Happy Families (26 page)

“Because there was the moment of your pictures, Father, there time doesn’t pass, there you never grow old.”

You attribute this to your son. You think that if what you think he thinks is true, your son has seen your movies, it isn’t Sagrario’s pious lie.

“Yes, Sagrario took me to see you whenever you were showing.” Sandokán laughed. “I never thought I’d know you in person.”

“But I’ve come a few times, son.”

“Always in disguise. Not now. Now I see you for the first time. I don’t know”—he stopped smiling—“if I prefer the truth to the lie.”

At that moment you decide you are not going to surrender, Alejandro. Something new in you—abandoning the play, leaving representation behind—sprang up in you unexpectedly, guiding you in an imperfect way toward your son’s personality, which was the path of affection. And for you this was a huge, joyful revelation.

“Know something, Papa? I had a dream that I’d escape, run away from the house. But I couldn’t do it alone. Then . . . look . . . open . . .”

He indicated a suitcase under his bed. You opened it. It was filled with postcards.

“I asked Sagrario to find me cards from everywhere. She knows a lot of strange people. Look. Istanbul, Paris, Rio de Janeiro . . .”

He smiled in satisfaction. “I’ve been everywhere, Papa, and besides . . .”

He sat down in front of a lectern. A volume lay open on it. Sandokán pressed a pedal, and the pages moved.

“ ‘On February 24, 1813, the lookout in the port of Marseille announced the arrival of the
Faraón,
proceeding from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples . . .’ ”

He looked at you. “You see? I’ve been to the same places you have. Except the book is earlier than the movie. I beat you!”

Sometimes Sandokán isn’t lovable. He tries to hurt you.

“What have you given me, Papa? What do you want me to give to you? How are you going to pay me for being abandoned? Just tell me that.”

“Don’t repeat my dialogues,” you say irritably.

“Seriously, Father, do you understand? You had everything, I’ve had nothing.”

The boy says this with a wooden face.

At other times you’re busy doing what you have never done. You cook. You keep the house clean. You pretend this is another role, just as if you were—it might have happened—the headwaiter at a restaurant.

Sandokán interrupts. You tell him to let you work. He turns his back.

“Whenever I want to tell you something that matters to me, you say you’re in a hurry.”

Where have you heard that same complaint before?

Your son wants to join you, aggressively. He falls flat on his face. You run to help him. He resists. He struggles with you. In the end he embraces you. You embrace each other.

“You ought to be dead,” the son tells the father, and you refrain from repeating the phrase because it compromises Cielo, your wife, Sandokán’s mother, who also tried to kill her son in the cradle before she fled.

“Have pity on me,” you say instead to your son, knowing that these are, in turn, the words the boy wants to say and cannot.

Sandokán looks at you with unexpected, invasive tenderness. “You know? Now both our feelings are hurt.”

He culminated his remark by extending his leg in order to trip you. This becomes Sandokán’s greatest diversion. Making you fall. At first you are resigned. It is difficult for you to scold him. You don’t dare to slap him. Little by little, you prefer to accept the prank. Finally, you celebrate it. You laugh each time Sandokán, with the agility of a pirate from the Island of Tortuga, extends his leg and makes you fall. The strength the boy has developed in his legs is surprising. Beneath the comfortable shirt he always wears, you see two robust limbs, very developed, almost hairless, statuesque, almost marble-like, streaked with blue veins. So that half of his body lives intensely, from the neck up and from his navel down. So that perhaps you were right to stop Cielo de la Mora from drowning your son in the bath or throwing him into a trash can or . . .

This means you will let Sandokán make you fall, and you will laugh because in this way, you celebrate the life of the boy, his presence in the world. Nothing less than that: his presence in the world. And little by little, Alejandro, you begin to realize that your son’s individuality was the most faithful mirror of the life that still was yours, that leaving the movie sets was not a death certificate, as you believed before, but a window that opened to let air, sun, birds, rain, pollen, bees into the closed tomb of a movie set reeking of sawdust, cardboard, glue, the hair of wigs made with the tresses of corpses, period costumes never sent to the cleaner, stained under the arms and between the legs, the clothing of extras, the others, the surplus, the replaceable, the dispensable.

Now you’re the extra in your final film, Alejandro. Except that your secret resignation—or can it be your will?—to disappear into the vast anonymous nation of failure has been frustrated by the encounter with your son, by the spirit of
comedy
that Sandokán displays in a situation that, instead of causing pity, he transforms into a prelude to a limited though hoped-for adventure: that of reuniting with you and initiating your real life together.

Hoped for and despaired over: Each fall that Sandokán makes you take is an invitation to the pending adventure. Is the child in fact father to the man? Where did you read that? Who said it to you? You confuse your dialogues on the screen with your words in life. You look in the mirror and accept that you’ll never escape this dilemma: speaking as if you were acting, acting as if you were speaking. Now, when you fulfill the rite of shaving each morning, you begin to believe that your old face is being lost, though not in a banal way because of the simple passage of time, but in another, more mysterious way, closer to both real life and theatrical representation. You feel that you have surpassed all the faces of your life, those of the actor and those of the man, those of the star and those of the lover, those of the role and those of flesh and blood.

All your faces are becoming superimposed in this poor, worn mirror with the rusting frame and insincere reflections. You are, in this moment you live through with fear like a throbbing announcement of approaching death, everything you have been. You are resigned to this fatality. You are grateful for it as well. You never imagined that the perfect film—simultaneous and successive, instantaneous and discursive—of all your moments would be presented to you in life. You enjoy this, even if you are resigned to the fatality of summarizing your entire past. Even if you suspect it signifies that you won’t have a future.

