7475 9528 1

In ‘Eternal Father’, the last story in Happy Families, three sisters meet for a candlelit reunion around their father’s coffin, in a sunken park in Mexico City, ‘a cool, shaded urban depression in the midst of countless avenues and mute skyscrapers’. The father died a rich man. We aren’t told how he made his money, although picking up themes from the other stories in the collection we can guess: real estate, construction, politics? (‘He made other people work and took advantage of them,’ his oldest daughter says.) The women gather where he was born, in a bare adobe garage with a sliding metal door, an improvised toilet on one side. He made it a condition in his will that in order to claim their inheritance his daughters must meet like this every year for ten years: this is the tenth. They don’t know what happens next, whether after this they will be free to claim their portion of what he left, or whether, as they suspect, their father will prolong his tyranny over them by exacting some further compliance. ‘The door clangs and sounds like prison bars.’