It is the moment when your son appears behind you in the mirror and looks at you looking at yourself. And you look at him looking at you. He looks at himself in you. He places his small, stunted hand on your shoulder. You feel the pressure of his cold fingers as part of your own flesh.

5. The Plaza de los Arcos de Belén near the Salto del Agua attracts the same working-class audience that frequents the so-called frivolous theaters in the center of the city as well as the anonymous bars, the dens where they still sing boleros, the dance halls where the danzón and the cha-cha-cha survive, the old lunchrooms with awnings that serve pozole, the few Chinese cafés that remain.

It is a peculiarity of this city that the arches and the canal that once ran through here celebrate the memory of an old lacustrine capital whose springs began to dry up until the entire valley was transformed into a saucer of dust surrounded by thirst and dead trees. Not long ago they finished setting up here one of those fairs that in every neighborhood of the immense capital of Mexico are, at times, the only solace of people of no means, which are the immense majority. My father and I see the numerous reality of our people in the Zócalo on the night of September 15, in the Villa de Guadalupe on December 12, on Sundays in Chapultepec, at any hour in the great human serpent of Tacuba in the center, of Andrés Molina in Santa Anita, of the Highway de la Piedad, the Highway de Tlalpan, the Highway Ignacio Zaragoza going to Puebla, and the Indios Verdes going north.

There are people.

There is an audience.

The fair at the Arcos de Belén has been assembling all kinds of attractions, from the wheel of fortune to the octopus, from the carousel to fortune-telling birds, from hawkers of remedies—sciatica, impotence, nightmares, calluses, bad blood, good life—to the wizards and diviners stationed at the corners with their crystal balls and starcovered pointed hats and several mariachi groups (the young star of the ranchera Maximiliano Batalla) and bolero singers (the retired songstress Elvira Morales). Weight lifters, failed tenors, big-bellied odalisques, certified veterans of the Revolution and improbable horsemen of the Empire, declaimers of immensely popular verses (Toast of the Bohemian; Nocturne for Rosario; Margarita, the Sea Is Beautiful). Reciters of the Constitution, memorizers of the telephone book, voices with the singsong of the lottery, with the buzz of neighborhood gossip, the acidity of balcony slanderers, the tears of unemployed circus clowns.

People come here five times a week, five nights in a row (the authorities don’t give seven-day permits in order to exercise authority in something). They come to have a good time with the spectacle of the armless teenager who, with long, strong legs, trips the old musketeer who threatens him with a little aluminum sword, and each time the old man attacks the boy, he extends his leg and makes the musketeer ostentatiously take a tremendous fall, to the delight of the audience. Applause whistles and shouts.

“How much?”

“Whatever you wish.”

6. In this way, my father and I managed to save enough to buy a VCR, and now the two of us can enjoy old movies brought back to life, clean, remastered, and in Dolby Digital, together we can see Edmundo Dantés escape the Castle of If in the shroud of Abbot Faria, D’Artagnan presenting the jewels of the Duke of Buckingham to the queen, Emilio de Rocabruna approaching the coast of Maracaibo under the black flags of the corsairs.

“Who’s the girl who falls in love with Zorro, Father?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I think she’s very pretty.”

“She’s just a foreigner, Sandokán, a bit player, a soubrette, as they used to say in the old days. She’s of no importance.”

Chorus of the Children of Good Families

Fito bored sunday afternoon

he’s unfailing

he doesn’t pass unnoticed

he’s good-looking

he’s superfine

a terrific time incredibly stoned

high as an eagle

cool cool cool

but he’s bored

he comes from a decent family nice fine

he has manners

he has servants

his mom and dad call them rude coarse untrustworthy trash bums

indians

but would never say it

his mommy and daddy feel more than disgusting

disgust: mexica louts

that’s why he organizes the group of pissers

to water the roses for them and give enough to their vegetables

the ones who are unfailing the nice ones the crème hey hey

now guys we fly over the wall

don’t fly over it, better aim at it

wanna see who has better aim hey?

no Fito my friend, hold on a little, drink another magnum all by yourself and when you can’t

hold it anymore we’ll aim at the wall but just remember that first we drink

until we die and before we die we aim at the wall to see who pisses more and better

because Fito got bored with sunday afternoons with the society girls at the cool

parties where he’s very good-looking and superfine

where everybody has a terrific time

except him

he wants strong sensations

to tell all the nice people like him to go to hell

all the society girls

and that’s why he comes to pee on his father-in-law’s wall

with his golden buddies

aiming at the wall

whoever pees the farthest wins a trip to las vegas with babes who make you stand up and salute hey hey

and that noise?

and that noise ay?

and that ay—dammit!

naco guys with their knives and machetes assaulting the children of good families

hey where’d they come from?

from penitenciaría and héroe de nacozari and albañiles and canal del norte

how did they get here?

by subway my fella citzens

since there’s been a subway we come out like ants scorpions moles from the black holes

of the siddy

with knives and machetes to assault

come to cut

in one slice the ones that have stopped

to slash the ones that are sleepy

to cut cock you bastards

now get them together

the pigs

let the boars in and the dogs

let the animals eat sausages

let them bleed

look at them vomit

look at them covering the wounds

look at the blood running down their thighs

look at them look at them look at them

sunday afternoon what a handsome birthday boy in the show on the tube everything very lively